Hi Jason, and thanks for the comment.

I don't think you've got me quite right however; I'll try to make clear where we differ on my view, which will involve explaining how I am not begging the question against AH, which seems to be the danger you identify for my paper.

When you say 'Mr. Coleman suggests that phenomenal knowledge is required before Mary becomes able to identify colors.' it is revealing. I don't claim any such thing, at least not in a temporal sense of 'before'. The thought is rather that knowing what redness is like is the ground of Mary's ability to recognise, remember etc. the experience (by the way we disagree here on what the abilities have as their objects - you think it is objects of perception - but I won't pursue this further as it doesn't appear crucial to your objection). I agree that gaining the phenomenal knowledge and gaining the abilities are simultaneous events. Now this may be because gaining the abilities is gaining the phenomenal knowledge. That I leave open. My point is that gaining the abilities may (or may not) involve new factual knowledge on Mary's part. That is why reducing Mary's knowledge to abilities is a dialectically useless move.

Reductions do have 'orders of explanatory priority'. When it is said that 'mind = matter' by physicalists, we know what is being reduced to what. Just so when hypothesists say that 'knowing what it's like = having abilities'. But I argue that abilities of the relevant kind depend on knowing what sensations are like. This latter component (which I later on in the paper do call 'phenomenal knowledge') is unreduced by the claim that knowing what it is like is ability. That is why the reduction to abilities is neither here nor there for the issue of factuality.