Swamp man

Swampman is the subject of a philosophical thought experiment introduced by Donald Davidson, in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind". The experiment runs as follows:

Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death.

This being, whom Davidson terms 'Swampman', has, of course, a brain which is structurally identical to that which Davidson had, and will thus, presumably, behave exactly as Davidson would have. He will walk out of the swamp, return to Davidson's office at Berkeley, and write the same essays he would have written; he will interact like an amicable person with all of Davidson's friends and family, and so forth.

Davidson holds that there would nevertheless be a difference, though no one would notice it. Swampman will appear to recognize Davidson's friends, but it is impossible for him to actually recognize them, as he has never seen them before. As Davidson puts it, "it can't recognize anything, because it never cognized anything in the first place."

These considerations lead Davidson to deny that the swamp man's utterances can be construed as referring to anything in particular. To take a fairly specific example: suppose that at some point the previous day Davidson had looked at a glass marble on a shelf; unbeknownst to him there was another, visually identical glass marble hidden right behind it. When he makes an assertion about 'the marble I saw yesterday' we take him to be referring to the one that he did in fact see, even if he could not supply enough descriptive information to identify it later. Had the marbles been arranged in the other order, therefore, we would take him to be referring to the other marble, yet his internal state would be identical.

The Swampman has no causal history. He is in the same state as the actual Davidson and the counter-factual Davidson considered above, whose utterances refer to different marbles. As a result his utterance could refer to either marble. In principle, Davidson tells us, the above indeterminacies can be extended to any degree we like: the fact that the Swampman happens to be identical to Davidson does not change the fact that he could have arrived at that state by any one of countless histories, each of which would demand we interpret him differently. Until the Swampman has begun interacting with and using language among the objects of the real world, we can have no grounds to attributing any meanings or thoughts to him at all.

Amongst those who accept the force of this argument, there are two distinct ways of viewing its consequences. On the one hand, many philosophers have taken it to affect merely how we should evaluate Swampman. The argument is believed to demonstrate that Swampman's utterances and thoughts do not mean anything, and do not refer to anything in particular. On this view, Swampman's subjectivity and consciousness are considered to be unchanged. Others have argued that this lack of a causal history renders incoherent the notion that Swampman could have a mind at all, which in turn raises the question of whether he is, in fact, a person. (Note that Davidson calls Swampman 'it' rather than 'he'. This is obviously not a result of anatomical considerations.)

This argument depends upon the acceptance of semantic externalism - the claim that what one's words mean is determined not merely by some internal state, but also by the causal history of the speaker.

Objections

Other philosophers have denied that any such conclusions can be derived from this thought experiment. Many adherents to the mind-brain identity theory have maintained that, as Swampman's brain is identical to Davidson's, so must his mind be identical to Davidson's. Therefore, any theory of language which leads one to conclude that swamp man's utterances and, particularly, thoughts, are any different is necessarily flawed.

Others have called in to question the validity of this sort of thought experiment altogether, maintaining that when a thought experiment is too far moved from the actual state of affairs, our intuitions cease to be meaningful.

References

Davidson, Donald (2001 (1987)). Knowing One's Own Mind. Reprinted in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (pp. 15-38). New York Clarendon Press. Originally published in Proceeding and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 60 (1987), 441-58.

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Objections

References

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