# The Knowledge Argument ## [Stanford Encyclopedia page](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/) ### Refuting the Ability Hypothesis As we have seen, proponents of the Ability Hypothesis assume that the know-how which Mary acquires is distinct from any propositional knowledge. This assumption can be challenged, based for example on the work of Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). On this view, for a subject S to know how to do something (to F) is for S to know that there is a way w for S to F, and for S to know this under a practical mode of presentation (2001, 430). Stanley & Williamson themselves apply this thought to Lewis’s version of the Ability Hypothesis: Knowing how to imagine red and knowing how to recognize red are both examples of knowledge-that. For example, x’s knowing how to imagine red amounts to knowing a proposition of the form ‘w is a way for x to imagine red’, entertained under a guise involving a practical mode of presentation of a way (2001, 442; see also McConnell 1994). ### Refuting the Acquaintance Hypothesis A friend of the knowledge argument might concede that a person is acquainted with Q only if she has or had an experience with property Q but he would have to insist that being acquainted with Q in that sense is a necessary condition for being able to know (in the relevant sense) that an experience has Q. Another kind of criticism of the Acquaintance Hypothesis is developed in Gertler (1999). She argues that the property dualist can explain why the most direct way to get familiar with a quale is by having an experience of the relevant kind while the physicalist does not have any explanation for this particular feature of qualia. Similarly, Robert Howell (2007, 146) argues that all other physicalist responses to the Knowledge Argument depend upon the Acquaintance Hypothesis, and that acquaintance is incompatible with objectivism (see Section 4.9 below). ### The New Knowledge / Old Fact View Many philosophers find it hard to deny that Mary gains new factual knowledge after release and for that reason (if they are physicalists) feel attracted by the New Knowledge/Old Fact View. Positions that clearly fall into that category are defended in Horgan 1984; Churchland 1985; Tye 1986, 1995; Bigelow and Pargetter 1990; Loar 1990/1997; Lycan 1990a, 1996; Pereboom 1994; Perry 2001; Byrne 2002; Papineau 2002, 2007; Van Gulick 2004; Levin 2007; Balog 2012a, 2012b. The basic ideas common to the New Knowledge/Old Fact View may be summarized as follows: - (1) Phenomenal character, e.g. phenomenal blueness, is a physical property of experiences (but see Lycan 1990a for an exception who construes qualia as properties of external objects). - (2) To gain knowledge of what it is like to have an experience of a particular phenomenal character requires the acquisition of phenomenal concepts of phenomenal character.[5] - (3) What it is for an organism to acquire and possess a phenomenal concept can be fully described in broadly physical terms. - (4) A subject can acquire and possess phenomenal concepts only if it has or has had experiences of the relevant phenomenal kind. - (5) After release Mary gains knowledge about phenomenal characters under phenomenal concepts. ==But the facts that make these new items of knowledge true are physical facts that Mary knew before release under another conceptualization.== Commentary - "Physical" facts? How could phenomenal knowledge be considered a physical fact? - The physical description and functional explanation of a phenomenal experience are more sensibly interpreted as physical knowledge of a phenomenal fact. The differences between variants of the New Knowledge/Old Fact View concern the theoretical (physicalist) account of (a) phenomenal character, (b) phenomenal concepts of phenomenal characters and (c) the relation between phenomenal characters and the corresponding phenomenal concepts. All proponents of the view point out that, according to their proposal, physical concepts and phenomenal concepts are cognitively independent: it is impossible to see a priori that something that falls under a physical concept of a particular phenomenal character also falls under the corresponding phenomenal concept of that phenomenal character. This is why it is possible to have (like Mary) complete physical knowledge about e.g. phenomenal blueness (you know everything there is to know about phenomenal blueness under its physical conceptualization) without having a phenomenal concept of blueness and without knowing any of these facts under a phenomenal concept of blueness. ==Some have argued that the phenomenal conceptualization is not expressible in language (see Byrne 2002 and Hellie 2004).== In general, if a philosopher _A_ claims that the argument of philosopher _B_ does not go through, it is a point in favor of his view if he can provide an error theory, that is if he can explain why the argument may _appear_ correct in the first place. The New Knowledge/Old Fact View can claim to have an error theory with respect to the knowledge argument. ==Given the cognitive independence of physical and phenomenal concepts of blueness it _appears as if_ we could imagine a situation where everything Mary knew before release were fulfilled but not what she came to know after release (and this can be taken to imply that she _does_ come to know new facts). But, according to the New Knowledge/Old Fact View this is an illusion. There is no such possible situation. What Mary learns after release is made true by a physical fact that she already knew before her release.