Graeme's Philosophical ramblings about animals and the mind (+ rant)

Roll up! Roll up!
See the phantasmical "MIKE, THE HEADLESS CHICKEN"

Also, i was thinking about animals and morality earlier, recently in the news there was the story of a 4 year old boy who was killed by a dog, the dog was promptly killed. I find this to be pathetic, humans kill people all the time and have "human rights" but when an animal kills someone, even if it is an accident, you never know, the dog could have felt in danger from the child. When an animal, especially dogs, kill someone, the media makes a big deal of it and like i said, it is killed, the same is true of schizophrenics. When anyone other than a "normal" person kills, it is "OMG SHOCK HORROR, THE WORLD IS ENDING!", when a "normal" person kills someone its like, "oh hello how are you? would you like a biscuit?"

Thoughts?

(Rant over)

Descartes Assignment

Read the posts on 1. Clear and Distinct Ideas and the Cartesian Circle, 2. The Ontological Argument, and then write the following essay:

Assess the Ontological Argument and explain its significance in Descartes' philosophy.

You may choose to mention the Trademark Argument but don't linger on it. You may also mention the Cartesian Circle criticism, which is especially relevant if you are attacking the Ontological Argument by disagreeing with Descartes' account of rational knowledge (clear and distinct ideas). You can't really ignore the Kantian and Humean criticisms.

I would like you to build in some actual quotations from Meditation 5. Also do some research, eg using the on-line encyclopedias of philosophy.

Remember that you are assessing, or evaluating, the argument. You have to give a full account of the argument and of some of the main objections to it...but you must go a step further and assess the criticisms also. Don't automatically agree with criticisms. Reach a conclusion by weighing up the balance of how successful the arguments are on both sides. Think about your conclusion: remember that Descartes claims not only to have proved that God exists but that He exists necessarily.

Deadline: Tuesday 17th November.

The Ontological Argument

You need to read Meditation 5, especially section 7 onwards. Before we begin, remember why it is important for Descartes to prove the existence of God. He needs to be able to trust his clear and distinct ideas in order to show that he has knowledge of things other than his own existence. Only God can guarantee clear and distinct ideas because only God can trump the Evil Demon. Without God, Descartes could be the victim of the demon - even clear and distinct ideas could be tricks. But if Descartes can show that a supremely perfect being exists then he can be sure that he is not being deceived. God could not be a deceiver, so whatever innate ideas and clear and distinct ideas Descartes finds in his mind can be trusted (even if he still cannot fully trust his senses).

The Ontological Argument can be summarised as follows:

a) The idea of God is the idea of a supremely perfect being.
b) Existence is a perfection.
c) Therefore God must exist.

a) depends on the theory of innate ideas; b)and c) depend on the theory of clear and distinct ideas. The idea of God as a supremely perfect being is an innate idea - we are born with the capacity for thinking it. We can clearly and distinctly perceive that existence is built into the idea of a supremely perfect being.

Warning! Don't rush into thinking that Descartes is claiming that thinking of a supremely perfect being makes it true that God exists. Conceiving of a mountain doesn't make the mountain exist, and conceiving of God doesn't make God exist. The point is that just as you cannot conceive of the mountain without a valley, because they cannot occur separately, so you cannot conceive of a God that doesn't exist because God and existence cannot be separated. Descartes perceives this distinctly.

Ah ha! you exclaim - just because the idea of God cannot be separated from the idea of existence, that doesn't prove that God actually exists, that he is real. That's certainly true if you are an empiricist, but if, like Descartes, you believe that certain rational intuitions (ie clear and distinct ideas) can give you a priori truths about reality, then Descartes' argument might still work. So your final response to the Ontological Argument might well depend on your response to the claim that we can have a priori knowledge of reality.

But...aaargh! you scream...Descartes is clearly talking nonsense - anyone can conceive of God not existing. I know what God's attributes are supposed to be - I've got a clear conception of what He would be like if He existed, but he doesn't.

Descartes is not amused, nor impressed. He responds: All the attributes of God entail each other. Omnipotence entails omniscience, for example - only a being who knew everything could be able to do anything. Only a being who existed could be either omniscient or omnipotent. Also, in order to be omnipotent God must not depend on anything else or on anything else existing (including ourselves and our ideas of Him). He must exist Himself all the time, eternally. He cannot come into and go out of existence at any point. We cannot, without contradiction, conceive of a God who doesn't actually exist or who only existed contingently. This means that God exists necessarily (not contingently). He doesn't just happen to exist; he must exist.

Remembering how Thomas Aquinas objected to Anselm's version of the argument, you insist that Descartes' argument is about the concept of God being inseparable from the concept of existence: it doesn't say anything about reality. But, as I said before, that depends on whether you think certain kinds of thought (a priori rational intuitions or clear and distinct ideas) can give us knowledge of reality. If they can, then the concept of God could be one of those a priori intuitions: the thought reflects reality.

We'll come back to that later. Let's try Kant's "existence is not a property" argument. Kant says Descartes is wrong to classify existence as a property or a predicate - that is, as part of the description of God. Saying that God exists doesn't add anything to our understanding of what God is like. To use AJ Ayer's example, being white, having a horn, being horse-like are all properties of a unicorn, part of the description, but not existing is not part of the description. No existential statement is part of the description of an object. We have the description of a unicorn, now whether such a thing exists or doesn't is a different kind of claim: perhaps it does exist, perhaps it doesn't, but either way it is a purely factual question. It is a contingent fact that unicorns don't exist and, if God does exist, that is a contingent fact too. A synthetic rather than an analytic truth. This doesn't prove God's existence one way or another, but it does suggest that Descartes' argument doesn't prove God's existence is a logical necessity.

Hume, a little earlier than Kant, also denies that God's existence is a necessary truth. He argues that all truths are either synthetic (matters of fact, known empirically) or analytic (known by reason but only by virtue of the definitions). If God's existence were a necessary truth it would be analytic and the contrary ("God does not exist")would be self-evidently contradictory (as is "My bachelor friend is a married man"), but it isn't, anymore than "Unicorns exist" is contradictory. According to Hume, no existential statements are ever self-evidently contradictory, even if they are obviously untrue.

But Descartes would not accept Hume's starting point about all truths being either analytic a priori or synthetic a posteriori. Descartes could argue that not all rational intuitions are analytic - in other words there can be synthetic a priori truths. we can know things about reality by thought alone. In this case, "God does not exist" might not be self-contradictory, but it is incoherent. It cannot make sense, given our clear and distinct perception that the idea of God entails His existence.

So, as I suggested earlier, it all boils down to whether you can accept Descartes' rationalist theory of clear and distinct ideas giving us knowledge of reality.

The Wax Example

Descartes argues that he is a res cogitans, a thinking thing. He is a thing that "doubts, perceives, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, that imagines also, and which feels". Some of these attributes seem to link mental states to physical states, for example to our sense organs. Surely, to perceive something is to experience it through our senses? But Descartes insists that the essential features of perception are intellectual rather than sensual.

One purpose of the wax example is to demonstrate this point. Wax makes an excellent example because it connects with all the senses.

The wax has a certain colour, smell, taste. It is hard to the touch and makes a sound when tapped. But when it melts all these sensory properties change. The appearance, smell, taste, sound, and texture all change - and yet, Descartes says, he perceives it to be the same wax. This shows that the wax is not its sensory properties, for if it were its colour, taste, smell, etc. could not change without it being different wax. So when he thinks of the wax he is thinking of something that is extended (takes up space) and changeable.

It is not through imagination that he knows what it is, for he knows that it can go through more changes than he can imagine. If it's not through the senses, nor through imagination, that he perceives the wax, how does he do it? The answer is: through his understanding - ie intellectually. When he says he "sees" the wax (visually), what he is really doing is making an intellectual judgement.

He backs this up with the example of looking out of his window and seeing a man in the street below. What he actually sees from above is a hat and cloak moving along. But he makes a judgement that there is a man underneath (rather than a machine). He does not see the man visually; he makes an intellectual judgement that it is a man.

Notice that these examples are about how we know things. Although the wax example is sometimes seen as reinforcing the cogito argument, and the distinction between mind and matter, it is mainly about how we know things about the physical world. It makes a point about the nature of matter too, of course. The wax is not essentially its sensory properties; it is essentially those properties that are perceived intellectually.

This is not such an extraordinary idea - after all, nowadays we don't think that physical objects are really as we perceive then with our senses; we don't see protons and electrons, do we? But, on the other hand, we don't generally think of our recognition of objects as being an intellectual activity: we tend to think that we just see things, hear things, touch things, etc - in other words, that we know things through our senses. But surely Descartes is right. When we see things as something - eg a black shape as a cat - that is surely at least partly an intellectual judgement. Cats, of course, don't normally change all their sensory properties as we look at them, as the wax does. That's why the wax example is so well chosen, and why we wouldn't normally accept what Descartes says about true perception" (by which he means something close to recognition or identification) is an intellectual judgement. But if it true in the case of wax, it is perhaps true in the case of all perception. We intellectually judge or infer the presence of physical objects from their sensory properties, but the only physical properties we can judge objects really to have are extension and changeability.

So the first purpose of the wax example is to make a point about how we have knowledge of physical objects. The second purpose is to say something about what the essential properties of physical objects are.

Clear and Distinct Ideas. The Cartesian Circle.

Descartes is a rationalist. The cogito argument rests on an acceptance of an idea that is immediately present to his mind - not on experience or deduction (although this could be disputed). The thought that if he is thinking then he must exist is the first "clear and distinct idea". He intuits it directly, by pure thought. By "clear" Descartes means that the idea is open and present to the attending mind. By "distinct" he means that it is a precise, separated, sharply defined idea, not mixed up with other ideas or concepts.

The point is that at the time we rationally "perceive" the idea, its truth cannot be doubted. It is self-evident.

But what about when we are not attending to the idea, when we are not "perceiving" it directly? Does it cease to be true? What could make it true when we aren't thinking about it? Does its truth come and go?

One obvious response would be to say that memory makes it true. We remember that it is an idea we have previously perceived to be self-evidently true. But memories themselves can be confused, vague and inaccurate; and they are not demon-proof. So far there is only one demon-proof idea, for even if the demon is tricking Descartes about every other idea (and every memory), he cannot be tricking him about his existence.

So Descartes needs something other than memory that can establish enduring truths, truths that remain certain even when not be directly attended to. But having established that clear and distinct ideas are self-evidently true in the case of the cogito, he can now use them to establish the existence of God. Once he has established the existence of an omnibenevolent God he can be sure that God would not permit him to be systematically deceived. Some of his sense perceptions may be illusions, but his clear and distinct ideas, which are purely intellectual and not linked to the body, can surely be trusted. This means he can trust them to be true enduringly, even when not attended to.

The Cartesian Circle

This is a famous objection to Descartes' use of clear and distinct ideas. It is claimed that he argues in a circle, as follows:

1) I am certain that God exists because I am certain of whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive.
2) I am certain of what I clearly and distinctly perceive because I am certain God exists.

This would obviously be an unacceptable form of argument. But Descartes denied that he was arguing circularly. He said we can trust clear and distinct ideas without relying on God, but only at the time of the "perception". Once we have proved the existence of God (who by definition must endure when we are not perceiving his existence by pure thought), we can claim that we have enduring knowledge of him and his goodness, and that therefore we can trust our clear and distinct ideas not to be only temporarily true. Once we have proved even fleetingly the existence of God, we can be sure that we are not being systematically deceived by the demon - and therefore that what we clearly and distinctly perceive to be true is true enduringly, even when we are not attending directly to the idea.

Not everyone is satisfied by this response. You must decide whether you think Descartes'clear and distinct ideas theory, on which his whole philosophy depends, really does avoid the Cartesian Circle objection.

Cogito: The First Certainty

In Meditations II Descartes argues that even if the Evil Demon is deceiving him about everything else, it cannot be deceiving him about one thing - that he exists. As long as he is doubting everything, he is thinking, and as long as he is thinking, he must exist. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am; or: I am thinking, therefore I exist. If the demon tricked him into thinking he didn't really exist, he could reason his way out of the trickery, for if he is doubting his own existence, he is surely thinking. Something is thinking, and that which thinks is the "I".

Clearly, Descartes is making the assumption that thoughts require a subject to think them, something that isn't itself a thought but which in some sense is aware of the thoughts. Is he entitled to assume that thoughts require a thinker? If we think he isn't then his argument fails, for all he'd be left with is "There are thoughts". In any case, he does seem to be assuming that the subject of the thoughts is a continuing thing, subsisting from one thought to the next, and from one kind of mental process to the next (doubting, imagining, etc). He is not entitled to do this, for this could be an illusion created by the demon. But without this continuing "I", his argument looks much weaker: a fleeting "I" that exists only momentarily, as each separate thought occurs, would not be able to reason. It could not form the cogito argument, nor be the subject of clear and distinct ideas, for it would not be able to linger on them long enough to check they really are clear and distinct.

Perhaps you disagree with me, or have your own arguments against Descartes. Get posting!

The Method of Doubt and Its Purpose

Descartes begins by adopting the position of a global sceptic. He wants to doubt everything because he wants to get back to the foundations of all knowledge in order to build science up from principles that are absolutely certain. He needs to doubt all his previous beliefs because he suspects that some of them are false; if some are, all might be, and therefore all subsequent beliefs would by insecure. He thinks that knowledge has to be certain, indubitable. He sets the standards for knowledge very high - perhaps too high, certainly for everyday purposes, but he is interested in the foundations of scientific knowledge, so perhaps it is reasonable to set very high standards. However, he doesn't live up to those standards himself. Before long he is trusting any ideas that are "clear and distinct", which is not the same as ideas that are indubitable.

Also, Descartes seems to confuse certainty with conviction. Just because you have a strong conviction that a belief is true, it doesn't follow that it is certainly true. He thinks certainty can come from a kind of rational insight (clear and distinct ideas), but this is different from an idea being logically certain.

Descartes' doubt is universal. He is questioning all his beliefs, not individually but by questioning the principles they rest on. For example, any belief based on trusting perception is undermined by the first wave of doubt. It is hyperbolic: extreme, over-the-top, absurd (eg the Evil Demon) - but it has to be like this because it has to get into all the corners of his usual ways of thinking.He must not allow himself to slip back into his habitual attitudes.

First Wave: Doubting the Senses

In the past Descartes has been deceived by his senses. Distant things appear small, for example. However, such perceptual illusions don't undermine all perceptions, he says. They aren't usual (they wouldn't be illusions if they were), and they can often be explained. In fact, Descartes could perhaps have gone further. There are good reasons for doubting all our perceptions in so far as we cannot be sure that the actual world is as it appears to be to us (but this point concedes that there is an actual world distinct from our perceptions).

Second Wave: The Argument from Dreaming

Descartes is a man, so he sleeps and has dreams. Sometimes his dreams are ordinary, sometimes extraordinary. But "there are no conclusive signs by means of which one can distinguish clearly between being awake and being asleep". So, how can he be sure that what he takes to be the real world, when he is awake, isn't actually a dream? He could be dreaming that he is sitting by the fire in his dressing gown, holding a piece of paper.

One response to this is that genuine perception is more coherent than dreams are and that we can usually tell when we are awake and when dreaming; but of course we could simply be dreaming that we can tell the difference! Another response is that the concept of dreaming depends on the concept of real perception, just as the concept of fake money depends on there being genuine money. If everything was a dream, would we be able to talk about dreams and reality? Personally, I think we could, because we would be dreaming that there was a dream world (within the dream-reality) and a "real" world (also within the dream-reality), so I think we could still have versions of the two concepts. Also, Descartes doesn't really need to prove that everything is or could be a dream, only that we can't know when we are dreaming and when we are awake. It is the correct application of the concepts that he is sceptical about.

But dreaming doesn't undermine all Descartes' beliefs. Even in dreams a square has four sides, 2+3 = 5, etc. So he introduces his secret weapon.

The Third Wave: The Evil Demon

What if our minds were controlled by a powerful and malignant demon who wants to deceive us about everything? Then everything would be thrown into doubt. I couldn't be sure anything I experience or think is real. The demon controls all my experience, perceptions, thoughts. He could be deceiving me even about mathematics and geometry, and about apparent features of objects such as shape, location and extension.

So Descartes now doubts everything. But somehow he has to get out of this global scepticism in order to establish a firm foundation for knowledge, but how? He has dug himself a deep hole!At present he does not know a single thing.

Matrix

I have never seen the Matrix before (shock horror) but i am fairly sure this is a good example of what to expect - watch out for something in this video that Graeme shall surely be saying in a lesson soon...

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJDrpJhTycs

(having trouble with the link, so either click on post name or copy and paste link to browser)

Summer Holiday Task

A small task for you to do before the start of next term. Read Meditation 2 and makes sure you really understand the cogito argument. Then write a paragraph or a page about whether it is a good argument. Does it work? You could do some research to see what other people say about this. There's no doubt that at first sight it seems fine. But does it assume the very thing it is attempting to prove?

Feel free to comment or to add a post about this or any other topic. Enjoy your holiday. See you in the new school.

End of Term

I will be back in school on Monday (July 20th) and we will have a lesson - in fact, the last lesson of the year. Please be there. (Also Literature in the afternoon.) Please return your AS textbooks if you haven't already done so. Thanks.

Descartes: task (and Meditations 2)

This is work for you to do this week. We miss a lesson on Monday and two on Wednesday, when I am not in, so this is for you to have completed by Thursday, and we will discuss it in the lesson.

Task: Read Descartes' first Meditation in the post below and then write a summary of it, concentrating on the three waves of doubt and how they lead into each other.

Don't worry if you find this hard. You'll have plenty of chances to understand it thoroughly. But do your best with the summary. Of course, you could discuss this between yourselves and help each other by adding posts or comments.

In Meditation 2 Descartes escapes from the hyperbolic doubt he has talked himself into and establishes his first certainty - that he exists (the cogito). Clicking on the post title above will take you to Meditations 2 - in case you'd like to check it out.

Descartes

MEDITATION I.

OF THE THINGS OF WHICH WE MAY DOUBT.

1. SEVERAL years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences. But as this enterprise appeared to me to be one of great magnitude, I waited until I had attained an age so mature as to leave me no hope that at any stage of life more advanced I should be better able to execute my design. On this account, I have delayed so long that I should henceforth consider I was doing wrong were I still to consume in deliberation any of the time that now remains for action. To-day, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares [and am happily disturbed by no passions], and since I am in the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.[ L][ F]

2. But, to this end, it will not be necessary for me to show that the whole of these are false--a point, perhaps, which I shall never reach; but as even now my reason convinces me that I ought not the less carefully to withhold belief from what is not entirely certain and indubitable, than from what is manifestly false, it will be sufficient to justify the rejection of the whole if I shall find in each some ground for doubt. Nor for this purpose will it be necessary even to deal with each belief individually, which would be truly an endless labor; but, as the removal from below of the foundation necessarily involves the downfall of the whole edifice, I will at once approach the criticism of the principles on which all my former beliefs rested.[ L][ F]

3. All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.[ L][ F]

4. But it may be said, perhaps, that, although the senses occasionally mislead us respecting minute objects, and such as are so far removed from us as to be beyond the reach of close observation, there are yet many other of their informations (presentations), of the truth of which it is manifestly impossible to doubt; as for example, that I am in this place, seated by the fire, clothed in a winter dressing gown, that I hold in my hands this piece of paper, with other intimations of the same nature. But how could I deny that I possess these hands and this body, and withal escape being classed with persons in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapors as to cause them pertinaciously to assert that they are monarchs when they are in the greatest poverty; or clothed [in gold] and purple when destitute of any covering; or that their head is made of clay, their body of glass, or that they are gourds? I should certainly be not less insane than they, were I to regulate my procedure according to examples so extravagant.[ L][ F]

5. Though this be true, I must nevertheless here consider that I am a man, and that, consequently, I am in the habit of sleeping, and representing to myself in dreams those same things, or even sometimes others less probable, which the insane think are presented to them in their waking moments. How often have I dreamt that I was in these familiar circumstances, that I was dressed, and occupied this place by the fire, when I was lying undressed in bed? At the present moment, however, I certainly look upon this paper with eyes wide awake; the head which I now move is not asleep; I extend this hand consciously and with express purpose, and I perceive it; the occurrences in sleep are not so distinct as all this. But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.[ L][ F]

6. Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that all these particulars--namely, the opening of the eyes, the motion of the head, the forth- putting of the hands--are merely illusions; and even that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see. Nevertheless it must be admitted at least that the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities; and, therefore, that those general objects, at all events, namely, eyes, a head, hands, and an entire body, are not simply imaginary, but really existent. For, in truth, painters themselves, even when they study to represent sirens and satyrs by forms the most fantastic and extraordinary, cannot bestow upon them natures absolutely new, but can only make a certain medley of the members of different animals; or if they chance to imagine something so novel that nothing at all similar has ever been seen before, and such as is, therefore, purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is at least certain that the colors of which this is composed are real. And on the same principle, although these general objects, viz. [a body], eyes, a head, hands, and the like, be imaginary, we are nevertheless absolutely necessitated to admit the reality at least of some other objects still more simple and universal than these, of which, just as of certain real colors, all those images of things, whether true and real, or false and fantastic, that are found in our consciousness (cogitatio),are formed.[ L][ F]

7. To this class of objects seem to belong corporeal nature in general and its extension; the figure of extended things, their quantity or magnitude, and their number, as also the place in, and the time during, which they exist, and other things of the same sort.[ L][ F]

8. We will not, therefore, perhaps reason illegitimately if we conclude from this that Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, and all the other sciences that have for their end the consideration of composite objects, are indeed of a doubtful character; but that Arithmetic, Geometry, and the other sciences of the same class, which regard merely the simplest and most general objects, and scarcely inquire whether or not these are really existent, contain somewhat that is certain and indubitable: for whether I am awake or dreaming, it remains true that two and three make five, and that a square has but four sides; nor does it seem possible that truths so apparent can ever fall under a suspicion of falsity [or incertitude].[ L][ F]

9. Nevertheless, the belief that there is a God who is all powerful, and who created me, such as I am, has, for a long time, obtained steady possession of my mind. How, then, do I know that he has not arranged that there should be neither earth, nor sky, nor any extended thing, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor place, providing at the same time, however, for [the rise in me of the perceptions of all these objects, and] the persuasion that these do not exist otherwise than as I perceive them ? And further, as I sometimes think that others are in error respecting matters of which they believe themselves to possess a perfect knowledge, how do I know that I am not also deceived each time I add together two and three, or number the sides of a square, or form some judgment still more simple, if more simple indeed can be imagined? But perhaps Deity has not been willing that I should be thus deceived, for he is said to be supremely good. If, however, it were repugnant to the goodness of Deity to have created me subject to constant deception, it would seem likewise to be contrary to his goodness to allow me to be occasionally deceived; and yet it is clear that this is permitted.[ L][ F]

10. Some, indeed, might perhaps be found who would be disposed rather to deny the existence of a Being so powerful than to believe that there is nothing certain. But let us for the present refrain from opposing this opinion, and grant that all which is here said of a Deity is fabulous: nevertheless, in whatever way it be supposed that I reach the state in which I exist, whether by fate, or chance, or by an endless series of antecedents and consequents, or by any other means, it is clear (since to be deceived and to err is a certain defect ) that the probability of my being so imperfect as to be the constant victim of deception, will be increased exactly in proportion as the power possessed by the cause, to which they assign my origin, is lessened. To these reasonings I have assuredly nothing to reply, but am constrained at last to avow that there is nothing of all that I formerly believed to be true of which it is impossible to doubt, and that not through thoughtlessness or levity, but from cogent and maturely considered reasons; so that henceforward, if I desire to discover anything certain, I ought not the less carefully to refrain from assenting to those same opinions than to what might be shown to be manifestly false.[ L][ F]

11. But it is not sufficient to have made these observations; care must be taken likewise to keep them in remembrance. For those old and customary opinions perpetually recur-- long and familiar usage giving them the right of occupying my mind, even almost against my will, and subduing my belief; nor will I lose the habit of deferring to them and confiding in them so long as I shall consider them to be what in truth they are, viz, opinions to some extent doubtful, as I have already shown, but still highly probable, and such as it is much more reasonable to believe than deny. It is for this reason I am persuaded that I shall not be doing wrong, if, taking an opposite judgment of deliberate design, I become my own deceiver, by supposing, for a time, that all those opinions are entirely false and imaginary, until at length, having thus balanced my old by my new prejudices, my judgment shall no longer be turned aside by perverted usage from the path that may conduct to the perception of truth. For I am assured that, meanwhile, there will arise neither peril nor error from this course, and that I cannot for the present yield too much to distrust, since the end I now seek is not action but knowledge.[ L][ F]

12. I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [ suspend my judgment ], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice. But this undertaking is arduous, and a certain indolence insensibly leads me back to my ordinary course of life; and just as the captive, who, perchance, was enjoying in his dreams an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that it is but a vision, dreads awakening, and conspires with the agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged; so I, of my own accord, fall back into the train of my former beliefs, and fear to arouse myself from my slumber, lest the time of laborious wakefulness that would succeed this quiet rest, in place of bringing any light of day, should prove inadequate to dispel the darkness that will arise from the difficulties that have now been raised.

