empiricism seems to get a pretty bad rap in much of historical, academic, and colloquial (“armchair”) philosophy.
we are told that we cannot trust what our senses tell us, that what we experience is not “true reality”, that we could be “brains in a vat”, that “all is illusion”, etc. but when it comes down to it, most of us (i would, in fact, wager all of us) use, and indeed MUST use, our senses daily in order to survive. in regular life, in our own experiences, we have no reason to distrust our senses. if we did have such a reason, we would never drive a car; we would never eat or drink anything; we would never even move, for fear that we cannot trust that the floor we see below our feet is indeed solid and real.
so, there is a divide between what philosophically we are told about empiricism, and what entails from our experiences in daily living.
yes, there are occasionally times where we go “wow, that wasnt what i thought it was at all”, where we realise that our senses “deceived” us-- in truth, however, our senses CANNOT DECEIVE US: only WE, in our interpretation of our senses, can deceive, i.e. arrive at false conclusions. sensation cannot lie, but perception can.
whatever your senses tell you is the case, IS the case-- i.e., it is the case that your senses tell you so, i.e. it is the case that you are having an experience of sensation such as your senses tell you… in otherwords, it is never the case that you are NOT having the experience of sensation that your senses tell you you are having.
however, of course, INTREPRETING this experience can be where problems arise.
our estimations and interpretations of our experiences can be mistaken; we can think that we see one thing, when in fact it is something else… but, does this really happen to you frequently? how often do you stop and say “well that estimation of that experience is clearly wrong!” for myself, i do not have this experience often… and that leads to the next point, that in order to understand that our estimation of an experience is incorrect, we need to rely on experience itself!
does this entail contradiction? when we say “i had experience X, but now i realise that my understanding of X at the time was wrong, and now i know differently” we are USING EXPERIENCE ITSELF, new experiences, to re-evaluate the previous ones in a more “truthful” light…
…so, of course it seems circular, using experience to justify experience. and if we are talking about complete and irrefutable justification, then yes, it is circular. however, do we really need this complete justification??
certainly, we never act in real life from a position of absolute justification or knowledge; nor do we typically feel that our actions, taken from such a perspective of limited justification, are unjustified; nor, even, do we typically re-evaluate the experience after the fact and say “my justification was wrong” (although this does occasionally happen).
given:
A) it seems that we NEVER act from absolute justification
B) this seems typically not to bother us in the least, and
C) it seems IMPOSSIBLE to even be able to act with absolute justification,
then why does much of traditional and modern philosophy tell us that we should “distrust” our senses to one degree or another? why, given A, B and C, should we accept extreme skepticism which is argued for, in greater or lesser degrees, by a large part of philosophical thought?
if A, B and C entail, and further if we have little or no reason in our own lives to think “my senses are wrong all, or even most, of the time”, then why does anyone actually think, believe or argue such ideas as “brains in vats” or “the Matrix”? isnt the very idea of extreme skepticism, of the rejection of empiricism as a justification for belief, contradictory with itself?
in otherwords: distrusting our sense experiences seems to contradict our sense experiences— is not this contradiction therefore enough reason to NOT distrust our sense experiences?
I am stating something; I am making a point.
