In this sub-section, I provide a few clarificatory notes on the Deference Principle. (i)Contextualized experiences: The experiences relevant to the principle must becon- textualized— that is, presented to a subject with a description of what types of experiences they are. Each experience insi should be paired with a description that includes (at min-
imum): (a) the subject in question and (b) a description of the counterfactual situation relevant to the experience. Without this information, a subject would be unable to interpret how the experiences insibear on the truth ofSi.8
(iii)The Cosmoscope: There are various ways to explicate the idea of a subject being
7Of course, as I mentioned in 6.5.4, there have been many attempts to show that ordinary objects judg-
mentsare justified under the assumption of realism. See, e.g., Vogel (1990), DeRose (1999) and Pryor (2000).
8When describing the contexts for the experiences ins
1-s6, I directly referred to ordinary objects (e.g., the book, the bicycle). This may seem puzzling, since the experiences insiare supposed to determine truths
about objects. This worry is closely related to a famous circularity objection to phenomenalism raised by Sellars (1963a). I discuss how the idealist should respond to this objection in chapter 9.
“presented with the experiences in si”. One option is to invoke Chalmers’ (2012, 114-
116) notion of a “Cosmoscope”. The Cosmoscope is a hypothetical virtual reality device that allows a user to select a certain counterfactual experience and which then induces that experience in the user.9 For example, a user might select: the experience I would have if I
were in positionpat timetand were to look towards the book. After appropriate warning, the Cosmoscope would induce this experience in the user. We can think of the subjects in the Deference Principle as using a Cosmoscope to learn about all of the counterfactual experiences relevant toSi.
(iv) Idealizations: The Deference Principle appeals to the experiences ordinary sub- jects “ideally” consider evidentially relevant to a given judgment Si. To see why this
idealization is needed, consider S3 ≡ ‘The bicycle is blue’. s3 cannot be viewed as the
experiences considered relevant to S3 given our actualevidence; after all, our actual ev-
idence may suggest that the bike is in the closet when, in fact, it is outside. Instead, s3
should include the experiences considered relevant toS3after a certain process ofidealized
evidence-gathering. I describe how the idealist should understand this process in chapter 9.
The Deference Principle also requires an idealization for the judgment about Si that
abstracts away from our contingent cognitive limitations. For example, the idealization should give subjects the ability to remember an infinite number of experiences, should allow subjects to entertain thoughts of infinite complexity, and should give subjects com- petence with any concept it is possible to possess.10
(v) Manifest sentences: The scope of the Deference Principle is restricted to “mani- fest sentences”: sentences involving the properties directly presented to us in experience. Examples of such sentences include: ‘X is blue’, ‘Xis cube-shaped’, ‘XandY are twice
9In fact, the Cosmoscope described by Chalmers is more complex. But these additional features will not
be relevant to this chapter.
as far apart asX andZ’, etc. In contrast, I will not consider “theoretical” sentences such as ‘Xhas a charge of 3e’ or sentences involving “higher-level” properties such as: ‘Xis a zebra’, ‘Xis loved by John’, and ‘Xhas a palindromic name’.11
To capture the above restriction, I stipulate that a sentence Si relevant to the Defer-
ence Principle must employ onlymanifest vocabulary, where manifest vocabulary excludes theoretical terms and higher-level terms.12 With this restriction in place, the term ‘book’
in S1 should be replaced by the more neutral term ‘book-shaped object’ (although I will
sometimes continue to use higher-level terms like ‘book’ as abbreviations in the discussion ahead).13
(vi)Type of analysis: The Deference Principle should not be viewed as aconceptual analysisof statements about ordinary objects. Traditional conceptual analyses must meet various criteria of adequacy; common criteria include that that the definition be a priori, that the definition be analytic, and that the terms in thedefiniendumbe semantically prior to the terms in thedefiniens. But the Deference Principle does not meet any of these criteria. Furthermore, one could not use the Deference Principle to teach the meanings of ordinary object terms to someone who did not already understand them.
Nor should the Deference Principle be viewed as an attempt to give a metaphysical analysis of ordinary objects. For example, the Deference Principle does not assert that facts about ordinary objects are constituted by, metaphysically grounded in, made true by,
11Some theorists, such as Siegel (2010), claim that higher-level properties are directly presented in expe-
rience. Whether or not this correct, I am excluding higher-level sentences from the scope of the Deference Principle.
12In contrast, manifest vocabulary will include (at the very least): predicates expressing edenic properties
(‘is blue’, ‘is square’), singular terms based off edenic properties (‘the cube-shaped object’), indexical terms (‘I’, ‘this’, ‘now’), and mathematical and logical terms (‘2’, ‘or’).
13I have excluded theoretical and higher-level judgments because it is not clear that subjects will always
be able to know such judgments solely on the basis ofsi. For example, forX to count as a zebra,X must
have certain genetic properties. But subjects may not be able to judge whetherXhas these properties solely on the basis ofsi. The scope restriction rules out such complications.
I discuss how the edenic idealist should view theoretical truths in chapter 9. As for “higher-level” truths: these truths plausibly supervene on theoretical and manifest truths (in addition to certain other classes of truths).
or reducible to facts about the epistemic practices of ordinary speakers.
Instead, the Deference Principle describes how the counterfactual experiences sup- ported by WE, in conjunction with facts about our epistemic practices, select a certain
possible edenic worldWM as the one relevant to the truth of our ordinary object judgments.