About this topic
Summary The knowledge argument against physicalism centers on the claim that complete physical knowledge does not enable knowledge of consciousness.  In Frank Jackson's formulation, Mary is brought up in a black-and-white room and learns the complete neuroscience of color processing in humans, but she still does not know what it is like to see red: she learns a new fact about color experience when she leaves her room and sees red for the first time.  Jackson argues that Mary knows all the physical facts but not all the facts about color experience, so some facts about color experience are not physical facts.  Physicalists have replied in many different ways.  Some argue that Mary gains an ability without learning a new fact.  Others argue that she gains acquaintance with a property without learning a new facts.  Others argue that she learns a fact she already knew under a new mode of presentation.
Key works Jackson's original papers on the knowledge argument are Jackson 1982 and Jackson 1986 (he changes his mind in 2003).  Nemirow 1990 and Lewis 1990 give the ability reply: on leaving the black-and-white room, Mary gains an ability without learning a new fact.  Loar 1990 gives the old-fact reply: Mary learns a fact she already knew under a new mode of presentation.  Conee 1985 gives the acquaintance reply: Mary gains acquaintance with a property without learning new facts.  Dennett 2006 argues that Mary could know about color experience from inside her room.  Two excellent collections of papers on the topic are Ludlow et al 2004 and Alter & Walter 2006.
Introductions Encyclopedia articles include Nida-Rumelin 2002, Alter 2005, and Gertler 2005Stoljar & Nagasawa 2004 is a thorough introduction including a historical discussion.
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  1. Deconstructing the Physical World.Brendon Hammer - manuscript
    Some metaphysics are provided showing that what is commonly called ‘the physical world’ can be deconstructed into three ‘levels’: a single, unified ‘noumenal world’ on which everything supervenes; a ‘phenomenal world’ that we each privately experience through direct perception of phenomena; and a ‘collective world’ that people in any given ‘language using group’ experience through learning, using and adapting that group’s language. This deconstruction is shown to enable a clear account of qualia and of how people can hold some things (...)
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  2. Solving the mind-body problem - the real significance of the knowledge argument.Dennis Nicholson - manuscript
    The Knowledge Argument is misconstructed. Knowing that it is ‘just obvious’ that Mary will learn something new on leaving her black and white room, we nevertheless assume she can acquire a complete knowledge of the physical inside it – thereby predetermining the outcome of the thought experiment in favour of a refutation of physicalism. If we reformulate the argument to leave the question of what she can learn in the room open, it becomes clear, not only that physicalism can survive (...)
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  3. Phenomenal Concepts and Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument.Martina Prinz & François-Igor Pris - manuscript
  4. What it is like to perceive colour.John Gardner - manuscript
    I argue that the knowledge argument is best understood as an argument for the existence of non-physical properties of material objects, or colours. I suggest that the knowledge argument is standardly presented as an argument for the existence of qualia because it is implicitly assumed that physics “tell us” that what it is like to perceive colour is determined, not by properties of material objects, but by properties of perceiving subjects; hence any gaps in Mary’s knowledge must be gaps in (...)
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  5. Knowledge argument.Yujin Nagasawa - manuscript
    The knowledge argument is an argument against physicalism that was first formulated by Frank Jackson in 1982. While Jackson no longer endorses it, it is still regarded as one of the most important arguments in the philosophy of mind. Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that, roughly speaking, everything in this world—including tables, galaxies, cheese cakes, cars, atoms, and even our sensations— are ultimately physical. The knowledge argument attempts to undermine this thesis by appealing to the following simple imaginary scenario: Mary (...)
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  6. The know-how response to Jackson's knowledge argument.Author unknown - manuscript
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  7. What Mary Really Didn't Know.Michael Metzler - unknown - Proceedings of the Heraclitean Society 21.
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  8. What was that like? Intuitions and the epistemology of consciousness.Brandon Ashby - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that physicalists have been too conciliatory in granting that certain classic thought experiments about consciousness like Mary the colour scientist, colour spectrum inversion, and zombies provide strong prima facie support for epiphenomenal anti-physicalism. While these thought experiments may suggest that we are intuitive epiphenomenal anti-physicalists when taken individually, when they are appropriately combined, they suggest that epiphenomenal anti-physicalism leads to a version of phenomenal scepticism according to which (i) we cannot know how our states of phenomenal consciousness compare (...)
