Metadata of the chapter that will be visualized online ChapterTitle The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience Chapter Sub-Title Chapter CopyRight Year Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 (This will be the copyright line in the final PDF) Book Name Feminist Metaphysics Corresponding Author Family Name Janack Particle Given Name Marianne Suffix Division Organization Hamilton College Address Clinton, NY, 13323, USA Email Abstract This chapter argues that the dilemmas that arise about the proper place of experience in knowledge are artefacts of a particular theory of mind and the contents of experience: what Alva Noë calls the "brain photoreceptor" model. By giving up this model, we can see that the critiques of experience that have been leveled by feminist theorists and allied anti-foundationalists lose some of their bite. I argue that a model of mind that assumes a fully embodied and active subject-as the brain photoreceptor model does not-does not run into the same conundrums about experience. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chapter 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience Marianne Janack Abstract This chapter argues that the dilemmas that arise about the proper place of experience in knowledge are artefacts of a particular theory of mind and the contents of experience: what Alva Noë calls the "brain photoreceptor" model. By giving up this model, we can see that the critiques of experience that have been leveled by feminist theorists and allied anti-foundationalists lose some of their bite. I argue that a model of mind that assumes a fully embodied and active subject-as the brain photoreceptor model does not-does not run into the same conundrums about experience. Introduction In ordinary discourse, the invocation of "experience" is a shorthand way of marking AQ1 a certain claim as epistemically privileged. "I know from experience that. . ." is often a way of offering argument-stopping evidence. In this respect, arguments from experience are offered to vindicate a position that is both perspectival and privileged, and that draws its authority from our pre-philosophic commitment to the reliability of first-hand sensory experience. An appeal to experience operates as a thick description: it captures not just a description of how I came to know something, but also carries with it a justification or evaluative charge. When I say, "I know from experience that will never work," I am describing the way I came to know something and, in the very same gesture, marking that source of knowledge as epistemically privileged-my knowledge is, so to speak, "first-hand," not subject to the deformations of translation, testimony, or interpretation. Its grounds are (assuming that I am a rational, autonomous being)1 given the imprimatur of authenticity and reliability. M. Janack (B) Hamilton College, Clinton, NY 13323, USA 1But see, for instance, Steven Shapin for an interesting analysis of the ways in which social position, gender, and class contributed to, or detracted from, one's status as a reliable "experiencer." C. Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics, Feminist Philosophy Collection, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1_10, C© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 M. Janack This ordinary sense of "experience" is often contrasted with theoretical knowledge, or knowledge that is justified by other beliefs I already accept.2 Foundationalism is the epistemology that is built on this understanding of experience. Foundationalism assumes that all of our knowledge claims are eventually traceable to something which is itself immediately justified, rather than immediately justified by other beliefs. Beliefs that are immediately justified might be a priori judgments (as in the case of Cartesian and Leibnizian rationalism) or they might be beliefs we hold on the basis of sense data or sense experience (as in the case of Lockean empiricism). The privileging of experience generally as a foundational ground can thus be seen as an aspect of modern empiricism. Yet, our post-Kuhnian theories of perception and experience seem to be reasons to reject this privileging. If we know anything about perception and experience, it seems that after Kuhn we know that there can never be an "innocent eye" that sees things as they are in and of themselves. According to post-Kuhnian doctrine, perception and experience are deeply indebted to theories, outlooks, paradigms, world-views or conceptual schemes (pick your favorite disciplinary metaphor here) and our views of the world are structured by those theoretical commitments. We do not see the world as it is-we see it only as it can show up for creatures like us, whose contact with the world is necessarily mediated through the thick interpretive lens of frames or theories. Like the appeal to experience as unimpeachable first-hand knowledge, our common, everyday understandings of experience have been influenced by this Kuhnian analysis as well. In addition, however, the Kuhnian analysis has provided feminist politics with a particular model of activism: a model in which recognizing the ways in which our experience of the world is shaped by our identities is an essential part of the political process. In a recent workshop I attended on teaching about race, class and gender issues, the moderator emphasized the value of trying to get students to adopt a different "perspective" or "mind-set" that would allow them to see the ways in which privilege operates to structure their experience of the world. Helping students to recognize the effects of class, race, or gender privilege is a process that must begin with getting them to take up a different perspective, according to the moderator, which will allow them to have different experiences of the world. Quoting from Joan Scott's essay "The Evidence of Experience", the moderator reminded us that "experience is always political." These two models of experience-the first, in which experience is understood as giving us authentic, reliable first-hand knowledge I will call the "Romantic" model, and the second, in which experience is taken to be theory-dependent I will call the "Kuhnian" model-create a particular dilemma for feminist theory and practice. This dilemma has, in turn, given rise to a skepticism about experience that co-habits uncomfortably with a feminist politics that has given experience a big role to play in grounding feminist demands. 2Williams (116–7) tracks the ways in which "experience" and "empiricism" are contrasted with "theoretical knowledge"-sometimes as an invocation of authenticity, sometimes as a way of condemning it as random or as "mere observation." U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience The claim that experience is always political is as close to a cornerstone of twentieth and twenty-first century feminist theory and politics as we are likely to come. Postmodernists, analytic feminists, pragmatist feminists, standpoint theorists, feminist phenomenologists-I think it is fair to say that none would object to the claim that experience is always political. But what does this claim amount to? To say that experience is always political is often taken to mean that we learn to see the world in certain kinds of ways that support certain kinds of political agendae, and that our experience of the world is an effect of the theories we already-consciously or unconsciously-accept. Such theories make us take notice of certain things and ignore others. According to this metaphysic of experience, our experiences of the world are interpretations of the world, not simply data we receive from "brute" reality, and are structured by-indeed, perhaps determined by-our "perspectives" on that world. These perspectives are themselves understood as the conceptual schemes that yield these interpretations of the world, which we often mistake for direct, unmediated apprehensions of reality. Perspectives are, in essence, theories that we learn, and that we mobilize in our attempts to know the world. They might also be called "worldviews." In this sense, the claim that experience is political amounts to a reiteration of the Kuhnian model of experience. But if we accept this metaphysic of experience, on what basis could we convince others to adopt this new and different-and, presumably, superior-"worldview," "perspective," or "conceptual scheme" of feminism or anti-racism? The challenge seems insurmountable, especially if their experiences of the world either