(August 22, 2024 at 7:49 am)Angrboda Wrote:(August 22, 2024 at 7:44 am)Belacqua Wrote: Granted, the way we interpret our experiences is inevitably influenced by what we have learned.
But I don't think that training is invariably something that invalidates an interpretation. For some unusual or unsettling experiences, training may be very useful.
So we'd have to go back and analyze whether there are other reasons to accept or reject the interpretation of the person having the experience.
I think there is a danger of begging the question if we say that only those interpretations are valid which can be confirmed by a certain set of scientific means.
You're mistaking the implication. It's not saying that the experiences aren't valid if such and so, it's saying that the experiences aren't validated by the intersubjective shared experience. The experiences may be perfectly valid, but if there is a competing explanation -- imagination, indoctrination, whatever -- then intersubjective validation would not apply and thus would not be a route to validation. But again, that's not the same thing as saying the experiences aren't valid.
That's fine.
It's just puts us back at having to analyze what lies beneath the experiences. The fact that they are subjective is not in itself sufficient for rejecting them.
And I don't want to beg the question by dismissing anything for which we don't have a certain kind of objective evidence.
