- published: 20 Dec 2015
- views: 23987
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:
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 recognized anything in the first place."
These considerations lead Davidson to deny that the Swampman'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.
Actors: Fernando Rubio (actor), Bigas Luna (writer), Dennis Hopper (miscellaneous crew), Michael Moriarty (actor), Bigas Luna (writer), Xabier Elorriaga (actor), Francisco Rabal (actor), Dennis Hopper (actor), Bigas Luna (director), Anastasi Rinos (editor), Peter Bart (miscellaneous crew), James Carrington (actor), Antonella Murgia (actress), Barbara Jones (actress), Anne Settimó (miscellaneous crew),
Plot: A man discovers that his girlfriend is a "stigmata" (someone whose hands and feet mysteriously bleed in the same places where Jesus Christ was crucified) and tries to keep her out of the hands of a greedy TV preacher who plans to exploit her to make money for himself.
Keywords: catholic, childbirth, christian, esp, evangelist, faith, faith-healer, female-nudity, filling-station, gas-station