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Addendum on Wilhelm Dilthey and Lived Experience
On my other blog I have just posted Wilhelm Dilthey on Lived Experience, in which I discuss Dilthey’s use of the term “lived experience” and the difficulties involved in describing conscious experience when we don’t have a viable scientific theory of consciousness.
In my exposition I made use of the “knowledge argument,” also known as the “Mary’s room” thought experiment (read the blog post for more detail). In the case of the historical variant of “Mary’s room” that I proposed – according to which, “…if Mary had
exhaustively studied life in colonial Kush during the later second
millennium BC, and then Mary was enabled to actually go back and live in
colonial Kush during the later second millennium BC, would Mary learn
anything by the latter method that she did not already know from the
first method?” – it could (and should) be argued that our knowledge of colonial Kush during the later second millennium BC
is highly imperfect, so that even if a scholar studied every known instance of knowledge about this place and time, this knowledge would still be incomplete, so that it is inevitable that anyone, having studied second millennium BC Kush in this way would learn many things as a result of getting into a time machine and being sent there.
It could further be argued that there is a sense in which knowledge of an historical milieu is potentially infinitistic – there are always further perspectives that might be obtained, like that of a time-traveling scholar who visits, and who, in visiting, sees and notices things that no one has previously seen or noticed – so that even under ideal conditions of the preservation of the historical record, no finite record could be complete, and any “lived experience” of a given place and time may reveal new aspects of that place and time. Therefore, lived experience will never be reducible to that which actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen, following Leopold von Ranke).
Similar considerations can be applied to the original form of the Mary’s room thought experiment. Even if we maintain that Mary has learned everything that there is to know about color visual perception, all that there is to know on the subject does not necessarily exhaust all that could be known on the subject. An adequate theory of color visual perception, even though perfectly adequate for all practical purposes – making predictions about color vision, treating pathologies of color vision, etc. – will still rely upon more general scientific principles, and when we push this reliance upon general scientific principles to the furthest extent, we come to the limitations of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge about nature, like knowledge about the historical past, is potentially infinite. We may draw the line at some point and consider our knowledge to be adequate, but there are always further avenues we might pursue, or we might pursue the familiar avenues beyond the present scope of our knowledge.
There is, therefore, always more to know about science, and that means that the science of color visual perception is erected on foundations that are incomplete. Mary will never know everything about color visual perception, because science on the whole will never know everything about nature. Now, in most cases, a failure of knowledge of fundamental physics is not going to make a difference, especially in regard to color visual perception, but when it comes to unknowns like consciousness and the origins of the universe, these unknowns – the fact that science is incomplete, and that a new theory would significantly transform our knowledge of nature – remains highly relevant.
I have here given an infinitistic argument that Mary could learn something upon emerging from her black and white world studying color visual perception (or visiting Kush after having studied all there is to know about Kush). There may also be a finitistic argument to the same end, following the general principles of my argument above, but not relying upon an appeal to a potential infinity of experience. I think that there is such an argument, but it eludes me at the present moment, so I will have to continue to think about this.
