The "list of negative life experiences" itself--the gestalt, if you like--is non-transobservable (note that I do not say "unobservable", that would be substituting a different and more restrictive term in as if it were equivalent to the one we've been using thus far). While you may very well have had some, possibly many, similar experiences in which somebody claims to love you and you later discover an underlying motive of selfishness, the actual observed dataset as a whole that this person is working from (a life-long, unbroken string of people faking love) is not available to you.
Well, this would be very significant if we needed the experential content of someone’s life in order to believe things about them. But we don’t. This standard of corroboration, or confidence-building, is unrealistically high. In fact it’s off the chart. Our entire concept of truth and belief is based on understanding and evaluating the truthfulness of statements -- and that process of evaluation never involves directly accessing the experiences of others.
Imagine if a detective investigating a crime were to say, “Well, I either have to believe every word the suspect says, or I have to assume everything he says is a lie, because I can’t access the entirety of his experience.” It doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t need to access the suspect’s experience at all, in fact, in order to build or destroy confidence in the statement. He simply has to cross-reference it with other pieces of information he can experience for himself, or that others have experienced as his proxy (and thereby producing further questions of confidence and reliability). Does the suspect’s alibi match verifiable physical or electronic evidence -- a credit-card transaction, a security camera’s footage? This builds confidence in the story. Does the suspect’s alibi match the statements of disinterested witnesses? Yes? That builds another layer of confidence. What about the internal consistency of the alibi -- the chronology, locations, distances involved? All good? Another layer. Note that none of this has to do with (a) either simply believing someone at their word or (b) having direct access to their experience.
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Date: 2012-08-02 10:59 pm (UTC)Well, this would be very significant if we needed the experential content of someone’s life in order to believe things about them. But we don’t. This standard of corroboration, or confidence-building, is unrealistically high. In fact it’s off the chart. Our entire concept of truth and belief is based on understanding and evaluating the truthfulness of statements -- and that process of evaluation never involves directly accessing the experiences of others.
Imagine if a detective investigating a crime were to say, “Well, I either have to believe every word the suspect says, or I have to assume everything he says is a lie, because I can’t access the entirety of his experience.” It doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t need to access the suspect’s experience at all, in fact, in order to build or destroy confidence in the statement. He simply has to cross-reference it with other pieces of information he can experience for himself, or that others have experienced as his proxy (and thereby producing further questions of confidence and reliability). Does the suspect’s alibi match verifiable physical or electronic evidence -- a credit-card transaction, a security camera’s footage? This builds confidence in the story. Does the suspect’s alibi match the statements of disinterested witnesses? Yes? That builds another layer of confidence. What about the internal consistency of the alibi -- the chronology, locations, distances involved? All good? Another layer. Note that none of this has to do with (a) either simply believing someone at their word or (b) having direct access to their experience.