Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T06:49:24.415Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Consciousness, Experience, and Justification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Harold Langsam
Harold Langsam*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA22904-4780, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A belief must have justification if it is to count as knowledge. And it is a commonplace thought that in certain circumstances experiences can serve as justifications for beliefs. Moreover, many have thought that there is something distinctive about the wayin which experiences justify beliefs, and that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. In this paper, I seek to elucidate views about experience and justification that can make sense of these thoughts and that can show us why so many have been attracted to them.

I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justify beliefs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 R. Audi, ‘Fallibilist Foundationalism and Holistic Coherentism/ in The Theory of Knowledge: Classic and Contemporary Readings, L. Pojman, ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1993), 269

2 See Audi: ‘Whatever coherence is, it is a cognitively internal relation, in the sense that it is a matter of how your beliefs (or other cognitive items) are related to one another, not to anything outside your system of beliefs, such as your perceptual experience’ (268). But J.L. Kvanvig and W.D. Riggs, ‘Can Coherence Theory Appeal to Appearance States?’ Philosophical Studies 67 ( 1 9 9 2 ) 197-217, argue that although ‘coherence theorists have universally defined justification as a relation only among (the contents of) belief states,’ ‘this feature of coherentism is only an artifact of its history and a regrettable one at that’ (197). Instead, they recommend that ‘coherence theorists ought to devote more attention to the prospects of a coherence theory employing both beliefs and appearances in the class of things over which coherence is defined’ (216). Nevertheless, Kvanvig and Riggs do not themselves provide such a theory, and thus they cannot help us understand why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to the thought that experiences can justify beliefs. Note that although L. Bonjour in The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985) defends a version of coherentism that assigns a special role to ‘observational’ beliefs, he defines these in a way that makes no reference to sense experience, as he himself emphasizes: ‘According to the coherentist account, observation is not essentially tied to sense experience in the way it is for more traditional views, and thus any sort of reliable, cognitively spontaneous belief, no matter what sort of causal process it may result from, can in principle count as observational’ (175).

3 A.I. Goldman, ‘What is Justified Belief?’ in Justification and Knowledge, G.S. Pappas, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1979), 14

4 I suppose that if a reliable belief-forming process gives rise to experiences, then a reliabilist might wish to say that the experiences produced by this process justify the beliefs produced by this process. But such a position cannot help us make sense of the thought with which I am concerned in this paper, the thought that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. For according to the reliabilist, all reliable belief-forming processes justify beliefs in the same way, both those that involve experiences and those that do not: they justify beliefs simply by being reliable.

5 I add the word ‘internalisf to qualify ‘foundationalism’ in order to distinguish the foundationalism with which I am concerned from reliabilism, which can be characterized as an externalist version of foundationalism. See, for example, Bonjour (Empirical Knowledge, ch. 3). All subsequent references to foundationalism should be understood to exclude reliabilism.

6 For discussion of the epistemic regress argument, see, for example, Bonjour (Empirical Knowledge, ch. 2), and Audi.

7 J.L. Pollock, ‘Epistemic Norms/ Synthese 71 ( 1 9 8 7 ) 61-95, at 61

8 The importance of this ‘process of elimination’ argument in motivating foundationalism is suggested by E. Sosa, ‘Mythology of the Given/ History of Philosophy Quarterly 14 (1997) 275-86: ‘On the other side [the side that holds that experiences must justify beliefs] are Schlick, Hempel, C.I. Lewis, and Chisholm, among others. For these it is an “astounding error” to suppose that the mere coherence of a self-enclosed body of beliefs might suffice to confer justification on its members. And it is hard to see what, other than sensory experience, could serve to supplement coherence appropriately so as to explain empirical justification’ (278).

9 Thus if my argument succeeds, I will be in a position to explain why ‘classical foundationalism accepts the act-object analysis of experience’ (J. Dancy, Introduction to Perceptual Knowledge, J. Dancy, ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988], 11).

