Knowing about my own experiences
I'm thinking about the "knowledge" we have of our present experiences- a type of knowledge that a phenomenologist might tell us is immediate and complete, as we cannot be mistaken about what we are presently experiencing. To clarify, I might be busy forming mistaken interpretations about what I'm presently experiencing, but the naked experience, the color and the scent and the flavor, etc, is supposed not to be something I can be wrong about.
I have trouble with the idea that I can have "knowledge" of my immediate experience. Roughly, I think the experience is constitutive of the "I" that knows, and is prior to the sophisticated, reflective, conceptualizing awareness necessary for knowledge. By the time I can know anything about an experience, it's finished occurring and has been filed and tagged. I don't think I can be mistaken about my present experience, but I don't think there's anything for me to be right about there either.
Relative to anyone else, I remain the authority on what I have experienced because no one else can have the kind of access to it that I can, but memory does not form perfect copies, and I still might be mistaken about what actually occurred, even at the most subjective, personal level.
I should read about this. I'm not sure if I really have the Husserlian picture of knowledge about experience right, or what advances have been made in phenomenology since his work.
I have trouble with the idea that I can have "knowledge" of my immediate experience. Roughly, I think the experience is constitutive of the "I" that knows, and is prior to the sophisticated, reflective, conceptualizing awareness necessary for knowledge. By the time I can know anything about an experience, it's finished occurring and has been filed and tagged. I don't think I can be mistaken about my present experience, but I don't think there's anything for me to be right about there either.
Relative to anyone else, I remain the authority on what I have experienced because no one else can have the kind of access to it that I can, but memory does not form perfect copies, and I still might be mistaken about what actually occurred, even at the most subjective, personal level.
I should read about this. I'm not sure if I really have the Husserlian picture of knowledge about experience right, or what advances have been made in phenomenology since his work.