226 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSscience course, or being shocked at the number of conspiracy theories
people accept. If there are social science explanations, as there seem to be,
these experiences are going to be explained by them in whatever sense
social science explanations do explain anything. But their being social
science explicable in no way discredits the evidential value of such
experiences, if they have any in the first place. After all, the development of
the social sciences themselves, their procedures of inquiry and standards of
research and methods of theory testing are all themselves social science
explicable. If being social science renders unreliable what is explained,
social science itself is a crock.
Two things are necessary for what might be called social science
debunking. The first is that the thing – the experience, belief, practice, or
whatever – has been shown to be unreliable, false, unsuccessful, or
otherwise defective. Then some social science explanation is appealed to in
order to explain how anybody could accept an unreliable experience, a false
belief, an unsuccessful practice. But all of the critical intellectual work
involved in the debunking has already been done by the time social science
is appealed to. Of course what typically happens is that opponents of a view
simply offer the social science explanation without bothering about
offering actual arguments and evidence against what they oppose, and then
claim to have debunked the view they dislike, hoping that no one will
notice that their own view is also social science explicable and that they
haven’t actually refuted anything.
Question 10: aren’t there crucial differences between, say,
sensory experience and religious experience?
There certainly are differences. They are crucial for some matters, and not
crucial for others. Let such experiences as seeing that identity is transitive,
recognizing that no contradiction can be true, discerning that arguments of
the form (P or Q, and not-Q; therefore P) are valid but arguments of the
form (P or Q, and Q; therefore P) are invalid be conceptual experiences.
There are crucial differences between sensory experiences and conceptual
experiences; that fact casts no aspersions on either sort of experience and
gives no reason to suppose that either is evidentially suspect.
Suppose that Tara and Todd sit beside one another at morning worship.
Tara and Todd both at least appear to see a stained-glass window and Tara
has a religious experience whereas Todd does not. If Tara were to seem to
see a window and Todd were not, given that both are sighted and looking in
the same place, either Tara is window-hallucinating or Todd is window-
blind. But Todd’s not having a religious experience does not call into