Xxxxxxx’x Knowledge Argument. Xxxxx Xxxxxxx’x knowledge argument, which he described in Epiphenomenal Qualia (1982), is a thought experiment involving the scientist Xxxx who lives in a black-and-white room and knows all physical facts (or at least all physical facts related to vision and colour perception). When she leaves the black-and-white room and sees red for the first time, will she gain new knowledge from that experience? This is how Xxxxxxx outlines the thought experiment: “Xxxx is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. […] What will happen when Xxxx is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.” (Xxxxxxx 1982: 130) Xxxxxxx’x specific point is that no amount of physical knowledge will entail knowledge of what it is like to experience red. Because there is knowledge other than physical knowledge, namely knowledge of non-physical facts, physicalism must be false. After her release, Xxxx gets to know what red is like in her own experience or what it is like for red to appear in her experience. She gains knowledge of a non-physical fact not entailed by the complete physical knowledge she had while locked in her black-and-white room. The qualitative, introspectively accessible what-it-is-likeness of having a particular conscious experience is what Xxxxxxx calls qualia (singular: ‘xxxxx’) (Xxx 2021a). Qualia are non-physical properties3 which are epiphenomenal, meaning that they are not causally efficacious in any way: “Qualia cause nothing physical but are caused by something physical” (Xxxxxxx 1982: 134). Common examples for qualia in the literature include the throbbing pain of a headache, seeing the colour red, the taste of wine, the feeling of sandpaper on fingertips, and so on (Tye 2021a). For Xxxxxxx, knowledge that lies beyond the physical is not merely knowledge of certain perspective-dependent fa...
