Reply to Commentators

Abstract

Both Gale and Pappas argue that I fail to justify the claim that mystical experience is perceptual. Hence, in Gale's terms, my project derailed before it leaves the station. However, the two criticisms are rather different. Gale's is the more radical, since he seeks to show that mystical experience is not even a candidate for being a source of justification for beliefs about any objective reality. His strategy is to lay down two requirements for perceptual status and argue that mystical experience satisfies neither. The first, or requirement is that the object of the experience occupy a position in some dimension which it is individuated and within which it is causally hooked up with different perceivers, thereby explaining how it is possible.. .for it to be the common accusative of different perceptions... The requirement is stated in this unspecific way-some dimension-because Gale wants to avoid tying the requirement too closely to sense perception by requiring a spatio-temporal location of the object. He points out, quite correctly, that God's individuation is not based on any location (God is everywhere all the time). Rather it is based on His certain descriptions. So what? What is the difficulty? So long as God gets individuated somehow, that should be sufficient to satisfy any metaphysical demand for a principle of individuation. What Gale takes to be a difficulty is that there is no way in which we can experientially identify someone as satisfying the descriptions that allegedly uniquely apply to God. In other words the individuating features do not provide us with an effective handle for determining when we are perceiving God rather than something else or nothing at all. Clearly, though the label 'epistemological' is reserved for the second requirement, it is an epistemological consideration that provides the rationale for imposing this requirement as a condition of perceptual status. So far as purely metaphysical considerations are concerned, they would seem to be satisfied by the provision of an effective way of distinguishing God from all other beings, whether by descriptions or otherwise.