10 See, e.g., J. Dancy (6-7); F. Jackson, ‘On the Adverbial Analysis of Visual Experience/ Metaphilosophy 6 (1975) 127-35, at 127, and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977), ch. 3; W. Sellars, ‘The Adverbial Theory of the Objects of Sensation/ Metaphilosophy 6 (1975) 144-60, at 145; and S. Shoemaker, ‘Introspection and the Self/ in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume X,P.A. French, T. E. Uehling, and H.K. Wettstein, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986), 105-7. I should note that although some contemporary philosophers construe the act-object conception as including the view that the objects in question are mental objects (Dancy, 7; Shoemaker, ‘Introspection/105), I shall not be following their lead. I shall not be concerned in this paper with the question of whether the objects of experience are mental or physical (see footnote 21, below), and so I shall take the act-object conception to be neutral on this issue, as does CD. Broad, Scientific Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1923), 252

11 D. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986), 62

12 S e e F. Brentano, Psychology From an Empirical Viewpoint, O. Kraus and L. McAlister, eds., A. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell, and L. McAlister, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul [ 1 8 7 4 ] 1 9 7 3 ) : ‘Every mental phenomenon is characterized by… direction toward an objecf (88). See also E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, W.R. Boyce Gibson, trans. (New York: Collier 1962): ‘If an intentional experience is actual, carried out, that is, after the manner of the cogito, the subject “directs” itself within it towards the intentional object. To the cogito itself belongs an immanent “glancing-towards” the object, a directedness which from another side springs forth from the “Ego,” which can therefore never be absent’ (109).

13 Broad defines an act as ‘something which cannot exist by itself, but can only exist as a constituent in a complex, whose other constituent is its object’ (252). He immediately goes on to say that the act ‘is, of course, the characteristically mental factor in such a complex'; he thus seems to be defining the act-object conception as a conception that takes consciousness to be essentially relational.

14 G.E. Moore insists upon this point at length in ‘The Refutation of Idealism/ Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1922), 1-30. See, for example: ‘We have then in every sensation two distinct elements, one which I call consciousness, and another which I call the object of consciousness. This must be so if the sensation of blue and the sensation of green, though different in one respect, are alike in another: blue is one object of sensation and green is another, and consciousness, which both sensations have in common, is different from either’ (17). Broad argues f o r the same point as follows: ‘It does seem clear that, when I have a sensation of a red triangular patch, some things are true of the patch itself (e.g., that it is red and triangular) which it is very difficult to believe to be true of my sensation of the red patch. If so, it seems necessary to hold that the sensation and the sensum are not identical; that the sensum is an objective constituent of the sensation; and that there is another constituent which is not objective and may be called “the act of sensing’” (257).

15 Quotations from J. Locke are taken from the following edition: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P.H. Niddich, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon 1975).

16 Quotations from D. Hume are taken from the following editions: A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Niddich, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon 1978) and Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Niddich, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon 1975).

17 See especially Essay Il.xix for Locke's explicit use of the term ‘thinking’ in a broad sense. In this chapter, Locke characterizes various different kinds of mental acts as different ‘modes of thinking.’

18 I am thinking here of the familiar complaint that functionalist analyses leave out the ‘qualitative’ aspects of experiences. See, e.g., N. Block and J.A. Fodor, ‘What Psychological States Are Not/ Philosophical Review 81 (1972) 159-81, and D.J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996).

19 Compare H.H. Price, Perception (London: Methuen 1 9 3 2 ) : ‘The subject or subject-matter about which we think must be somehow brought before the mind, if we are to think about it, and it cannot always be brought there by previous thinking, or we should have an infinite regress. This means that something must be given. And sensing is one of the ways (I do not say the only one) in which subject-matters for thought are given to us’ (7).

20 J. McDowell, ‘Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space/in Subject, Thought, and Context, P. Pettit and J. McDowell, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon 1982), 140

21 I remain neutral on the question of whether the sensory properties in question are mental or physical; similarly, I remain neutral on the question of whether the objects of sensory experience are mental or physical. My concern in this paper is not to explain how experiences justify beliefs about the external world; rather, my goal is the more modest but also more basic one of explaining how it is ever possible f o r an experience to justify a belief of any kind. Those who hold that the objects of sensory experience are always mental objects are traditionally known as sense-data theorists; contemporary defenders of sense-data theory include F. Jackson (Perception) and H. Robinson, ‘The General Form of the Argument for Berkeleian Idealism/ in Essays on Berkeley, J. Foster and H. Robinson, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon 1985), and ‘The Objects of Perceptual Experience 11/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 64 ( 1 9 9 0 ) 1 5 1 - 6 6 . Those who hold that the objects of sensory experience are sometimes familiar medium-sized physical objects (i.e., tables and chairs) generally subscribe to what is referred to as the disjunctive conception of experience; for discussion of the disjunctive conception, see, for example, H. Langsam, ‘The Theory of Appearing Defended/ Philosophical Studies 87 ( 1 9 9 7 ) 33-59; J. McDowell, ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge/ Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 455-79 and ‘Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space'; and P. Snowdon, ‘Experience, Vision, and Causation/ in Perceptual Knowledge, J. Dancy, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981) and ‘The Objects of Perceptual Experience 1/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 64 ( 1 9 9 0 ) 1 2 1 – 5

22 See Essay Il.vi and Il.ix.l. What Locke claims here is that our idea of ‘Perception, or Thinking’ is simple (Il.vi. 1), but I believe that my use of the term ‘consciousness’ is virtually equivalent to Locke's use here of the terms ‘perception’ and ‘thinking.'

