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0:00
That way, this is because this is an opportunity for me to talk about a number of different things that come together in a book that I have that's coming out I hope this summer. It's only one part of it but it's a really I think really interesting part of it. And the book is called Learning from our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World
0:23
and in that book I know for example Paul was at a lecture I gave on the in January. I'm going to start off with the same warnings that I did with that one, but then I'm going to take off in a somewhat different direction and at the end I'll maybe come back and just say a few things about the book. But, for today I want to actually talk about topics that all of us here are philosophy teachers and we all have, I believe most of us anyway, have some somewhat
0:57
similar training. And I want to talk about how that training actually has
1:10
given us certain kinds of presuppositions in epistemology that I think are deeply mistaken and that have actually led to
1:23
a really kind of very interesting phenomenon, very interesting contrast. I actually work in every area having to do with normativity but my main areas are moral and political philosophy, and epistemology. And here what I do in the book is, I'm going to use the history of epistemology to look for clues. But there's one big clue that I want to start out with the clue of why did epistemology go wrong? How did it go wrong?
1:56
And the big clue is when I'm working in political moral and political philosophy
2:05
in the western tradition feel as though well, you know there are lots of missteps in any tradition, but overall it's a really positive tradition. It's really contributed to all sorts of important ideas and views that really make a difference, you know And you can go and you can be proud of John Locke's social contract theory, you know, and you can be, you can I mean and also even Rousseau
2:31
Rousseau it has really a beautiful theory. And you can see wow, of course the French revolution ended up as a disaster but still to have had the ideas fundamental to the French revolution. Just as I think Locke had many of the ideas fundamental to the American revolution. Wow, that's philosophy actually making a difference in the world, you know. And there's a difference for good.
2:57
And so when, and so then and you know, when I look as again in political philosophy, if you ask me
3:03
what was the most important idea in philosophy completely in philosophy in the 20th century? I think it was what I call the Harsanyi Rawls original position. Rawls developed it later but Harsanyi was the first one to develop it. And it's a fascinating thought experiment, shows exactly to me the power of philosophy. One thought experiment, that can be taken, now of course both of them were using it to try to come up with sort of the fundamental principles of justice. Well
3:33
good luck with that. I don't think it's really that useful for that, but it's great for just analyzing all sorts of different kinds of real world situations like you know, I mean you know even from the original position, you know. Could you justify slavery in the original position? Well now here's the thing, there's no thought experiment or anything else that will turn people into
3:59
moral people. And so if you were, you know, a committed slave owner, I'm sure you know if i'd gone back you know before the civil war and said, 'well let's go behind the veil of ignorance would you endorse slavery by.' I'm sure they would have, in other words I'm not claiming that it solves all problems. But I'm thinking it's a really powerful way of thinking and then if it's approached in the
4:23
right way it's really powerful. Okay so and so then and then I say, now let's go and take a look at the history of western epistemology. And you go out and you say, man think of all the contributions that have been made in moral political philosophy. I mean I only mentioned a few there's so many. And then you say, okay how about western epistemology, where are the contributions that western epistemology. And now I know that you're all philosophy teachers and you're going
4:50
to say well, there are lots of ways in which philosophical thinking and so on, but I'm just still say, I'm going to do on really simple-minded things, like okay well how about climate change?
5:03
Has western epistemology helped us to understand
5:08
the the conflict between those who believe in climate change and the climate change denialists.
5:16
And you immediately think oh and I'm going to talk more about David Hume today.
5:21
Well, David Hume said, basically we can have no rational beliefs about the future at all, none. And so David Hume is provides as much support to the climate change denialist as to the advocate of climate change, and that's an easy one. I mean that's a no-brainer.
5:43
Okay I'm going to say some more about other things later but to me
5:48
what that indicates is for all I mean these are really smart guys and I'm going to now start sharing my screen, and they're very I mean, they're very, and yet somehow or other all these smart guys have somehow gotten engaged in an enterprise which has taken us nowhere. Except to go further and further like depths of skepticism, or the other things that I'll talk about shortly.
6:18
Why is that why when I look out at moral and political philosophy, do I see a flowering garden? And why when I look out at epistemology now I'm looking at it not as well, it's really intricate but just in terms of think of all these real world issues, I mean now with you know with alt facts and so on. You see that's why I include western epistemology I'm just not going to talk about American I mean think of all the different varieties of you know structuralism
6:52
post-structuralism, deconstructionism and so many of them deny there's even any truth,
7:00
no truth. So in other words forget, we we're not, you can know this philosophy is not going to help you with climate change. There's not even any truth.
