The Reliability Of Experience

I have not yet properly written in one place a fairly detailed explanation of the epistemology of experience, dissecting the role of experience in knowledge and the reliability of experience.  Experience itself is the process of learning from some observation or participating in some activity.  Before I continue, I need to clarify something vital.

I am a rationalist AND an empiricist because both rationalism and empiricism are true.

What I mean by empiricism is not the self-refuting position that all knowledge comes from sensory experience, which sensory experience fails to prove and which internal experience of my thoughts and mind indubitably refute.  I call that philosophy sensory empiricism, which is very different than the type of empiricism I just identified with.  Empiricism is just the position that all knowledge involves experience.  I am also, as the title of my blog broadcasts openly, a rationalist, with rationalism being the position that all of my knowledge involves reason and hinges on my ability to grasp logic.

To even know that "I think, therefore I am", I have to experience my thoughts.  To know what a particular passage of the Bible says, I have to experience the process of reading it.  To know if I desire to consume food, I have to experience the desire.  To know that I love a friend, I have to experience genuine affection for that person and concern for his or her wellbeing.  And yet apart from my grasp of logic I would not even have coherent, intelligible experiences, as without awareness of logic I would not even be able to realize that something is what it is and be able to contemplate my experiences at all!  It is objectively true that all knowledge is only possible because of both reason and experience.  Without either, knowledge is impossible.

Past this point, I distinguish between fallible and infallible experiences.  I divide the two to show that there are some experiences which simply cannot be illusions and some which are totally unreliable.


Fallible Experiences

Fallible experiences are experiences which involve perceptions that may be false.  For instance, if I have a feeling as if I am in a divine presence, the feeling alone does not mean that I am actually perceiving God's presence, as this does not follow logically.  For this reason, all arguments for general theism or particular religions based upon anecdotes and sentimentality do not prove anything except to the original experiencer that the experience occurred.  For another example, I will refer to the senses.  Just because I see a house in front of me doesn't mean the house is objectively real, as it could be a simulated stimuli in some artificial projection from the true external world.

In this case, while the perception itself is infallibly known to be a real perception and the fact that I have the perception is infallibly true, it is not necessarily true that the house objectively exists and thus a claim extending to anything more than "I perceive the house" is fallible and uncertain.  The perceptions are real perceptions and that cannot be an illusion, but beyond this the perceptions may not correspond to reality at all.


Infallible Experiences

Infallible experiences are experiences which involve perceptions that cannot be illusions.  Some examples?  I know for sure that I am conscious because I am perceiving and thinking.  I know for sure that my senses are actually perceiving stimuli (I did NOT say that my senses are perceiving the external world as it is) because I am perceiving them.  I know for sure that intimate non-romantic friendships between men and women are possible because romantic affection for my female friends is totally nonexistent in my heart and mind (though logic can prove this independent of actual friendship experience).  I know for sure that I like certain movies more than others simply because I enjoy some movies over others.  There is no way that I can be wrong about these things.  Through deductive reasoning and immediate introspection I have absolute certainty that I really am conscious, that I truly do have senses that are perceiving certain things, that I do not love my best friend, who is a woman, in a romantic way, and that I really do like some movies more than others.  To verify these things with the utmost certainty (absolute certainty), I merely need to experience my existence.

Where infallible experiences depart from fallible experiences often has to do with perception.  It is infallibly true that many things seem a certain way to me, but it is not infallibly true that these perceptions necessarily mean that reality must be as it appears to me.  That is why I know it is infallibly true that I have senses but not that the specific contents of my sensory perceptions necessarily conform to actual reality.  I hope that readers can clearly comprehend the difference between the two that I have articulated.


Conclusion

All knowledge inescapably involves experience of some sort, and yet the experience of a perception does not necessitate that the perception actually aligns with reality.  It is not difficult to distinguish between the two types of experience, fallible and infallible.  Is a perception you experience incapable of not conforming to reality?  Then it is an infallible experience.  Is a perception possibly illusory?  Then is fallible.  Perceptions themselves are not illusions, but things which seem true may not be.  Reason can infallibly identify an experience as one kind or the other.  While experience is a necessary component of all knowledge, it remains unintelligible without the illumination of logic.