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Knowledge argument

The Knowledge argument, also known as Mary's room or the color scientist thought experiment, is a philosophical challenge to physicalism—the thesis that all truths about the world are physical truths—developed by Frank Jackson in his 1982 paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia."^[1] It posits a scenario in which Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a monochromatic black-and-white environment, acquires complete physical knowledge of human color vision through textbooks, lectures, and black-and-white television, including all facts about light wavelengths, neural firings, and behavioral responses to colors, yet has never herself experienced color.^[1] Upon exiting her room and seeing a ripe tomato, Mary purportedly learns something new: the subjective, qualitative nature (or qualia) of seeing red, which cannot be captured by physical facts alone.^[1] The argument's structure rests on two core premises: first, that Mary's pre-experience knowledge exhausts all physical information about color; second, that her post-experience insight constitutes genuine new knowledge about the world.^[1] Jackson supports this with a parallel example of "Fred," a subject with hypersensitive color vision who can distinguish shades of red indistinguishable to others, where physical descriptions of his brain and eyes fail to reveal what it is like for him to see those shades.^[1] From these, the conclusion follows that phenomenal facts—what experiences feel like from the inside—are non-physical and irreducible, implying physicalism's falsity.^[1] This highlights an epistemic gap between objective physical descriptions and subjective conscious experience, central to debates on qualia and the hard problem of consciousness.^[1] Since its publication, the Knowledge argument has become one of the most influential critiques of physicalism, sparking extensive discussion in philosophy of mind and generating responses across representationalism, externalism, and compatibilist views.^[2] A prominent reply is the ability hypothesis, advanced by Laurence Nemirow and David Lewis, which contends that Mary's gain is not new propositional knowledge (facts) but practical abilities, such as imagining, recognizing, or discriminating color experiences, which are consistent with physicalism.^[3] Other critiques include Paul Churchland's charge of equivocation on "knowledge" and Daniel Dennett's dismissal of qualia as illusory, while defenders argue it underscores the irreducibility of first-person phenomenology.^[4] Notably, Jackson himself recanted the argument's anti-physicalist implications in the early 2000s, embracing a representationalist form of physicalism where Mary's new "knowledge" aligns with physical facts via conceptual shifts, though the thought experiment remains a touchstone for ongoing inquiry.^[5]

Background and Origins

Philosophical Context in Mind and Knowledge

Physicalism, a dominant metaphysical thesis in late 20th-century philosophy of mind, posits that everything is physical, meaning all facts about the world, including mental states and conscious experiences, are ultimately reducible to or supervenient upon physical facts.^[6] This view gained prominence through the influence of analytic philosophers like J.J.C. Smart and David Armstrong, aligning with the rise of scientific naturalism and the rejection of Cartesian dualism in favor of explanations grounded in physics and neuroscience.^[6] By the 1970s and 1980s, physicalism had become the prevailing position, shaping debates on consciousness by asserting that mental phenomena could be fully accounted for by physical processes without invoking non-physical entities.^[7] Central to challenges against physicalism are qualia, the subjective, phenomenal properties of conscious experiences that capture the "what it is like" aspect of sensations, such as the vivid redness of seeing a rose or the pain of a headache.^[8] These intrinsic qualities are directly accessible through introspection and resist complete objective description, highlighting the first-person nature of consciousness.^[8] Thomas Nagel, in his seminal 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", illustrated this subjectivity by arguing that even detailed physical knowledge of a bat's echolocation fails to convey the experiential "point of view" from which the bat perceives the world, underscoring qualia's irreducibility to third-person scientific accounts.^[8]^[9] In epistemology, the distinction between *a priori* and a posteriori knowledge provides a framework for understanding how propositions are justified: a priori knowledge is independent of sensory experience, derived through reason alone (e.g., "all bachelors are unmarried"), while a posteriori knowledge relies on empirical evidence from observation (e.g., "the sky is blue today").^[10] Thought experiments play a crucial role in philosophical inquiry by testing these boundaries and intuitions without empirical testing, as seen in René Descartes' 1641 "evil demon" hypothesis in Meditations on First Philosophy, which posits a deceptive entity manipulating perceptions to doubt external reality.^[11] Similarly, Hilary Putnam's 1981 "brain in a vat" scenario modernizes this skepticism, imagining a brain disconnected from its body and fed simulated inputs, to probe whether we can distinguish genuine experiences from illusory ones.^[11] Preceding later challenges to physicalism, early 20th-century epistemologists like C.I. Lewis explored gaps between physical descriptions and conscious experience in his 1929 book Mind and the World-Order. Lewis introduced "the given" as the raw, pre-conceptual sensory content immediately presented in experience, distinct from the conceptual frameworks that interpret it into coherent knowledge.^[12] He argued that while the physical world is a conceptual construction built upon verifiable patterns, it does not exhaust the immediacy of the given, creating an irreducible divide between objective physical facts and the subjective immediacy of sensation.^[12]^[13] This conceptual pragmatism emphasized that knowledge bridges but never fully eliminates the experiential gap, influencing subsequent debates on consciousness.^[12]

