Swampman

The thought experiment of the swamp man of Donald Davidson builds on Twin Earth by Hilary Putnam and reaffirms the concept of semantic externalism. It is presented in the essay "Knowing One 's Own Mind", which was published in 1987 by Donald Davidson.

Situation

Assume that Davidson is wandering around in a swampy area and suddenly hit by a lightning and killed. At the same time proposing to another nearby location and causes another flash, that the molecules arrange at this point spontaneously and completely random so that they accept exactly the form that had Davidson's body at the time of his death.

The resulting creatures, the swamp man has a brain that is exactly identical to that in the structure, which had Davidson, and is for this reason exactly behave like Davidson. He will return from his hike and write the same essays that have written Davidson; he will behave to Davidson's family like Davidson, and so on.

Follow

The swamp man will behave exactly as Davidson and is indistinguishable from it. However, as Davidson, there is a difference. Apparently the swamp man will recognize the friends, colleagues and family Davidsons. However, this is impossible because he has never really recognized - he has never seen before.

Likewise, the swamp man could refer to an essay he had read last week. Since he has but a week earlier does not exist, this is also impossible. Davidson, however, could make the same statement truthfully. From the outside, the truth of the statements would not be seen.

The experiment is to show that the importance of the same testimony of two completely identical individuals can be different, even though the two people have exactly the same imagination.

Counterarguments

  • There are divergent views as to whether a copy of a brain also implies a copy of the mind, if such a copy is at all possible, whether a mind can be copied, or a product of a development process is, and so on. ( Davidson himself describes the swamp man with the English gender-neutral pronoun it, because it is not sure if it is a person, because it is not sure if it has its own mind. )
  • Thought experiments, which differ from reality too, could be misleading because they can be intuitively understood only in the context of the actual reality.
754617
de