Empiricism reformed

Conscious Experience is a rigorous and intriguing reanimation of the empiricist tradition. There are many riches in the book that caused me to ponder, and that deserve mention in a commentary such as this. However, I will confine myself to a line of discussion on Gupta’s embrace of realism and rejection of pluralism in philosophy of science. The project of Conscious Experience is to reform empiricism in such a way as to firmly establish “experience as the supreme epistemic authority”, while avoiding the mistakes of earlier versions of empiricism. A related motive is to lend support to the idea that mature science is a privileged view on the world, that it provides the best understanding of reality, humanity included, leading reformed empiricism to endorsement of scientific realism. This is a surprising place to end up, given that scientific realism is the traditional antagonist of empiricism. My discussion of Gupta’s anti-pluralism centres around the hypothetical given, the distinctive innovation of this empiricism. Gupta’s commitment to convergent scientific realism, over accounts which take scientific knowledge to be inherently pluralistic, rests on the notion of the hypothetical given. I argue that this in turn depends on an over-simplified notion of experience, which cannot accommodate the way that scientific observation is learned skill that fundamentally affects how practitioners perceive their objects.