7:13
Okay so now anyway, I said I was going to share my screen but I can't talk and share my screen at the same time so give me just a second here to
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okay, so here ,this is where we are on February 19th 2021 and Where Did Western Epistemology Go Wrong and Why? Why when we look out do we see a wasteland, and I'm saying I'm agreeing with you there's all sorts of beauty in it that you can appreciate philosophically.
7:47
But when you ask is it relevant to the real world , the answer is well the only if it is relevant the real world's in big trouble. Okay trigger warning, the history of western physiology can be shocking, and because you've been internalized to philosophy and epistemology
8:07
you may have become inured to how shocking it is. So part of what I want to do today is to just, it's really like you know, I hate to, I don't want to you know, I don't want to actually
8:21
reawaken old traumas but in this case actually it's actually worthwhile. A little bit okay and then I'm going to say that the history, what we're going to see is it's a history in part of interconnected intellectual pathologies. And that's the part I'm primarily going to focus on and boy, that's you'll see, the main part and what I want to do is they're not the product of bad people. But they're product of something and that's what we're looking for clues to. What is it that's
8:49
the problem that has led western epistemology into what I'm going to claim are dead ends.
8:59
Okay and so in order to answer that question, I want to go back to the epistemological Garden of Eden, which you may have heard me do before. This is where, I break off into this talk after this one in the epistemological Garden of Eden, no one realizes they have ever made a mistake.
9:16
So why would they need epistemology. So epistemology begins with the discovery, you know for each one of them, I could, I made a mistake
9:27
and sadly in western epistemology and it may be true generally but in less service this discovery generated intense emotional reaction. Two emotions, first shame at having made a mistake and then anxiety that I might make a mistake again. And so error was epistemic original sin.
9:48
And it's at the beginning, western epistemology was defined by the anxious question how can I guarantee that I avoid making a mistake.
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And this is familiar to you, you know this, I mean that's what Descartes starts with
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but I want to go back to the beginning where that that anxious question actually leads to
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a pathway, that pathway which then sort of in a way determines the history of western epistemology.
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And the pathway starts in ancient greece with the discovery of what I call the proof paradigm for knowledge and rational belief.
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And it begins with the discovery of mathematical proofs in Ancient Greece.
10:35
And then we have Parmenides' use of deductive proof in philosophy to prove that reality is one and unchanging. And so that's the first example that I know of, some of you may even know an earlier one, but where it's like he contrasts, he contrasts the method of the senses which lead to error, which the method of reason which leads to truth and then he gives us proof. And of course if the door is over Plato's academy said, 'let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.'
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And we know in the mean of Socrates elicits from a slave boy the proof of a special case of the Pythagorean theorem to illustrate is epistemology of the forms. So what we can see is that we've got a whole epistemology and obviously the epistemology is aimed at making sure we never make a mistake. And there was one thing missing from the epistemology which was a theory of reasoning and so Aristotle with his great discovery of syllogistic reasoning also sent epistemology down
11:39
this pathway of the proof paradigm, because now we had an account of deductively valid inference.
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And even 2,000 years later when Kant was writing he was able to argue that for all practical purposes Aristotle had completed logic. We now know that there was a lot more to come and that was Fraga, but still that's how influential Aristotle's syllogistic logic was. And by the way, syllogism now we used to refer to certain kinds of reasoning in Aristotle but for Aristotle it actually just meant deductively valid.
12:13
That's what his goal was to identify deductively valid rules rules of reasoning.
12:21
And then what I'm now calling the proof paradigm is now launched on its way and there are five presuppositions and historically you can find philosophers who have all five of the presuppositions. At the beginning you find all five of them, but even as people start to break away
12:42
they still end up with holding on to maybe one or two. And every one of them is a problem. What are they? Infallibilism: all rational belief is infallible. Deductivism: the laws of logic are laws of rational reasoning. I mean that seems obvious to philosophers. Inferentialism: all laws of rational reasoning are inferential in the sense that they are unidirectional and monotonic.
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Okay here well, unidirectional means that the reasoning goes in one direction from the premises to the conclusion and monotonic means that it always adds new beliefs it never subtracts them
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And we can see the influence of the deductivist assumption on reasoning because when
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other kinds of reasoning are identified by philosophers, they're called like induction.