Frank Jackson's Formulation

Frank Jackson first fully articulated the knowledge argument in his 1982 paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia," published in The Philosophical Quarterly.^[14] In this work, Jackson presents the argument as a challenge to physicalism, the view that all phenomena, including mental states, can be fully explained by physical facts. He structures it around premises demonstrating that complete physical knowledge leaves out certain truths about conscious experience, specifically qualia—the subjective, qualitative aspects of sensations.^[1] Jackson presents the knowledge argument to challenge physicalism. In the paper, he defends epiphenomenalism, the theory that qualia are non-causal properties arising from physical processes but not reducible to them or causally efficacious in the physical world. He argued that qualia, such as the phenomenal experience of seeing red, represent facts beyond the physical, thereby refuting the completeness of physicalist accounts of mind. To illustrate this, Jackson posed a scenario involving a scientist named Mary, who knows all physical facts about color vision but has never experienced color herself; upon seeing red for the first time, he contends, she gains new knowledge. As he writes, "Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it."^[1] The argument quickly garnered attention in 1980s philosophy of mind circles, sparking debates on consciousness and materialism. It received endorsements from dualists, including David Chalmers, who highlighted its role in establishing the existence of non-physical properties of experience.^[15]^[16]

The Thought Experiment

Mary's Room Scenario

Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room, viewing the outside world solely through a black-and-white television monitor.^[14] From this controlled environment, she studies the neurophysiology of color vision and masters every conceivable physical fact about it, including how light wavelengths interact with the retina, how neural signals are processed in the brain, and the behavioral responses they elicit, such as uttering the words "that's red."^[14] Despite her exhaustive knowledge of all physical processes and information related to color perception—gained through textbooks, lectures, and scientific instruments—Mary has never personally experienced the sensation of seeing color.^[14] Her education encompasses every detail of the physical sciences concerning vision, yet she remains deprived of direct sensory exposure to hues like red, blue, or green.^[14] The pivotal moment occurs when Mary is released from her monochromatic confines and encounters a ripe tomato for the first time.^[14] Upon seeing its vivid red, she exclaims something to the effect of realizing what it is like to see red, thereby acquiring new knowledge that was not part of her prior physical understanding.^[14] This experience reveals to her the subjective quality of color perception, which her scientific mastery had not captured.^[14] The thought experiment can be structured logically as follows: Premise 1 states that Mary knows all the physical facts about color vision before her release.^[14] Premise 2 asserts that, upon experiencing color, Mary learns something new—what it is like to see a specific color.^[14] The conclusion follows that there is knowledge beyond the physical facts, as her complete physical knowledge proves insufficient for grasping certain experiential aspects.^[14] While the scenario primarily focuses on visual color experience, Jackson briefly extends the idea to other senses, such as imagining a person who knows all physical facts about sound but has never heard music, or variations involving heightened sensory discrimination, like distinguishing subtle hues that appear identical to others.^[14]