Exam Essay

Dear Students

In your exam essays please remember to select examples and to evaluate (criticise) as well as describe. For example, if you were asked to "assess hard determinism", you should spend a third of the essay describing what it is, then a third giving some examples that clarify what it is and its implications, then a third on a series of coherently linked criticisms - before reaching a conclusion that clearly answers the question. You cannot score very well if you don't evaluate the arguments. You can counter-counterargue the counterarguments, of course.

Good luck. I am in school on Monday if you want to ask anything.

Free Will Revision

Dear Students

Is anybody out there? I have added three posts to help you with Free Will and Determinism revision. Please ask questions, respond, or just grunt. Any sign of life would be welcome. Don't just read. You must make notes and put things in your own words.

Questions: Is free will compatible with determinism? What are the implications of Hard Determinism? What are the attractions and problems associated with Libertarianism?

Also, any feedback on the first exam would be welcome. I wasn't in last Friday and don't even know what the questions were.

Free Will: Implications

If we accept Hard Determinism we have to face up to some pretty serious implications. It could change the way we think about morality and personhood.

If the causes of our actions are beyond our free control, does this mean their consequences are not our responsibillity? And would this mean that we shouldn't be punished for them? Morality is about "oughts" and "shoulds", and determinism is about "coulds". We could not have acted differently, so we had no real choice. What we ought to have done, or should not have done, doesn't come into it. So is it part of Hard Determinism that morality as well as freedom is illusory? I don't blame a fallen branch for scratching my car, so why should I blame a youth who couldn't have acted other than how he did?

But we could argue that morality is compatible with determinism. We have been exposed to morality - it is part of the cultural influence on us - so it has gone into the complex mix of factors that determine our actions. Blaming and the threat of punishment are factors that our desires etc respond to and which become part of the causal process. We may resist an action as the result of a second-order desire not to want the pain of punishment or shame. This is supported by the point that we do distinguish between sane adults who restrain their basic desires and animals, children, the mentally ill, who may not. Mind you, this is not to say that punishment is actually fair, because determinism still means that ultimately your character has been formed by factors outside your control.(Although as Chris pointed out, fairness may not be a concept that we should be allowed to use if morality had been undermined by Hard Determinism.)

Even so, we may think that this unfairness is a price we have to pay for keeping society safe and orderly through our systems of morality, law and punishment. In other words, determinism forces on us a practical rather than moral justification for our social practices.

But do we want to explain morality away, as science explains magic away, so that we feel we don't need it anymore? Or do we want to insist that moral blame is ineliminable, too fundamental to get rid of? For example, would you like to see scientific defences extended in court cases to such an extent that people can be excused any crime they were "caused to commit" eg by drugs, alcohol, junk food, low self-esteem, genetic inheritance, poor upbringing, peer pressure, etc?

Would it not be dehumanising to lose the notion of holding peple responsible for their actions? Peter Strawson argues that if we can't hold people responsible for their actions, we can't think of them as objects of our "reactive attitudes" such as gratitude and resentment. You can't resent, or be grateful for, a mere mechanical reaction. To treat people as people rather than as medical cases or as machines means to respond to them with such attitudes. To treat everyone objectively, without personal feelings, would be to dehumanise them. Strawson goes so far as to argue that even if science showed that free will is an illusion, the concept of freedom or autonomy is so fundamental that we simply could not eliminate it. Proving Hard Determinism true would not change a thing. If it did, society would unravel, come apart. Do you agree with Strawson?

But it is not only morality that would be affected by Hard Determinism. It could be seen as undermining rationality too, by suggesting that actions should be explained or accounted for in terms of causes rather than reasons, intentions, purposes, etc. And moral responsibility is not the only kind. We are also considered to be responsible rationally, for our beliefs and reasoning. It is irresponsible, for example, to hold two beliefs which contradict each other.

Why are you reading this now? What kind of answer does that question expect? One in terms of the physical causes that led up to you reading this, or one in terms of your reasons? I don't care about the mechanical causes; I want to know about the rational motives. This explanation would refer to things in the future, your aims and ambitions, rather than past events. Causal explanations look backwards; they explain the how but not the why. We need to see people as rational beings, with the freedom to make considered choices, not as blind bundles of mechanical atoms.

Also, we need to see actions in a social context - in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" - or in the context of a particular "game", with specific rules and purposes. Exactly the same body movement becomes a different action in the context of a football game from what it is in the context of a fight, and therefore it needs a different explanation, one which connects with the context, the rules and purposes. This is a rational explanation rather than a causal one. A causal explanation would be missing something.

So we have two different stances on human actions/behaviour. The Intentional Stance sees us as persons with free will, as responsible for our actions, participating in various "games" for various purposes. The Mechanical Stance sees us a bodies, subject to the laws of nature, whose behaviour can be explained in terms of causes, scientifically. The question then is: Can the Intentional Stance be eliminated. Can we reduce all rational explanations to causal, scientific ones.

Of course, desires can be seen as both reasons and causes, but a cause has a law-like status. If A causes B, A will always cause B if the circumstances are the same. So we would have to show that a certain desire was always caused by a certain brain state and that it always had the same consequences when circumstances were precisely the same. If this were possible we might be able to see desires as both causes and reasons. Both could explain my behaviour in different ways without being in competition.

The Intentional Stance is one we are likely to adopt towards any very complex system with complex mechanisms and outputs - eg organisations, some animals, computers. Not just people. So that suggests it has a useful function even when genuine freedom is not really an issue.
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Free Will: Libertarianism and Compatibilism

There are two main challengers to Hard Determinism.

Libertarians include dualists who, like Descartes, believe the mind is a non-physical substance (spiritual) and is therfore not subject to laws of nature - it is essentially free.

The problem with this is how to account for the interaction of the physical body and the non-physical mind. If we want the mind to cause the body to behave in a particular way (eg pick up the pen), how does the mental message connect with the physical body? Through the brain? OK, but that doesn't help: the brain is still physical. Likewise, in reverse, how can bodily events (accidents) cause a mental event (pain)? Surely only two physical things or events can interact causally.

Also, there is plenty of evidence that mental events depend on the physical brain. If we damage our brains, we can lose certain mental abilities, even consciousness. Then there's the problem of God. Dualism claims the mind is non-physical, spiritiual, supernatural. This implies God, and God is omniscient, which means He must know what we are going to do in the future, which means it must already in some sense be determined, pre-destined. So there is a question mark over Dualism's ability to deliver genuine freedom.

Libertarians aren't all substance dualists, so the problems with Dualism don't affect all kinds of Libertarianism. But all kinds must put some constraints on our freedom to act, for two reasons. 1) We need to act consistently rather than totally randomly in order to have a unique character, personality, identity. 2) We need our actions to be determined, or at least influenced, by rational considerations - reasons for choosing A rather than B. You could argue that for any particular decision, there is always just one most rational option, so the more rational we are, the more we are determined (influenced) by the compulsions of rationality. Does this mean that very rational and intelligent people are in some ways less free than others?

One interesting attempt to produce a radically Libertarian philosophy was Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentionalism (1940s/50s). Our existence precedes our essence. Infact we have no essence, no essential characteristics. We choose our own natures. We are 100%responsible for our lives. We are nothingness, not confined or defined by human nature. But we suffer from "bad faith", the illusion that we are fixed, determined in various ways. We fear responsibility, we are made giddy by our freedom. Existensionalism, like all forms of Phenomenology, starts from the cogito (I think, therefore I am): what's most certain is that I exist, rather than that matter and the laws of nature exist. Our starting point should be our freedom, not physics.

The trouble with this is that most of us do feel that we have some kind of nature, some essence. When we introspect we find not only a sense of freedom but a sense of being a certain kind of person who makes decisions of certain kinds. Also, can we really ignore science and what it tells us about how we work, including our brains? If you have a brain disease, you don't go to an existentionalist.

