Abstract
Deviant phenomenal knowledge is knowing what it’s like to have experiences of, e.g., red without actually having had experiences of red. Such a knower is a deviant. Some physicalists have argued and some anti-physicalists have denied that the possibility of deviants undermines anti-physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. The current paper presents new arguments defending the deviant-based attacks on anti-physicalism. Central to my arguments are considerations concerning the psychosemantic underpinnings of deviant phenomenal knowledge. I argue that physicalists are in a superior position to account for the conditions in virtue of which states of deviants constitute representations of phenomenal facts.
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Notes
It will be useful, for brevity’s sake, to count hallucinations and afterimages of red as episodes of seeing red.
This way of sorting philosophies of mind in terms of various attitudes toward epistemic and ontological gaps is due to Chalmers (2003a). The gappy physicalists are identified by Chalmers as “type-B materialists”. The non-gappy physicalists are “type-A materialists,” but there’s also reason to regard what Chalmers calls “type-Q materialists” (“Q” for “Quinean”) as non-gappy. For an extended defense of type-Q materialism, see Mandik and Weisberg (2008).
Dennett (2007, p. 24) attributes the suggestion of Swamp Mary to Gabriel Love.
We can, on perhaps some occasions, accept unexplained truths if they themselves are explainers. But there’s no apparent explanatory work that acceptance of Premise Two does, so a proponent of it who denies it needs an explanation is offering us a putative truth that neither is explained nor does any explaining. It’s difficult to see that there can be any grounds for accepting alleged facts that are entirely cut loose from the web of explanation.
Formulating the Experience Requirement as being about all experiences would make it an implausibly strong claim. Consider, in opposition to this stronger version of the Experience Requirement, the Humean concern about a missing shade of blue. Plausibly, a person may know in advance what it is like to see a previously unseen shade of blue if they have previously seen other shades of blue. Similarly, a person who has never seen a red and white striped object before may nonetheless know in advance what it would be like if they had prior experiences of striped things, red things, and white things.
An anonymous reviewer asks why isn’t another plausible explanation one that incorporates the disjunct “or the knower is a deviant”. One possible response, that I won’t develop here, is to point out general problems for disjunctive explanations. Another line of response that strikes me as more immediately promising is to raise problems for the proffered disjunct. I assume “deviant” to be a technical term whose stipulated meaning is exhausted by characterizations such as “being who knows what it’s like, for example, to see red without having seen red”. On such an assumption, then, “deviant” is no natural kind term and lacks what philosophers of science call the “surplus content” needed to do the required explanatory work. If this line about lacking surplus content is correct, then the proffered disjunctive explanation may be read as the following obviously unsatisfactory explanation of Premise Two: “knowledge of what it’s like to see red requires that the knower either has experienced red before or is able to know what it’s like without having experienced red before.” Another way of putting my point may be by noting that what needs to be explained about Premise Two is why Mary isn’t a deviant and so any explanation that amends the disjunct “or the knower is a deviant” gains no additional explanatory power.
Alter (2008, pp. 263, 5) presents an interesting case that there is relatively sparse evidence of any philosophers explicitly affirming a thesis Alter identifies as “the experience requirement”. Two points are worth noting in the present context. First, the thesis Alter calls “the experience requirement” is “the idea that seeing in color is required for knowing what it’s like to see in color” (p. 248) and it is not clear whether this is to be read as equivalent to what I am presently calling “the Experience Requirement”. A person who has seen colors other than red before and knows what it’s like to see red prior to seeing red would satisfy at least one reading of Alter’s requirement but not satisfy mine. The second, and perhaps more important, point worth noting is that it is not directly relevant to the present discussion how many philosophers explicitly embrace the Experience Requirement. Crucial to the deviant-based attack is the claim that the Experience Requirement is the only plausible explanation for Premise Two. This claim is compatible with the claim that the Experience Requirement is seldom explicitly affirmed. Of course, there might be some way in which Alter’s sociological claim is indirectly relevant. Perhaps an argument can be constructed against the deviant-based attack that has as a premise “If the Experience Requirement were the only plausible explanation, more philosophers would have explicitly affirmed it”. However, I will not consider this line of thought further.
For Alter’s (2008) detailed response to this remark of Dennnett’s see pp. 250–253.
Further, this representational requirement on phenomenal knowledge seems to be the most important requirement as opposed to, say, requirements concerning justification. I think that Alter (1998) is exactly right when he writes:
[L]et us ask what exactly [Mary’s] lack of factual knowledge consists in. We color-sighted folk in the outside world are supposed to know facts that she does not, but what distinguishes her epistemic state from ours? The difference does not seem to turn on justification. That is, her problem is not that she has the same beliefs as we, but her beliefs, unlike ours, are unjustified—as though she suspects that seeing red has a certain distinctive phenomenal quality, the same one we know it to have, but she cannot confirm her suspicion. Rather, if she lacks knowledge of facts about color experiences, this would seem to be because she lacks the appropriate beliefs: certain propositions, which we grasp, are inaccessible to her. (p. 46)
I should clarify that I agree with Alter here on what failing to know what it’s like consists in. I do not, of course, agree that pre-experience Mary fails to know what it’s like. For a view in opposition to mine and Alter’s, one that construes Mary’s knowledge failure as hinging crucially on justification, see Beisecker (2005).
Though note that Papineau (2007) abandons this account of phenomenal concepts for one better construed as either an instance of Actual cause or some combination of Actual cause and Descriptive-isomorphism.
See Schwitzgebel (2008) for an excellent recent discussion of the pitfalls of introspective artifacts.
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Acknowledgements
For especially useful comments on earlier versions and precursors, I thank Torin Alter, David Chalmers, Josh Weisberg, and an anonymous reviewer. I’m also grateful for discussions with Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Paula Droege, Brian Fiala, Ellen Fridland, Chris Gauker, Uriah Kriegel, Eric Schwitzgebel, John Martin, Tom Polger, William Robinson, William Seager, Ben Young, and audiences of presentations at the University of Cincinnati Philosophy Colloquium on the Churchlands and the 2008 meeting of Toward a Science of Consciousness in Tucson, Arizona.
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Mandik, P. Swamp Mary’s revenge: deviant phenomenal knowledge and physicalism. Philos Stud 148, 231–247 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9322-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9322-1