Phenomenality Matters: Epistemic Progress through Complex and Empathically Simulated Experiences

• Applicant: Dr. Christiana Werner
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568267966

"When your child tells you they're hungry, and you can't provide anything, it’s the worst feeling in the world.” This is how the World Food Programme quotes a father of a starving child, highlighting the deep personal impact of experience. What it is like to be in a specific situation, i.e. its phenomenality, matters to us in many ways, as does the knowledge of what it is like ("WIL-knowledge"). Traditionally, phenomenal consciousness has been central to mind-body-debates; hence, WIL-knowledge has primarily been analysed in this metaphysical context. However, from an epistemological perspective, the question of how to characterize the epistemic progress achieved through experience is significant in its own right. The urgency of studying WIL-knowledge is underscored by its relevance to contemporary debates on transformative experiences, racism, sexism, oppression, and the philosophy of imagination and empathy. Philosophers in these contexts often rely on accounts developed within the mind-body debate, which typically define WIL-knowledge in terms of abilities or phenomenal concepts. However, the project hypothesizes that experiences of the kinds at issue raise serious challenges for these standard accounts: First, they focus primarily on simple experiences like colour perception. Complex experiences—such as experiences of parenthood, warfare, or oppression–seem significantly different. There has been scant research addressing the epistemic gap between those who have undergone such complex experiences and those who have not. Second, an epistemically optimistic view of empathy suggests that empathically simulating another’s experience can provide genuine WIL-knowledge. Since simulation is a form of imagination, this view implies that imagination can yield WIL-knowledge. This conflicts with the common assumption in the mind-body debates, that WIL-knowledge is only attainable through immediate, first-hand experience. However, no systematic analysis has explored whether WIL-knowledge gained through empathic simulation can be understood in the same way as first-hand experience. The project hypothesizes that an analysis of WIL-knowledge in terms of abilities is inadequate for both complex and simulated experiences. Moreover, there are also good reasons to doubt whether these cases can be analysed in terms of phenomenal concepts as modelled by existing accounts. Nevertheless, the project conjectures that phenomenal concepts have the requisite analytic potential if suitably modified. The project’s constructive goal is correspondingly to develop an account of WIL-knowledge based on a new model of complex phenomenal concepts, their acquisition and application, where the sources of such knowledge can be either complex first-hand experiences or empathic simulation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants