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The Knowledge Intuition and the Ability Hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2012

Huiming Ren
Huiming Ren*
Affiliation:
Zhejiang University of China
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Abstract

ABSTRACT: I argue that the Ability Hypothesis cannot really accommodate the knowledge intuition that drives the knowledge argument and therefore fails to defend physicalism. When the thought experiment is run with, instead of Mary, an advanced robot Rosemary, for whom there presumably is no distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, proponents of the Ability Hypothesis would have to give a far-fetched and counterintuitive explanation of why Rosemary wouldn’t learn anything new upon release.

RÉSUMÉ : Je soutiens que l’hypothèse de la capacité (Ability Hypothesis) est incompatible avec l’intuition de connaissance qui sous-tend l’argument de la connaissance, et par suite échoue à valider le physicalisme. Si on opère l’expérience de pensée en remplaçant Mary par Rosemary, un robot perfectionné, dont on présume qu’elle ne peut distinguer le «savoir-comment» et le «savoir-que», les avocats de l’hypothèse de la capacité devraient élaborer une explication contre-intuitive et exagérément complexe des raisons pour lesquelles Rosemary n’apprendrait rien de nouveau après sa sortie de la chambre.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 313 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2012

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