My Mind is Made Up

I have just re-read Anil Gupta’s “Experience and Knowledge” (2008).  This essay is drawn from his intriguing volume, Empiricism and Experience (2006).  I want to push on one part of it, today.  Specifically, I want to defend the naive response to Gupta’s central question.  In this article he defines the given in a perceptual experience as its total rational contribution to the perceiver and the question he poses is, What is this given?  Gupta then argues that the naive answer one might give does not respect two key constraints on an account of the given:

“Consider an ordinary example: I walk into a room full of people, I have a particular experience, and I come to know that Fred is wearing a red tie.” (181).

“The given in this experiences, it may be said, just consists of the ordinary judgments of perception — judgments such that Fred is wearing a red tie….  If this kind of naive answer were right, a good part of modern philosophy would deserve to be thrown in the trash bin.  But it is not right.  The answer fails to respect two vital constraints on any account of the given:

The Equivalence Constraint. The given in subjectively identical experiences is the same;

and

The Reliability Constraint. The given in an experience never contains a false judgment (i.e., false proposition).” (182-3).

I contend that the naive answer is basically correct, but that the way that Gupta expresses the examples of the ordinary judgments of perception that he gives need to be expanded a bit; they are expressed somewhat naively and do not, I think, truly capture our ordinary judgments.  Basically, a rather typical sort of caveat is needed: Ordinary perceptual judgments should be understood as making a claim that is conditional on circumstances being reasonably normal, specifically including that nobody is trying to trick the perceiver and so on.  This caveat is needed because the world is tricky and people know that it is.

By saying that the world is tricky, I mean that whenever you perceive some bit of the world there are multiple ways that that bit of the world could be that are compatible with your experience of it.  To illustrate, consider Gupta’s example again.  As he notes, it is possible (as far as he knew) that when he entered the crowded room his friends were playing a trick on him.  Perhaps, Fred was not wearing an actual red tie, but a shirt with a red tie-shaped bit of fabric built into it.  This is, we are supposing, perfectly compatible with what Gupta saw.  His experience in either case would be subjectively identical.  Further, I have no doubt that if Gupta were pushed to reflect on the experience at the time, he could have given any number of unlikely alternatives that were compatible with what he saw.

I suspect that this lack of certainty is part of people’s ordinary understanding of perceptual judgments.  It is part of an implied caveat.  Thus, Gupta’s judgment is better rendered as something like: “The best interpretation of what is in front of me (taking the circumstances to be typical of my past experience and that nothing tricky is going on) includes that Fred is wearing a red tie.”

I don’t actually think that this account is all that different from Gupta’s in the end.  But, note, that the revised statement of the ordinary perceptual judgment is (arguably) about an ordinary object — a red tie — and not about “special objects such as sense-data” (187).  Gupta holds that such judgments cannot be part of the given as they are ruled out by the two constraints: “The constraints imply that the given in an experience never contains judgments about ordinary objects.  For, by the Reliability constraint, a non-veridical experience cannot yield judgments about ordinary objects.  Hence, by the Equivalence constraint, a veridical experience cannot do so either.” (186 and fn 10).  This leads Gupta to argue that the given is not propositional.  He takes it to be hypothetical, noting that “given my concepts, conceptions, and beliefs — in short, given my view — at the time of the experience, I am perfectly entitled to my perceptual judgments” (189).  He rightly concludes that “the same experience when joined with different views can yield different perceptual judgments” (189).  The question I am asking is: Why shouldn’t we include the hypothesis that one’s view of the situation is correct in the statement of the ordinary perceptual judgment?

I take it that Gupta’s insight, and it is an important insight, is that we shouldn’t expect certainty when it comes to our perceptual judgments.  What we perceive just isn’t enough to tell us how that bit of the world is with certainty. Rather, in conjunction with our past experience and knowledge of the world, we make an “educated guess” about how the world is.  I think that this is correct.  But, I also suspect that a recognition of this is an implicit part of our ordinary understanding of perceptual judgments.  Those judgments are not generally taken to have the certainty that Gupta’s examples suggest, but are more charitably taken to have an implied caveat like the one I suggest above.  I suspect this because people’s ordinary perceptual judgments reflect their experience of the world and the world is a tricky place.  I expect that most people have been fooled; they have found out, probably numerous times, that their best guess as to what they were perceiving was mistaken.  As such, I expect that the possiblity of error becomes part of most people’s naive view of ordinary perceptual judgments.  If this is correct, then the naive answer to Gupta’s question — that the given in experience just consists in the ordinary judgments of perception — does, in fact, respect his two constraints.