ABSTRACT
It has frequently been urged that there are facts about our sensory experiences, both perceptual and bodily, which no amount of physical information, including that of a functional sort, can capture. 1 The facts I am referring to are familiar to all of us in our everyday conscious lives: they pertain to the subjective phenomenal qualities or ‘qualia’, as they are sometimes called, which characterize our pains, our itches, our sensations of colour, our feelings of love, hate, and despair. I believe that the argu ments adduced for the view that these facts lie outside the physicalist’s net are unsound. I also believe, however, that at least one of the arguments, which I call ‘the Argument from Knowledge’, deserves a great deal more careful attention than it has received heretofore. This argument in one form or another has exerted a powerful influence on many philosophers, and it has been a thorn in the side of physicalism for a number of years. In what follows, my primary concern is to present a conclusive refutation of this argument.
