Brady W.

Manning
06/04/14
 Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument” has been widely discussed and heavily disputed since he

first put it forward in his 1982 article “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The argument, which is intended as a

refutation of physicalism, is best instantiated in Jackson’s famous thought experiment, hereafter

referred to as “Mary’s Room.” There are many problems with the thought experiment, including issues

with the terms Jackson uses and how he uses them, and questions of whether or not the premises of

Mary’s Room can be held, as well as whether or not the conclusion is properly drawn. An examination of

the various objections to Jackson’s knowledge argument will show that these problems completely

undermine his attempts to refute physicalism. Any value which the argument holds stems not from its

validity as a means of denying physicalism, but rather as a thought-provoking mental exercise, in which

capacity its value is undeniable.

Before beginning to examine the responses to the knowledge argument, it is first necessary to

gain a good understanding of the Mary’s Room thought experiment. The experiment begins with a

couple of suppositions. We are first to suppose that a scientist, Mary, has been locked in a black and

white room since birth, never having any access to colour of any kind. We are asked to further suppose

that Mary, through whatever means, has come to know everything physical that there is to know about

other people, and is the foremost expert in the physicality of colour. Now we are asked to imagine that

Mary is released, or escapes, from her confinement and has access to the outside world where, for the

first time, she encounters colours visually. The thought experiment is supposed to lead one to the

conclusion, which Jackson makes, that Mary has learned some new factual knowledge about other

human beings, namely that they experience colour in the same manner in which she just has. What

Jackson’s conclusion is mean to show is that, since Mary knew all physical information about people,

and since she has learned something new, there must be some non-physical information which exists.

(Jackson, What Mary Didn’t Know, Pgs. 291-294) In this way Jackson seeks to refute physicalism, by

proving that something epiphenomenal exists, namely what he terms “qualia”.

 In order to proceed, there are a few terms which need better defining. The first, physicalism, is

formulated by Jackson as “the challenging thesis that [the world] is entirely physical.” (Jackson, What

Mary Didn’t Know, Pg. 291) Though Jackson’s use of the term is in dispute, in the interest of meeting

him on an even playing field it will be accepted. The second term is qualia, which Jackson uses to refer to

singular instances of subjective, conscious experience. (Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia, Pgs. 127-129)

The third and final term is epiphenomenalism, which Jackson uses in the sense “… ‘x is epiphenomenal’

means ‘x is an effect but itself has no effects in the physical world whatsoever.’” (Dennettt, Pg. 402)

It will also be useful to provide an actual formulation of Jackson’s argument to refer to:

(1) Premise 1: Before leaving the room, Mary knows all the physical information (facts) that there is

to know about other people and their experiences

(2) Premise 2: After leaving the room for the first time, Mary comes to know something new about

other people, namely what their experience of colour is like

(3) Premise 3: When she was still in the room, Mary as yet lacked some knowledge

(4) Conclusion: Some fact about other people’s experience exists such that Mary was ignorant of it

when she was in the room

The responses to Jackson’s argument can widely be seen as falling in to one of three categories.

The first is those which deny that Mary, after emerging from her room, has in fact acquired some new

piece of knowledge. The second is those which accept that she gains some new piece of knowledge, but

hold that what she comes to know is some old fact known in a new way, rather than a new fact about

the experiences of other people. (Gulick, Pg. 370) The third is those which seek to undermine his use of

certain terms, thus discrediting his premises or conclusion.

David Lewis’s response to the knowledge argument centres around a denial of Jackson’s second

premise, that Mary has learned something new after leaving the room. To begin with, he concedes that

knowing what an experience is like requires one to actual have that experience. Indeed, Lewis contends
that the real lesson of Jackson’s thought experiment is that no information exists, either physical or non-

physical, which could give Mary knowledge of what it is like to see colours. (Lewis, Pgs. 93-96) Where

Lewis diverges from Jackson is in noting a distinct difference between “knowing that”, which includes all

physical facts which Mary might have been given, and “knowing how”, a form of knowledge only

obtainable through experience. No matter how much information Mary acquires, physical or non-

physical, she will not have gained the ability to understand and contextualise colour until she has

experienced colour for herself. (Lewis, Pgs. 96-101)

In essence, Lewis’s argument is that, in leaving the room, Mary has not gained new knowledge,

but rather she has gained new abilities. In response to this idea, Jackson would assert that Lewis has

missed his point entirely. Though Mary may indeed have gained the ability to understand and

contextualise colour, she has also gained new knowledge that other people experience colour in such a

way. By Lewis’s own argument, such knowledge is, in fact, something new, and thus he has failed to

address a key part of Jackson’s argument. Though he has stripped away the possibility that Mary has

learned anything new except perhaps about other people, Lewis has not entirely refuted Jackson’s first

premise. (Jackson, What Mary Didn’t Know, Pg. 294)

Terrence E. Horgan’s response to the knowledge argument focuses on the exact nature of the

new knowledge which Mary gains upon leaving the room. While Jackson asserts that it is a new fact

which Mary has learned, Horgan contends that it might rather be new knowledge of an old fact. He

demonstrates this through a denial that the conclusion is properly drawn from the third premise; while

Mary has indeed gained new knowledge, it is not necessarily the case that she has gained new

knowledge about some fact. He goes on to provide an example of such a phenomenon: Superman and

Clark Kent. Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly, but is unaware that Clark Kent possesses the same

power. Thus, to Lane, the sentence “Superman can fly” must express different information from the

sentence “Clark Kent can fly”, even though they attribute the same quality to the same entity. It might
well be the case, then, that Mary is using two different concepts of a single physical property (a physical,

scientific concept and a qualitative, experiential concept), and as such is not learning a new fact but

rather applying a new concept (her experience of colour) to an old property (colour). (Horgan, Pgs. 147-

151)

Together, Horgan and Lewis have succeeded in casting major doubt on the knowledge

argument’s validity as a refutation of physicalism. Adding still further to the objections, Daniel C.

