Frank Jackson Physicalism Essay

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Frank Jackson’s proposed a philosophical theory about physicalism, which had lead to many discussions debating whether physicalism is true or false. In “The Journal of Philosophy”, Jackson described physicalism with an example of Mary in a black-and-white room where she was being educated through lectures in black-and-white television, along with black-and-white books. She learnt every physical fact there is in our environment and physical natures, but not all. When she left the room, given a colored television, she will then learn what it is like for something to be colored and to even see color. Learning all physical facts that exist in black-and-white world, but does not learn other physical facts that exists outside of the confined black-and-white room. However, in Jackson’s example of Mary, she was seeing colors for her first time, which shows that she does not know and did not learn everything there is in this world. Instead, she is still learning what color vision is, learning new…show more content…
The truth in the physical fact may not be everything that there is, and it is not necessarily the truth about everything, it may also not be the truth about our world and the environment we live in. Considering if the physicalism is true, notion of all the physical facts she learnt during the period upon her release is logical and coherent. On his view, there are facts that we learn, but does everything that we learn the only way we acquire knowledge? Other ways of acquiring knowledge would include learning from new experiences that people experience or even imagination. Mary may have already learnt what every physical fact about the different color perception but has not experienced it yet. Is it possible to learn every physical fact there is in our environment with the claim that physicalism being

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