What We Mean by Experience

Marianne Janack

• Editore: Stanford University Press
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804784306
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Mente e corpo in filosofia

Social scientists and scholars in the humanities all rely on first-person descriptions of experience to understand how subjects construct their worlds. The problem they always face is how to integrate first-person accounts with an impersonal stance. Over the course of the twentieth century, this problem was compounded as the concept of experience itself came under scrutiny. First hailed as a wellspring of knowledge and the weapon that would vanquish metaphysics and Cartesianism by pragmatists like Dewey and James, by the century's end experience had become a mere vestige of both, a holdover from seventeenth-century empiricist metaphysics. This devaluation of experience has left us bereft, unable to account for first-person perspectives and for any kind of agency or intentionality.This book takes on the critique of empiricism and the skepticism with regard to experience that has issued from two seemingly disparate intellectual strains of thought: anti-foundationalist and holistic philosophy of science and epistemology (Kuhn and Rorty, in particular) and feminist critiques of identity politics. Both strains end up marginalizing experience as a viable corrective for theory, and both share notions of human beings and cognition that cause the problem of the relation between experience and our theories to present itself in a particular way. Indeed, they render experience an intractable problem by opening up a gap between a naturalistic understanding of human beings and an understanding of humans as cultural entities, as non-natural makers of meaning. Marianne Janack aims to close this gap, to allow us to be naturalistic and hermeneutic at once. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, the pragmatist tradition, and ecological psychology, her book rescues experience as natural contact with the world.

CHAPTER 1

The Linguistic Turn and the Ascendancy of Anti-foundationalism

The concept of experience went from being the most useful concept for philosophical purposes to being one of the most neglected or vilified concepts over the course of the twentieth century. This is attributable to two dominant intellectual developments: the ascendancy of the theoretical trend known as “the linguistic turn,” and the growth of anti-foundationalism (see below) in the humanities generally, and in Anglo-American philosophy in particular. When the linguistic turn was paired with anti-foundationalism, there was little left for the term “experience” to do. Discussions of the concept “experience” were replaced by linguistic analysis and discourse theory, or by empirical psychology and linguistic behaviorism, and bifurcated into “discourse” and “stimuli.” This division introduced new versions of the problem of realism and new challenges to the theory of mind and philosophical psychology more broadly, even as it appeared to offer new solutions to those problems. Anti-foundationalism, as it was worked out by figures like Popper, Kuhn, Rorty, and Quine, branched off in two different directions, with those who were less concerned with problems of realism and objectivity arguing that “discourse” could substitute for the concept of experience, while anti-foundationalists like Quine, who were more willing to treat experience as a purely psychological event, turned to “stimuli” or “input” to try to close the gap between theory and the world that seemed to open up as a result of the displacement of “experience” from the epistemological story. This chapter examines the different challenges to experience that we find in the key writings of the anti-foundationalists and advocates of the linguistic turn that led to the reversal of fortune for the concept of experience. Popper, Kuhn, Rorty, and Quine represent the variety of challenges to experience that arose out of these intellectual movements; their primary target was the idea of the “observation” or “observation sentence.”

The philosophers who challenged the value of appeals to experience focused on the question of the possibility of “observation sentences”—that is, simple, basic observational reports like those that the positivists argued could serve the purpose of verifying a claim, and thus limn the border between the scientific and the metaphysical. Some philosophers—in particular, Karl Popper—called into question the appeal to experience in order to show that metaphysics could not be so readily dismissed, and to save philosophy from “psychologism.” But the attack on observation sentences went well beyond that, challenging the very possibility of empiricism. The role that was claimed for them in theory-choice in general by garden-variety empiricists was also imperiled by the attack on experience and observation, as we see in Thomas Kuhn’s controversial discussions of scientific revolutions.

Since James and Dewey used a very different concept of experience, one might wonder why the attack on observation would extend to their use of the term, as it did. Skepticism about observation sentences does not seem to apply to their use of experience, or so it would seem. Nevertheless, the linguistic turn and general skepticism about the role that experience could (or should) play as “contact with the world” undermined the appeal to experience that marked the early pragmatists’ philosophical project as well. The idea that there was some way in which experience could count as contact with a real world and as a corrective to our theories, which characterizes both pragmatists’ version of empiricism and the more narrowly circumscribed methodology of empiricism in philosophy of science, was also caught up in the skeptical attitude toward observation. This debate, of course, continues as the debate about realism and objectivity.

Anti-foundationalism and the Problem of Observation Sentences

The critique of experience in the philosophy of science that dominated the middle and late twentieth century seems to have had very wide-reaching effects. We see it not only in the traditional philosophical debates; echoes of it also appear in political theory, testifying to the power, most centrally, of one book: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn himself, however, drew on earlier work by N. Russell Hanson, whose book Patterns of Discovery (1958) offers a detailed argument supporting the claim that observation is theory-dependent, and cannot play the confirming or infirming role that empiricists claimed for it. Empiricism is, in its most general outline, a story about the source of knowledge (properly so called). All knowledge, according to Hume, begins with the senses, and empiricists are so called because they privilege sensory experience in their accounts of justification and knowledge. In the account of empiricism that comes from the British empiricists, sense impressions give rise to ideas, which are the functional equivalent of copies of impressions. This form of empiricism has a ready ally in foundationalism: the way of characterizing our epistemic practices in which some beliefs are immediately justified. For the empiricist foundationalist, that immediate justification arises for those beliefs that have their basis in experience.

Anti-foundationalism is characterized by two different tenets: the idea that the source of our beliefs is not relevant to their justification; and the idea that sensory experience-cum-observation is theory-dependent. The first is a straightforwardly philosophical point, based on the idea that there is a difference between causes and reasons, and that no story about causes (that is, sources) can, by itself, be a story about reasons. The second claim can be taken to be a philosophical point as well, but it becomes something more like a hybrid of an empirical and philosophical point in its development by people like Kuhn and Hanson. These tenets, in combination or singly, raise the question of the evidential role that experience is capable of playing. But they also jeopardize the grounding function that the early pragmatists attributed to experience as a way of tying philosophy to real-world problems. As a result, the anti-foundationalist program opened the prospect for redefining traditional philosophical problems about language, mind, and knowledge.

The idea that the source of our beliefs is irrelevant to their justification follows from the idea that justification is a logical notion, while experience is a quasi-psychological and causal notion. Karl Popper blamed the confusion of justification (a normative and discursive concept) with the causal, anormative process of sensory experience on the British empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He called these philosophers (along with Russell and Popper’s logical positivist contemporaries) “belief philosophers.”

According to Popper, the epistemology and philosophy of science produced by the belief philosophers is marked by a confusion of justification with empirical psychology, leading to subjectivism and the introduction of irrelevant considerations into the theory of scientific knowledge (Popper 1972, 108). Only claims (propositional entities) can justify other claims, and the essence of the justification of scientific knowledge is the inferential relationship between these claims: the intellect is essentially discursive, Popper argues, and psychological states (which are what Popper takes experience to be) are too subjective and private to do the rational work of justification. Thus one strand of anti-foundationalism is critical of the elision of the distinction between sensory experience and rationality.¹ For Popper, the main objection to British empiricism and its successor subject, logical positivism, is that it is a form of psychologism: the replacement of philosophical and normative problems by psychology.

The British empiricists and the “belief philosophers” whom Popper saw as their heirs confused psychological claims with justificatory claims in their characterization of knowledge as a state that one could be in as a result of having certain kinds of sensory experiences, and tying justification to a foundation in such experiences. In order to show the difference between justifications and causes, Popper argued that the physiological state that follows from a causal interaction with particles (Locke’s story of corpuscles and the way in which they literally bombard our sensory organs) can be caused in many ways. If that is so, then there are many ways that one might end up with a particular belief without having any reason for having it. So the question of justification, Popper argued, is independent of the question about how I came to have certain impressions.

