Mary & Detectivism

Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument has done much heavy lifting for those who are wary of a physicalist worldview. Since its publication in Epiphenomenal Qualia, it has spawned a plethora of responses and this article is yet another response but, instead of accepting the argument on its own grounds, it pushes back against it at more of a meta-level. This article begins by closely analyzing the argument and providing different ways in which one might avoids its conclusion. Next, it isolates certain presuppositions about the mechanisms by which the data of conscious experience is acquired by examining the role of mental ostension in Jackson’s analysis. After articulating a particular model of how the ostension might work, I then provide a late-Wittgensteinian analysis the model and critique its applicability to the knowledge argument. I argue that the philosophical difficulties that the knowledge argument supposedly uncovers come about by a reliance on certain grammatical expectations and those grammatical expectations come about because of our reliance on a particular model. I go on to claim that Jackson is taken in by a certain way of speaking (which comes about by reliance on a certain model) and this leads to many of the puzzling difficulties associated with the knowledge argument. Once this error is noticed, we can make progress towards dissolving some of the philosophical problems associated with qualia by attempting to find a different way to model our epistemic relation to the contents of our mental states.