Is Phenomenal Knowledge Expressible?

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the nature of phenomenal knowledge. Phenomenal knowledge is knowledge of phenomenal properties of one’s conscious experience, i.e., its what-it’s-likeness. It is commonly assumed that phenomenal knowledge is a species of propositional knowledge: it consists in one’s phenomenal beliefs about their experiences (e.g., ’I know that this is what it’s like to experience pain’ or ‘I know that this phenomenal property is instantiated’).

Phenomenal knowledge has a special signi!cance for contemporary debates about the nature of the human mind: it is situated in the context of the knowledge argument (Robinson, 1982; Jackson, 1982). According to the knowledge argument, one learns additional information (over and above physical facts) about a certain phenomenon by experiencing it for the !rst time, i.e., what it is like for her to experience this phenomenon.

Philosophers who dispute the propositional treatment of phenomenal knowledge have different motivations for postulating it as a third sui generis kind of knowledge. Some (e.g., Tye, 2009; Churchland, 1989) posit phenomenal knowledge as a species of objectual knowledge to block the knowledge argument. More recently, Duncan (2018) and Giustina (2022) have been advancing some independent reasons for rejecting that phenomenal knowledge consists in a mental attitude toward a proposition: phenomenal knowledge seems to resist communicability. Arguably, communicability is a necessary feature of propositional knowledge. If I know that P, I must be able to fully transmit my knowledge of P to my interlocutor. This condition, however, does not hold for phenomenal knowledge. Unless my interlocutor has had the corresponding experience, my knowledge of the experience’s what-it’s-likeness is incommunicable. Hence, this knowledge is non-propositional. Call it the argument from incommunicability.

In what follows, I situate the discussion over the nature of phenomenal knowledge in the context of the knowledge argument. I then spell out the argument from incommunicability and extend it to inexpressibility of phenomenal knowledge in response to Farkas’ (2023) objection from expressibility /1. According to this objection, communicability is not the same as expressibility: even if I fail to convey phenomenal knowledge to my interlocutor, I can nonetheless fully and perfectly express phenomenal knowledge to myself. In the paper, I attempt to counteract the objection from expressibility by denying genuine expressibility of phenomenal knowledge either because (1) the demonstrative ‘this’ in ‘this is what P is like’ fails to adequately grasp one’s experience or (2) a concept which is supposed to stand for P is not fully understood by the subject of experience or does not exist at all. I thus defend the following claim: phenomenal knowledge is neither communicable nor expressible. In conjunction, incommunicability and inexpressibility of phenomenal knowledge give us good reasons for postulating a third sui generis kind of knowledge — objectual knowledge — to account for phenomenal knowledge.

/1: Farkas, K. (2023). Transmission of Skill. Moodle.