Furthermore, according to Popper, the British empiricists and their associationist models of knowledge confused psychological questions with philosophical questions, preparing the way for the eventual replacement of philosophical questions by psychological questions. In response to the positivists’ efforts to eliminate metaphysical problems, labeling them “pseudo-problems,” critical rationalists like Karl Popper took it upon themselves to defend the importance of philosophy:

Time and again, an entirely new philosophical movement arises which finally unmasks the old philosophical problems as pseudo-problems and which confronts the wicked nonsense of philosophy with the good sense of meaningful, positive, empirical science. And time and again do the despised defenders of “traditional philosophy” try to explain to the leaders of the latest positivistic assault that the main problem of philosophy is the critical analysis of the appeal to the authority of “experience”—precisely that “experience” which every latest discoverer of positivism is as ever, artlessly taking for granted. . . . “Experience” for him is a programme, not a problem (unless it is studied by empirical psychology). (Boyd et al. 1991, 102)

In posing the problem as the problem of the authority of experience, Popper gave the problem a distinctly Kantian cast in an attempt to fend off the dangers of psychologism that he saw lurking in the positivists’ naïve appeals to experience. Only claims, which are propositional entities, can justify other claims—this is the point that Popper pursues in framing the question as about the authority of experience. Thus, having a certain experience is not the end of the discussion. The important question is: what kind of authority can and should experience have in determining our scientific theories? The essence of the justification of scientific knowledge is the inferential relationship that holds between claims, Popper argued, and so the question of the authority of experience is not answered by simply stating that one has had an experience of a certain type. Rather the question is: what kinds of inferences are licensed by that experience? What are the claims that one can be said to be entitled to on the basis of a particular sensory experience? The intellect is essentially discursive, Popper argues, and psychological states (which are what Popper takes experience to be) are too subjective and private to do the rational work of justification. Thus one strand of anti-foundationalism, represented by Popper, is critical of attempts to undermine the distinction between sensory experience and rationality. For Popper the main objection to the epistemology of the British empiricists and their successors, the logical positivists, is that they are guilty of psychologism: the replacement by psychology of philosophical and normative problems. This exemplifies the first tenet of anti-foundationalism: that a purely causal process like sensory experience is irrelevant to the question of justification. Rationality is discursive, which is to say it has an inferential structure that admits of evaluation. Sensory experience is a psychological event, so this argument goes, but rationality is normative. While nonhuman animals have sensory experience, they do not have rationality—the ability to justify and critically evaluate their beliefs (if they can even be said to have them). This objection is a philosophical point about the conceptual difference between causes and reasons.

The second objection to foundationalism, however—that sensory observation is theory-dependent—actually relies, in some of its versions, on the results of empirical psychology for its persuasiveness. I will begin with a discussion of this aspect of the anti-foundationalist critique of experience, and return to the claim that justification is essentially discursive after that discussion.

Challenges to Experience: The Data of Psychology and the Attempt to Replace Epistemology with Empirical Psychology

There Is No Innocent Eye: Experience Is Theory-Dependent

I begin with the challenge to experience that arises out of post-Kuhnian philosophy of science, not because it is the first, but because in Kuhn, we find the problem put most pointedly. In “Revolutions as Changes in World View,” chapter 10 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn remarks that the history of scientific revolutions seems to demand a rather radical interpretation: that not only do scientists “adopt new instruments and look in new places” during revolutions, they also “see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well” (1996 [1962], 111). But, of course, scientists are not bodily transported to a new world, Kuhn says. Nevertheless, he says that insofar as the only recourse that practicing scientists have to the world is “through what they see and do” (111), they are, in a sense, transported to another world: their research world is transformed by means of scientific training in a new paradigm. This training involves teaching scientists to see differently by taking old situations and reorganizing them into a new gestalt.

The idea that perception is of a situation—that is, elements or entities configured in relation to one another such that the situation is more than simply the sum of its constituent elements, but is rather a meaningful arrangement of those elements—is a cornerstone of Kuhn’s claims about the ways in which scientific education teaches scientists in the making to see. Observation is literally theory-dependent, because the process of seeing requires such an education. The claim that scientists working in different paradigms work in different worlds goes back to Kuhn’s claim, which he advances on the basis of psychological experiments, that what one sees depends both on what one looks at and what one’s “previous visual-conceptual experience has taught” (113) one to see. Kuhn cites the playing-card experiment, mentioned in the Introduction above, as well as cases in which subjects are fitted with goggles with inverting lenses.

