The epistemic impact of the etiology of experience

By S. Siegel. 2013

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

forthcoming in Philosophical Studies as a symposium Down in the basement of the mind, unconscious processes unfold that give rise to conscious experience. In this paper I argue that those processes can impact the rational role of experience. Suppose you want to know whether there's any mustard in the fridge. You open the door to look. There's the mustard, in a half-­‐empty jar, sitting in the fridge door. So far, looking in the fridge has given you excellent reason to believe that there's mustard in the fridge. Having a reason to believe is a generic notion, tied to what is epistemically appropriate to believe. Sticking with this generic normative notion, we can say that your perceptual experience provides justification, or equivalently, rational or evidential support for believing p. 1 The very grammar of " perceptual experiences provide justification " can seem to presuppose that experiences do this all by themselves, or at least that they suffice to do so, absent defeaters. But don't read this into the grammar. Read it in a way that allows (but does not entail) that experiences might provide justification for believing a proposition p, only with the help of additional factors, such as having justification for believing other propositions besides p, or having the right sort of etiological features, or more generally being had under the right external conditions. Back in the kitchen, you learn you're probably hallucinating. Intuitively, you now have less reason for believing that there's mustard in the fridge. Relative to a baseline at which our perceptual experiences provide pretty good reason to believe our eyes, the amount of rational support provided by epistemically downgraded experiences is reduced-­‐ maybe even eliminated. When the rational support provided by experiences is reduced below the baseline, those experiences are epistemically downgraded. * I'm grateful to many audiences for responses to this paper, which I gave as a talk (often called " The Epistemic Impact of Reasoning in the Basement " Ye for their helpful reactions. 1 Two terminological remarks. First, I use " experience " to abbreviate " perceptual experience " , a category that encompasses hallucinations and illusions as well as veridical perceptions, but excludes bodily sensations such as pains and tickles. Second, whether " evidence " , " justification " and " rational support " can be used interchangeably (as I do here) is controversial. For instance, Lycan (1988) argues that conservative principles …

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2e7df064f68f5afbedfc28a8ea0c9a50c56a8ba