What We Mean by Experience - Softcover

Janack, Marianne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804776156 ISBN 13: 9780804776158

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Social scientists and scholars in the humanities all rely on first-person descriptions of experience to understand how subjects construct their worlds. The problem they always face is how to integrate first-person accounts with an impersonal stance. Over the course of the twentieth century, this problem was compounded as the concept of experience itself came under scrutiny. First hailed as a wellspring of knowledge and the weapon that would vanquish metaphysics and Cartesianism by pragmatists like Dewey and James, by the century's end experience had become a mere vestige of both, a holdover from seventeenth-century empiricist metaphysics. This devaluation of experience has left us bereft, unable to account for first-person perspectives and for any kind of agency or intentionality.

This book takes on the critique of empiricism and the skepticism with regard to experience that has issued from two seemingly disparate intellectual strains of thought: anti-foundationalist and holistic philosophy of science and epistemology (Kuhn and Rorty, in particular) and feminist critiques of identity politics. Both strains end up marginalizing experience as a viable corrective for theory, and both share notions of human beings and cognition that cause the problem of the relation between experience and our theories to present itself in a particular way. Indeed, they render experience an intractable problem by opening up a gap between a naturalistic understanding of human beings and an understanding of humans as cultural entities, as non-natural makers of meaning. Marianne Janack aims to close this gap, to allow us to be naturalistic and hermeneutic at once. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, the pragmatist tradition, and ecological psychology, her book rescues experience as natural contact with the world.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Marianne Janack is Sidney Wertimer Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College.

Marianne Janack is Sidney Wertimer Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College.

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WHAT WE MEAN BY EXPERIENCE

By Marianne Janack

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7615-8

Contents

Preface.......................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................................................................xiIntroduction: The Authority of Experience: Realism, Empiricism, and the Problem of Theory.....................11 The Linguistic Turn and the Ascendancy of Anti-foundationalism..............................................212 Cognitive Sciences of Experience............................................................................553 Children and Other Living Computers.........................................................................674 Feminist Discussions of Experience: Identity, Naturalisms, and Discourse....................................895 Naturalism and Agency.......................................................................................1196 Experience Recaptured.......................................................................................150Notes.........................................................................................................177References....................................................................................................187Index.........................................................................................................197

Chapter One

The Linguistic Turn and the Ascendancy of Anti-foundationalism

The concept of experience went from being the most useful concept for philosophical purposes to being one of the most neglected or vilified concepts over the course of the twentieth century. This is attributable to two dominant intellectual developments: the ascendancy of the theoretical trend known as "the linguistic turn," and the growth of anti-foundationalism (see below) in the humanities generally, and in Anglo-American philosophy in particular. When the linguistic turn was paired with anti-foundationalism, there was little left for the term "experience" to do. Discussions of the concept "experience" were replaced by linguistic analysis and discourse theory, or by empirical psychology and linguistic behaviorism, and bifurcated into "discourse" and "stimuli." This division introduced new versions of the problem of realism and new challenges to the theory of mind and philosophical psychology more broadly, even as it appeared to offer new solutions to those problems. Anti-foundationalism, as it was worked out by figures like Popper, Kuhn, Rorty, and Quine, branched off in two different directions, with those who were less concerned with problems of realism and objectivity arguing that "discourse" could substitute for the concept of experience, while anti-foundationalists like Quine, who were more willing to treat experience as a purely psychological event, turned to "stimuli" or "input" to try to close the gap between theory and the world that seemed to open up as a result of the displacement of "experience" from the epistemological story. This chapter examines the different challenges to experience that we find in the key writings of the anti-foundationalists and advocates of the linguistic turn that led to the reversal of fortune for the concept of experience. Popper, Kuhn, Rorty, and Quine represent the variety of challenges to experience that arose out of these intellectual movements; their primary target was the idea of the "observation" or "observation sentence."

The philosophers who challenged the value of appeals to experience focused on the question of the possibility of "observation sentences"—that is, simple, basic observational reports like those that the positivists argued could serve the purpose of verifying a claim, and thus limn the border between the scientific and the metaphysical. Some philosophers—in particular, Karl Popper—called into question the appeal to experience in order to show that metaphysics could not be so readily dismissed, and to save philosophy from "psychologism." But the attack on observation sentences went well beyond that, challenging the very possibility of empiricism. The role that was claimed for them in theory-choice in general by garden-variety empiricists was also imperiled by the attack on experience and observation, as we see in Thomas Kuhn's controversial discussions of scientific revolutions.

Since James and Dewey used a very different concept of experience, one might wonder why the attack on observation would extend to their use of the term, as it did. Skepticism about observation sentences does not seem to apply to their use of experience, or so it would seem. Nevertheless, the linguistic turn and general skepticism about the role that experience could (or should) play as "contact with the world" undermined the appeal to experience that marked the early pragmatists' philosophical project as well. The idea that there was some way in which experience could count as contact with a real world and as a corrective to our theories, which characterizes both pragmatists' version of empiricism and the more narrowly circumscribed methodology of empiricism in philosophy of science, was also caught up in the skeptical attitude toward observation. This debate, of course, continues as the debate about realism and objectivity.

Anti-foundationalism and the Problem of Observation Sentences

The critique of experience in the philosophy of science that dominated the middle and late twentieth century seems to have had very wide-reaching effects. We see it not only in the traditional philosophical debates; echoes of it also appear in political theory, testifying to the power, most centrally, of one book: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn himself, however, drew on earlier work by N. Russell Hanson, whose book Patterns of Discovery (1958) offers a detailed argument supporting the claim that observation is theory-dependent, and cannot play the confirming or infirming role that empiricists claimed for it. Empiricism is, in its most general outline, a story about the source of knowledge (properly so called). All knowledge, according to Hume, begins with the senses, and empiricists are so called because they privilege sensory experience in their accounts of justification and knowledge. In the account of empiricism that comes from the British empiricists, sense impressions give rise to ideas, which are the functional equivalent of copies of impressions. This form of empiricism has a ready ally in foundationalism: the way of characterizing our epistemic practices in which some beliefs are immediately justified. For the empiricist foundationalist, that immediate justification arises for those beliefs that have their basis in experience.

Anti-foundationalism is characterized by two different tenets: the idea that the source of our beliefs is not relevant to their justification; and the idea that sensory experience-cum-observation is theory-dependent. The first is a straightforwardly philosophical point, based on the idea that there is a difference between causes and reasons, and that no story about causes (that is, sources) can, by itself, be a story about reasons. The second claim can be taken to be a philosophical point as well, but it becomes something more like a hybrid of an empirical and philosophical point in its development by people like Kuhn and Hanson. These tenets, in combination or singly, raise the question of the evidential role that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804776156
• ISBN 13: 9780804776158
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 215
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande