The Reality of Subjects

Pessoa often expresses hesitation in his ability to tell what is more real and what is less, the actual or the virtual, veridical experience or dream, fact or fiction. At other times Pessoa offers something like a criterion to distinguish the imaginary from the empirical. Imagined entities are ‘one-sided’ in a manner actual entities are not. Pessoa’s view seems to be that subjects of experience are grounded (and therefore are not Cartesian souls), and that the grounding of both actual and virtual subjects is the same. The intuitive view that unsimulated subjects ground simulated ones, that Shakespeare is ‘more real’ than Hamlet, is regarded as deeply suspicious if not rejected outright. What we need is a way to make sense of the idea that subjects of experience which are simulated in imagination are no ‘less real’ than the subjects of experience in everyday life. There have, indeed, been studies which suggest that there is a functional equivalence in the two cases, such as Tamar Gendler’s studies of imaginative contagion.

Illusory Looks

One debate the Pyrrhonian skeptics had with the Epicureans concerned the relation between sense perceptions and beliefs. The debate centers on the Epicurean claim that all perceptions are true, a claim rejected by the Skeptics, who proceed on the assumption that there is no judgment component in perception, and it echoes widely through today’s philosophy of perception. In the past the author has defended a non-standard version of intentionalism, according to which (visual) experiences indeed are beliefs, but have contents—so-called looks-contents—that, if ever, very rarely are false. This chapter works out how this view can nevertheless account for non-veridical experience. It harnesses the rational role of experience to work out a precise way of characterizing non-veridical experience in terms of misleadingness.

Religious experience

Philosophy is interested in religious experience as a possible source of knowledge of the existence, nature and doings of God. The experiences in question seem to their possessors to be direct, perceptual awarenesses of God. But they may be wrong about this, and many philosophers think they are. Many philosophers think that such experiences are never what they seem, and that no one has a veridical experience of the presence and/or activity of God. The main philosophical reason for supposing that such experiences are in fact sometimes veridical is a principle according to which any apparent experience of something is to be regarded as veridical unless we have sufficient reasons to the contrary. Experiences are innocent until proven guilty. If we do not accept that principle, we will never have sufficient grounds for taking any experience to be veridical – religious, sensory or whatever. There are critics who think that we do have sufficient reasons to the contrary in the case of religious experience. For one thing, we do not have the same capacity for intersubjective checks of religious experiences that we have with sense perceptions. But to this it can be replied that we should not suppose that sense perception represents the only way in which we can achieve genuine cognitive contact with objective reality. For another thing, it is widely supposed that religious experience can be adequately explained by psychological and social factors, without bringing God into the picture. But even if this-worldly factors are the only immediate causes of the experience, God could figure as a cause farther back in the causal chain. Finally, the disagreements between alleged experiences of God, especially across different religions, provide a reason for doubting the deliverances of religious experience. But it is possible for a number of people to be genuinely experiencing the same thing, even though they disagree as to what it is like. This is a common occurrence in sense perception.

Inferência metafísica e a experiência do observável

Some strongly empiricist views of scientific knowledge advocate a rejection of metaphysics. On such views, scientific knowledge is described strictly in terms of knowledge of the observable world, demarcated by human sensory abilities, and no metaphysical considerations need arise. This paper argues that even these views require some recourse to metaphysics in order to derive knowledge from experience. Central here is the notion of metaphysical inference, which admits of different “magnitudes”, thus generating a spectrum of putative knowledge with more substantially empirical beliefs at one end, and more metaphysically imbued beliefs at the other. Given that metaphysical inference is required even concerning knowledge of the observable, the empiricist hope of avoiding metaphysics altogether is futile: knowledge of the observable simply involves metaphysical inferences that are of smaller magnitudes than others. Metaphysical inferences are required not only to distinguish veridical from non-veridical experience and to determine the quality of empirical information, but also in order to explain how we construct experience (through categorizations and classifications of objects, events, processes, and properties), how we extrapolate from empirical evidence to generalize about observable phenomena, and how we use this evidence to test and confirm hypotheses and theories.

Light out of Plenitude: Towards an Epistemology of Mystical Inclusivism

The question to what extent the putative mystical experiences reported in the variety of religious traditions contribute to the conflict of religious truth claims, appears to be one of the hardest problems of the epistemology of religion, identified in the course of the ongoing debate about the philosophical consequences of religious diversity. A number of leading participants in this debate, including the late W.P. Alston, took a strongly exclusivist stance on it, while being aware that in the light of the long coexistence of seemingly irreconcilable great mystical traditions, mystical exclusivism lacks philosophical justification. In this paper I argue that from the point of view of a theist, inclusivism with respect to the issue whether adherents of different religious traditions can have veridical experience of God (or Ultimate Reality) now, is more plausible than the Alstonian exclusivism. I suggest that mystical inclusivism of the kind I imply in this paper may contribute to the development of cross-cultural philosophy of religion, as well as to the theoretical framework for interreligious dialogue, because (1) it allows for the possibility of veridical experience of God in a variety of religious traditions, but (2) it avoids the radical revisionist postulates of Hickian pluralism and (3) it leaves open the question whether the creed of any specific tradition is a better approximation to the truth about God than the creeds of other traditions.

The Externalist's Demon

Let's say that two individuals are epistemic counterparts iff they happen to be in precisely the same (non-factive) mental states. If one has a veridical experience, her counterparts will undergo a subjectively indistinguishable conscious experience. If she remembers something, her counterparts will seem to recall the same event or fact. If she knows something to be true, her counterparts will believe it to be true. Counterparts always find the same things intuitive. Any difference between those who know a great deal about the external world and their systematically deceived counterparts is a difference the deceived counterparts could never appreciate.