Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind Weeks 16: Mysterianism & Chomsky’s Approach to the Mind-Body Problem.

Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind

Weeks 16:Mysterianism & Chomsky’s Approach

to the Mind-Body Problem

Mysterianism

• In his 1992 book Consciousness Reconsidered, Owen Flanagan introduced the term “mysterianism” (he actually called it “the new mysterianism”) to refer to the view that

The Explanatory-Gap View

• What Flanagan called “mysterianism” is also known as “the explanatory-gap view”

• Those who hold the explanatory-gap view acknowledge a gap between facts about the mental and facts about the physical -- so that, as Jackson claims, you can know all the latter without knowing certain of the former.

• But on this view the gap is best explained in terms of us -- what our minds are suited to know -- rather than in terms of the world -- what sorts of things make it up.

• This line of argument originated with Joe Levine and was later taken up by Colin McGinn.

Levine’s Version

• Consider the example of pain. • Levine claims that much would be explained by learning that

pain is C-fiber stimulation. (The phrase “C-fiber stimulation” refers to some hypothetical neural stimulation of the brain.) – “If we believe that part of the concept expressed by the term ‘pain’ is

that of a state which plays a certain causal role in our interaction with the environment (e.g., it warns us of damage, it causes us to attempt to avoid situations we believe will result in it, etc.), [learning that pain is C-fiber stimulation] explains the mechanisms underlying the performance of these functions.”

• It is much like learning that water is H20. If the concept expressed by the term “water” is the concept of something that plays the causal role water does, then to learn that is to learn the underlying physical mechanism for that causal role.

Difference Between Water and Pain

• The difference between water and pain for Levine is that while the physical mechanism of being H20 is “fully explanatory” in the case of water, it is not in the case of pain,

• This is because “there is more to our concept of pain than its causal role, there is its qualitative [phenomenal] character, how it feels; and what is left unexplained by the discovery of C-fiber firing is why pain should feel the way it does!”

Levine’s analysis of our understanding of the identity statement about pain:

Levine’s Analysis

• On Levine’s account, the second premise is what is right about the causal-role or “functionalist” story, providing the physical mechanism underlying pain’s causal role.

• It’s the first premise that is the problem. • For it seems possible that it is false; and we have no

good account of this intuition, since the only sure thing available, the second premise, serves a different purpose. He writes: – “There seems to be nothing about C-fiber firing which makes it

naturally ‘fit’ the phenomenal properties of pain.” The first premise “makes the way pain feels into merely a brute fact.”

Connection to Mary Argument

• This is related to Jackson’s Mary argument• Its seeming possible that pain (for example) should

satisfy a functionalist description doesn’t entail its seeming possible that pain should feel some way.

• Someone convinced by Levine’s position might easily conclude that that fact is analogous to Jackson’s intuition that knowing that pain satisfies a functionalist description doesn’t entail knowing how pain feels.

• In both cases, there is an “explanatory gap.”

McGinn’s Version

• McGinn provides a different argument, one that resembles Descartes’s argument for dualism in some respects.

• McGinn’s idea: the concept of a brain state is a spatial concept but the concept of a phenomenal state is not.

• But because of this we cannot conceive of something’s being both a brain state and a phenomenal state except, at best, in a brute fashion.

• The concept of a “psychophysical link” between mind and brain, however, is supposed to make the connection intelligible, not brute.

• Thus, he concludes, no such concept exists.• But it does not follow that the mind is immaterial but only that we

cannot have a concept of how that would be.

Comparison Between Levine & McGinn

• McGinn’s conclusion resembles Levine’s. • According to Levine, nothing metaphysical can be concluded from

this, since it’s only an epistemological point -- a fact about us rather than a fact about the World -- though it’s still of interest that there is this limitation to our knowledge.

• McGinn’s conclusion is that it’s fully consistent with the evidence that there exists a naturalistic theory fully explaining the dependence of consciousness on brain states, but that this theory is beyond our limited human conceptual capacities to grasp.

• Since we shouldn’t reject materialism unless we must, the best the anti-reductionist could do is to show that phenomenal properties are physical but “noumenal,” beyond any humanly possible psychophysical reduction.

Chomsky’s Rather Different Line of Argument

• Themes in Chomsky’s rather different line of argument—–Mysteries in explaining “will & control”

(free will and action)–Cognitive closure– Impossibility of formulating a “mind-body

problem”–The “unification problem”

Chomsky on the Mind-Body Problem: Begins with the Sources of Action

• In setting out his own diagnosis of the mind-body problem, Chomsky begins not with consciousness or qualia or phenomenal properties, as many philosophers have, but with something very different, the sources of action.

