Abstrakt
This paper considers the so-called "knowledge argument for qualia" (Jackson 1982: 128ff.) from the perspective of Peirce's account of sensation and its role in cognition. According to this argument, the phenomenal, qualitative dimension of perceptual experience (sensation) cannot be captured in terms of "physical information" (ibid. 127) - if knowledge of what is it like to be in a particular phenomenal state cannot be derived from the totality of physical facts, the state is not physical and, therefore, physicalism is false.
Such an argument rests on the assumption that qualia are informative, that to have a quale is to know something, something unknowable by any other means. A Peircean analysis of this assumption is the subject of my paper.
Peirce presented at least two accounts of how sensation (or, more broadly, perceptual experience) functions as an element of cognition. Both early (e.g. 1866-7 MS 740; 1868, W 2: 211-242) and later (e.g. 1903, EP 2: 226-241) versions of the theory, however, present the same central thesis: a character of sensation is accessible only by means of hypothetical, or abductive, inference.
If considered in abstraction form that inference, sensational quality is entirely incomprehensible and does not bring about any knowledge. According to the early theory, a sensation (quale) is understood as a "simple conception" produced by "nominal hypothesis" (1866-7, MS 740: 648).
In this way Peirce's account can be seen as a precursor of modern approaches explaining qualia as "modes of presentation" (as summarized by Prinz 2012: 308ff.), most particularly as either "recognitional concepts" (Loar 1990) or "phenomenal concepts" (Stoljar 2005). It shares with the latter the thesis that phenomenal state's quality is not a new fact to be known but rather a mode of how some fact is known.
My aim is to sketch-out the ways in which the Peircean perspective can be utilized to support the modern modes of presentation strategy and answer the objections raised against it. I will defend the claim that Peirce's theory meets all the requirements for a non-dualistic solution of the knowledge argument stated by Prinz (2012: 303-17).
Besides, it has the advantage of avoiding not only ontological dualism (phemonenal/physical properties) but an epistemological dualism (direct access to mental states/indirect access to objects via mental states) as well.