Do you see what I know? On reasons,perceptual evidence,and epistemic status

Our epistemology can shape the way we think about perception and experience. Speaking as an epistemologist, I should say that I don't necessarily think that this is a good thing. If we think that we need perceptual evidence to have perceptual knowledge or perceptual justification, we will naturally feel some pressure to think of experience as a source of reasons or evidence. In trying to explain how experience can provide us with evidence, we run the risk of either adopting a conception of evidence according to which our evidence isn't very much like the objects of our beliefs that figure in reasoning (e.g., by identifying our evidence with experiences or sensations) or the risk of accepting a picture of experience according to which our perceptions and perceptual experiences are quite similar to beliefs in terms of their objects and their representational powers. But I think we have good independent reasons to resist identifying our evidence with things that don't figure in our reasoning as premises and I think we have good independent reason to doubt that experience is sufficiently belief‐like to provide us with something premise‐like that can figure in reasoning. We should press pause. We shouldn't let questionable epistemological assumptions tell us how to do philosophy of mind. I don't think that we have good reason to think that we need the evidence of the senses to explain how perceptual justification or knowledge is possible. Part of my scepticism derives from the fact that I think we can have kinds of knowledge where the relevant knowledge is not evidentially grounded. Part of my scepticism derives from the fact that there don't seem to be many direct arguments for thinking that justification and knowledge always requires evidential support. In this paper, I shall consider the three arguments I've found for thinking that justification and knowledge do always require evidential support and explain why I don't find them convincing. I think that we can explain perceptual justification, rationality, and defeat without assuming that our experiences provide us with evidence. In the end, I think we can partially vindicate Davidson's (notorious) suggestion that our beliefs, not experiences, provide us with reasons for forming further beliefs. This idea turns out to be compatible with foundationalism once we understand that foundational status can come from something other than evidential support.     

The mind's best trick: how we experience conscious will

We often consciously will our own actions. This experience is so profound that it tempts us to believe that our actions are caused by consciousness. It could also be a trick, however - the mind's way of estimating its own apparent authorship by drawing causal inferences about relationships between thoughts and actions. Cognitive, social, and neuropsychological studies of apparent mental causation suggest that experiences of conscious will frequently depart from actual causal processes and so might not reflect direct perceptions of conscious thought causing action.     

A word about words

The title of my paper comes from an essay by Václav Havel. In his essay, Havel addressed most evocatively the question of the unique power of words for thinking and to influence, for good or for harm, as well as to inform and to educate. As analysts our medium is the word. I suggest that it is of inestimable importance that we are able to listen deeply to our patients' words and to be aware of our own. The quality of our ability to think deeply and consistently about the unconscious experience of our patient is intimately related to our ability to hear what is being said. The effect of our own words upon the patient likewise cannot be overstated. I offer my reflections on words in the analytic relationship and I give some clinical examples that I hope will illustrate my thoughts as to the power and the importance of what and how we hear and of what we say.     

Marginal comments on the evolution of self psychology response to editors’ follow'up questions

The author argues that terrorism aims to obliterate the conditions that allow us to distinguish between situations of safety and situations of danger. If we are unable to make that elemental distinction, we necessarily doubt the value of our own immediate thoughts, perceptions, and ideas. Psychoanalytic theory offers an alternative to immediacy. I think psychoanalytically about an object, one must identify with it and doing so to think of what the terrorists meant we must find a way to identify with them. This entails consciously working against the strong appeals of disidentification. Disidentification is the precondition for pitilessness and, as such, is the precondition for limitless activities directed against the objects of our hatred. It matters what the terrorists meant, then. It matters that we find our way to identifying with what we think they meant. The moment we conclude that it does not matter, we loosen the checks on our own capacities for terrorizing.     

My body as an object: self-distance and social experience

In phenomenology the body is often referred to as the lived body which makes the world familiar to me. In this paper, however, I discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of self-distance. Self-distance is the suggestion that bodily self-consciousness consist in a reflective stance where you conceive of your body as a physical thing, an object in the world as well as the subject of bodily experiences. I argue that we are bodily self-conscious because we experience our own body in more than one way and that these ways are not derivative of one another or hierarchically ordered. This latter claim conflicts with certain phenomenological readings of how the body is experienced, one of which I will refer to and discuss as the Familiarity Objection to my idea of self-distance. I end the paper with a discussion of why we need the conception of experienced objectification that is entailed in the notion of self-distance to account for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences. The notion of self-distance improves our understanding of how the body plays a central role in psychosis for the experience of distorted inter-subjective relations.     

Nondoxastic Perceptual Evidence

How does a particular experience evidence a particular perceptual belief for us? As Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 98) puts it, “[W]hat makes it the case that a particular way of being appeared to—being appeared to greenly, say—is evidence for the proposition that 1 see something green?” Promising, but unsuccessful, answers cite a reliable connection between our having the experience and the belief's being true, our having good reason to believe in such a connection, the proper functioning of our faculties, and objective epistemic norms. A superior view, developed here, is that our experience of being appeared to greenly evidences for us that something is green because we have learned to identify green objects by experiences of that sort. Our learning to do so amounts to our adopting an epistemic norm directing us to form that belief on the basis of that experience.     

Freedom to play,dream and think

The intention in this paper is to study what we mean when we say that play is a mediator of an inner psychic world. The internal scene becomes furnished with your own impressions from the external world. The passions and the experiences from within have no forms of their own and will use the forms in time and space in external reality. An inner object world will be created, and thus far it is the same process as it is for the creation of the dream image and its furniture. In play, there is a circular movement: the furnishings from the inner world intrude into external reality; the external form and the form of the inner object create a double exposure. We look at the object in the room with a binocular view. The experience from psychoanalysis with three children is presented to give different perspectives on the internal movements inherent in play and playing.     

Answering to Future People: Responsibility for Climate Change in a Breaking World

Our everyday notions of responsibility are often driven by our need to justify ourselves to specific others – especially those we harm, wrong, or otherwise affect. One challenge for contemporary ethics is to extend this interpersonal urgency to our relations with those future people who are harmed or affected by our actions. In this article, I explore our responsibility for climate change by imagining a possible ‘broken future’, damaged by the carbon emissions of previous generations (including ourselves), and then asking what its inhabitants might think of our current behaviour, our moral thinking, and our excuses. In particular, I will focus on a simplified scenario where present people can only avoid a broken future by sacrificing Rawlsian favourable conditions. Suppose we refuse to avoid a broken future, on the grounds that we cannot be expected to make such great sacrifices. If the broken future lacks favourable conditions, will its inhabitants accept our excuses? Will they hold us responsible for things we regard as excusable? If so, should we be guided by their judgements or by our own?     

Thinking about others and the future: Neural correlates of perspective taking relate to preferences for delayed rewards

We infer the thoughts and feelings of others by taking their perspectives. Similar processes could be used to understand how we will be affected by future events, by allowing us to take the perspective of our future self. In this paper, we test this idea using a previously presented framework for guiding predictions. The framework proposes that a shared neural mechanism is involved in controlling egocentric bias, both while shifting our perspective away from self and towards others, and while shifting our perspective from immediate to future perspectives. To test this framework, 36 adults performed an intertemporal choice task. They were then scanned using 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging while completing a false-belief “localizer” task, which requires egocentric bias control. A positive correlation was observed between the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) response during the false-belief task, and preferences for delayed rewards in intertemporal choices. A subset of participants performed the intertemporal choice task again in the scanner, which revealed that the response of the same rTPJ cluster, individually localized during the false-belief task, was higher during delayed over immediate reward choices. In addition, functional connectivity between the rTPJ and ventromedial prefrontal cortex was found to differ between immediate and delayed choices. The current results indicate an overlap in processes of egocentric bias control and those that determine preferences in intertemporal choices, offering a social cognitive explanation for why rewards are devalued with delay in temporal discounting.     

Control, Desert and the Difference between Distributive and Retributive Justice

Why is it that we think today so very differently about distributive and retributive justice? Why is the notion of desert so neglected in our thinking about distributive justice, while it remains fundamental in almost every account of retributive justice? I wish to take up this relatively neglected issue, and put forth two proposals of my own, based upon the way control functions in the two spheres.     

Against Limited Foreknowledge

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’.     

Imagination and immortality: thinking of me

Recent work in developmental psychology indicates that children naturally think that psychological states continue after death. One important candidate explanation for why this belief is natural appeals to the idea that we believe in immortality because we can’t imagine our own nonexistence. This paper explores this old idea. To begin, I present a qualified statement of the thesis that we can’t imagine our own nonexistence. I argue that the most prominent explanation for this obstacle, Freud’s, is problematic. I go on to describe some central features of contemporary cognitive accounts of the imagination, and I argue that these accounts provide an independently motivated explanation for the imaginative obstacle. While the imaginative obstacle does not dictate a belief in immortality, it does, I maintain, facilitate such a belief.     

Explanatory Consolidation: From ‘Best’ to ‘Good Enough’

In science and everyday life, we often infer that something is true because it would explain some set of facts better than any other hypothesis we can think of. But what if we have reason to believe that there is a better way to explain these facts that we just haven’t thought of? Wouldn’t that undermine our warrant for believing the best available explanation? Many philosophers have assumed that we can solve such underconsideration problems by stipulating that a hypothesis should not only be ‘the best’ explanation available; rather, it should also be ‘good enough’. Unfortunately, however, the only current suggestion for what it might mean to say that an explanation is ‘good enough’ is, well, not good enough. This paper aims to provide a better account of what is required for an explanatory hypothesis to be considered ‘good enough’. In brief, the account holds that a ‘good enough’ hypothesis is one that has gone through a process that I call explanatory consolidation, in which accumulating evidence and failed attempts to formulate better alternatives gradually make it more plausible that the explanation we currently have is better than any other that could be formulated.     

The Automaton Self: Defensive organisation,psychodynamics and treatment approaches

Abstract

This paper is not primarily concerned with the content of theory and what we then, in the light of this and of our own experience, say to our clients. Rather, it is concerned with the nature of this knowledge that we are using and that the client in turn uses and experiences in the counselling.

How, or the way in which, we know, defines our knowledge as much as the actual content of that knowledge. The paper delineates two fundamental ways of knowing. One is our ordinary practical and rational way of understanding reality and is usually about achieving some goal – this is what I am calling the product side of counselling: the other is concerned with our more immediate first-hand experiential knowing of ourselves and our world.

The paper opens with a definition of these two kinds of knowledge, product and process, and presents some clinical material to show how these different ways of knowing can have a real effect on the counselling. It then moves on to the question of why counselling trainings are becoming increasingly concerned with product knowledge, and ends with a discussion of how Freud himself was constantly using both ways of knowing as if they were the same, without understanding the implications of this for therapeutic practice.     

Observer‐relative chances and the doomsday argument

Suppose various observers are divided randomly into two groups, a large and a small. Not knowing into which group anyone has been sent, each can have strong grounds for believing in being in the large group, although recognizing that every observer in the other group has equally powerful reasons for thinking of this other group as the large one. Justified belief can therefore be observer‐relative in a rather paradoxical way. Appreciating this allows one to reject an intriguing new objection against Brandon Carter's ‘doomsday argument’. Carter encourages us to doubt that we are among only the first hundredth, say, or first millionth, of all humans who will ever have existed. He thereby reinforces whatever reasons we may have for suspecting that, unless we take great care, the human race will not survive long. Admittedly his argument is weakened if our world is indeterministic, so that there is no suitably guaranteed ‘fact of the matter’ of how many humans will ever have existed. But even then, it can caution us against believing that a lengthy future for humankind ‘is as good as determined’. Of all the objections the argument has yet faced, the new one is the most interesting.     

Ineffability and intelligibility: Towards an understanding of the radical unlikeness of religious experience

Conclusion I do not for a moment question the fact that many people have experiences of a special type which may be termed religious, that such experiences often involve reference to something which appears to display a radical unlikeness to all else and that they are therefore in some sense inexpressible. Doubtless the ideas I have put forward about the possible source of such unlikeness and ineffability might suggest models of God which would not find much theological approval, at least within any mainstream theistic tradition, since some sort of pantheism seems inevitably to be implied. But however this might be, the concept of radical unlikeness as it has been analyzed here can, I think, help us towards understanding certain problematic areas in religion quite apart from the issue of intelligibility, which has been the focus of this discussion.To begin with, radical unlikeness suggests a way in which the historical continuity of concepts of the transcendent might be upheld against the discontinuity suggested by the diversity of interpretations through which they have moved. Ancient and modern outlooks on, say, God differ enormously, as indeed do the range of co-temporal accounts at many particular moments. But, by and large, theologians firmly maintain that it is a single and unchanging phenomenon which is being dealt with. Unless we can point to some common element which is both specific enough to create a binding sense of common tradition, yet never completely expressed by any attempt at understanding it within that tradition (thus persistently demanding new attempts to apprehend it), then given the widely differing views of God within, for example, the Christian community, it is difficult to see how we could assume that in fact they all stemmed from the same source and were talking about the same thing. The idea of radical unlikeness could provide an element with just these required characteristics: it could be seen as what all the accounts attempt to net, with varying degrees of adequacy, within their offered interpretations. It could be seen as what remains constant, constantly elusive yet constantly generative of fresh attempts to apprehend it, throughout a history of intra-religious diversity. Secondly, radical unlikeness might suggest a possible way of understanding inter-religious diversity in a way which allows that whilst such diversity exists, whilst the differences between religions are real, they are grounded in a similar root-experience. It may, at first sight, seem difficult to continue thinking of the various religious traditions as truly separate phenomena if they are taken as being grounded on experiences whose ineffability stems from the unlikeness of experiencing things as a whole. Here we must stress again that if they are to be considered intelligible, radically unlike experiences cannot be considered completely so - or putting this another way, we cannot more than approach experience of totality. Sense can be given to religious claims of ineffability by suggesting experience of near totality, where we reach the last point on the scale of inclusiveness which complies with the logical criteria demanded of something for it to be possible for us to be aware of it. We might thus attempt an explanation of inter-religious diversity based on the view that Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc. acquire their differences from the different elements included in their experience of near totality. Taking totality to be represented by the scale of one to ten, Hinduism might be seen as grounded on experience of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-9-10, Buddhism on experience of 1-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 and so on. The resulting dissimilarities are thus centred not on different types of experience, but on different areas of inclusiveness. This is, of course, to suppose that the various religious traditions are all based on the same degree (as opposed to the same elements) of inclusiveness, but it is by no means clear that such a supposition is justified. Continuing with our decimal analogy, might it not be suggested that whilst Christianity stemmed from experience of 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, Jainism was founded on a less extensive encounter with the divine (say 4-5-6-7-8-9-10)? It is, however, uncertain how we can compare and evaluate different religious traditions in such a way as to be able to comment on such claims. The analysis of radical unlikeness and ineffability which has been advanced might also suggest a way in which certain passages in religious writings could be understood, passages which at first sight can be seriously perplexing. If, for example, to return to the quotation given in the introductory section of this paper, we continue to think of accounts of the nature of Shiva as being attempts to describe some discrete, objective entity, then it is inevitable that either we will share the Puranic writer's puzzlement or that much of what we read about Shiva will appear as the muddled and extravagant thinking thrown up by an uncritical and over-fertile mythological imagination, consisting of little more than a hotch-potch of contradictory elements. But if we see such accounts as attempting to say something about everything, as symbols of near totality stemming from experiences which verge on the holistic, then what we read - with all its ambiguities - may become somewhat more meaningful. This analysis of ineffability and intelligibility seeks to introduce for debate a possible way of understanding the radical unlikeness which accounts of religious experience apparently attempt to speak about. It does not, however, claim to present an exhaustive treatment of the issues raised, on the contrary, I am conscious of many shortcomings and omissions. For instance, it remains to be seen under precisely what conditions something counts as being an elucidating likeness (presumably all experiences are, for example, temporal, yet temporality alone would not seem to offer a particularly elucidating comparison). Moreover, the degree to which appeal to likeness is allowed operation in actual accounts of religious experience needs to be explored. In addition, the notion of categorizing experiences according to the extent to which they approach a point of total inclusion requires careful clarification. To begin with, according to what criteria could we establish that one experience was more inclusive than another? However, such issues can only be mentioned here, any adequate consideration of them would require a separate paper.In conclusion, I would suggest that to use radical unlikeness and/or ineffability simply as devices by which to halt any process of investigation, proclaiming that the thing in question is not like anything and so is beyond all words, risks making unintelligible and placing beyond all further inquiry an important and extensive area of human experience. As William Alston put it, to label something ineffable in an unqualified way is to shirk the job of making explicit the ways in which it can be talked about. It is surely more accurate to take ineffability as a qualifier which multiplies models without end than as an absolute which prevents the construction of any elucidating models.An early draft of this paper was read to a seminar group at the University of St. Andrews during Martinmas term 1984. I am grateful to Dr. Gordon Graham & Mr. Tony Ellis, both of the Department of Moral Philosophy, and to Dr. George Hall, of the Department of Divinity, for remarks which stimulated some subsequent revisions of the argument.

