Abstract
According to Schellenberg, our perceptual experiences have the epistemic force they do because they are exercises of certain sorts of capacity, namely capacities to discriminate particulars—objects, property-instances and events—in a sensory mode. She calls her account the “capacity view.” In this paper, I will raise three concerns about Schellenberg’s capacity view. The first is whether we might do better to leave capacities out of our epistemology and take content properties as the fundamental epistemically relevant features of experiences. I argue we would. The second is whether Schellenberg’s appeal to factive and phenomenal evidence accommodates the intuitive verdicts about the bad case that she claims it does. I argue it does not. The third is whether Schellenberg’s account of factive evidence is adequate to capture nuances concerning the justification for singular but nondemonstrative perceptual beliefs, such as the belief that’s NN, where NN is a proper name. I argue it is not. If I am right, these points suggest a mental-state-first account of perceptual justification, rather than a capacity-first account, and one which treats the good and bad cases alike in respect of justification and complicates the relation between perceptual content and what one is justified in believing.
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Notes
This may not be what Schellenberg takes the content of this experience to be. However Schellenberg understands that content, we could reformulate the answer accordingly.
Generally, we should deny the following principle: if x having P1 metaphysically grounds x having P2 and x having P2 makes it the case that x has epistemic property Q, then x having P1 makes it the case that x has epistemic property Q. Schellenberg herself denies the principle, since she allows that the fact that an experience is an exercise of a capacity might itself have a deeper metaphysical grounding but also claims that this deeper grounding is explanatorily irrelevant to epistemology.
On traditional conceptions of mental states, a lifelong brain in a vat (or Swampman) could have the same mental states that I in fact have.
See Burge (2003).
This is not to deny that it might turn out that some externalist account of experiential content is correct, in which case the lifelong BIV might well not have experiences with contents as of blue, with the result that the intuitive verdict that the BIV is justified in believing something blue before him would be false. However, epistemology alone shouldn’t decide this. Only epistemology together with metaphysical theories of content does so.
Here Schellenberg relies on the assumption that “having more evidence for p means that p is better justified” (p. 7).
As Susanna Siegel pointed out to me, a question arises here for Schellenberg: why couldn’t enjoying an experience with a certain content type make Hallie justified in her singular belief? Perhaps she doesn’t have factive evidence, but could her phenomenal evidence justify her singular belief?
The same considerations apply to the capacities-second two-tiered phenomenal states view outlined in the previous section, for it, too, denies that Hallie has evidence for her singular perceptual belief.
References
Burge, T. (2003). Perceptual entitlement. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67(3), 503–548.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pryor, J. (2000). The skeptic and the dogmatist. Nous, 34(4), 517–549.
Schellenberg, S. (2015). Phenomenal evidence and factive evidence. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0528-8.
Acknowledgments
Author would thanks to James Genone and Susanna Siegel for helpful comments.
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McGrath, M. Schellenberg on the epistemic force of experience. Philos Stud 173, 897–905 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0529-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0529-7