Experiences of Absence that Get the World Right

Abstract The topic of absences and their ontological status has long been the focus of intense philosophical debate. Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of a related discussion concerning the phenomenon of experiencing absences. A lot of this discussion revolves around the question of whether such experiences are best construed as literal perceptions or as some other kind of mental state. Rather than try to settle that ongoing debate, I take as my starting point a claim that seems to be granted by virtually all of the participants in that debate, namely, that experiences of absence are capable of representing reality accurately and of misrepresenting reality. But if they can represent reality accurately, they can do so in a manner that is merely a lucky coincidence and they can do so in a way that is noncoincidental, and I offer reasons for thinking that the latter is more valuable than the former. The burden of this paper, then, is to try to offer an account of the conditions under which absence experiences can be noncoincidentally accurate representations of reality – something that only one other author in the current literature has thus far attempted. To begin with, Section 1 outlines various kinds of experiences of absence and singles out the kind that will be my focus throughout the rest of the paper. In Section 2, I survey the current debate over whether experiences of absence are best construed as perceptual or as something else, and I outline several assumptions I shall be making in the remainder of the paper. Section 3 motivates the project of trying to understand the conditions in which experiences of absence are noncoincidentally accurate, and Sections 4–5 develop an account of those conditions. Finally, in Section 6, I discuss the connections between experiences of absence and justifiedly believing and knowing that a given object is absent from a given location.