Then we’d be justified in saying that she really understood what it’s like to be a man. If, however, we knew that she’d read the transexual’s book, we’d be justified in rejecting that interpretation.
Except that in both cases she actually knows, in an epistemic sense, what it is like to be a man. The only difference is that she may have never experienced certain mental states that are unique to men. So what?
The difference is that you can’t read a book from a human who used to be a bat. But if you could, (e.g. it was a vampire), or you were some super-neuroscientists who did very accurate studies on the bat brain, you could, in principle, know what it is like to be a bat, in an epistemic sense.
In my model, the woman was deducing epistemic facts about men, and the most likely explanation was that she was generalising from the knowledge she had to construct a subjective experience that mirrored that of a man (rather than reading them in a book and copying it). This explanation has testable differences from getting the explanations from a book, eg whether she will answer correctly in “this male faces [unknown new situation]; what do they do?”
Sure, mental states are physical configurations of the brain, which is a piece of matter, so the question of whether a certain piece of matter in the universe is or was in a certain physical configuration is in principle amenable to scientific enquiry.
My question is, what is the point? I mean, in some circumstances it may certainly useful to determine whether somebody is lying or telling the truth, but in general, if somebody beliefs are epistemically correct, does it matter what specific subjective experiences are associated to them?
Except that in both cases she actually knows, in an epistemic sense, what it is like to be a man. The only difference is that she may have never experienced certain mental states that are unique to men. So what?
Really? How do we know that? What makes female-male a difference of kind to human-bat, rather than a question of degree?
The difference is that you can’t read a book from a human who used to be a bat. But if you could, (e.g. it was a vampire), or you were some super-neuroscientists who did very accurate studies on the bat brain, you could, in principle, know what it is like to be a bat, in an epistemic sense.
In my model, the woman was deducing epistemic facts about men, and the most likely explanation was that she was generalising from the knowledge she had to construct a subjective experience that mirrored that of a man (rather than reading them in a book and copying it). This explanation has testable differences from getting the explanations from a book, eg whether she will answer correctly in “this male faces [unknown new situation]; what do they do?”
Sure, mental states are physical configurations of the brain, which is a piece of matter, so the question of whether a certain piece of matter in the universe is or was in a certain physical configuration is in principle amenable to scientific enquiry.
My question is, what is the point? I mean, in some circumstances it may certainly useful to determine whether somebody is lying or telling the truth, but in general, if somebody beliefs are epistemically correct, does it matter what specific subjective experiences are associated to them?