One argument in favour of Libertarianism concerns gaps in causation. There is at least one gap in the causal chain - at the very beginning. If one, why not lots? Is the notion of uncaused events really so absurd? If not, why not free will?

Compatibilism is the other alternative to Hard Determinism. It is also known as Soft Determinism because it does not try to deny that our decisions are caused, but it claims that determinism and free will are compatible, they can co-exist. The basic idea is that for an action to be my action it has to have been caused by my desires or volitions. It is free in so far as it wasn't caused by anything outside me - I was not physically forced or constrained by another person or an outside force. I could have acted differently if my desires had been different, but they were my desires and so the action was my action, the result of my decision. My free choice, albeit one constrained by my desires, which were, of course, themselves connected to the causal chain. This accords with out common-sense notion of choice, and with our ideas about morality and moral responsibility. I must take responsible for the actions that were caused by my desires.

Problem is, what counts as constraint? Is being constrained by my desires, caused perhaps by factors of which I am unaware, really compatible with freedom? My actions derive from my desires which derive from my character which derives from my genes and upbringing, etc. Is that really freedom? It still doesn't really explain our choices - "explain" in the sense not of "accounting for" but in the sense of "justifying". We want rational explanations, not causal ones, based on our thinking not our bodily processes. A rational explanation would provide the right kind of constraint. We would do the same thing again because we would make the same rational choice again because it was the right choice in the first place. Being a rational person means not being wobbly in our decision-making, but also being free to make bad decisions too.

So it is not clear than Compatibilism gives us what we really want. We want a theory that can account for our sense that we can rationally over-ride our desires, etc. Harry Frankfurt has proposed a theory according to which our basic "first-order" desires (eg for a cigarette) can be controlled by our "second-order" desires (not to want to want a cigarette) - by our desires about our desires. We do not have to be wanton and give in to every passing whim. We can resist the doughnut! Frankfurt says this is what free will is. This is what you are: the controlling, censoring mechanism. This theory explains why you are willing to accept a degree of pain and boredom (revison?) in order to gratify your longer term higher-order desires and purposes. We can train ourselves to ignore desires that don't fit in with our higher order desires.

Trouble is, what makes these second-order desires more you than the first-order ones? Where do they come from? Are they not just as caused (genetics, culture) as the others? The theory makes it still a matter of luck whether you can resist temptation or not. It doesn't seem to help that much with the question of moral responsibility. If someone has limited second-order control over his or her basic desires, can s/he be blamed when s/he (dangerously) gratifies them? May be the theory helps to explain our psychology a little, but it doesn't solve the philosophical issues.

So, what are you? As a human - a machine or a person with autonomy, freedom? As a philosopher - a Hard Determinist, a Libertarian or a wishy-washy Soft Determinist? Me, I'm a marshmallow.

Free Will and Determinism: Introduction

What is freedom? Not in the political sense, but in the sense of our ability to make free decisions. Are we machines? Can we ever over-ride our programming? Our bodies, including our brains, work like everything else in nature by cause and effect. But is there, in humans at least, something beyond this which makes us genuinely free? In other words, do will have free will or are we physically determined?

Obviously the answer makes a real difference to how we view ourselves, what we think a person is, how we approach our futures. It also, of course, affects our attitude to morality. Should we hold people responsible for their behaviour? If not (because they have not freely chosen to behave as they did), should we punish them?

The white snooker ball hits the red snooker ball and they each go off in certain directions and stop. Repeat the event exactly and the same consequences will be repeated. Even a leaf twirling in a breeze isn't free. Its apparently random movements are actually the result of complex causes. But you, when you make a choice, is your choice causally determined? Of course, you may have good reasons for your choice - you prefer A to B, or you can't afford B - but we must be careful not to confuse reasons with causes. Reasons are rational, not physical. They can be ignored.

If you think all our actions are physically caused, either by physical events in our bodies of which we are unaware or by mental states, such as desires, which themselves have physical causes, then you are a (physical)determinist. There are other kinds of determinism - eg religious and logical - but we are interested in physical or causal determinism. This is a scientific concept. Everything in the universe obeys the laws of nature: everything that happens can be explained purely in terms of cause and effect. Each cause was itself caused. Every event is connected by a long chain of causes to...the first cause. Everything is completely predictable, or would be if we had perfect knowledge. Some things are unpredictable due to complexity - and that may include human behaviour - but in theory even we are part of the causal chain. So when we think we are making a free decision, we are deluded. This is the claim made by "hard" determinists. Whatever we think our reasons for decisions are, our volitions, intentions, purposes, etc., what is really happenening is that physical causal mechanisms (most immedidiately of course, in our brains and other body parts)are causing us to behave in certain ways.

In response to this we can question the nature of causation, as Hume did - he argued it was merely a question of our human habit of expecting one thing to follow another when we have seen that happen a few times. (We never see a physical event that we can say is the cause, only smaller and smaller events occurring under maginification.) Also, we can refer to quantum physics and the unpredictability of subatomic particles. But these points don't really affect hard determinism. After all, scientists are getting better and better at explaining and predicting human behaviour, discovering paterns, accounting for behavioural characteristics in terms of brain events; and there is some evidence (eg from Libet) that messages are sent out to our limbs by our brains before we have made a conscious decision to move them - this would suggest that our feeling of freedom is illusory.

On top of the neurological and other biological causes affecting our behaviour, there is evidence that culture also has a causal effect on us - ie our environment, upbringing, religion, etc. This is still to be counted as physical because it is about patterns of behaviour, dispositions, being created in the brain during our formative years. Culture contributes to our "hard-wiring".

So, if hard determinists are right, you are pretty much just a very complex machine. It means your AS level results are already inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. Even if you decide to work harder, that will only be because you are already predisposed to make the decision to work harder. Oh, well!

The best philosophy quote!

For something can be thought that cannot be thought not to exiat. Hence, if that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought can be thought not to exist, then that than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is not the same as that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought, which is absurd. Something-than-that-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought exists so truly then, than it cannot be even thought not to exist.

(Anselm)

Revision

If anyone wants a revision pack I can send you one via email as I have been creating one for each of the 3 subjects for the up-coming exam on Friday, I have done one on:

Persons

Reason + Experience

Ontological argument etc.

Just leave a comment and I shall c what I can do! =D

Revision

Dear Students

For Friday's exam, please revise Reason and Experience, Persons and the first God unit. I have some handouts that a few of you asked for. The Reason and Experience question is compulsory.

Please read the relevant sections of the textbook. Revise all the topics thoroughly. Remember there will be shorter Part A questions and longer (essay length) Part B questions, where examples and fully developed arguments are required. On the blog, below, you will find posts on Personal Identity, Introduction to Reason and Experience, Rationalism, Empiricism, Criticisms of Empiricism and, lastly, Conceptual Schemes. You may need to click on Older Posts to read the earlier ones. Read them carefully. Make notes from them and from the textbook and other sources. Make sure you understand. This subject is much less about knowledge (although you are expected to know things!) as about understanding and arguing rationally.

Ask me questions via the blog.

Good luck!

Conceptual Schemes

At the end of the eighteenth century (c 1770) the German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to combine rationalism with empiricism in what is known as Kant's Synthesis. He was dissatisfied with the attempt by both rationalism and empiricism to make our knowledge of the world conform to how objects in the world really are, with one arguing that we have knowledge of them through sense experience, the other through reason.

The problem is that in both cases we don't have direct experience of them. Kant's solution was to ditch that attempt and to see if he could connect objects to our minds by looking at the problem the other way round - by explaining how objects conform to our understanding. In other words, it's not the objects that cause the way we experience them; it is our minds that "create" the object as we experience it. The concepts he called "the categories of experience" impose a particular conceptual scheme on the raw data of sense experience. Without that conceptual scheme, we would not have self-conscious experience at all. There would be no "I" to know it was experiencing the world. The categories include space, time, causation. They do not derive from experience; they are a priori in that they come before experience, but they are not mental processes that we control, as maths and inferential reasoning are. We can only experience objects in space and time, but we don't actually experience space and time themselves: they are part of the structure of our experience. Without experience, there could be no awareness of them.

So Kant is neither an empiricist nor a rationalist. He argues against both sides. Hume had argued that knowledge was either synthetic a posteriori (factual knowledge from experience) or analytic a priori (true by definition, not factual), but Kant argued that knowledge can be synthetic a priori - that is, knowledge that is known independently of experience but which is not analytic, not trivial. "Every event has a cause" is an example. It is factual but it depends on the a priori categories organising experience in such a way that we experience events chronologically and as causally connected.You couldn't even form the concept of an event without the categories: it depends on us perceiving things in space and time.

Today we would more naturally think of the categories as brain mechanisms (as Chomsky does in relation to the Language Acquisition Device) but Kant thought of them as a priori rules of the understanding which somehow unify our experience, imposing an order and coherence on it. Otherwise, our raw sense experience would be chaotic, confused, incoherent. We wouldn't even be able to say it was our experience because we wouldn't have a sense of an enduring self without the concepts of time, space and causation. This order comes from our minds, so it is in this sense that objects "conform to our knowledge". [Look at the quotation from Kant on page 25 of the textbook.]

Notice two important points. Firstly, Kant is accounting for our experience being as it is (phenomenon). He does not claim to explain how things in the world really are in themselves (noumenon). So you might well think that he still leaves us cut off from reality. Secondly, some philosophers (including Bertrand Russell) have argued that if the categories are a contingent fact about how we happen to filter raw sense data in our minds, then there is no logical necessity in our knowledge of the world. It could have been different. In which case, do we have the kind of certainty that is usually considered necessary for science, maths and inferential reasoning?

Kant certainly did consider that his conceptual scheme, his categories, were essential for human experience. Without them to filter raw sense data, we would not have experience because there would be no selves to experience. My sense of self depends on my ability to differentiate myself from other people, and that depends on my knowledge of objects in the expternal world, outside of my own experience, which in turn depends on the categories filtering sense experience and imposing a particular order or schema on it. The conceptual scheme makes the concept of self possible.

So even if they are not logically necessary, the categories are supposed to be essential, fundamental to what it is to be a human or a person. But we can think about conceptual schemes in a very different way. Perhaps we all need to experience the world through concepts that organise our perceptions in particular ways, but could the conceptual scheme vary from person to person, or at least from culture to culture? Perhaps the way people in one time and place organise experience (the way they see things) can be different from the way people in a different time and place do. If so, we might still consider that Kant's categories are essential, operating at a deeper layer in our minds, perhaps, but the particular way our culture conceptualises the world could be overlaid on top of them.

Think, for example, of different ways in which different cultures might categorise animals or plants. We see certain four legged animals as dogs, despite their different sizes, shapes, habits, etc. But do we have to? Could a different culture organise their concepts differently and therefore see things differently? Surely, the answer is yes. We interpret the world, we don't just see it, and our culture imposes an interpretation on us to a large extent, through language and concepts. So our world - our way of seeing how things are in the world - is not universal. It is specific to our culture, or to our culture's conceptual scheme.

This means that on top of the Kantian conceptual scheme that is considered to be essential to our human nature, to our human experience, there are culture-specific conceptual schemes that affect the way we perceive things. Both kinds affect our view of reality and of truth.

But the idea of variable conceptual schemes opens up the possibility of truth and knowledge being relative to particular cultures. Unless...we can decide that one conceptual scheme is better than others, that one presents the world to us as it is, and the others are false. In that case, we can dismiss relativism and say truth is not relative, it is absolute, fixed, and Culture X has it.

Problem is, which culture is Culture X, the one with The Truth? Is it, for example, the culture of the Sioux Indians, of Kalahari hunter-gatherers, of the Taliban or of fundamentalist Christians from the American mid-west? No, I don't think so either. I think my culture, my way of seeing the world is more right than theirs is. On the whole, I trust science and rationality. I am biased in favour of what I know and understand.

It was just this kind of problem that Foundationalism wanted to avoid. If we could trace all our knowledge and ideas back to absolutely secure basic beliefs, we could then build up truths from there with confidence, as Descartes and Locke both intended. But neither rationalism nor empiricism has convinced us that they can provide firm foundations. A priori reasons and sense experience lead to problematic theories. Kant's categories look promising, but they are contingent on human nature and don't give us logical necessity or certainty. In any case, the cultural concepts can be considered to be in addition to Kant's conceptual scheme.

The main alternative to Foundationalism is Coherence Theory. This says that all we can aim for is that our beliefs are coherent, that they fit together and help us to interpret the world in a particular way and to make predictions. They are useful rather than absolutely true. As long as conceptual schemes work, do the job, we cannot choose between them. Our scientific web of beliefs is no better and no worse than any other. Some schemes could be criticised, perhaps, for being contradictory or over-complicated, but most long-established cultures will have traditional beliefs that are coherent and with their own kind of elegance or beauty. (One twentieth century philosopher who has argued for this is W V Quine.)

Personally, I am not convinced. I do not believe that all conceptual schemes that are coherent are as good as each other, for I don't think they really can all do what, on the whole, our broadly scientific and rational conceptual scheme can do. Ours has more predictive and explanatory power. It has allowed us to bring the world to the brink of disaster by developing technology...but (with necessary adjustments) it may allow us to go beyond existing technology and save the world from disaster. It is very open to change; it revises itself as new evidence and techniques become available. It does not get quite so bogged down in traditional belief as some cultures do. It allows us to change not only the minor beliefs at the edge of the web of beliefs but even occasionally important beliefs towards the centre. Also, as the world shrinks due to globalisation and electronic media, it the scientifc culture of the West (USA and Europe) that is spreading. It is hard not to conclude that this is simply because it is more likely to bring progress through knowledge and truth. (Although, of course, many would disagree, including fundamentalists of all kinds - but they still use the technology that Western thinking invented.)

Of course, that is not a reason for disregarding other conceptual schemes or cultures. We can respect them without accepting that they have an equal claim to truth as ours. Also, of course, there may be some aspects of them from which we can learn, ways in which we can recognise that they are wiser or clearer.

So I want to avoid relativism about conceptual schemes. Some beliefs simply are more true than others. But you must decide for yourself, and when you do you will inevitably be using ideas and concepts (reasons, truth, knowledge, justification, fairness, freedom, etc) which are concepts from our culture, with which we organise our understanding or interpretation of the world. It is hard to escape the conceptual scheme - the web of beliefs, the language, the concepts - our culture has given us.

Criticisms of Empiricism

1. Empiricists talk about forming compound ideas by combining simple ideas, but what is a simple idea? If "golden mountain" is a compound idea, what makes "mountain" a simple idea - is it too not a combination of ideas? Is the concept "horse" simple or compound? It is not a clear distinction.

2. Do you agree that all ideas could come from sense experience - not just from experience but from sense experience? Take moods such as joy and melancholy - do we really acquire those through our senses? Also, we have concepts of things that we believe exist but no-one has ever experienced (eg atoms; and we have abstract ideas (such as justice and freedom). How do they connect with sense impressions?

On the other hand, perhaps we do experience justice and freedom in some way. Perhaps we can trace them back to basic human needs and experience. Perhaps we can relate them to evolutionary developments. What do you think? Also, the example of people who are born blind and therefore lack certain ideas may be relevant: they do not seem to form certain concepts or ideas. How convincing is this point?

3. Do you agree that Hume's empriricism about meaning is dodgy? Language doesn't have to relate to sense experience to be meaningful, but that's what the twentienth century Logical Positivists (such as A J Ayer) argued (as well as Hume). They were extreme empiricists. They argued that "metaphysical" words, such as "God" and "soul" were meaningless because they did not connect with things that had been drectly experienced and therfore couldn't be verified. But we do have perfectly meaningful converations about such things. They are trying to restrict what we can talk about, but if we couldn't speculate about such things our lives would be devalued. Do we experience beauty directly? Self? Justice?

Part of the problem is that Hume thought of ideas as images in the mind (copies of impressions), but this is a naive account of ideas, as Wittgenstein showed in "Philosophical Investigations". An account of language that is based on meanings being private images or ideas in the head is fundamentally incoherent: meanings have to relate to what is shared. (Remember the beetles in a matchbox example.)

4. Empiricism, like Descartes' version of rationalism, cuts us off from the physical world, from reality - because we can only know it indirectly, via sense impressions. This means that we can't be certain about anything except our own private sensations, which makes our beliefs subjective, whereas we normally like to think that our knowledge claims (ie good quality beliefs) are objectively true.

