§115. The Excess of Experience

The late-model nominalism of Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty attacks empiri­cism with the argument that nothing counts as a reason for a belief except an­other belief. There is nothing epistemological for experience to do until it is described, and then it is the descriptions that matter, propositions, not expe­rience, which is at most a cause and not a reason.

Part of the argument is indisputable, which is that nothing except a belief can be a reason for a belief. That may be a problem for a theorematic em­piricism expecting sense data to deliver ultimate evidence (Carnap, Quine), but no one would say that nothing except a belief can change a belief. The only thing that changes belief is experience. If we feel dissatisfied with a concept and motivated to seek alternatives, it is not because of logic, which accommodates anything (with compensatory adjustment). Dissatisfaction with our concepts arises (if it does) from experience, with its power to sur­prise perception and trouble memory.

Logic has no use in advance of experience, and experience is veritably a posteriori, following after trials and much memory. It is only after experi­ence supplies something to work on that we find employment for logic; iso­lated from experience it behaves like a compass at the North Pole, useless for orientation. Is that not the lesson of “grue”? Nelson Goodman's argument begins with two hypotheses:

(1) Emeralds are green.

(2) Emeralds are grue—green and examined before t, or blue.

Set t for tomorrow, and down to the stroke of midnight the two hypotheses are perfect equals in evidence. Why is it somehow more reasonable to expect newly observed emeralds to be green rather than blue (i.e., grue, like all the rest)?³

A half-century and more of discussion has shown that all the easy answers (e.g., simplicity, consistency) do not work. Gruesome expectations are not our habit, that is true, but is habit all there is to it? Hume would say yes, as would Ockham, who invented this answer in his theory of mental signs, which are habitudes. Goodman describes such habits as the “entrenchment” of a predicate in a language: “green” is entrenched in English use and history as “grue” is not. But entrenchment is an effect in the space of causes, and does not rationalize the expectation of green. Logic offers nothing against anx­iety as the moment approaches when emeralds either continue to be green or continue to be grue. However, my experience gives all the reason I want for projecting “green” and ignoring “grue.” I expect orientation in relation to goals, not justification before a tribunal. If my action is justified, that will be by how it turns out, not because of the experience that emboldened me to try. Experience has something better to do than justify beliefs. It can change them, move the creation of new ones, and motivate experiments.

Logic has no value in advance of experience because experience is born of percepts, affects, action, and memory, not concepts. Experience exceeds concepts in being incommensurable, too much, too changeable, too contin­uous, interpenetrating, and densely heterogeneous for the finite form of a concept. No proposition is information-equivalent to any phase of experi­ence. What proposition people offer in lieu of their experience depends on the resources of their language, the context of their report, and the caprice of memory. The experience itself is non-denumerably more, which is the excess of experience and the source of its power to boil over and surprise us.

The “grue” argument shows that past evidence is consistent with multiple futures. In one of these, we expect newly examined emeralds to be green, in another blue. A different argument seems to show that the present is con­sistent with multiple pasts. Philosophers tend to allow that the subjective quality of present experience (in their sense of “experience”) is consistent with multiple alternative geneses, or can be “factored” in many ways, as for instance in Descartes’s dream argument, which assumes that any conscious present might be exactly as it is whether you are awake or dreaming. Johannes Muller drew this idea into neurology with his theory of specific nerve energy. The optic nerve has no idea what stimulates it—stimulate it any way at all and it produces its specific energy, and the brain “sees.” Muller’s theory is now without defenders in neurology, and I doubt that it is realistic to think per­ception can be generated in indiscernible ways, a notion as science-fictional as time travel. The “brain in a vat,” helpless to penetrate the lab’s nefarious deception, is a fantasy, not a thought experiment, and presupposes a “specific energy” concept that neurology has abandoned. The only people who think hallucinations resemble normal perception are mentally ill, and their sad ex­perience scarcely proves that perception passing for normal might have hal­lucinatory factors.⁴

The philosophers’ expression “my present experience,” used for current sensory awareness, is a malapropism. It is not experience they are having; rather it is because of the experience they have had that present perception has the qualitative wealth it does. We do not have experience, we become ex­perienced, as perception passes into the past and changes what we tend to do. Experience is a mnemic synthesis, virtual and tending. Its value does not lie in any en bloc relation to theories, concepts, or language, nor is it explained by a quality common to experience per se. The value of experience is that of a difference in experience, the difference induced by surprise and consum­mated by recovery, the experience from which we learn.

Peirce too thought that the action of experience took place by surprise. “It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us.” We are forced to confront an implacable obstacle. Peirce explains experience as “that which is forced upon a man's recognition” and “shapes his thoughts to some­thing quite different from what they naturally would have been.” Such ex­perience is not an impression, percept, or sense datum, it is the feeling of a problem. “Difficulty as such,” writes Deleuze, “along with its cortege of problems and questions, is not a de facto state of affairs but a de jure structure of thought.” Feeling problems fuels the inquiry that is the empirical birth of concepts. Experiments probe the unknown, but they do so by problemat­ically expanding the web of interaction, not by unveiling what was always there in advance of experience. You could even say experiments create the unknown. The unknown exists only because we tried to know and failed. The discovery of the unknown was our first surprise.⁵