To be published as an entry in the forthcoming Companion to Philosophy in Australasia.

Frank Cameron Jackson

Born in 1943, Frank Jackson took Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Upon graduation, in 1967 he taught for one year at the University of Adelaide before returning to Melbourne for a lectureship appointment at La Trobe University. While at La Trobe, Jackson published his first book (also his doctoral thesis), Perception: A Representative Theory. In 1978 he succeeded his father, Camo Jackson, to the chair of Philosophy at Monash University, before moving to Canberra in 1986 to succeed J.J.C. Smart as head of the Philosophy Program in the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences. Jackson delivered the Locke Lectures at Oxford University in 1994-95, only the second Australian to do so, and has delivered many other named lectures. At ANU he also served for some time as Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies and other high level administrative positions, for which, in addition to his singular contributions to philosophy, he was awarded the Order of Australia in 2006 by the Australian Government. He is currently on a joint appointment between Princeton University and La Trobe University, and continues to spend considerable time at ANU.

Jackson’s philosophical writings are notable for their range. He has written influential works on philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, philosophical methodology, philosophy of language, ethics, and metaphysics. The discussion here will be confined to the first three of these areas.

Philosophical Logic. In Conditionals and elsewhere, Jackson defended the view that that indicative conditionals (of the general rough form ‘If P, then C’), have the same truth conditions as the material conditional of predicate calculus, P ⊃ C (P hook C) which, though often expressed “if P then C”, is formally equivalent to ~(P & ~C): “It is not the case that both P is the case and C is not the case.” This is not an easy position to defend, since there are many apparent counter-examples to the truth-functional equivalency thesis. H.P. Grice defended it using the theory of conversational implicature. According to this theory, even if it is strictly true an assertion must abide by certain general conversational rules (e.g., that the speaker believes the assertion) in order to be “assertable”. Grice claimed that the apparent counter examples to the equivalence thesis can be ruled out by these general rules of assertability.

Jackson argued that Grice’s defence is hopelessly vulnerable to counter-example, and went on to construct a defence that drew on Grice’s notion of conventional implicature. Jackson’s use and elaboration of the idea of conventional implicature was novel and influential. He argued, following Grice, that by convention we attach certain implication to particular words. For example, the use of “but” in the assertion that “This bicycle is plastic but strong” implies that plastic bicycles are usually not strong, but this implication is neither part of the truth conditions of that sentence, strictly speaking, nor given by general rules of conversation. It is merely the sort of implication that attaches, by convention, to the use of “but”. Similarly, Jackson argued—here departing from Grice—that the use of “if” is governed, by convention, by the adherence to what he called “Ramsey Test”, namely that the supposition of the antecedent of a conditional increases ones credence in the consequence (within the supposition), or, in Jackson’s terms, if the consequent is robust with respect to the antecedent. The function of conventional implicature, as Jackson elaborated it, is not to impart beliefs to one’s interlocutor, but rather to smooth the passage of the beliefs one is really trying to impart — namely, in the case of indicative conditionals, the beliefs by which the conditional is evaluable as strictly true or false.

Philosophy of Mind. In his writings in the field of philosophical logic, Jackson employed with considerable precision and inventiveness one of the standard argumentative tools in that field, namely linguistic or conceptual analysis. In Perception, Jackson employed that methodology in the defence of the sense-datum theory of the object of perception. Here Jackson argued that there is a sense of the “way things look” which is neither comparative (in the sense of looking like something) nor epistemic (in the sense of merely looking some way). This sense of “looks” — the phenomenal sense, as Jackson dubbed it — describes the way things are perceptually with us and is therefore quite legitimate, indeed indispensable, and yet, Jackson argued, does not describe the way things are physically. A number of theories about perceptual experience are compatible with this idea, most notably adverbialism, the idea that perception does not have an object at all; seeing red and seeing green are distinguished not by being a perception of a red thing as opposed to a perception of a green thing, on this account, but merely by being an instance of “seeing redly” as opposed to “seeing greenly”. Jackson argued that adverbialism is false because some differences between experiences cannot be captured without talk of objects; the difference, for example, between the perception of a green triangle and a red square, and the perception of a green square and a red triangle. The only remaining option, Jackson argued, is that perception has an object and that object is not physical; that is to say, the object is mental. This then raised the question of the relation between the world itself and perception. One possibility is idealism, the idea that world is itself mental in nature, and we see it directly. Jackson rejected idealism in favour of representationalism, the view that the world itself is physical, and that the immediate objects of perception — the sense data — are representations of that physical world. Although book, Perception: A Representative Theory did not bring about a revival in the sense-datum theory of perception, many of the arguments in it, such as the argument against adverbialism, were highly influential.

