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Knowledge of Language

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People are language users: they read, write, speak, and listen; and they do all of these things in natural languages such as English, Russian, and Arabic. Many philosophers and linguists have been interested in knowing what accounts for this facility that language users have with their language. A language may be thought of as an abstract system, characterized either as a set of grammatical rules or as an axiomatic theoretical structure (think, for example, of the way one would characterize chess as a set of rules, or the way one conceives of geometry as an axiomatic system). So the question may be posed: What relationship do speakers of a language have to the abstract system that constitutes the language they speak? The most popular line of thought is to cast this relationship in terms of knowledge, specifically, knowledge about linguistic facts: those who have mastered English have knowledge about the syntax and semantics of English. Moreover, it is because they have this knowledge that they are able to read, write, speak, and have conversations in English. Though this view is widely accepted, it is not without its objectors, and in the present article we shall examine the arguments for attributing linguistic knowledge to speakers and shall also think about the nature of this knowledge.

1. Introduction

Alex Barber puts the thesis we shall be investigating this way:

...ordinary language users possess structures of knowledge, reasonably so called, of a complex system of rules or principles of language. (2003b, 3)

And Robert Matthews characterizes what he calls the "Received View" similarly:

Knowing a language is a matter of knowing the system of rules and principles that is the grammar for that language. To have such knowledge is to have an explicit internal representation of these rules and principles, which speakers use in the course of language production and understanding. (2003, 188-9)

Though this view is widely accepted, it is not without its objectors, and in the present article we shall examine the arguments for attributing linguistic knowledge to speakers and shall also think about the nature of this knowledge.

There are three major questions that need to be addressed. First, assuming that it is correct to say that masters of a language have knowledge about their language, there is the question of what, precisely, they know. Stephen Stich (1971), in a discussion of speakers' knowledge of syntactic principles and concepts, distinguishes three alternatives. (A) Speakers of a language might be said to know facts about the particular properties of particular sentences and expressions of their language. Those who speak English, for instance, might be said to know that "Mary had a little lamb" is ambiguous, or that "Nancy likes Ben" and "Ben is liked by Nancy" are related as active and passive voice transformations. (B) More generally, speakers might be said to know the syntactic and/or semantic theory for their language. Speakers of English might be said, on this alternative view, to know the entire Davidsonian truth theory for English or to know, on the syntactic side, that NP → Det+Adj+N is a rule of the grammar of English. (Stich, 1971, 480). (C) Finally, and most generally, speakers might be said to know the principles and rules of what linguists call universal grammar. That is, they might be said to know "that all human languages have phrase structure and transformational rules, or that the grammar of every language contains the rule S → NP+VP." (Stich, 1971, 480). In more recent discussions of this topic which have centered on knowledge of a Davidsonian truth theory for the language rather than on knowledge of syntactic principles, the issue has been whether speakers know only the theorems of the truth theory or the axioms as well.

Second, why should we think that the relevant relationship is one of knowledge at all? The movements of a bicyclist who successfully rounds a corner are properly described by a complicated set of equations in physics, but there is certainly no need for the bicyclist to know these equations in order to keep her balance. In a similar vein, then, why can we not say that the linguistic behavior of a speaker of English is merely properly described by the semantic and syntactic rules of English? Why, in other words, must we say that speakers of English know the rules of English instead of merely saying that their linguistic behavior is correctly described by those rules in the way that the bicyclist's behavior is correctly described by the laws of physics? This article will briefly look at some of the more prominent arguments for the thesis that masters of a language know the semantic and syntactic theories of their language.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there is the question of what sort of knowledge linguistic knowledge is. All the participants in this debate agree that if masters of English have knowledge of the semantic and/or syntactic theory of English, this knowledge is importantly different from more ordinary sorts of knowledge. In addition to other important differences between knowledge of language and more ordinary sorts of knowledge, those who allegedly have knowledge of language are rarely, if ever, able to say what it is they know and the knowledge in question is largely, if not entirely, inaccessible to consciousness. The term "tacit knowledge" has been introduced to mark this distinction. Ruth, an English speaker, may know, in the ordinary sense of the term, that Chicago is the largest city in Illinois (if asked, for instance, what the largest city in Illinois is, she will answer correctly), but the knowledge she has of the semantic theory of English is best characterized as "tacit" since she is unable, among other things, to think about or tell someone else the content of what she knows. We shall discuss further the arguments for thinking that the knowledge we have of our language is tacit, the ways in which tacit knowledge differs from knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term, and the different conceptions of tacit knowledge that have been offered over the years.

2. What is it that Speakers of a Language Know?

The question of tacit linguistic knowledge has come up in connection with two separate issues in the philosophy of language. It first arose in the 1960s in connection with Noam Chomsky’s claim that every speaker of a natural language knows both the grammar of the language she speaks (English, Arabic, and so on) as well as the universal grammar which specifies linguistic universals, or grammatical properties of all natural languages. Chomsky’s claims drew the attention of philosophers not simply because of his claims of tacit linguistic knowledge, but because he claimed that knowledge of the universal grammar was innate to human beings. This claim, inasmuch as it seemed to revive certain key principles of 17th Century Rationalism, quickly attracted critical attention from the philosophical world. According to Chomsky’s view (at least as it was once expressed) human beings are born knowing the principles of universal grammar and, by deploying those principles in an environment of, say, English speakers, they come to learn the grammar of English. Knowing the grammar of English, Chomsky further claimed, is necessary for being able to read, write, speak, and understand English. Since Chomsky’s concern was primarily with the syntactic rules and principles of a language, the debate surrounding Chomsky’s nativism became a debate about whether or not speakers have syntactical (or, as it is frequently called, grammatical) knowledge of their language. In connection with this debate, philosophers have seen fit to think about three separate knowledge claims:

(a) That speakers of a language know the grammatical properties of individual expressions of their language;

(b) That speakers of a language know the particular grammatical rules of a natural language; and

(c) That speakers of a language know the principles of universal grammar. (See Stich, 1971, and Graves, et. al., 1973 for this taxonomy)

Most of our discussion here will focus on (a) and (b), though we will make some brief mention of claim (c). One of the central issues in this debate turns on the fact that the grammatical rules for any natural language are abstract, technical, and complex and, as such, are formulated in concepts that the average speaker does not possess. Because of these features of the grammatical rules, many philosophers are hesitant to ascribe knowledge of them to speakers. In the second place, the issue of tacit linguistic knowledge arose in connection with the truth-theoretic semantics inspired by the work of Donald Davidson. Davidson was more concerned with semantics than with syntax, and was interested in the project of constructing a semantic theory for a natural language. These theories (known in the literature as "T-theories" or "Truth-theories") have an axiomatic structure, with the axioms specifying the meanings of the atomic elements of the language (roughly, the words) and the theorems -- which are logically derived from the axioms -- specifying the meanings of the sentences. Here the question of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge is the question of whether competent speakers of a language must be said to know the truth theory for their language, and, if they do, whether they are to be credited with knowledge of the theorems alone, or with knowledge of the axioms as well (though Davidson himself was not interested in this particular question).

One of the central issues in the debate over knowledge of the axioms of a truth theory is the idea that there are multiple ways of axiomatizing the same set of theorems. If English speakers are said to know the axioms of the truth theory for English, which axiom set do they know? In addition to this problem of multiple axiomatizations, the issues of complexity and inaccessibility to the consciousness of speakers that arise in the Chomskian debate also surface here.

3. Why Think that Speakers of a Language have Knowledge about their Language?

It is clear that speakers' linguistic knowledge, if they have it, is an odd sort of knowledge. That is, such knowledge differs in significant ways from ordinary, everyday knowledge. Though a complete analysis of the conditions for knowledge is well beyond the scope of this article, Stich lays out some relevant features of ordinary knowledge:

Commonly when a person knows that p he has occasionally reflected that p or has been aware that p; he will, if inclined to be truthful and otherwise psychologically normal, assert that p if asked. More basic still, he is capable of understanding some statement which expresses what he knows. (1971, 485-6)

But these conditions are rarely, if ever, met in the case of language users' knowledge of the grammatical principles of their language. Martin Davies (1989) identifies three significant differences between tacit knowledge and knowledge ordinarily so called: propositions that are tacitly known are (i) inaccessible to the knower's consciousness, (ii) deploy concepts which the knower only tacitly possesses and (iii) are inferentially isolated from other propositions that the knower may know. (The inferential isolation of linguistic knowledge will be discussed in Section IV below.) The upshot of these considerations is that the argumentative burden is on the advocates of linguistic knowledge. After all, without such an argument, an appeal to Occam's Razor would seem to tell us that the simplest approach is simply to say that speakers' linguistic behavior is merely accurately described by the principles of a semantic or syntactic theory, not that they actually know the theory itself. (Think back to our example of the bicyclist: given that most bicyclists couldn't tell us or even bring to their own consciousness the details of the physical equations that describe their cycling behavior, without an argument for attributing them knowledge of those equations, we should say only that their behavior is accurately described by those equations.) In this section we shall look at some of the more prominent arguments for the attribution of linguistic knowledge to masters of a language.

a. The Language Learning Argument

There are some accounts of the nature of language learning that seem to imply that masters of a language have knowledge about their language. According to some accounts, a child learning a language is involved in much the same sort of activity as a field linguist who is trying to figure out the language of the natives she is studying. The field linguist is involved in constructing a theory of the native language: the linguist formulates hypotheses about what certain words and phrases mean, tests these hypotheses (perhaps by making predictions about what the natives would say in a certain situation, or by talking to the natives and making predictions about their replies to her), and modifies her theory in light of the results of those tests. The idea is that infant language learners are "little linguists" involved in the same sort of process: the infant is engaged in the formulating, testing, and revision of hypotheses about the meaning and structure of the language being spoken by those around him. Of course, on this picture of language learning as theory construction, the theory construction takes place at a subconscious level and the hypotheses are formulated in the so-called Language of Thought, which is distinct from any natural language.

If this account of language learning is true (Quine, for one, seems to be a proponent of it), then it must be the case that language learners have linguistic knowledge. For one, the language learners will know the results of their theory. In much the way that the linguist, at the end of the day, knows that "toktok" is the native word for "fire", so the language learner will know the meanings of the words of the language he has learned. Second, the language learner must have knowledge of the concepts required for the formulation of his hypotheses. If, for instance, the hypotheses formulated by the language learner include claims like "'The large box' is a noun phrase" and "'The box was painted by Nancy' is in the passive voice", then the language learner must know what noun phrases are and what it means for a sentence to be in the passive voice. To formulate hypotheses about noun phrases, the passive voice, and other semantic and syntactic categories, the language learner must have knowledge about those categories. Or, to put the point another way, the language learner must possess the concepts he deploys in the hypotheses he formulates in the process of learning the language.

