Abstract
In these comments I briefly discuss three aspects of the empiricist account of the epistemic role of experience that Anil Gupta develops in his Empiricism and Experience. First, I discuss the motivations Gupta offers for the claim that the given in experience should be regarded as reliable. Second, I discuss two different ways of conceiving of the epistemic significance of the phenomenology of experience. And third, I discuss whether Gupta’s account is able to deliver the anti-skeptical results he intends it to. I close by suggesting that, once fully fleshed out, Gupta’s account is best understood in terms of the fusion of certain core ideas within both the empiricist and the rationalist traditions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Gupta (2006).
Gupta (2006, p. 27).
Gupta believes that even an epistemologist who rejects Reliability should find his account of experience attractive. This may well be true, but there is no doubt that Reliability plays a crucial role in many of Gupta’s most forceful arguments for his position.
Gupta (2006, pp. 28–29).
This somewhat tortured description of the experience in question is necessary in order to avoid taking a stand on what exactly the content of this experiences is.
Of course, there is a sense in which something that is passive cannot really be the source of anything. This is the sense in which, say, one might hold that only active substances can be the causal source of new events. But I take it that the sense of “epistemic source” that is relevant to determining the given in experience does not carry with it these sorts of demands.
Gupta (2006, pp. 29–30).
Obviously more complicated cases are possible, but consideration of this case should be sufficient for our purposes here.
Gupta (2006, p. 30).
Of course, there is room for considerable debate about just how rich the Rich Subjective Character of my experience is. For example, some philosophers might doubt whether the fact that the object my feet are resting on is a footstool is part of this character. As much as possible I want to abstract away from these issues here in order to consider the more general distinction between the Rich Subjective Character of an experience and what I will call its Thin Subjective Character.
Compare the footnote to 32.
Couldn’t we extract a notion of the Thin Subjective Character of experience from the notion of the Rich Subjective Character of experience simply by defining an appropriate equivalence relation on the space of Rich Subjective Characters? Of course, we could. In fact, any number of such equivalence relations are possible. The question here is whether any of them have deep phenomenological or epistemological significance. In particular, it seems to me that any attempt to define a notion of Thin Subjective Character by such means will leave out of the picture some elements of the Rich Subjective Character that make an essential contribution to the phenomenology of my experience. So if our aim is to completely capture the first-person phenomenology of my experience, it is its Rich Subjective Character, and not any such thinner notion, that we should focus on.
Including this last option as a possible way in which defeat might function begins to blur the distinction between views of this sort and views of the sort of Gupta endorses. But I’m not convinced that this is unhelpful—since it seems to me that the line between these different sorts of views is not as clear as it might at first seem.
Gupta (2006, p. 103).
Gupta (2006, p. 154).
To be sure, Normal Response to Experience is more responsive to one’s experience than Experiential Paranoia is, since a particular experience will justify a more determinate belief given the former than it will given the latter. But this is not enough to make either unresponsive to experience in the sense defined by Gupta—nor is it enough to make either of them rigid in his sense—although it does imply that one of them is more rigid than the other. (For more on the issue of whether rigidity and responsiveness should be seen as a matter of degree, see below.)
Compare Gupta’s response to Ram Neta’s concerns about convergence in their forthcoming discussion in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
In discussing the similar case of the brain-in-a-vate hypothesis, Gupta writes that “like solipsism, the skeptical [brain-in-a-vat] hypothesis is pathological” (p. 171). Surely this is correct, but the question here is why it is pathological. The comparison with solipsism suggests that the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis should be rejected because of its rigidity. But, as the case under discussion demonstrates, not all skeptical hypotheses of this general type are rigid according to Gupta’s definition. For more on rigidity, see below.
One option for to Gupta would be to add a constraint that demands that we prefer initial views that are more likely to converge over those that are less likely to converge. (Perhaps on the grounds that such views are more likely to provide us with useful explanations and predictions?) Such a view might, if developed in the right way, give one a principled reason to prefer Normal Response to Experience over Experiential Paranoia.
Compare Hawthorne (2002).
References
Gupta, A. (2006). Empiricism and experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hawthorne, J. (2002). Deeply contingent a priori knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65, 2.
Peacocke, C. (2004). The realm of reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pryor, J. (2000). The skeptic and the dogmatist. Noûs, 34, 517–549.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Anil Gupta and Kathryn Lindeman for helpful discussion of these issues.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schafer, K. The rationalism in Anil Gupta’s Empiricism and Experience . Philos Stud 152, 1–15 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9436-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9436-0