Also, it leads us into solipsism - ie scepticism about the existence of other minds - and towards the Matrix/Brain-in-a-Vat scenario: how do we know this isn't all a dream/gigantic illusion/creation of a crazy scientist, etc? So, empiricism leads us towards the trap of scepticism and solipsism - the same trap that Descartes could only escape by relying on God not to be a deceiver, and which Berkeley also required God to save him from. But what if you don't believe in God? Can empiricism avoid scepticism about the external world and soliosism about other minds without invoking God? Hume didn't think so, which is why he gave up the search for rationally justified beliefs and focused on explaining why we believe what we believe, accounting for it by reference to human dispositions.

5. Another form of scepticism concerns our knowledge of the past and of the future. Can empiricism give us good reasons for trusting our memories, the main source of knowledge of the past? Can it justify our beliefs about the future? All our inductive reasoning about the future depends on things continuing as they have done previously - but can empiricism justify our faith in things continuing as they have done up to know. Perhaps the laws of nature will suddenly change. Can experience rule that out?

6. We can question the empiricist account of the relation between concepts and experience. Concepts depend on our forming general categories, but how can we know how to categorize our sense impressions. Sense impressions just arrive - they are pre-conceptual, immediate, "the Given" - but without some kind of conceptualization or categorization they would be simply a "blooming buzzing confusion" (as William James said). This is why Kant and others argued that it couldn't be true that all ideas derived from experience because we need some ideas or concepts to make any sense of sense impressions in the first place. So it might well be that what empiricists such as Locke took to be immediate and incorrigible sense experience, it actually experience which is already filtered through concepts that make sense of it, organise it, conceptualise it. In which case, experience isn't the incorrigible "Given" that empiricists take it to be: it is already the result of intellectual (cognitive) processes.

7. Of course, rationalists criticise empiricism for prioritising sense experience over a priori knowledge. Without inferential reasoning, for example, we would not be able to generalisze from particular experiential cases. If it is reason that makes categorisation or conceptualisation possible, then it is reason that makes self-conscious experience possible. So reason comes first and rationalists are right. But is it?

In the next post I will write about Kant and Conceptual Schemes.

Empiricism

We agreed (I think) that rationalists are right to argue that we cannot achieve certainty about knowledge unless we can generalize from particular cases (experience, observations, experiments) and form general principles or laws of nature. I think we could also agree that in order to do that we need to use the kinds of intellectual tools that rationalists say we have a priori knowledge of: maths, inferential reasoning, etc. But do we agree that we have knowledge of such tools innately or by intuition? Probably not.

Empiricists certainly argue that we can have knowledge only as a result of experience, and that includes knowledge of maths and inferential reasoning. They trace the foundations of all knowledge and all ideas back to the firm foundations (as they see it) of sense experience - that is, the basic, raw perceptions that reach our senses from the outside world. Hume called them "impressions". More recent philosophers have referred to "sense data". Whatever we call them, the point is that we cannot have any knowledge of the world except via our senses.

John Locke argued (against Descartes) that we are not born with any innate ideas; we arrive with "tabula rasa" minds - clean, blank, empty. The knowledge and ideas we acquire all come as a result of sense experience. Hume agreed with this, although he also thought that as humans we are born with a certain nature, dispositions, for example, to associate one idea with another, or to form habits of expectation, so that when we see item A we tend to expect item B. This was how he explained our inductive reasoning, causal explanations and our knowledge of the external world. "Hume's Fork" is his argument that all ideas and meanings can be traced back to impressions (sense experience). Ideas are faint copies of impressions. The impressions (sights, smells, sounds, etc) have impressed themselves, printed themselves, on our minds, and our memory of them is what we call "ideas", but of course we can combine ideas of basic impressions to create more complicated concepts and imaginary objects (eg golden mountain). As for analytic truths - Hume was dismissive: they cannot give us genuine knowledge of the world because they only recycle ideas we already have, being merely true by definition. All genuine factual knowledge (synthetic truths) derives from impressions, sense experience.

One major difference between Lock and Hume is that Locke believed our beliefs about the world were rationally justified, whereas Hume was more sceptical and thought they were only justified in so far as our natures (imaginations, habits, emotions) allow us to interpret the world in particular ways. He didn't think we could know what the external world was really like because we only ever see impressions, not the objects that (we assume) caused the impressions. Locke and Descartes were both Indirect Realists, believing that we could rationally infer the existence of the objects that cause our perceptions of them. The ordinary "common-sense" view is that we just see objects as they are. This is known as "Direct Realism", and Hume thought both the Direct and Indirect versions of Realism were equally shaky. So he was a kind of sceptic or anti-realist. He had been persuaded by Bishop Berkeley's arguments against Realism but he didn't follow him all the way to Idealism ("to be is to be perceived" - ie only perceptions actually exist) - partly because Hume couldn't believe in Berkeley's God, who ensures existence is continuous by perceiving everything! So Locke, Berkeley and Hume are all empiricists, because they all believe that we acquire knowledge from sense experience (a posteriori) not before it (a priori), but they represent different kinds of empiricism.

Next we will look at some criticisms of empiricism.

Rationalism

Rationalism claims that our knowledge of the world rests on firm foundations derived from ideas that we know a priori, before experience. We have ideas or knowledge that are not merely kinds of "knowing how" (such as knowing how to suckle) but can be used in propositional knowledge - factual knowledge or "knowing that...". So, not mere instincts. Innate knowledge or innate ideas are ideas or facts we are born with, even if they require experience to realise their potential, to make us aware of them. Claims are made for the idea of God, of maths and inferential reasoning, for morality and beauty. A famous example of a rationalist's claim about innate ideas is Descartes' Trademark Argument for the existence of God: we find in ourselves the idea of a perfect being, only a perfect being could have placed that idea in our minds from birth, therefore the perfect being must exist.

Intuitions are ideas or facts that are simply self-evident - "clear and distinct ideas", Descartes called them. We grasp them by pure thought or introspection. Descartes thought that we grasp the real nature of objects in this way: not their secondary, perceptual features but their underlying measurable features (extension - mass, etc.) G E Moore, a twentienth century moral philosopher, thought the rules of morality were grasped intuitively, not by experience - they are simply self-evident.

Another kind of a priori knowledge is analytic knowledge. That is knowledge of the identity or sameness of two different ways of putting things. Analytic propositions are true by definition. So, for example, "Torture is cruel" might be considered analytic (rather than synthetic) because it is true by definition: it is built into the concept of torture that it is cruel. A lot of philosophy is about analysing concepts in this way.

In general, rationalists argue that a priori truths are necessarily true. They are not contingent on how the world happens to be: they simply have to be true, the world could not be otherwise. Empiricists claim the opposite: the only necessarily true propositions are analytic ones and they don't give us any new information about the world; they simply repeat the same thing in different terms.

Rationalists claim that it is by pure rational thought that we are able to generalize from particular instances (experiences, observations, experiments) to reach necessarily true laws of nature. We do this by maths and by ampliative inductive inference.

Criticisms of rationalism. Research these for yourself, but make sure you consider the innate, intuition and analytic points separately. Are there really any ideas or facts that are innate in every human being? God? Morality? Maths? Reasoning? Do all hmans really find the rules of morality self-evident, or grasp the underlying nature of physical objects? Is Hume right when he argues that analytic truths are not facts about the world; they are only definitions - analysing the necessary conditions for using a particular term or concept?

On the other hand, is it not true that we do need to generalise from particular instances? Repeating experiences or observations does not gives us knowledge of general principles or laws of nature> For that we need maths, logic, rules of inference (such as non-contradiction). So you might agree with rationalists to some extent - at least, that experience alone cannot give us useful, practical or scientific knowledge.

Funny innate

I thought we could do with a laugh, but it is to do with innate ideas and stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLPyPJTwEC4&feature=related

watch from about 6:50

God and evolution, the meaning of life

The Meaning of life

I am thinking that humans as a species are only a link in a chain - at the end of the chain will be the ultimate knowledge of the 'meaning', but in order to get to that stage we need to evolve, evolve to something greater than human.

When the meaning is finally found by one thing, this ultimate meaning will give that thing ultimate knowledge, with knowledge comes power and with power brings the ability to be good, so basically a new 'God' shall be created....this is the only explanation i can give to how the God that is here now exists.

Once the new God is created, the old God (the one present) will die, however - its not really a death as the new being that is God will have all the same powers that God has so surely can be called God?

We say that shakespear lives forever due to his stories....he’s not physically living....can this not be the same with God...the powers stay the same, the being changes?

