Eric Schwitzgebel
speaker
445 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2011
last heard Jun 2011
Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If you look at people's reports about their imagery, people's intuitions, if I ask you, form an image of your house, a scene from the front, and then I start asking you questions like, is it flat or does it have depth?
Is it fully colored from the beginning or do you have to kind of think to assign colors to different parts and the color fills in over time?
Is it all simultaneously clear at once or is it sketchy?
How much is it like having a visual experience?
How vivid is it?
If I ask you a bunch of questions like that about your imagery experience or similar kinds of questions about your emotional experience...
then I think most people, not everyone, will feel a certain kind of doubt.
This is a case in which I think I'm tapping into a certain kind of epistemic intuition that we have maybe that is accurate.
We don't really know as well what the details are of our emotional experience as I know the details of what's on my desk by looking at it.
I don't know as well
the details of my, or even the major structural features of my imagery experience as I know what the properties are, the basic properties are of the chair in which I'm sitting.
So I think that looking at those cases, looking at the history of psychology, looking at
the variety of things people have said about their experience, which don't seem to correlate very well with what we might plausibly think would be real differences in experience.
All of that points to the basic idea that introspective reports are substantially less reliable than ordinary sensory reports, perceptual reports of middle-sized objects in our environment.
I am.
Right, so I think that... So, call that view introspective foundationalism.
On introspective foundationalism, you have introspective knowledge of your own experience, especially your sensory experience.
And on the basis of that introspective knowledge of your own experience, you reach conclusions about the outside world.
I think that that can't be right, because our knowledge of our own sensory experience is so poor.
We have much better knowledge, I think, of the outside world.
Showing 301–320 of 445 · page 16 of 23
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