explicitly contradict these constituent theoretical commitments ("Women just are worse than men at reasoning") or, minimally, fail to support them ("I've never seen any instances of sexism, and I've never been discriminated against, so what's the big deal?"). How would one get outside this closed loop? It seems that we do, in fact, escape that loop, at least some of us do some of the time. Accounts of feminist epiphanies constitute examples of such escapes. But if we aren't entirely enslaved by our worldviews, it seems that we would need some version of the Romantic model to explain how this can happen. And therein lies the dilemma: feminist politics seems to need both the Kuhnian and the Romantic models of experience. It seems that the only way to make it possible to have experiences of the world that testify to the presence of race, class, or gender privilege on the Kuhnian model is to take up a "perspective" or adopt a "conceptual scheme," "worldview," or "mind set" that accepts the thesis that there is such privilege, and which will in turn yield a different interpretation of the world that will confirm that thesis. In essence, it seems that in order to be willing to take up such a perspective, we must already, to some extent, accept it, or see it as a desirable perspective to adopt. But if, from the perspective of feminist politics, the experience of the marginalized is to serve as a catalyst for political change, and if that experience is to be taken to constitute an account of the world that reveals something true about the world-and that this perspective is superior to the perspective from which these facts are hidden-then it seems that we must have access to the type of experience posited by the Romantic model: experience that is true, authentic and to which our theories are answerable. This would be experience that can itself serve as an arbiter and a source of insight U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 M. Janack into the world independent of our "perspectives" or "worldviews." But the Kuhnian model of experience has, presumably debunked that model. Catherine MacKinnon offers consciousness-raising as a possible strategy for breaking out of this loop: "Through consciousness-raising, women grasp the collective reality of women's condition from within the perspective of that experience, not from outside it" (536), and "as its own kind of social analysis, within yet outside the male paradigm, just as women's lives are [consciousness-raising] has a distinctive theory of the relation between method and truth, the individual and her social surroundings" (535–6). The metaphor of "inside" versus "outside", and the invocation of feminism as the theory of "women's point of view" or "perspective" which lies somehow outside the male "paradigm" (535) is suggestive. MacKinnon wants to claim both that women's experience is an effect of our social position within patriarchy, and that there is something of the outsider that allows women to engage critically with that experience. Consciousness-raising is the attempt to reinterpret women's personal experiences and transform those experiences into a source of political insight, rather than understanding them as the purely personal and subjective experiences of a particular woman. What is it that women occupy? A "perspective" or a "point of view"-both ocular metaphors for a theoretical and political position. MacKinnon's analysis of women's social position seems to imply that women's perspective can constitute a critical perspective because it is both "inside" and "outside" of the patriarchal perspective or paradigm (these terms seem to be used interchangeably). Women's experience has its roots in the tension between being a part of the patriarchal order but also being excluded from it. This understanding of experience, with its echoes of authenticity and veridicality, seems to hearken back to Romantic notions of experience, and of women as a (natural?) class with greater access to this authenticity. But to the extent that women's experience is constructed by patriarchy, it is difficult to see how to make sense of that authenticity. MacKinnon's claims for women's experience, then, seem to appeal to both the Kuhnian and the Romantic accounts of experience in a way that is difficult to account for: women's experience is an effect of patriarchy, yet it can, at the same time, provide the resources for resisting patriarchy in virtue of its greater authenticity and its "outsider" status. We must have access to experience that is not determined by patriarchal paradigms, otherwise it would be hard to see how one might have experiences that "put the lie" to patriarchal interpretations. But for this to make sense, then women would have to either have access to Romantic experience, or, following the Kuhnian model, women would have to already have committed to a "feminist perspective" that would allow them to have the kinds of experiences that would put the lie to patriarchal interpretations. It might be tempting at this point to just pitch "experience" into the dustbin of outmoded terms and concepts, like "phlogiston" or "soul" or "the ether." Following out the theoretical consequences of the Kuhnian model of experience, Richard Rorty argues just that. Appeals to experience, and the epistemological machinery such appeals invoke, are wedded to a concept of mind as mirror, according to U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience Rorty. The model of mind as mirror, a model that Rorty attributes to Descartes,AQ2 encourages us to think of the subject of experience as a passive recipient of data. In John Dewey's words, it is part of a spectator theory of knowledge, in which knowledge has no-indeed ought to have no-constitutive connection to human interests or identity, and in which the subject of knowledge is ideally a passive spectator of the world. Similarly, this model assumes that the most objective subject is one whose "mirror" is relatively free of cultural or social influences; ideally, each mirror would be identical (and interchangeable) with any other mirror. Appeals to experience, then, are underwritten by the concept of the autonomous subject of liberal theory-an individual subject who exists as such prior to culture, and is, in this sense, a metaphysical posit. Thus, in the invocation of, and appeal to experience, we discover an assumption about the nature of individuals and subjects that emphasizes their status as ontologically given, and their social identities as either sources of bias, or as irrelevancies. The model of mind as mirror serves a particular political role, then, as well as framing a particular approach to epistemology. According to Rorty, we cannot free ourselves from this objectionable model of mind and identity if we continue to invoke "experience." Better to jettison the term entirely, Rorty thinks, or replace it with "discourse."3 But for feminists, this move seems to ignore the very important role that appeals to experience can play in feminist politics, and so to jettison "experience" as a concept in order to escape the model of mind as mirror-and the related versions of objectivity it supports-seems a rather high price to pay. Joan Scott and Louise Antony, for instance, both reject the model of mind as mirror, but neither feels compelled to jettison the term "experience" in the wake of that rejection. As I will show, however, the alternatives that Scott and Antony offer cannot solve the ideological dilemma posed by the Kuhnian and Romantic concepts of experience. This dilemma, it seems to me, is itself an artifact of a particular model of mind-"mind as interpreting machine"-which, even as it has promised to help us avoid particular problems having to do with objectivity, has had its own troublesome aspects. I shall begin with a discussion of anti-foundationalist critiques of traditional empiricism and the theory of mind that anti-foundationalists identify as supporting that tradition, but then argue that the discussion of experience we find in anti-foundationalist theorists ends up "linguistifying" experience and agency, as in the case of Scott's theory or, alternatively positing a priori a thin account of experience, as in Antony's theory. These moves represent a privileging of a particular model of objectivity, and a particular model of mind, that in combination give rise to the tension between the Romantic model of experience and the Kuhnian model. 