The sense that one is not quite ‘there’ is an odd one.
Towards the end of his life my father sometimes struggled badly with short term
memory, constantly losing things including, once, his walking stick somehow down
inside his own bed and generally losing track of actions that lasted longer than a
moment. (The fact that memory binds mere atoms together into rational forms was more and more apparent through a kind of all too poignant deficit study.) But also, sometimes, his normal common sense of what was epistemically
reasonable would go missing. This was confusing to others but hugely to him not least because it was occasional. Sometimes, despite all the dreadful, exhausting, miserable pressures of his last months, he was completely lucid and,
when lucid, found the very idea of his non-lucid periods baffling and
disturbing.
At the risk of the saying something like a Thought for
the Day platitude (“I was driving down the middle lane of the motorway today
and I thought to myself, Jesus is a little like the middle lane” [Sandi Toksvig, The News Quiz])
I am struck by an analogy to self knowledge of one’s status in
disjunctivism.
The basic picture of disjunctivism in epistemology (well, perceptually based knowledge) is this. A key argument for philosophical scepticism
starts from the idea that sometimes when one thinks one sees a cat, say, there
isn’t a cat but some suitable trick of the light. The ‘argument from illusion’
then runs: since illusion and veridical seeing is indistinguishable to the
subject, then even in the case of veridical seeing its truthfulness is, as far
as the subject goes, a matter of luck. She could, after all, be enjoying a
merely illusory seeming-seeing. Seeing and merely seeming-seeing share a common
element which is all that is directly available to the subject with a merely
external addition in the case of seeing that what is apparently seen - the cat
- turns out luckily to be there. So since knowledge and luck are incompatible,
one is never in a position to gain knowledge through normal cases of seeing (ie
ones where illusion is also possible).
Disjunctivism is based on the idea that there is
something quite different in the two cases. Either, one is seeing a cat. Or,
one is not. (Hence the name.) Further, the epistemic consequences of the bad disjunct, like Las
Vegas, stay in the bad disjunct. So if one is in the good disjunct one is in
the direct presence of the cat and hence there is no room for luck in the
perceptual knowledge this makes available. Of course, in the bad disjunct, one
will think one is in the good disjunct but since one is not, all bets are off.
Students reasonably object: but this doesn’t help knowledge
because one cannot tell whether one is in the good or the bad disjunct. As far
as one is concerned, one could be in either. But the steely nerved disjunctivist
patiently reminds them that what happens in the bad disjunct stays in the bad
disjunct. If the subject is in the good disjunct, then the very same perceptual sensitivity that
records the presence of the cat also makes the subject aware of how she knows
there is a cat: by seeing it. So not only is she in the good disjunct, she
knows that fact. Of course, the steely nerved disjunctivist continues softly,
had she been in the bad disjunct, she would have thought herself to be in the good and
also falsely thought that she knew she was in the good by the same perceptual faculty
that had already let her down. But what happens in the bad disjunct stays in
the bad disjunct.
I am reminded of this in the case of my coldy
disorientation. At the start of the week not only was I crassly stupid in
meetings but I had no insight into this (the mucous and the sneezing still being to come). Stuck in the bad disjunct, the self
awareness of the good disjunct was unavailable to me. Given, for me at least,
the close connection between trivial illnesses and marked affective responses,
being in the bad disjunct also prevented me from understanding quite why
the world seemed suddenly such a dreadful place. But at least with mere trivial and
hence in a sense ‘empirical’ illness (ie not fundamentally and forever putting the world beyond one), there is the possibility of a kind of
dawning realisation that one is not firing on all cylinders but that it will
pass. A blog post is a kind of reminder. What seems dreadful is the
possibility, later in life, of being permanently banished to the bad disjunct.
That was all rather a poor thought. But that is the point, really.
