Again, this seems to me like a pretty consistent way to look at things that also more accurately matches reality. Whether we use words “knowledge” and “ability” or “explicit knowledge” and “knowledge” doesn’t matter, of course. And for what its worth, I much less sure of usefulness of being precise about such terms in practice. But if there is an obvious physical model of this thought experiment, where there are roughly two kinds of things in Mary’s brain—one easily influenceable by words, and another not—and this model explains everything without introducing anything unphysical, then I don’t see what’s the point of saying “well, if we first group everything knowledge-sounding together, then that grouping doesn’t make sense in Mary’s situation”.
Again, this seems to me like a pretty consistent way to look at things that also more accurately matches reality. Whether we use words “knowledge” and “ability” or “explicit knowledge” and “knowledge” doesn’t matter, of course. And for what its worth, I much less sure of usefulness of being precise about such terms in practice. But if there is an obvious physical model of this thought experiment, where there are roughly two kinds of things in Mary’s brain—one easily influenceable by words, and another not—and this model explains everything without introducing anything unphysical, then I don’t see what’s the point of saying “well, if we first group everything knowledge-sounding together, then that grouping doesn’t make sense in Mary’s situation”.