13:41
Well, induction of course the word itself is based on the word deduction or abduction or inference to the best explanation. Inference the idea of inference and all of you i'm sure can recall back to you probably your earliest epistemology class where that you get the
14:06
problem of the regress. Well, if some beliefs are inferentially justified then there have to be some that aren't or what are the alternatives, you know.
14:15
Well, inferentialism the assumption that reasoning is inferential. First premises, well if reasoning is inferential, you have to have some first premises that don't depend on other beliefs for their support. And the other young the non-inferentially justified ones. And then finally first-person access, we have first-person access to what makes our beliefs rational when they are.
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And what's what's crucial to understand is that even though very few philosophers accept all five of them, even one of these presuppositions can have a large distorting effect on epistemology.
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And sadly even philosophies reject all five of them often manifest distorting effects that have just infected their thinking by intellectual osmosis from the proof paradigm.
15:09
Okay and so now we have the three poles of western epistemology. I'm just going to say what they are and then we'll starting right from the beginning. You get Platonism, Skepticism Relativism, the three alternatives. The rest of the history of western epistemology is going to be oscillating among these three alternatives, at least a western epistemology that isn't theological.
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Okay so let's do Platonism. Well Plato, you know,
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for platonism you have to have direct access to necessary truth And for Plato that was through the intellectual apprehension of the forms which we remembered from an earlier life. And so it provides the first premises for purely rational knowledge. And that's the way that we get
16:03
you know sort of the positive picture of the proof paradigm, that's the way we get knowledge or rational belief. And of course, we use Aristotle's syllogistic reasoning once we've got the first premises. Well the next alternative is skepticism and the most famous representative that is Socrates of whom the Delphic Oracle said that there was quote "none wiser" in Athens.
16:28
And you think, you know, you teach your students, you know wow, well if the oracle said, there's none wiser he must have known a lot, right. But no, as a matter of fact, Socrates summed up his wisdom by saying that while his fellow Athenians mistakenly think that they know many things, I neither know nor think that I know.
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Now of course I want to translate this over into rational belief, but so you have no rational beliefs at all Socrates?
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Well that's the skeptical alternative, and then we have the relativist alternative. And of course who represents that but, Protagoras, 'man is the measure of all things.'
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This is a relativist doctrine that there is no non-relative truth but only truth for someone. And then I want to extend that in epistemology, the other important kind of relativism is relativism about rationality, so rationality for you rational for me. And where do we find that, I mean in probably the largest movement in American philosophy pragmatism.
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What's rational for me depends on what my goals are.
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So truth or rationality can be held relative to it to be held to be relative to a culture, a language game, evolution, etc. There are lots of different forms of relativism.
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Okay and then what about the nature of epistemic rationality. And I'm going to do the three options for that and the three non-theological options because probably you're familiar with the work of Alvin Plantinga. There are the theists who say oh look, we have another alternative, basically god made us, so that we have you know reliable beliefs or whatever. But the three non-theological options are platonism: the fundamental principles of
18:34
epistemic rationality are true in all possible worlds. We have direct epistemic access to them. And of course the history of western epistemology has been what do you do when finally it becomes so clear, it took a long time, that we don't have direct apostamic access to those principles. Well, what do you have, two alternatives skepticism and by skepticism I include non-cognitive anything that says well, there are no truths of you know, epistemic rationality
19:07
or we don't have any rationally spelt what they are. And then relativism, epistemic rationality is relative to one's culture, language game, facts about evolution, etc. And this includes naturalist cognitivism, where what's rational for human beings is relative, relevant excuse me, relative to our evolutionary background what was favored by evolution. If I had more time I would try to persuade you that all three of these options are dead ends, but at least I have to tell
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you they are, so you can start to see as we go through. We talk about others, you can see, oh yeah
19:49
this is why they keep coming up to these, you know often literally insane conclusions.
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I believe it is due to the influence of the five presuppositions of proof paradigm, that's all the alternative. This number, these three seem to exhaust all the non-theological alternatives, that people come back, one, ever again to, one of these three alternatives. When each one of them is a dead end. And so that means that if you're doing epistemology almost no matter, which one you pick you can always, at least make a strong criticism of the other two. You
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know, your own may have its problems, but you can always make a strong criticism of the other two.