23 See Essay: ‘What Perception is, every one will know better by reflecting on what he does himself, when he sees, hears, feels, etc. or thinks, than by any discourse of mine. Whoever reflects on what passes in his own Mind, cannot miss it: And if he does not reflect, all the Words in the World, cannot make him have any notion of it’ (II.ix.2). See also Brentano (101-37) for a discussion of how a subject is able to be conscious of his own consciousness. Moore emphasizes the difficulty of becoming conscious of consciousness, but insists that it can be done: ‘When we refer to introspection and try to discover what the sensation of blue is, it is very easy to suppose that we have before us only a single term. The term “blue” is easy enough to distinguish, but the other element which I have called “consciousness” — that which the sensation of blue has in common with the sensation of green — is extremely difficult to fix. That many people fail to distinguish it at all is sufficiently shown by the fact that there are materialists…. The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know that there is something to look for’ (20, 25).

24 P.K. Moser, Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989),

25 ‘A belief is merely justifiante for a person S when S possesses reasons sufficient to justify the belief, but has not made any appropriate connection between the reasons and the belief, and consequently remains unjustified in holding the belief. The appropriate connection would be the belief's being based on the reason’ ( K . A. Korcz, ‘Recent Work on the Basing Relation,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 34 [1997] 171-91, at 171). ‘In such a situation [i.e., a situation in which a belief that P is merely justifiable] one might believe that P solely for the wrong reason’ (Moser, 156).

26 S e e Korcz's review of the recent literature on the basing relation; according to Korcz, ‘the standard view is that the correct analysis of the basing relation will be some sort of causal analysis’ (171). A notable dissenter to this standard view is K. Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon 1 9 7 4 ) , 1 2 2 - 6 . For present purposes, I shall simply note my agreement with Goldman's insistence that Lehrer's counterexample to the standard view is unconvincing (22, n.8). For an example of a causal analysis of the basing relation, see Moser (156-8).

27 Thus C. Wright, ‘McDowell's Oscillation,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (1998) 395-402, sees coherentism as ‘generated by the principle that justification is essentially a rational relation. That seems to require that it can obtain only between conceptually structured items — things that carry or are somehow indexed by propositional content’ (395). See also D. Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,’ in Truth and Interpretation, E. LePore, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986): ‘The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes’ (311).

28 My concern in this paper is, of course, with epistemic justification, the kind of justification required for knowledge, and so what I am saying here is that holding a belief is a rational thing to do only if the belief is epistemically justified. In other words, I am committed to the admittedly controversial view that the only way a belief can be justified is by being epistemically justified; I am denying, for example, that a belief can be ‘pragmatically’ or ‘practically’ justified but epistemically unjustified. For a defense of the view that it is impossible for a belief to be practically justified and epistemically unjustified, see E. Mills, ‘The Unity of Justification,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998) 27-50. Mills allows that a person ‘might be practically justified in doing things which will predictably result in her epistemically unjustified acceptance of [a belief]’ (33), but argues (convincingly, I believe) that it does not follow that the person is practically justified in accepting the belief.

29 My concern here is with conscious beliefs only. I am not claiming that all beliefs are conscious, but I am assuming that only conscious beliefs can be rational causes of beliefs. A conscious belief is a belief in which the subject is related to the content of the belief by means of the relation of consciousness; I remain neutral on the question of whether there are unconscious beliefs in which the subject is related to the content of the belief by means of some different kind of relation. For trenchant criticism of the popular philosophical view that there are unconscious beliefs, in the sense of beliefs that do not have access to consciousness, see S. P. Stich, ‘Beliefs and Subdoxastic States,’ Philosophy of Science 45 (1978) 499-518

30 I take it that most philosophers hold that the laws of physical nature are contingent, and so cannot be known a priori. Even philosophers such as S. Shoemaker, ‘Causality and Properties/ in Time and Cause, P. van Inwagen, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1980), and ‘Causal and Metaphysical Necessity/ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 ( 1 9 9 8 ) 59-77; and C. Swoyer, ‘The Nature of Natural Laws/ Australasian journal of Philosophy 60 (1982) 203-23, who claim that the laws of physical nature are necessary, nevertheless hold that these laws can only be known a posteriori.

