When Chalmers claims to have “direct” epistemic access to certain facts, the proper response is to provide the arguments for doubting that claim, not to play a verbal sleight-of-hand like Dennett’s (1991, emphasis added):
You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. And if you complain that some parts of how it seems to you are ineffable, we heterophenomenologists will grant that too. What better grounds could we have for believing that you are unable to describe something than that (1) you don’t describe it, and (2) confess that you cannot? Of course you might be lying, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
It’s intellectually dishonest of Dennett to use the word “ineffable” here to slide between the propositions “I’m unable to describe my experience” and “my experience isn’t translatable in principle”, as it is to slide between Nagel’s term of art “what it’s like to be you” and “how it seems to you”.
First of all, how in the world could you possibly know that your experience isn’t translatable in principle? That you can’t describe it—that you of course can know. But what additional meaning can it even have, to say that you can’t describe it, and on top of that, it “isn’t translatable in principle”? What does that even mean?
As far as I can tell, Dennett isn’t sliding between anything. There’s just the one meaning: you can’t describe some experience you’re having.
Secondly, it’s not clear that this paragraph is a response to claims about having “‘direct’ epistemic access to certain facts”. (I’d have to reread Consciousness Explained to see the context, but as quoted it seems a bit of a non sequitur.)
… it’s logically rude to conceal your cruxes, pretend that your method is perfectly neutral and ecumenical, and let the “scientificness” of your proposed methodology do the rhetorical pushing and pulling.
I confess I don’t really have much idea what you’re saying here. What’s Dennett concealing, exactly…?
but indeed can’t ever (without telepathy etc., or maybe not even then) be shown to another person, or perceived by another person, to be the case, that there are further facts revealed by introspection that can’t be translated into words.
There’s a version of this claim I agree with (since I’m a physicalist), but the version here is too strong. First, I want to note again that this is equating group epistemology with individual epistemology.
I wasn’t talking about group epistemology here at all, much less equating it with anything.
But even from a group’s perspective, it’s perfectly possible for “facts revealed by introspection that can’t be translated into words” to be transmitted between people; just provide someone with the verbal prompts (or other environmental stimuli) that will cause them to experience and notice the same introspective data in their own brains.
This clearly won’t do; how will you ever know that the verbal prompts (or etc.) are causing the other person to experience, much less to notice, the same “introspective data” in their brain as you experienced and noticed in yours? (How exactly do you even guarantee comparability? What does “same” even mean, across individuals? People vary, you know; and it seems fairly likely even from what we know now, that capacity to experience certain things is present to widely varying degrees in people…)
Why, there are entire reams of philosophy dedicated to precisely this very thorny challenge! (Google “spectrum inversion” sometime…) And in fact I once saw this principle play out in my own life. A musically inclined friend of mine was attempting to teach me the basics of music theory. When his initial explanations got nowhere, we opened someone’s laptop and loaded up a website where you could click buttons and play certain chords or combinations of tones. My friend clicked some buttons, played some chords, and asked me to describe what I heard, which I did… only to see my friend react with astonishment, because what I heard and what he heard turned out to be quite different. (As we later discovered, I have some interesting deficiencies/abnormalities in auditory processing, having to do, inter alia, with ability to perceive pitch.)
Now, how do you propose to cause me to experience “the same introspective data” that my friend experiences when he hears the tones and chords in question—or vice versa? What stimuli, exactly, shall you use—and how would you discover what they might be? What function, precisely, reliably maps arbitrary (stimulus X, individual A) pairs to (stimulus Y, individual B) pairs, such that the “introspective data” that is experienced (and noticed) as a result is the “same” in both cases of a set? And having on hand a candidate such function, how exactly would you ever verify that it is really the desired thing?
If that’s too vague, consider this scenario as an analogy: …
I find such fanciful analogies almost uniformly uninformative, and this one, I’m afraid, is no exception. Even if I were to stretch my brain to imagine this sort of scenario (which is not easy), and carefully consider its implications (which is quite challenging), and take the further step of drawing a conclusion about whether the given hypothetical would indeed work as you say (in which I would have quite low confidence), nevertheless it would still be entirely unclear whether, and how, the analogy mapped back to our actual world, and whether any of the reasoning and the conclusion still held. Best to avoid such things.
