Is the Noetic Quality Evidence for the Reality of Mystical Experiences?

William James famously suggested that mystical experiences have a “noetic quality”, i.e., the mystic is unshakably certain that the experience revealed something about the nature of reality. Despite the massive metaphysical weight that it carries, this feature remains severely under-analyzed. This presentation aims to answer the following question: Is the noetic quality a valid reason for believing in the reality of mystical states? Two main strategies are explored: a “coherentist” approach – the noetic quality is valid evidence, insofar as it fits with the rest of the available evidence – and a “foundationalist” approach – the noetic quality should be taken as direct evidence, unless there are valid reasons not to. I will also consider the impact of the “problem of diversity” on our argument; that is, the fact that different altered states with a noetic quality seem to reveal different facts about reality to different people. My conclusion will be that an appeal to the noetic quality fails or is, at the very least, significantly limited in scope. Nevertheless, one can argue that mystical states are pragmatically real. I will close by sketching such a pragmatic interpretation, inspired by the work of George Santayana, according to which the noetic quality amounts to the acknowledgment of a fact of human existence. This fact is the following: experiences of self-transcendence that seem unmistakably real are available to human beings. In this sense, the noetic quality of mystical states is akin to the “noetic quality” involved in walking into a wall: it does not prove the reality of the wall per se; however, it forces us to acknowledge the presence of the wall – the fact that we cannot walk through it – as a fact of human existence that, as human beings, we have to deal with, independently of our epistemic frameworks.