3This exchange between Rorty and an interviewer is probably the clearest statement of Rorty's position. When asked what he thought of Dewey's theory of experience, Rorty replies: "I regard that as the worst part of Dewey. I'd be glad if he'd never written Experience and Nature." When the interviewer then asks whether a philosophy shorn of its model of truth as representation and its pursuit of the theory of knowledge might not need a theory of experience, Rorty replies, "I'd prefer 'discourse' to 'experience'." (As quoted in Mendieta 20) U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 M. Janack I offer an alternative, naturalistically-informed model of mind that takes agency as constitutive of mind and that offers the possibility of avoiding rather than solving, the ideological dilemma. Anti-foundationalism, Feminism and the Escape from the Model of Mind as Mirror In her very influential essay "The Evidence of 'Experience'" Scott draws on the Rortian attack on foundationalism and its theory of mind to critique feminist projects that put "experience" at the center of a programme for documenting women's experience or that appeal to experience as a grounding for political claims-such as MacKinnon's claims about consciousness-raising and women's experience. This critique has had significant influence in feminist theoretical circles. Among other things, Scott charges that projects or justifications that give a central place to experience tend to "naturalize" experience and the experiencing subject, trading on the idea of experience as a non-linguistic, asocial encounter with the world on the part of a subject who exists as such "naturally." Appeals to experience, then, are troublesome from an epistemological perspective, because of their complicity with foundationalism, but they also operate with an assumption about the ontological givenness of the subject of experience, and thereby disguise the ways in which subjectivity is an achievement, not an ontological given. Scott's claim against empiricist foundationalism and the accompanying Romantic model of experience can best be captured with a paraphrase of Simone de Beauvoir: one is not born a subject; one becomes a subject. Subjecthood in its political sense-related to concepts of social identity, agency, and power-is an achievement marked by the successful appropriation of certain kinds of skills and performances that mark identities and constitute existents as subjects with interior mental lives and perspectives. The correlate of this that Scott emphasizes is the role of language in the constitution of subjects of experience: one might say that the possibility of claiming "linguistic space" is essential to the constitution and achievement of subjectivity because only this allows others to recognize one as a locus of desires, motives, intentions and beliefs. The role of language, however, cannot be overemphasized in Scott's critique: not only is the possibility of claiming linguistic space essential to the status of subject, but experience, Scott claims, cannot be disentangled from its expression in language. Experience is not prior to language, but is constituted by it. Scott advances this position by elaborating on the role of discursivity in the constitution of subjects of experience.4 According to Scott, appeals to experience 4I realize that it can be frustrating to philosophers to encounter terms like "discursive" or "discursive practices" when they seem to have no clear referent. My interpretative strategy when I encounter these terms is to understand them as referring to the concrete context of reason-giving, discussion, and theory construction-that is, as concrete, particular instances of such practices. For anyone with a bent for logic, the idea of a universe of discourse might be a good entry point for U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience and the related project of making experience visible assume that experience and its meaning are prior to language and that language is put at the service of representing or expressing experience; in essence, Scott argues, the relationship between experience and language is taken to be one in which experience can be meaningful prior to its expression in language, and this assumption commits such a position to the idea of a pre-discursive autonomous subject. According to Scott this subject is, yet again, the liberal individual for whom matters of identity and identification are irrelevant, and for whom experience of the world is "natural" and unmediated, as opposed to "learned" or "constructed." Rorty's related claims about the role of linguistic innovation in the constitution of subjects make this position especially clear. According to Rorty's analysis of feminist politics and feminist rhetorical strategies, women's status as agents is a discursive effect, rather than a prior (metaphysical) truth that must be captured or represented accurately ("Feminism"). In claiming for women a new moral identity as agents, feminists have not unearthed a pre-existing truth that has been hidden by patriarchal ideology, Rorty argues; we have created that identity, rather than discovering it. Agency and autonomy, as defining characteristics of subjects, are cultural posits or constructions, according to Rorty and Scott. To be an agent is to be taken to be such, and the process of going from non-agent to agent is a process of persuasive redescription. The status of agent is not a metaphysical status. It cannot be established a priori.5 Status as an agent is conferred, and is itself a function of being interpreted as exercising agency. But appeals to experience, Rorty and Scott imply, are always in danger of invoking and reinforcing the idea of mind as mirror and of an autonomous individual who pre-exists the effects of culture and social learning. In addition to their tendency to reinforce a debunked metaphysics of agency and mind, appeals to experience are, for both Rorty and Scott, "ocularcentric." Vision and visibility are the dominant models for knowledge and with this model we invoke at the same time the model of mind as mirror and the conception of experience as veridical (ocular) representation.6 We are misled by this metaphor, Rorty argues, and Scott argues that feminist appeals to experience, and the correlative privileging of a metaphor of visibility mean that this metaphysics of subject and experience are still exerting their undesirable force. Just as subjects of experience are discursively constructed, objects of experience are also so constituted. Objects of experience and of knowledge are constituted by their roles in epistemic practices and regimes of knowledge. They are picked out by their descriptions under some vocabulary understanding how this term is used. Whether Scott means to invoke these meanings is not clear from the article, but it seems the most promising and sympathetic reading. 5See Scott: ". . .[S]ubjects do have agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them" (793). 6Scott has a further objection to this emphasis on visibility, drawn from Foucault's analysis of disciplinary practices. While this is an important aspect of her argument, it is not connected directly to the metaphysical issues that are my concern in this chapter. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 M. Janack or rubric. We might think that visual representation is the result of an encounter between the passive eye and the simple (and brute) object of vision, but Scott emphasizes the embeddedness of all objects and subjects in discursive practices, without which they would have no meaning. Thus, if we follow the anti-foundationalist lead that Rorty and Scott have laid out for us, we come to see that vision is not the passive in-take of information from the world an sich, since visual experience is mediated by theories, and thus by language. Visual experience is learned-it is not natural- and it is, essentially, discursive-that is, tied up in discourse and knowledge practices. While she agrees with Scott and Rorty in rejecting the model of mind as passive (and blank) screen onto which visual images are projected, Antony draws on cognitive science to make her case. Unlike Scott, Antony is not concerned that vision and experience might be overly "naturalized" in the model of mind as mirror, but that it is not naturalized enough. Antony argues for the epistemic value of "bias" by drawing on Quinean and Kuhnian arguments about the theory-dependence of experience and the naturalized approach to the mind that they implicitly (in the case of Quine, explicitly) mobilize. According to Antony, a naturalized approach to epistemology