Indeed it’s not even clear how you’d demonstrate to yourself that what your introspection reveals is real.
You can update upward or downward about the reliability of your introspection (either in general, or in particular respects), in the same way you can update upward or downward about the reliability of your sensory perception. E.g., different introspective experiences or faculties can contradict each other, suggest their own unreliability (“I’m introspecting that this all feels like bullshit...”), or contradict other evidence sources.
What if there is no “contradiction”, as such? Surely it’s possible for introspection to be deficient or entirely misleading even so? In any case, if introspection is corrigible by comparison with “other evidence sources” (by which you presumably mean, sense data, and experimental and various other observational information acquired via sense data, etc.), then you can hardly be said to have “‘direct’ epistemic access” to anything via said introspection…
And now, a substantive response:
First of all, how in the world could you possibly know that your experience isn’t translatable in principle? That you can’t describe it—that you of course can know. But what additional meaning can it even have, to say that you can’t describe it, and on top of that, it “isn’t translatable in principle”? What does that even mean?
As far as I can tell, Dennett isn’t sliding between anything. There’s just the one meaning: you can’t describe some experience you’re having.
Secondly, it’s not clear that this paragraph is a response to claims about having “‘direct’ epistemic access to certain facts”. (I’d have to reread Consciousness Explained to see the context, but as quoted it seems a bit of a non sequitur.)
I confess I don’t really have much idea what you’re saying here. What’s Dennett concealing, exactly…?
I wasn’t talking about group epistemology here at all, much less equating it with anything.
This clearly won’t do; how will you ever know that the verbal prompts (or etc.) are causing the other person to experience, much less to notice, the same “introspective data” in their brain as you experienced and noticed in yours? (How exactly do you even guarantee comparability? What does “same” even mean, across individuals? People vary, you know; and it seems fairly likely even from what we know now, that capacity to experience certain things is present to widely varying degrees in people…)
Why, there are entire reams of philosophy dedicated to precisely this very thorny challenge! (Google “spectrum inversion” sometime…) And in fact I once saw this principle play out in my own life. A musically inclined friend of mine was attempting to teach me the basics of music theory. When his initial explanations got nowhere, we opened someone’s laptop and loaded up a website where you could click buttons and play certain chords or combinations of tones. My friend clicked some buttons, played some chords, and asked me to describe what I heard, which I did… only to see my friend react with astonishment, because what I heard and what he heard turned out to be quite different. (As we later discovered, I have some interesting deficiencies/abnormalities in auditory processing, having to do, inter alia, with ability to perceive pitch.)
Now, how do you propose to cause me to experience “the same introspective data” that my friend experiences when he hears the tones and chords in question—or vice versa? What stimuli, exactly, shall you use—and how would you discover what they might be? What function, precisely, reliably maps arbitrary
(stimulus X, individual A)pairs to(stimulus Y, individual B)pairs, such that the “introspective data” that is experienced (and noticed) as a result is the “same” in both cases of a set? And having on hand a candidate such function, how exactly would you ever verify that it is really the desired thing?I find such fanciful analogies almost uniformly uninformative, and this one, I’m afraid, is no exception. Even if I were to stretch my brain to imagine this sort of scenario (which is not easy), and carefully consider its implications (which is quite challenging), and take the further step of drawing a conclusion about whether the given hypothetical would indeed work as you say (in which I would have quite low confidence), nevertheless it would still be entirely unclear whether, and how, the analogy mapped back to our actual world, and whether any of the reasoning and the conclusion still held. Best to avoid such things.
What if there is no “contradiction”, as such? Surely it’s possible for introspection to be deficient or entirely misleading even so? In any case, if introspection is corrigible by comparison with “other evidence sources” (by which you presumably mean, sense data, and experimental and various other observational information acquired via sense data, etc.), then you can hardly be said to have “‘direct’ epistemic access” to anything via said introspection…