Reason and Experience: Introduction

Where does our knowledge come from? How do we acquire it? Epistemologists argue about what knowledge is – ie what its necessary conditions are. Is it, for example justified true belief? What properties must a mere belief have before we can count it as knowledge?

Epistemologists also argue about whether knowledge is a unitary concept: is knowing that Obama is the US president the same kind of thing as knowing how to swim or knowing your neighbour (knowledge by acquaintance)? But the arguments we are concerned with are about the sources of knowledge.

No doubt a great deal of what you know has come from other people (friends, parents, teachers) telling you things – ie testimony. Some people think they know things as a result of revelation – it has been revealed to them by a vision, or voices or a miracle. We might argue that our own memories can be a source of knowledge for us. But the main arguments traditionally have revolved around the claims that rationalists have made for reason as the primary source of knowledge, and the claims made by empiricists for experience as the only true source of knowledge.

On the whole, empiricists argue that none of our ideas come from reason alone, whereas rationalists argue that some do. Rationalists concede that much of our knowledge depends on sensory experience, but insist that the true foundations rest on what we know by reason alone.

Rationalism argues that we can know things by reason alone: thinking can give us truths without help from our senses. The truths of maths and logic are often used as examples. A solitary thinker sitting in front of his fire, with a candle burning by his side – Descartes’ meditator – can discover certain truths in his own mind. His senses may deceive him, he may be the victim of the tricks of an evil spirit, but certain clear and distinct ideas or intuitions can give him certain knowledge. In this way Descartes’ meditator achieved certain knowledge of his own existence and of the existence of God (the cogito argument and the ontological argument). He also discovered in himself innate knowledge of God(the trademark argument). He was then able to use such certainties as foundations on which to build a secure body of knowledge – the existence of the external world, science, etc.

So the twin claims of rationalism are that we can have knowledge without help from the senses (a priori knowledge) and we have a certain stock of innate knowledge or innate ideas (eg God, morality, rules of reasoning). These are separate claims and it is important not to confuse them. We could reject one without necessarily having to reject the other.

Two separate claims can be differentiated in the a priori claim: firstly, that substantive knowledge (facts) can be achieved by pure thought or intuition, and, secondly, that analytic truths can be known without sensory input – they are true by definition. Again, we could reject one without having to reject the other.

Both traditions, rationalism and empiricism, have generally (until the twentieth century) been forms of foundationalism. This is the idea that we justify our beliefs or claims to knowledge by connecting them to chains of reasoning going all the way back to basic foundational beliefs, the ones you can’t go beyond. For empiricists the basic foundation of all knowledge is sense experience – the raw sense data that comes into our mind from the outside world via our five senses. This is the Given; it is immediate, incorrigible, present. Rationalists argue that we can’t trust our senses: they can deceive us, so they cannot provide secure foundations for our judgements; absolutely certain knowledge can rest only on what we discover in our minds by pure thought.

One of the problems for empiricists is to explain how propositional knowledge (knowledge that p) can be built on perceptual experience, which is knowledge by acquaintance. But then rationalists have to explain how it is that we can discover propositional knowledge already in our minds. How did it get there? The problem for both traditions is to explain how something that is subjective and private (sense experience or thoughts) can be the foundation of something that is essentially public and shareable – knowledge.

At the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and empiricism through his idea of an innate conceptual scheme, and in the twentieth century philosophers have questioned foundationalism and the possibility of founding knowledge on private experiences. Various versions of coherentism argue that beliefs are only ever justified by other beliefs: what you belief is justified and rational when it fits into your existing web of beliefs. There are no foundations. This opens the way to relativism about truth and knowledge.

The starting point for all modern philosophy is Descartes’ cogito ergo sum argument in Meditations. It was published in the 1640s at the dawn of the new age of experimental science, which combined observation and experiment with mathematical reasoning – in other words, it combined the empirical with the rational. Particular empirical observations needed to be generalised into theorems, principles and laws of nature. Descartes and others considered that you need the empirical data but you also need to interpret the data in the light of the general, universalisable truths that rational methodologies have discovered. Observation gives us data but reason gives us understanding. So the philosophical debates about reason and experience have real significance for science, for how we interpret the world to ourselves. Empiricists and rationalists have to achieve generalised truths or laws of nature in different ways.

Another key moment was when John Locke, towards the end of the senventeenth century, rejected innate ideas and argued that we are born without any ideas or knowledge- the tabula rasa argument. So, what are the key arguments for and against innate ideas?

Survival

Derek Parfit (Oxford) has argued that it is not personal identity that matters to us. Why should we care if what survives of us is or isn't the selfsame person as previously? (The police and the insurance company and the Inland Revenue might care, of course). So what do you want to survive of your present self 1) into old age, 2) after death?

Parfit's point is partly that something of us can survive - not enough to satisfy your interest in immortality, perhaps, but something, for a time. Not even in your own continuous consciousness, perhaps, but in the thoughts and memories of others. "What will survive of us is love", Philip Larkin said in a lovely poem ("An Arundel Tomb"). Not just love, though: also, the way we may have affected the world, influenced others, etc.

Would this be better than nothing? What would you prefer: that you survive your death as a disembodied consciousness or that tangible effects on the world or on other people continue without you?

NB Get ready to revise Reason and Experience.

Mars Teletransporter Thought Experiment

You're in a hurry, so you take the quick route to Mars. You enter the cubicle on Earth and every cell of your body is (somehow) recorded and the information transmitted instantly to Mars, where the cells are replicated. The original cells on Earth (ie your body) are annihilated. A qualititively identical thing steps out of the cubicle on Mars. Is there numerical (quantitative) identity between the you that entered the cublicle on Earth and the one that steps out of the cubicle on Mars? Is it you?

Because all the cells of your body have been replicated, including brain cells, the assumption is that the new body will have all the thoughts, memories, etc of the old one. There is psychological continuity.

What are your intuitions about this? What can a thought experiment like this really show or prove? Would your intutions be different if the original body were simply replicated, but not annililated, so there is now one "You" on Mars and the original still on Earth? Perhaps one could have a conversation with the other.

Would your intuitions be different if what your thoughts, memories, etc were replicated in on Mars wasn't physically identical (qualititively) to your body - if it were more obviously a machine, if the medium were different but the content the same?

Itunes

I was just looking on iTunes and found the iTunes U section in the menu, if you go on this there appear to be many different video's on philosophy for free, the on that I have found is from the Missouri State University and is called PHI: Introduction to Philosophy - Lecture videos.

Just in this selection is some video's on empiricism and Dualism as well as other's, i'm sure there are many more to find,

hope this may be of some help and hope everyone's having a easter,

Matt

Fun Logical Mathematics

Here is something some one sent me that is indisputable mathematical logic :D:D

Caution:

This is a strictly mathematical viewpoint.

What make 100%? What does it mean to give MORE then 100%?

Here is a little mathematical formula that may answer these questions:

If:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Then:

H A R D W O R K

8 + 1 + 18 + 4 + 23 + 15 + 18 + 11 = 98%

K N O W L E D G E

11 + 14 + 15 + 23 + 12 + 5 +4 +7 +5 = 96%

A T T I T U D E

1 + 20 + 20 + 9 +20 + 21 + 4 + 5 = 100%

B U L L S H I T

2 + 21 + 12 + 12 + 19 + 8 + 9 + 20 = 103%

A S S K I S S I N G

1 + 19 + 19 + 11 + 9 + 19 + 19 + 9 + 14 + 7 = 118%!

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty, that while Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and attitude will get you there.

Its Bullshit and Ass Kissing that will put you in over the top.

Hope you enjoyed :)

Determinism Essay

Right i started this a few hours ago, it is quit difficult etc.

so lets help each other?

I can't be the only one surly?

How are you planning on righting it? Do you even plan it?

Free Will?

I was just thinking.

Free will, can it be applied to love?

These days people tend to have many relationships before they find 'the one' a lot of those will be choices from free will.

But when you do fall in love (your you think you have) surly that is against all free will and it just happens?

You can not help who you fall for.

It was just a small thought running through my mind at work thought i would post it and see what you thought of it.

Philosophyish

Earlier today in philosophy, some of you were saying that you wanted my iphone info, so the number is 07762794706. And my email on my iphone is graeme.franklin@yahoo.co.uk.

if you also put down your emails and phone numbers then we can more easily contact each other for things e.g. philosophy, because we aren't always at a computer able to use the blog, eh?

Do you approve Mr Nutbrown?