This argument is not without its objections. For one, there are philosophers who reject the model of language learners as "little linguists". Second, even if this account of language learning is true, it tells us nothing about whether linguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge of the semantics and syntax of a natural language) is involved in our everyday use of language. Perhaps, even if knowledge is involved in learning a language, such knowledge plays the same role that training wheels play in learning how to ride a bicycle: though necessary for learning how to cycle, they are jettisoned afterward. When mature cyclists ride, they are not using training wheels, and it might similarly be the case that when mature language users use their language they are no longer utilizing the knowledge which they made use of in acquiring it. What we are interested in here is whether using a language in everyday reading, writing, and conversing requires that the language users draw on linguistic knowledge, and so, the present argument is, taken by itself, incomplete.

b. A Psychoanalytic Argument: Recognition from the Inside

Language users sometimes, though not frequently, reflect on the semantic features of their language. They may do so on their own or they may do it in the course of being interviewed by a linguist. In the course of such reflection, language users make judgments about the semantic and syntactic properties of, and relations among, sentences. So, presented with a set of English sentences, masters of English will be able to match up those in the active voice with their synonymous passive versions, or declarative sentences with the corresponding questions, and so on.

One might think that something about the explicit linguistic judgments that language users make in the course of this second order, metalinguistic reflection requires the attribution of linguistic knowledge. Perhaps the fact that language users are able to make explicit judgments about the semantic properties of sentences they have never encountered before is reason to say that they must have known semantic truths beforehand. Thomas Nagel (1969) has argued that a certain feature of the reflective process -- the fact that when presented with certain propositions of semantic and syntactic theories, language users recognize them "from the inside" as correct -- implicates prior linguistic knowledge.

As already mentioned, one of the large obstacles barring the way to ascriptions of linguistic knowledge is the fact that the propositions of the relevant semantic theories are highly complex and involve technical theoretical concepts. In light of these facts, Nagel wonders under what conditions it may be proper to attribute knowledge of such propositions to speakers. Nagel turns his attention to "unconscious knowledge in the ordinary psychoanalytic sense" for a clue.

The psychoanalytic ascription of unconscious knowledge, or unconscious motives for that matter, does not depend simply on the possibility of organizing the subject's responses and actions in conformity with the alleged unconscious material. In addition, although he does not formulate his conscious knowledge or attitude of his own accord, and may deny it upon being asked, it is usually possible to bring him by analytic techniques to see that the statement in question expresses something that he knows or feels. That is, he is able eventually to acknowledge the statement as an expression of his own belief, if it is presented to him clearly enough and in the right circumstances. Thus what was unconscious can be brought, at least partly, to consciousness. It is essential that his acknowledgment not be based merely on the observation of his own responses and behavior, and that he come to recognize the rightness of the attribution from the inside. (1969, 175-6)

Nagel then offers the following proposal for attribution of unconscious or tacit knowledge:

...where recognition of this sort is possible in principle, there is good reason to speak of knowledge and belief, even in cases where the relevant principles or statements have not yet been consciously acknowledged, or even in cases where they will never be explicitly formulated. (1969, 176)

and claims that this sort of recognition exists in the linguistic realm:

...we may observe that accurate formulations of grammatical rules often evoke the same sense of recognition from speakers who have been conforming to them for years, that is evoked by the explicit formulation of repressed material which has been influencing one’s behavior for years. (1969, 176)

Accordingly, he concludes, we have reason to attribute linguistic knowledge to language users. Nagel has, it seems, found a phenomenon -- recognition "from the inside" of the correctness of a rule or principle -- which is adequately explained only by the ascription of prior knowledge. We cannot make adequate sense of this "Of course! That's it! I knew it all along!" phenomenon unless (or so it is argued) we say that language users had knowledge prior to being questioned.

There are two objections to this argument. First, even if this is sound, we would need to hear more about how this applies to unreflective language use. In general, one may try to explain some feature of explicit linguistic judgments in terms of linguistic knowledge, but in order for us to conclude that first order language use involves the active deployment of linguistic knowledge, we need an argument for the claim that first order language use consists in making explicit linguistic judgments. To build on the earlier analogy of cycling, we may say that a cyclist has all sorts of knowledge of the mechanical workings of his bicycle -- and we may show that he does by interviewing him before the race in his garage -- but it does not follow that he is deploying or using that knowledge in the course of cycling.

Second, as Stich (1971) has claimed, it is doubtful that we can actually bring speakers to this sort of recognition. While it is certainly possible to do this with some linguistic rules, the fact that the rules which, according to linguists and philosophers, constitute any natural language are exceedingly abstract, complex, and technical would argue against the possibility of bringing speakers of a language to this "from-the-inside" recognition of the linguistic rules of that language.

c. The Behavior Rationalizing Argument

The two arguments we have just examined fail to give us conclusive reasons for thinking that ordinary every day language use requires the attribution of linguistic knowledge to speakers. While they may take us some of the way toward that conclusion, they are, at best, incomplete. The Behavior Rationalizing Argument, by contrast, focuses precisely on everyday language use to establish its conclusion and is, for that reason, a stronger argument.

One common justification for ascribing knowledge to people is that such knowledge ascriptions are necessary to explain their behavior. So, to borrow an example from Ernest LePore, a proponent of this argument, if we see Cinderella running and seek to explain that behavior of hers, we will naturally ascribe to her a desire (say, to be home by midnight) and some beliefs (say, that it is almost midnight and that she won't get home by midnight unless she runs). The only way to rationalize (i.e make sense of) Cinderella's behavior is to ascribe some set of beliefs and desires to her. So far, this is merely standard belief-desire psychology and has nothing in particular to do with linguistic knowledge. LePore, however, has adapted this argument to make the case for linguistic knowledge, and it is that adaptation that constitutes the "Behavior Rationalizing Argument" for linguistic knowledge.

LePore asks us to imagine that Cinderella begins running because Arabella has yelled to her, "It's almost midnight!" In this case, in order to make sense of Cinderella's behavior, it seems we have to ascribe to Cinderella at least three additional beliefs:

(i) that Arabella uttered the sentence "It's almost midnight"; and

(ii) that "It's almost midnight" means that it's almost midnight; and

(iii) that Arabella is telling the truth

Claiming that Cinderella has these three beliefs seems necessary to adequately explain why Cinderella believes, upon hearing Arabella, that it's almost midnight. (And, given her belief that she can get home by midnight only if she runs and her desire to be home by midnight, we can understand why she is running.) Notice, however, that if this is the story to tell, we have, with (ii), ascribed to Cinderella a belief about the semantic properties of a particular English sentence. If Cinderella runs because Arabella yelled to her "It's almost midnight," it seems that rationalizing Cinderella's behavior requires attributing to Cinderella a belief about the linguistic properties of a sentence of her language. Rationalizing Cinderella's behavior, therefore, requires that we attribute linguistic knowledge to Cinderella.

The point can be further appreciated if we imagine that Cinderella does not understand English. Upon Arabella's yelling "It's almost midnight", Cinderella may still form beliefs (i) and (iii), (belief (i), note, is just about the words that Arabella has uttered; even if she doesn’t understand English, Cinderella may still believe that Arabella has uttered certain words) but she will not begin running. The reason she will not is because she has not understood what Arabella has said. That is, she lacks belief (ii). This seems to be a strong case for conceiving of a speaker's understanding of the language in terms of linguistic knowledge of the language itself. LePore puts the point this way:

What about understanding language justifies, for example, the belief that it is midnight, when this understanding combines with other attitudes, for example, the belief that Arabella uttered "It's [almost] midnight"? It is hard to see how else we could justify such a belief without ascribing additional beliefs, knowledge, or other propositional attitudes the speaker might have but the non-speaker lack. (1986, 5)

Such, then, is the Behavior Rationalizing Argument for the conclusion that speakers of a language have beliefs about the meanings of particular sentences of their language. The behavior of language users (in particular, their reactions to the utterances of others) shows that they have beliefs about what sentences of their language mean. Upon noticing a sign in a shop window that reads "Free philosophy books inside!" Cinderella enters the shop. Rationalizing her behavior requires that we ascribe to Cinderella the belief that there are free philosophy books inside the shop. And the best explanation for how she came by that belief is that she knows what the English sentence "Free philosophy books inside!" means. And so on for her reactions to other sentences of English. It is only if we ascribe linguistic knowledge to English speakers that we can make sense of their behavior. What is important about this argument is that it appeals to ordinary, everyday, features of language use, and that is one of its strengths.

One of the limitations of this argument, however, is that it succeeds in attributing to speakers knowledge of the semantic properties of only particular sentences of their language. In terms of Davidsonian theories of meaning, in other words, it is an argument that Cinderella knows the theorems of those theories. For an argument that Cinderella knows more than this, we need to turn to the Novel Sentence Recognition argument.

d. The Novel Sentence Recognition Argument

This is perhaps one of the best known, and most relied upon, arguments for linguistic knowledge, and we can approach it by picking up where the Behavior Rationalizing Argument left off. That argument, if sound, has established that speakers’ understanding of the sentences of their language consists in their having beliefs about the meanings of those sentences. Now, philosophers and linguists have long been impressed by the fact that, after being exposed to only a small number of strings of language, masters of a language are able to understand a potential infinity of previously unencountered strings of language. After exposure to only a small number of English sentences, speakers are able to recognize, of just about any English sentence -- including sentences they have never seen or heard before -- what that sentence means. This is a remarkable feat, and cries out for explanation. As Crispin Wright characterizes it, the central project of theoretical linguistics is to "explain our recognition of the syntax and sense of novel sentences" (1989, 258), and, according to the Novel Sentence Recognition Argument, the best such explanation will appeal to cognitive states of language users.

The best explanation of speakers’ ability to have beliefs about the meanings of a potential infinity of sentences involves the claim that speakers are deriving their belief about the meaning of a sentence from other beliefs about (simplifying a bit) the meanings of the component words. The reason why Nancy has a belief about the meaning of a sentence she has never encountered before is that she already has beliefs about the meanings of all the words (and semantic significance of the syntax) in that sentence. Since Nancy’s beliefs about the meanings of the sentences are viewed as beliefs about the theorems of a Davidsonian theory of meaning, we can view the conclusion of this argument as attributing to Nancy beliefs about the axioms of the theory.

It may help to think about the language itself, setting aside the question of speakers’ knowledge of the language. What is it that allows for the construction of novel sentences of English, sentences that have never before been constructed? Surely it is the fact that English is compositional: sentences are constructed out of words, to put it simply. A finite collection of words can be arranged in an infinite number of ways, generating the potential infinity of English sentences. This compositionality applies, then, to the structure of speakers’ knowledge of their language: their ability to understand (which, according to the Behavior Rationalizing Argument, consists in having a semantic belief) a potential infinity of sentences is rooted in their knowledge of the axioms of the theory of meaning.

e. The Rule-Following Argument

Inspired by Wittgenstein’s discussion in The Philosophical Investigations, there is a tradition according to which speaking a language is conceived of as a matter of following a set of rules: the language itself is conceived of as a set of rules (as chess is) and those who speak the language are following those rules in the course of their language use, much like chess players are following the rules of chess as they play. John Searle is a proponent of this view of language use:

Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behavior. To learn and master a language is (inter alia) to learn and to have mastered these rules. This is a familiar view in philosophy and linguistics. (Searle, 1969, 12)

Somewhat later, and more simply, Searle says this: "speaking a language is performing acts according to rules." (1969, 36) If we adopt this view, we can construct an argument for attributing linguistic knowledge to speakers of a language.

The first point to make is that there is an important difference between, on the one hand, following a rule or being guided by a rule, and, on the other hand, acting in accordance with a rule or having one’s behavior correctly described by a rule. Quine illustrates the distinction this way:

Imagine two systems of English grammar: one an old-fashioned system that draws heavily on the Latin grammarians, and the other a streamlined formulation due to Jespersen. Imagine that the two systems are extensionally equivalent, in this sense: they determine, recursively, the same infinite set of well-formed English sentences. In Denmark the boys in one school learn English by the one system, and those in another school learn it by the other. In the end all the boys sound alike. Both systems of rules fit the behavior of all the boys, but each system guides the behavior of only half the boys. (Quine, 1972, 442)

Only half of the boys are following the Jespersen rules (because only half the boys learned the Jespersen rules), but all the boys are acting in accordance with the Jespersen rules. That is, the behavior of all of the boys is correctly described by the Jespersen rules. Or, put differently, none of the behavior of any of the boys ever violates the Jespersen rules.

According to advocates of the Rule-Following Argument, fluent speakers of English are to be thought of as following the rules of English and not as merely acting in accordance with them. What is the difference between one who is following a rule and one who is merely acting in accordance with it? The Rule-Following Argument claims that drawing this distinction requires attributing knowledge of the rules to fluent speakers.

The argument goes like this. First, an agent is following a rule only if that rule is somehow involved in the explanation of her behavior. If we say that Nancy, while playing chess, is following the rule "Bishops may move diagonally only", then we commit ourselves to the view that the explanation of why Nancy acted as she did will appeal to that rule. By contrast, that rule does not appear in the explanation of the behavior of someone who is merely acting in accordance with that rule. Second, the way in which the rule shows up as part of the explanation of Nancy’s rule-following behavior is that the rule appears as one of the causes of her behavior. Accordingly, the rule is not involved in the causal explanation of the behavior of someone who is merely acting in accordance with that rule. The most we can say of a rule with which an agent is merely acting in accordance is that the rule truly describes her behavior. The rule is among the causes of the behavior of an agent who is following that rule. Third, and finally, a rule features as a cause of an agent’s behavior because the agent knows, or somehow has present to mind, that rule. From these three claims, we get the conclusion that fluent speakers of a language (whose linguistic behavior is conceived of as rule-following behavior) have linguistic knowledge: they know the rules they are following. Rosenberg gives a nice description of this position:

Learning to behave according to certain rules is, presumably, learning to pursue or eschew certain activities. But it is not simply that. A pigeon who has been trained (conditioned) to peck at a key under certain circumstances has not learned to behave according to any rules. What more is required is that the activities in question be pursued or eschewed because they are enjoined or proscribed by the rules. If an agent is following a rule in the course of his activities, then the rule in question must, in some sense, be "present to the mind." (1974, 31)

This Rule-Following Argument, with its talk of the difference between following a rule and acting in accordance with a rule, differs in its starting point from the Behavior Rationalizing Argument. Its focus is on making sense of agents’ responses to their interlocutors’ utterances, but it ends up in much the same place: fluent language users have linguistic knowledge and make use of that knowledge in the course of their language use.

f. The Optimal Simulation Argument

Jerry Fodor defends "intellectualist" accounts of psychology, and, in the course of so doing, provides another argument for the attribution of tacit knowledge to language users. Fodor is concerned with psychology generally, and not simply with the explanation of linguistic behavior, and so fully appreciating the argument requires that we briefly review his intellectualist position.

According to Fodor, the explanation for how people snap their fingers or tie their shoes is that there are instructions for how to do these things -- descriptions, in terms of the elementary operations of our nervous, perceptual, and muscular systems -- and that these instructions are encapsulated as information in our minds. Since, in snapping our fingers or tying our shoes, we are applying these instructions, we must know them. Fodor frequently uses the images of "little men in our heads", but the cash value of this metaphor is simply that the information is somehow represented in our minds. Whenever we tie our shoes, little agents in our head (and in other parts of our nervous system) execute the instructions encapsulated in the "instruction manual" for shoe tying. To say that we know how to tie our shoes is simply to say that we know the instructions for doing so. What makes his position an intellectualist one is precisely this appeal to represented information as part of the explanation of our behavior. As Fodor himself puts it, "The intellectualist account of X-ing says that, whenever you X, the little man in your head has access to and employs a manual on X-ing; and surely whatever is his is yours." (1968, 636)

Fodor is sensitive to the fact that those of us who possess this knowledge are unable to answer the question, "How does one X"? That is, Ruth may be unable to explain (in terms of nerve firings and muscle contractions and so on) how it is she snaps her fingers, but, all the same, she knows the instructions for finger snapping which are formulated in terms of nerve firings and muscle contractions. Thus, Fodor acknowledges, this knowledge must be tacit, and he seeks to provide an argument for saying, despite her inability to say how she X-es, that Ruth knows the instructions for X-ing. His argument appeals to optimal simulations of an organism’s behavior -- that is, to a machine or computer program, or some other artificial device that would simulate the organism’s behavior.

Fodor’s position on tacit knowledge attributions is aptly summed up thus:

...if X is something an organism knows how to do but is unable to explain how to do, and if S is some sequence of operations, the specification of which would constitute an answer to the question "How do you X?," and if an optimal simulation of the behavior of the organism X-s by running through the sequence of operations specified by S, then the organism tacitly knows the answer to the question "How do you X?," and S is a formulation of the organism’s tacit knowledge. (1968, 638)

If we build a robot that optimally simulates Ruth’s finger snapping behavior, and the robot runs through a series of instructions S1, S2, S3, and so on, then, according to Fodor, Ruth tacitly knows S1, S2, S3, and so on A particularly odd feature of this proposal is that it draws a conclusion about Ruth upon noticing something about a robot. The fact that we can build a robot to simulate Ruth’s (or any human being’s) finger snapping shouldn’t give us any evidence at all about Ruth, should it? As Fodor puts it, "how could any fact about the computational operations of some machine (even a machine that optimally simulates the behavior of an organism) provide grounds for asserting that an epistemic relation [that is, tacit knowledge] holds between an organism and a proposition?" (638)

It is at this stage that Fodor deploys the following, seemingly reasonable, inductive principle: From like effects, infer like causes. Since the robot and Ruth are exhibiting similar effects, and we know the cause of the robot’s behavior -- it is running through the instructions -- we can infer (inductively, of course) that Ruth’s behavior has a similar cause.

If machines and organisms can produce behaviors of the same type and if descriptions of machine computations in terms of the rules, instructions, and so on, that they employ are true descriptions of the etiology of their output, then the principle that licenses inferences from like effects to like causes must license us to infer that the tacit knowledge of organisms is represented by the programs of the machines that simulate their behavior. (640)

So far we have spoken in general terms about the behavior of organisms -- shoe tying, finger snapping, and so on, -- but, of course, we can apply Fodor’s argument to linguistic behavior. Since speaking English or reading German or having a conversation in Arabic are intelligent behaviors on a par with shoe tying and finger snapping, if we can (a) arrive at a specification of a set of instructions for how one does these things -- a set of instructions which will, in all likelihood, make reference to the semantic and syntactic theories of these languages -- and if we can (b) produce an optimal simulation of such language use which simulates human language use by running through those instructions, then we can, by Fodor’s reasoning, conclude that human speakers of those languages have tacit knowledge of the semantic and syntactic theories of the languages they speak.

g. Summary

We have seen a number of arguments that attempt to establish that speakers of a language have knowledge of the semantic and syntactic properties of the words and sentences of their language. It is worth reiterating that the argumentative ball is in the court of the proponent of linguistic knowledge: the many ways in which linguistic knowledge, if it exists, differs from ordinary knowledge puts the burden of argument on the philosopher who advocates the position that every ordinary speaker of a language has syntactic and semantic knowledge.

The arguments assembled here are, in one way or another, all arguments to the best explanation. There are some phenomena (language learning, novel sentence recognition, behavior in response to an utterance, and so on) which, according to the arguments, can best (or, perhaps, only) be explained by the attribution of knowledge to the speakers. This is a perfectly legitimate form of argument, of course, and may ultimately carry the day. But, as with all such arguments, they are vulnerable to the objector who thinks either that the phenomena in question do not need explanation or can be explained in simpler terms -- that is, terms that don’t require knowledge attribution.

If, however, we accept the conclusion of these arguments, we need next to investigate the nature of tacit knowledge. In what respects is tacit knowledge like other, more familiar sorts of knowledge? In what ways is it different? Might it be so different as to not qualify as knowledge at all? These are some of the questions we shall be discussing in the final section.

4. What Kind of Knowledge is Tacit Knowledge?

If we accept the conclusion of the above arguments and, consequently, attribute tacit knowledge of a language to speakers of that language, the question that next presents itself is this: what sort of knowledge is tacit knowledge? How is tacit knowledge of a language like other sorts of knowledge that we ordinarily ascribe to people?

a. Linguistic Knowledge as Knowledge-How

A common move by those who are somewhat skeptical of the attribution of tacit linguistic knowledge is to draw a distinction between propositional knowledge and practical knowledge, or, more colloquially, between "knowledge that" and "knowledge how". (Ryle (1949) is credited with the original distinction, but also see Stanley and Williamson (2001) for a more recent treatment.) The distinction is meant to emphasize that not all knowledge should be regarded as a relationship between a knower and a proposition. So, for instance, when we say

(1) Sophie knows that Paris is the capital of France

we usually understand that attribution in terms of Sophie’s relationship to the proposition expressed by the sentence "Paris is the capital of France." To possess that knowledge, accordingly, Sophie must bear some sort of cognitive relationship to that proposition. She must, in some sense, "have that proposition before her mind". By contrast, were we to say

(2) Sophie knows how to swim

we would not thereby be attributing to Sophie any relationship to any propositions. There may be a good many propositions that accurately describe what Sophie is doing while she is swimming ("Sophie is kicking her feet 75 times a minute", "Sophie is traveling 5 miles an hour", and so on) but, the position holds, she need not bear any cognitive relationship to those propositions in order for us to truly assert (2). To say that Sophie knows how to do something is to attribute to Sophie a practical ability, but in doing so (if we accept the knowledge-that/knowledge-how distinction) we do not attribute to her cognitive relationships to a particular set of propositions.

Some have argued that the sort of knowledge that speakers have of their language should be conceived of as knowledge-how. Wittgenstein gives voice to the sentiment in the Investigations thus:

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique. (1958, para. 199)

But is has been more clearly asserted more recently by Anthony Kenny:

To know a language is to have an ability: the ability to speak, understand, and perhaps read the language. (1989, 20)

and by Michael Devitt who claims that we should view linguistic competence

not as semantic propositional knowledge, but as an ability or skill: It is knowledge-how not knowledge-that. (1996, 25)

To accept this line of thought is to conceive of the propositions that constitute the grammar or theory of meaning for a particular language as accurately describing the linguistic behavior of speakers; those propositions are not to be conceived of as the content of speakers’ propositional attitudes.

There are a number of reasons for accepting the view that linguistic knowledge is knowledge-how, but perhaps the most popular line of thought is this: Since, or so it has been claimed, propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that, requires that one understand a language (the language in which the propositions are represented), linguistic understanding cannot, on pains of regress or circularity, be analyzed in terms of propositional knowledge. We cannot, it is argued, analyze Cinderella’s understanding of English in terms of her knowledge of a set of English sentences of the sort found in, say, Davidsonian meaning theories, for example,

"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white

because knowing the propositions expressed by those sentences requires understanding English.

There are responses to this argument and there are, as mentioned, other reasons to endorse the view that linguistic knowledge should be viewed as knowledge-how. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, there are arguments against the knowledge-how/knowledge-that distinction. Stanley and Williamson have argued that "all knowing-how is knowing-that" (2001, 444). If their argument stands up to scrutiny, it makes the project of trying to analyze linguistic knowledge as a species of practical knowledge much more difficult. The topic of practical knowledge and its relationship to propositional knowledge is a fascinating one, and the brevity of this discussion here should not be taken as a dismissal of the importance or complexity of the existing debate.

b. Isolated Knowledge

If we accept that speakers of a language have propositional knowledge of the grammar, or meaning theory, for their language, we need to think about the ways in which that knowledge is like other sorts of propositional knowledge. One condition that seems satisfied by ordinary beliefs (and states of knowledge) is the following:

Beliefs (and states of knowledge) are the sorts of states that interact with the believer’s desires and which must potentially be at the service of many of the believer’s different projects.

Gareth Evans has endorsed this condition on beliefs:

It is the essence of a belief state that it be at the service of many distinct projects, and that its influence on any project be mediated by other beliefs. (1981, 132)

So consider Susie who believes that a pot of soup is laced with cyanide. According to this condition on beliefs, Susie counts as having this belief (and, if she meets other conditions, counts as knowing that the soup is laced with cyanide) only if it is possible for this cognitive state to serve a number of different projects. Susie’s belief might lead to her refusing to eat the soup herself, to her keeping her friends from eating the soup, to serving the soup to her enemies, and, if Susie further believes that ingesting a bit of cyanide each day for a month renders one immune to its effects and desires to develop a cyanide immunity, her belief that the soup is laced with cyanide might lead to her taking a spoonful of it each day for a month. Susie thus stands in contrast to a laboratory rat to whom, given its conditioning, we might be tempted to attribute the belief that the soup is laced with cyanide. What makes it the case that the rat does not have a genuine belief is that this belief leads to only one kind of behavior -- avoiding eating the soup. This putative belief of the rat’s does not help to explain anything else the rat does, and because of this, it does not count as a genuine belief.

The plausibility of this condition on our ordinary concept of belief emerges when we realize that these multiple projects are the result of multiple desires. Susie’s different desires -- for her own health, for the health of her friends, for the demise of her enemies, for immunity to cyanide -- are what interact with the belief that the soup is laced with cyanide to produce different behaviors. A belief is the kind of thing that can interact with multiple desires to produce behavior, and, consequently, so with knowledge. Beliefs (and thus states of knowledge) cannot be isolated to the degree that they are incapable of interacting with different desires to produce different behavior.

All of this is relevant to our discussion of linguistic knowledge because, according to many authors, the knowledge that speakers have of the grammar or meaning theory of their language is, or seems to be, isolated in the way that ordinary beliefs are not. A speaker’s linguistic beliefs(whose content are the grammatical principles of their language or the contents of the meaning theory for their language) seem to be inferentially isolated from the rest of her beliefs and from her desires. Such beliefs operate (especially if we are attracted to either the Behavior Rationalizing Argument or the Novel Sentence Recognition Argument above) simply to account for a speaker’s understanding of a string of the language. If we are convinced by the Novel Sentence Recognition Argument to ascribe to a speaker a belief about some syntactic structure, we do so only in order to explain the fact that the speaker is able to understand a sentence she has never encountered before. That belief interacts with no other desires of the speaker and is at the service of one project alone: the comprehension of encountered sentences. Accordingly, if we accept Evans’ claim, we should conclude that while an English speaker may have some cognitive relationship to the grammar or meaning theory for English, that relationship is not a full-fledged belief. It is, perhaps, not even a belief at all. Investigation of the particular cognitive status of these subdoxastic states is an important topic not just in relation to tacit linguistic knowledge, but in cognitive science generally.

5. References and Further Reading

Barber, Alex. ed. Epistemology of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2003a.

Barber, Alex. "Introduction" Epistemology of Language. Ed. Alex Barber. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2003b. 1-43.

Davies, Martin. "Tacit Knowledge and Subdoxastic States." Reflections on Chomsky. Ed. Alexander George. Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge,1989. 131-52.

Devitt, Michael. Coming to Our Senses. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1996.

Evans, Gareth. "Semantic Theory and Tacit Knowledge." Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule. Eds. Holtzman, S.H. and C.M. Leitch. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,1981.

Fodor, Jerry. "The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation." Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 627-40.

George, Alexander. Reflections on Chomsky. Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1989.

Graves, Christina, et. al. "Tacit Knowledge." Journal of Philosophy 70, (1973): 318-30.

LePore, Ernest. "Truth in Meaning." Truth and Interpretation. Ed. Ernest Lepore, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1986. 3-26.

Matthews, Robert. "Does Linguistic Competence Require Knowledge of Language?" Epistemology of Language. Ed. Alex Barber. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2003. 187-213.

Nagel, Thomas. "Linguistics and Epistemology." Language and Philosophy. Ed. Sidney Hook. New York University Press, New York, 1969. 171-82.

Quine, W.V. "Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory." Semantics of Natural Language. Eds. Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1972. 442-454.

Rosenberg, Jay. (1974). Linguistic Representation. D. Reidel, Dordrecht.

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson, London,1949.

Searle, John. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969.

Stanley, Jason and Timothy Williamson. "Knowing How." Journal of Philosophy, 98 (2001): 411-444.

Stich, Stephen. "What Every Speaker Knows." Philosophical Review, 80 (1971): 476-96.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. Macmillan, New York, 1958.
Wright, Crispin. "Wittgenstein's Rule-following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics." Reflections on Chomsky. Ed. Alexander George. Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1989. 233-64.

The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism

2009-03-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

The knowledge argument is one of the main challenges to physicalism, the doctrine that the world is entirely physical. The argument begins with the claim that there are truths about consciousness that cannot be deduced from the complete physical truth. For example, Frank Jackson’s Mary, learns all the physical truths from within a black-and-white room. Then she leaves the room, sees a red tomato for the first time, and learns new truths—new phenomenal truths about what it’s like to see red. The argument then infers that, contrary to physicalism, the complete physical truth is not the whole truth. The physical truth does not determine or metaphysically necessitate the whole truth about the world.

This article discusses the argument’s structure, compares Jackson’s version with others, compares the knowledge argument with other anti-physicalist arguments, and summarizes the main lines of response. Eight controversial assumptions are identified. These are the assumptions that:

* the notion of the physical is coherent;
* the complete physical truth is accessible to the pre-release Mary;
* upon leaving the room, she learns something;
* the kind of knowledge she acquires upon leaving the room is informational knowledge, rather than ability knowledge, acquaintance knowledge, or something else;
* she gains new information, rather than old information represented in a new way;
* if the complete-knowledge claim and the learning claim are true, then what Mary learns when she leaves the room cannot be a priori deduced (deduced by reason alone, without empirical investigation) from the complete physical truth.
* if there are phenomenal truths that cannot be a priori deduced from the complete physical truth, then the complete physical truth does not metaphysically necessitate those phenomenal truths;
* the knowledge argument and epiphenomenalism are consistent.

Various criticisms and defenses of these assumptions are discussed.

1. Introduction

The knowledge argument aims to refute physicalism, the doctrine that the world is entirely physical. Physicalism (also known as materialism) is widely accepted in contemporary philosophy. But some doubt that phenomenal consciousness—experience, the subjective aspect of the mind—is physical. The knowledge argument articulates one of the main forms this doubt has taken.

Frank Jackson gives the argument its classic statement (in Jackson 1982 and Jackson 1986). He formulates the argument in terms of Mary, the super-scientist. Her story takes place in the future, when all physical facts have been discovered. These include “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” (Jackson 1982, p. 51). She learns all this by watching lectures on a monochromatic television monitor. But she spends her life in a black-and-white room and has no color experiences. Then she leaves the room and sees colors for the first time. Based on this case, Jackson argues roughly as follows. If physicalism were true, then Mary would know everything about human color vision before leaving the room. But intuitively, it would seem that she learns something new when she leaves. She learns what it’s like to see colors, that is, she learns about qualia, the properties that characterize what it’s like. Her new phenomenal knowledge includes knowledge of truths. Therefore, physicalism is false.

In the late 1990’s, Jackson changed his mind: he now defends physicalism and rejects the knowledge argument. But others defend the argument, and even those who reject it often disagree about where it goes awry. The knowledge argument has inspired a voluminous literature, which contains insights about consciousness, knowledge, the limits of third-person science, and the nature of the physical. It is also discussed in non philosophical works, including a book by E. O. Wilson (1998), a work of fiction (Lodge 2001), and a T.V. series (Brainspotting). This article discusses the argument’s structure, compares Jackson’s version with others, compares the knowledge argument with other anti-physicalist arguments, and summarizes the main lines of response.

2. The Knowledge Intuition and the Inference to Physicalism’s Falsity

The knowledge argument has two parts. One says that physical knowledge is not sufficient for phenomenal knowledge. Call this the knowledge intuition (Stoljar and Nagasawa, 2004). The other says that the knowledge intuition entails the falsity of physicalism.

Thus described, the knowledge argument is not new with Jackson. Locke and other 18th Century British empiricists discussed the knowledge intuition. C. D. Broad gave a version of the knowledge argument in 1925. And other versions appear in more recent writings, such as Thomas Nagel’s 1974 “What is it Like to be a Bat?” What is distinctive about Jackson’s contribution?

Daniel Stoljar and Yujin Nagasawa (2004) answer this question in their introduction to a volume of essays on the knowledge argument. As they say, Jackson contributes at least two main ideas: his Mary example illustrates the knowledge intuition better than previous attempts; and he provides distinctive reasons for inferring physicalism’s falsity from the intuition. Let us take these points in order.

The Mary case divides the knowledge intuition into three claims:

* The complete-knowledge claim: before leaving the room, Mary knows everything physical.
* The learning claim: upon leaving, she learns something.
* The non-deducibility claim: if the complete-knowledge claim and the learning claim are true, then what Mary learns when she leaves the room cannot be a priori deduced (deduced by reason alone, without empirical investigation) from the complete physical truth.

Physicalists may deny the knowledge intuition. But the Mary case suggests that doing so requires rejecting the complete-knowledge claim, the learning claim, or the non-deducibility claim.

The cases discussed by Broad, Nagel, and others do not deliver this result. Consider, for example, Broad’s “mathematical archangel,” a logically omniscient creature who knows all the physical truths about various chemical compounds. Broad calls these truths “mechanistic” instead of “physical,” but the point is the same. On his view, the archangel would know all such truths but still lack phenomenal knowledge concerning, for example, “the peculiar smell of ammonia.” And Broad infers that physicalism (“mechanism”) is false. But what if the physicalist denies that the archangel would lack the relevant phenomenal knowledge? We appear to be at an impasse. By contrast, if the physicalist claims that, while in the room, Mary knows what it’s like to see colors, he must explain why she seems to acquire this knowledge when she leaves. The Mary case breaks the deadlock in favor of the knowledge intuition. Other illustrations of the intuition that precede Jackson’s have further drawbacks. For example, Nagel’s claim that humans cannot imagine what it’s like to be a bat raises distracting issues about the limits of human imagination, about which physicalism carries no obvious commitments. Mary’s fame is just.

To explain the second of Jackson’s distinctive contributions, it will be useful to explain some terminology and abbreviations. First, there is the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori. A priori truths are those that are justifiable by reason alone, without empirical investigation. Logical truths provide clear examples. For example, one can figure out without empirical investigation that the following claim is true: if Socrates is mortal, then either Socrates is mortal or Socrates is fat. Compare the claim that Socrates is mortal. While we believe the latter claim to be true, reason alone does not justify this belief. Instead, we rely on experience—empirical investigation. So, while it is a priori that if Socrates is mortal, then either Socrates is mortal or Socrates is fat, it is a posteriori that Socrates is mortal. We may also speak of truths that are a priori deducible from other truths. For example, although “Socrates is mortal” is a posteriori, that same truth is a priori deducible from two other truths: “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man.” In other words, the latter two truths, taken together, a priori entail that Socrates is mortal.

Second, there is the notion of metaphysically necessary truths. A necessary truth is a truth that could not have failed to be the case. Logical truths again provide clear examples: “Either Socrates is mortal or it is not the case that Socrates is moral” is usually regarded as necessary. Contrast that truth with “Socrates is mortal.” The latter is not necessary. Truths that are not necessary are also known as contingent. Philosophers often distinguish between different strengths or kinds of necessity. For example, there is arguably a sense in which it is a necessary truth that pigs cannot fly like birds. But if the laws of nature were different, then perhaps pigs would be able to fly like birds. So, perhaps it is not metaphysically impossible that pigs should be able to fly like birds. A metaphysically necessary truth is a truth that is necessary in the strictest possible sense: a truth that holds not just because of contingent laws of nature. Saul Kripke (1972) famously argues that there are metaphysically necessary truths that are not truths of pure logic. Indeed, he argues that there are metaphysically necessary truths that are not a priori. For example, on his view, that water is H2O is metaphysically necessary but a posteriori. He recognizes that there could have been substances that resemble water—substances that share water’s superficial qualities, such as its taste and visual appearance—but with a different molecular structure. But, he argues, these substances would not be water.

Third, let us introduce some abbreviations. On Jackson’s version of the knowledge argument, the assumption that Mary knows the complete physical truth about the world does not guarantee that she will be able to figure out the complete truth about human color vision. His reasoning involves the idea of the complete physical truth. Call the complete physical truth P. P can be seen as a long conjunction of all the particular physical truths, which, according to Jackson, Mary learns from watching science lectures. What about the truths that, according to Jackson, Mary does not learn until she leaves the room? Those would be included in the psychological truths about the world. Call the complete psychological truth Q. Finally, consider what Stoljar and Nagasawa call “the psychophysical conditional”: if P then Q, where P is the complete physical truth and Q is the complete psychological truth. As we will see, part of Jackson’s reasoning can be understood in terms of his view about the psychophysical conditional.

We are now in a position to state the second of Jackson’s distinctive contributions to the discussion of the knowledge argument. This contribution concerns his inference from the knowledge intuition to physicalism’s falsity. His inference assumes that if physicalism is true then the complete truth about human color vision is a priori deducible from the complete physical truth. But here a problem arises: why accept this assumption? Consider the psychophysical conditional, if P then Q (again, P is the complete physical truth and Q is the complete psychological truth). As Jackson conceives of physicalism, physicalism entails that the psychophysical conditional is a priori. If he is right, then all truths about color vision would be deducible from P (the complete physical truth). But here physicalists have a natural, obvious response: why not instead characterize physicalism as a Kripkean a posteriori necessity, akin to water is H2O? On this characterization, the psychophysical conditional is metaphysically necessary but not a priori.

In later work, Jackson criticizes this response. His argument is complex, but the basic idea is simple enough. In a 1995 “Postscript,” he reasons as follows. Consider the argument:

H2O covers most of the planet.
Therefore, water covers most of the planet.

The premise necessitates, but does not a priori entail, the conclusion. But, Jackson asks, why is there no a priori entailment? On his view, there is no such entailment because the argument’s premise gives us only part of the physical story. It is also part of the physical story that H2O does the other things that water does, that is, that H2O plays the water role. Playing the water role includes such things as being a substance that occupies oceans and lakes, looks clear to us, has little or no taste, is referred to as “water”, etc. So, let us add the following premise to the argument displayed above:

H2O plays the water role.

Now, says Jackson, the premises do a priori entail the conclusion. Moral: “a rich enough story about the H2O way things are does enable the a priori deduction of the water way things are” (Jackson 1995, p. 413). Likewise, physicalism entails that “knowing a rich enough story about the physical nature of our world is tantamount to knowing the psychological story about our world” (Jackson 1995, p. 414). But if physicalism is true, P should provide just that: a rich enough story. Thus, Jackson concludes, physicalism entails the apriority of the psychophysical conditional after all.

Jackson’s argument is controversial. But in developing it, he fills an important lacuna in the knowledge argument and thereby improves on earlier versions. Others, too, have attempted to fill this lacuna. Most notably, David Chalmers (1996, 2003, 2004, and 2006a) has given sophisticated arguments to this end, which are partly inspired by Jackson’s argument.

3. Related Arguments

The knowledge argument is one of several ways to articulate the suspicion that phenomenal consciousness is not physical. Another common way of articulating the doubt is through the conceivability argument. This argument descends from René Descartes’ main argument for mind-body substance dualism. He argued that, since he can clearly and distinctly conceive of his mind without his body and his body without his mind, they can exist without each other and are therefore distinct substances.

Contemporary versions of the conceivability argument usually rely on thought experiments concerning qualia. One such thought experiment involves inverted qualia. It seems conceivable that there be an individual exactly like me, except he and I are red/green inverted. We are physically and functionally identical, but the color experiences he has when viewing a ripe tomato (in normal light, without special contact lenses, and so forth) resemble the color experiences I have when viewing a ripe zucchini, and vice versa. Such a person would be my inverted twin. Likewise, it seems conceivable that there be a world exactly like ours in all physical and functional respects but without phenomenal consciousness. Creatures that lack consciousness but are physically and functionally identical to ordinary human beings are called zombies. If it is conceivable that there be creatures such as my inverted twin or my zombie twin, then, the conceivability argument runs, this supports the metaphysically possibility of such creatures. And most agree that if such creatures are metaphysically possible, then phenomenal consciousness is neither physical nor functional: physicalism is false.

Yet another related argument is the explanatory argument. This argument begins with the premise that physicalist accounts explain only structure (such as spatiotemporal structure) and function (such as causal role). Then it is argued that explaining structure and function does not suffice to explain consciousness, and so physicalist accounts are explanatorily inadequate.

As Chalmers (2003) notes, the knowledge argument, the conceivability argument, and the explanatory argument can be seen as instances of a general, three-step argument. The first step is to establish an epistemic gap between the physical and phenomenal domains. In the case of the knowledge argument, the gap is often put in terms of a priori deducibility: there are phenomenal truths that cannot be a priori deduced from physical truths. In the case of the conceivability argument, the gap is put in terms of conceivability: it is conceivable that there be inverted qualia or zombies. And in the case of the explanatory argument, the point is put in terms of an explanatory gap. After establishing an epistemic gap, these arguments take a second step and infer a corresponding metaphysical gap: a gap in the world, not just in our epistemic relation to it. The knowledge argument infers a difference in type of fact. The conceivability argument infers the metaphysical possibility of inverted qualia or zombies. And the explanatory argument infers that there are phenomena that cannot be physically explained. As a third step, all three results appear to conflict with physicalism. There are important differences among the arguments, and it is not obvious that they stand or fall together. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that they follow a single abstract pattern.

4. More Physicalist Responses

Most physicalist responses to the knowledge argument fall into three categories: those that reject the inference to physicalism’s falsity and thus deny the metaphysical gap; those that reject the knowledge intuition and thus deny the epistemic gap; and those that derive an absurdity from Jackson’s reasoning.

We have already noted one way of rejecting the inference from the knowledge intuition to physicalism’s falsity: one could defend a version of physicalism on which the psychophysical conditional is necessary but not a priori. There are other ways of rejecting the inference. One is to reject the assumption that phenomenal knowledge is propositional knowledge—knowledge of truths or information. That is, one could argue that the type of knowledge Mary gains when she leaves the room is non propositional. The most popular version of this view is based on the ability hypothesis, the claim that to know what it’s like is to possess certain abilities, such as the ability to imagine, recognize, and remember experiences. On this view, Mary’s learning consists in her acquiring abilities rather than learning truths. As the view is sometimes put, she gains know-how, not knowledge-that. There are other versions, including the view that upon leaving the room Mary acquires only non propositional acquaintance knowledge (Conee 1994, Bigelow and Pargetter 1990). On this version, her learning consists, not in acquiring information or abilities, but in becoming directly acquainted with the phenomenal character of color experiences, in the way that one can become acquainted with a city by visiting it.

These views allow the physicalist to accept the knowledge intuition without facing objections that Jackson, Chalmers, and others bring against a posteriori physicalism. But other problems arise. Regarding the ability hypothesis, some doubt that Mary’s learning could consist only in acquiring abilities. Her new knowledge appears to have characteristic marks of propositional knowledge because its content can be embedded in conditionals such as “if seeing red is like this, then it is not like that” (Loar 1990/97). And some philosophers question the significance of the distinction between know-how and knowledge-that on which the strategy of the ability-hypothesis seems to rely (Alter 2001, Stanley and Williamson 2001).

The idea that Mary acquires only acquaintance knowledge has similar difficulties. It is not clear that all she acquires is acquaintance knowledge or that the requisite distinction between acquaintance knowledge and propositional knowledge is tenable. Also, there is a danger of trading on an ambiguity: sometimes “acquaintance” refers to knowledge, sometimes to experience. On the former, epistemic interpretation, it is unclear that Mary’s new “acquaintance knowledge” includes no factual component. And on the latter, experiential interpretation, the acquaintance hypothesis trivializes the learning claim: no one denies that when Mary leaves the room she has new experiences.

Another way to reject the inference to physicalism’s falsity is to argue that Mary’s learning consists in acquiring new ways to represent facts she knew before leaving the room (Loar 1990, 1997, Lycan 1996, Horgan 1984, McMullen 1985, Pereboom 1994, Tye 2002). This view is often combined with an appeal to a posteriori necessity (see section 2 above). But it need not be: one could argue that while the psychophysical conditional is a priori knowable by those who possess the relevant phenomenal concepts, Mary lacks those concepts before leaving the room. The main challenge for this view concerns the status of her new concepts. It is not enough to say that she gains some new concept or other: her conceptual gain must explain her gain in knowledge. The concern is that any concepts adequate to the task—such as the concept having an experience with phenomenal feel f—might incorporate a non physical component (Chalmers 2006b).

Philosophers have also devised ways to reject the knowledge intuition. Some believe that intuitions based on hypothetical cases should be given little or no weight. Also, specific strategies for rejecting the knowledge intuition have been developed. One is to reject the learning claim: to argue that on reflection Mary does not learn anything when she leaves the room. Some defend this position by arguing that we simply underestimate the power of complete physical knowledge. Suppose we try to fool Mary by greeting her when she leaves the room with a blue banana. Would she be fooled into thinking that seeing yellow is what we would describe as seeing blue? Not necessarily. She could use a brain scanner (perhaps a descendent of a PET device) to examine her own brain processes. She would notice that her brain processes correspond to people having blue experiences, and thereby evade our trap. Maybe our intuition that she learns something fails to take this sort of consideration into account (Dennett 1981, 2006). But other philosophers doubt that the intuition derives from any such error.

Another way to reject the knowledge intuition is to challenge the complete-knowledge claim: to argue that not all physical facts about seeing colors can be learned by watching black-and-white lectures. On this view, a fact might be physical but not discursively learnable. How could this be?

Some (for example, Horgan, 1984) use “physical” broadly, so that that the physical truths include high-level truths necessitated by the microphysical truths. These physicalists argue that phenomenal truths are themselves high-level physical truths, and that it is question-begging to assume that Mary knows all the physical truths simply because she watches lectures on chemistry, physics, etc. Chalmers (2004, 2006a) suggests a natural response to this move: use “physical” narrowly, so that the physical truths include only the microphysical truths (or those plus the truths in chemistry or some other specified domains). It is harder to deny that such truths would be accessible to the pre-release Mary. Of course, this entails that high-level biological truths, for example, will count as non physical, and thus the existence of non physical truths will not itself defeat physicalism. But if Jackson’s reasoning is sound, then there are phenomenal truths that are not metaphysically necessitated by the narrowly physical truths—and that result would defeat physicalism.

On another version of the view that the complete-knowledge claim is false, Mary’s science lectures allow her to deduce the truths involving structural-dynamical properties of physical phenomena, but not their intrinsic properties. The knowledge argument does not appear to refute this view. If this view can reasonably be called a physicalist view, then there is at least one version of physicalism that the knowledge argument appears to leave unchallenged. However, it is unclear that this is a significant deficiency. Arguably, on the view in question, consciousness (or protoconsciousness) is a fundamental feature of the universe—or at least no less fundamental than the properties describable in the language of physics, chemistry, etc. That sounds like the sort of view the knowledge argument should be used to establish, not refute. (It is a form of neutral monism; see next section.)

5. Non Physicalist Responses

If we accept the knowledge argument, then how should we understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical world? Jackson (1982) defends epiphenomenalism, on which phenomenal properties or qualia are caused by but do not cause physical phenomena. But epiphenomenalism is only one non physicalist view that the knowledge argument leaves open. Others include interactionism, parallelism, and idealism. These views agree that consciousness is not reducible to the physical, but disagree over how the two interact causally. On interactionist dualism, consciousness affects the physical world and vice versa. On parallelism, physical events and events of consciousness run in parallel but do not affect each other. On idealism, there are only conscious phenomena. The knowledge argument also leaves open neutral monism, the view that phenomenal properties (or protophenomenal properties) are the categorical, intrinsic bases of physical properties, which are at bottom dispositional and relational. This view might or might not be considered a version of physicalism, depending on whether the intrinsic nature of physical properties is considered physical.

All of these views have significant costs and benefits. For example, interactionist dualism is commonsensical but hard to reconcile with the popular view that the physical world is causally closed, that is, the view that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause. To take another example: epiphenomenalism preserves causal closure but seems to conflict with the widespread naturalistic assumption that consciousness is an integrated part of the natural world. Accepting the knowledge argument forces philosophers to weigh such costs and benefits and develop new, non physicalist accounts.

Historically, epiphenomenalism is associated with Huxley (1874), interactionist dualism with Descartes (1641), parallelism with Leibniz (1714), idealism with Berkeley (1713), and neutral monism with Russell (1927). For more recent versions, see Jackson (1982) and Robinson (1982b, 1988) for epiphenomenalism; see Popper and Eccles (1977), Hart (1988), Foster (1991), and Hodgson (1991) for interactionist dualism, see Rosenberg (2004) for neutral monism; and see Adams (forthcoming) for idealism. There are no recent defenses of parallelism.

6. Other Responses

Some claim that Jackson’s position is internally inconsistent (Watkins 1989, Campbell 2003). The argument runs roughly as follows. On the knowledge argument, Mary acquires knowledge when she leaves the room because she has states with new qualia. But this is impossible if, as Jackson (1982) suggests, epiphenomenalism is true: on epiphenomenalism, qualia are causally inefficacious; so, how can qualia produce an increase in knowledge? So, Jackson cannot consistently maintain both epiphenomenalism and the learning claim.

However, the sort of epiphenomenalism Jackson defends implies, not that phenomenal features are inefficacious, but only that they have no effects on physical phenomena. He might therefore reply that phenomenal knowledge is not a physical phenomenon, and thus qualia may indeed cause Mary to acquire it. Also, he can reasonably complain that the objection assumes a causal theory of knowledge that is not appropriate for phenomenal knowledge.

Despite the availability of these replies, there is a serious problem in the vicinity of the inconsistency objection. We should expect physical or functional explanations of our judgments about qualia. But if the knowledge argument is sound, then qualia would seem to be explanatorily irrelevant to these judgments—including the judgment that qualia cannot be explained in physical or functional terms. This is what David Chalmers calls “the paradox of phenomenal judgment” (Chalmers 1996, chapter 5). It appears to be a real problem, which arises for any non physicalist theory of consciousness.

Another important response to the knowledge argument should be noted. The argument seems to assume that “physical” has a clear meaning. But whether this notion can be adequately defined is not obvious. One problem is “Hempel’s dilemma” (Hempel 1980, Montero 1999). Arguably, we should not define the physical in terms of current physics, because current physics will be extended and presumably revised in substantial ways. We could define it in terms of ideal physics. But who knows what ideal physics will look like? Future physics may involve novel concepts that we cannot begin to imagine. If “physical” is defined in terms of such unknown concepts, then how can we judge whether Mary could learn all the physical facts from black-and-white lectures? And how else should we define the notion except by appeal to (current or ideal) physics?

Some take such considerations to show that the debate over whether consciousness is physical is misguided or meaningless (Chomsky 1980, 1988, Crane and Mellor 1990, Montero 1999). But the difficulty may be surmountable. On one view, ideal physics will not be wholly unrecognizable: like today’s physics, it will be concerned entirely with structure and dynamics. And one may be able to argue that any structural/dynamical properties can in principle be imparted by black-and-white lectures.

7. Jackson’s Retraction

As we noted earlier, Jackson (1998, 2003, 2006) has come to embrace physicalism and reject the knowledge argument. More specifically, he rejects the claim that Mary learns new truths when she leaves the room. He argues that this claim derives from a mistaken conception of sensory experience—a conception that he thinks should be replaced with representationalism, the view that phenomenal states are representational states. Interestingly, he combines this view with the ability hypothesis. He writes,

Those who resist accounts in terms of ability acquisition tend to say things like “Mary acquires a new piece of propositional knowledge, namely, that seeing red is like this”, but for the representationalist there is nothing suitable to be the referent of the demonstrative.

We have ended up agreeing with Laurence Nemirow and David Lewis [the authors of the ability-hypothesis strategy] on what happens to Mary on her release. But, for the life of me, I cannot see how we could have known they were right without going via representationalism. (Jackson 2003, p. 439)

It is unclear why Jackson’s representationalism leads him to embrace the ability hypothesis. Despite his commitments to physicalism and the apriority of the psychophysical conditional, he has other options. For example, instead of explaining Mary’s epistemic progress in terms of newly acquired abilities, he might argue that her “progress” is an illusion; in other words, he might reject the learning claim. Moreover, it may be possible to formulate a representationalist version of the knowledge argument that inherits the force of the original (Alter, 2006).

8. Summary of Assumptions and Criticisms

As we have seen, the knowledge argument depends on several controversial assumptions. It will be useful to summarize some of these assumptions and some criticisms of them. I will also mention some sources for relevant arguments.

Assumption 1: The coherence of the notion of the physical: physicalism is a substantive doctrine with non trivial content.

Criticism 1: The notion of the physical is not well defined, and there is no substantive issue of whether physicalism is true (Chomsky 1980, 1988, Crane and Mellor 1990, Montero 1999). For replies, see Chalmers (1996, 2004) and Stoljar (2000).

Assumption 2: The complete-knowledge claim (“truths” version): before leaving the room, Mary knows all physical truths.

Criticism 2a: Pre-release Mary does not know all the physical truths, because high-level physical truths cannot in general be a priori deduced from low-level physical truths (Horgan 1984, van Gulick 2004, Block and Stalnaker 1999). For replies, see Chalmers (2004, 2006a) and Chalmers and Jackson (2001).

Criticism 2b: Pre-release Mary does not know all the physical truths, because truths about the intrinsic properties of physical phenomena cannot be discursively learned (Alter 1998, Stoljar 2000). For replies, see Chalmers (1996, 2003, 2004, 2006a)

Assumption 3: The learning claim: upon leaving the room, Mary learns something.

Criticism 3a: We think Mary learns something because we fail to appreciate the implications of knowing all physical truths (Foss 1989, Stemmer 1989, Dennett 1991, 2004, 2006a). For replies, see Chalmers (1996), Alter (1998), Robinson (1993), and Jacquette (1995).

Criticism 3b: We think Mary learns something because we fail to recognize that phenomenal properties are just representational properties (Jackson 2003). For a reply, see Alter (2006); and for a counter-reply, see Jackson (2006).

Criticism 3c: Mary gains only unjustified beliefs (Beisecker 2000).

Assumption 4: The non-deducibility claim: if Mary learns new phenomenal truths when she leaves the room, then those truths cannot be a priori deduced from the complete physical truth.

Criticism 4: Mary cannot deduce certain phenomenal truths from the complete physical truth only because she lacks the relevant concepts, such as the concept of phenomenal redness. Thus, even though Mary cannot deduce Q from P, the psychophysical conditional is a priori for those who have the relevant concepts (Tye 2000, Hellie 2004). For replies, see Chalmers (2004, 2006a) and Stoljar (forthcoming).

Assumption 5: The propositional-knowledge claim: the kind of knowledge Mary gains upon leaving the room is propositional or factual—knowledge of information or truths.

Criticism 5a: Mary gains only abilities (Lewis 1983, 1988, Nemirow 1990, Mellor 1993, Meyer 2001). For replies, see Jackson (1986), Bigelow and Pargetter (1990), Loar (1990/97), Conee (1994), Nida-Rümelin (1995), Lycan (1996), Alter (1998, 2001), Gertler (1999), Tye (2002, chapter 1), Raymont (1999), and Papineau (2002). For counter-replies, see Tye (2002, chapter 1) and Nemirow (2006).

Criticism 5b: Mary gains only acquaintance knowledge (Conee 1994, Bigelow and Pargetter 1990). For replies, see Alter (1998), Gertler (1999), and Papineau (2002).

Criticism 5c: Mary gains non propositional knowledge that does not fit easily into folk categories (Churchland 1985, 1989).

Assumption 6: The new-information claim: the information Mary gains upon leaving the room is genuinely new to her.

Criticism 6: Mary merely comes to know truths she already knew under new, phenomenal representations. This view is sometimes called the old-fact/new-representation view. It comes in at least two versions. On one, phenomenal knowledge is assimilated to indexical knowledge: Mary’s “learning” is comparable to the absent-minded U.S. historian’s learning that today is July 4th, America's Independence Day (McMullen 1985). For replies, see Chalmers (1996, 2004, 2006a). Another version attaches the old-fact/new-representation view to a posteriori physicalism. Advocates of this version include Loar (1990/97), Lycan (1996), Horgan (1984), and Pereboom (1994). For replies, see Alter (1995, 1998) Chalmers (1996, 2003, 2004, 2006a) and Stoljar (2000).

Assumption 7: The claim that the knowledge intuition entails non necessitation: if there are phenomenal truths that cannot be a priori deduced from the complete physical truth, then the complete physical truth does not metaphysically necessitate those phenomenal truths.

Criticism 7: Physicalism is an a posteriori necessity and is therefore compatible with the claim that the phenomenal truths are not deducible from the complete physical truth. For references, see the second version of criticism 6 above.

Assumption 8: The consistency claim: the knowledge argument and non physicalism are consistent.

Criticism 8: The assumption that Mary gains knowledge is inconsistent with epiphenomenalism (Watkins 1989, Campbell 2003). For replies, see Nagasawa (n.d.).

The knowledge argument rests on other assumptions. One is that if Mary gains new, non physical information, then there are non physical properties. Another is that if there are truths that are not metaphysically necessitated by the complete physical truth, then physicalism is false. But doubts about these assumptions may be terminological variants on doubts about assumptions 1-8.

Some critics combine elements of different criticisms. For example, Michael Pelczar’s (forthcoming) criticism appears to contain elements of the acquaintance hypothesis and the old-fact/new-representation view; Jackson both rejects the learning claim and endorses the ability hypothesis (Jackson 2003); and Robert van Gulick (2004) argues that the various physicalist criticisms of the knowledge argument can be seen as parts of a single, coherent reply. Those who endorse the knowledge argument (in addition to Jackson, before he changed his mind) include Robinson (1982a), Nida-Rümelin (1995), Chalmers (1996, 2004, 2006a), and Gertler (1999).

William Lycan (2003) writes, “Someday there will be no more articles written about the “Knowledge Argument”… That is beyond dispute. What is less certain is, how much sooner that day will come than the heat death of the universe” (Lycan 2003). At least for now, however, the knowledge argument continues to inspire fruitful reflection on the nature of consciousness and its relation to the natural world.

9. References and Further Reading

Adams, Robert. 2006. “Idealism Vindicated.” Forthcoming in D. Zimmerman and P. van Inwagen (eds) Persons: Human and Divine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alter, Torin. 1998. “A Limited Defense of the Knowledge Argument”, Philosophical Studies, 90, 35-56

Alter, Torin. 2001. “Know-How, Ability, and the Ability Hypothesis”, Theoria, 67, 229-39.

Alter, Torin. 2006. “Does Representationalism Undermine the Knowledge Argument?” Forthcoming in T. Alter and S. Walter (Eds.) Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Beisecker, David. 2000. “There's Something about Mary: Phenomenal Consciousness and Its Attributions”, Southwest Philosophy Review, 16, 143-52.

Berkeley, George. 1713. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.

Block, N. & Stalnaker, R. 1999. Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap. Philosophical Review 108: 1-46.

Brainspotting. 1994. U.K. television series.

Broad, C. D. 1925. The Mind and its Place in Nature, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bigelow, John, and Robert Pargetter. 1990. “Acquaintance with Qualia”, Theoria, 61, 129-47.

Campbell, Neil 2003. “An Inconsistency in the Knowledge Argument”, Erkenntnis, 58, 261-66.

Chalmers, David J. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, New York: Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, David J. 2002. “Consciousness and it Place in Nature” in S. Stich and T. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted in D. Chalmers (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, (2002): 247–272, New York: Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, David J. 2004. “Phenomenal Concepts and the Knowledge Argument.” In Ludlow, et. al. (2004).

Chalmers, David J. 2006a. “The Two-Dimensional Argument against Materialism.” Forthcoming in his The Character of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, David J. 2006b. “Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap”. Forthcoming in T. Alter and S. Walter Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, D.J. and Jackson, F. (2001). Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation. Philosophical Review 110: 315-61.

Chomsky, Noam. 1980. Rules and Representations, New York: Columbia University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Churchland, Paul. 1985. “Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States”, Journal of Philosophy, 82, 8-28.

Churchland, Paul. 1989. “Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson”, in A Neurocomputational Perspective, Cambridge: MIT Press, 67-76.

Conee, Earl. 1994. “Phenomenal Knowledge”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72, 136-50.

Crane, Tim and Hugh Mellor 1990. “There is no question of physicalism”, Mind, 99, 185-206.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little Brown and Company.

Dennett Daniel C. 2005. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dennett, Daniel C. 2006. “What RoboMary Knows”. Forthcoming in T. Alter and S. Walter (Eds) Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641.

Foster, J. 1991. The Immaterial Self: A Defense of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of Mind. Routledge.

Foss, Jeff. 1989. “On the Logic of What It Is Like to be a Conscious Subject”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67, pp. 305-20.

Gertler, Brie 1999. “A Defense of the Knowledge Argument”, Philosophical Studies, 93, 317-36.

Hart, W. D. 1988. Engines of the Soul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hellie, Benj 2004. “Inexpressible Truths and the Allure of the Knowledge Argument.” In Ludlow, et. al. (2004), 333-64.

Hempel, Carl. 1980. “Comments on Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking”, Synthese 45:193-9.

Hodgson, D. 1991. The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Horgan, Terence 1984. “Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 147-52.

Huxley, Thomas H. 1874. “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History”. In D. Chalmers (ed.) The Philosophy of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 24-30.

Jackson, Frank. 1982. “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 127-36.

Jackson, Frank. 1986. “What Mary Didn't Know”, Journal of Philosophy, 83, 291-5.

Jackson, Frank. 1995. “Postscript”, in Contemporary Materialism, ed. by Paul K. Moser and J. D. Trout, New York: Routledge, 184-9.

Jackson, Frank. 1998. “Postscript on Qualia.” In his Mind, Method, and Conditionals: Selected Essays: 76-79. London: Routledge.

Jackson, Frank. 2003. “Mind and Illusion”, in Minds and Persons: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53, ed. by Anthony O'Hear, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 251-271.

Jacquette, Dale. 1995. “The Blue Banana Trick: Dennett on Jackson's Color Scientist,” Theoria 61, pp. 217-30.

Kripke, Saul. 1972. “Naming and Necessity”. In The Semantics of Natural Language. Ed. G. Harman and D. Davidson. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted as Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Leibniz, G. 1714. The Monadology.

Lewis, David. 1983. “Postscript to ‘Mad Pain and Martian Pain.’” In his Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 130-32.

Lewis, David. 1988. “What Experience Teaches”, Proceedings of Russellian Society (University of Sydney), Reprinted in Lycan (1999); Block, Flanagan and Güzeldere (1997)

Loar, Brian. 1990. “Phenomenal States”, in Philosophical Perspectives IV: Action Theory and the Philosophy of Mind, ed. by James Tomberlin, Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing, 81-108.

Loar, Brian. 1997. “Phenomenal States (Revised Version)”, in The Nature of Consciousness, ed. by Ned Block, Flanagan Owen and Güzeldere Güven, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 597-616.

Locke, John. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Lodge, David. 2001. Thinks... London: Secker and Warburg Random House.

Ludlow, P., Y. Stoljar, and D. Nagasawa, eds. (2004) There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lycan, William G. 1996. Consciousness and Experiences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lycan, William G. “Perspectival Representation and the Knowledge Argument,” in Q. Smith and A. Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

McMullen, C. (1985), “'Knowing What It's Like' and the Essential Indexical”, Philosophical Studies 48, pp. 211-33.

Mellor, D. H. 1993. “Nothing Like Experience.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93, pp. 1-16.

Meyer, Uwe. 2001. “The Knowledge Argument, Abilities, and Metalinguistic Beliefs”, Erkenntnis, 55, 325-47.

Montero, Barbara. 1999. “The Body Problem,” Noûs, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1999) p. 183-20.

Nagasawa, Yujin, n.d. The “Most Powerful Reply” to the Knowledge Argument. ANU manuscript.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”, Philosophical Review, 83, 435-50.

Nemirow, Lawrence. 1990. “Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance”, in Mind and Cognition: A Reader, ed. by William G. Lycan, Oxford: Blackwell, 490-9.

Nemirow, Lawrence. 2006. “So This is What it’s Like: a Defense of the Ability Hypothesis.” Forthcoming in T. Alter and S. Walter (eds) Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nida-Rümelin, Martine 1995. “What Mary Couldn't Know: Belief About Phenomenal States”, in Conscious Experience, ed. by Thomas Metzinger, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 219-41.

Papineau, David. 2002. Thinking about Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Pelczar, Michael. “Enlightening the Fully Informed.” Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.

Pereboom, Derk 1994. “Bats, Brain Scientists, and the Limitations of Introspection”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 315-29.

Popper, K. and Eccles, J. 1977. The Self and its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism. Springer.

Raymont, Paul. 1999. “The Know-How response to Jackson's Knowledge Argument”, Journal of Philosophical Research, 24, 113-26.

Robinson, Howard. 1982a. Matter and Sense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robinson, Howard. 1993. “Dennett on the Knowledge Argument”, Analysis, 53, 174-7.

Robinson, W. S. (1982b) “Causation, Sensations and Knowledge”, Mind 91, 524-40.

Rosenberg, Gregg. 2004. A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Russell, Bertrand. 1927. The Analysis of Matter. London: Kegan Paul.

Stemmer, Nathan (1989), "Physicalism and the Argument from Knowledge" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67, pp. 84-91.

Stoljar, Daniel 2000. “Physicalism and the Necessary A Posteriori,” Journal of Philosophy, 97, 33-54.

Stoljar, Daniel 2000. forthcoming. “Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts”, forthcoming in Mind and Language.

Stoljar, Daniel and Yujin Nagasawa. 2004. Introduction to Ludlow, et al. (2004).

Tye, Michael. 2000. Consciousness, Color, and Content, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Van Gulick, Robert. 2004. “So Many Ways of Saying No to Mary”. In Ludlow, et. al. (2004).

Watkins, Michael 1989. “The Knowledge Argument against the Knowledge Argument,” Analysis, 49, 158-60.
Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. 1020)

2009-03-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani was a prominent Ismaili missionary during the reign of the Fatimid caliph-imam al-Hakim (996-1021). He was of Persian origin and was probably born in the province of Kirman. He seems to have spent the greater part of his life as a Fatimid da‘i (missionary) in Iraq (in Baghdad and Basra) and in central and western parts of Iran.

Al-Kirmani was part of the official Fatimid campaign against the dissident da‘is, who had also proclaimed al-Hakim’s divinity. In Cairo he produced several works in refutation of the Druze movement and religion. Subsequently, al-Kirmani returned to Iraq where he completed his last and magnum opus, Rahat al-‘aql.

A prolific writer, al-Kirmani was one of the most learned Ismaili theologians of the Fatimid times. He was well-acquainted with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Syriac version of the New Testament, and the post-Biblical Jewish writings. He expounded the Ismaili Shi‘i doctrine of the imamate in numerous writings. In a few treatises, al-Kirmani refuted the theological views of the Zaydis, the Twelver Shi‘is, and other Muslim opponents of the Fatimid Ismaili imams. Al-Kirmani was also an accomplished philosopher belonging to that select group of Ismaili da‘is of the Iranian lands who amalgamated in an original manner their Ismaili theology with different philosophical traditions, notably a type of Neoplatonism then current in the Muslim world.

Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani was a prominent Ismaili da‘i or missionary and one of the most learned Ismaili theologians and philosophers of the Fatimid period. As in the case of other prominent missionaries who observed strict secrecy in their activities in the midst of hostile milieus, few biographical details are available on al-Kirmani, who flourished during the reign of the Fatimid caliph-imam al-Hakim (996-1021). Al-Kirmani is not mentioned in any contemporary Muslim historical sources, but highlights of his life and career can be gathered from his own numerous extant works as well as the writings of the later Musta‘li-Tayyibi Ismaili authors of Yaman.

Al-Kirmani’s date of birth remains unknown, but he was of Persian origin and was probably born in the province of Kirman. He seems to have spent the greater part of his life as a Fatimid da‘i in Iraq, having been particularly active in Baghdad and Basra. In Iraq, al-Kirmani successfully concentrated his efforts on local rulers and influential tribal chiefs, with whose support the Ismailis aimed to bring about the downfall of the ‘Abbasids. Alarmed by the successes of the Fatimid da‘wa or mission in Iraq, the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Qadir took retaliatory measures. In 1011, he sponsored the so-called Baghdad manifesto to discredit the Fatimids, also refuting their ‘Alid ancestry. The honorific title hujjat al-Iraqayn, meaning the hujja or chief da‘i of both Iraqs (al-Iraq al-Arabi and al-Iraq al-Ajami), which is often added to al-Kirmani’s name and may be of a late origin, implies that he was also active in central and western parts of Iran.

Al-Kirmani rose to prominence during the reign of al-Hakim, when the central headquarters of the Fatimid da‘wa in Cairo considered him as the most learned Ismaili theologian of the time. It was in that capacity that al-Kirmani played an important role in refuting the extremist ideas of some dissident da‘is, who were then founding what was to become known as the Druze movement and religion. As part of the official Fatimid campaign against the dissident da‘is, who had also proclaimed al-Hakim’s divinity, al-Kirmani was summoned in 1014 or shortly earlier to Cairo where he produced several works in refutation of the extremist doctrines. Al-Kirmani’s writings, which were widely circulated, were to some extent successful in checking the spread of the extremist doctrines associated with the initiation of the Druze movement. Subsequently, al-Kirmani returned to Iraq where he completed his last and magnum opus, Rahat al-‘aql, in 1020 and where he died soon afterwards.

A prolific writer, al-Kirmani was one of the most learned Ismaili theologians of the Fatimid times. He was well-acquainted with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Syriac version of the New Testament, and the post-Biblical Jewish writings. He expounded the Ismaili Shi‘i doctrine of the imamate in numerous writings. In a few treatises, al-Kirmani refuted the theological views of the Zaydis, the Twelver Shi‘is, and other Muslim opponents of the Fatimid Ismaili imams. In his al-Aqwal al-dhahabiya, al-Kirmani refuted the ideas of Abu Bakr Mohammad b. Zakariya al-Razi (d. 934), who had argued for the necessity of revelation and prophethood while tracing all sciences to revelational origins. Al-Kirmani was also an accomplished philosopher belonging to that select group of Ismaili da‘is of the Iranian lands who amalgamated in an original manner their Ismaili theology (kalam) with different philosophical traditions, notably a type of Neoplatonism then current in the Muslim world. As a philosopher, al-Kirmani was fully acquainted with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophies as well as the metaphysical systems of the Muslim philosophers (falasifa), notably al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who was his contemporary. In his Kitab al-riyad, al-Kirmani acted as an arbiter in a philosophical debate that had taken place earlier among some Iranian da‘is, notably Muhammad al-Nasafi, Abu YaRahat al-‘aql, which is written for the advanced adepts. In this book, al-Kirmani also propounded what may be regarded as the third stage in the development of Ismaili cosmology in medieval times. Al-Kirmani replaced the Neoplatonic dyad of the Intellect (‘aql) and Soul (nafs) in the spiritual world, which had been adopted by his Iranian Ismaili predecessors, by a series of ten separate Intellects in partial adaptation of al-Farabi’s Aristotelian cosmic system. Al-Kirmani’s cosmology, representing an original synthesis of different philosophical traditions, was not however adopted by the Fatimid Ismailis; it later provided the basis for the development of the fourth and final stage of Ismaili cosmology at the hands of the Musta‘li-Tayyibi scholars in Yaman.

References and Further Reading

W. Ivanow, Ismaili Literature: A Bibliographical Survey, Tehran, 1963, pp. 40-45. Contains a survey of al-Kirmani’s known works and their manuscripts, preserved mainly in Yaman and India.

I. K. Poonawala, Biobibliography of Ismaili Literature Malibu, Calif., 1977, pp. 94-102. Also contains a survey of al-Kirmani’s known works and their manuscripts, preserved mainly in Yaman and India.

J. van Ess, “Bibliographische Notizen zur islamischen Theologie. I. Zur Chronologie der Werke des Hamidaddin al-Kirmani”, Die Welt des Orients, 9, 1978, pp. 255-261. A partial chronology of al-Kirmani’s works.

W. Madelung, “Das Imamat in der frühen ismailitischen Lehre”, Der Islam, 37, 1961, pp. 114-127.

H. Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, London, 1983, index.

F. Daftary, The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 113, 192-193, 196-197, 218, 227, 229-230, 235-236, 240, 245-246, 287, 291, 298.

Paul E. Walker, Early Philosophical Shiism, Cambridge, 1993, index.

Paul. E. Walker, Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani: Ismaili Thought in the Age of al-Hakim, London, 1999.

Daniel De Smet, La Quiétude de l’intellect: Néoplatonisme et gnose ismaélienne dans l’oeuvre de Hamid ad-Din al-Kirmani, Louvain, 1995.