Frank Cameron Jackson

Frank Cameron Jackson: The Man Who Refuted Himself

Put a brilliant scientist named Mary in a black-and-white room. Give her every physical fact there is about human colour vision — wavelengths, retinal chemistry, the firing of every neuron, the full behavioural science of what people say when they see ripe tomatoes. Then open the door. Does she learn anything? Frank Jackson said yes, and with that one word he set the philosophy of mind arguing for four decades. Then, having become the most cited opponent of physicalism alive, he changed his mind and joined the other side.

A Family Trade

Jackson was born in Melbourne on 31 August 1943 into what may be the only household in Australia where philosophy was the family business. His father, Allan Cameron Jackson (1911–1990), had studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge. His mother, Ann E. Jackson, taught philosophy at the University of Melbourne from 1961 to 1984, rising to senior tutor. Jackson has described them as philosophers "in the Old School," working squarely in the Wittgensteinian tradition that dominated mid-century Anglophone thought.

That inheritance produced one of the more peculiar footnotes in academic history. In 1995 Jackson delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, the most prestigious lecture series in analytic philosophy. His father had delivered them in 1957–58. They remain the first father-and-son pair to have done so. He married Morag E. Fraser in 1966.

Mathematics, Abandoned

The younger Jackson did not set out to inherit the trade. He read mathematics and science at the University of Melbourne, taking a B.Sc., and intended to stay there. Only in his final undergraduate year did he switch to philosophy, having concluded — with the flat practicality that runs through his prose — that he was simply better at it and enjoyed it more. He took an honours B.A. in philosophy at Melbourne and then a Ph.D. at La Trobe University under Brian Ellis.

The mathematical training never left him. Jackson's arguments have the compressed, load-bearing quality of proofs: three premises, a conclusion, no ornament.

The Woman in the Black-and-White Room

Jackson spent a year at the University of Adelaide in 1967, lectured at La Trobe, and in 1978 took the Chair of Philosophy at Monash University — succeeding his father in the post. It was during the Monash years that he published the paper that made his name.

"Epiphenomenal Qualia" appeared in 1982; "What Mary Didn't Know" followed in 1986. The argument they contain is now simply called the knowledge argument, and its skeleton is brutally short. Mary has all the physical information concerning human colour vision before her release. But there is some information about human colour vision that she does not have before her release. Therefore not all information is physical information. Jackson's own summation is the sentence every philosophy student memorises: "But she had *all* the physical information. *Ergo* there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false."

The thought experiment's reach outran the seminar room. Mary's Room featured in the 1996 Channel 4 documentary *Brainspotting* and turned up as a plot device in David Lodge's 2001 novel *Thinks…*. Few philosophical arguments of the late twentieth century acquired a nickname; fewer still acquired a character.

Epiphenomenalism, and Its Cost

What Jackson originally built on the argument was a modest and deliberately unglamorous dualism. Certain qualitative mental states, he proposed, are non-physical: they are produced by physical changes in the brain but they cause nothing themselves. They are causally inert byproducts — epiphenomena. Consciousness, on this picture, is the smoke, not the engine.

The position drew fire immediately, and much of the best philosophy of mind written since has been a response to it. David Lewis and Laurence Nemirow argued that Mary gains not a fact but a set of abilities — to recognise, to imagine, to remember colour. Earl Conee argued she gains acquaintance, direct familiarity with a quale, rather than any proposition. The majority physicalist reply concedes that Mary learns something propositional but insists she learns an old physical fact under a new *phenomenal concept* — a fresh way of grasping something she already knew.

Canberra

Jackson moved to the Australian National University in 1986 and stayed for nearly three decades, becoming Distinguished Professor in 2003 and Emeritus in 2014. His administrative career there was substantial: head of the philosophy program, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies (1998–2001), Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research in 2001, Director of the Research School of Social Sciences from 2004 to 2007. From 2007 to 2014 he was also a visiting professor at Princeton.

Canberra gave its name to his other major project. The "Canberra Plan," set out in *From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis* (1998) — the book grown from those Locke Lectures — argues that conceptual analysis is not a quaint prewar hobby but the engine of serious metaphysics. You cannot say whether free will or moral value exists in a physical world, Jackson contends, until you have said clearly what you meant by the words. The programme fed directly into his moral functionalism and shaped a generation of Australian metaethics. His other books include *Perception: A Representative Theory* (1977), *Conditionals* (1987), *Philosophy of Mind and Cognition* (1996, with David Braddon-Mitchell), *Mind, Morality, and Explanations* (2004, with Philip Pettit and Michael Smith) and *Language, Names and Information* (2010).

Capitulation

Then came the reversal. A 1995 postscript already conceded a structural crack: "Knowledge about qualia is impossible if qualia are epiphenomenal" — if experiences cause nothing, they cannot cause our beliefs about them. By 2003, in "Mind and Illusion," Jackson had gone the whole way. "Although I once dissented from the majority," he wrote, "I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism… go wrong." He came to endorse representationalism: phenomenal experience represents objective properties, and those are explicable in physical terms. The argument that made him famous, he now holds, is a trap laid by intuition.

Why Frank Is Called a Genius

The specific quality here is compression — the ability to reduce a vast, sprawling metaphysical dispute to a scene a child can picture and three sentences that cannot be waved away. That is rarer than technical brilliance and harder to fake. Physicalism had been argued about for a century; Jackson gave the argument a face, a room and a door, and the entire field reorganised around it. The volume of published replies — the ability hypothesis, the acquaintance hypothesis, the phenomenal-concept strategy — is the honest measure: these are major positions in philosophy of mind that exist principally because Mary does.

The counter-case is serious and Jackson himself made it. He no longer believes the argument works. A thought experiment that its own author repudiates is a magnificent provocation, not a discovery, and philosophy is littered with brilliant provocations that turned out to prove nothing. One might also note that Jackson's fame rests disproportionately on roughly ten pages published in 1982; the Canberra Plan, arguably his more sustained intellectual achievement, is known mainly to specialists. What the record unambiguously supports is intellectual courage of an uncommon kind. Very few thinkers build a career on an argument and then publish, under their own name, the reasons it fails.

Legacy

Jackson was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1981, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1998, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He received the Centenary Medal in 2001, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006 for service to philosophy and the social sciences, and received the Peter Baume Award in 2018. He retired from ANU in 2014. Mary, meanwhile, is still in her room, still on the syllabus, still refusing to settle the question — which is, in the end, the most a thought experiment can hope for.

Achievements

• Centenary Medal — 2001
• Officer of the Order of Australia — 2006
• Held posts at Princeton University, Australian National University and La Trobe University