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Frank Jackson

b. 1943

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

A scientist who knows every physical fact about colour still learns something when she first sees red – or so he argued before changing his mind.

Placement

Analytic Philosophy · Oceania · Mind & Consciousness, Metaphysics

Australian philosopher: Mary, a colour scientist who has only ever seen black and white, learns something new when she first sees red – so physical knowledge is not all knowledge (1982). He later rejected the argument himself.

Key ideas

  • Knowledge argument (Mary’s room)
  • Epiphenomenal qualia
  • Conceptual analysis (“Canberra plan”)

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Influence

Influenced by 1

  • J. J. C. Smart

    influenced by

    Jackson worked within the Australian materialism shaped by Smart: after the knowledge argument (1982) he returned to a physicalism defended by conceptual analysis (From Metaphysics to Ethics, 1998). F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (1998); “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982); J. J. C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes” (1959); SEP “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument”

    Evidence: AI draft

    J. J. C. Smart › 1920–2012

Influenced 1

  • David Chalmers

    influenced

    Chalmers used Jackson’s knowledge argument about Mary against materialism (The Conscious Mind, 1996) and defended with Jackson the a priori entailment of macroscopic truths by physical ones (2001). D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996); D. J. Chalmers and F. Jackson, “Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation”, Philosophical Review 110 (2001); F. Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982); SEP “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument”

    Evidence: AI draft

    David Chalmers › b. 1966

Criticism

Criticized by 2

  • David Lewis

    criticised by

    Lewis answered Jackson’s knowledge argument with the ability hypothesis: on seeing red, Mary gains abilities to recognise, imagine and remember, not new information (‘What Experience Teaches’, 1988). D. Lewis, “What Experience Teaches”, Proceedings of the Russellian Society 13 (1988); F. Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know”, Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986)

    Evidence: AI draft

    David Lewis › 1941–2001

  • Daniel Dennett

    criticised by

    Dennett argued that Jackson’s Mary, knowing all physical facts, would learn nothing on seeing colour and would spot a blue-painted banana as a trick (Consciousness Explained, 1991). D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991), ch. 12; F. Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982); Jackson later gave up the argument (“Postscript on Qualia”, 1998)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Daniel Dennett › 1942–2024

Works

Position

“Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982) contains one of the best-known thought experiments in the philosophy of mind. Mary is a brilliant scientist who has spent her life in a black-and-white room and has learned everything physical there is to know about colour and colour vision. When she leaves the room and sees a ripe tomato, she seems to learn something new: what it is like to see red. If so, not all knowledge is physical knowledge, and physicalism is false. Jackson took the further step of accepting that such “qualia” have no physical effects. He distinguished his argument from Nagel’s question of what it is like to be a bat, which concerns another point of view rather than complete physical knowledge. Replies became a literature of their own: Lewis argued that Mary gains abilities, not information; Dennett denied that she would be surprised; Chalmers built on the argument against physicalism. From the late 1990s Jackson himself became a physicalist and argued that the intuition that Mary learns a new fact is mistaken. In From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998) he defended conceptual analysis as the way to locate colour, mind and value in a physical world, a method later called the “Canberra plan”. He has also written on perception, conditionals and consequentialism.

Life & context

Frank Cameron Jackson was born in Melbourne in 1943. Both his parents taught philosophy; his father, Allan Cameron Jackson, had studied with Wittgenstein in Cambridge. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne and took his doctorate at La Trobe University. After posts at Adelaide and La Trobe he succeeded his father in the chair of philosophy at Monash University in 1978. From 1986 he worked at the Australian National University in Canberra, and from 2007 to 2014 he was a regular visiting professor at Princeton. He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1995 and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006.

Further main works

  • Perception: A Representative Theory (1977)
  • What Mary Didn’t Know (1986)
  • Conditionals (1987)
  • Language, Names, and Information (2010)

Appears in

Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata

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