Specter of Reason

Thanks in large part to my recent email correspondence with L. A. Paul (see here and  here  for some background on that), I've formulated a position which, as far as I know, is novel in the philosophy of mind.  The basic assumption is this: (1) One knows *about* what it is like to X iff one knows some of the consequences and/or functional correlations associated with the experience of what it is like to X.   It follows that,  (2) one can know about what it is like to X without ever directly experiencing X.   This only requires that phenomenal properties have functional correlations (these can be statistical or accidental, and not intrinsic, of course) and/or that they are not epiphenomenal.  This is consistent with the common intuition that you can only know what it is like to X if you have some experience of X-ing.  (That is the new-knowledge intuition associated with Frank Jackson's Mary thought experiment:  When Mary the ...

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...