Mysticism and the Explanatory Mode of Inference

Abstract

Philosophers who doubt the cognitive value of mysticism will perhaps have felt a growing dissatisfaction with the handling of the issues in the previous chapter, and at this point may want to lodge a general protest against the approach taken in the present study. They might charge that the strength of the critic’s case has been seriously underestimated by blithely assuming (according to the all-too-aptly named “principle of credulity”) that there is a presumption in favor of the validity of contemplative awareness, and then proceeding to dismiss the standard objections to mysticism’s cognitive value because they do not conclusively disconfirm the veridicality of these experiences. For surely when the object of a experience is very strange or unusual, as the object of mystical states certainly is, then the assumption in favor of validity is substantially reduced, and the question of what others observe and what tests reveal becomes crucial. In this respect (they might argue), mystical experiences are more appropriately compared with Linus’s reported encounters with the Great Pumpkin (in the comic strip “Peanuts”) than with the perceptions of the wine-connoisseur or chicken-sexer.¹ Like the mystic, Linus has ways of explaining why others fail to have similar experiences (e.g., their pumpkin patches are not “sincere”); yet we would reject his alleged perceptions on the basis of considerations like those considered in the fifth chapter.