Subjective knowledge
A few days ago, I wrote a little bit about the kind of knowledge we can obtain through rational reflection. One commenter made the point that humans have lots of ways to knowing, including poetry, faith, etc. Isn’t, however, physicalism an argument against these kinds of subjective facts? At least, that’s often how it’s understood.
I’ve grappled with this question, too, especially in the context of Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. It’s a classic thought experiment which purportedly disproves physicalism. A woman named Mary has lived all of her life inside of a room that is entirely black and white, but she’s studied every possible physical fact about color (psychology, neurology, physics). Upon exiting the room one day, she sees a red tomato. The question is, has she learned anything? If you say yes, the claim is you’ve agreed that all facts are not physical, therefore physicalism is false.
Tim Crane has an excellent paper on this problem which, to me, dispels a lot of muddled attempts to refute this simple yet poweful argument. Below the fold is a short precis of his discussion, and how I think it impacts arguments about faith as a special kind of knowing.
The argument is, as I mentioned, pretty straightforward:
1. Mary knows all the physical facts about color.
2. Upon seeing a red tomato, Mary learns a new fact.
3. Therefore, not all facts are physical.
In approaching the problem, one response has been that it’s invalid and equivocates on the term “knowledge.” There’s knowledge-that and knowledge-how, and premise 1 is about knowedge-that, while premise 2 is about knowledge-how. It is therefore invalid.
Unfortunately, this won’t work. Propositional knowledge is still in question in both 1 and 2. Someone who is blind does, it’s true, lack an ability that a sighted person has. Yet they also lack knowledge of a fact: “It is like that to see red.”
If the argument is valid, then perhaps we can explain away the conclusion by appeal to sense and reference distinctions. Take someone who knows that Venus is the morning star. If they learn that Venus is the evening star, they haven’t learned a new physical fact, just the same fact under a different Fregean mode of presentation. Unfortunately, this also entails that they have learned a new physical fact: that the morning star and the evening star are the same.
Crane argues that physicalists can embrace the conclusion of this argument without harming their metaphysical claim in any way. After all, that’s what physicalism is–a claim about what exists. The Mary story is aimed at what Mary can know, an epistemological claim.
Here’s how Crane puts it: “[The argument] is really an objection to the view that all facts are, so to speak, ‘booklearning’ facts: facts the learning of which do not require you to have a certain kind of experience or occupy a certain position in the world.”
Indexical facts are of this sort–in one paper, a philosopher wrote of following a trail of sugar around a grocery store, so he could tell the shopper that their sugar bag was leaking. Coming full circle, he realized he was the one with the leaky bag. This is a new fact: “I am the one with the leaking bag of sugar.” In order to know this fact, the knower must be in a certain position in the world, that is, the fact is subjective. This indexical fact is not contained by the set of propositions a full physical description of the world would include. But Crane argues that physicalism is not committed to the non-existence of indexical facts like this, only that ”physics is causally closed, not even to the view that physics is explanatorily adequate. Therefore, physicalism does not need to say that physics must state all the facts.”
So subjective facts are facts “about the subject’s representation of reality” and do not necessarily threaten the claim that the universe is entirely physical and causally closed.
This means, further, that a misconception about “faith” is resolvable. One of the claims I hear made is that faith is “subjective” and therefore it is untouchable by claims about the physical world. There’s objective knowing and subjective knowing, and the latter sort holds a privileged location in relationship to the first. If I know subjectively that god exists, then it is a claim that cannot be disproven by any appeals to objective evidence.
The problem is that this kind of “subjective fact” is reducible to a sense of certainty or an emotion, not a fact that is only knowable through a particular stance in the world. What must be shown in order for these kinds of claims to go through, is that knowledge of god’s existence requires an individual to have a special kind of relationship to that reality. Further, subjective facts are about our representations of reality. So a subjective fact about god has a necessary relationship to my existence.
Does the religious believer want to make these two claims? Perhaps in the first instance they might want to claim a kind of epistemological “location” in terms of humility, openness to a spirit, etc. Tertullian, Augustine and other church fathers have made this argument. But it is not prima facie obvious that an epistemological location is required to know god (understood as an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent being). That requires more than just defining faith as “subjective.”
The second claim is more deeply problematic, I think. What it does is compress a metaphysical claim (god exists) to a claim about my representation of god. Facts about the existence of god collapses into a fact about my stance towards an idea. Kierkegaard is one of those philosophers, I think, who takes this route (I am just beginning to read him now, so if my characterization is incorrect, please let me know). Instead of propositional knowledge and belief, we have attitudes, actions and desires. Metaphysics goes out the window and is replaced by existential crises which press us towards an absurd leap.
Either of these claims takes us into irrationalism, where there is no possibility of checking beliefs against evidence (whether it be physical reality or inferential connections). When that is the case, we have gotten past the point of “knowledge.”
Image: From Wikimedia Commons under fair use.
Tim Crane’s article is found in Real Metaphysics edited by Hallvard Lillehammer and Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (London: Routledge 2003) 68-83.