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The knowledge argument aims to refute physicalism — the view that the world is entirely physical. The argument first establishes the existence of facts (or truths or information) about consciousness that are not a priori deducible from the complete physical truth, and then infers the falsity of physicalism from this lack of deducibility. Frank Jackson gave the argument its classic formulation, but has since rejected the argument claiming that it relies on a false conception of sensory experience, which should be replaced with representationalism (also known as intentionalism) — the view that phenomenal states are just representational states. This chapter argues that Jackson's representationalist response to the knowledge argument fails. Physicalists face a representationalist version of the knowledge argument that inherits the force of the original. Reformulating the challenge in representationalist terms does little to help physicalists answer it.

Frank Jackson and the author each take the other to hold a position in philosophy of mind that it is extremely difficult to sustain. This chapter tries to say something about how that can be. It seeks to demonstrate the sanity of Jackson's opponents and the fragility of his own position than to hold out for the truth of any particular doctrine. It wants to bring to the surface an assumption in ontology, which is seen as a crucial part of the grounding of Jackson's particular version of physicalism. Once it is appreciated that this assumption is contestable, Jackson's opponents may be seen in a different light from the one in which they appear in his writings. More generally, a connection will appear between the vast literature on physicalism as a topic in philosophy of mind and the equally vast literature on material constitution as a topic in metaphysics.

According to Stich and Weinberg, Frank Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defence of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. The author agrees but the book is also very difficult. This chapter explores the book's three main chapters, trying to clarify its basic notions and its argument, and taking issue where the author sees fit.

This chapter proposes a conception of Practical Ethics which ties what epistemically limited agents are to do on some occasion not only to limits on their non-evaluative information about how much intrinsic value would result from various actions, but also to epistemic limits on their evaluative information about what has intrinsic value. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section spells out Moore's view of the way in which uncertainty affects the proposed definition of rightness in terms of the maximization of value. The second section compares Moore's view with an alternative put forward more recently by Frank Jackson (1991). The third and fourth sections present the author's own account and say why it should be preferred to both Moore's and Jackson's views. To anticipate, it turns out that Moore and Jackson are both right about something and wrong about something. The correct view combines elements from both.

This chapter presents a number of concerns about Jackson's approach to conditionals. The first section discusses the view defended by Frank Jackson in his book Conditionals; it describes his account and notes some of its shortcomings. There are good reasons for doing this. Views of the kind defended there are, if not orthodox, still very common. And Jackson defends the view in, arguably, its most cogent form. The second section sketches a rather different account, which avoids these shortcomings. It proposes a general framework for an account of conditionals, one that leaves plenty of parameters to be adjusted for fine tuning.

This chapter borrows what Frank Jackson says about propounding arguments, a phenomenon in the dialectical domain, and transposes it to the epistemological domain. It seeks to clarify the notion of transmission of epistemic warrant and, particularly, the idea of failure of warrant transmission (transmission failure). In this transposition there will be, corresponding to the two purposes of arguing, two kinds of epistemic project. These are referred to as deciding what to believe (corresponding to the teasing-out purpose of arguing) and settling the question (corresponding to the convincing purpose). For each kind of epistemic project, there will be a property of arguments that makes an argument ill-suited for use in projects of that kind. Each property might be called ‘transmission failure’. The two accounts of transmission failure (one analogous to Copi's account of begging the question and the other to Jackson's) provide principled limitations on the arguments that can properly be used in pursuing epistemic projects of the respective kinds (deciding what to believe and settling the question).

Certain assumptions about language, naturally cast in semantic terms, are crucial to Jackson's conception of the task of philosophy in the cases he calls location problems. These assumptions underpin the most natural path to the view that there is a distinctively metaphysical problem for philosophy to address, as opposed to a problem of a broadly anthropological kind, about human linguistic behaviour — in this case, about the use of the semantic terms, ‘true’, ‘refers’, and the like. Although Jackson is aware of the need for these assumptions, he underestimates the work needed to justify them, and hence the extent of the threat that they pose to the foundations of his program. By making the assumptions explicit, and by arguing that we need to take seriously the possibility that they might fail, this chapter shows that the foundations are in need of reinforcement; indeed, that there is a serious issue about the advisability of the enterprise, at least in Jackson's ambitious form. There is an alternative conception of what philosophy should be up to in this area — a conception that regards the main task as more like anthropology than metaphysics. And the issue as to which is the right conception is not to be settled by philosophy, but by the science of human linguistic behaviour, broadly construed. So there is an important sense in which the anthropological viewpoint should come first.

The subject of colour has long fascinated Frank Jackson. Perhaps one reason that colours have fascinated Jackson is that they represent a striking instance of what he has called a ‘location problem’. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 sketches Jackson's solution to ‘the location problem for colours’. Section 3 argues that Jackson's attempted resolution of the clash between the two axioms of the folk theory fails because of its inconsistency with other firm folk intuitions about colours. In Section 4, after agreeing with Jackson that the folk theory entails both axioms, it is argued that these axioms imply a conception of colours as simple, non-physical, intrinsic properties of objects. Section 5 takes up the issue of why Jackson rejects this primitivist conception of colours and the easy solution it provides to the apparent clash between his two basic axioms. Section 6 examines the exclusion assumption and its role in his argument for the conclusion that colours must be physical properties. Section 7 outlines a conception of causation according to which non-physical properties as well as physical properties can both cause colour experience in ways that do not compete with each other and do not exclude each other.

The work of Frank Jackson has been important to at least two central debates in consequentialist ethical theory: (1) between possibilism and actualism and (2) between objective consequentialism and expectabilism (or a variety of subjective consequentialism). Suppose that we define the right action as that action which maximizes the good. Some writers, such as Michael Slote, have argued that this straightforward criterion is underdetermined. Are we to maximize ‘actual’ good or ‘expected’ good? That is the debate between the objective consequentialist and the subjective consequentialist. There is also the issue of whether or not the agent who is deliberating considers what would be best given what will happen as opposed to what could or can happen. That is the debate between the actualist and the possibilist in determining relevant options for the moral agent to consider in deliberation. This chapter explores differing answers to both of these questions, and then explores one strategy for answering both — a strategy which has been very much influenced by the work of Frank Jackson. Though the author agrees with Jackson on actualism, it disagrees with him on expectabilism. It is argued that the definition of ‘right action’ is clear and not at all underdetermined — the right action just is the action that maximizes the good, the actual good. But what is often confusing is that the semantics of right is confused with an issue in the epistemology of right — that is the issue of determining how we are to go about doing the best that we can properly.

This chapter presents Frank Jackson's response to his critics in the preceding chapters. His responses are guided by the following principles. i) There didn't seem much value in repeating points that he largely agreed with, unless he felt it could make a useful emendation or clarification; in one case, he says very little because he agreed with just about everything in the chapter and couldn't think of a better way to say what the author said. ii) As was to be expected, the same issues recur, although this happens less than might have been expected, thanks to the work of the editor.

This introductory chapter sketches some key aspects of Jackson's thought. The discussion is in four sections, corresponding to the four parts of the collection. The sketch provides a framework for briefly introducing some of the ideas developed in this collection. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter is an expanded version of a review of Frank Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics that the author wrote for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. It attempts to sketch the essence of Jackson's approach to metaphysics and ethics, and to indicate some of the places where it is surprising and, inevitably, controversial. It focuses on the ‘analytic descriptivism’, or the ‘a priori passage principle’ that Jackson stands by, generating ‘the view that for each true statement concerning our world, there is a statement in physical terms that a priori entails that statement’ (Jackson 2003).

Jackson often writes as if his account of public language meanings in terms of descriptivist conventions were just plain common sense. How else are we to explain how different speakers manage to communicate using a public language? And how else can we explain how individuals arrive at confident judgments about the reference of their words in hypothetical scenarios? This chapter shows just how controversial the psychological assumptions behind Jackson's semantic theory really are. First, it explains how Jackson's theory goes well beyond the commonsense platitudes he cites in its defence. Second, it sketches an alternative explanation of those platitudes, the improvisation model of meaning, which seems psychologically more realistic. The chapter concludes that the psychological picture presupposed by Jackson's semantic theory stands in need of a more substantial defence than he has so far offered.

Few arguments in the recent philosophy of mind have generated as much discussion or controversy as Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (KA), and none has had a more surprising history. Having offered the KA in 1983 and ably defended it for fifteen years against a wide variety of objections, Jackson did an about-face in 1998 and disavowed it. His rejection of the argument is essentially coupled with the acceptance of another controversial if widely held view, namely the Representational Theory of Consciousness or at least of Conscious Sensory Experience (RTS), which he regards as the sole means to defeat the KA and avoid the cognitive illusion that generates its intuitive appeal. This chapter begins by briefly reviewing objections to the KA. It considers where, if anywhere, Jackson's own present critical view fits in the logical geography of options. It then turns to the question of whether the RTS is in fact either necessary or sufficient for refuting the KA.

This chapter suggests that the nearest and dearest objection is best understood as attempting to show that consequentialism is, in Parfit terms, ‘indirectly collectively self-defeating’. The concern is that if significant numbers of us act to maximize neutral value we will end up living lives which are not worth living — not worth living because we will have given up precisely those projects that make our lives worth living. Consequentialism is thus indirectly collectively self-defeating: adhering to the injunction to act so as to maximize neutral value is likely to render us all worse off.

This chapter argues that the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent is crucial to understanding indicative conditionals. However, unlike Jackson, it denies that the truth value of an indicative conditional is given by the corresponding material conditional. To begin with are the difficulties that embedded conditionals (i.e. conditionals which have conditional antecedents and/or consequents) present to Jackson. Jackson is aware that embedded conditionals present problems to his approach, and argues that ‘If A then (if B then C)’ is regarded by English users as interchangeable with ‘If (A and B) then C’. Since the latter contains no embedded conditionals, the problem is avoided. However, the proposed solution fails to generalize in satisfactory ways to connectives like ‘but’ and ‘even’. In addition, Jackson's approach to conditionals is restricted to conditionals used to make assertions, and does not readily generalize to conditionals used in other kinds of speech acts. The response to the difficulties with taking the material conditional as giving the truth conditions for the indicative conditional is not to seek an alternative, more satisfactory account of the truth conditions of indicative conditionals; rather, the chapter endorses the ‘no truth conditions’ position originally proposed by Ernest Adams.

A response to a paper by Frank Jackson. Although philosophers sometimes defend certain ‘analyses’ as analytic or a priori truths, such analyses are far from obviously true and are defended inductively. Contrary to Jackson's claim, the rejection of analyticity is based on consideration of central cases.