Frank Jackson What Mary Didn\'t Know HW Response PDF

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reading response - Prof. Kaleena Stoddard...

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Zoe Green PHIL1010-01 Frank Jackson: What Mary Didn’t Know 10/4/19

In Frank Jackson’s article “What Mary Didn’t Know” he states one of the claims of a physicalist to be that “complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge simpliciter”. I do agree with this statement, but only to a certain extent. In a vague sense, I do agree that complete physical knowledge is a much simpler, watered-down version of one’s whole complete knowledge. I think that in order to have what is known as complete knowledge, we need to include the knowledge obtained through sensory and learning experiences that we have subjectively throughout life, not just the physical findings we can objectively learn at any point in time. Physical knowledge is simpliciter to complete knowledge in that there is only so much you can gain from physical knowledge before you need other kinds of experiences and forms of understanding to fully grasp an idea. For example, we can research in-depth what chemicals, hormones, and parts of the brain function and how they function when we fall in love with someone. We can learn about all aspects of the physicalities our bodies go through when experiencing falling in love, but we can’t physically understand, go through, and feel the individual experience each person endures when they are falling in love; that knowledge is something much greater than physical knowledge. I do think that when Mary comes out of her room, she came knowing something that she didn’t know before. Although Mary was considered to be an expert on color perception and all things involving color, she needed the computer malfunction of showing her the apple in color to experience color for herself and fully grasp the

idea of what it is like to see color, associate it with images, understand the differences between all of the colors, etc. Regardless of Mary’s claim to being a master on the knowledge of color perception, her knowledge was never complete in the first place because it was based solely on the physical facts that can only be conveyed in words. I would agree that Jackson is right in saying that “it is plausible that lectures over a black-and-white television might in principle tell Mary everything in the physicalist’s story”. In the physicalist’s eyes, every piece of knowledge that is to be learned can be described through words and understood as a physical aspect of life that can be taught to anyone; it doesn’t need to be experienced and can’t be subjective. With that idea in mind, simply conveying this knowledge through a black-and-white television would be acceptable because there is no experience needed to learn the material, the simple relay of information from one person to another is all that is needed to tell the physicalist’s story. I think a physicalist would agree with me in this idea, as well. Being that the physicalist’s don’t believe in the necessity for an experience when conveying knowledge, they would agree that a simple black-and-white television would suffice in relaying the information that is needed to be relayed. I think that Jackson’s knowledge argument is significantly damaging against the physicalist argument because the ideas are so contrasting. Jackson’s argument states that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another something might still lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that thing because it didn’t have the conscious experience with that thing that lacks physical properties. The physicalist argument simply claims that there is no conscious experience needed to obtain complete knowledge as they are all the same, but for Jackson’s argument to be great would be to completely disprove this idea set by the physicalist....