Replies to Six Critics

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Notes

1 I am particularly grateful to José Martínez, who organized the workshop on Empiricism and Experience at the University of Valencia in June 2006 and who helped my family and me in innumerable ways during our visit to Spain.

2 I assume familiarity with the main ideas of E & E. Martínez and Valor provide helpful abstracts of these ideas in their essays. For a more extended summary, see my ‘Experience and Knowledge’.

3 Martínez, ‘On the Reliability of Experience and the Norm of Revision’, §4. Iranzo, too, endorses a similar demand. He thinks that I need to provide an ‘epistemological argument … that, in ordinary circumstances, experience can effectively lead to convergence among views and eliminate falsity from them’ (‘On the Epistemic Authority of Experience’, §2).

4 Valor, ‘Empiricism and Experience: Two Problems’, p. 327.

5 See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism.

6 Let me say something about the argument Valor offers near the end of his paper. This argument is not clear to me because the view on which the argument turns – namely, that of the Non‐Cartesian Solipsist (NCS) – is not specified in the requisite detail. If the NCS view is rigid, then it is not epistemically symmetrical to the view of the externalist (who, I shall assume for concreteness, accepts the commonsense view). The externalist view is not rigid at all: an extraordinary course of experience may force the externalist to abandon even his central tenet, that there are mind‐independent objects. On the other hand, if the NCS view is non‐rigid, then one wants to know what experiences prompt it to acknowledge objects as mind‐independent. One also wants to know why the view cannot converge, as Valor states that it cannot, to the externalist view.

 Perhaps Valor’s aim in the present argument is to show that a failure of convergence is inevitable. If so, let me draw attention to my exchange with Ram Neta, where this issue is addressed. See Neta’s ‘Empiricism about Experience’ and my ‘Equivalence, Reliability, and Convergence’, §III.

7 Martínez writes, ‘If we can say that a brain‐in‐a‐vat is rational, it is because we have reasons to believe that, if she were not a brain‐in‐a‐vat and would promote convergence (in ideal conditions), she would achieve truth’ (§4). I have doubts here about the connection claimed by the word ‘because’, for I see no reason to believe the claim about convergence and truth other than that the claim is definitional of ‘ideal conditions’.

 The idea that the brain‐in‐a‐vat is rational is rooted, I believe, in the thought that rationality supervenes on the subjective character of experiences and on the epistemic resources available to the subject. The brain‐in‐a‐vat is rational because the person on whom she is modelled is rational and, from the subjective point of view, the epistemic lives of the two are the same.

8 I stated at the outset (E & E, chapter 1) that my goal in the book was to reconcile two fundamental ideas, the Insight of Empiricism and the Multiple‐Factorizability of Experience.

9 Note that competing accounts of empirical rationality – foundationalism and coherence theories – are no better placed to provide such a ‘soundness proof’.

10 Iranzo also raises, en passant, sceptical concerns about convergence and truth. His principal objections, however, concern admissibility and empiricism; and it is these that will be my focus in the present section. My response to Martínez and Valor addresses, I believe, the sceptical worries expressed by Iranzo.

11 Iranzo, ‘On the Epistemic Authority of Experience’, §3.

12 For a counterexample, see Neta’s ‘Empiricism about Experience’; see also my reply to Neta, ‘Equivalence, Reliability, and Convergence’, §III.

13 Grimaltos and Moya, ‘Content, Meaning and Truth’, p. 301.

14 Ibid., p. 304.

15 ‘Meaning and Misconceptions’, p. 30.

16 Observe also that, on Grimaltos and Moya’s understanding of it, the absolute content is liable to vary from context to context even for sentences such as ‘7 + 5 = 12’, since the beliefs of the speakers are liable to vary from context to context. This, too, shows that the notion I endorsed is not the one that Grimaltos and Moya are refuting (see E & E, p. 141).

17 Grimaltos and Moya, ‘Content, Meaning and Truth’, p. 300.

18 See ‘Meaning and Misconceptions’, p. 32.

19 If Grimaltos and Moya were correct in their characterization of absolute content, a separate notion of content would be necessary in virtually all cases.

20 ‘Meaning and Misconceptions’, pp. 31–2.

21 Note also that effective content is not necessarily a part of the absolute content. The absolute content of ‘Charley is nibbling on a leaf’ does not include as a part the content of ‘Ant A is nibbling on a leaf’.

22 Grimaltos and Moya, ‘Content, Meaning and Truth’, p. 303.

23 Of course, the astronomer might accept that the Sun will not appear to be in Capricorn from certain locations, but that is irrelevant to the present point.

24 ‘The Insight of Empiricism’, §4.

25 From David Lewis, quoted by Corbí in §6.

26 We can mathematically represent the given as a function from views to perceptual judgments, just as we can represent an argument schema as a function from sets of judgments to judgments. This representation can be useful. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that it is only a representation and not the real thing. Furthermore, the fact that the given, when thus modelled, is a function makes the theory offered similar to functionalist theories only in name. The issue I am addressing is radically different from that addressed by functionalist theories of, e.g., experience.

27 The aspect of phenomenology that founds a particular perceptual judgment may well shift from view to view and, indeed, within a view, from perceptual judgment to perceptual judgment. I happily accept this kind of ‘contextualism’. I want to insist, however, that the given is not propositional and that judgments about experience are not epistemically prior to ordinary perceptual judgments.

28 Thanks to Anjana Jacob for her comments on a draft of these replies.