• Chomsky begins with Descartes -- he draws not from Descartes’s statement of the problem in the Meditations but from a very different treatment in the Discourse on Method.

The “Moral Distinction” in Discourse on Method

• In Discourse, Descartes argues that there is a “moral distinction” between mind and body that we observe when we observe the causes of behavior.

• The behavior of machines, Descartes argued, is entirely determined by their environments and by the arrangements of their parts.

• If a machine’s parts are arranged in a certain way and its environment takes a certain form, then the machine can do one and only one thing. What it does is inevitable.

• But we humans, Descartes argues, are not machines, for this is not true of us.

“Descartes’s Problem” of “the Creative Aspect of Language Use’

(Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988), p. 6)

Descartes’s Problem, the Mind-Body Problem, the Problem of Other Minds• “Descartes’s problem, the problem of how

language is used in the normal creative fashion,” Chomsky writes, “… arose in the context of the mind-body problem or, more specifically, what was later called “the problem of other minds”….

Chomsky on Descartes’s Test for the Creative Use of Language

(Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988), p. 6)

Chomsky’s Summary of Descartes’s Reasons

• “More generally, … the problem is that a ‘machine’ is compelled to act in a certain way under fixed environmental conditions and with its parts arranged in a certain way, while a human under these circumstances is only ‘incited and inclined’ to behave in this fashion. The human may often, or even always, do what it is incited or inclined to do, but each of us knows from introspection that we have a choice in the matter over a large range. And we can determine by experiment that this is true of other humans as well. The difference between being compelled, and merely being incited and inclined, is a crucial one, the Cartesians concluded -- and quite accurately.”– Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 139

“Free and Undetermined”• “Returning now to Descartes’s problem, notice that it

still stands, unresolved by … developments in the natural sciences. We still have no way to come to terms with what appears to be a fact, even an obvious fact: Our actions are free and undetermined, in that we need not do what we are ‘incited and inclined’ to do; and if we do what we are incited and inclined to do, an element of free choice nevertheless enters. Despite much thought and often penetrating analysis, it seems to me that this problem still remarks unresolved, much in the way Descartes formulated it. Why should this be so?” Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 147

“Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach” (excerpt)Noam Chomsky interviewed by John Gliedman

Omni, 6:11, November 1983• QUESTION: What about the problem of free will? If

genes play a crucial role in structuring the mind's abilities, is free will an illusion?

• CHOMSKY: Well, that's interesting. Here, I think, I would tend to agree with Descartes. Free will is simply an obvious aspect of human experience. I know – as much as I know that you're in front of me right now – that I can take my watch and throw it out the window if I feel like it. I also know that I'm not going to do that, because I want the watch. But I could do it if I felt like it. I just know this….

Continuation of Quotation• … Now, I don't think there's any scientific grasp, any hint of an

idea, as to how to explain free will. Suppose somebody argues that free will is an illusion. Okay. This could be the case, but I don't believe that it's the case. It could be. You have to be open-minded about the possibility. But you're going to need a very powerful argument to convince me that something as evident as free will is an illusion. Nobody's offered such an argument or even pretended to offer such an argument.

• So where does that leave us? We're faced with an overwhelmingly self-evident phenomenon that could be an illusion even though there's no reason to believe that it is an illusion. And we have a body of scientific knowledge that simply doesn't appear to connect with the problem of free will in any way.

What Is “the Problem of Free Will”?

• Unclear what Chomsky takes “the problem of free will” to be– “We still have no way to come to terms with what appears to be a

fact, even an obvious fact: Our actions are free and undetermined….” Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 147

– “I don't think there's any scientific grasp, any hint of an idea, as to how to explain free will.” Omni interview

• Is it a problem of how to reconcile determinism with the existence of free will? If so, then it is unclear why compatibilism won’t work

• If it’s the question of whether free will exists (whether hard determinism is true), then why not discuss the evidence?

• If it’s the “scientific question” of what free will is, then why think there is one?

• Is it the scientific program of explaining or predicting action?

Problems and Mysteries

• Chomsky introduces his well-known distinction between problems and mysteries at the beginning of a June 1974 article reprinted in Reflections on Language

“Admissible Hypotheses” (Reflections on Language, p. 156)

“A Theory of Problems and Mysteries for the Human Organism”

“A Theory of Problems and Mysteries for the Human Organism” (cont.)

