What Mary Didn T Know Analysis

Essay 2

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In Frank Jackson’s What Mary Didn’t Know, Jackson provides an argument against physicalism, the belief that the actual world is entirely physical. His argument, known as the knowledge argument, involves a woman named Mary who is educated only inside a black and white room her entire life. She is educated using only black and white pictures, books, and other black and white things. Through this education, Mary learns all the physical things that there are to know about people, physics, and the entire world. Jackson argues that, if physicalism were true and therefore the actual world was entirely physical, then Mary would know everything there is to know. However, Mary does not know certain things about other

people’s, and her own, experiences.

When Mary is released from the room she will see color. Jackson makes it clear that the important point of Mary’s release and sight of color is not that Mary has an experience that she has never had before, it is instead that she learns something new about other people’s experiences that she did not know before. Therefore, although Mary knows all of the physical facts there are to know about the world, she does not have knowledge of a truth of how she and others perceive things; color in this case. As a result, Jackson suggests that physicalisms is false because Mary’s knowledge, although it contained knowledge of all physical things, was incomplete. In this argument it is important to note that what Mary learned when she came out of the room was not the color of objects; rather, she learned what it felt like to see specific colors. One should also note that Jackson’s argument does not simply claim that Mary couldn’t imagine what sensing color was like; rather the argument is based on the fact that she would not know what it is

like to sense color (Blanchette).
Paul Churchland offers three objections to Jackson’s argument.

Churchland’s first objection is that Jackson’s knowledge argument itself is flawed. Churchland offers a shortened version of Jackson’s knowledge argument to show that Jackson’s argument is invalid. Churchland displays Jackson’s argument as follows: 1) Mary knows everything there is to know about brain states and their properties, 2) Mary does not know everything there is to know about sensations and their properties, therefore by Leibniz’s law, sensations and their properties are not equivalent to brain states and their properties (Jackson 293). In this shortened argument of Jackson’s, Churchland claims that Jackson’s conclusion is wrong because the type of knowledge in premise one is different from the type of knowledge in premise two. Leibniz’s law suggest that two things cannot be identical unless their properties are identical. In this context, Churchland claims that the knowledge in premise one is descriptive knowledge, and the knowledge in premise two is knowledge by acquaintance. Because Mary knows the properties of one and not the other, they must have different properties and are therefore different types of knowledge according to Leibniz’s law. As a result, the shortened version of Jackson’s argument is flawed in attempting to draw a conclusion based on the fact that Mary possessed descriptive knowledge and did not know facts and information that could only be acquired through a different type of

knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance.
Churchland’s second objective to Jackson is that Jackson’s argument it too widely applicable to be sound, as it could also apply to dualism. Churchland changes the situation and suggests that instead Mary was educated in her black and white environment by a strict dualist. This dualist teaches her all there is to know about “ectoplasm” and “qualia” (Jackson 295). After learning from the dualist, Mary would still learn something new upon leaving the room, despite having full knowledge of ectoplasm and qualia. As a result, Churchland’s second objection suggests that there is something wrong with Jackson’s argument. If the argument were sound, and could demonstrate that physicalism was indeed false, then a similar argument could be applied to dualism and demonstrate that dualism is also false (Blanchette). Churchland suggests that it cannot be correct that both dualism and physicalism are false, and therefore Jackson’s argument cannot be sound. Churchland’s third objection is again an interpretation of Jackson’s knowledge argument. The third objection argues that the knowledge argument claims that Mary’s incredible neuroscientific knowledge does not allow her to imagine what the experience of seeing color would be like for others. As a result, Mary lacks crucial knowledge that is a part of the world, but not contained in all the physical facts of the world. Churchland argues that what he perceives to be Jackson’s argument is flawed. If Mary had lacked information, and then gained it later by seeing red things, then Mary’s earlier knowledge would be incomplete in the way that Jackson claims (Blanchette). However Churchland instead suggest that what Mary gains is an ability, which is only gained by acquaintance, and not knowledge of new information. Therefore it can be admitted that Mary did not have this ability, and a physicalist like Churchland is able to claim that her previous knowledge was not defective in that it did not lack information about the world.