Tye on Acquaintance and the Problems of Consciousness (original) (raw)
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The Gap in the Knowledge Argument
Philosophia, 2024
Alter (The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism, GB: Oxford University Pres, 2023) argues for something surprising: despite being widely rejected by philosophers, including Frank Jackson himself, Jackson's knowledge argument succeeds. Alter's defense of Jackson's argument is not only surprising; it's also exciting: the knowledge argument, if it's sound, underscores the power of armchair philosophy, the power of pure thought to arrive at substantial conclusions about the world. In contrast, I aim to make a case for something unsurprising and unexciting: that the knowledge argument does not succeed, or, even less far-reaching, that Alter's defense of it is not persuasive. Mine is a classic file-drawer thesis, but what it has going for it is that it's true, or so I think, and hope to illustrate why you should too. Keywords Knowledge argument • Frank jackson • Consciousness • Reduction • A priori In The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism, Torin Alter argues for something surprising: despite being widely rejected by philosophers, including Frank Jackson himself (1994), Jackson's (1982, 1986) knowledge argument-in essence, that not all facts are physical facts because you cannot learn what the experience of seeing color is like from black and white information-succeeds. Alter's defense of Jackson's argument is not only surprising; it's also exciting: the knowledge argument, if it's sound, underscores the power of armchair philosophy, the power of pure thought to arrive at substantial conclusions about the world. In contrast, I aim to make a case for something unsurprising and unexciting: that the knowledge argument does not succeed, or, even less far-reaching, that
Knowledge by Acquaintance: An Explication and Defence
UCL PhD Dissertation , 2024
Recently, there has been a renaissance of study on knowledge by acquaintance. One reason for this is that many writers believe acquaintance holds the key to understanding consciousness and our conscious experience of the world. For this reason, research on acquaintance has been primarily focused on perception and self-knowledge. While these questions are undoubtedly important, I believe being overly focused on these issues has prevented a defensible theory of knowledge by acquaintance from being developed. In particular, two questions have largely been ignored in the literature. First, what kind of knowledge is knowledge by acquaintance? If knowledge by acquaintance is supposed to give us special epistemic access to its objects, what are the central epistemic features of it and how do they differ from other kinds of knowledge? Second, can we have knowledge by acquaintance beyond cases of perception and self-knowledge, and if so, how? In this dissertation, I answer both of these questions. In response to the first question, I argue that knowledge by acquaintance is a form of non-propositional discriminatory knowledge. Roughly, discriminatory knowledge is the exercise of a discriminatory capacity to single out a particular object from other objects of its kind. It is non-propositional because the object of the mental act of discriminating is not a proposition or truth. It is important that we understand knowledge by acquaintance in terms of discriminatory knowledge because it allows us to move beyond perceptual knowledge and self-knowledge. In this dissertation, I show how this is possible by showing that we can be acquainted with the natural numbers. This provides an answer to the second question. There is, in principle, no reason why acquaintance should only exist in sensory perception, provided we understand it in terms of discriminatory knowledge. The upshot of this is that my account of knowledge by acquaintance has a breadth and unity not often found in the acquaintance literature.
On the Rehabilitation of the Knowledge Argument
In the last decade, some viable materialist accounts of how to overcome Frank Jackson's powerful Knowledge Argument has been elaborated into such an extent that even Jackson himself has changed sides and joined its critics. In order to rehabilitate its force and importance, George Graham and Terence Horgan have redefined the original argument and exploited it against theories that reply to Knowledge Argument with a mode of presentation replies (using Michael Tye's representational theory of mind as an example). The message of this paper is that Graham and Horgan do not succeed in their task, since their view of Tye's theory is inadequate and because the intuitive thrust of their argument is derived from Joseph Levine's explanatory gap-argument that Tye has already successfully met.
Russellian Acquaintance Revisited
In Bertrand Russell’s writings during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century there occur two rather different distinctions that involve his much-discussed, technical notion of acquaintance. The first is the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; the second, the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge of truths. This article examines the nature and philosophical purpose of these two distinctions, while also tracing the evolution of Russell’s notion of acquaintance. It argues that, when he first expressly formulates his Principle of Acquaintance in 1903, Russell’s chief concern is to appeal to the first distinction to argue against a certain tightly restrictive epistemology of understanding that he finds in the writings of William James. By contrast, when in 1911 he begins to place emphasis on the second distinction, his concern is to appeal to it in the course of defending his thesis that we are capable of having perfect knowledge (by acquaintance) of particulars. The defense is necessary because this thesis comes under attack from a certain argument Russell finds in the writings of the Monistic Idealists.
Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, 1984
IN "KNOWLEDGE BY Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description", Russell appears to distinguish two kinds of knowledge of things, knowledge by acquaintance, which is clearly the primary form, and knowledge by description, "where the object is known as 'the so and so.''' I While there has in recent times been some questioning of the possibility of a direct cognitive relation such as Russell's notion of acquaintance, it is clear that Russell thought we had knowledge by acquaintance, although it was restricted to certain universals, memories and the immediate data of sense, and he did not extend it to physical objects and other people. What is less clear is whether Russell held that there really was knowledge by description or whether all such knowledge should be analyzed away in terms of acquaintance. Russell's work does not give us a clear answer to this question, or rather, it answers the question in both the affirmative and negative.
In Defense of the Knowledge Argument
This paper attempts to argue for a defense of Frank Jackson's seminal Knowledge Argument against metaphysical materialism. By first presenting the argument and then directly responding to notable objections from philosophical academia, I seek to demonstrate not that Jackson's argument is certainly sound in its refutation of materialism, but that the degree of confidence with which his premises imply his conclusion ultimately establish a form of property dualism as more philosophically tenable and likely than any variant of materialism.