Snowdon on Knowing One’s Own Experience
By Tony Cheng
Paul F. Snowdon passed away unexpectedly in summer 2022. The posts dedicating to our memories of him were written a while ago, and we are pleased that these pieces can finally appear after some delays. Personally, I first met Paul back in 2006 at the conference in London on Sellars’s EPM. I joined UCL in 2012 as a MPhil. student, and worked with Paul (and others) for my thesis. Paul soon retired in 2015 or so. I am so glad to have a chance work with him officially, as one of his latest students, and have kept in touch with him since then, both as a student and as a friend. In 2019, the special issue Objectivity, Space, and Mind (2019) edited by Paul and myself came out in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. I was going to invite Paul to Taiwan in 2019 or 2020, right after I went back, as I know it would be more and more difficult for him to travel for such a long way. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the trip has been postponed. After waiting for two years, I finally invited him for an online talk, and he kindly agreed. Too bad that this was never happening. I blame myself for not inviting him early enough. I attach three photos that epitomise my fond memories of Paul.
In my post, I will briefly highlight some aspects of Snowdon’s views on a certain kind of self-knowledge. Since this is not an academic piece, the style will be sketchy and selective.
Knowing One’s Own Experience
Snowdon uses the term ‘phenomenal self-knowledge’ (2012) to refer to our self-knowledge of one’s own experiences, which might be potentially misleading. The reason is that what is phenomenal here is the target: we are talking about self-knowledge about phenomenal characters. However, ‘phenomenal self-knowledge’ sounds like self-knowledge itself is phenomenal, though its targets might be non-phenomenal states. That said, let’s stick to this terminology for convenience, with the above caveat in mind.
Here Snowdon’s main interlocutor is Crispin Wright, specifically his Rails to Infinity (2001). To begin with, Wright divides his topics into phenomenal avowals (‘I have a headache,’ ‘my feet are sore,’ ‘I’m tired,’ ‘I feel elated,’ ‘my vision is blurred,’ ‘my ears are ringing.’ ‘I feel sick,’ and so on) and attitudinal avowals (‘I believe that term ends on the 27th,’ ‘I hope that noise stops soon,’ ‘I am frightened of that dog,’ ‘I am thinking of my mother,’ and so on) (2001: 321). Snowdon is going to take issue with two points: first, the division between the phenomenal and the attitudinal as Wright conceives it is problematic, and secondly, to focus on avowals here is a red herring.
First, ‘ordinary reports of perceptual experience (such as “It looks to me as if there is a city ahead”) are not mentioned at all’ (2012: 246). If the division is supposed to be exhaustive, and this seems to be Wright’s intention, then this is indeed a problem. A prior issue needs to be settled first in deciding which side we should put perception: namely that whether perceptual experiences are propositional attitudes. If they are, it belongs to the attitudinal side. This is a big issue that divides philosophers; for example, Alex Byrne (2005) prefers the positive answer, while Tim Crane (2009) argues for the negative answer. I suspect this is why Wright wants to leave it out – it is too controversial to be fit in an initial and supposedly plausible division. However, this is not to say that Wright is justified in doing so. If the division is supposed to be exhaustive, he has to take side about the kind of reports in question.
I will have perception in my list in discussing self-knowledge, since what is crucial here is that the target in question is conscious or phenomenal; whether the vehicle is a propositional attitude is irrelevant for our purposes. This relates to Snowdon’s objection to Wright’s idea that we should focus on avowals. As Snowdon says, avowals are ‘speech acts’ (2012: 245), which should not be the primary concern if what we care here is self-belief/knowledge. In moving away from avowals, we can legitimately talk about knowledge of one’s own experiences, or phenomenal self-knowledge in Snowdon’s term, without getting us into troubles.
Although Snowdon has denied that avowals should be the central notion, for the sake of argument he considers Wright’s proposed properties for phenomenal avowals:
- Groundless: ‘[T]he demand, in response to an avowal, that the subject produces reasons or corroborating evidence for their claim is always inappropriate’ (2012: 249-50; original emphasis).
- Authoritativeness: ‘[I]f someone doubts what the avower says then that doubt has to resolve into either a doubt about the subject’s sincerity or about his or her understanding’ (ibid.: 250).
- Transparency: ‘[I]t is absurd to profess ignorance of the form “I do not know whether P or not,” where “P” would be a phenomenal avowal’ (ibid.: 250; original emphasis).
Against groundless, Snowdon distinguishes between ‘inappropriateness of asking for evidence’ and ‘inappropriateness of asking how the subject can tell’ (ibid.: 250). Although the former is fine, the latter is in effect wrong, because ‘wherever there is knowledge there is a method whereby the knowledge is acquired.’ If this is the case, then the ‘how’ question would be appropriate. Wright here confuses groundless with non-inferentiality.
Against authoritativeness, Snowdon considers a scenario in which a teenager is seriously injured in most parts of the body. In this kind of cases, a doctor is in a better position to know about that teenager’s pain states. But the doctor would not think that ‘the injured boy was either lying or did not understand English’ (ibid.: 252), as Wright implies. This example is telling to some extent, but it does not seem to be decisive. Snowdon’s rationale is that when the doctor presses a place where there is no physical injury but the teenager cries out, it is justified to think that the doctor is more authoritative in this case. However, maybe there is no perfect correlation between physical injuries and pains. Even assuming physicalism, due to the extremely bad situation imagined, the teenager might confabulate and thereby actually feel pain in that area. Sometimes in real life we do locate pain in areas where there is no corresponding injury; phantom limb is a prominent example. After all, pain does not really have a location, or so it seems. It is all brain’s interpretation, according to many in the empirical sciences. If for some reasons the signals get misinterpreted by the brain, then the subject might indeed feel pain in uninjured places. To be fair to Snowdon, he does not take this example to be decisive, but since the above point was not considered in his work explicitly, maybe it is worthwhile to be put on the table.