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Naturalizing Subjective Character

When I have a conscious experience of the sky, there is a bluish way it is like for me to have that experience. We may distinguish two aspects of this “bluish way it is like for me”: (i) the bluish aspect and (ii) the for‐me aspect. Let us call the bluish aspect of the experience its qualitative character and the for‐me aspect its subjective character. What is this elusive for‐me‐ness, or subjective character, of conscious experience? In this paper, I examine six different attempts to account for subjective character in terms of the functional and representational properties of conscious experiences. After arguing against the first five, I defend the sixth.     

Right to life, right to die and assisted suicide

In 2002 Diane Pretty went to the European Court of Human Rights to gain a ruling about assisted suicide. In the course of this she argued that the right to life implied a right to die. This paper will consider, from an ethical rather than a legal point of view, how the right to life might imply (or not) a right to die, and whether this includes either a right that others shall help us die, or a right against non-interference if others are willing to help us. It does this by comparing the right to life to conceptions of property rights. This is not because I think human life is property, but because some of our ways of talking and thinking about our control over our own lives seem to be similar to our thoughts about our control over our own property. The right to life has traditionally been taken as a negative right, that is a right that others not deprive us of life. Pretty's argument, however, seems to be moving towards a positive right, not just to remain alive, but to be enabled in doing what we want to with our lives, and thus disposing of them if we so choose. The comparison with property rights suggests that the right to die only applies if our lives are ours absolutely, and may itself be modified by the suggestion that suicide harms all of us by devaluing human life in general.     

The Amplification and Integration of Near-Death and Other Exceptional Human Experiences by the Larger Cultural Context: An Autobiographical Case

Although I became a parapsychologist in part to help me understand the near-death experience (NDE) I had in 1952 as an undergraduate, it was not until 1990 that I began to integrate my NDE into my life. Doing so alerted me to the role the larger cultural context plays in regard to NDEs and other exceptional human experiences (EHEs). I propose not only that we need to draw on cultural resources to amplify the meaning of our exceptional human experiences, but that EHEs themselves carry the seeds of cultural change.     

Same-sex attraction, homosexual orientation, and gay identity: a three-tier distinction for counseling and pastoral care

Given recent prevalence estimates most pastoral caregivers and counselors will work with persons who experience same-sex attraction (SSA). Many of the people who experience SSA will report such a consistency in the directionality and intensity of their attractions that they think of themselves as having a homosexual orientation. Others will integrate their experiences of SSA into a gay identity. What can facilitate pastoral care and counseling is an intentional use of this three-tier distinction: experiences of SSA, homosexual orientation, and gay identity. A discussion of this three-tier distinction is followed by specific suggestions for utilizing this conceptual framework as a resource in pastoral care and counseling.