Tutorial #17. Skepticism And "Proof of an External World". Discussion Questions

In Light of Moore's "proof of an external world", try to think at these questions:

• Is commonsense knowledge unrevisable?
• How does Moore know that he has hands?
• Is it relevant whether Moore can prove that he knows that he has two hands?
• From the premises: “Here is one hand”, and "Here is another," would you be justified to conclude that an external world exists?
• If you do know you have hands then do you know there are external things? Or, if you don’t know there are external things then do you know you have hands?
• Should Descartes be satisfied with Moore's proof?
• What is the logical form of Moore’s argument? What is a proof according to Moore?
• Do you know anything better than you have hands?
• Can you know that you have hands without already knowing that there is an external world?
• Do we have more or less reason to doubt that we know there’s an external world?
• What’s the strongest skeptical argument?
• What is the best way to respond to the problem of radical scepticism?

Tutorial #17. Skepticism And "Proof of an External World". G.E.Moore

G.E. Moore (1939). “Proof of an External World.” Proceedings of the British Academy 25.

Certain Keypoints in the argument:

1. According to Moore, to prove that he was holding up his hands would require him, as Descartes pointed out, to prove (not just know) that he isn’t dreaming, which Moore doesn’t think he can do.
2. Moore thinks you can know things you can’t prove.
3. It has been a common view among philosophers, however, that you can’t know things you can’t prove–you can only take them on faith.
4. A test to see if a conclusion is different from a premise (or, if two propositions are different) is to see if one could be true while the other false.
5. To say that something might be proven to exist (or be true) is to say that that thing might be certain to exist or be true.

Tutorial #17. Skepticism. G.E.Moore

"G.E. Moore (1873-1958) (who hated his first names, ‘George Edward’ and never used them — his wife called him ‘Bill’) was an important British philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century. He was one of the trinity of philosophers at Trinity College Cambridge (the others were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein) who made Cambridge one of centres of what we now call ‘analytical philosophy’. But his work embraced themes and concerns that reach well beyond any single philosophical programme."

* A good overview of his argument against the skeptic:
Common Sense and Certainty

By Tom Baldwin on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Tutorial #16. Epistemology: What is Knowledge? Gettier Problem. Discussion Questions

After having read Edmund Gettier, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, think about these questions.

• Do you think that Gettier cases are successful in showing that knowledge is not justified true belief? Try to come up with a counter-argument.
• What is the best way to respond to the Gettier problem?
• What conditions would you add to the definition that knowledge is justified true belief, to counter the Gettier cases?
• What’s the role of justification in knowledge? Consider different cases of knowledge (e.g. common sense knowledge, scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge, "artistic" knowledge)?
• What is the role of evidence and methodology in all these different cases?
• Would you claim that you are more justified to believe that carbon has a standard atomic weight of 12.0107(8) g·mol−1 than to believe that Inter Milan is a great football team?
• Do you think that by adding some kind of causal condition (that is, an appropriate causal relation between the belief that X, and X itself) would help?
• Do you think that the difference between true belief and knowledge involves things beyond our control (i.e. beyond your mental states)? Make examples.
• Were people in the xv century justified in believing that witches exist?
• Can we really say that we know that the universe is geocentric, until we have another truth (heliocentric) which destroys this view?
• What’s the role of intuition in the Gettier problems?
• How would you account for cross-cultural differences in the Gettier problem (see the post on Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001) experiment)?
• Would that mean that the appeal to intuition is not a sound philosophical methodology?
• Why should we care what the concept of knowledge is?

Tutorial # 16. Epistemology: What is Knowledge? Gettier:‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’

Edmund Gettier: "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" in Analysis, v. 23.

Available at http://www.ditext.com/gettier/gettier.html

Gettier presented two examples in that:

It is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false;

and that a deduction from believing something which is flawed also allows the conditions to be satisfied yet, them not really knowing

Smith and Jones

First counterexample by Gettier:

Smith has strong evidence for a conjunctive proposition:
(a) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith's evidence for (a) is that the president of the company told Smith that Jones would get the job. And Smith has also counted the coins in Jones' pocket.

From (a) Smith infers the following:
(b) the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith accepts (b) based on proposition (a). In this case Smith is justified in believing that (b) is true.

BUT...

Unknown to Smith, he himself, and not Jones, will get the job.

And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket.

Proposition (b)) is then true, though proposition (a), from which Smith inferred (b), is false.

In this example, then, all of the following are true:

(i) (b) is true,

(ii) Smith believes that (b) is true,

(iii) Smith is justified in believing that (b) is true.

But does Smith really know that (b) is true?

(b) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in (b) on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.

Some usueful resources:

• Gettier problems on The Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy
  http://www.iep.utm.edu/g/gettier.htm


• Jim Pryor on Gettier. A Nice Summary of the Argument
  http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/epist/notes/gettier.html

Tutorial # 16. Epistemology: What is Knowledge? A Test across cultures

Consider this case:

"Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years.Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car.He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car."

Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it?

From: Weinberg, J., Nichols, S. and Stich, S. 2001. “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions.” Philosophical Topics, 29, 429-460.

This case was proposed - see Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001), to a number of subjects both Western and from East Asia.

The striking finding is that a large majority of Ws give the standard answer in the philosophical literature, viz. “Only Believes.”

