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PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS 247
In both cases I somehow possess the concept ’that’, although it is obvious that in the first case
I do not really know what ’that’ is. Then although I’m a competent user of indexicals and also
possess the concept chair, before I turned around I could not know if the sentence That is a
chair was true or not. I could surely do a priori inferences before I turn around, but I’m not
capable of saying something relevant about ’that’. Just after I turn around I gain knowledge of
what “that” really is.
Some might claim that we are misusing the demonstrative, since it could be actually the case
that I did not refer to anything before I turned around. However we can imagine different
cases with different grades of indexical abuse. Imagine first a case of complete misuse:
someone stands in a room with no Bears (or representations of Bears) and says I know what
that Bear is like. Even if the weird person in question is normally a competent user of
demonstratives, the ’that’ in question refers to nothing.
But imagine now a case of minor misuse. For lack of a better example imagine this scenario:
In the party game Truth or Dare someone, who chose to be dared, has to engage in some
daring activity with someone else. However to follow the strict rules of the game he has to
choose his partner randomly. All players stand in line by the wall (whose length is known to
everyone) while the dared one is turned around, then he randomly without turning around
has to point at someone and say ’You’. In this case, the speaker knows that he is definitely
pointing at someone, and he would be able to know the many truths that apply to all persons
and that he knows by report, categorical inference or just as a competent speaker. However
when he turns around he might well be very surprised. And although he somehow possessed
the demonstrative ’You’, he was pointing blindly. And he would have the right to express (12)
before he turns around and (13) after he realized who we randomly picked.
If someone wanted to argue that a further shortcoming of the PCS is that it would falsely
predict that Mary would be surprised about far too many things, for example about the fact
that Redphen is not a number although she should not. Our distinction would allow us to
counter that she would be indeed be surprised to learn that “”That’ is what it’s like to
experience visual information sent to the brain from retinal ganglion cells via the optic nerve
to the optic chiasma.” But she would not be surprised about the sentences she could know by
report that do not involve demonstrative, i.e. the relevant way to refer to qualitative
experiences via PC’s. To continue with the above suggested scenario, I’m not surprised that
’that’ or ’you’ did not turn out to be a rational number. Furthermore if she turns out to be
synesthetic (and did not know it) she might be surprised that PC refers to red objects and
some graphemes. In that case she could say “’That’ is what it’s like to see red and it is just like
seeing some numbers.” But given the appropriate understanding of PC, the PCS does not over
generate predictions.
So Mary can indeed come to know new contents by correctly deploying demonstrative
concepts she could not use before. Given that the demonstrative must not refer to a nonphysical
object, Mary does not learn any new fact. And this version of the PCS is a coherent
and sufficient way to disarm the KA.
7. Two Not Worrisome Worries and a Conclusion
There remain basically two worries. The first arises from a thought experiment proposed by
Wittgenstein (1973). He invites us to imagine that everyone has a box with a beetle inside.
However nobody can see the beetle of the others. The beetle could stand for the private
qualitative experience to which we refer via demonstratives. But the problem is that it could
be the case that there actually is no beetle in the box. This worry ignores one fact that we have
been stressing throughout the paper, that we are not claiming that the demonstratives are
private, but maybe just their referents. Like the box possessor we are equipped with a public