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Certainty and Our Sense of Acquaintance with Experiences

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Abstract

Why do we tend to think that phenomenal consciousness poses a hard problem? The answer seems to lie in part in the fact that we have the impression that phenomenal experiences are presented to us in a particularly immediate and revelatory way: we have a sense of acquaintance with our experiences. Recent views have offered resources to explain such persisting impression, by hypothesizing that the very design of our cognitive systems inevitably leads us to hold beliefs about our own experiences with certainty. I argue against this kind of “designed certainty” views. First, I claim that it is doubtful that we really hold beliefs about our own experiences with certainty—in any sense of certainty that would make our phenomenal beliefs special. Second, I claim that, even if it were the case that we hold beliefs about experiences with certainty, this would fall short of explaining our sense of acquaintance.

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Notes

  1. In Chalmers’ paper, it is not clear whether this “sense of acquaintance” is a genuine problem intuition (a certain disposition to believe something about consciousness), or something more general, that gives rise to a series of problem intuitions. I will set aside this worry here: I will talk indifferently of the “sense” of acquaintance and of the “intuition” of acquaintance.

  2. An influential line of thinking, initiated by Harman (1990) and Tye (2002), claims that experiences are transparent: the only qualities we introspectively find in experiences are qualities of objects, not of experiences themselves. Proponents of transparency might be interpreted as stating that we do not have a sense of acquaintance with experiential qualities. This suggests that the intuition of acquaintance is not widely shared after all – as it would not be shared by the numerous philosophers who are attracted to the transparency thesis! However, the transparency view is also naturally seen as suggesting that we feel so acquainted with objectual qualities, and maybe even with experiences themselves – not as bearers of sui generis qualities, but as acts of acquaintance with objectual qualities (this is Chalmers’ view). Hence, it is not clear that proponents of transparency can easily deny that we have a problematic intuition of acquaintance of some sort, even if they might deny that we feel acquainted with experiential qualities irreducible to presentations of objectual qualities. I think that similar things could be said about views such as Byrne’s (2009), according to which experience-talk is misleading, and so that there are properly speaking no “experiences”. The detailed discussion of such views falls beyond the scope of this paper.

  3. For the view that acquaintance itself can be naturalized, although our sense of acquaintance can perhaps not be fully explained in physical-functional terms, see Balog (2020).

  4. This kind of approach is similar to the approach labeled “Introspective Opacity” by David Chalmers in his meta-problem paper (Chalmers, 2018, pp. 22–23).

  5. I have argued at length against Pereboom’s explanation of our sense that introspection is in some sense infallible in (Kammerer, 2018). See (Pereboom, 2019) for Pereboom’s response. Regarding Dennett’s view or views inspired by Armstrong, I argued in (Kammerer, 2019b) that it predicts that the processes generating our problem intuitions should be cognitively penetrable, while they are not. David Chalmers also criticizes views of this kind (Chalmers, 2018, pp. 22–23), for comparable reasons.

  6. “Certainty” is ambiguous between a psychological and an epistemic meaning (on which I will say more later). I use here the psychological sense: beliefs or judgments are (psychologically) certain when they are held with a maximal degree of confidence.

  7. Note that Schwarz claims that these imaginary propositions would be held with certainty, but does not claim that they would believed with certainty. Indeed, he reserves terms such as “belief” or “credence” for attitudes we have regarding real propositions – propositions about the world – as opposed to these “imaginary” propositions. He also recognizes that this difference might not be relevant from the point of view of the subject (Schwarz, 2018, p. 782). I will set aside this subtlety here and just consider the sort of certainty we have towards imaginary propositions as a kind of belief.

  8. Schwarz argues at length for the view that we should expect Bayesian updaters to function in this manner, and I cannot do justice to his argument here. He notably stresses that his model, which conceives of Bayesian updating as relying on such imaginary propositions of which we are absolutely certain, provides a way of avoiding the “input problem” that arise for models of Bayesian updating which do not admit such bedrock certainty, such as Jeffrey conditionalization. Besides, by making the propositions of which we are certain “imaginary”, Schwarz claims to avoid the pitfalls of “hardcore empiricism”, which posit a real world of sense-data of which we have certain knowledge (Schwarz, 2018, p. 776). Whether or not he is right in saying all this is independent from the question that I will now tackle, which regards whether or not the resulting model can appropriately account for our sense of acquaintance.

  9. Clark, Friston and Wilkinson also develop a rich conception of phenomenality as corresponding to certain mid-level encodings within the human cognitive system, considered as a hierarchical Bayesian engine. I will not talk about these aspects here, even if they are supposed to explain some of our intuitions regarding consciousness (the apparent “concreteness” of experience).

  10. Although these accounts are not formulated using the vocabulary of “acquaintance”, I think that it is legitimate to interpret them as aiming notably at an explanation of our sense of acquaintance. Indeed, they aim at explaining why we have the strong and inescapable impression that we know our own experiences in some uniquely reliable way, which makes the puzzling character of consciousness particularly persistent, and renders both standard realist materialism and illusionism hard to accept. Moreover, note that, even if it turned out that the intuition of acquaintance is not the main explanatory target of these views (not more, say, than other problems intuitions), it would still be extremely relevant, for someone who thinks that the intuition of acquaintance is crucial to the meta-problem, to examine how such views fare when it comes to explaining this intuition.

  11. I do not think that any other feature posited by these views could be interpreted as explanatory of our sense of acquaintance. However, if it turns out that these views admit other potential explanans, one can read the following arguments as a criticism, not of these views per se, but of a rational reconstruction of these views in which certainty towards phenomenal propositions is the explanans of our intuition of acquaintance.

  12. One other advantage (which I will pass over quickly) of designed certainty views is that they see this designed certainty feature as an advantageous feature of our cognitive architecture, which makes then these features easier to explain evolutionarily.

  13. Pereboom borrows this example from Hill (1991, pp. 128–129), who himself borrowed it from Rogers Albritton.

  14. This might follow from what Schwarz suggests when he writes: “A system’s world model need not match its considered judgments about metaphysical reality” (Schwarz, 2019, p. 225).

  15. Note however that it is not for this kind of reason that Clark et al. reject Schwarz’s view that we hold phenomenal judgments with 100% certainty. Their own motivation is linked to the way in which multi-level Bayesian updaters work: “For technical reasons it is usually not a good idea for the processing itself to reach 100% certainty as this locks solutions into place in a way that blocks ongoing multi-level processing” (Clark et al., 2019, p. 25).

  16. This is not to say that full certainty is distinctive of our beliefs about experiences. For example, it is arguably believe that we have non-experiential full certainty (say, that 1 + 1 = 2). I will discuss that example later.

  17. Certainty here means “full certainty”; but what I said could also apply to meta-certainty (as we arguably believe with certainty that we are certain of such a priori truths). As for near-certainty, it encounters even more serious problems, given that we are nearly certain of a great deal of very mundane truths – as noted earlier.

  18. See my footnote 9 for elements in Clark et al.’s account, which might help here.

  19. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this line of objection.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the audience at the ANU as well as Wolfgang Schwarz for their comments. I also want to thank an anonymous reviewer at Erkenntnis for their useful comments.

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This research was supported by the Humboldt Stiftung.

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  1. Institut Für Philosophie II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    François Kammerer

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Kammerer, F. Certainty and Our Sense of Acquaintance with Experiences. Erkenn 88, 3015–3036 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00488-5

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