20:41
And when you look at the history of western epistemology what you find are certain kinds of intellectual pathologies, and these intellectual pathologies I trace back to the proof paradigm. Obviously I don't have time to do the tracing here, but I want to draw your attention these pathologies, because this is where you get to in philosophy kind of repressed memory. That philosophers at some level have an awareness, well you know, there are these problems there are these
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problems with these different views. But they sort, of you know, repress the memory and what I'm doing today part of it is a kind of group therapy where we allow the memories to come back because if we're going to make our peace with them, we have to just allow them the freedom to get expressed.
21:27
Self-refuting views. Well, you know, well we find in the western history lots of self-refuting views Here's an example of a self-repeating view, 'Everything that I say is false.'
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I mean look if it's true, it's false, so. Why would anybody say that, and yet people say things that are
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hardly more, almost as transparent as that one. Self undermining views, it can never be rational to believe a universal generalization. Well number two itself is a universal generalization right? And so if it's true it can't be rational to believe it. So it's different from self refuting, there's no contradiction in there, it's just it can't be rational to believe it it could actually be true.
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And then explanation appearing framework substitutions and my example here is phenomenalism because it's been so influential in philosophy. And I'm going to say some more about it what I mean by explanation impairing.
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Okay so now Hume is going to be for me you know, a test case, you know just we're going to look at Hume, because I mean, well we'll see. You know, I mean Hume is the most influential epistemologist,
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certainly in English, so let's not overstate it, but I think, I think, in any language.
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I'm going to do just a little bit of exposition, I'm assuming this is all familiar to all of you. And then I'm going to draw your attention to some sort of pathologies.
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Hume: all of our ideas are ultimately derived from impressions, right, absolutely standard Hume. Therefore we can have no idea of cause, nor can we have the concept of a body with external and continued existence. We can't have any of these ideas.
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The only idea of cause that we can have is an idea of constant conjunction of impressions in the past combined with the feeling of necessity in us. That's his substitute idea for cause.
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There is no way to rationally infer from a past regularity to a future regularity. Okay, anything unusual about this just sort of restatement of some of the main parts of Hume's epistemology. But now what I'm going to do is, you know I actually when I was a grad student, I took a course on Hume, and I've also done other courses where Hume was partly studied. In none of them, did anyone ever point out what I'm going do say now, and that's always puzzled me.
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Actually one of the reasons I'm writing the book is I just get to actually say these things, you know. So remember the four because now what we're going to do is, we're going to see how, they make no sense together, or some of them individually. So the first intellectual pathology I'm going to give an example of self undermining because this is the one I want to start with. If there is no rational way to infer future regulatories from past regularities,
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then even if all ideas have been ultimately derived from impressions in the past it cannot be rational to conclude that in the future all ideas will be ultimately derivable from impressions. Does everybody see that? Did any of your teachers ever tell you this, Hume's own conclusion
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that all ideas are ultimately derivable from impressions is itself irrational by his own epistemology, it's self-undermining. Nobody told me that, never even just pointed out to me.
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Okay now, how about self-refuting. If all ideas are ultimately derived from impressions then we can have no idea of a past, excuse me, this is three, i wanted to get to two, self-refuting. In order to deny that we can have the idea of a cause, or the idea of a body with external and continuing existence
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Hume must use all of these ideas.
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So he just to deny that we can have these ideas he has to use them.
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That's clearly self-refuting and notice that he can't get out by substituting his conception of cause in his denial that we can have the idea of cause, because he clearly does not deny that we can have his conception of cause, it's the bad conception of cause that we can't have. Anybody ever point that out to you,
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they didn't to me.
26:32
Okay then we get to a little more complicated one, but it's really fascinating.
26:39
Another way that it's self-refuting, if all ideas are ultimately derived from impressions then we can have a no idea of a past conjunction of impressions because we can have no idea of the past. All impressions even so-called impressions of memory are current impressions.
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This implies immediately it is not possible to have an impression of memory
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because it is not possible to have an idea of a memory either. This should be obvious because a memory is an impression caused by a past a memory,
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impression is an impression caused by a past impression, but for Hume there is no way to have an idea of a cause. See so in the majority we got caused by a past impression. In addition, as we see and we've seen here for Hume there is no way to have an idea of the past either.
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Of course a so-called impression of memory could be an impression accompanied by a certain feeling. That's the way Hume distinguishes different oppressions. But the feeling could not be a feeling of pastness, because there would be no way to have an idea of pastness. And now
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just to pile on for very much the same reasons on Hume's account we could have no idea of the future either.