Core Premises and Assumptions

The Knowledge argument, as formulated by Frank Jackson, rests on a series of interconnected premises that challenge the completeness of physical knowledge regarding conscious experience. The first core premise posits that Mary, confined to a monochromatic environment, possesses exhaustive knowledge of all physical facts pertinent to color vision, encompassing details from physics, neurophysiology, and behavioral dispositions. This includes information on wavelengths of light, retinal stimulation, neural firings in the visual cortex, and functional roles of color perception in guiding behavior.^[14] Jackson describes Mary as acquiring all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see red, assuming this covers every scientifically describable aspect without direct experiential involvement.^[1] A second premise asserts that upon exiting her room and encountering color for the first time, Mary acquires novel knowledge—specifically, the phenomenal character or "what it is like" to see red. This new knowledge is characterized as factual rather than merely a skill or ability, such as the capacity to recognize or imagine colors, which Mary already possesses through her scientific expertise. Jackson emphasizes that the revelation is substantive: "It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world when she is first exposed to the relevant array of colours."^[14] The argument thus hinges on the assumption that this phenomenal knowledge constitutes a distinct category, irreducible to the prior physical information, and arises a posteriori through direct acquaintance.^[1] Underlying these premises is the assumption drawn from physicalism's supervenience thesis, which holds that all facts about the world supervene on physical facts—meaning no additional facts can exist independently of the physical base. If physicalism is true, knowing all physical facts should preclude any further factual discoveries. The argument exploits this by contrasting the completeness of Mary's physical knowledge with the evident gain in phenomenal knowledge, implying a gap in physicalism's explanatory scope. Analyses of the argument formalize this as follows: Let P represent the totality of physical facts about color, which Mary knows exhaustively; upon release, she comes to know Q, the qualia of seeing red. Since Q is not deducible from P, it follows that Q \not\subseteq P, underscoring the premises' challenge to physical completeness.^[14]^[17] Potential ambiguities in the argument center on the demarcation of "physical facts." These are typically construed as those expressible in the vocabulary of the physical sciences, excluding first-person perspectives or subjective modes of presentation, though critics debate whether such exclusions beg the question against non-physical properties. Another ambiguity concerns the a posteriori nature of the revelation: the new knowledge emerges through experience, not logical inference, yet it is presumed to be objective and factive, not merely perspectival. Jackson addresses this by insisting the argument makes no causal assumptions about qualia, focusing solely on epistemic completeness.^[14]^[17]

Implications for Physicalism and Consciousness

Refutation of Physicalism

The knowledge argument refutes physicalism by demonstrating an epistemic gap between complete physical knowledge and phenomenal knowledge. In Frank Jackson's formulation, Mary, a scientist confined to a black-and-white environment, acquires all physical facts about color vision through scientific study, yet upon seeing color for the first time, she learns something new about the experience of red. This new knowledge cannot be reduced to her prior physical information, establishing that physical facts alone do not exhaust all facts about the world. As Jackson argues, "It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false."^[1] The argument targets both reductive and non-reductive forms of physicalism. Reductive physicalism, which posits that qualia can be fully identified with physical brain states or processes, is directly undermined because Mary's exhaustive physical knowledge fails to capture the subjective nature of color experience, implying that phenomenal properties cannot be reduced to physical ones.^[1] Non-reductive physicalism, which allows mental properties to supervene on physical ones without identity, is challenged on the grounds that logical or metaphysical supervenience should enable a priori deduction of phenomenal facts from complete physical knowledge; the persistence of Mary's knowledge gap reveals that no such entailment holds, violating the supervenience thesis.^[18] Supporting this refutation are analogies to other epistemic or modal knowledge gaps, such as those in a posteriori necessities where physical descriptions do not a priori reveal essential properties, suggesting a similar divide between physical and phenomenal domains.^[18] This gap implies that consciousness involves non-physical properties, as physicalism cannot account for the explanatory closure required to bridge it without invoking additional fundamental features beyond physics. The knowledge argument has had significant historical impact, bolstering property dualism by highlighting the irreducibility of experience and influencing David Chalmers' articulation of the "hard problem of consciousness," which questions why physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all.^[18] Chalmers integrates the argument to argue that phenomenal properties must be treated as fundamental alongside physical ones in a naturalistic dualist framework.^[18]

