Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Frank Jackson

Frank Jackson (b. 1943) is an Australian philosopher who spent most of his career at the Australian National University in Canberra, working across metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. His career has an unusual shape: he is best known for an argument he later decided was wrong, and the intellectual honesty of that reversal has won him as much admiration as the argument ever did.

Major Works

  • Perception: A Representative Theory (1977) — a rigorous modern defense of the sense-datum (representative) theory of perception
  • “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (Philosophical Quarterly, 1982) — the knowledge argument for qualia epiphenomenalism
  • “What Mary Didn’t Know” (Journal of Philosophy, 1986) — the concise canonical statement of the Mary’s Room argument
  • From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998) — the mature systematic statement of his methodology and his move toward physicalism

Key Positions

The knowledge argument (Mary’s Room). Jackson’s central contribution to philosophy of mind is the thought experiment known as Mary’s Room. Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist confined from birth to a black-and-white room. She learns everything physical there is to know about color vision — the wavelengths, the neural responses, the functional roles of every brain state involved. Then she is released. She sees red for the first time. Jackson’s claim: she learns something new — what it is like to see red. Since she already knew all the physical facts, what she learns cannot be a physical fact. Therefore, phenomenal consciousness involves non-physical facts (qualia). See Mary's Room.

Epiphenomenal qualia. Jackson initially argued that qualia are causally inert — they are byproducts of brain processes with no causal power themselves. This avoids the interaction problem of dualism while preserving the non-physical reality of phenomenal properties. The position attracted as much objection as the knowledge argument itself: if qualia are causally inert, how can we refer to them, or know we have them?

The representative theory of perception. Before the knowledge argument, Jackson wrote Perception: A Representative Theory (1977), the most careful modern defense of the indirect-realist picture. On this account, we are immediately aware of mind-dependent sense-data, and the external world is known only mediately, through these inner items. This is the sophisticated descendant of Locke’s way of ideas.

Later physicalism: the recantation. Jackson later rejected the Knowledge Argument and became a physicalist. His mature route is strongly representationalist: release places Mary in a new representational state and gives her new abilities to recognize, imagine, and remember red, without revealing a further non-physical property. He denies that she thereby acquires new propositional knowledge about how the world is.

My View

Jackson is the figure whose career the book most admires, almost independently of any single argument. He built the cleanest anti-physicalist intuition pump of the late twentieth century, Mary’s Room, and then, years later, decided it was wrong and came over to physicalism. The recantation is not a footnote; it is the book’s preferred destination, reached by the very philosopher who built the best road away from it.

The book parts from early Jackson on two fronts. On perception, it rejects the representative theory of Perception (1977): sense-data are the inner intermediaries transparency and Austin remove. On consciousness, it rejects the move from Mary’s epistemic novelty to a non-physical truthmaker. The ability hypothesis captures a real part of her change, but not all of it. The book grants that Mary gains a new true thought and reads it through an a-posteriori, acquaintance-and-recognition structure: one physical fact reached by descriptive and first-person routes.

Later Jackson is therefore an ally, not the book’s exact destination. His recantation, physicalism, and strong representationalism all matter deeply, but his mature view denies the propositional novelty this book grants. The house Type-B account is more concessive about Mary’s knowledge. It also keeps the phenomenal profile precise: externally fixed content under a perceptual mode, with determinacy, field structure, and attentional organization. World-involving history fixes the content; a separate state-consciousness relation supplies the domain. Chapter 8 states the negative result; Chapter 11 develops the acquaintance-recognition account.

  • Mary's Room — Jackson’s knowledge argument in its canonical form; the book’s deflationary reading
  • Qualia — Jackson the self-described “qualia freak” of 1982, and the later physicalist who gave the freak up
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness — the knowledge argument as a leading statement of the hard problem the book treats as epistemic
  • Indirect Realism and Sense-Data — Perception: A Representative Theory (1977) as the modern sense-datum view the book answers
  • Physicalism — later Jackson’s physicalism as the most persuasive form of the book’s own broad position
  • Lewis — the ability hypothesis reply to Jackson’s Mary; the central exchange the book inherits
  • Tye — an important interlocutor on representational capacity and acquaintance, whose successive replies the book does not adopt wholesale
  • Locke — the way of ideas that Jackson’s 1977 representative theory modernizes