Empiricism and Experience [Paperback]

This book offers a novel account of the relationship of experience to knowledge. The account builds on the intuitive idea that our ordinary perceptual judgments are not autonomous, that an interdependence obtains between our view of the world and our perceptual judgments. Anil Gupta shows in this important study that this interdependence is the key to a satisfactory account of experience. He uses tools from logic and the philosophy of language to argue that his account of experience makes available an attractive and feasible empiricism.

How do our perceptual experiences serve as reasons for our beliefs about the world around us? Many philosophers have addressed this question, but Anil Gupta's profound, sophisticated, and imaginative new book raises the bar for all future discussion. It deserves to have an agenda-setting impact on the epistemology of perception. --Ram Neta, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Empiricism and Experiencedevelops an original, ambitious, and radical view of how experience, together with a background view, can justify perceptual beliefs. The theory is developed in a large-scale argument that is elaborated through the MS. The theory draws at crucial points on the author's (and Belnap's) theory of interdependent definitions. The issues addressed are absolutely fundamental issues in philosophy. The writing, as is to be expected from the author's previous contributions, is lucid, highly readable, and often witty. Many important insights, independent of the main argument, are developed along the way. The work also displays a broad historical perspective: it effectively locates the author's position in relation to classical empiricists, and to such twentieth-century figures as Davidson, Sellars and Quine. --Christopher Peacocke, Columbia University

The analytical apparatus [this book] develops is worked out in considerable detail and it is rich in engagements with key figures in the literature ilœ