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Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism and the distinctiveness problem

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Abstract

Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism (PDE) holds the following thesis: if \(S\) has a perceptual experience that \(p\), then \(S\) has immediate prima facie evidential justification for the belief that \(p\) in virtue of the experience’s phenomenology. The benefits of PDE are that it (a) provides an undemanding view of perceptual justification that allows most of our ordinary perceptual beliefs to be justified, and (b) accommodates two important internalist intuitions, viz. the New Evil Demon Intuition and the Blindsight Intuition. However, in the face of a specific version of the Sellarsian dilemma, PDE is ad hoc. PDE needs to explain what is so distinct about perceptual experience that enables it to fulfill its evidential role without being itself in need of justification. I argue that neither an experience’s presentational phenomenology, nor its phenomenal forcefulness can be used to answer this question, and that prospects look dim for any other phenomenalist account. The subjective distinctness of perceptual experience might instead just stem from a higher-order belief that the experience is a perceptual one, but this will only serve to strengthen the case for externalism: externalism is better suited to provide an account of how we attain justified higher-order beliefs and can use this account to accommodate the Blindsight Intuition.

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Notes

  1. Note that Huemer and Chudnoff also allow other seemings (e.g. memorial, intuitive) besides perceptual experiences to play this role.

  2. See Lyons (2008) for more on the distinction.

  3. Note that Conee and Feldman (2004) think otherwise: they think it is overly restrictive to exclude experiences and feelings of confidence from acting as evidence even if they do not have propositional content. As it is not necessary to think of experience as evidentially justifying perceptual belief, I believe the burden of proof is on them to show that non-propositional evidential justification makes sense. Moreover, feelings of confidence might be able to act as evidence only because they are reducible to higher-order beliefs (see Sect. 3 for related considerations).

  4. Note that I do not present the dogmatist thesis as “necessarily, if it perceptually seems to you that \(p\), then you thereby possess some prima facie justification for believing that \(p\)”. Although some dogmatists explicitly subscribe to this latter thesis (e.g.,Tucker 2010), the necessity claim is left out in the original formulation of the thesis by Pryor (2000).

  5. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

  6. See Comesaña (2010) for a version of evidentialist reliabilism that might be compatible with dogmatism.

  7. This last condition might actually be problematic. For instance, Huemer says the following about the basing relation: “when one apprehension, B, is based on another, A, A causes B because A (apparently) logically supports B” (2001, p. 56). This suggests that a subject needs to recognize, or think he recognizes, that an experience supports a certain belief for his belief to be based on that experience. And this seems too demanding for unsophisticated agents.

  8. A reliabilist dogmatist experientialism would also be able to accommodate this intuition due to the lack of evidence on the part of the subject. But that view is closed off from the specific reply to the New Evil Demon Intuition that I sketch in the final section.

  9. Note that this does not deny that blindsighters may have indirect justification by inference from what is happening around the blind spot.

  10. Maybe imagination is a possible evidential justifier in cases where one imagines that something is the case to ‘see’ what would happen. However, the cases I’m concerned with are ones in which one simply imagines that \(p\).

  11. Notice that this latter question is not adequately dealt with by claiming that experiences provide non-inferential justification, as this does little more than giving a name to the unexplained phenomenon.

  12. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me to include this problem to clarify my own proposal.

  13. Note that this does not deny Pryor’s claim that it’s not enough for prima facie justification to think you have the phenomenology (Pryor 2004, p. 357). I’m envisaging a situation in which a higher-order belief actually gives rise to the necessary phenomenology.

  14. Chris Tucker (2010, p. 530) mentions a similar property of ‘assertiveness’, and Tolhurst (1998, pp. 300–301) talks of the property of ‘presence’.

  15. Although this is not so easy to determine, as the ‘Perky effect’ nowadays refers in psychology to the general interference of imagination on perception. Although it is implausible to explain this general effect by appealing to confusion of perception with imagination, in a specific instance (viz., the 1910 Perky experiment) this confusion might still take place.

  16. Cf. Reeves and Craver-Lemley (2012, p. 7): “An [attractive] alternative hypothesis is that the Perky effect results from a combination of real and imagined features that makes the real features more difficult to extract.”

  17. One reviewer pointed out that I have not considered the possibility that there might be experiences that have the phenomenal feature normally sufficient for justificatory power (F), but that also have another feature (G) which blocks F’s making the state into a justifier. Although I acknowledge that I have not ruled out this possibility, I think it is up to the defender of PDE of working out its details to make it into a plausible theory.

  18. An anonymous referee provided this suggestion.

  19. At the end of the day, this is an empirical question, but I contend that it is not even phenomenologically apt to claim that we usually identify experiences on the basis of their phenomenology.

  20. There is some evidence that this source-monitoring mechanism is not as reliable in at least some cases of actual hallucinators, such as schizophrenics and Parkinson’s patients (Barnes et al. 2003; Simons et al. 2006).

  21. The phenomenon of known hallucination might be more difficult to deal with, although it’s not obvious that hallucinatory subjects do not believe that they are perceiving in the relevant sense if they know that they are hallucinating.

  22. This would make the blindsighters very much like BonJour’s (1985) clairvoyant Norman. The difference is that blindsighters would surely be justified if they still enjoyed the relevant perceptual experiences, although it is not so clear that Norman would be justified if he also enjoyed specific clairvoyant experiences.

  23. I am now outlining two ways that connect to my ideas about higher-order beliefs about perception. One could also use a different way to respond to the Blindsight Intuition by using externalist responses to clairvoyance objections (see, e.g., Goldman 1986; Bergmann 2006; Lyons 2009).

  24. This would depend on whether one holds that justification requires reliability of a process with regard to a specific domain of beliefs.

  25. See also Bergmann (2005) for such a theory.

  26. Again, there are also other externalist replies to the New Evil Demon problem (see, e.g., Goldman 1986, 1988; Comesaña 2002; Majors and Sawyer 2005).

  27. Although natural, one could also deny even this and hold that the agent in the New Evil Demon scenario merely thinks that he has the same evidence. This seems to require some form of metaphysical disjunctivism about perceptual experience (Haddock and Macpherson 2008).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christoph Kelp, Jan Heylen, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. KU Leuven Institute of Philosophy, Andreas Vesaliusstraat 2, Box 3220, 3000 , Leuven, Belgium

    Harmen Ghijsen

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Ghijsen, H. Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism and the distinctiveness problem. Synthese 191, 1549–1566 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0348-3

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