Against the intrinsic epistemicity of experience

Abstract

A commonly endorsed assumption about experience – a.k.a. ‘phenomenal consciousness’ – is what I call the intrinsic epistemicity thesis (‘the IE thesis’), according to which an experience E exists only if the subject is epistemically related to it. I argue that the IE thesis is unstable. It entails a worrisome circular ontological dependency relationship between an experience E and the subject’s epistemic relation ER to E: an experience E depends for its existence on the subject’s epistemic relation ER to E, while the subject’s standing in epistemic relation ER to E itself depends on E’s existence. I call this circularity the problem of intrinsic epistemicity or ‘PIE’. I argue that the PIE entails three further worries for the IE thesis: (1) the impossibility, under the IE thesis, of a non-circular definition of experience; (2) the impossibility, under the IE thesis, of a subject becoming epistemically related to an experience E; and (3) the impossibility, under the IE thesis, of finitely specifying the subject’s epistemic relation ER to E. The aim of this paper is to call attention to the PIE as a problem for the IE thesis and to motivate the development of accounts of experience that do not rely on it.