Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 12:35 pm Post subject: Tentative return to posting philosophical piffle
It’s been a long time since I found time and interest to post much on Connect, or anything at all not about disability.
I occasionally look at The Stone on the NYT, an online column about philosophy. Here are two opening paragraphs that caught my eye this morning:
Quote:
Almost every article that appears in The Stone provokes some comments from readers challenging the very idea that philosophy has anything relevant to say to non-philosophers. There are, in particular, complaints that philosophy is an irrelevant “ivory-tower” exercise, useless to any except those interested in logic-chopping for its own sake.
There is an important conception of philosophy that falls to this criticism. Associated especially with earlier modern philosophers, particularly René Descartes, this conception sees philosophy as the essential foundation of the beliefs that guide our everyday life. For example, I act as though there is a material world and other people who experience it as I do. But how do I know that any of this is true? Couldn’t I just be dreaming of a world outside my thoughts? And, since (at best) I see only other human bodies, what reason do I have to think that there are any minds connected to those bodies? To answer these questions, it would seem that I need rigorous philosophical arguments for my existence and the existence of other thinking humans.
Here are four tentative responses. I present this somewhat tongue in cheek, disclaiming any full commitment:
1. We’ve never solved what’s sometimes called “the riddle of induction.” The riddle is one of circularity: the only evidence that inductive reasoning works is inductive—that it always has in the past. Our inability to come up with “rigorous philosophical arguments” in favor of inductive reasoning hasn’t kept us from making inductive reasoning a central aspect of our existence.
2. Hume stretched this to all causation. Why does A cause B? We have no sense impression of causation: we cannot see, hear, or feel it. In Hume’s language it’s “custom and habit” that brings us to rely on causation. It helps, of course, that just like for induction, relying on causation without waiting for a rigorous argument for it turns out to be quite successful.
3. G. E. Moore brought this back to the particular issue The Stone raised. He wrote in ‘Proof of an External World” that demonstration of the existence of externals could be achieved this way: "By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another.’ “
4. Moore wrote something called “A Defense of Common Sense.” I will leave a linguistic analysis of just what “common sense” means to others, or at least to another post. But there’s a related entry in Simon Blackburn’s Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy for “naïve realism.” Blackburn presents this as “the view that in sense-experience we directly perceive the objects of the external world . . . .” The killer comes in the opening clauses of the next sentence, that naïve realism is “[t]he view [that] is the natural view of people everywhere, and of philosophers when they are off duty . . . .”
Is this all BS? Ah, well now that’s another question. In On Bullshit Harry Frankfurt offered a distinction that might be relevant, between bullshit and bull sessions. The second describes a discussion during which the participants can try out ideas without having any commitment to them.
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