There are a lot of different cases where people claim to have an experience which amounts to simply seeing that some P is the case. Chess players ‘see’ the weakness of a pawn structure, potters ‘see’ that a certain pot will crack when fired, people having religious experiences suddenly ‘see’ that god is real and cares about them, intro math students ‘see’ that you can’t put 4 puppies into 3 boxes without putting more than one puppy into some box, and nearly all ordinary people can ‘see’ that you can’t pick a lock with a banana and, of course we can see that we have hands. This raises a some natural questions: how much justification do these experiences-as-if-of-seeing-that-p provide? And, are there natural divisions in the list of examples I just gave, or do they all have the same epistemic status?
At present I am torn between two opinions about the epistemic status of these ‘seeming to see’ experiences. The simple view would be to say that any such experience where it feels like you are sensing that P provides prima facie warrant for believing that P. The case of religious experience gives me some qualms though, and one can cook up even more implausible cases. Some people claim that they can feel via a sense of forboding in their heart that their twin or loved one is in trouble. Or, imagine looking northwards at the clouds in the direction of Canada and ‘feeling a great disturbance in the force’ as it were, which seems to let you feel that something terrible is happening in a certain small town in Canada.
Now I hesitate to say, given this kind of example, that seeming to see that P provides prima facie justification. It’s pretty clear that in these circumstances a rational person should not immediately believe what their strange experience seems to show them but check (say, by making the appropriate phone calls) whether this experience really does reliably track how their twin is doing or what is going on in Canada. And a supporter of the ‘prima facie warrant’ idea can agree with this. But what about cases where there is no practical possibility of checking – suppose you have these experiences when you are out in the woods, or suppose God tells you as part of your religious experience that you will only get normal empirical evidence for his existence after he is dead [ed: after YOU are dead :)]? Here I am inclined to think that you shouldn’t believe what you seem to see at all, until you have checked the reliability of your experiences as if of seeing – and that once you do this the amount of evidence which your seeming to see provides is proportional to the evidence that you have now accumulated that your experiences of seeming to see are reliable.
But what about the case of sense perception? You can’t check the reliability of your senses against something else, but surely seeming to see that there’s a table in front of you does give you reason to believe it. This leads to the second more complicated theory of the epistemic status of seeming-to-see-that-P.
On this (slightly Peacockian theory) most such experiences give one no reason to believe anything on their own. You are only justified in believing what such experiences seem to tell you if you are also frequently exposed to evidence that confirms the reliability of this supposed perception. So the chess player who ‘seems to see’ that his queenside pawns are weak only has as much reason to believe that the pawns *are* weak as he has evidence that these experiences of his are reliable (so e.g. if he is a chess master he will have strong reason to believe it while if he is infamously bad at chess like myself he will have very little reason to believe this).
BUT (here’s the Peacockian part) in some cases the experience of seeming to see that P is central to, or indeed nearly all there is to our practice of saying that P. In these cases the facts about when we ‘seem to see that P’ largely determine what we mean by P and hence what it would take for P to be true. Specifically, these facts determine the meaning of P in such a way that if we say P whenever we feel like we can ‘see that P’ we are quite likely to be right. So, for example if what tends to give us the experience of ‘seeming to see that there’s a table’ is tables then ‘there’s a table’ means there’s a table, if it is vat state T then ‘there’s a table’ means the vat is in state T and so on a la Putnam on the BIV. Thus, in these very special cases believing that P when you have the experience of seeming to see that P will be a reliable, and maybe even justified method of forming belief.
This proposal has the advantage of giving a motivated way of separating up the list of ‘seeming to see’ experiences I started with in a motivated way. We have other practices which give us an independent grip on what it would be for your twin sister to be in trouble or disaster to be striking in Canada. Thus your feeling of conviction that P remains just that until you have evidence that this sixth sense of yours is reliable. But, on the other hand, in the perceptual case we don’t have this kind of independent grip on the stuff which our five senses seem to show us. Thus your experience of seeming-to-see that there is a table plays a role in determining *what it would mean for there to be* a table there which ensures that you are justified.
So how does this sound? Any takers on the simple proposal or the split (not to say…shudder…disjunctive ;) ) proposal? New proposals? Obvious points in the philosophy of perception which I am missing?
Read more!
