Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Frank Jackson

Frank Jackson is an Australian philosopher whose work spans perception, metaphysics, language, and ethics. His knowledge argument became a prominent challenge to physicalism, and he later rejected its antiphysicalist conclusion. An accurate account must distinguish the argument he originally defended from the representationalist physicalism developed in his later work.

Major Works

  • Perception: A Representative Theory (1977) defends a sense-datum account of perception.
  • “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982) introduces the knowledge argument and defends causally inert phenomenal properties.
  • “What Mary Didn’t Know” (1986) restates the argument and responds to objections.
  • From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998) develops his method of conceptual analysis and a physicalist approach.
  • “Mind and Illusion” (2003) explains his later rejection of the knowledge argument through representationalism.

Mary and the Knowledge Argument

Mary learns through black-and-white materials and has never experienced color. She nevertheless knows all physical facts about color vision. Jackson’s stipulation includes not only neural events and wavelengths but also the relevant causal, relational, and functional facts. The case does not turn on the incompleteness of present neuroscience.

When Mary first sees red, Jackson originally argues, she learns what seeing red is like. If she already knew every physical fact, this new knowledge appears to reveal something nonphysical. The argument thus connects an epistemic premise about learning with a metaphysical conclusion about what facts exist.

In the 1986 paper, Jackson emphasizes that the missing knowledge concerns other people’s experiences as well as Mary’s own. Her release would show her that her prior understanding of their visual lives was incomplete. He also separates lack of knowledge from lack of imaginative ability: being unable to imagine an experience is not by itself the argument’s conclusion.

Early Epiphenomenalism and Perception

In “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Jackson accepts nonphysical qualities while arguing that they need not affect bodily behavior. This epiphenomenalism avoids positing additional mental causes that interfere with physical causal explanations. It does not avoid every difficulty of dualism. Critics ask how causally inert qualities could explain our reports about them, our knowledge of them, or the reliability of those reports.

The earlier book Perception defended awareness of mind-dependent sense-data and a mediated relation to external objects. Arguments from illusion and perceptual variation supported that account. It should not be treated as interchangeable with his later representationalism: representing an object is not automatically perceiving a sense-datum that stands in for it.

Later Physicalism and Representationalism

“Mind and Illusion” rejects a response based only on the necessary a posteriori: Jackson does not regard saying that the experiential is physically necessitated but not a priori derivable as a satisfactory solution. He seeks an account under which the character of experience could, in principle, be deduced from a sufficiently rich physical account.

His later explanation distinguishes properties represented in experience from properties instantiated by the experience itself. Seeing red presents something as red; it need not acquaint the subject with an intrinsic nonphysical redness in the mind. Jackson argues that mistaking represented properties for instantiated experiential properties helps produce the antiphysicalist intuition.

He does not identify visual experience with any belief having the same simple content. A person can believe that a red, round object is present without seeing it. In “Mind and Illusion,” perceptual representation has distinctive richness, inextricability, immediacy, causal content, and functional role. Color, shape, location, and movement are presented together rather than as detachable sentence parts. Sensory experience also affects the transition between beliefs without necessarily producing belief in the represented scene: an illusion can persist after a person knows it is an illusion.

Jackson argues that Mary acquires such a representational state on release. This gives her capacities to recognize, remember, and imagine that state. He agrees with Lewis and Nemirow’s ability approach at this point, but reaches it through representationalism. He denies that she thereby learns a new proposition about a further property of the world. That is not the same as physicalist theories which grant new propositional knowledge under a new mode of presentation while denying any new nonphysical fact.

Objections and Replies

New knowledge or new abilities? Critics regard Mary’s first-person thought about seeing red as factual knowledge, not merely practical skill. Ability theorists distinguish possession of an experience-based ability from learning an additional fact. Other physicalists accept factual learning while disputing the inference to a nonphysical truthmaker. Jackson’s later position is one member of this range, not the common position of every physicalist.

The idealization. Critics question whether anyone who knew every physical fact could really be ignorant in the stipulated way. Jackson’s early response is that the stipulation isolates the explanatory issue rather than describing a feasible experiment. The disagreement concerns what complete physical knowledge includes, not whether a person can actually learn an infinite textbook.

Representation and feel. Critics of his mature theory ask whether the distinctive representational features suffice for phenomenal experience or merely describe its cognitive role. Jackson offers their combined operation as an explanation of feel. The success of that explanation depends on defending the representational account rather than invoking his change of mind as evidence for physicalism.

His reversal also does not refute the knowledge argument for other philosophers. Its premises and competing interpretations remain subjects of debate regardless of its originator’s later judgment.

  • Mary's Room — the knowledge argument and its competing interpretations.
  • Qualia — the phenomenal properties at issue in early Jackson.
  • Physicalism — the later position and alternative physicalist replies.
  • Intentionalism — the mature representational theory.
  • Indirect Realism and Sense-Data — the earlier account of perception.
  • Lewis — the ability hypothesis.
  • Tye — other representational approaches to phenomenal knowledge.

Further Reading

  • Jackson, Frank. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The Philosophical Quarterly 32, no. 127 (1982): 127–136.
  • Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Didn’t Know.” The Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 5 (1986): 291–295.
  • Jackson, Frank. “Mind and Illusion.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53 (2003): 251–271.

Mind, Matter, and Meaning presents the site author’s arguments about mind and meaning. It is a separate argumentative work, not a neutral source for the account above.