The Nature of Qualia

Qualia are defined as the ineffable, subjective properties of conscious experiences, such as the phenomenal "what it is like" to see the redness of red, distinct from objective physical descriptions like light wavelengths or neural firings. These properties capture the intrinsic, first-person feel of sensations, including the hurtfulness of pain or the taste of a lemon, which cannot be fully conveyed through third-person scientific accounts. In the context of the knowledge argument, qualia represent the element Mary acquires upon her release from the black-and-white room, despite her exhaustive prior knowledge of all physical facts about color vision, such as the 700 nm wavelength of red light or the responses of cone cells in the retina.^[19] Her pre-experience understanding encompasses objective mechanisms—like the functional roles of brain states and their relations to stimuli—but omits the subjective phenomenal character, revealing that qualia transcend complete physical descriptions.^[19] This gap underscores qualia's irreducibility, as Mary's new knowledge is not merely acquaintance with a fact but an experiential property unavailable through propositional learning. Philosophical debates surrounding qualia highlight their privacy and non-transferability via descriptive language, as seen in thought experiments like the inverted spectrum, where two individuals might physically process colors identically yet experience inverted qualia (e.g., one sees red where the other sees green). Such scenarios, exemplified by the case of "Fred" who discriminates colors differently from others due to unique qualia, illustrate that qualia are inherently private and cannot be shared or inferred solely from behavioral or physical evidence. This non-transferability reinforces the argument's point that qualia elude exhaustive objective enumeration, challenging attempts to reduce them to physicalism.^[19] Frank Jackson originally posited qualia as epiphenomenal—real non-physical properties that are causally inert with respect to the physical world but nonetheless essential to understanding consciousness. In his view, qualia emerge as by-products of brain processes without influencing physical causation, yet their existence demands recognition beyond physicalist frameworks.

Links to Epiphenomenalism

Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental states, such as qualia, are causally inefficacious byproducts of underlying physical processes in the brain, much like steam rising from a locomotive engine—real phenomena that arise from but exert no downward causal influence on the physical world.^[1] The knowledge argument bolsters epiphenomenalism by highlighting a gap between complete physical knowledge and experiential understanding, as illustrated in Mary's scenario: despite knowing all physical facts about color vision and accurately predicting behavioral responses to red without ever seeing it, Mary gains new knowledge upon direct experience, indicating that qualia transcend physical information yet play no causal role in generating those predictions or behaviors.^[1] This supports the epiphenomenal view that qualia exist non-physically but without causal powers, preserving the completeness of physical explanations for action. In his 1982 paper, Frank Jackson explicitly endorsed epiphenomenalism, deploying the knowledge argument to challenge identity theory and revive epiphenomenalism as a viable dualist alternative that accommodates irreducible qualia.^[1] A key advantage of this position in relation to the argument is its compatibility with the causal closure principle, which holds that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause; by rendering qualia causally inert, epiphenomenalism avoids overdetermination while accounting for the apparent novelty of Mary's knowledge.^[1] Nonetheless, critics argue that epiphenomenalism's attribution of causal irrelevance to qualia is problematic, as it renders such states evolutionarily implausible—natural selection would unlikely favor the emergence and persistence of features that provide no adaptive advantage in influencing behavior or survival.

