Epistemology

A few posts ago, I raised a puzzle of contemporary epistemology: How can experience provide justification for beliefs, given that it is an event and not a proposition and therefore cannot have any logical connection to any conclusion? Here is an answer to the puzzle that I think is right. In order to be justified in believing that you are seeing an ordinary object, such as a table, it must be that you seem to see a table. This is because in order to be justified in believing that you see a table, you must be justified in believing that you seem to see one. But you can’t be justified in believing that you seem to see one unless you do seem to see one. This is because if there aren’t components of your visual experience that are jointly constitutive of seeming to see a table, then you have nothing to cite as a fact about your experience that justifies you in believing that you seem to see a table. “Because there seem to be four straight things going down from a flat expanse in my visual field” is an example of the sort of reason you need in order to be justified in claiming that you seem to see a table. In other words, in order to be justified in believing that you see a table, you must have a visual experience of a certain sort. Therefore, experiential states can provide justification for belief by fulfilling this necessary role.