Abstract
In its original context, the problem of the speckled hen was a challenge to classical foundationalists who held that introspective beliefs about experience enjoy infallible foundational justification. Ernest Sosa has led a revival of interest in the problem, using it to object to neoclassical foundationalists and to motivate his own reliabilist theory of introspective justification. His discussion has spawned replies from those who claim that there are viable non-reliabilist solutions to the problem. I argue that these alternative proposals in the literature are unsuccessful. I end, though, with an objection to Sosa’s theory. Along the way I also consider what the speckled hen and related examples have to teach about the fineness of grain of experience.
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Cf. (Chisholm 1989, 25). According to Chisholm, Gilbert Ryle originally suggested the problem to A.J. Ayer, who raises it against his own theory and proposes a solution in The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Ayer 1964), originally published in 1930. But (Fumerton 2009b) gives grounds for an alternative history that attributes the original objection to C.D. Broad.
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This claim is intended in part to be stipulating the process under discussion. I don’t intend to deny that there is also a kind of seeing that is unconscious, as perhaps occurs in cases of blindsight or cases in which visual information is processed via the dorsal pathway of the brain (see Goodale et al. 2004).
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The determinacy of experiential properties has been the subject of much discussion lately in the philosophy of mind (where it is sometimes described as richness or the fineness of grain of experience) and has been central in the debate over whether experience has nonconceptual content. Some philosophers have argued that in order to explain the fineness of grain of experience, one must postulate a grasp of content that does not depend essentially on a deployment of concepts (cf. Heck 2000; Peacocke 2001a, b).
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Chisholm recognized that the problem that the speckled hen example raises generalizes to color. Chisholm (1942) attempts to answer the challenge that identity judgments about phenomenal colors are not infallible.
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Pace (2010) argues that foundationalists who hold that perceptual beliefs about the external world can be foundationally justified based on experience also face a version of the problem.
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Superior introspectors even of 48-speckled hen experiences may be more than a mere metaphysical possibility. Oliver Sacks describes autistic twins who upon looking at a pile of matchsticks dropped on the floor were able quickly to recognize that there were 111. (They seem to have recognized them as three sets of 37 and quickly inferred the sum (Sacks 1985).) Sacks has also written about Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic savant who is able to perform such amazing feats as drawing a remarkably accurate aerial view of Rome after seeing it from a 15-min helicopter ride. Stephen can accurately depict, for example, the number of windows on a house after a very brief visual experience of it (cf. Sacks 1995). It is not clear, however, that he is able to report the number of windows that he is able to draw. There may also, of course, be less extreme differences among individuals without autism (or the same person at different ages) with respect to such abilities.
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Writing at the start of World War II, Chisholm compares Ayer’s solution to “saying that victory will come in 1943, but not in January or February or any other particular month up to and including December. If it cannot occur during any of the twelve month which comprise 1943, there is no time left in that year when it can occur, and hence it is contradictory to say that it will occur in that year…” (Chisholm 1942, 369). The evidential worth of the comparison loses something in an era of modern war, where it seems quite conceivable to win a war without being able to pinpoint any month of the year that the victory came. It seems to me that the sense-data theorist might equally resist the idea that sense data need determinate numbers of speckles in order to have many. Couldn’t a sense-data theorist hold that sense data are sometimes blurred, for example, like Fig. 6.3?
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Thus, although Fumerton opposes the intentional theory of perception, he says, “If sensation, like belief, really were a kind of intentional state then I’m not sure how the problem of the speckled hen even arises….If I thought that sensation was a species of intentional state, I’d end this paper here” (Fumerton 2005, 127).
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Can one have foundational justification for believing that one has an experience as of an entire sentence? Before one says no, it might be worth considering that some sense modalities are essentially processes that take time. We could not hear melodies if we restrict our talk of hearing to experiences at an instance, and it might be difficult to even think of hearing a tone in this way. Likewise we can’t plausibly hold that we can be visually aware of movement or change without thinking that experiential qualities are sometimes given that don’t occur in a single glance.
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Notice that in this case, the lack of detail in one’s visual phenomenology is not owing to an experience of blur. There is a phenomenal difference between experiencing a loss of visual acuity in the center of one’s visual field by taking off one’s glasses and the loss of visual acuity that occurs in the periphery of the visual field. The former, but not the latter, involves an experience of blurriness. See (Pace 2007), which criticizes Tye’s representational theory of perception for not being able to adequately account for the distinction.
