Tutorial #18. Philosophy of Mind: The Mind-Body Problem. "What is it like to be a bat?". Key Ideas

From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#4.1
By Robert Van Gulick

What it is like

Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous“what it is like” criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view.

Subjectivity is another notion sometimes equated with the qualitative or the phenomenal aspects of consciousness in the literature, but again there are good reason to recognize it, at least in some of its forms, as a distinct feature of consciousness — related to the qualitative and the phenomenal but different from each. In particular, the epistemic form of subjectivity concerns apparent limits on the knowability or even the understandability of various facts about conscious experience (Nagel 1974).

On Thomas Nagel's (1974) account, facts about what it is like to be a bat are subjective in the relevant sense because they can be fully understood only from the bat-type point of view. Only creatures capable of having or undergoing similar such experiences can understand their what-it's-likeness in the requisite empathetic sense. Facts about conscious experience can be best incompletely understood from an outside third person point of view, such as those associated with objective physical science.

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.