The inverting-lens experiment, originally performed at the end of the nineteenth century, showed that, while the subjects who were wearing the goggles were initially completely disoriented, “after the subject has begun to deal with his new world, his entire visual field flips over, usually after an intervening period in which vision is simply confused. Thereafter, objects are again seen as they had been before the goggles were put on. The assimilation of a previously anomalous field has reacted upon and changed the field itself” (112). Kuhn uses this example to support his claim that we cannot isolate “raw data” of sense experience, because the candidates for such a role in sense perception cannot really explain how we see things. While the inverting-lens experiment shows that two people with different retinal images (i.e., one who is wearing the goggles, one who is not) can see the same thing, Kuhn points out that the duck-rabbit gestalt, in which a picture can be seen either as a duck or a rabbit, but not both at the same time, shows, conversely, that two people with the same retinal images can see different things (127). In effect, Kuhn argues that the idea that we could isolate a neutral stimulus input like retinal images that could serve as a given of sensory experience is undermined by these different experimental results.

Kuhn connects these empirical data to the history of failed attempts to identify a “language of observation”—a language comprising only percepts and logical terms to which the logical positivists aspired. The failure of these attempts was due, Kuhn argues, to the fact that meaningful terms are embedded in a theory of nature that involves a “host of expectations about nature and fails to function the moment these expectations are violated” (127). Attempts to identify a language of observation show that paradigms are essential to perception, because the most successful such attempts have usually involved areas of discourse in which a paradigm is already operative, or a small bit of everyday discourse. The alternative to some paradigm-informed observation is not a more basic “fixed” vision but only “vision through another paradigm” (129). The search for an observation language—a purportedly theory-neutral description of the world—or the attempt to identify retinal images (the physical stand-in for theory-neutral data) can only begin after experience has been determined by paradigms, Kuhn argues. This is because it is only with a paradigm that our experience of the world can be experience under a description. But more important, the questions about which descriptions are more basic than others can only be answered by invoking other theory-informed descriptions: “it is . . . only after experience has thus been determined that the search for an operational definition or a pure observation-language can begin. . . . Therefore, though they are always legitimate, and are occasionally extraordinarily fruitful, questions about retinal imprints or about the consequences of particular laboratory manipulations presuppose a world already perceptually and conceptually subdivided in a certain way” (129). An artificial language, or a language of sense data must include in its specifications an ontology—the kinds of things that are possible subjects of description—and thus are themselves theory-dependent. Our designation, then, of a more basic description does not mean that we have stripped away the theory; it means only that we have opted for a particular version of the world. This gives rise to the diagnosis of incommensurability, for which Kuhn is notorious. The fact that scientific paradigms are incommensurable, Kuhn says, means that it is misleading to characterize one paradigm as a correction to an earlier paradigm. Scientific theories do not progress through accretion, but through radical rupture, in which the world is reconfigured each time. There is no theory-free, basic, or primitive description of the world that could serve as the corrective for, or touchstone of, theories and paradigms.

Kuhn has been charged with making choice of scientific theory an agonistic and wholly rhetorical exercise. The ontological pluralism that seems to follow from his claim that observation is always theory-dependent, and that no one ontology is more “real” than any other, allegedly makes choosing a theory at best arational, at worst irrational. The challenge to the rationality of scientific theory choice arises because, if there are no common observations that can serve as the arbiter between competing theories, then it is not clear that there is any evidence that could be invoked to justify the choice of one theory rather than another; incommensurability and the claim that paradigms determine “large areas of experience” (129) means that there is no theory-independent evidence. In William James’s words, this seems to leave the world wagging; our theories do not seem to be constrained in any important way by the world. We might have a completely consistent theory, but this leaves open the possibility that there might be a number of internally consistent, but mutually inconsistent, theories. How should we choose among them?

This problem is even more difficult when we realize that according to Kuhn’s analysis, a scientist only “sees” the evidence that would falsify a paradigm if she has already developed an allegiance to a competing paradigm. Similarly, she only has access to the evidence that would corroborate a particular theory if she already accepts the paradigm of which that theory is part. This would seem to be the worst kind of data-mining and confirmation bias, but is, according to Kuhn, exactly how science works.

Kuhn describes the process that leads to a scientist’s allegiance to a new paradigm as a “conversion,” fully recognizing, and even self-consciously drawing upon, the term’s connotation of an enthusiastic embrace of a moral stance or religious commitment.² Kuhn’s adoption of this form of narrative, perhaps more than anything else in his theory, provokes concerns on the part of his critics and his sympathizers alike about the extent to which scientific revolutions could be said to be rational and constrained by the world. If, that is, scientific revolutions involve a proc...