But amongst EAs this pattern is actually reversed!A majority of EAs say that Bob really knows.

Tutorial # 16. Epistemology: What is Knowledge? Classical Analysis

Traditionally, knowledge was defined as justified true belief.

A knows that X meant that:
- X is true;
- A believes that X;
- A is justified in believing that X.

There must be three conditions satisfied if person A is to know X.
Firstly, person A must believe that X is the case.
Secondly, X must be true; it must be the case that X is true.
Thirdly, person A must be justified in believing that X is the case.

Edmund Gettier saw a flaw in this argument of justified true belief. In his paper he presented two counterexamples to the classical theory of knowledge.
He argued that the three conditions were satisfied, but person A really did not know X. Therefore, if Gettier is right, the three conditions are not sufficient to define what knowledge is: Knowledge is not justified true belief.

Tutorial # 15. Descartes’ Meditations. In a Nutshell

HERE
You can find a very useful summary of the main arguments from Descartes' Meditations
by David Banach,

Department of Philosophy St. Anselm College

Tutorial # 15. Descartes’ Meditations VI: The Union of Mind and Body. Discussion Questions

After having read the Meditations II & VI - A Trilingual HTML Edition of Descartes' Meditations can be found HERE Edited by David B. Manley and Charles S. Taylor, think about these questions.

• Think about some example of mental and physical aspects of the world.
• Consider a situation where you are dancing, what are the mental aspects of this situation?What are the physical aspects? Are these aspects the very same thing? Or can you find any substantial difference?
• How does Descartes conceive of the essence of mind and body?
• What is a thinking thing? Is a computer a thinking thing? Is a virus a thinking thing? And a dog? What might be a sufficient condition for being a thinking thing?
• Descartes (Meditation ii) claims “I am the same being who perceives, that is, who apprehends certain objects as by the organs of sense, since, in truth, I see light, hear a noise, and feel heat.”. Now, what is this ‘I’? How our perceptions (of colors, noises, shapes, etc) are unified?
• Do we know better the properties of the mind, or the properties of the body?
• Consider the wax example (Meditation ii). In which sense does the wax remain the same after all the changes?
• If there were no minds to attend the wax, would the wax have a certain color, say white?
• According to Descartes, can a mind exist without a body?
• Imagine that your body were transformed into the body of a bee, do you think your mind would be the same?
• “I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity” (Meditation vi): What does this “certain unity” amount to?
• “When we stand in need of drink, there arises from this want a certain parchedness in the throat that moves its nerves, and by means of them the internal parts of the brain; and this movement affects the mind with the sensation of thirst, because there is nothing on that occasion which is more useful for us than to be made aware that we have need of drink for the preservation of our health.” What is the role of the mind here, and what is the role of the body?
• Can a non-physical mind be investigated scientifically?
• If mind and body are radically different types of stuff, how can they interact with each other?
• If all physical effect is fully caused by physical causes, then can the mind have a causal influence on anything physical?
• Does the mind affect the brain? Make examples.

Tutorial # 15. Descartes’ Meditations VI: The Union of Mind and Body. The Pineal Gland

René Descartes was a philosopher who believed that he had found the exact point in the brain where the body and soul meet. Rather unromantically, the structure he chose was the humble pineal gland.

Tutorial # 14 Descartes’ Meditations III, IV and V: The Existence of God. Discussion Questions

Try to think about\answer the questions below after having read and meditated:
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditations III, IV, and V)
A useful summary of Descartes' "Proof" for the existence of God is HERE
Another very useful resorce is the Descartes Ontological argument entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• What are Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God?
• His ontological argument is grounded in a theory of innate ideas and the doctrine of clear and distinct perception . But Is the idea of God innate? If so, how and why? Try and speculate (reasonably) about it.
• If not, would that make a difference with regard to the existence of God?
• How would you argue that the idea of God is clear and distinct?
• Is Descartes’ argument for the existence of God apriori (take a look at the post on apriori\aposteriori)?
• Is it logically valid? Or does the argument have a different form?
• What are the main differences between St Anselm’s and Descartes’ ontological arguments?
• Is Descartes’ God the God of the Bible (or of any reveled religion)?
• What is the role of God in Descartes’ philosophy?
• What attributes does Descartes’ God possess?
• If God is supremely good, would it follow that we cannot be deceived? In which sense?
• If God is supremely good, would it follow that God gave the same innate ideas to all minds?
• Think about Pascal’s critique: Why Does Pascal claim: “Descartes useless and uncertain”?
• Is Pascal’s target the logical validity of Descartes’ argument?

Tutorial # 14 Descartes’ Meditations III, IV and V: The Existence of God. Pascal's Critique

From 1670 PENSEES

by Blaise Pascal

SECTION II: THE MISERY OF MAN WITHOUT GOD

77. I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.
‑‑78. Descartes useless and uncertain.
‑‑79. Descartes. -- We must say summarily: "This is made by figure and motion," for it is true. But to say what these are, and to compose the machine, is ridiculous. For it is useless, uncertain, and painful. And were it true, we do not think all Philosophy is worth one hour of pain.

Tutorial # 14. Descartes’ Meditations III, IV and V: The Existence of God. On God's Perfections

On The Perfections Attributed to God...