A Rose, By Any Other Name (Or Description)

Abstract

Many philosophers, Including myself, find the above verdict of self-ascribed ‘qualia freak’ Frank Jackson extremely appealing. Consider an alternative premise: ‘Nothing you could tell of a physical sort captures the mass of a rose’. That clearly is false. We define mass as a physical property, and ‘capturing’ It demands nothing more than specifying some subset of the rose’s complete physical description. A physical description of rose mass misses out nothing, because there Is nothing else to it but that physical description.