and philosophy of mind shows us that "far from being the streamlined, uncluttered logic machine of classical empiricism, the mind now appears to be much more like a bundle of highly specialized modules, each natively fitted for the analysis and manipulation of a particular body of sensory data" (137). Antony argues that the most objectionable aspects of "traditional" epistemology and philosophy of mind, from a feminist perspective, are the aspects of it that come down to us from classical empiricism, which assumed that the tabula rasa of the mind was written on only by experience, and any elements contributed by the mind itself would inevitably distort that experience and thereby undercut the possibility of objectivity and knowledge. In this respect, she and Rorty and Scott are fellow travelers; all three critique a model of mind and an allied version of empiricism that eschews any kind of in-put from the mind. And all three see the inevitability-and necessity-of such in-put as requiring a revision of that model. Drawing on Quine,7 Antony argues that we cannot have knowledge of the world without "bias": A completely 'open mind' confronting the sensory evidence we confront could never manage to construct the rich systems of knowledge we construct in the short time we take to construct them: from the point of view of an unbiased mind, the human sensory flow contains both too much information and too little: too much for the mind to generate all the logical possibilities, and too little for it to decide among even the relatively few that are generated. (137) Experience, according to this naturalized approach, is a thin dribble of sensory in-put from the world that is insufficient for the task of producing knowledge of the world; to produce full-blooded knowledge of the word we must draw inferences 7This is another respect in which Antony and Rorty (but not Scott) are fellow travelers; both take themselves to be drawing out the consequences of a Quinean critique of classical empiricism. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience or come up with explanations (for ourselves) of that in-put. Since the possible explanations of in-put are underdetermined by that in-put in virtue of its thinness, then we must furnish the rest from our other cognitive resources. Those resources are, to a certain extent, theoretical (and discursive), but they are also, to a certain extent, hard-wired into the brain, according to Antony. The theoretical resources are what Antony captures in her discussion of "worldviews" (139): analogous to scientific paradigms, worldviews give us a common language, shared mores and values, and a common ground for starting inquiry. According to Antony, worldviews do some of the work of simplifying and streamlining cognitive tasks, but, contra Rorty and Scott's version of anti-foundationalism, they do not do all the work. When Antony speaks of the mind as a bundle of highly specialized modules, or of the role that native conceptual structure (137) plays in helping us to process information about the world, she is drawing on the approach to cognitive science pioneered by people like Jerry Fodor, who argue that the physical structure of the brain-its modules-make certain kinds of cognitive short-cuts possible, and that the organizing function of such modules is what allows experience to be intelligible to a subject. One might justifiably ask what Antony's approach has in common with Rorty's and Scott's, other than an appeal to Kuhnian analyses of paradigms, a commitment to anti-foundationalism, and a theory of vision and the subject in which that subject brings something of her own to her visual encounters with the world. After all, one might object, Antony embraces the results of naturalistic investigations into the brain and mind to argue against the Romantic model of experience and the model of mind as mirror, while Scott and Rorty seem to prefer to take up dramatically different weapons, viz.: the idea of experience and subjects as discursively constructed, and what we might think of as an "externalized" model of mind. Rorty shares with Antony an enthusiasm for Quine, it's true, and that might be said to have trickled down to Scott, but still the fact of the matter is that, other than a thin veneer of agreement on the fact that experience is "theory-dependent," the route that Antony follows would seem to be a violation of the dictum laid down by Scott that "feminists shall not naturalize." In that respect, it would seem that the differences between Scott and Antony constitute an unbridgeable gulf. However, what they share is perhaps more important than what they do not. Scott and Antony search for a way to reframe experience that does not invoke foundationalist assumptions about the subject of experience. Vision is, according to Rorty and Scott, the organizing metaphor for knowledge and mind that animates foundationalism. They object to this privileging of vision because vision seems to be a passive faculty, in which information from the world is passively absorbed and, ideally, reflected without distortion in the mirror of nature-the mind. Antony does not take up the issue of whether the model of visual knowledge is appropriate for understanding our attempts to know the world generally, but she does, with Scott and Rorty, take issue with the model of mind and perception she sees as animating the marriage of classical empiricism and foundationalism. While Rorty and Scott emphasize the role of language in the constitution of experience and mind, Antony emphasizes the role that theory (closely allied to, if not necessarily identical with, language) U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 M. Janack and brain modularity play in helping us come to know the world through experience. The commitment to elaborating a model of mind and the knowing subject that eschews the model of mind as passive is a deep similarity: the mechanism for establishing the non-passivity of mind for Scott is language and discursive practices. Recognition of the role these play in the construction of subjects and experience should lead us to give up the model of mind as an interior space or canvas on which experience writes. For Antony the mechanisms of non-passivity are theories and brain structure. While "mechanism of non-passivity" might seem a cumbersome and ugly stylistic choice on my part, I have a reason for not equating these "mechanisms of non-passivity" with activity and agency, as I will show in the next section. In the next section I will argue that the approach to the problem of experience that we find in Scott and Antony represents a particular model of objectivity, one that essentially eviscerates the concept of experience. This model of objectivity is captured both by the linguistifying move that Scott makes in her appeal to discursive practices and the externalized model of mind they give rise to, and by Antony's appeal to cognitive science and its characterization of experience as a type of thin in-put to a visual system which must then do something with it to come up with the meaningfulness of states of affairs. In each case, however, we lose the robust model of experience that characterizes the Romantic model of experience, and to which feminist politics appeals. This might seem to be the price we must pay to escape the mode of mind as mirror. But the escape from the hall of mirrors need not lead us to cede the term "experience" or replace it with a thin imitation of what it once was. Recognizing agency and the first-person perspective as essential aspects of mind provide us with other options. Impersonal and First-Person Perspectives: Critical Positions Versus Avowals Viewed from the third-person perspectives of the anthropologist, the historian, or the sociologist, the analysis of experience is an opportunity to learn about how a subject understands her world: what she takes to be important, how she organizes that world, and how those understandings are deployed in explanation. But from this perspective, experiences are treated as "experiences": they are merely data points, or phenomena in need of explanation. The scare quotes imply a certain ironic stance, as we see in the title of Scott's essay. Scare-quote experiences are not taken at face value as revealing the world as it is, but as revealing the way that a particular subject interprets her world. The challenge that arises for the historian, the anthropologist, or the sociologist in understanding how the personal (first-person) and impersonal (third person) perspectives on a given experience or experiences relate to each other is the challenge of grappling with an irreducibly personal phenomenon (experience) from an impersonal perspective ("experience"). Yet, when viewed from the impersonal perspective, the grounds of experience's epistemic U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience and rhetorical authority threaten to slip away-its veridicality can be called into question, its theoretical grounds or constitutive frameworks viewed and criticized.8 The impersonal perspective is, essentially, a critical or ironic position. Taking up this critical position with respect to our experiences, however, is itself an achievement.9 It is, in essence, the stance of objectivity and critical distance, but this stance also seems to threaten with evaporation the very phenomena it seeks to critique: in taking up a third-person perspective toward our own experiences (and those of others) we do not necessarily commit ourselves to the theories or frameworks that inform and shape that experience-we hold those experiences at a distance, so to speak, without avowing the truth of their deliverances. Experience becomes "experience"-no longer carrying with it the presumption of veridicality or the assumption of a revelation from an objective world, and shorn of its subjective bases.10 From the critical perspective, we see the mind as an interpreting machine, processing in-put from the world, but for the subject of these "experiences" the activity of the interpreting machinery must remain unacknowledged. From the impersonal perspective we have only "experience"; it is only the first-person perspective that can give us non-ironic, no-scare-quotes experience. This asymmetry between the third-person and first-person perspectives manifests itself in our analyses of agency as well; while the critical perspective views the subject's "experience" as data points-as providing us with information about how the subject interprets the world-the out-put of that interpretation, when viewed from this perspective, can only be behavior, rather than agency. Agency is itself something that is essentially constituted from the first-person perspective; it is a way of understanding behavior that necessarily invokes the trappings and presupposition of subjecthood.11 Viewed from the third-person perspective, agency can be inferred or imputed, but in taking up a third-person perspective toward some being, I am at the same time viewing that being as an object-that is, as a non-subject. The sideways-on view of a person, or of a set of beliefs, is then different from the first-person perspective that has as its essential ingredient agency, and which 8Edward Bruner reflecting on his own discipline of anthropology says: "Traditionally, anthropologists have tried to understand the world as seen by the 'experiencing subject,' striving for an inner perspective. . .[but] we systematically remove the personal and the experiential in accordance with our anthropological paradigms; then we reintroduce them so as to make our ethnographies more real, alive" (Turner and Bruner 9). 9See, for instance, John McDowell and Wilfred Sellars, both of whom argue that the ability to distance ourselves from our experiences is an achievement that is associated with an "objective stance." Critical distancing from experience is also a hallmark of rationality in some moral theories that place a high value on reflective equilibrium as a model for reasoning. 10Kwame Anthony Appiah (60) makes a similar argument about the ways in which third-person and first-person stances interact with attributions of agency. 11See, for instance, Moran and a slightly orthogonal, but still relevant argument in Dennett (254–5) where he argues that I cannot but see myself as a person, and thus as a subject, in Scott's terminology. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 496 497 498 499 500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540 M. Janack avows certain beliefs or commitments. In the case of both experience and agency, the first-person perspective is essential to the constitution of these concepts. The third-person perspective that Scott's account privileges-the perspective of critical distance and objectivity-threatens with dissolution these concepts-experience and agency-since the first-person perspective from which they are avowed nonironically is itself taken to be a discursive effect; an effect that is essentially third-person. Appeals to experience (as in the case of the Romantic model of experience) and anti-foundationalist critiques of these appeals (as in the Kuhnian model) are caught in this conflict between the third-person "objective" or critical stance and the first-person stance of avowal. For the anti-foundationalist the conflict is resolved in favor of the impersonal, critical stance-the stance of objectivity. The objective stance that Scott and Rorty privilege is also inconsistent with attributions of agency, since taking up the impersonal perspective is just that perspective that is constituted by exiling agency. To see oneself or others from the impersonal (or third-person) perspective is just to interpret them as behaving, rather than as acting, since the intentions that would make something an action rather than a mere behavior are invisible from the third-person perspective. Viewed impersonally from the third-person perspective intentions can only be imputed or inferred on the basis of other behaviors (including testimonies). The anti-foundationalist premises from which Rorty and Scott derive their claims about experience and to which they appeal in arguing that agency is conferred would be expected to deliver these verdicts on experience and agency because we can get only "experience" and behavior when we take up this critical position. But, in the attempt to avoid the model of mind as mirror, Rorty and Scott replace it with a model of mind as interpreting machine that "outputs" behavior. Antony's version of anti-foundationalism also exiles agency from her account, but does so by focusing on cognitive modularity and "worldviews." Antony, like Scott, offers an essentially third-person approach to the subject and agent, where experience becomes "experience." Unlike Rorty and Scott, however, Antony explicitly elaborates the concept of experience as thin in-put to a visual system which then works with that thin in-put, contributing resources from its cognitive resources (worldviews, paradigms, theories and cognitive modularity) to produce for the experiencing subject a world of states of affairs, three-dimensional objects, and meaningfulness. But the assumption that experience is the thin in-put to the interpreting machine that is the mind is an a priori commitment to a story about what experience must be like according to the model that Antony advocates, rather than a thoroughly naturalistic version of experience. It is one way of approaching mind naturalistically, it is true, but the naturalistic stance that takes seriously the phenomenological aspects of experience is also viable, as we shall see, and allows us to preserve some of what is valuable in the Romantic model of experience. Models serve certain kinds of research purposes-they delineate a field of study and provide methods and simulacra for the target of investigation. The model of mind as interpreting machine has provided solutions to pressing problems in cognitive science. But the ideological dilemma that presents itself in feminist politics as the dilemma U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 556 557 558 559 560 561 562 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575 576 577 578 579 580 581 582 583 584 585 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience of interpreting our social experiences, and the relationship of our gendered/raced identities to those interpretations, might be an arena for which the model is unsuited. One of the virtues of the model of mind as mirror and the Romantic model of experience that accompanied it was its ability to fold the first-person aspect of experience into mentality. Not only did it preserve the phenomenological aspects of experience, but it also helped explain the persuasiveness of experience to the experiencing subject. Scott, Rorty and Antony begin with models of mind that privilege "scientific" or third-person approaches to mind-in the case of Scott and Rorty, the model is primarily drawn from the social sciences, in Antony's case from cognitive science-that are essentially antithetical to the development