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Anybody ever draw that your attention to that?
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Hume's entire epistemology is self-refuting.
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The whole thing totally collapses.
28:28
Okay and then remember earlier I talked about explanation impairing framework substitutions. Now of course Hume is a phenomenalist and we have all of the empiricists, well it, Locke an interesting case, but anyway certainly Berkely was definitely you know an idealistic phenomenalist. And as a matter of fact through the
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18th and 19th centuries I think, I don't know you know, I haven't ever done a poll but I think most epistemologists were phenomenalists. And a lot of the logical positives were,
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you know carnaps out alfal was actually to show us how we can construct the world out of our impressions. And as you know it failed but that was the project. Okay so anyway because Hume denies that we can have the idea of a body with external and continued existence Hume is a phenomenalist. Our ordinary framework of beliefs in ordinary physical objects with causal properties explains how our experiences change over time, for example as we walk around a table you know.
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I'm right now sitting here at this desk and I can easily imagine what it would be like if I just turned the desk so I was looking at the other side, because I've seen the other side of this desk many times. A phenomenalist framework cannot explain how our experiences change over time because having a table impression without a table does not support any expectation about future experience.
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You can't walk around a table impression without a table.
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And so we have these
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substitute frameworks that actually take away explanatory value, but of course for Hume
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explanatory the idea of explanation itself is some kind of idea of there being some kind of causal or other necessity, and so he would have said I threw that one away.
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But now what we have to deal with is look at everything else he threw away too. okay.
30:53
Why is such a pathological epistemology been so influential?
30:59
Hume's epistemology was taken over with only minor modifications by the logical positives one of the most influential philosophical movements of the 20th century. And you see I'm old enough to remember when logical positivism still exerted a big influence on philosophy. And basically the expectation was that philosophy of language was just going to replace almost all philosophy there was really nothing
31:24
else for philosophy to do, except a few minor things and then you could study language.
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The greatest influence on Wittgenstein early and late was Hume.
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One of the most influential movements in epistemology today naturalized epistemology takes Hume as its founder.
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Quine famously wrote quote, 'the human predicament is the human predicament.'
31:56
You know that was in that his essay naturalized epistemology, and by that he meant, I mean he was like clear about it, where we were with rational belief with Hume, and remember with Hume we hadn't gotten very many rational beliefs well we haven't gotten any further since then either. And then there's this really interesting survey by Burgay and Chalmers and if you want to I'll I can send you the reference to it, but anyway uh
32:26
it was it was english-speaking philosophy for the most part identified Hume as basically the non-living philosopher with whom they most identify.
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And then on the issue of whether they had a Humeian or non-Humeian position on laws of nature which is going back to that issue I just talked about whether there's causal necessity.
32:51
24.7 of all respondents and 45.9 percent of those who specialize in philosophy of science
33:01
endorsed a Humeian view one according to which law of nature is a misnomer because they are simple reports of regularities with no causal or any other kind of necessity. So I just want you to see, everybody knows this but Hume's epistemology is still very much alive in the 21st century.
33:21
Now Hume is only one example and rather than talk, me coming up with other examples, I thought I would ask you, now think back you know these repressed memories. I want just want you to bring back some of the repressed memories of epistemologists who ended up with absurd or insane results and by the way you know I've given you extreme examples in Hume but just the result that we could have no rational beliefs about the future that would be a form of
33:55
insanity. If you really really took that seriously you couldn't make any plans for the future at all. So what about other epistemologists who end up in positions that, really in other words I'm not just saying, well I disagree with them, I'm saying that just by the ordinary standards of whether or not
34:23
you would be regarded as a sane human being. You know they're insane.
34:32
Please the floor is open. Unmute yourself if you're muted.
34:38
This is our group therapy.
34:58
No one can think of anyone else. Well how about Graham Priest? Graham Priest?
35:06
Okay now Graham Priest you're doing his theory of truth right? yeah. okay. That's a really interesting one that's a really interesting one, it's not actually an epistemology. But it's one that seems it, sounds absurd on its face, I think we could have a really interesting conversation about that one, but I would like to if I can keep it, okay, you know like epistemologies like right I already mentioned Berkley's idealism, right.
35:33
Okay. I mean here's the thing let's do phenomenalism because people get so used to it. They don't even think about what it would be like to really believe in it. To really believe in it I would have to think each of you is just a product of my own mental life.
