218 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSexperience as potential evidence for claims to the effect that things are as the
experiences that are potential direct evidence for them represent things as
being^3 – with the cases of experiences and claims where the claims match up
with the phenomenological content of the experiences. Experiences will not be
direct evidence for any other claims.
A principle of experiential evidence
Question 3: how do we tell what an experience can be direct
evidence for the existence of?
Suppose that Mary reports at least seeming to see a tiger in her garden; having
this experience provides her with reason for concern or delight (depending on
her views about having a tiger in her garden that she previously lacked). She
has some evidence that There is a tiger in Mary’s garden is true. There may not
be: it is logically possible that she seems to see a tiger and there is none there.
But even if tigers do not typically roam in her garden, her at least seeming to
see a tiger in her garden provides her with hitherto absent evidence that there
is one there now. The basic idea, then, is this: if Mary has an experience which,
if reliable, is a matter of seeing a tiger in her garden, then she has experiential
evidence that there is a tiger there. More formally:
(P) If a person S has an experience E which, if reliable, is a matter of being
aware of an experience-independently existing item X, then S’s having E
gives S evidence that X exists.
Alternatively, suppose that Max has an experience, the phenomenological
content of which justifies Max in saying If this experience is reliable, then I am
experiencing something that fits description D, where D simply says what
features it at least experientially seems to Max that something has. Then
Max’s experience is evidence that Something fitting D exists. If there ever is
experiential evidence for anything that exists independent of our experience,
(P) or some close cousin is true. What an experience can be evidence for is a
function of what its phenomenology is; its phenomenology constrains what an
experience can be evidence for. Further, at least seeming to see a tiger correctly
describes only a very small range of possible phenomenologies or
phenomenological contents. If an experience is correctly described as at least
seeming to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, at least seeming to smell coffee
brewing, at least tasting like peppermint, at least seeming to see a large
elephantly shaped thing, at least seeming to see a battleship, or the like, it will