Evidentialism
May 14, 2014 at 12:39 am
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2014 at 12:40 am by Tea Earl Grey Hot.)
I've been reading up on evidentialist epistemology, mostly from Richard Carrier in "Sense and Goodness without God" and Jonathan E Adler's "Beliefs Own Ethics". Along the way I've been creating my own understanding of evidentialist epistemology loosely inspired by these materials which I'm going to share here. This is all tentative and I'm just an amateur philosopher so this all might be a load of crap that I'm about to state.
Experiences are undeniable. You cannot coherently deny that you are experiencing something right now. Experiences come from several sources. Sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch -- aka the senses -- are the most obvious. Imagination is also a sort of experience and it is the most important for my case. Imagination is our capacity to invoke sensations in our mind. We know this for instance as our "mind's eye" but properly speaking we also have a "mind's ear", a "mind's nose" etc. Each instance of imagination allows us to experience a simulation of a sensation.
A proposition can believed to be true only if the experiences entailed by the proposition if true are experienced. This last sentence is not self defeating either. The experience I'd expect if that sentence is true is experiencing being completely unable to find a proposition that can be known to be true apart from experience. This is what I experience. Also, the sentence "I believe x is true but I have no reason or evidence (i.e. anything that can be experienced in someway) to demonstrate x is true" is incoherent. Does it make any sense to say "I know the number of stars is even but I have not counted them"? So these two things makes me confident in the truth of the claim.
I can believe "I own a car" to be true if I experience: (1) being in possession of car keys (2) having a car in my driveway (3) being able to unlock the car with the keys (4) having registration for the car. These are experiences I predict from "I own a car" being true and if I experience them I know "I own a car" is true.
In essence what we are doing is comparing the experiences created by our imagination to experiences from our senses. A proposition is true if its imagined experiences matches the sensory experiences we predict, false if predictions fail, and meaningless if we can't conceive of any predictions in the first place.
Since imagination is also an experience, propositions that do not entail predictions that can only be experienced directly from the five senses are still knowable. I can know "1+1=2" is true by picturing one thing and then picturing another thing next to it and realizing that I am now picturing two things. Those are experiences I'd predict to experience in the world of imagination. It is crucial to understand this point because many theists scoff at the notion that everything can be known only through experience because they take "experience" to mean "known via the five senses" which would rule out abstract thinking. But to me at least imagination is just another source of experience and abstract thinking is the imagination making predictions about itself.
I hope this makes sense.
Experiences are undeniable. You cannot coherently deny that you are experiencing something right now. Experiences come from several sources. Sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch -- aka the senses -- are the most obvious. Imagination is also a sort of experience and it is the most important for my case. Imagination is our capacity to invoke sensations in our mind. We know this for instance as our "mind's eye" but properly speaking we also have a "mind's ear", a "mind's nose" etc. Each instance of imagination allows us to experience a simulation of a sensation.
A proposition can believed to be true only if the experiences entailed by the proposition if true are experienced. This last sentence is not self defeating either. The experience I'd expect if that sentence is true is experiencing being completely unable to find a proposition that can be known to be true apart from experience. This is what I experience. Also, the sentence "I believe x is true but I have no reason or evidence (i.e. anything that can be experienced in someway) to demonstrate x is true" is incoherent. Does it make any sense to say "I know the number of stars is even but I have not counted them"? So these two things makes me confident in the truth of the claim.
I can believe "I own a car" to be true if I experience: (1) being in possession of car keys (2) having a car in my driveway (3) being able to unlock the car with the keys (4) having registration for the car. These are experiences I predict from "I own a car" being true and if I experience them I know "I own a car" is true.
In essence what we are doing is comparing the experiences created by our imagination to experiences from our senses. A proposition is true if its imagined experiences matches the sensory experiences we predict, false if predictions fail, and meaningless if we can't conceive of any predictions in the first place.
Since imagination is also an experience, propositions that do not entail predictions that can only be experienced directly from the five senses are still knowable. I can know "1+1=2" is true by picturing one thing and then picturing another thing next to it and realizing that I am now picturing two things. Those are experiences I'd predict to experience in the world of imagination. It is crucial to understand this point because many theists scoff at the notion that everything can be known only through experience because they take "experience" to mean "known via the five senses" which would rule out abstract thinking. But to me at least imagination is just another source of experience and abstract thinking is the imagination making predictions about itself.
I hope this makes sense.
My ignore list
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
