There's Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument

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Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, Daniel Stoljar
MIT Press, Nov 19, 2004 - Philosophy - 486 pages
In Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment, Mary is confined to a black-and-white room and educated through black-and-white books and lectures on a black-and-white television. In this way, she learns everything there is to know about the physical world. If physicalism—the doctrine that everything is physical—is true, then Mary seems to know all there is to know. What happens, then, when she emerges from her black-and-white room and sees the color red for the first time? Jackson's knowledge argument says that Mary comes to know a new fact about color, and that, therefore, physicalism is false. The knowledge argument remains one of the most controversial and important arguments in contemporary philosophy.There's Something About Mary—the first book devoted solely to the argument—collects the main essays in which Jackson presents (and later rejects) his argument along with key responses by other philosophers. These responses are organized around a series of questions: Does Mary learn anything new? Does she gain only know-how (the ability hypothesis), or merely get acquainted with something she knew previously (the acquaintance hypothesis)? Does she learn a genuinely new fact or an old fact in disguise? And finally, does she really know all the physical facts before her release, or is this a "misdescription"? The arguments presented in this comprehensive collection have important implications for the philosophy of mind and the study of consciousness.

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Contents

Epiphenomenal Qualia
39
What Mary Didnt Know
51
Does She Learn Anything?
57
Epiphenomenal Qualia?
59
Dennett on the Knowledge Argument
69
The Ability Hypothesis
75
What Experience Teaches
77
Motion Blindness and the Knowledge Argument
105
What Mary Couldnt Know Belief About Phenomenal States
241
Phenomenal Concepts and the Knowledge Argument
269
Did She Know Everything Physical?
299
Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia
301
Two Conceptions of the Physical
309
Inexpressible Truths and the Allure of the Knowledge Argument
333
So Many Ways of Saying No to Mary
365
Postscripts
407

Knowing What It Is Like The Ability Hypothesis and the Knowledge Argument
143
The Acquaintance Hypothesis
161
Knowing Qualia A Reply to Jackson with Postscript 1997
163
Acquaintance with Qualia
179
10 Phenomenal Knowledge
197
Old Facts New Modes
217
Phenomenal States Revised Version
219
Postscript
409
Postscript on Qualia
417
Mind and Illusion
421
Supplemental Bibliography
443
Index
457
Copyright

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Page xx - Mary is confined to a black-and-white room, is educated through black-andwhite books and through lectures relayed on black-and-white television. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of "physical...
Page xx - She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of "physical" which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this, including of course functional roles. If physicalism is true, she knows all there is to know. For to suppose otherwise is to suppose that there is more to know than every physical fact, and that is just what physicalism denies.

About the author (2004)

Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, is the author of Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press, 1999), among other books, and the editor of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (MIT Press, 2001) and High Noon on the Electronic Frontier (MIT Press, 1996).

Yujin Nagasawa is Research Fellow at the Australian National University and Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta.

Daniel Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University.

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