What do you think?
Rate this book
Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry
A distinguished philosopher offers a novel account of experience and reason, and develops our understanding of conscious experience and its relationship to thought: a new reformed empiricism.
The role of experience in cognition is a central and ancient philosophical concern. How, theorists ask, can our private experiences guide us to knowledge of a mind-independent reality? Exploring topics in logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Conscious Experience proposes a new answer to this age-old question, explaining how conscious experience contributes to the rationality and content of empirical beliefs.
According to Anil Gupta, this contribution cannot be determined independently of an agent's conceptual scheme and prior beliefs, but that doesn't mean it is entirely mind-dependent. While the rational contribution of an experience is not propositional--it does not, for example, provide direct knowledge of the world--it does authorize certain transitions from prior views to new views. In short, the rational contribution of an experience yields a rule for revising views. Gupta shows that this account provides theoretical freedom: it allows the observer to radically reconceive the world in light of empirical findings. Simultaneously, it grants empirical reason significant power to constrain, forcing particular conceptions of self and world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through novel treatments of presentation, appearances, and ostensive definitions.
Collectively, Gupta's arguments support an original theory: reformed empiricism. He abandons the idea that experience is a source of knowledge and justification. He also abandons the idea that concepts are derived from experience. But reformed empiricism preserves empiricism's central insight: experience is the supreme epistemic authority. In the resolution of factual disagreements, experience trumps all.
The role of experience in cognition is a central and ancient philosophical concern. How, theorists ask, can our private experiences guide us to knowledge of a mind-independent reality? Exploring topics in logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Conscious Experience proposes a new answer to this age-old question, explaining how conscious experience contributes to the rationality and content of empirical beliefs.
According to Anil Gupta, this contribution cannot be determined independently of an agent's conceptual scheme and prior beliefs, but that doesn't mean it is entirely mind-dependent. While the rational contribution of an experience is not propositional--it does not, for example, provide direct knowledge of the world--it does authorize certain transitions from prior views to new views. In short, the rational contribution of an experience yields a rule for revising views. Gupta shows that this account provides theoretical freedom: it allows the observer to radically reconceive the world in light of empirical findings. Simultaneously, it grants empirical reason significant power to constrain, forcing particular conceptions of self and world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through novel treatments of presentation, appearances, and ostensive definitions.
Collectively, Gupta's arguments support an original theory: reformed empiricism. He abandons the idea that experience is a source of knowledge and justification. He also abandons the idea that concepts are derived from experience. But reformed empiricism preserves empiricism's central insight: experience is the supreme epistemic authority. In the resolution of factual disagreements, experience trumps all.
- GenresPhilosophy
440 pages, Hardcover
Published February 11, 2019
3 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Anil Gupta
8 books2 followersAnil Gupta is Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 28, 2020
I really do agree with most of his conclusions about the nature of empirical dialectic, but the fact that he has to go to such great lengths to justify such obvious statements shows how out of touch with reality modern philosophy is. Maybe I am failing to appreciate the subtlety of the relevant philosophical issues — that is perhaps likely — but to me almost everything he said felt somewhat obvious, in line with ideas found plenty of other places, and the people he was arguing against were just examples of how crazy philosophers can be. His thesis on the interdependence between experience/views, the denial of the propositional given, and his discussion of Sellars/Russell are probably the highlights; but even then nothing he was saying I found all that innovative. The most innovative parts — his formal apparatus and stuff about view convergence — didn’t do much explanatory work and felt like silly analytic philosophy formalizing. I enjoyed the section on Kripke, don’t feel like I fully understand either position, but am inclined to side with Gupta. Overall, this is not a book that made me want to engage more with analytic philosophy or believe that analytic philosophy is actually probing these issues in substantive ways. Maybe that is a failure of my understanding, and it makes me feel quite anxious to think that might be so, but at some point I do have to trust my judgment: what is going on in this tradition is somewhat bankrupt! All the good insights here are in LW, everything that is bad could be avoided if he read LW closer! I feel silly saying that but kind of think it is true.
Displaying 1 of 1 review