Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

It’s hard to shake the intuition that something epistemologically significant happens to Mary the omniscient neuroscientist when she first sees color. Yet it has proved difficult for physicalists to satisfactorily describe Mary’s epistemological progress. There are, of course, prominent physicalist stories of what happens to her—e.g. she acquires know-how, or tokens new demonstrative thoughts—but objections to these stories repeatedly stress the fact that in Mary’s context the relevant events simply wouldn't be epistemically significant enough.

Here I propose a (somewhat) novel physicalist account of what might make Mary’s first experience of color epistemologically significant. The idea is that over and above the acquisition of know-how and of demonstrative thoughts, Mary will also gain understanding of color and color experiences when she first sees color. Drawing on a recent, independently motivated account of understanding (Wilkenfeld, forthcoming), and a range of cases involving visualization in the philosophy of science, I will argue that one can gain understanding of a phenomenon without thereby coming to know a new fact about it--and that such a gain can indeed be epistemologically significant.