โ Scribed by George S. Pappas
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
A number of philosophers have maintained that some traditional empiricist epistemological doctrines can be swept away by appropriate scientific, theoretical developments. For example, it has been claimed that it is reasonable to hold that neurophysiological science will someday have developed to the point where there are many highly confirmed, entrenched laws relating neural occurrences of various sorts, and occurrences of various mental events, e.g., sensations. In such a situation, were some conflict to arise between a subject's sincere report of some sensation and, say, a cerebroscope reading which indicates that the neural event correlated with that sensation is not occurring, then, it is claimed, the subject's sincere report would be overridden by the machine reading. Hence, the possibility that sincere introspective reports should be overridden in this fashion, it is often argued, suffices to show that such introspective reports are not incorrigible, and that no subject has logically privileged access to his own current mental states, and that no subject is the final epistemological authority with respect to the existence and character of his own mental states. 1
Recently, K. Parsons has produced a variant of the above well-known argument3 Suppose that in the future, when science has developed sufficiently, a conflict arises between a subject's sincere report of a sensation and a cerebroscope reading. (We will call this an EEG-conflict.) It is then argued that, In this event, the incorrigibilist position would force us to say that while the psychologist might have discovered interesting laws about bodily states, he had not discovered regular and good laws about sensations. ~ And, Parsons also claims that, ... the incorrigibilist position forces us to say a priori that either such cases will not arise or else no non-trivial laws about bodily manifestations of sensations are possible. 4
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