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These points undermine some arguments for determinacy. For example, Sosa asks that we consider the following series of arrays of dots:
. .
. . .
. . . .
. . . . .
. . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Sosa reasons that since each row phenomenally looks to have one more than its predecessor and since the first few row looks determinately numbered, the last line must look determinately numbered as well (Sosa 2003b, 132). However, the defense of Tye’s test above casts doubt on the pattern of reasoning that Sosa employs here, since Sosa’s array (at least viewed from some distances) fails Tye’s test.
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One complication for what I say in this paragraph is that the brain often fills in parts of the visual field based on information from other parts of the visual field or perhaps stored knowledge. Admittedly, sometimes these effects can be dramatic and can involve texture.
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I say in some sense because one might hold that Fumerton’s case of the headache is similar to examples to which Ned Block appeals in drawing his influential (though controversial) distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Block suggests that there can be experiences (like Fumerton’s headache example) that are conscious in the sense that there is something it is like to be in the state but not in the sense that they are broadcast for use in action and reasoning. Drawing on this distinction, one might hold that there is a concept of consciousness according to which sensory states like pain are always conscious but another sense in which they are unconscious. Other theorists (see, e.g., (Rosenthal 2002)) hold that sensory qualities can be unconscious but deny that there is anything that there is like to be in these states when they occur unconsciously. A-awareness IJP is designed to be neutral between these two views. One can treat the relation described by a-awareness as denoting one kind of consciousness (access consciousness in Block’s sense) or as denoting the only kind of state consciousness.
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One source of evidence for this is a famous experiment by Roger Sperling. Sperling gave test subjects a brief glance at a figure with three rows of three letters. He found that if asked what they had seen, subjects were able to say only three or four of the letters that they had been presented with. However, if the subjects were cued immediately after the letters stopped displaying with a high, medium, or low tone, the subjects were able to accurately report the letters on the corresponding (top, middle, or bottom) line. It seems that subjects were justified in their judgments, even though they likely did not fully attend to the letters when they were presented.
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Cf. (Sosa 2003b, 128–129)
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Poston (2007).
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Sosa (2003b).
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The existence of phenomenal-recognitional concepts in particular is a matter of controversy. See, for example, (Fodor 1998).
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Cf. (Pace 2010), where a similar criticism is raised for an inferentialist strategy regarding perceptual justification.
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It is unclear whether the view about to be described is Feldman’s. Feldman describes superior introspectors as having information connecting phenomenal-recognitional concepts and SGA concepts. This arguably suggests that these beliefs must be true (since information is factive) but need not be justified.
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What the inferentialist says about this case will depend on his views on how memory justifies. According to some synchronic views about memorial justification, any time a proposition seems true based on an apparent memory, it has some foundational prima facie justification, even if the belief is unjustified when it was originally formed. According to other diachronic views, the original justificatory status of the belief can disqualify it from being justified. Given the synchronic view, it is difficult to find cases of unjustified but true beliefs in (P2), since seeming to remember that (P2) is true is by itself sufficient to provide prima facie justification for (P2), regardless of whether or not the belief was originally justified. Synchronic views of memorial justification, however, face insurmountable difficulties in part because of the examples presented here. It is intuitively implausible that a belief can come to be justified merely by being held in memory when it was not justified originally (Huemer 1999; Senor 2005).
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It may be instructive to compare this case with Sosa’s example of Jane, who arrives at a true conclusion based on a tissue of fallacies but later forgets most of her evidence and retains only the belief (Sosa 2003b, 151). Sosa says that Jane is unjustified owing to the defective etiology of the belief. Might he say the same about Sue? (Thanks to John Turri for pressing this point.) There is a crucial difference between the cases. In Jane’s case, the defective etiology is the unreliable process (the tissue of fallacies) that was directly responsible for producing the belief that she now retains in memory. In Sue’s case as we’ve described it, the defective etiology is responsible for producing a non-inferential method of forming beliefs about azure experiences, a method that turns out to be reliable. The case is thus in many respects less like Jane and more like Swampman, who gets belief-forming competences by a freak accident and who, Sosa claims, thereby has justified beliefs. Unlike Swampman, however, it seems highly counterintuitive to suppose that Sue is justified.
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See (Pace 2010) for a discussion of some related principles governing foundational justification of perceptual beliefs.
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Pace, M. (2013). Introspective Justification and the Fineness of Grain of Experience. In: Turri, J. (eds) Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 119. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5934-3_6
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