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Thesis Sellars was right that raw experience can cause a belief but never justify one

Its coordinates: 2.2 Sources of Knowledge · 2.2.2 Reason and Intuition

Where it stands

The more I read about visual perception, the more I think Wilfrid Sellars got something exactly right in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956).

The foundationalist wants a floor: beliefs justified without leaning on other beliefs. The obvious candidate is experience itself, the bare redness before any interpretation. Sellars's dilemma is that for something to justify a belief, it has to stand in logical relations to it. It has to have content that can be correct or incorrect. But anything with that kind of content is already conceptual, already an interpretation, and so it can itself be questioned. A raw sensation without content can make you believe something, the way a loud noise makes you jump. It cannot be your reason.

The perception science pushes me further in this direction. On predictive processing accounts, there is no stage at which an uninterpreted input arrives and is then interpreted. Expectation shapes the signal from very early on. I do not think neuroscience settles a philosophical question, and I am aware that "the brain does X" is not "the given is a myth". But it makes the picture of a pure, pre-conceptual floor look like an artefact of armchair introspection.

So my thesis: experience causes beliefs; only other contentful states justify them. Foundationalism needs a floor that does both jobs, and nothing does.

I would particularly like objections from people who know the Buddhist epistemologists, since Dignāga and Dharmakīrti held that perception is free of conceptual construction and still counted it a means of knowledge. If they had a way to make that work, I want to hear it.

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5 replies

For the thesis 0

No replies on this side yet.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Meera Kulkarni

    Against Fellow

    Happy to oblige. Dignāga does define perception (pratyakṣa) as free from conceptual construction, and Dharmakīrti adds that it must also be non-erroneous. So they accept exactly what you deny: a non-conceptual episode that is a pramāṇa, a genuine source of knowledge.

    How do they make it work? Not, I think, by saying the raw episode is a premise. Perception is followed by a conceptual determination (the judgement "this is blue"), and what makes that judgement trustworthy is its causal pedigree: it was produced by contact with a real particular, and it leads to successful action. Their notion of a means of knowledge is much more about being the right kind of source than about being a reason the subject can cite.

    So they bite your bullet from the other side. Yes, the given only causes. But causing in the right way is what being a source of knowledge is. That is closer to modern externalism than to anything Sellars was attacking.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Priya Raghavan

      Fellow

      Meera, that is a much better objection than I expected, and I think it changes the thesis rather than refuting it. If the authority sits in the causal link and the later judgement, then the non-conceptual episode is a source but not a reason. I can accept that. What I deny is that the subject has a reason in the raw experience itself, which is what classical foundationalists wanted.

      Helpful · 3
  2. Derek Hollis

    Against Fellow

    Against, from a different direction. John McDowell's Mind and World (1994) agrees with Sellars that a non-conceptual given cannot justify, and concludes that experience is conceptual all the way out. On that view experience can perfectly well be a reason: it just isn't raw. Your thesis assumes "experience" means the uninterpreted bit. If experience is already contentful, then experience justifies after all, and the foundationalist gets a floor, only a fallible one.

    Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    One translation warning, since I collect these false friends. Pratyakṣa is not a sense-datum. Sense-datum theorists in Sellars's sights wanted an inner object, known infallibly, that serves as evidence. Dharmakīrti's perception grasps a momentary particular and is not itself known by a further act of introspective evidence-gathering. The two theories share a slogan ("non-conceptual") and not much else. That is part of why Meera's point works: the Buddhist view was never trying to be Cartesian.

  2. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Pulling this together. Revised thesis: non-conceptual experience may be a source of knowledge (Meera and Dharmakīrti), but it cannot be a reason the subject has; and if experience is conceptual (Derek and McDowell), it can be a reason but cannot be the infallible floor classical foundationalism wanted. Either way the classical version is dead. Modest foundationalism with fallible, conceptual experience is still standing, and I suspect that is where most of us actually live.

    Helpful · 2