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  9. Phänomenale Begriffe.Martina Fürst - forthcoming - In Vera Hoffmann-Kolss & Nicole Rathgeb (eds.), Handbuch Philosophie des Geistes. Metzler. pp. 1-11..
    Viele unserer Bewusstseinszustände sind dadurch charakterisiert, dass es irgendwie für uns ist (Nagel 1974), in diesen Zuständen zu sein. In der Philosophie des Geistes werden derartige Zustände als ‚phänomenale Zustände‘ bezeichnet. ‚Phänomenale Begriffe‘ sind nun spezielle Begriffe, mittels derer wir uns auf phänomenale Zustände beziehen. Paradigmatische Beispiele für phänomenale Zustände, von denen wir einen phänomenalen Begriff besitzen können, sind das bewusste Erlebnis, die Farbe Blau zu sehen, den Klang einer Violine zu hören oder Schmerz zu fühlen. Zentral ist, dass sich (...)
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  10. Does Representationalism Offer a Reply to the Knowledge Argument?Frank Jackson - forthcoming - Philosophia:1-8.
    I agree with Torin Alter that physicalists should be a priori physicalists. I argue against his rejection of the representationalist response to the knowledge argument.
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  11. Non-eliminative reductionism: the basis of a science of conscious experience?Dennis Nicholson - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    A physicalist view of qualia labelled non-eliminative reductionism is outlined. If it is true, qualia and physicalism can co-exist without difficulty. First, qualia present no particular problem for reductionist physicalism - they are entirely physical, can be studied and explained using the standard scientific approach, and present no problem any harder than any other scientists face. Second, reductionist physicalism presents no particular problem for qualia – they can be encompassed within an entirely physicalist position without any necessity, either to reduce (...)
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  12. Facts, Abilities and Concepts: Knowledge Argument and Physicalism.Jose Ramon E. de Leon & Napoleon M. Mabaquiao - 2023 - Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy (Philippine e-journal) 24 (1):91-112.
    One compelling argument challenging the tenability of physicalism, which sees reality as fundamentally comprised of physical facts, is Jackson's knowledge argument. Through a powerful thought experiment involving the case of Mary, the super neuroscientist, the argument demonstrates how knowledge of phenomenal facts cannot be deduced from knowledge of physical facts. For allegedly leaving out phenomenal facts in its account of reality, physicalism is shown to be incomplete and hence mistaken. Physicalists respond to this argument in a variety of ways, challenging, (...)
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  13. Knowing What It's Like.Andrew Y. Lee - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):187-209.
    David Lewis—famously—never tasted vegemite. Did he have any knowledge of what it's like to taste vegemite? Most say 'no'; I say 'yes'. I argue that knowledge of what it’s like varies along a spectrum from more exact to more approximate, and that phenomenal concepts vary along a spectrum in how precisely they characterize what it’s like to undergo their target experiences. This degreed picture contrasts with the standard all-or-nothing picture, where phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge lack any such degreed structure. (...)
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  14. An Alternative Response to the Knowledge Argument.Clarton Fambisai Mangadza - 2023 - In Aribiah David Attoe, Segun Samuel Temitope, Victor Nweke, John Umezurike & Jonathan Okeke Chimakonam (eds.), Conversations on African Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence. Springer Verlag. pp. 49-66.
    Kwasi Wiredu’s interpreted view of the Akan concept of mind (adwene), complemented with David Lewis’s version of the ability reply, offers an alternative African statement of the ability reply, and, at the very least, in a novel way turns the negative ability reply into a positive reply to Frank Jackson’s formulation of the knowledge argument. For Wiredu the mind is not taken as a distinct substance, but rather as a cognitive ability; while for Lewis together with Paul Snowdon’s capacity thesis (...)
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  15. Reflections on the Foundations of Russellian Physicalism.Mirza Mehmedovic - 2023 - Giornale di Metafisica. Nuova Serie Torino 1 (Il Processo e l'Idea):195-211.
    Russellian monism is the doctrine according to which physical properties, usually described as structural and dynamic, are grounded in categorical properties, often characterised as phenomenal or proto-phenomenal properties, of which physics leaves us ignorant, and therefore often called inscrutables or quiddities. Several authors claim that this doctrine derives its raison d’être from an attempt to overcome the insuperable difficulties posed to physicalism by the conceivability and knowledge arguments. There are several versions of this doctrine, the best known of which is (...)