Responses and Criticisms

Critiques of Experimental Design

Critics have pointed out ambiguities in the Knowledge Argument's central premise that Mary knows "all the physical facts" about color vision before experiencing it. Daniel Dennett argues that the term "physical facts" is unclear, questioning whether it encompasses only third-person scientific descriptions or also includes first-person phenomenal concepts, such as what it is like to see red. If phenomenal concepts are themselves physical, then Mary's knowledge might already include them, rendering the argument's setup question-begging against physicalism.^[20] The isolation premise—that Mary can acquire complete physical knowledge of color without any personal experience—is also seen as methodologically unrealistic. This assumption posits a superhuman capacity for knowledge acquisition in a contrived environment, ignoring how human cognition typically integrates sensory experience with learning; without exposure to color, it is implausible that Mary could fully grasp even the physical mechanisms of color perception. Dennett illustrates this with thought experiments suggesting that practical neuroscience knowledge would enable Mary to simulate or anticipate the experience, undermining the premise's isolation.^[20] Furthermore, the thought experiment relies on intuition pumps that may prejudice intuitions against physicalism by design. Paul Churchland contends that the argument's persuasive force stems from an equivocation in "knowing," shifting between propositional knowledge of facts and experiential acquaintance, which begs the question by assuming qualia are irreducible without empirical justification. This methodological flaw highlights how the setup manipulates intuitions rather than rigorously testing physicalism.^[21] A more recent critique identifies gaps in treating experiential knowledge as purely factual rather than dispositional. Barbara Montero argues that the argument overlooks how understanding "what it is like" to see red may require dispositional capacities activated only through experience, not deducible from factual physical truths alone; thus, Mary's apparent new knowledge upon seeing color reflects a shift in accessibility, not the discovery of non-physical facts, exposing a flaw in the experiment's assumption of complete factual exhaustiveness.^[22]

The Three Main Strategies

Physicalists have developed three primary strategies to counter the knowledge argument while preserving the view that all facts are physical facts. These approaches reinterpret what Mary gains upon her release from the black-and-white room, arguing that it does not constitute knowledge of non-physical facts but rather involves abilities, modes of acquaintance, or conceptual guises that do not imply an ontological commitment beyond physicalism. The ability hypothesis, as articulated by David Lewis, maintains that the "new knowledge" Mary acquires is not propositional knowledge of additional facts about the world but instead a set of practical abilities or know-how. Specifically, these include the skills to imagine, recognize, and remember what it is like to see red, which Mary lacked despite her complete physical knowledge. Lewis argues that such abilities do not reveal new physical or non-physical truths; they merely enable the application of existing physical information in imaginative or recognitional contexts, thus avoiding any challenge to physicalism. The acquaintance hypothesis, proposed by Earl Conee, posits that Mary's gain is knowledge by acquaintance—a direct, non-propositional familiarity with the phenomenal quality of red—rather than knowledge by description of a new fact. Conee distinguishes this from her prior descriptive knowledge, emphasizing that acquaintance provides an experiential mode of access to the same physical phenomenon without introducing novel propositions or properties. This hypothesis upholds physicalism by framing the difference as epistemic rather than metaphysical, where acquaintance enhances understanding without expanding the ontology.^[23] The old fact/new guise analysis, advanced by Brian Loar in a manner echoing aspects of Thomas Nagel's discussion of subjective experience, contends that Mary does not learn a new fact upon seeing red; the physical fact remains the same, but she grasps it under a new phenomenal concept or "guise" derived from her direct experience. Loar describes these concepts as recognitional and quasi-indexical, allowing for an apparent epistemic novelty that arises from the subject's perspective without positing non-physical entities. This strategy reconciles the intuition of new knowledge with physicalism by attributing the difference to variations in conceptual representation rather than to hidden facts.^[24] Collectively, these strategies defend physicalism by recasting Mary's apparent acquisition of new knowledge as involving non-factual abilities, direct but non-propositional acquaintance, or re-presentations of established physical facts under novel conceptual modes.^[24]^[23]

