Even zombies Can be Surprised: A Reply to Graham And Horgan

In their paper “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” (2000), George Graham and Terence Horgan argue, contrary to a widespread view, that the so- called Knowledge Argument may after all pose a problem for certain materialist accounts of perceptual experience. I propose a reply to Graham and Horgan on the materialist’s behalf, making use of a distinction between knowing what it’s like to see something F and knowing how F things look.     

Action,Control and Sensations of Acting

Sensations of acting and control have been neglected in theory of action. I argue that they form the core of action and are integral and indispensible parts of our actions, participating as they do in feedback loops consisting of our intentions in acting, the bodily movements required for acting and the sensations of acting. These feedback loops underlie all activities in which we engage when we act and generate our control over our movements.The events required for action according to the causal theory, or Searle’s theory, do not add up to agency. I find the agent at work, her engagement in her action, in her sensation of acting.It is often thought that bodily movements are either mere events or actions. I suggest that there is a third possibility: that they are activities which are not actions. Activities, whether they are actions or not, differ from mere events in that they are controlled from within the brain. They are actions only if this control forms agent control, that is, control in which the conscious mind, the agents’ intentions in acting and her sensations of acting, participates.Internally wayward actions are characterized by the fact that the person involved does not have a sensation of action and therefore does not control her movements. In the absence of such a sensation she does not act.     

The Ambiguity of Quantifiers

In the tradition of substructural logics, it has been claimed for a long time that conjunction and inclusive disjunction are ambiguous:we should, in fact, distinguish between ‘lattice’ connectives (also called additive or extensional) and ‘group’ connectives (also called multiplicative or intensional). We argue that an analogous ambiguity affects the quantifiers. Moreover, we show how such a perspective could yield solutions for two well-known logical puzzles: McGee’s counterexample to modus ponens and the lottery paradox.