Against transparency, Snowdon considers the case in which he has his eyes tested with different pairs of lens (ibid.: 252). Sometimes it is truly difficult to say which one is blurrier. In that case he thinks it is fine to profess ignorance. Here the case seems quite powerful, but there might still be a way out. Perhaps we can use demonstratives here. I can say: ‘I do not know which is blurrier because they are too similar, but at least when I wear one I do know this degree of blurriness.’ Here the content of the demonstratives is fixed by external conditions. Here Snowdon might reply that since it is externally fixed, it is not transparent anymore. Perhaps we should conclude that if phenomenal avowals are transparent, they are transparent only to a certain extent.
Snowdon’s fundamental objection here is that Wright focusses on a wrong level: the whole discussion should be about self-belief/knowledge, as opposed to speech acts. After making this point, he turns away from Wright and focusses instead on two properties that are similar to Wright’s suggestions but now at the correct level. They are self-intimatingness and incorrigibility. The former is this:
Necessarily, if any phenomenal condition C applies to S, then S knows that he/she is in C. (ibid., 256)
As it stands, it faces obvious counterexamples such as human infants and lower animals because many of them can have phenomenal experiences but lack the ability to form beliefs, e.g., they do not have relevant concepts. So it should be improved like this:
Necessarily, if phenomenal condition C applies to S and S possesses the relevant concepts, then S will know that C applies to him/her. (ibid.: 257)
But even with this, it might still be problematic. For example, ‘if I look at a group of twelve objects then I cannot immediately detect that it is a group of twelve, but must report a procedure of counting’ (ibid. 257). This echoes the famous the ‘speckled hen’ problem against the sense-datum theory. Snowdon then carries on offering five more objections to self-intimation, but let’s turn our discussion to incorrigibility, since this speckled hen problem is sufficiently threatening for self-intimation as formulated above. Incorrigibility says this:
Necessarily, if S believes that he/she is in C, then S is in C. (ibid.: 256)
At this point the dialectic does not seem to be quite clear, because as it stands, few contemporary philosophers would believe this strong condition, including Wright. This brings us to a general misgiving about Snowdon’s discussion here: the reason why Snowdon is focussing on these two properties is because they ‘would have to obtain if Wright’s suggestions hold’ (ibid.: 256). However, it is not clear that the exact formulations above of the two properties are really what are required by Wright’s properties about phenomenal avowals. The formulations we considered above seem so implausible that there is no need to raise multiple objections to it. For example, the old speckled hen problem seems to be sufficed to threaten self-intimation as it formulated like this. I shall leave the readers to decide for themselves about these matters.
Metaphilosophy: Snowdon as a Destructive Philosopher
I would like to close by some remarks about Snowdon’s metaphilosophy. Snowdon is best known for his position ‘animalism’ in personal identity. He is also known in the discussion of ‘disjunctivism’ in perception, although he is hesitant to commit himself to it. He has written on many areas in philosophy of mind, knowledge and metaphysics. However, his distinctive style is to identify a target, say a renowned philosopher, and offer a barrage of objections to the target, like we saw above. This is very different from many contemporary philosophers.
In a relatively recent paper on Wittgenstein (2011), Snowdon portraits Wittgenstein as ‘a negative philosopher,’ because Wittgenstein’s ‘aim is primarily to establish claims of the form Not [P], or, perhaps: “we should not think that P”’ (2011: 403). With similar considerations, I venture to call Snowdon a ‘destructive philosopher’: it is not simply negative; what Snowdon often does is to go very slowly through another philosopher’s argumentation, and make some critical points here and there. Gradually, one realises that the target has been torn down along the way. Very often, his positive view would emerge gradually, but it takes effort for readers to distill those lessons. There is nothing wrong with being destructive per se: nowadays many philosophers are too ready to be constructive by making big claims with fishy starting points. It is crucial for the community to be more careful about initial assumptions. Snowdon’s metaphilosophy offers us exactly that. To be sure, we need different styles of philosophy, since if everyone is primarily destructive, then it is hard to make any progress. However, my sociological observation is that recently many philosophers are too constructive and revisionary: they write too many big books and huge papers with grandiose assertions. It is true that they sometimes offer good arguments for their claims, but overall careful examinations of initial assumptions like what Snowdon offered are often lacking. No matter how much you accept the actual contents of Snowdon’s writings, I hope this distinctive style can be inherited by some of us.
2015, after my visit to Oxford to meet him.
2016, during one of our stimulating discussions.
2017, discussing my notes in an informal supervision.
References
Byrne, A. (2005) ‘Perception and Conceptual Content,’ E. Sosa and M. Steup (eds.) Contemporary Debate in Epistemology, Wiley-Blackwell
Cheng, T., & Snowdon, P. (2019) (eds.) Objectivity, Space, and Mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18(5): 791-917.
Crane, T. (2009) ‘Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?’ Philosophical Quarterly 59: 452-69
Snowdon, P. (2011) ‘Private Experience and Sense Data,’ in O. Kuusela and M. McGinn (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press
Snowdon, P. (2012) ‘How to Think about Phenomenal Self-Knowledge,’ in A. Coliva (ed.) The Self and Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press
Wright, C. (2001) Rails to Infinity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Harvard University Press