brade wrote:I sat on a plane next to a professed atheist who pressed his disbelief in God so urgently that I bore my testimony to him. “You are wrong,” I said, “there is a God. I know He lives!”
He protested, “You don’t know. Nobody knows that! You can’t know it!” When I would not yield, the atheist, who was an attorney, asked perhaps the ultimate question on the subject of testimony. “All right,” he said in a sneering, condescending way, “you say you know. Tell me how you know.”
When I attempted to answer, even though I held advanced academic degrees, I was helpless to communicate…When I used the words Spirit and witness, the atheist responded, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” The words prayer, discernment, and faith, were equally meaningless to him. “You see,” he said, “you don’t really know. If you did, you would be able to tell me how you know.”
I felt, perhaps, that I had borne my testimony to him unwisely and was at a loss as to what to do. Then… an idea came into my mind and I said to the atheist, “Let me ask if you know what salt tastes like.”
“Of course I do,” was his reply.
“When did you taste salt last?”
“I just had dinner on the plane.”
“You just think you know what salt tastes like,” I said.
He insisted, “I know what salt tastes like as well as I know anything.”
“If I gave you a cup of salt and a cup of sugar and let you taste them both, could you tell the salt from the sugar?”
“Now you are getting juvenile,” was his reply. “Of course I could tell the difference. I know what salt tastes like. It is an everyday experience—I know it as well as I know anything.”
“Then,” I said, “assuming that I have never tasted salt, explain to me just what it tastes like.”
After some thought, he ventured, “Well-I-uh, it is not sweet and it is not sour.”
“You’ve told me what it isn’t, not what it is.”
After several attempts, of course, he could not do it. He could not convey, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore testimony to him once again and said, “I know there is a God. You ridiculed that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt. I am no more able to convey to you in words how this knowledge has come than you are to tell me what salt tastes like. But I say to you again, there is a God! He does live! And just because you don’t know, don’t try to tell me that I don’t know, for I do!”
So, what do you think? If we cannot convey by language
what salt tastes like, then we should not expect believers to be able to convey
how they know that something is the case on the basis of spiritual experience. Right?
A few possible responses.
1) Even if we buy into the metaphysics of qualia and all that stuff about "what Mary knows" put forth by Jackson, we would still only be able to conclude that the testimony bearing person quoted above knows what it is like to be convinced they know that the church is true. They only know what it seems like so to speak. Any decent theory of knowledge makes connection to publically available proceedures, norms, evidence and so on.
In short, there is a huge and obvious gap between knowing (as in being justified believing) and thinking that one knows. Normally we overcome this by appealing to rational and publically available considerations.
2) It may be better to reject the idea that knowing what salt tastes like to is have been in direct eptistemic contact (?!) with some mental, ineffable, intrinsic, private item we might call "saltiness". We should resist the idea that there really even is such a thing (even if it seems there is).
Knowing saltiness should be construed in terms of dispositions and abilities such as identifying which soup has more salt in it or distinguishing salt from sugar etc. Read "Quining Qualia" and Dennett's push back on Jackson's thought experiment in "Consciousness Explained" and in "What RoboMary Knows".
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm3) We can always point to people who say they know that the church isn't true or that some other religion is true. At least some of these may claim they know by some ineffable inner experience. But some of them may say they know and be able to say how.
Aren't those who say they know something
and can explain
how they know in the stronger position epistemically?
In any case, we should say that the person putting forth this comparison with salt has a naïve notion of what constitues knowledge. In particular, they do not appreciate the basically intersubjective nature of knowledge.
Finally, here is a little thought experiment of my own:
Suppose for grins we accept that there is a quale (singular of qualia) that corresponds to sensing saltiness and is also brought into consciousness when we remember saltiness and so on.
Now suppose that God changes this quale by toying with our spirit or the way our spirit is connected to our brains or some other way. But suppose he arranges that our memories and recollections of saltiness are also changed to match. Would we know?
Not if God took care to make all the replacements needed.
But now suppose that he changes the saltiness
quale fifty times per second. Now when some one asks us if we know what it is like to taste salt we recall this quale and re-experience it. We then confidently tell the questioner that yes we do know. But by the time these words are half way out of our mouth, the quale connected to salt
and to all our memories of salt and saltiness have changed together in a way that we cannot detect.
Do we really then know something? What do we know?
Actually, even for people who believe in qualia, this isn't so strange because the brain is changing all the time in functionally irrelevant ways and so perhaps the experience of saltiness is quietly morphing without our being able to detect it. When we bring saltiness to mind or remember a salty soup, the brain activates a neural token that is connected to but (for qualephiles) not identical to the quale itself. The quale may have changed but the functional role of the corresponding neural token is unchanged. This by definition means that we would find ourselves saying that the taste was the same as ever and we would still say all the things about saltiness that we would ever have done.
This seems like a reductio to me.
But personally, I reject these quale as real ontologically distinct objects of knowledge.
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo