Empiricism is epistemologically sound

The plausible assumption behind Devitt’s questions is that S is justified in believing any claim about the world only if there is some link through which information from the world makes its way to S’s mind. For a posteriori justification, this link is experience. We have a fairly clear idea of how experience relates us to the world: we have sensory organs that, via causal processes, receive information from the world and then somehow we represent that information in the form of sense-perception. It is currently not clear exactly how the brain produces sense-perceptions, but there should be little doubt that science will eventually have a good answer about this. However, matters are less clear with a priori justification. According to rationalists, a priori justified beliefs are about the world, not meanings or concepts. So, S has a priori justified beliefs only if there is some non-experiential link through which the information about the world travels to S’s mind. What is this link? BonJour’s answer is “apparent rational insight.” However, beyond giving the alleged non-experiential connection a name, he says little that is very informative. The empiricist’s story about experience is good for two main reason: first, we have a fairly clear idea of what experience is phenomenologically (it involves raw feels, representations, etc.) and, 24 second, we have a causal account of how it connects us to the world. However, the phenomenological evidence for rational insight is much weaker than it is for experience, and it is unclear how rational insight fits with our metaphysical and scientific views. The basic objection, then, is this: we have an answer for how experience connects us to the information from the world in the way required for justification, but no answer for how anything other than experience could connect us to the world in this way. Hoping to avoid this anomaly, the radical empiricist tries to show that experience can function as our link to all information from the world. Devitt takes these two considerations to establish a “nice abduction,” according to which radical empiricism is the best explanation of how we know what we know (Devitt 2005, 106).