== Some versions of the New Knowledge/Old Fact-View will be briefly described in what follows. ### Variants of the New Knowledge/Old Fact View Horgan (1984) does not provide a developed theoretical account of phenomenal concepts but is one of the first to formulate the basic intuition shared by most or all proponents of the New Knowledge/Old Fact View: By having experiences of blue, Mary gets acquainted with phenomenal blueness (which is in fact a physical property of experiences) “from the experiential perspective,” she gains what he calls “the first person ostensive perspective on that property” (Horgan 1984, 151): she now can refer to phenomenal blueness by thinking or saying “that kind of property” while having, remembering or imagining a blue experience and while attending to its particular quality. She thus has acquired a new concept of phenomenal blueness. Using this new concept she can form new beliefs (and acquire new knowledge) about phenomenal blueness. Formulated in this way, the view may appear similar to Conee’s acquaintance account. According to both views, Mary’s progress consists primarily in getting acquainted with phenomenal blueness from an inner perspective. But contrary to Conee’s thesis, according to the New Knowledge/Old Fact View, acquaintance with phenomenal blueness from an experiential perspective enables the subject to form a new concept of phenomenal blueness and thereby implies the capacity to acquire new beliefs. ==An example of a more explicit theoretical account of phenomenal character, phenomenal content and their relation can be found in Tye (1995). He proposes a representationalist account of phenomenal character. For a state to have phenomenal character is to represent internal or external physical items in an ‘abstract’ and nonconceptual way that is “appropriately poised for use by the cognitive system”== (see Tye 1995, 137–144). According to Tye, there are two kinds of phenomenal concepts: indexical concepts (an example is the concept applied when thinking of a particular shade of red as “this particular hue” while having a red experience) and what he calls “predicative phenomenal concepts” that are based on the capacity to make certain discriminations. Tye wishes to accommodate the natural intuition that Mary before release cannot fully understand the nature of phenomenal blueness (she doesn’t really know what it is to have a blue experience). One might think that his view is incompatible with the intuition at issue. Phenomenal blueness, according to his view, has a physical nature and one might expect that physical natures are fully describable in physical terms and fully understandable under a physical conceptualization. ==But Tye has a surprising response: although phenomenal blueness has a physical nature, a person cannot fully understand its nature unless she thinks of phenomenal blueness under a phenomenal concept.== ==Papineau (1996) distinguishes third person and first person thoughts about experiences.== First person thoughts involve the imagination of an experience of the relevant kind. The basic idea may be put like this: When Mary is finally released and after some time sufficiently acquainted with color experiences she can ‘reproduce’ blue experiences in her imagination. These imaginations of experiences of a particular kind can be used to refer to experiences of the kind at issue and to think about them. Obviously, Mary could not have first person thoughts about color experiences (she could not use imagined blue experiences in order to refer and to think about blue experiences) before she ever had blue experiences. ==After release, Mary can acquire new beliefs: first person beliefs about blue experiences. But for every such new first person belief about a given kind of experience, there will be one of her old third person beliefs which refers to the same kind of experience and has the same factual content.== - Makes sense, but the crux, again, is whether the first person belief constitutes new facts that cannot be expressed in purely physical terms (ie without invoking phenomenal concepts) An influential view about phenomenal concepts which answers the knowledge argument admitting that Mary gains new knowledge but no knowledge of new facts is developed in Loar (1990/1997): ==Phenomenal concepts are recognitional concepts. To have the phenomenal concept of blueness is to be able to recognize experiences of blueness while having them.== The recognitional concept of blueness refers directly to its referent (the physical property of blueness) where this means (in Loar’s terminology): there is no other property (no property of that property) involved in the reference fixing. According to Loar’s view the recognitional concept of phenomenal blueness refers to the physical property phenomenal blueness in virtue of being ‘triggered’ by that property. It has been doubted that ‘directness’ in Loar’s sense provides an account for what one might call acquaintance: for the way in which the phenomenal character is present to the mind when a thinker employs phenomenal concepts (see Levine 2007). White (2007) argues against Loar that the account cannot explain the a posteriori character of mind-brain identity statements in a satisfying manner. - Clearly, recognizing blueness is not the same thing as experiencing blueness - mere recognition does not capture the vividity of having such an experience. ### 4.8. Objections Against the New Knowledge/Old Fact View An objection to the New Knowledge/Old Fact View can be made as follows. In standard cases, if a subject does not know a given fact in one way that it does know in some other way, this can be explained by two modes of presentation: the subject knows the fact under one mode of presentation and does not know it under some other mode of presentation. So, for example, a person may know the fact that Venus is a planet under the mode of presentation associated with “the morning star is a planet” and fail to know the very same fact under the mode of presentation associated with “the evening star is a planet.” In this particular case, as in many others, the difference in the mode of presentation involves two different properties that are used to fix the referent. In one mode of presentation Venus is given as the heavenly body visible late in the morning (or some similar property), whereas in the other mode of presentation the object is given as the heavenly body visible early in the evening. ==If the New Knowledge/Old Fact View involves two modes of presentation of this sort, then it cannot be used to defend physicalism because this kind of explanation of the supposed double epistemic access to facts concerning phenomenal types would reintroduce non-physical properties at a higher level: the subject would have to be described as referring to the phenomenal type at issue by some physical property in case it believes the relevant fact under its physical mode of presentation and as referring to that phenomenal type by some non-physical property in case it believes the relevant fact under its phenomenal mode of presentation.== - (thus, property dualism) White (2007) develops the objection in detail. Block (2007) gives a detailed answer to White (2007) based on a distinction between what he labels cognitive and metaphysical modes of presentation. Chalmers (1996, 2002, 2010) makes a similar point as White (2007) using his framework of primary and secondary intensions. In that framework, primary intensions describe the way a concept picks out its referent in the actual world and the cognitive independence of phenomenal and physical concepts is explained by their different primary intensions. If one singular fact can be known under a physical mode of presentation as well as under a phenomenal mode of presentation, then the two items of knowledge involve two concepts (a phenomenal and a physical concept) with different primary intensions and these different primary intensions correspond to different properties. A two-dimensional framework is used in a different manner in Nida-Rümelin (2007) to develop the idea that the nature of phenomenal properties is present to the mind of the thinker when using phenomenal properties – an idea which leads to the result that the New Knowledge/Old Fact View is mistaken. This idea is also suggested by Philip Goff (2017). He suggests that the knowledge argument does not by itself refute physicalism because it does not overcome the New Knowledge/Old Fact View. However, things are different if the phenomenal concept which Mary acquires is transparent (i.e., it reveals the nature or essence of the phenomenal property which satisfies it): > in this case Mary’s new knowledge is knowledge of the nature of red experiences, but if pure physicalism is true, she already knew the complete nature of red experiences in knowing the pure physical truths, and hence there ought to be nothing more she can learn about their nature (2017, 74–75; see also Fürst 2011, 69–70; Demircioglu 2013, 274–275). A general argument against the materialist strategy of appealing to phenomenal concepts is developed in Chalmers (2004; 2007); for critical discussion see Balog (2012b). ### 4.9 The Knowledge Argument and Objectivism The Knowledge Argument has traditionally been understood as an argument against physicalism or perhaps against reductive versions of physicalism. But an influential alternative approach sees the argument as working not against physicalism per se, but against a different position which can be termed objectivism.[7] ==Objectivism is the view that an objective description of what exists can be complete; that there are no aspects of reality which can only be understood by having experiences of a specific type.== This notion is closely related to Nagel’s characterization of the physical nature of organisms as “a domain of objective facts par excellence – the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems” (1974, 442). On this view, the point of Jackson’s thought experiment is to bring out that Mary learns something which can only be known by having an experience of a certain kind (e.g., a perceptual experience). If this is correct, then this shows that no objective description of what exist can be complete. As Howell formulates it, the argument understood in this way runs as follows: > ==before leaving the room, Mary knew all the objective information about the world. When she left the room, she gained further understanding about the world. Therefore, all the objective information about the world is insufficient for a complete understanding of the world== (2007, 147). - Precisely. A number of proponents of this interpretation of the Knowledge Argument suggest that it is compatible with a specific form of physicalism, on which all facts are physical or metaphysically necessitated by microphysical facts but some facts can only be understood by having specific experiences (see, e.g., Kallestrup 2006; Howell 2007; for slightly different formulations see Crane 2003; Zhao 2012). ==That said, it is worth asking how the ‘physical’ is to be understood, such that facts which can only be known if one has certain experiences can count as physical.== ==Furthermore, it is worth questioning whether a view on which facts are either physical or metaphysically necessitated by microphysical facts thereby counts as a form of physicalism. It has been argued that such a view is compatible with non-physicalist positions such as emergentism or certain forms of ethical non-naturalism== (see Horgan 1993, 559-566; 2010, 311-314; Crane 2010; for discussion see Stoljar 2017, section 9). ### The Dualist View About the Knowledge Argument There has not been much discussion of the knowledge argument from a dualist perspective. This is unsurprising given the small number of contemporary philosophers who defend a dualist position (for a prominent exception see Chalmers (1996); the knowledge argument is discussed on pp. 140–146). There are two possible strategies for a dualist to take who wishes to defend the knowledge argument. The first is merely defensive or ‘destructive’ in that it tries to refute the positive theoretical proposals one by one that have been used by physicalists in their objections against the knowledge argument. The second is more ‘constructive’ in that it aims at developing an alternative positive dualist account of phenomenal concepts, phenomenal properties and their relations such that on that account Mary does learn new and nonphysical facts upon release. Examples (or partial examples) for the first strategy may occasionally be found in the literature (compare Warner 1986, Gertler 1999, Raymont 1995, 1999 and Connell 1994). Examples for the second are hard to find, but Chalmers (1996, 2002) and Nida-Rümelin (2007) exemplify the second strategy. ==Using his framework of primary and secondary intensions he develops a positive account of what he calls “pure phenomenal concepts” that can be described as incorporating the old and natural intuition that in the case of qualia (phenomenal characters) there is no distinction between appearance and reality, in other words: qualia ‘reveal their nature’ in experience.