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PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS 245
that the words of the sentence, say the demonstrative ’That’ is private, but rather that the
private feeling that accompanies color vision is private and that undergoing that qualitative
experience is necessary to deploy correctly the demonstrative in the sentence ’That is what
it’s like to see Red’. The only thing that Mary could possess via deference is the linguistic
character of indexicals. She could indeed be a successful user of indexicals, she could, for
example, deploy correctly sentences of the form ’That is a table’, ’That is what it is like to feel
pain’, but not the sentence ’That is an object that I cannot point at’ or ’That is what it is like to
see red’.
At this point it is important to evaluate one possible objection to the claim I have been
defending. Every Indexical, the objection goes, can be substituted by a non indexical term. 20
’That dog there’ can be substituted by ’Fido’, if the name of the dog is indeed Fido. So, the
objection continues, the demonstrative in turn could be substituted by a non demonstrative
term Q 21 and Q can be learned deferentially. So, again, the experience thesis would be
challenged. In order to answer to this objection, let us recall that we established that concepts
are fine-grained. So, surely, Mary is going to be able to learn something about Q by
interaction with her experienced colleagues. She is going indeed going to possess knowledge
involving Q. But the important issue is that she is just going to possess knowledge of a certain
sort, namely sentences like 1-6. That is, sentences with a low informative character, that are
produced via competent language possession, report or Kind-Inference.
However, as we noted before this knowledge is going to be limited to sentences that do not
include demonstratives. And although we want both concepts to refer to the same object,
namely a type brain state, they can indeed have a different sense. It seems that Ball ignores
for one second that co-extension does not mean identity of concepts. Then although Mary is
going to possess certain knowledge of color vision as brain state and certain knowledge of
phenomenal concepts per report, she necessarily needs to undergo the qualitative experience
to acquire the concept that is co-extensional to Q and ‘Type Brain State’ but has a different
sense because it has a different mode of presentation. Again, until she undergoes the
qualitative experience she is not going to be able to refer correctly using the demonstrative
‘that’, since she lacks the relevant context and intention. This form of direct pointing is
wanted while answering to the KA, for it permits that she knows all the physical facts but can
still learn a new content. So although she has the concept Q she is not going to be able to
entertain the thought ‘That is red’ until after her release. If indeed different PC can share a
referent, then it will be proved that PC are not exhausted by their referents. Mary’s new
experience is what allows her to know the fine grained content that referred to the old fact she
knew.
Let’s consider a relevant example of co-extensional terms that have different senses. Alfred
could possess the concept Arthritis, (and even achieve concept mastery) without coming to
know that Arthritis = inflamed Arthrons in standard human beings. 22 However, although
both concepts refer to the same thing they are different. So we can conclude that Mary
possesses prior to release a co-extensional concept but she is not able to use the
demonstrative PCs. In order to possess them, she needs to undergo a certain experience.
20
Byrne (2011) offers a similar response to this criticism. He agree that subjects can introduce terms to
express concepts they entertain which are not expressed by public language terms but he also explains
the notion of expression in question is very thin: “In particular it seems that for Mary to be able to
conceptualize phenomenal colour qualities in the same was as a normally-experienced person, she
needs to do a lot more than to read a term with which another thinker expresses it”.
21
Or Redphen for example
22
This identity statement is of course fictional, however it is sufficient to think that it is possible that
science discovers that Arthritis occurs iff X (Where X is a natural kind). If this case does not seem
convincing the paradigmatic case can do the work too. It is clear that ’Hesperus’ and ’Phosphorus’, and
’Mean kinetic energy’ and ’heat’ are different concepts, although the respective identities are necessarily
true and they respectively refer to the same object or natural kind.