How can a physicalist account of the mind survive the intuitive pull of Mary’s Room while still explaining what we genuinely learn when we first experience color?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Frank Jackson is Professor Emeritus at Australian National University and was a visiting professor at Princeton University. His work focuses primarily on mind, language, and ethics, among other things, and most listeners will probably recognize him for the "Mary's Room" argument.
2. Interview Summary
Frank Jackson begins by unpacking what “physicalism” is even claiming, stressing that the thesis only looks empty if we’re sloppy about what counts as “physical.” He highlights two natural ways to draw the line: (i) “physical” as whatever properties we need to explain the non-sentient world, and (ii) “physical” as whatever properties govern the causal interactions that link brains to behavior and perception. On this framing, physicalism is a substantive bet that mentality can be explained using the same property-base that already earns its keep in explaining the non-mental world, and he’s happy to defend it as a challenging, contingent a posteriori claim about our world (without insisting it must hold across all nearby possible worlds).
The interview then turns to the legacy of the “Mary’s Room” argument: Jackson says he no longer accepts it, but insists it’s a genuinely deep challenge that has pushed philosophers into fruitful work on the ties between epistemology, concepts, reference, and the necessary a posteriori. His preferred diagnosis is broadly representationalist: when Mary leaves the black-and-white room, she doesn’t necessarily gain new propositional information so much as enter new kinds of representational states that make similarity-and-difference relations vividly available “for free,” rather than via laborious calculation—analogous to finally being able to see faces as alike rather than inferring it. This picture feeds into his views about color (as located in a similarity space rather than grasped by “acquaintance” with intrinsic qualia), his skepticism about “pure” demonstrative phenomenal concepts, and his broader take on mind–brain identity and multiple realizability: what’s shared across creatures is the functional role (e.g., being in pain), while the realizing states can differ by kind.
A third through-line is methodology—what thought experiments and conceptual analysis are for. Discussing Edmund Gettier and Timothy Williamson, Jackson treats Gettier-style cases as revealing both something about how we actually apply “knowledge” and something substantive about an easily missed possibility: justified true belief can still be true “by fluke,” and so fall short of epistemic gold-standard. He resists a caricature where “conceptual analysis” is anti-metaphysical; instead, he frames it as a bridge-project that connects how our language carves things up to the best overall metaphysical picture (his example is how talk of “change” relates to a four-dimensional spacetime view). In ethics, he brings the same naturalist impulse: start with plausible constraints like supervenience-style dependence of the ethical on the descriptive, then look for naturalistically acceptable properties that play the right functional roles for terms like “morally obligatory.” He also connects this to a decision-theoretic treatment of what one “ought” to do—favoring an “expected/prospect” notion of ought over a stark “objective” ought, and separating questions about right action from questions of praise and blame; where values come from may be partly preference-based, but he argues that the decision-theoretic framework itself doesn’t force any particular metaphysics of value.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:51 - Characterizing the physical
05:26 - Causal closure argument
06:41 - Clarifying definition
09:12 - Modal concern for defining physicalism
11:29 - Physicalism as a thesis about only the actual world
13:40 - The knowledge argument
17:18 - Current response
22:27 - Functional account incomplete?
27:22 - Functional properties not required?
31:30 - Phenomenal concepts strategy
35:34 - Knowledge vs. abilities
37:03 - Different ways of knowing
38:06 - Contingent identities
42:27 - Multiple realizability
46:11 - Thought experiments
52:06 - Opposing approaches
56:23 - Reductionism in ethics
1:01:00 - Arguing for property identities
1:04:44 - Decision theory in ethics
1:10:24 - Subjectivist theory?
1:12:50 - Nothing special about ethical decisions?
1:17:29 - Language, names, and information
1:22:03 - Similarity with causal theory
1:25:43 - Direct reference
1:29:19 - Singular propositions
1:33:59 - Kripke’s arguments against descriptivism
1:39:00 - Value of philosophy
1:43:27 - Conclusion
