LTT: Philipp Berghofer

Title: From Epistemology to Quantum Mechanics: A Phenomenological Proposal

Abstract:

Contemporary epistemology is dominated by externalist approaches. In this picture, evidence is not constituted by our experiences but by facts and the epistemic status of our beliefs is not determined by what is internally accessible to us but by external factors such as reliability. This implies that there is nothing intrinsically special about experience. A crucial rationale for externalism is the idea that philosophy should be methodologically similar to the natural sciences. Here the natural sciences are typically understood as adopting a third-person perspective that successfully abstracts away from the subject and her experiences. My proposal is to break with both these preconceptions of how to do epistemology and how to understand science. More precisely, I wish to introduce and defend a phenomenological experience-first epistemology. One cornerstone of this system is the claim that all epistemic justification and every piece of knowledge can be traced back to epistemically foundational experiences. Furthermore, I will argue that epistemology and science are intimately related as follows: Epistemology specifies the epistemic role of experience; the most fundamental aim of science, then, is to develop the formalism that allows the experiencing subject to answer the following question: Given my actual experiences, what should I believe (to experience next)? The relationship between epistemology and science is particularly intimate if this formalism can be reconstructed from phenomenological-epistemological principles. My thesis is that this formalism is the formalism delivered by quantum mechanics.

This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.