When
Where
The Philosophy Department spring 2023 colloquium series is proud to present Martina Fürst (University of Graz).
Abstract:
According to phenomenal conservatism, whenever you have an experience as of p this experience provides you with prima facie justification to believe p. Cases in which the experience has a bad basis challenge phenomenal conservatism. To explain the bad basis cases, some philosophers (e.g., Siegel 2017) develop an etiologically restricted conservatism. However, these accounts depart from the key tenet of phenomenal conservatism that etiology does not matter for an experience´s justificatory power. I propose a novel version of a restricted conservatism that meets the desideratum of explaining the bad basis cases by looking at intrinsic features of the experience. To meet this aim, I focus on the experience’s overall phenomenology. In particular, I argue that the experiences in the bad cases exhibit a mismatching phenomenology and, hence, do not have prima facie justificatory power. The reason is that phenomenal mismatch provides internal phenomenal defeat within the experience, which makes the experience epistemically deficient. The resulting view explains the bad basis cases while staying true to the spirit of phenomenal conservatism.