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  16. Grounding physicalism and the knowledge argument.Alex Moran - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):269-289.
    Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does not (...)
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  17. Kripke's knowledge argument against materialism.Adriana Renero - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):370-387.
    In his unpublished 1979 Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Saul Kripke offers a knowledge argument against materialism focusing on deaf people who lack knowledge of auditory experience. Kripke's argument is a precursor of Frank Jackson's better‐known knowledge argument against materialism (1982). The paper sets out Kripke's argument, brings out its interest and philosophical importance, and explores some similarities and differences between Kripke's knowledge argument and Jackson's.
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  18. Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.Josh Weisberg - 2023 - Routledge. Edited by Josh Weisberg.
    Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness argues that despite the worries of explanatory pessimists, consciousness can be fully explained in “easy” scientific terms. The widespread intuition that consciousness poses a hard problem is plausibly based on how consciousness appears to us in first-person access. The book offers a debunking argument to undercut the justificatory link between the first-person appearances and our hard problem intuitions. -/- The key step in the debunking argument involves the development and defense of an (...)
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  19. The Moral Parody Argument Against Panpsychism.Zach Blaesi - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):1821–1852.
    I exploit parallel considerations in the philosophy of mind and metaethics to argue that the reasoning employed in an important argument for panpsychism overgeneralizes to support an analogous position in metaethics: panmoralism. Next, I raise a number of problems for panmoralism and thereby build a case for taking the metaethical parallel to be a reductio ad absurdum of the argument for panpsychism. Finally, I contrast panmoralism with a position recently defended by Einar Duenger Bohn and argue that the two suffer (...)
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  20. Transformative experiences and the equivocation objection.Yuri Cath - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-22.
    Paul (2014, 2015a) argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have a transformative experience by trying to form judgments, in advance, about (i) what it would feel like to have that experience, and (ii) the subjective value of having such an experience. The problem is if you haven’t had the experience then you cannot know what it is like, and you need to know what it is like to assess its value. However, in earlier work I argued that ‘what (...)
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  21. Rorty and Beyond ed. by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński. [REVIEW]Susan Dieleman - 2021 - American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 42 (3):83-87.
    The key organizing theme of Rorty and Beyond, edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, is—as the title suggests—to consider what pragmatism and philosophy are and could be in a post-Rorty world. As Auxier puts it in his preface to the volume of 19 papers, "no one can deny that the world we now write in is one in which Rorty defined what pragmatism would be, and what it has become. To write beyond Rorty is to address (...)
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  22. Richard Rorty’s Critique of the Self in Term of Interaction Between the Self and Others.Trung Kien Do - 2021 - Contemporary Pragmatism 18 (2):134-153.
    The experiential self in interaction with an object is not, as Richard Rorty emphasizes, an inherent attribute that exists before real interactions, nor is it an entity with fixed characteristics. What Rorty constantly highlights is that the interaction in forming the self must achieve self-awareness as an entity impacted, acknowledged, and evaluated by others. This line of interpretation leads to two important concepts regarding the self’s formation that need to be clarified: First, when an individual expands his/her ability to manage (...)
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  23. The Philosophy of Westworld.Paul Skokowski - 2021 - In Cybermedia: New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media. New York, NY, USA: pp. 207-222.
    What exactly does an android experience? Could an android have experiences as rich as humans, or are there limits? The Westworld T V series (Jonathan Noland, 2016- ) offers the opportunity to explore philosophical questions related to human and android experiences through its depiction of a fictional Wild West theme park with androids playing the main characters. Among the most fascinating scenes in the Westworld TV series are the interviews between the android characters Bernard Lowe and Dolores Abernathy. These interviews (...)
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  24. Fizikalizm, Bilgi Argümanı ve Felsefi Düşünce Deneyleri.Alper Bilgehan Yardımcı & Atilla Volkan Çam - 2021 - Nosyon: Uluslararası Toplum Ve Kültür Çalışmaları Dergisi 1 (8):1-11.
    Thought experiments, one of the most effective ways of acquiring knowledge, are an intellectual tool frequently used by scientists or thinkers in their fields of study. Thought experiments used to respond to scientific issues are considered scientific thought experiments, while thought experiments used for philosophical problems are called philosophical thought experiments. In this context, firstly, the differences between scientific and philosophical thought experiments are determined in the article. In particular, philosophical thought experiments are often needed in discussions within the field (...)