31 The notion of attention under discussion here is helpfully elucidated by M.G.F. Martin, ‘Sense, Reference and Selective Attention 11/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 71 (1997) 75-98: ‘Arguably, it is part of the manifest image of the mind that we are aware of objects of sense experience in a different way from being aware of the objects of thought, and that this is reflected in the ways attention can relate one to an object of sense as opposed to thought…. It is tempting to think of experience in terms of a whole array of items stretching beyond what I have focused my attention on at a time — an array over which I could move my attention, as a beam or spotlight. It is as if I am aware of the whole array at a time, albeit more or less determinately, whether I now focus my attention on one part of it or not; and my awareness of some element of it can explain why I shift my attention from one part of the scene to another. There seems to be no corresponding array of items to shift one's attention over in thought: if we think of thoughts as determinations of attention, then there can be no way of thinking of something without thereby to some extent to be attending to it’ (78). See also M.G.F. Martin, ‘Setting Things Before the Mind/ in Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43, A. O'Hear, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998): ‘We can attend to objects that we perceive in ways not present when merely thinking about them…. In perception, focal attention seems to range over objects which are already objects of awareness, and a motive for directing your attention to something is to find out more’ (171).

32 Compare Shoemaker, ‘Introspection’: ‘Perception is in the first instance a relation to nonî actual objects; we perceive facts by perceiving objects that they are facts about — e.g., we perceive that the branch is bent by perceiving the branch’ (102).

33 Bonjour has since embraced foundationalism; see his ‘Foundationalism and the External World,’ Philosophical Perspectives, 13: Epistemology, J. Tomberlin, ed. (Maiden, MA: Basil Blackwell 1999).

34 In claiming that experiences cannot be caused in rational ways, I am understanding ‘experiences’ as applying only to experiences characteristic of the five senses and bodily sensations. I remain neutral on the question of whether such arguably sensory states as feelings and emotions can be caused in rational ways, and thus I also remain neutral on the question of whether issues of justification arise for feelings and emotions.

35 Examples of such claims can be found in W. Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind/reprinted in W. Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1963) ; Bonjour (Empirical Knowledge, ch. 4); and J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994), Lecture I.

36 Hume ‘affirm[s], as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation [i.e., the relation of cause and effect] is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other’ (Enquiry IV.i, 27). Reasonings a priori are unavailing, according to Hume, because ‘when we reason a priori, and consider merely any object or cause, as it appears to the mind, and independent of all observation, it could never suggest to us the notion of any distinct object, such as its effect; much less, show us the inseparable and inviolable connexion between them’ (Enquiry IV.i, 31).

37 Hume also purports to have a direct a priori argument that shows that we can have no a priori knowledge of causal powers; see Treatise: ‘There is no object, which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we form of them. Such an inference wou'd amount to knowledge, and wou'd imply the absolute contradiction and impossibility of conceiving any thing different. But as all distinct ideas are separable, ‘tis evident there can be no impossibility of that kind’ (86-7 [I.iii.6]). See also Enquiry, 29-30 (IV.i). For decisive criticism of this ‘separability of distinct ideas’ argument, see B. Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977), 47-52.

38 It is particularly instructive in this context to note the contrast between Locke's ideas of reflection and Hume's ideas of ‘reflexion.’ Whereas Locke's ideas of reflection include ideas of ‘the Actions of the Mind about its Ideas/ actions such as ‘Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing’ (Essay II.i.4), Hume's ideas of reflexion are limited to ideas of ‘passions, desires, and emotions’ (Treatise I.i.2,8), for Hume has no room for such ‘actions of the mind’ in his ontology. Hume's ideas of reflexion are merely ideas of impressions that are produced by other ideas (Treatise I.i.2,8). For Locke, perception is a relation between a mind and one or more of its ideas, whereas for Hume, perceptions just are (Lockean) ideas

39 I would like to thank Jim Cargile, Gil Harman, Susanna Siegel, and anonymous referees for Canadian Journal of Philosophy for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Virginia; thanks to all who provided comments on that occasion.