of a robust concept of experience, since these models have exiled the first-person and phenomenological aspects of experience in an attempt to overcome the problems with the Romantic model of experience and the model of mind as mirror. The problem of experience as we find it posed in the dilemma between the insights of anti-foundationalism and the desire to salvage something of experience as a way of coming to know the world-between the Kuhnian and the Romantic models of experience-is a relic of a priori assumptions about the mind, sense experience, and our attempts to know the world that assume that the vehicle of meaningfulness for our interactions with the world is theory and language, and that the non-passivity of the mind must be attributed not to a fundamental agency, but to theories or brain structures that essentially project meaning onto the world. The model of mind that Scott, Rorty, and Antony are assuming is that of mind as an information processing system or interpreting machine, where theories or "perspectives" are taken to be the software or "instructions" according to which in-put from the world is processed. Antony adds as well the "hardware" of modularity to this story. But putting agency at the center of our account of mind fundamentally reorients the issue, and gives us a different way to understand knowledge, mind, and the constitution of subjects. I think this shift can be justified on the basis of both its "naturalistic" credentials and its promise for allowing us to evade the dilemma that is posed by the model of mind and experience that we have inherited from this branch of anti-foundationalism. A different model of mind can displace this dilemma. Agency and Models of the Mind Before going further with the argument, I should explain the role that models play in theorizing about the mind, since it is my contention that at the heart of the ideological dilemma is the assumption that we must choose between two opposing models of mind, one of which has been debunked (the mind as mirror) and the other of which has been forced upon us by advances in theory and science. Models, according to Joseph Rouse, like simulacra "[mimic] features of the world which interest us in an object that we can manipulate in different ways than we can manipulate the things simulated" (Engaging Science 227). Models are stand-ins for the target of scientific investigation: minds, atoms, hurricanes, or the trajectory of a flying golf U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598 599 600 601 602 603 604 605 606 607 608 609 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617 618 619 620 621 622 623 624 625 626 627 628 629 630 M. Janack ball can all be targets of investigation via computer models, mathematical models, or in some cases, pictorial models.12 The distinction between metaphor of mind and model of mind is blurry in the discussion of experience, however. While models are used in scientific research, the feminist discussion of experience seems to be as much a part of our common, everyday language as it is a problem for science,13 and yet the two domains overlap. The spillover of scientific models into the non-scientific discourses of mind and experience may be one of the things that distinguishes present-day psychology from present-day physics; while most nonphysicists still resort to and privilege folk physics in their interactions with the world, folk psychology has been interwoven with scientific psychology as well as with social scientific models in accounts of behavior. Models are important to scientific research programmes because they make certain aspects of the target of investigation more perspicuous, but the cost of that level of resolution is that other characteristics of the target object are obscured, or vanish altogether. When models are taken up in everyday political discourse, their role as model-and the pragmatic ground of that role-is often forgotten: models are then assumed to be simply descriptions of the entity in question. Scott is correct when she says that the objects of experience and of knowledge are discursively constructed-and this is nowhere so evident as it is in the discussion of mind and experience itself. The discursive construction of mind and experience has been the effect primarily of the overlap between our "everyday" need to understand others and ourselves with the discourses of anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and other branches of scientific psychology. While the models of mind we have adopted from the social sciences and from scientific psychology have helped solve certain problems, they have given rise to other problems-in particular the ideological dilemma. But the problem is that the ideological dilemma is not just a narrowly defined scientific puzzle-it is also, for feminist politics and theory, an important aspect of political life and engagement. The model of mind as mirror and the Romantic model of experience gave rise to certain problems to which the model of mind as interpreting machine provides answers. In some cases, the introduction of the model of mind as interpreting machine actually led to the dissolution of old problems (e.g., the missing shade of blue). But the model of mind as interpreting machine requires that we exile from our account of mind the phenomenological aspects of experience, including the essentially first-person character of experience and agency that was a central component of the Romantic model of experience and of mind as mirror. A particular model of objectivity seemed to dictate this exile, but that model seems to have its own drawbacks when we try to use it for feminist 12Unlike paradigms, however, models are models in virtue of being taken up in scientific practices, and are themselves more objects in the world. For an informative discussion, see (Rouse, Engaging Science 227–30). 13My use of the term "science" in this chapter is meant to include not just the natural and physical sciences, but also the behavioral and social sciences. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 631 632 633 634 635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience political purposes: it gives rise to the ideological dilemma. The ideological dilemma itself may be dissolved by adopting a different model of mind.14 Recent developments in empirical psychology have questioned the value of the "input-output" (or "interpreting machine," as I have been calling it) model of mind, in which sensory data is the in-put from the world to the mind while action is the output of mind to the world. The "enactive theory of mind" fundamentally re-orients the conflict between first-person and third-person approaches to agency and experience that constitutes the feminist intellectual inheritance of the struggle between the Romantic and the Kuhnian models of experience. By placing agency and practical activity at the nexus of mind and world, the enactive theory of mind can preserve the meaningfulness of experience to its subject without reverting to the model of a passive and disembodied mind that mirrors the world. Much of the motivation for Antony's naturalistic account of the theorydependence of perception comes from her commitment to the characterization of sensory experience as "thin"-a conception that comes from Quine, who himself borrows it from the going psychological theories of the mid-twentieth century. According to Irving Rock's summary of theories of perception, the dominant approaches to explaining sense perception share a commitment to a model of sensory experience as a thin (proximal) stimulus provided by the "optical array," which is itself furnished by brute physical objects in interaction with sources of light (the distal stimulus). While different schools might disagree over the mechanism for producing meaningful representations out of the thin stimulus of the optical array, none of the dominant computational models questions the assumption that the in-put is "thin" (Rock, 12). Alva Noë calls this the "brain-photoreceptor" model of mind, in which the in-put available to the experiencing subject is analogous to that which is available to a camera, and the brain then "processes" that thin in-put to produce, from two-dimensional images, a world of three-dimensional objects. The most striking thing from a feminist perspective about this model of the brain-photoreceptor and the concomitant assumption that sensory in-put is thin- analogous to the information available, in essence, to a camera-is the absence of an embodied and active subject of experience. The alternative offered to us by cognitive science on which Antony draws does not seem to solve matters very much. While some cognitive scientists (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson) have bemoaned the absence of a body in philosophical theories of mind, the body that is usually incorporated in an attempt to correct that error is only a brain, or perhaps a brain in a bodyschemata. This remains true of the model of mind as interpreting machine-both in its cognitive science guise, and in its linguistified guise. 