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  25. Artificial Consciousness, Meta-Knowledge, and Physical Omniscience.Ron Chrisley - 2020 - Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 7 (2):199-215.
    Previous work [Chrisley & Sloman, 2016, 2017] has argued that a capacity for certain kinds of meta-knowledge is central to modeling consciousness, especially the recalcitrant aspects of qualia, in computational architectures. After a quick review of that work, this paper presents a novel objection to Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (KA) against physicalism, an objec- tion in which such meta-knowledge also plays a central role. It is first shown that the KA's supposition of a person, Mary, who is physically omniscient, and (...)
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  26. Dualism: How Epistemic Issues Drive Debates About the Ontology of Consciousness.Brie Gertler - 2020 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    A primary goal of this chapter is to highlight neglected epistemic parallels between dualism and physicalism. Both dualist and physicalist arguments employ a combination of empirical data and armchair reflection; both rely on considerations stemming from how we conceptualize certain phenomena; and both aim to establish views that are compatible with scientific results but go well beyond the deliverances of empirical science. -/- I begin the chapter by fleshing out the distinctive commitments of dualism, in a way that illuminates the (...)
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  27. Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: A New Précis.Marc Champagne - 2019 - American Journal of Semiotics 35 (3/4):443-462.
    I will be talking today about the limits of cognitive science. I won’t be talking about contingent shortcomings that could perhaps be remedied with, say, more time, resources, or ingenuity. Rather, I will be concerned with limitations that are “baked into” the very enterprise. The main blind spot, I will argue, is consciousness—but not for the reasons typically given. Current work in philosophy of mind can sometimes seem arcane, so my goal today will be to answer the question: why bother? (...)
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  28. The Knowledge Argument.Sam Coleman (ed.) - 2019 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Frank Jackson's knowledge argument imagines a super-smart scientist, Mary, forced to investigate the mysteries of human colour vision using only black and white resources. Can she work out what it is like to see red from brain-science and physics alone? The argument says no: Mary will only really learn what red looks like when she actually sees it. Something is therefore missing from the science of the mind, and from the 'physicalist' picture of the world based on science. This powerful (...)
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  29. Epistemic Gaps and the Mind-Body Problem.Thomas Foerster - 2019 - Dissertation, Cornell University
    This dissertation defends materialism from the epistemic arguments against materialism. Materialism is the view that everything is ultimately physical. The epistemic arguments against materialism claim that there is an epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths (for example, that knowing the physical truths does not put you in a position to know the phenomenal truths), and conclude from this that there is a corresponding gap in the world between physical and phenomenal truths, and materialism is false. -/- Chapter 1 introduces (...)
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  30. Grounding, Analysis, and Russellian Monism.Philip Goff - 2019 - In Sam Coleman (ed.), The Knowledge Argument. Cambridge University Press. pp. 198-222.
    Few these days dispute that the knowledge argument demonstrates an epistemic gap between the physical facts and the facts about experience. It is much more contentious whether that epistemic gap can be used to demonstrate a metaphysical gap of a kind that is inconsistent with physicalism. In this paper I will explore two attempts to block the inference from an epistemic gap to a metaphysical gap – the first from the phenomenal concept strategy, the second from Russellian monism – and (...)
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  31. The Physical as the Nomalous.J. Goldwater - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6):65-88.
    I argue physicalism should be characterized as the thesis that all behavior is law-governed. This characterization captures crucial desiderata for a formulation of physicalism, including its broad import and worldview defining features. It also has more local virtues, such as avoiding Hempel’s dilemma. A particularly important implication, I argue, is that this thesis makes the question of the mind’s physicality turn on what the mind can do- rather than what experience is like.
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  32. What Acquaintance Teaches.Alex Grzankowski & Michael Tye - 2019 - In Thomas Raleigh & Jonathan Knowles (eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays. Oxford University Press. pp. 75–94.
    In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object-knowledge rather than propositional-knowledge. To know what it is like (...)
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  33. Semantic gaps and protosemantics.Benj Hellie - 2019 - In Acacio de Barros & Carlos Montemayor (eds.), Quanta and Mind: Essays on the Connection Between Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness. Berlin: Springer.
    Semantic gaps between physical and mental discourse include the 'explanatory', 'epistemic' (Black-and-White Mary), and 'suppositional' (zombies) gaps; protosemantics is concerned with what is fundamental to meaning. Our tradition presupposes a truth-based protosemantics, with disastrous consequences for interpreting the semantic gaps: nonphysicalism, epiphenomenalism, separatism. Fortunately, an endorsement-based protosemantics, recentering meaning from the world to the mind, is technically viable, intuitively more plausible, and empirically more adequate. But, of present significance, it makes room for interpreting mental discourse as expressing simulations: this blocks (...)
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  34. Mary does not learn anything new: Applying Kim's critique of mental causation to the knowledge argument and the problem of consciousness.Adam Khayat - 2019 - Stance 2019 (1):45-55.
    Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy serves as (...)
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  35. Mary's Powers of Imagination.Amy Kind - 2019 - In Sam Coleman (ed.), The Knowledge Argument. Cambridge University Press. pp. 161-179.
    One common response to the knowledge argument is the ability hypothesis. Proponents of the ability hypothesis accept that Mary learns what seeing red is like when she exits her black-and-white room, but they deny that the kind of knowledge she gains is propositional in nature. Rather, she acquires a cluster of abilities that she previously lacked, in particular, the abilities to recognize, remember, and imagine the color red. For proponents of the ability hypothesis, knowing what an experience is like simply (...)
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  36. Phenomenal Concepts and Physical Facts: A Dialogue with Mary.Tufan Kiymaz - 2019 - Filozofia 74 (10):797-807.
    This is a dialogue between an opponent of the phenomenal concept strategy and Mary from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. In this dialogue, Mary, who has complete physical knowledge about what it is like to see red, but has never seen red, is a physicalist and she defends the phenomenal concept strategy against her interlocutor’s objections. In the end, none of them is able to convince the other, but their conversation, through considerations of different versions of the knowledge argument and different (...)
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  37. What Gary Couldn’t Imagine.Tufan Kiymaz - 2019 - Journal of Philosophical Research 44:293-311.
    In this paper, I propose and defend an antiphysicalist argument, namely, the imagination argument, which draws inspiration from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument, or rather its misinterpretation by Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland. They interpret the knowledge argument to be about the ability to imagine a novel experience, which Jackson explicitly denies. The imagination argument is the following. Let Q be a visual phenomenal quality that is imaginable based on one’s phenomenal experience. (1) It is not possible to imagine Q solely (...)
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  38. Knowing What an Experience Is Like and the Reductive Theory of Knowledge‐wh.Kevin Lynch - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (3):252-275.
    This article discusses a kind of knowledge classifiable as knowledge-wh but which seems to defy analysis in terms of the standard reductive theory of knowledge-wh ascriptions, according to which they are true if and only if one knows that p, where this proposition is an acceptable answer to the wh-question ‘embedded’ in the ascription. Specifically, it is argued that certain cases of knowing what an experience is like resist such treatment. I argue that in some of these cases, one can (...)
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  39. Phenomenal knowledge why: the explanatory knowledge argument against physicalism.Hedda Hassel Mørch - 2019 - In Sam Coleman (ed.), The Knowledge Argument. Cambridge University Press.
    Phenomenal knowledge is knowledge of what it is like to be in conscious states, such as seeing red or being in pain. According to the knowledge argument (Jackson 1982, 1986), phenomenal knowledge is knowledge that, i.e., knowledge of phenomenal facts. According to the ability hypothesis (Nemirow 1979; Lewis 1983), phenomenal knowledge is mere practical knowledge how, i.e., the mere possession of abilities. However, some phenomenal knowledge also seems to be knowledge why, i.e., knowledge of explanatory facts. For example, someone who (...)
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  40. On the Self-Knowledge Argument for Cognitive Phenomenology.M. A. Parks - 2019 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 1 (6):91-102.
    The present paper will be primarily concerned with criticizing the defense of cognitive phenomenology presented by David Pitt’s (2011) self knowledge argument, focusing on his response to Joseph Levine (2011). In this essay, I argue that Pitt’s self-knowledge argument appears to presuppose that a person makes voluntary judgments about their beliefs on the basis of recognition of distinctive phenomenal states, the way we recognize what we see, hear, or smell. However, many of those who reject the existence of cognitive phenomenology (...)
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  41. Mastering Mary.Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4):361-370.
    I make three claims about the interactions between concept mastery and the knowledge argument. First, I argue that, contra Ball, the concept mastery response to the knowledge argument does not suffer from the heterogeneity of concept mastery. Second, I argue that, when doing metaphysics by relating propositions on the basis of whether a hypothetical agent who knew a base collection could infer a target proposition, it is legitimate to rely on propositions that are not contained in the base, as long (...)
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  42. Modal rationalism and the demonstrative reply to the scrutability argument against physicalism.Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):2107-2134.
    According to the scrutability argument against physicalism, an a priori gap between the physical and conscious experience entails a lack of necessitation and the falsity of physicalism. This paper investigates the crucial premise of the scrutability argument: the inference from an a priori gap to a lack of necessitation. This premise gets its support from modal rationalism, according to which there are important, potentially constitutive, connections between a priori justification and metaphysical modality. I argue against the strong form of modal (...)
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  43. Online Overview Article: Materialism.Jan G. Michel - 2018 - SDA, Digital Humanities Project, Oxford University.
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  44. Qualitative Attribution, Phenomenal Experience and Being.Mark Pharoah - 2018 - Biosemiotics 11 (3):427-446.
    I argue that the physiological, phenomenal and conceptual constitute a trichotomous hierarchy of emergent categories. I claim that each category employs a distinctive type of interactive mechanism that facilitates a meaningful kind of environmental discourse. I advocate, therefore, that each have a causal relation with the environment but that their specific class of mechanism qualifies distinctively the meaningfulness of that interaction and subsequent responses. Consequently, I argue that the causal chain of physical interaction feeds distinctive value-laden constructions that are ontologically (...)
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  45. A Kantian account of the knowledge argument.de Sá Pereira Roberto Horácio - 2018 - Kant-e-Print 13 (3):32-55.
    This paper is a new defense of type-B materialism against Jackson’s knowledge argument (1982) inspired by the Kantian main opposition between concepts and sensible intuitions. Like all materialists of type B, I argue that on her release from her black-and-white room, Mary makes cognitive progress. However, contrary to the so-called phenomenal concept strategy (henceforth PCS), I do not think that such progress can be accounted for in terms of the acquisition of new concepts. I also reject Tye’s recent account of (...)
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  46. How Mary defeated the Zombies; Destabilizing the Modal argument with the Knowledge argument.Amber Ross - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (5-6):499-519.
    Several of the most compelling anti-materialist arguments are motivated by the supposed existence of an unbridgeable epistemic gap between first-person subjective knowledge about one’s own conscious experience and third-personally acquired knowledge. The two with which this paper is concerned are Frank Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ and David Chalmers’s ‘modal argument’. The knowledge argument and the modal argument are often taken to function as ‘two sides of the same coin … in principle each succeeds on its own, but in practice they work (...)
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  47. The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of 'Knowing What it's Like'.Daniel Stoljar - 2018 - In Dale Jacquette (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness. London, UK:
  48. Physicalism and the Knowledge Argument.Torin Alter - 2017 - In Susan Schneider & Max Velmans (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Chichester, UK: Wiley. pp. 404–414.
    This chapter explains how the knowledge argument works and describes various physicalist responses to the knowledge argument. Frank Jackson first presented the knowledge argument in his 1982 paper, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”. “Qualia” refers to phenomenal properties: properties such as those Mary is said to understand only after leaving the room. Not everyone shares Jackson's opinion that epiphenomenalism is the best option for knowledge argument proponents. And some argue that there are versions of physicalism that the knowledge argument does not rule out. (...)
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  49. How to befriend zombies: a guide for physicalists.Bradford Saad - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (9):2353-2375.
    Though not myself a physicalist, I develop a new argument against antiphysicalist positions that are motivated by zombie arguments. I first identify four general features of phenomenal states that are candidates for non-physical types; these are used to generate different types of zombie. I distinguish two antiphysicalist positions: strict dualism, which posits exactly one general non-physical type, and pluralism, which posits more than one such type. It turns out that zombie arguments threaten strict dualism and some pluralist positions as much (...)
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  50. The Ability Hypothesis: An Empirically Based Defense.Mahdi Zakeri & Majid Ghasemi - 2016 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 30 (1):23-38.
    We defend Laurence Nemirow’s and David Lewis’s Ability Hypothesis against Paul Raymont’s criticisms in defense of Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. According to the Ability Hypothesis, what Mary lacked when she was in her black-and-white room was a set of abilities; she did not know how to recognize or imagine certain types of experience. Her subsequent discovery of what it is like to experience color amounts to no more than her acquiring these abilities. Appealing to the Molyneux test, Raymont has argued that (...)
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