Specter of Reason

Peter Mandik sent me a draft of a paper in which he addresses one aspect of my criticism of Swamp Deviants. The issue, which I discussed here a couple of days ago ( Deviant Phenomenal Knowledge ) and elaborated upon earlier today ( Can Swampkinds Be Deviants? ), is this: Can a Swampkind have deviant phenomenal knowledge--that is, can they know what it is like to see red without first seeing, imagining, or hallucinating the color red? A Swamp Deviant is a Swampkind who knows what it is like to see red without having ever seen, imagined, or hallucinated the color red. One objection to the idea of Swamp Deviants is the argument that Swampkinds cannot know anything at all, because they cannot have any intentional states. To have an intentional state which is about red, for example, you must have a causal history which connects your state to the color red. Knowledge supervenes over causal histories, and not simply over neurological states. Since Swampkinds have no causal histories at a...

In my last post , I challenged philosophical appeals to deviants. Deviants are beings who have phenomenal knowledge (they know what it is like to X), but who have not had any experiences which could "earn" that knowledge. For example, a deviant is somebody who knows what it is like to see red, though who has never actually seen, imagined, or hallucinated red. I previously argued that deviants are plausibly impossible--the very idea of a deviant is not obviously coherent--and that, if we do our best to make the notion coherent, the possibility of deviants becomes an empirical question. Here I want to further support the argument that deviants may be inconceivable. The argument I will now develop is that Swampkinds cannot be deviants--or, rather, that any claim that Swampkinds are deviants will carry undesirable philosophical baggage. Swampkinds are beings who are physically and functionally identical to human beings, and who have phenomenal consciousness, but who are cre...

Phenomenal knowledge is normally defined as "knowing what it is like to experience [something]". This is usually further defined either in terms of, or in terms closely related to, the abilities to recognize, remember, and imagine experiences. Some recent philosophical discussions have focused on the issue of deviant phenomenal knowledge. Torin Alter (2008) explains: Phenomenal knowledge is earned if the experience requirement is satisfied. For example, since I have seen ripe tomatoes, my knowledge of what it’s like to see red is earned . . . To access phenomenal knowledge is to exercise closely related abilities, such as the ability to imagine, recognize, or remember relevant experiences. I access my phenomenal knowledge when I visualize a ripe tomato, stop at a traffic light, or have an episodic memory of seeing oxygenated blood. Phenomenal knowledge that is unearned, inaccessible, or both is deviant . In what follows, I use "deviant " to refer to anybody w...