14I hasten to add that I am not arguing that we ought to give up the model of mind as interpreting machine entirely-clearly, models have pragmatic value for solving certain kinds of problems in psychology. What I would argue, though, is that we make a mistake when we take that model of mind to be a description of what the mind and experience really are, rather than understanding that model as a problem-solving tool. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 676 677 678 679 680 681 682 683 684 685 686 687 688 689 690 691 692 693 694 695 696 697 698 699 700 701 702 703 704 705 706 707 708 709 710 711 712 713 714 715 716 717 718 719 720 M. Janack The discussion of the political nature of experience as we find that in the move to replace "experience" with "discourse" and in discussions of identity has not fared much better in including the body in its conceptual grounding. The critique of subjectivity that we find in Scott (and, to a certain extent, in Judith Butler) has taken as its primary lens of analysis the linguistic/discursive aspects of experience. The problem with this approach is that it tends to miss the fact that discursive practices are also constituted by material practices-they are not merely linguistic in nature.15 Linda Martín Alcoff, Sonia Kruks, and Paula Moya have been critical of these approaches for this very reason: they see in Scott's approach (and the related approach to experience that we find in Butler) a failure to appreciate the nondiscursive aspects of experience, including the material basis of embodied identity and agency. While Alcoff, Linda Martín, Kruks, and Moya draw on the existential and phenomenological philosophical traditions, the enactive theory of mind focuses on experimental evidence to do essentially the same thing. For the enactivist, perception is a bodily-based "skillful activity," rather than the processing of neutral in-put. As we saw earlier, part of the goal of the anti-foundationalists is to show that the mind is not a blank and passive recipient of neutral data from the world; Scott's analysis focuses on the ways in which experience is not a thin, neutral in-put from the world, but is, rather, "discursively constructed"; Antony's approach is to accept the premise that the in-put is thin and neutral, but to emphasize the way that the experiencing subject gets interpretive help in giving that in-put meaning from paradigms, worldviews, and brain structure. Yet the Kuhnian analysis of experience they offer lends itself to skepticism about the possibility of experiences revealing to us a world that is independent of our pre-conceived theories or "paradigms." The possibility of genuinely revelatory experiences and the phenomenological, first-person attachment to this is offered by the Romantic model of experience that underwrites feminist appeals to experience, but this model seems wedded to the model of mind as mirror. Given that feminist political practice seems to support both the revelatory potential of experience and the commitment to a conception of experience as "educable" through political engagement, we must look beyond the dominant model of mind as interpreting machine and the assumption that identities can be cashed out in the highly theoretical-and intellectualized-terms of "worldviews." Understanding perception as a type of skillful activity, where such activity is substantially embodied, not merely a brain process, allows us to preserve aspects of both the Kuhnian and the Romantic models of experience and evade the ideological dilemma. The idea that we directly perceive, rather than infer, the characteristics of our environment as affording us certain opportunities for action (Gibson 127) is central to the ecological approach to sensory perception, and is adopted by contemporary philosophers of mind who advocate the enactivist model of mind. Both reject the a priori assumption that sensory experience is thin by resituating the mind as an 15See, for instance, Alcoff, Linda Martín (Real 121–6) and Rouse ("Understanding" 449–51). U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 721 722 723 724 725 726 727 728 729 730 731 732 733 734 735 736 737 738 739 740 741 742 743 744 745 746 747 748 749 750 751 752 753 754 755 756 757 758 759 760 761 762 763 764 765 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience embodied aspect of a subject of experience who is actively engaged in interacting with the world, not merely as a brain-photoreceptor system, but as a walking, talking, exploring and curious agent. Perception is conceptually and developmentally linked to agency. Gibson introduced the idea of "affordances" to capture what it is that we directly perceive when we perceive a state of affairs, and to offer an alternative to the assumption that experience is thin. Gibson connects his own theory to that of the gestaltists who, he argues, rightly recognized that the meaningfulness and value of objects seems to be directly perceived: "The accepted theories of perception, to which the gestalt theorists were objecting, implied that no experiences were direct except sensations and that sensations mediated all other kinds of experience. Bare sensations had to be clothed with meaning" (140). The way the gestaltists tried to explain the direct perception of meaningfulness and value, according to Gibson, was by postulating the existence of a "phenomenal object" as distinct from the physical object. The gestaltists explained the seeming immediacy and directness of the perception of value and meaningfulness as the result of the interaction between the ego and the phenomenal object. Gibson argues that we can preserve the phenomenology of the immediacy of perception by foregrounding an animal or organism's active engagement with, and perception of, the environment. Affordances, then, "afford" the organism in question with possibilities for action-possibilities that are both embodied and culturally enriched. For the gestaltists, "it was the phenomenal postbox that invited letter-mailing, not the physical postbox. But this duality is pernicious. I prefer to say that the real postbox (the only one) affords letter-mailing to a letter-writing human in a community with a postal system. This fact is perceived when the postbox is identified as such. . . ." (139). The "worldview" within which letter-writing and letter-mailing are possible, and in which we can see the affordances of a postbox, is not encoded in a theory, but in a way of acting in the world that is both culturally variable, learned, and, for all that, not modeled on a disembodied perspective the characteristics of which are encoded in language or theories. The perceiver in this case sees what can be done with the postbox, and that affordance is directly and immediately perceived when one sees the postbox as such. Perception is a skillful activity and always involves the possibility for action and use. In addition, the ecological approach to perception, and the enactivist theory of mind that builds on it, emphasize that the world is not a cabinet full of neutral objects, but is rather a world full of meaning-affordances-that are taken up by perceiving, active agents as possibilities for action. Objects are directly perceived as meaningful to agents, understood as embodied subjects for whom action is an essential ingredient in coming to know the world.16 The dilemma that seems to press so hard on feminist politics-the conundrum of how we can have transformative political experiences that are not mere projections of our going theories-is a dilemma that we've inherited from traditional 16Sheets-Johnstone gives a good overview of the evidence for the centrality of agency to selfconsciousness, and Hurley argues that it is essential to the unity of perception. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 766 767 768 769 770 771 772 773 774 775 776 777 778 779 780 781 782 783 784 785 786 787 788 789 790 791 792 793 794 795 796 797 798 799 800 801 802 803 804 805 806 807 808 809 810 M. Janack theories of mind and perception. The dilemma arises as a result of thinking that the vehicles of meaning must be theories of some sort, or theories plus brain structure (on the Kuhnian conception of experience in conjunction with the model of mind as interpreting machine) or that experience constitutes mental images that are projected onto an internal screen, and carry their meanings as such images (as on the Romantic conception of experience in conjunction with the mind as mirror model). According to the enactive model of mind, mind is not just "in the head"-it has intentional relations with the external world-but it is also developed through practical engagement with a world that is not sharply distinguished from the cultural practices in which human beings engage. The line between the "natural" world and the "cultural" world is blurry. At the same time, however, these cultural practices do not entirely dictate the affordances of objects, since, as in Gibson's example, a postbox can be either an opportunity to mail a letter or, in other instances, an annoying thing that the snowplow tends to knock down every winter. States of affairs and objects remain open to new and different possibilities as our practical engagement with the world shifts and morphs. Furthermore, contrary to Rorty's and Scott's claims, our understanding of experience as veridical need not invoke a "spectator theory" of knowledge; attention to a naturalistic account of sense perception reveals that sense perception is essentially active, but need not, on that account, be understood as the product of interpretation or inference. Meaning need not be created or discovered on this model, since it is both created and discovered, to some extent. So, while Scott argues that the problem with our concept of experience is that it leads us to "naturalize" experience and the subject as agent, the problem seems to be that we have not naturalized experience and the agential basis of subjectivity enough. The enactivist approach has the virtue of taking seriously a first-person perspective on our engagement with the world, allowing us to reconstruct the developmental and phenomenological aspects of our attempts to know the world, and yet it does not require the assumption of a transcendental subject that is the metaphysical conduit of agency. Agency is, indeed, "imputed" or inferred in this model, but that agency is simply the practical activity of reaching for things, grasping them, using them and understanding them in relation to their potential for such activity. This is not the metaphysical agency to which Scott and Rorty object; it is a naturalized agency in a different sense-drawn from our own observations of the world and our recognition of the relatively seamless integration of subjective states and a world of objects that are encountered as meaningful. Conclusion What I hope to have shown is that the assumption that subjectivity is achieved, paired with the idea that experience is educable, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that we can only "see"-metaphorically and actually-what we already believe. In this respect, I hope to have clarified some of the issues at stake in the claim that experience is always "political." In addition, I hope to have made a U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 811 812 813 814 815 816 817 818 819 820 821 822 823 824 825 826 827 828 829 830 831 832 833 834 835 836 837 838 839 840 841 842 843 844 845 846 847 848 849 850 851 852 853 854 855 10 The Politics and the Metaphysics of Experience case for moving beyond an a prioristic approach to the analysis of experience, an approach that seems to assume that our only choices for an analysis of experience are limited to a model in which we accept experience as "given" and subjectivity as an ontological primitive or brute (the Romantic model), or a model in which we understand experience as theory-laden, and subjective projection as inescapable (the Kuhnian model). What we need, in truth, as feminists and philosophers, is a different approach to the old problem of mind, one that understands mind as embodied, agential, and responsive to the problems that present themselves as we try to be politically and responsibly engaged in the world. Acknowledgement I'd like to thank Elizabeth Potter, Mary Varney Rorty, Alice Sowaal, David Stump, Ásta Sveinsdóttir, and Shelley Wilcox for very useful conversations about this chapter, and the opportunity to present it to them at the Bay Area Feminist Philosophy Colloquium in May, 2008. I'd also like to thank Charlotte Witt for her very helpful comments on an earlier draft, and Louise Antony with whom I had several interesting conversations about the issues raised by theories of mind. Work Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. Real Knowing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Alcoff, Linda Martín. "Phenomenology, Post-Structuralism, and Feminist Theory on the Concept of Experience." Feminist Phenomenology. Ed. L. Fisher. Dordecht, NL: Kluwer, 2000. 39–56. Antony, Louise. "Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology." A Mind of One's Own (2nd edition). Eds. L. Antony and C. Witt. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. 110–153. Appiah, Kwame A. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Dennett, Daniel. "Mechanism and Responsibility." Brainstorms. Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978. 233–255.AQ3 Fodor, Jerry. "Observation Reconsidered." Philosophy of Science 51.1 (1984): 23–43. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Hurley, Susan. Consciousness in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Kruks, Sonia. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999. MacKinnon, Catherine. "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory." Signs 7.3 (1982): 515–544. McDowell, John. Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Mendieta, Eduardo. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews With Richard Rorty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Moran, Richard. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Moya, Paula. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Rock, Irving. Perception. New York, NY: Scientific American Books, 1984. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rorty, Richard. "Feminism and Pragmatism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 202–227. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 856 857 858 859 860 861 862 863 864 865 866 867 868 869 870 871 872 873 874 875 876 877 878 879 880 881 882 883 884 885 886 887 888 889 890 891 892 893 894 895 896 897 898 899 900 M. Janack Rouse, Joseph. Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Rouse, Joseph. "Understanding Scientific Practices: Cultural Studies of Science as a Philosophical Program." The Science Studies Reader. Ed. M. Biagioli. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. 442–456. Scott, Joan. "The Evidence of Experience" Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 773–797. Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. "Phenomenology and Agency." Models of the Self. Eds. S. Gallagher and J. Shear. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1999. 231–251. Turner, Victor and Edward Bruner. The Anthropology of Experience. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1983. Additional Readings Brandom, Robert. Articulating Reasons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hein, Alan and Held, Richard. "Movement-Produced Stimulation in the Development of Visually Guided Behavior." Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56.5 (1963): 872–876. Jacob, Pierre and Marc Jeannerod. Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003. James, William. "The Will to Believe." The Writings of William James. Ed. J. J. McDermott. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1896–1977. Kuhn, Thomas. The Essential Tension. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984. U N C O R R E C TE D P R O O F SPB-161936 Chapter ID 10 September 21, 2010 Time: 09:49am Proof 1 901 902 903 904 905 906 907 908 909 910 911 912 913 914 915 916 917 918 919 920 921 922 923 924 925 926 927 928 929 930 931 932 933 934 935 936 937 938 939 940 941 942 943 944 945 This is an Author Query Page Integra Chapter 10 Q. No. Query AQ1 Please provide e-mail id for "Marianne Janack". AQ2 Does this need to make explicit which work of Rorty's from the Works Cited list? AQ3 If possible please provide editor details for "Dennett, 1978"