Lena asked:

If we cannot depend on our experience to tell us what something really tastes like, what color it is, or
what it sounds like, what other way is there?

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It depends on how you construe experience. Kant made an important distinction between raw
sensory input — as in what happens when you first open your eyes in the morning before you
recognise anything — and when it seems to make sense to say 'I know what this tastes like' or 'I
recognise that colour'. I want to understand 'experience' in that latter way — in other words that our
every day experiences (perceptions, tastes etc) already have something conceptual attached to them
by which we come to makes sense of raw inputs.

There is one sense in which we are immediately acquainted with what things look and taste like — we
just see and taste them and they appear to us a certain way. In this sense experience is the only way
to taste things, see colours and hear sounds. The problem for empiricism comes when you start to
move from the subjective world and wonder whether the tastes and colours I taste and see in objects
are real properties of the objects in the sense that they 'belong' to the objects as I see and taste them.
What is the reality of colours and tastes beyondone's perception of them? Do you see colours as I
see them?

You can rack your brains as to whether there could be a perspectiveless account of the world where
things would appear as they really are, or what the world might look and taste like for other people. I
think it is those questions which cause the difficulty. You can wonder about how things are in
themselves, but once you free everything from some perspective or other, no more can be said. If I
crawled inside your head and looked out at what you see, things would appear to me as they appear
to me now. Perhaps this is where the argument stops.

The experience of tasting chocolate, seeing a blue thing, hearing a pattern of notes etc. is not the
whole story when you think about the actual nature of sound and colour etc. — their wavelengths and
measurable properties. We certainly cannot know about wavelengths etc. very readily from a simple
experience yet if you ask a physicist what sound really is and he will certainly tell you that it is some
kind of wave. So there is a possible way in which you can find out what sounds are really like, but it
doesn't really correspond to much you can identify with.

There are thus metaphysical issues (what is the independent reality of the things I sense) as well as
epistemological ones (how do I know that things I see resemble things as they are) which are not
readily answerable on empirical grounds. Experience doesn't tell you the answer.

You might however think that the senses are the best things you have to go on. After all, what else
can tell us what chocolate tastes like? This is a perfectly good intuition. The problem with empiricism
is slightly different however — try asking yourself whether you can point to anything in the chocolate
itself that is the taste, before you pop it in your mouth. A possible answer to this is that the chocolate
has the power to produce taste in us by virtue of its micro-structural parts and material constitution.
And you know what chocolate tastes like by knowing a language.

What about colour? Here are some options. A realist might say that when you say:

"X is red"

then this refers simply to the nature of X (I call this simple objectivism) — you see things as they are.
A Hume-type answer which points to the inadequacy of that response would be that X being 'red'
means whatever seems red to a normally sighted observer in normal light conditions (call this simple
subjectivism).

But I think we want to say more than this if we can. I like a view that David Wiggins names 'sensible
subjectivism'. One cannot say what is red without some reference to what seems red to a normal
observer in normal conditions, but we cannot say what seems red to a normal observer in normal
conditions without some reference to the red object. Just because it is wrong to try to capture
'redness' etc. entirely independently of us doesn't mean skeptical disaster in other words.

Adam Gatward