Dennett questions two of the core concepts involved in Jackson’s argument: epiphenomenalism and

qualia. Dennett elucidates the distinction between the scientific use of epiphenomenalism, as a

nonfunctional property or byproduct, and the philosophical use of the term, in which ‘x is

epiphenomenal’ means ‘x is an effect but itself has no effects in the physical world whatsoever.’ Dennett

points out, correctly, that for Jackson to commit himself to the second definition (which he ostensibly

does) is for him to commit himself either to something utterly beyond verification or to something

which denies his own conclusion. (Dennett, Pgs. 402-404)

Jackson’s use of the term epiphenomenalism implies that qualia are themselves an effect, but

do not have an effect on the physical world whatsoever. That being true, there are only two possible

logical outcomes of that implication, neither of which is desirable for Jackson. The first possible outcome

is that it is impossible to verify the existence of qualia, since their inability to affect the material world

makes them utterly unempirical. Thus, although someone may claim to have qualia, it would be

impossible for another person to know that that is in fact the case. The second possible outcome is that

the epiphenomenalist attempts to escape the first outcome by embracing dualism and saying that the

existence of qualia can be seen in their effects on the mental, non-physical world. However, since one’s

actions are undeniably affected by the status or contents of one’s inner mental world, and since qualia

are said to affect that mental world, then it would be logically inescapable that qualia affect the physical
world. (Dennett, Pgs. 401-404) With Dennett’s criticism, Jackson is now faced with two possibilities,

both of which undermine his philosophy significantly.

Dennett offers another effective criticism of the knowledge argument, providing his own,

equally plausible ending to Jackson’s famous thought experiment. In Dennett’s ending, instead of Mary

leaving her room, her captors bring in a banana which they have cleverly changed from yellow to blue.

Their intention is to trick Mary in to thinking that blue is yellow, based on her knowledge that bananas

are meant to be yellow. However, when presented with the banana, Mary correctly identifies it as being

blue, saying:

"You have to remember that I know everything - absolutely everything - that could ever be
known about the physical causes and effects of color vision. So of course… I already knew exactly
what thoughts I would. I realize it is hard for you to imagine that I could know so much about my
reactive dispositions that the way blue affected me came as no surprise. It's hard for anyone to
imagine the consequences of someone knowing absolutely everything physical about anything!"
(Dennett, Pgs. 399-400)

This alternate ending is, of course, a reduction ad absurdum argument meant to highlight the extreme

improbability of Jackson’s hypothetical. Since Dennett’s clearly absurd alternate ending is at least as

plausible as Jackson’s own, the reader is led to conclude that Mary’s Room is a fundamentally flawed

thought experiment.

One final noteworthy reply to the knowledge argument comes from Paul Churchland, who

primarily attacks Jackson’s equivocation of two different uses of the term “know” in his argument. In the

first premise, Jackson uses the word know to refer to knowledge of physical facts, the possession of

which Mary has absolutely no gaps in. This realm of knowledge is both able to be articulated and

assessed for truth-value. However, the use of the word know in the second premise only makes sense in

the context of knowledge as something which is inarticulable and beyond truth-value assessment. This is

the difference between “knowledge of facts” and “knowledge by acquaintance”. (Churchland, Pgs. 67-

71)
 Because of this equivocation in relation to a key term, Jackson’s argument cannot be considered

valid. In the interest of fairness, however, Churchland formulates a version of Jackson’s argument in

which the terms agree by using the first instance of “know” in the second premise as well as the first.

The initial result of this is that the second premise now becomes valid: Mary does indeed learn some

new physical fact about other people, their experience of colour. However the first premise is now such

a strong statement that it cannot possibly be held. If Mary did indeed know all possible physical facts

before hand, and the knowledge of others’ experience of colour is a physical fact, then Mary would have

already known it before she learned it. Such an idea is, of course, impossible. (Churchland, Pgs. 71-76)

Thus, even when the two uses of the word “know” are made to agree with each other, Jackson’s

argument is not valid.

Jackson’s knowledge argument, and the Mary’s Room thought experiment in particular, have

been the subject of some intense debate for three decades since their unveiling. While the thought

experiment seems initially very appealing, upon further examination it becomes quite apparent exactly

why it is so very contentious. Between misuse and misunderstandings of language, unfairly made

assumptions based solely on intuitions, and poorly constructed premises and improperly drawn

conclusions, this argument is plagued with issues. Despite that fact, in formulating the knowledge

argument Jackson sparked a wider interest and pursuit of many other important philosophical

questions, and so, while ultimately ill-conceived, Mary’s Room is undeniably important and usefully

illuminating.
Bibliography:

Churchland, Paul. “Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson.” A Nuerocomputational Perspective, Yujin

Nagasawa, Peter Ludlow, & Daniel Stoljar (eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 67-76.

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Gulick, Robert Van. “So Many Ways of Saying No to Mary.” There’s Something About Mary, Peter
Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 366-404.

Horgan, Terence E. “Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia.” Philosophical Quarterly. April, 1984:
147-152.

Jackson, Frank. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The Philosophical Quarterly. April, 1982: 127-136.

Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Didn’t Know.” The Journal of Philosophy. May, 1986: 291-295.

Lewis, David. “What Experience Teaches.” There’s Something About Mary, Peter Ludlow, Yujin
Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 77-103.