OGHoosier

I mean, I can't determine what is true using that method, as long as the requirements for "determine" are sufficiently stringent. I once read a book by a philosopher named Philip Wiebe, who is one of my favorite philosophers (though he unfortunately passed away a few years ago) and a significant influence in my own thought. The book was entitled Intuitive Knowing as Spiritual Experience. The thrust of the book is Wiebe's discussion of his own conversion to Christianity after several decades as an atheist philosopher (of epistemology, the study of what constitutes knowledge, no less), in conversation with a database maintained by the University of Wales containing 45 first-hand accounts of people having experiences which cause them to "know things they have no right to know." Wiebe goes into the question of reliability and finds similarly to what you have - the reliability of "intuitive knowing" as method is not readily demonstrable - but maintains that belief in the output of individual spiritual experiences or "intuitive knowing" is still justifiable because "spiritual experience" is a remarkably fuzzy category and is not really suitable for classification as a "method." I mean, we're fundamentally talking about a set of sensations here - it's really hard to rigorously categorize! I can't say that I consider anybody else's spiritual experiences as existing in the same category as mine because there's no way to really compare the phenomena - we both felt the experience was special in some way but that's basically the only boundary on the umbrella of "spiritual experience", which is way too wide to do serious comparisons. This leads me to the belief that each experience is (as Blake Ostler also argues) sui generis, and needs to be taken individually. If you want to run with spiritual experiences as method a little more, though... Almost any method can be impugned if you define it without clearly addressing its inputs, because virtually all methods of thought have produced erroneous outcomes, but we also accept beliefs from methods which produce contradictory results across society. For instance, take political and philosophical reasoning. There is a wide diversity of views which are not simply subjective - our faculties of reasoning, when applied to politics and philosophy, are oriented towards the truth, but diversity in conclusions remains! We confront these differences by disputing the inputs of the method - our data - but even that doesn't produce uniformity. Are we justified in holding those beliefs which we arrive at using our philosophical reasoning? How rigorous does an epistemological method have to be, how exclusive of error, before we hold beliefs based on it? In other words, I'd like to push on the bolded: Lessening one's confidence may be appropriate. But total dismissal seems a bridge too far to me. I don't think we have a very good account of the inputs of spiritual experience. It seems to be a very dynamic, even chaotic phenomenon that takes inputs from both the divine and human side. So long as that is the case, it's hard to pinpoint where the mistakes lie, if mistakes they in fact are. However, I don't think we should discount the phenomenon of spiritual experience because it misfires every now and again - all epistemologies are vulnerable to that to some degree. It really, honestly, depends on your tolerance for error and how worried you are about Type I errors (incorrectly believing something false) vs. Type II errors (incorrectly dismissing something true).