== - Experience is the only part of reality that we can be sure exists, as it is verified first-hand - other, objective forms of reality can be 'verified' by experiment but require the assumption that our perceptions are not false. We can be sure that we perceive, but we cannot be sure of *what* we perceive, no matter how much data is perceived, as it could all have been maliciously constructed, e.g. as in a simulation. - A coherent and sensible metaphysics derived from first principles ('metaphysics' in the sense of understanding the meta-rules of possible laws of physics and the possible universes that those possible laws entail) would be helpful for ruling out certain universes that may be manipulating our perception. If it is possible to rule out all universes where our perception can be manipulated, one could have a higher trust in what it is that we perceive. Alas, it appears that the systematic manipulationion of perception is possible in the universe currently perceived. The intuitive idea just mentioned has been expressed in different ways. ==Some say that qualia ‘have no hidden sides’. Others say that qualia are not natural kind terms in that it is not up to the sciences to tell us what having an experience of a particular kind amounts to (we know what it amounts to by having them and attending to the quality at issue).== It is quite clear that an account of this intuitive idea has to be one of the ingredients of a dualist defense of the knowledge argument. ==Nida-Rümelin (2007) develops a technical notion of grasping properties which is intended to serve the purposes of dualists who argue against materialism using the assumption that in the special case of phenomenal concepts the relation that the thinker bears to the property he conceptualizes is more intimate than in other cases: the thinker understands what having the property essentially consists in==. This idea can be used to block familiar objections to the knowledge argument in particular those falling into the Old fact/ New Knowledge category. A similar basic idea but formulated within a different theoretical framework is elaborated in Stephen White (2007). According to mainstream opinion the most serious problem for property dualism is the danger of being driven into epiphenomenalism. ==If phenomenal characters are non-physical properties and if every physical event has a physical cause and if we exclude the possibility of overdetermination (where something is caused by two different causes that are both sufficient), then, arguably, whether or not a state has a particular phenomenal character cannot have any causal relevance.== - This appears to be the strongest objection to the knowledge argument - if qualia are epiphenomenal, why does it seem that they have causal effects on the physical world? e.g. A phenomenal feeling of sadness can cause me to cry and release physical tears? But if qualia are causally impotent, how can a person know that she has an experience with a particular phenomenal character? ==Many take it to be obvious that a person cannot know that she now has a blue experience unless her blue experience plays a prominent causal role in the formation of her belief at issue.== This particular problem has been formulated as an objection against the knowledge argument in Watkins (1989). Until some time ago Jackson was one of the very few philosophers who embraced epiphenomenalism. But Jackson changed his mind. Jackson (1995) argues that knowledge about qualia is impossible if qualia are epiphenomenal and he concludes that something must be wrong with the knowledge argument. ==In Jackson (2003) and Jackson (2007) he argues that the argument goes wrong in presupposing a false view about sensory experience and that it can be answered by endorsing strong representationalism: the view that to be in a phenomenal state is to represent objective properties where the properties represented as well as the representing itself can be given a physicalist account.== **Jackson admits that there is a specific phenomenal way of representing but he now insists that the phenomenal way of representing can be accounted for in physicalist terms. Doubts about the latter claim are developed in Alter (2007).** - Alas (in reference to the bolded sentences), it appears that once again we are in square one. Other possible reactions to the threat of epiphenomenalism for dualism would be either to doubt that a property dualist must embrace epiphenomenalism or to develop an account of knowledge about one’s own phenomenal states that does not imply a causal relation between qualia and phenomenal knowledge about qualia (see Chalmers 2002). ### Concluding Remark The appropriate evaluation of the knowledge argument remains controversial. The acceptability of its second premise P2 (Mary lacks factual knowledge before release) and of the inferences from P1 (Mary has complete physical knowledge before release) to C1 (Mary knows all the physical facts) and from P2 to C2 (Mary does not know some facts before release) depend on quite technical and controversial issues about (a) the appropriate theory of property concepts and their relation to the properties they express and (b) the appropriate theory of belief content. It is therefore safe to predict that the discussion about the knowledge argument will not come to an end in the near future. ### Thoughts The draw towards epiphenomenalism is one of the biggest concerns.