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Tye's Criticism of the Knowledge Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Paul Raymont
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

Traditionally, one of the primary obstacles for physicalist accounts of the mind has been the apparent contrast between the intrinsic nature of our experiences and the intrinsic nature of the brain states with which they are allegedly identical. For instance, the intrinsic nature of an itch seems quite different from that of any electro-chemical state or event in the brain.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1995

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References

Notes

1 Jackson, Frank, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 127 (April 1982): 127–36. Jackson elaborates on his views in “What Mary Didn't Know,” Journal of Philosophy, 83, 5 (May 1986): 291–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Jackson, , “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” p. 130.Google Scholar

3 Tye, Michael, The Metaphysics of Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 6, pp. 133–50. In his Acknowledgments, Tye says that this chapter is a virtual reprint of his “The Subjective Qualities of Experience,” Mind, 95, 377 (January 1986): 1-17.Google Scholar

4 Tye, , The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 144.Google Scholar

5 Ibid, p. 145.

6 Ibid., 141, as given in (lc). According to Tye's analysis, person x knows what it is like to have an experience with a certain quale Q if, and only if, “Either x is presently undergoing an experience with Q and x is introspectively aware that his experience has Q, or x can remember having an experience with Q, or x can remember having experiences with qualities either phenomenally similar to Q or phenomenally constitutive of Q and x, on the basis of what he is here able to remember, can imagine having an experience with Q.”

7 Ibid., p. 142.

8 Tye himself adopts this manner of speaking in the last paragraph of The Metaphysics of Mind, where he says, “One of the things [Mary] knows of [George's] e is that it has the phenomenal content (whatever it actually is) that is typically caused in [George] by his viewing red objects” (Tye, The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 145).

9 Russell, Bertrand, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Logic and Knowledge, edited by Charles Marsh, Robert (London: Unwin Hyman, 1956), p. 195. (Tye alludes to this section from Russell in The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 139.) Russell was here speaking of redness itself. Perhaps he should have confined his remarks to phenomenal redness, that is, to the phenomenal quale that usually characterizes our experiences when we see red things (i.e., R), since some would prefer to reserve the term 'red' for referring to the physical features of external objects that reflect light waves onto the retina in such a way as to induce in the observer an R-quale.Google Scholar

10 Tye, , The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 145, n.14. Tye was there criticizing a view presented in Terence Horgan, “Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 135 (April 1984): 147–52.Google Scholar

11 Tye, , The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 145, n.14.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 148.

13 Ibid., p. 148.

14 Ibid., p. 148.

15 Ibid.

16 My thanks to Duncan Macintosh for this point.

17 Tye, The Metaphysics of Mind, p. 145-46, n.14.

18 Ibid., p. 146, n.14.

19 An anonymous referee has complained that I am trading on an unclear notion of “factual information.” While I cannot pretend to have ready a fully adequate and thorough analysis of this concept, I shall assume for present purposes that whenever one's beliefs are augmented in such a way as to eliminate possibilities with which they were previously compatible, one has thereby acquired new information. So that since Mary's pre-exit belief of (4) is compatible with a possibility which her post-exit belief eliminates (that is, the possibility that e exemplified a blueness quale), the two beliefs must differ with respect to their informational content. This is not to deny that many vexatious questions remain concerning the nature of information about qualia. William Seager probes them insightfully in his Metaphysics of Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), especially pp. 144-68.

20 Feigl, Herbert, The 'Mental' and the ‘Physical’ (1958; rpt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p. 68.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 68.

22 Ibid. Emphases in the original.

23 Support from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged.