J. Perry’s qualia-phisicalism as an answer to the knowledge argument

The article is dedicated to one of the most complicated questions of philosophy of mind - reduci-bility of phenomenal properties or qualia to properties of other types. There are a lot of arguments used by proponents of irreducible qualia to prove their position. Likely, the knowledge argument, better known as “Mary’s room” thought experiment, is the most discussed of them. It’s a story about girl who has been imprisoned in black and white room since her birth, where she, impulsed by her curving to unknown, has studied every single physical fact about color, and then she was released to see the colored world with her own eyes. Intuition tells that Mary, who has leaved the room, will study something new about colors, for example, what it is like to see red. It’s usually considered that accepting the intuition testifies against physicalism about qualia. John Perry, the author of “Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness” (2001), disagrees with this position. Basing on analysis of examples from semantics of propositional attitudes, Perry formulates his own concept of content, assuming that any knowledge contains a reflexive component that bounds the subject matter component of this knowledge to some subjective perspective - a perspective, from which this knowledge was received or from which it can be used in practice. As he shows further, the novelty of Mary’s knowledge of colors is in that reflexive component. So, assuming existence of some special non-physical properties is not necessary to accept intuitive result of thought experiment with Mary, it is sufficient to distinguish subjective perspectives.

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