William Lycan: Summary of Chomsky on “Will and Choice”

How Questions of “Will and Choice” Are Issues for Science but Evade It

(“Reply to Lycan”)

Questions

• “Why the animal does this or that”? Are we to suppose that animals have free “will and choice”?

• “The problems that motivated the problem of other minds for the Cartesian remain unexplained … and in fact are not empirically investigated”?

• “There is important recent work … but not into what is concealed by the phrase ‘at will’”?

• Is the “problem of free will” (1) whether it exists, (2) if it is compatible with determinism, or (3) how action is caused? If (3), it is unclear how much of answering (3) addresses traditional issue

Why Not Conceptual Analysis?

• Why not Hume’s answer in the Enquiry – “By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to determinations of the will”?

• We can distinguish liberty of the person from liberty of the will

• Hume’s view responds to, among other views, Descartes’s metaphysical-libertarian view in Meditation Four

• Why isn’t there an analytic connection between freedom and acting on desire? Why is this a scientific question, except to determine the concept’s nature?

The Appeal to Newton

• Separately, Chomsky rejects the mind-body problem

• However, it is not clear who the target is• Chomsky argues that we have no clear notion

of “body” in the aftermath of the Newtonian revolution

How the Free Will Problem Arose for the Cartesians

Chomsky Parts Company with the Cartesians & Their Res Cogitans

• The Cartesians accounted for this difference by positing a “second substance,” a soul made of soul-stuff over and about the physical stuff of the human body.

• But here Chomsky parts company with the Cartesian. • His argument is that being able to draw the conclusion

from the observed differences between machine behavior and human behavior that humans were partly made up of stuff different in kind from the stuff of human bodies requires a prior notion of what makes something a “body.”

• But he argues that we don’t have such a prior notion.

Descartes’s Mechanistic Idea No Longer Available, Nothing Replaces It• Descartes’ idea was mechanistic -- that

physical things occupied space and made things happen by touching, and in particular by pushing -- other physical things.

• But we know from Isaac Newton’s discovery of “action at a distance” -- the way bodies effect each other gravitationally -- that the mechanistic account is incorrect.

Chomsky’s Conclusion

• What does Chomsky conclude?– That “there is no clear and definite concept of body”

(Language and Problems of Knowledge, p. 144)– The material world is “whatever we discover it to be”

• But this invites the question: What is the mind-body problem taken to be, such that this is the result?

• One might think that there is nothing in the new Newtonian picture that alters the Cartesian problem or undermines the Cartesian result

• If a second substance is justifiable on the mechanistic picture, why not also on the Newtonian?

Newton Exorcises the Machine: How the Mind-Body Problem Disappeared

(New Horizons, p. 84)

“No Real Progress to Speak Of”

What Is the Mind-Body Problem?

• Again, the question: What is the mind-body problem, such that this is the result?

• Chomsky’s point is that the mind-body problem is generated by thinking that we have a priori access to a ready-made, finished picture of the “physical” side of reality

• This makes the mind-body problem metaphysical• Chomsky’s idea is that we do not have a priori access

to a ready-made, finished picture of the “physical” side of reality

Three Alternative Ways of Motivating the “Body” Side of the Mind-Body Problem

• McGinn-Strawson Way. – That the “physical” be defined in terms of the spatial. Both take spatial concepts to be essential to satisfactory explanation. For McGinn, this is a barrier, thus a source of cognitive closure. For Strawson, this is an opportunity for panpsychism.

• The Subject-Object Way.– This is the basis of the Cartesian-esqe appeal to zombies and disembodiment. The basic idea is that subjectivity, prima facie, can be subtracted from anything objective because it is, prima facie, wholly different. This is the basis of the Locke & Hume quotes at the start of “The Mysteries of Nature.”

• An alternative suggestion of my own. – That the “physical” be definable in terms of parts and wholes – or at least that the mind-body problem becomes problematical when it is – exploiting an original intuition behind mechanism and picked up by functionalism.

Parts & Wholes• Successful materialist explanations reveal how what we see around us is the

result of underlying mechanisms. At least in the case of phenomenal states, any successful explanation would have to reveal how what we see around us is the result of underlying mechanisms -- in terms of the processes affecting parts of the World. It is hard to see how anything else could function as an explanation -- at least in the case of phenomenal qualities -- besides some account that would refer to aspects of the World more fundamental than the separate phenomenal qualities and would account for the existence of these qualities in terms of the ways they would emerge from the more fundamental aspects.

• Immaterial states of the World would not have parts. Suppose they did. Then we could construct a Jackson-style Knowledge Argument that they would then have further immaterial properties distinct from the immaterial properties of their parts. Let Mary know not only every physical aspect of the brain but also every property of the parts. Still, there would be something she didn’t know: she would not know what it is like to see red, and for the same reasons as ever. Thus, she could not explain what it was like to see red in terms of parts, even though she knew all the parts.

Two Mind-Body Problems• So far we have focused on Descartes’s Discourse Five mind-

body problem – • Can a wholly physical body pass the two tests for intelligence

of Part Five of Discourse on Method?• Chomsky seems at times to connect this problem with the

separate mind-body problem suggested by Descartes’s Fourth Meditation—

• What is the mind’s connection to the body if, as Descartes asserts in the Fourth Meditation, “the faculty of will consists alone in our having the power of choosing to do a thing or choosing not to do it (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or to shun it), or … consists alone in the fact that in order to affirm or deny, pursue or shun those things placed before us by the understanding, we act so that we are unconscious that any outside force constrains us in doing so”?

Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Part One

• We have an everyday, non-scientific conception of “body,” the basis of the mechanistic picture of reality

• It is based on innate concepts (or innate resources)• The innate concepts (or resources) underlying our

everyday, non-scientific conception of “body” do not give us insight into reality

• Newton “left us with the conclusion that common-sense intuition – the ‘folk physics’ that was the basis for the mechanical philosophy – cannot be expected to survive the transition to rational inquiry into the nature of things” (New Horizons, p. 84)

Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Part Two

• Only science gives us insight into reality, and thus only science gives us insight into “body”

• On the other hand, science is “open-ended” about “body” (currently so, presumably; not in principle so)

• The mechanistic picture was wrong in two ways:– (1) Metaphysical – that reality has this form– (2) Epistemological – that there is an a priori, ready-made,

finished picture of the “physical” side of reality

• The effect of Newton was to show that our concepts underwrote a seemingly finished picture of reality that turned out to be wrong

Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Part Three

• It is not clear that there is much in the way of commensurability between the innately given picture of reality and the true picture

• One might capture the distinction with the Kantian terms phenomenon and noumenon (Ding an sich, thing-in-itself), although in this context these would seem to be more epistemological notions than metaphysical and Chomsky does not use them.

Summary of Chomsky’s Answer: Methodological Naturalism

• “Let us … understand the term ‘naturalism’ without metaphysical connotations: a ‘naturalistic approach’ to the mind investigates mental aspects of the world as we do any others, seeking to construct intelligible explanatory theories, with the hope of eventual integration with the ‘core’ natural sciences [what he elsewhere calls ‘the unification problem’].” – New Horizons, p. 76

Distinguishing Methodological Naturalism from Methodological Dualism

• “… Such ‘methodological naturalism’ can be counterposed to what might be called ‘methodological dualism,’ the view that we must abandon scientific rationality when we study humans ‘above the neck’ (metaphorically speaking), becoming mystics in this unique domain, imposing arbitrary stipiulations and a priori demands of a sort that would never be contemplated in the sciences, or in other ways departing from the normal canons of inquiry.” --New Horizons, p. 76

Does Chomsky Think That There Is No Mind-Body Problem?

• He speaks of the dissolution of the problem, since there is no scientific notion of “body”

• But at the same time, he recognizes a “unification problem”: “One [aspect] has to do with the hardware-software relation (to adopt the metaphor): How do the computational procedures of the mind relate to cells and their organization, or whatever is the proper way to understand the functioning of the brain at this level?” – “Language and Thought: Descartes and Some Reflections

on Venerable Themes”

The Unification Problem

• “Let us turn to the first unification problem: finding the ‘physical basis’ for computational systems of the mind, to borrow the conventional (but as noted, highly misleading) terminology?”

• Unification problems in the sciences, he says, have been solved in a variety of ways: chemistry with physics; biology with biochemistry.

• “In the case of the mental aspects of the world, we have no idea how unification might proceed. Some believe it will be by means of the intermediate level of neurophysiology, perhaps neural nets. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Perhaps the contemporary brain sciences do not yet have the right way of looking at the brain and its function, so that unification in terms of contemporary understanding is impossible. If so, that should not come as a great surprise. The history of science provides many such examples.”—”Language and Thought …”

The Difference?

• What is the difference between the supposedly not-coherent “mind-body problem” and this “unification problem” involving mental aspects of the world?

• Is it that the mind-body problem is “metaphysical” while the unification problem is “scientific”?

• If so, in what sense is the mind-body problem “metaphysical”?

Metaphysical Naturalism as a Demand for Unification?

• “Shall we understand metaphysical naturalism to be the demand for unity of nature? If so, it could be taken as a guiding idea, but not as a dogma…. Suppose dark matter turns out to be crucially different from the 10 per cent of the world about which there are some ideas. The possibility cannot be discounted in principle; stranger things have been accepted in modern science. Nor can it be excluded in the case of theories of mind. Though there is no reason to entertain the hypothesis, some version of Cartesianism (with a far richer concept of body) could in principle turn out to be true, consistent with a naturalistic stance.” New Horizons, p. 85

The Sources of Action

• As I suggested at the outset, in setting out his own diagnosis of the mind-body problem Chomsky begins not with consciousness or qualia or phenomenal properties but with something very different, the sources of action.

• Chomsky begins with Descartes -- he draws Descartes’s statement of the problem from Descartes’s treatment in Part Five of the Discourse on Method and, secondarily, from Descartes’s Fourth Meditation.

Two More Mind-Body Problems?• Chomsky’s use of the phrase “the mind-body problem” is idiosyncratic • There is, it seems, a different mind-body problem in Discourse Four—

– What is the relation between I and my body, given that “I could pretend that I had no body and that the world and the place where I was did not exist, but that, in spite of this, I could not pretend that I did not exist”?

• Likewise, there is the very different mind-body problem of the Second & Third Meditations – – Here, Descartes distinguishes his ideas from anything existing external

to him– But what was it that I clearly [and distinctly] perceived in them ?

Nothing more than that the ideas and the thoughts of those objects were presented to my mind…. But there was yet another thing which I affirmed, and which, from having been accustomed to believe it, I thought I clearly perceived, although, in truth, I did not perceive it at all; I mean the existence of objects external to me, from which those ideas proceeded

What Is Different?

• These are what most philosophers mean by “the mind-body problem”

• It is certainly these two problems, and especially the second, that philosophers have in mind when they speak of the “hard problem of consciousness”

• What’s different between Chomsky’s pair of “mind-body problems” and this second pair?

• On the face of it, consciousness – or, we might say, the subject/object split – subjectivity

Chomsky on Russell on the “Knowledge Intuition”

• Intuitively, there is a distinction between two sorts of knowledge• In “The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?”, Chomsky cites

Russell’s 1927 Analysis of Matter, Chap. 37, p. 389:“So far as causal laws go, therefore, physics seems to be supreme among the sciences…. There is, however, one important limitation to this. We need to know in what physical circumstance such-and-such a percept will arise, and we must not neglect the more intimate qualitative knowledge which we possess concerning mental events. There will thus remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics. To take a simple example: physics might, ideally, be able to predict that at such a time my eye would receive a stimulus of a certain sort; it might be able to trace the physical properties of the resulting events in the eye and the brain, one of which is, in fact, a visual percept; but it could not itself give us the knowledge that one of them is a visual percept. It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not in not part of physics.” (My emphasis.)

Stoljar and Nagasawa on Russell on the “Knowledge Intuition”

• Stoljar and Nagasawa, who Chomsky cites, quote from Russell’s 1912 Problems of Philosophy, Chap. 3:– “It is sometimes said that ‘light is a form of wave-motion’, but this is

misleading, for the light which we immediately see, which we know directly by means of our senses, is not a form of wave-motion, but something quite different – something which we all know if we are not blind, though we cannot describe it so as to convey our knowledge to a man who is blind. A wave-motion, on the contrary, could quite well be described to a blind man, since he can acquire a knowledge of space by the sense of touch; and he can experience a wave-motion by a sea voyage almost as well as we can. But this, which a blind man can understand, is not what we mean by light: we mean by light just that which a blind man can never understand and which we can never describe to him.”

Introduction of the Phrase “Knowledge Intuition”

• Stoljar and Nagasawa introduce the phrase “knowledge intuition” by quoting from the opening paragraphs of Frank Jackson’s 1982 article “Epiphenomenal Qualia”: – “Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on

in a living brain, the kind of states, their functional role, their relation to what goes on at other times and in other brains, and soon and so forth, and be as clever as can be in fitting it all together, you won't have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky.”

Definition of the Phrase “Knowledge Intuition”

• Based on this quotation, Stoljar and Nagasawa define “knowledge intuition” as follows:– “The intuition that … no matter how it is put

together, no amount of knowledge of a certain sort – a physical sort – is going by itself suffice for knowledge of a different sort, namely, a phenomenal sort.”

Definition of a“Knowledge Argument”

• Stoljar and Nagasawa go on to define “knowledge argument”:– “Suppose we say that any argument whose

premises constitute or contain the knowledge intuition, and whose conclusion is that physicalism is false, is property called a knowledge argument.”

A “Learning Argument”

• Following Stoljar and Nagasawa, I will introduce a special kind of knowledge argument – I will call it a “learning argument”

• According to what I call a “learning argument,” the knowledge intuition is expressed through “two quite distinct claims – [a] complete physical knowledge claim and [a] learning claim,” acceptance of which “amounts to acceptance of the knowledge intuition.”

The Form of a Learning Argument

• A learning argument asserts that there could conceivably be a person X, a domain D of facts and a time t such that:(1) The complete physical knowledge claim: X knows everything physical about D at t(2) The learning claim: X learns something of a phenomenal sort

about D at t_____________________________________

∴ (3) Physicalism is false

• Accepting (1) and (2) amounts to accepting the knowledge intuition

Chomsky & Mary

• Stoljar and Nagasawa, as Chomsky describes it, “call this the ‘knowledge intuition’ as distinct from the ‘knowledge argument,’ presented in the resurrection of Russell’s example by Frank Jackson: in this case the physicist (Mary) ‘learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world’ while confined to a black-and-white room, but when released, she ‘will learn what it is like to see something red.’” (“Mysteries of Nature”)

Some Objections and Replies

• Anti-Learning Objection (1): Absence of Surprise

• Anti-Learning Objection (2): Possibility of Figuring Out

• Anti-Learning Objection (3): Ability Hypothesis– Two replies: Knowing how requires knowing that• Reply One: Performative knowledge• Reply Two: Performance presupposes

competence

Anti-Learning Objection (1): Absence of Surprise

• Dennett imagines that Mary, presented with a blue banana on her release, protests that her captors have tried to trick her: “I was not in the slightest surprised by my experience of blue”

• Howard Robinson argues that, since it would be a “revelation” that something that Mary knows is called ‘blue’ and leads to ‘blue appropriate’ behavior looks like it does, it is false she is not surprised

• Neither the objection nor the reply works: Since Mary has no expectations, she cannot be surprised, so absence of surprise is compatible with learning

Anti-Learning Objection (2): Possibility of Figuring Out

• Dennett lists neurophysiological effects that Mary knows to be linked to colors and argues that “the only task that remains is for her to figure out a way of identifying those … effects ‘from the inside.’” He suggests this to be possible by her “figuring out tricky ways in which she would be able to tell that some color, whatever it is, is not yellow, or not red” by means of “noting some salient and specific reaction that her brain would have only for yellow or only for red.” In this way, she could gain “a little entry into her color space,” and from there “leverage her way to complete advance knowledge.”

• The objection does not work, since if Mary has complete physical knowledge there is nothing for her to “figure out”

• Also, the “recognitional knowledge” she gains is not even knowledge of what it’s like, which is the knowledge she lacks and must learn

Anti-Learning Objection (3): Ability Hypothesis

• The Ability Hypothesis, due to Laurence Nemirow, rejects the learning claim by arguing that Mary does not learn anything – i.e., gain knowledge that new facts obtain – but rather gains abilities – i.e., know-how

• The standard way of rejecting the Ability Hypothesis is to argue that ability or knowing how (or “knowing how to …”) often requires “knowing that …”– Reply One: Performative knowledge– Reply Two (Chomsky’s way): Performance presupposes

competence

Reply One: Performative Knowledge

• If a pitcher knows how to throw his accurate fastball, then he usually will have “knowledge that” which he can present using sentences like, “I know that my accurate fastball is thrown like this,” as he shows the way it is properly thrown and his ability to throw it that way with an accurate throw

• Such performative uses of demonstratives produce demonstrata for display instead of ostending them

• Thus knowhow is no alternative

Reply Two (Chomsky’s way): Performance presupposes competence