Neuroscientific Counterarguments

Neuroscientific counterarguments to the knowledge argument emphasize that qualia, such as the experience of red, can be fully explained by physical processes in the brain, thereby eliminating any purported gap between physical knowledge and phenomenal experience. Pioneering work by Francis Crick and Christof Koch in the 1990s identified neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) that link specific sensory experiences to localized brain activity. For instance, they proposed that activity in the visual area V4 is crucial for color perception, as neurons there respond selectively to color stimuli and contribute to the conscious experience of hue.^[25] In the context of Mary's room, this implies that her complete physical knowledge would encompass the functional and structural details of V4 activation, including how it generates the qualia of red, thus closing the explanatory gap without requiring direct experience.^[26] Building on such NCC research, illusionism posits that qualia are not intrinsic features of consciousness but introspective illusions arising from neural mechanisms that users misinterpret as ineffable properties. Daniel Dennett, in his 2017 book From Bacteria to Bach and Back, argues that once the full neural architecture of perception is understood—through detailed models of distributed brain processes—there is no remaining "hard problem" of qualia, as the apparent mystery dissolves into explainable cognitive judgments. This view aligns with empirical neuroscience by treating phenomenal reports as user-illusions generated by the brain's self-modeling, much like optical illusions, rather than non-physical facts that Mary would miss.^[27] Recent developments in neuroscience further bolster physicalist responses by integrating predictive processing frameworks, which model experiential knowledge as Bayesian inference in the brain rather than additional non-physical facts. In a 2023 analysis, Alex Moran defends grounding physicalism against the knowledge argument, contending that Mary's pre-experience knowledge in her black-and-white room omits certain physical facts about phenomenal grounding—such as how lower-level neural states metaphysically necessitate qualia—allowing her to learn something new upon seeing red without invoking non-physicalism.^[28] Complementing this, a 2025 study frames qualia within predictive error coding (PEC), where the brain acts as an active inference engine generating "query acts" to minimize prediction errors from sensory inputs; here, the "what it is like" of red emerges dynamically from these neural predictions, fully reducible to physical processes and resolvable via objective neuroimaging.^[29] Supporting evidence includes fMRI datasets from 2025 that map relational similarities among color qualia to distributed cortical patterns, demonstrating how experiential content correlates with predictive neural hierarchies without extra facts.^[30] A lingering critique of these neuroscientific approaches notes that, even if qualia reduce to neural activity like V4 firing or predictive models, Mary's monochromatic environment prevents her from simulating the full experiential necessity assumed in the argument—her knowledge might describe the processes but not replicate the causal integration required for genuine qualia realization.^[15]

Dualist Rebuttals and Jackson's Reconsideration

Dualists have offered robust defenses of the knowledge argument, maintaining that it effectively demonstrates the existence of irreducible phenomenal facts beyond physical description. David Chalmers, in his analysis, argues that the argument reveals phenomenal truths—such as the subjective experience of color—that cannot be a priori deduced from complete physical knowledge, thereby supporting property dualism.^[31] He contends that this establishes an ontological gap, where consciousness involves non-physical properties essential to reality.^[32] Chalmers further rebuts prominent physicalist responses, such as the ability hypothesis, the acquaintance hypothesis, and the phenomenal concepts strategy, as question-begging or insufficient to bridge the explanatory gap. These strategies, he asserts, presuppose physicalism by reinterpreting Mary's new knowledge in physicalist terms without addressing why phenomenal facts appear non-deducible from physical ones, thus failing to refute the argument's core intuition.^[33] Frank Jackson himself underwent a significant reversal regarding the knowledge argument. In his 2003 essay "Mind and Illusion," he abandoned his earlier anti-physicalist stance, embracing physicalism and a form of indirect realism, influenced by advances in neuroscience that he saw as progressively closing the explanatory gap between physical processes and conscious experience. Jackson argued that empirical progress, including models of perception like predictive processing, supports the view that qualia are representational and fully accountable within a physical framework. In a 2023 interview, he explicitly stated, "I no longer accept the argument," reaffirming his commitment to physicalism while acknowledging the thought experiment's enduring pedagogical value.^[34] This shift undermines the argument's original intent to establish epiphenomenalism, as Jackson now views qualia as causally efficacious representations rather than non-physical epiphenomena, attributing the reversal to neuroscience's success in explaining sensory and cognitive phenomena without invoking irreducible mental facts. Despite Jackson's reconsideration, the knowledge argument persists in philosophical debates, with recent analyses highlighting ongoing tensions between its intuitive appeal and physicalist critiques. For instance, a 2024 paper in Philosophia examines gaps in the argument's assumptions about knowledge acquisition, yet affirms its role in challenging reductive accounts of consciousness, ensuring its continued relevance even as empirical evidence evolves.^[22]

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