Essay on Jackson’s ‘knowledge

argument’
Outline Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ and evaluate one way that a
physicalist might respond.
This essay will lay out Frank Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ against physicalism
and evaluate the response put forward in similar forms by Brian Loar and William
G. Lycan - summarised by Robert Van Gulick in Understanding the Phenomenal
Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos? (Van Gulick, 1993). The First section will
constitute an outline and explanation of Jackson’s knowledge argument and the
second section will start with the summary offered by Van Gulick of Lycan and
Loar’s response, followed by an elaboration of Van Gulick’s summary, with
reference to Lycan and Loar’s original developments, and finally an evaluation of
this response.

In Epiphenomenal Qualia, Jackson demonstrates his knowledge argument for

qualia by using two different thought experiments (Jackson, 1982). Both of these
analogies are intended to prove that physicalist accounts of reality, particularly
accounts of conscious experience, are incomplete. They do this by illustrating
that it is possible to have a full physical description of a subject without having
complete knowledge of them, and therefore there must be non-physical facts
concerning them which a purely physical enquiry cannot reveal. In the first such
experiment, a hypothetical person called Fred exists who is capable of greater
chromatic distinction than most people; where most people see a single colour,
red, Fred can discern two distinct colours, red1 and red2. The rest of the world is
essentially red1-red2 colour-blind, being entirely unable to detect any difference
by normal observation. The difference between red1 and red2, Fred explains, is
not the same as a difference in shade of the same colour, but is as conspicuous
to him as the difference between yellow and blue is to most people. His
behaviour is shown to corroborate his claims: he can consistently discriminate
the same objects from a group which most people would consistently classify as
part of the same group according to their (red) colour. Furthermore, his
discriminatory abilities are shown to have a physiological basis: his sight organs
are shown to be as sensitive to the differences between red1 and red2 as they are
to the difference between yellow and blue on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Jackson contends that we would have to accept, if Fred existed, that he can
genuinely discern more colours than we can. Here he makes a brief allusion to
The Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells, in which the protagonist finds himself in a
place inhabited solely by blind people, and is unable to convince them that he
can see since they can’t imagine his experience of sight. To deny that Fred had
any special ability would be as unreasonable as the denial made by the blind
people in Wells’ story.

Jackson then asks: what is it like for Fred to see red1 and red2? No amount of
physical information can convey this, he claims, since normal people cannot see
the extra colours and therefore we can never fully appreciate Fred’s phenomenal
experience. Jackson concludes that there is some information about Fred which
we do not know even after exhaustive physical examination, specifically the
knowledge of what Fred’s perceptions of red1 and red2 are like. We did not know
everything there was to know about Fred, though we knew all the physical
information that could be known about him; “it follows that Physicalism leaves
something out”(Jackson, 1982). He reinforces this conclusion with the following
development: if it was learned that everyone could somehow gain Fred’s ability
to discriminate red1 from red2, then they would anticipate that some new insight
would be gained that they didn’t possess before despite their physical study of
Fred – they would expect to gain new knowledge by experiencing red1 and red2
for themselves.

This final development in Jackson’s first thought experiment is extended by the

second thought experiment, which involves a hypothetical scientist called Mary.
Mary is an expert in all scientific fields which concern visual perception; she
understands everything that can be known about the physical state of a person
when they perceive colour. However, she has been confined to a colourless
environment for her entire life and has never perceived colour herself, though
she has been able to acquire full knowledge of all the physical facts concerning
colour perception in humans via a black-and-white television monitor. Upon
leaving the colourless room (or receiving a colour television monitor) and
perceiving colour, according to Jackson, Mary must learn something new about
colour perception that she did not previously know. She comes to know ‘what it
is like’ to perceive colour, which could not be taught via black-and-white
television, and therefore the physicalist scheme is incomplete as long as it
asserts that to know all physical facts is to achieve knowledge of all facts.

In Understanding the Phenomenal Mind Van Gulick makes a multi-tiered defence

of physicalism-functionalism against the knowledge argument. He considers
several questions about the knowledge Mary gains in order, firstly asking
whether she gains any knowledge at all, then asking what kind of knowledge it is
(i.e. is it knowledge of new facts/propositions/information or simply ‘know-how’?),
then asking whether the knowledge is genuinely new to her or simply the same
knowledge presented in a different way, and finally asking what mode of
individuation Mary learns new propositions on. Assuming that Mary does learn
something which is not merely know-how and is genuinely a new proposition and
not just a new way of understanding a proposition she already knew, Van Gulick
reaches the final defence which appeals to a distinction between “fine-grained”
and “course-grained” modes of individuating propositions. If one takes the
coarse-grained approach, regarding propositions as functions from possible
worlds to truth values, it is possible that Mary could have learned a new concept
through the phenomenal experience, but this concept applies to the same
property that she had previously only had a physical-functional concept of, e.g.
she gains a new conceptual understanding of the colour red which still refers to
the same features of the physical world that her study of neurophysiology had
centred on but is not part of the same proposition, and therefore her studies
were complete; they simply used a different conceptual framework to the
practical activity of engaging in the sensory experience.

Lycan, in What is the “Subjectivity” of the Mental?, points out the

hyperintensional nature of knowledge (Lycan, 1990). He says that is possible to
know P but not know Q even if P=Q. In a coarse-grained method of individuation,
one would say that knowing P amounts to knowing Q since they are identical;
however, this is demonstrably not an accurate account of knowledge, since it is
possible to know, for example, that Hesperus is Venus but not know that
Phosphorus is Venus, despite the fact that all of these concepts refer to the same
celestial body, since they are genuinely different concepts. Lycan uses the
perspectival nature of self-regarding beliefs to illustrate this: the proposition “I
am underpaid” is a different proposition to “Lycan is underpaid”, since it has a
different conceptual structure; yet the concepts “I” and “Lycan” still refer to the
same subject. So, applied to Jackson’s thought experiment, Mary could learn the
new fact “seeing red is like this”, but this conceptual understanding of the
experience is still referring to the same experience as “seeing red stimulates
these cells and induces this behaviour [etc]”. Hence, acquiring new concepts
from experience does not amount to gaining knowledge of properties, objects or
events which the physicalist account does not capture.

Loar makes the same contentions in Phenomenal States(Loar, 1990), and

explains the intuitive appeal of the knowledge argument by highlighting the
distinctness of phenomenal concepts from physical-functional concepts. While
the phenomenal concept of a state is radically different to the physical-functional
concept of a state, they still refer to the same state; it is the subjective nature of
the phenomenal concept that prevents its induction from purely physical-
functional concepts. The false notion that the different concepts refer to different
states is due to this distinctness of concepts, he argues. While phenomenal
concepts are subjective in that they are specific to the person who holds them,
phenomenal states themselves are not subjective since they are ultimately
identifiable with objective physical-functional states. For example, Fred’s
phenomenal concept of perceiving red is peculiar to him; my phenomenal
concept of Fred’s perception of red is different since to Fred, Fred is “I”, whereas
to me, Fred is “Fred” – the concepts are inevitably different since we have
different perspectives, though both concepts refer to the same state.

This argument appears to be successful in demonstrating that a subject can gain

knowledge of new propositions without gaining knowledge of new states,
provided that one makes a sufficiently precise distinction between propositions –
namely, by discriminating on the grounds of their conceptual structure. In order
to refute this, the anti-physicalist would have to demonstrate that the new
proposition that the subject gained knowledge of genuinely referred to
something distinct from a physical-functional state. One way of doing this may
be to emphasise that the proposition that Mary gains knowledge of after
experiencing colour refers not to her phenomenal state but to a quale – the
subjective quality of her phenomenal state. Qualia are features which only bear
ostensive definition, since they are the simplest constituents of conscious
experience; more complex features might be described in terms of their
constituent qualia, but qualia cannot be described using complexes. For
example, redness is a quale since it cannot be described adequately to someone
who has never experienced it. If qualia are indeed distinct from the physical
world, and can’t be described exhaustively in terms of their functional role, this
presents a problem for the conventional view of causality: it implies that an
event can have a phenomenal cause in addition to its physical cause, since the
physical cause is presumed to be sufficient for the effect in question. To explain
the apparent causal redundancy of qualia, Jackson contends that they are
epiphenomenal: they are caused by events in the physical world but they have
no effect on it. Epiphenomenalism has many criticisms of its own, so a counter to
Lycan and Loar’s argument would have to involve a defence of
epiphenomenalism.

In conclusion, the defence against the knowledge argument proposed by Lycan

and Loar is successful in refuting the premise that a subject cannot gain
knowledge of a new proposition without gaining knowledge of new properties,
features or events. For the argument’s conclusion to hold, it would have to be
reached via a different kind of argument; one which demonstrated that qualia
are not physical or functional objects, and hence that a subject could gain
knowledge of something that physicalism does not capture. The knowledge
argument itself fails to demonstrate this, as illustrated by Lycan and Loar’s
defence.

Bibliography
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly , XXXII (No.
127), 127-130.
Loar, B. (1990). Phenomenal States. Philosophical Perspectives: Action Theory
and Philosophy of Mind , IV, 81-108.
Lycan, W. G. (1990). What is the "Subjectivity" of the Mental. Philosophical
Perspectives: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind , IV, 109-130.
Van Gulick, R. (1993). Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just
Armadillos? In M. Davies, & G. W. Humphreys (Eds.), Consciousness:
Psychological and Philosophical Essays (pp. 141-142). Oxford: Blackwell.