/lit/ - Literature

>>17650793
>What's the physicalist response to color?
The Acquaintance Hypothesis, which states that Mary’s experience of red involves a different form of knowledge than what Mary encountered in her studies, called ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance’. It denies that her experience of red was propositional, and therefore factual, and so it would not come under the purview of Physicalism, which again is just a collection of all the facts. This is to say nothing about its physicality—only that its absence from the collection of all facts does not constitute a threat to the collection’s truth.

If Physicalism is true, then Mary had learned and knows all the facts, and all the facts are physical facts. The way Mary came to know the facts was through knowledge-by-description. This covers all the discursive knowledge, whatever can be conveyed through propositions.

What Mary does not possess is all knowledge of the form knowledge-by-acquaintance. This can be described as “knowing what it is like” as applied to experiences. Hear Earl Conee, who wrote that
>“learning what an experience is like is identical to becoming acquainted with the experience… This suggests the more specific acquaintance hypothesis that becoming acquainted with a phenomenal quality consists in experiencing the quality”.

So, to know what it is like to have an experience is to have actually had the experience, and having had an experience with “a maximally direct cognitive relation” (i.e. awareness) to it constitutes knowledge-by-acquaintance. So it is true that Mary lacks knowledge-by-acquaintance of the experience red, for she has never had the experience of red prior to being shown the color; it is also true that Mary lacks knowledge of many other experiences, such as the experience of living in Paris, on account of having never been to Paris.

What qualifies knowledge-by-acquaintance as different is that experiences are not factual, and do not take a propositional form. There can be facts about experiences, and propositions can be arranged to express some experience, but experiences themselves are “irreducible to factual knowledge”.

>>17650793
>What's the physicalist response to color?
The Acquaintance Hypothesis, which states that Mary’s experience of red involves a different form of knowledge than what Mary encountered in her studies, called ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance’. It denies that her experience of red was propositional, and therefore factual, and so it would not come under the purview of Physicalism, which again is just a collection of all the facts. This is to say nothing about its physicality—only that its absence from the collection of all facts does not constitute a threat to the collection’s truth.

If Physicalism is true, then Mary had learned and knows all the facts, and all the facts are physical facts. The way Mary came to know the facts was through knowledge-by-description. This covers all the discursive knowledge, whatever can be conveyed through propositions.

What Mary does not possess is all knowledge of the form knowledge-by-acquaintance. This can be described as “knowing what it is like” as applied to experiences. Hear Earl Conee, who wrote that
>“learning what an experience is like is identical to becoming acquainted with the experience… This suggests the more specific acquaintance hypothesis that becoming acquainted with a phenomenal quality consists in experiencing the quality”.

So, to know what it is like to have an experience is to have actually had the experience, and having had an experience with “a maximally direct cognitive relation” (i.e. awareness) to it constitutes knowledge-by-acquaintance. So it is true that Mary lacks knowledge-by-acquaintance of the experience red, for she has never had the experience of red prior to being shown the color; it is also true that Mary lacks knowledge of many other experiences, such as the experience of living in Paris, on account of having never been to Paris.

What qualifies knowledge-by-acquaintance as different is that experiences are not factual, and do not take a propositional form. There can be facts about experiences, and propositions can be arranged to express some experience, but experiences themselves are “irreducible to factual knowledge”.