the depths and shallows of experience 79consisting of deductive and inductive inferences from simple sense-data (or
MachianEmpfindungen). To find a sustained critique of this way of thinking,
we have to turn to the American pragmatists, and especially John Dewey. Ex-
tending the line of thought that William James had begun with his talk of
apperceptive ideas and sensations as “fusing,” Dewey saw that science end-
lessly and inventively creates new observation-concepts, and that by so doing
it institutes newkindsof data.^17 A scientist with a cloud chamber may now
observea proton colliding with a nucleus (without being able to answer the
question “Exactly what visual sensations did you have when you observed it?”
except by saying “It looked like a proton colliding with a nucleus”), orobserve
a virus with the aid of an electron microscope, orobservea DNA sequence, and
so on. And the impact of science on the conceptualization of experience is not
confined to specialists; the way in which all of us experience the world was
changed by Darwin, and was changed by Freud (whether one thinks this or
that claim of Freud’s was well- or ill-founded) as the notion of the unconscious
became part of our vocabulary, and is being changed today by computer science
and the concepts and metaphors it adds to the language.
On the metalevel, the level of the methodological appraisal of scientific
theories, we also find something in science analogous to the indeterminate
concepts involved in aesthetic judgment, indeterminate concepts that figure in
judgments that are internal to scientific inquiry itself: judgments of coherence,
simplicity, plausibility, and the like. The similarity of such judgments to aes-
thetic judgments has, indeed, often been pointed out. Dirac was famous for
saying that certain theories should be taken seriously because they were “beau-
tiful,” and Einstein talked of the “inner perfection” of a theory as an “indis-
pensable criterion.”^18
But it is time to say something of the wider relevance of this picture of
experience, the picture of experience as deep, for the concerns of the present
volume, for reflections on “science, religion, and the human experience.”
Conceptuality and Skepticism
At first blush, recognizing that perception (and experience that purports to be
perception or resembles perception) is always conceptualized, may seem to
make the problem of skepticism much worse, especially when religion is the
issue. From Kant to John McDowell, philosophers who point out that experi-
ence is conceptualized have been told that they are problematizing our access
to reality. Concepts can, after all, mislead as well as lead, conceal as well as
reveal.
The fact that religious concepts are no longer intersubjectively shared
within Western culture, and have not been for a long time, makes this more
than a purely theoretical issue, as skepticism about the existence of houses and