The Empiricist Mind," The Human Life Review 25 (Spring 1999), 77.

He revels in the "unfair" advantage the empiricist inevitably enjoys over the theologian, who has to construct stuttering, after-the-fact explanations of the noumenal world, as William James (another of Dennett's Unglaubensgensossen) says in The Varieties of Religious Experience: "So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.

The underlying purpose is not to extrapolate broad generalizations or to formulate empiricist explanations of phenomena but to challenge existing assumptions, develop intimate familiarity with a specific issue, and, in this particular example, to gain insight into the experiences of first-generation college students as it is viewed from their own realities (Plummer, 2001).