Jackson is perhaps most well known for an argument, put forward in 1982 and defended 1986, that some properties of conscious experience are neither physical properties nor can causally affect physical properties. The argument employs the hypothetical case of a future scientist who has come to know every physical fact that could be relevant to conscious experience, but has never actually had the experience of seeing colours. Jackson argued that when such a person has her first colour experience, she will learn something about the world, namely what it is like to have a colour visual experience. Since, intuitively, such a person would thus learn a fact about conscious experience, and yet already possess the physical facts, the learned fact must not be a physical fact. Therefore, the argument concludes, physicalism about conscious experience is false. The “Knowledge Argument”, as it is known, provoked a wide range of published responses though very little agreement, a state of affairs that continues to exist. Jackson did not defend non-physicalism beyond the two papers, but the Knowledge Argument has become part of the standard arsenal of non-physicalist philosophers. David Chalmers used it to great effect in his very influential book in defence of non-physicalism, The Conscious Mind (1996.) Jackson himself repudiated the conclusion of the Knowledge Argument in a 2003 paper, in which he defends physicalist representationalism about conscious experience.

Philosophical Methodology. Jackson has been an influential defender of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy. Beginning in a 1992 critical notice of Susan Hurley’s Natural Reasons, then elaborated in a paper, “Armchair Philosophy”, and further expanded in his 1996 Locke Lectures (published in book form as From Metaphysics to Ethics) Jackson employed two-dimensional modal logic, developed by Stalnaker and others, in the course of an argument that conceptual analysis is actually indispensable for the resolution of certain problems common in philosophy. According to Jackson, the lesson to be learned from Kripke’s Naming and Necessity is not that there is a cognizer-independent “metaphysical” necessity, but rather that sentences (most relevantly such as “Murder is wrong” or “The mind is the brain”) express two propositions, or have a dual intensional structure. Teasing out the two propositions is an armchair enterprise and a necessary first step to discovering their truth (a point on which Stalnaker himself did not agree).

On Jackson’s view, a goal of metaphysics is completeness. It seeks to give an account of what exists, without double-counting, and what doesn’t. H20 molecules exist; water exists but is the same thing as collections of H20 molecules; ghosts don’t exist. Brains exist; do minds exist in addition, or are they the same things as functioning brains—or do they not exist at all, strictly speaking? Jackson argued that this “location or elimination” question, an essential one for metaphysics, always has an a priori component, which is the task of discovering the entailment relations between statements in the vocabulary of (in this case) neuroscience and statements in everyday mental (or “folk psychological”) vocabulary. Jackson’s use of two-dimensional modal logic purported to demonstrate how a successful analysis combined with empirically obtained contingent knowledge is essential for answering “location or elimination” questions.

Finally, Jackson defends a version of descriptivism about linguistic content, Representationalism about phenomenal consciousness, and naturalism about ethics. The latter position was developed, in large part, in a series of papers in collaboration with Philip Pettit. Jackson and others at the ANU in Canberra defended a program of thorough-going naturalism through conceptual analysis that became known in the mid-1990’s as the “Canberra Plan”.

 

List of References

Chalmers, David J. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Grice, H.P. 1989. Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, Frank. 1982. 'Epiphenomenal Qualia'. Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127-36.

Jackson, Frank. 1986.'What Mary Didn't Know'. Journal of Philosophy 83: 291-5.

Jackson, Frank. 1987. Conditionals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Jackson, Frank. 1992. ‘Critical Notice of Susan Hurley's Natural Reasons’. Australasian Journal of philosophy 70: 475-87.

Jackson, Frank. 1994. 'Armchair Metaphysics'. In Philosophy in Mind, edited by Hawthorne, John O’Leary; Michael, Michaelis. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Jackson, Frank. 1997. From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Frank. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Frank. 1998. Mind, Method, and Conditionals: Selected Essays. London: Routledge.

Jackson, Frank. 2003. ‘Mind and Illusion’. In Minds and Persons: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53, edited by. O’Hear, A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ramsey, P.P. 1931. Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Stalnaker, Robert C. 1978, ‘Assertion’. In Syntax and Semantics 9, edited by Cole, P. New York: New York Academic Press.