The politics and the metaphysics of experience
pp. 159-178
in: Charlotte Witt (ed), Feminist metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 2011Abstract
This chapter argues that the dilemmas that arise about the proper place of experience in knowledge are artefacts of a particular theory of mind and the contents of experience: what Alva Noë calls the "brain photoreceptor" model. By giving up this model, we can see that the critiques of experience that have been leveled by feminist theorists and allied anti-foundationalists lose some of their bite. I argue that a model of mind that assumes a fully embodied and active subject—as the brain photoreceptor model does not—does not run into the same conundrums about experience.