35:57
You are just impressions in my mind that's all you are. And
36:06
I mean think about again, I sort of say sometimes philosophers get used it. To really believe that would make a tragic life that you couldn't actually have any interactions with any other people except these little, I mean, you know remember, as soon as I close my eyes you don't even exist anymore, and then I open my eyes oh you're back in my mind. What would be the point of life if I couldn't have any relationships with other people. Now, I know an epistemologist will always say
36:40
yeah but, Bill for all you know subject to the evil demon and everyone is just a figment in your mind. But I'm not talking about that now I'm talking about the I'm not worried yet i'm just saying what would it be like to really believe it. To really believe it would mean
37:04
my life was total tragedy. There's this being and it's controlling all of my sensations so that I have no human relations, no relation to anything else, there's nothing that I can actually do that would make a difference in the world. All I can do is just think.
37:24
Can we can we get it away from the Cartesian demon a little bit? Is there another way to think about this, about this kind of Solipsism that you're describing? I'm not sure. I might just, i'm just trying to yeah, I'm just trying to the,
37:44
yeah I mean, it's here's think about it from Kant's point of view. Kant says well, his problem was, he thought, remember one of the assumptions of the proof paradigm was rational belief has to be infallible. And he couldn't explain how rational beliefs could be infallible if they were about things in themselves. His synthetic a priori so he said no. What happens is we impose certain things on our experience right, that's and that's how we can know them
38:19
infallibly because we're the authors of them. And i say and so then, and so then it says what we can know is the world of our experience. We cannot know the world of things in themselves. And this is exactly what I'm talking about how western epistemology, they doing the best they can but they can't get out. And you know that. I mean just you know all the people who've struggled to try to just be able to rationally believe an external world.
38:51
But I say no it's actually really important part of my life and your life too, that we are able to interact with other people who are things in themselves.
39:05
Of course I don't have infallible knowledge about you or your thoughts or whatever, so what.
39:17
Did that help Andrew? It does. It does. Right.
39:30
I'm wondering if we could drag Nozick's experience machine in here. Well the experience machine again is it's not an epistemological thought experiment. It's to actually find out what you care about, okay. And the experience machine works even if you're already on the experience machine that's a really interesting thing about it. Because it's a, it's a question about what you care about. And so
39:54
suppose unknown to me I'm on an experience machine where I'm given the option of hooking up to a experience machine. I find out that I care about more than my experiences when I refuse to hook up. And then you say. Right. Haha Bill but it's too bad because you're already. And then I say if you're right, if you're right then my life is a tragic life because then you now know you just gave me a test, you know what I care about and it's not just my experiences
40:24
and you're telling me nonetheless I cannot actually affect anything except my experiences. And that I mean that's overwhelmingly sad and tragic.
40:45
And so well I mean again you know
40:48
I mean there's so many I mean I said the.
40:58
Here's I mean this is the kind of thing, I mean just this is just to Wittgenstein, his whole argument of the investigations depends on his persuading you that the following series
41:14
has no rational continuation. Here's the series one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. How long do I have to continue it, 11, 12, 13. Let me stop at 14.
41:29
There isn't any rational, you know rationally unique in my continuation. Now of course if you just make the point anybody who's doing the series, they could do it to fool you they could do it for all sorts of other reasons, but the question is just this is there a way of identifying the rational continuation. I mean it's a no-brainer but once he persuades you of that then you realize there's nothing left that rationality can do. And that's his whole point,
41:54
his whole point is that rationality is the part of philosophy that you can't get out of. It's the fly in, the fly bottle you the only way you get out of it is you stop talking about it.
42:14
As if rationality is an important distinction, well if you just think it's like continuing the series ah what whinges on that. But now we get into the real world and in the real world we have all these, I mean white supremacist ideologies, we have these fascist epistemologies, we have all these things where huge hugely important things depend on them.
42:41
And what's Wittgenstein saying Wittgenstein's saying there aren't any rational
42:46
or irrational distinctions. There's just fitting in with your group.
42:52
That's, that is the key idea of
42:57
what I'm calling fascist epistemology which we see in many different countries now. The idea of fascist epistemology is you replace whatever rationality is with fitting in with the group.
43:07
Does everybody realize we're living in a country where that is happening before our eyes.
43:14
Where people decide what to believe not on the basis of rational considerations, but on the basis of fitting in with their group. And you say Wittgenstein
43:27
there's something important that your philosophy left out. We need some philosophy, we need something that actually can help us distinguish between rational and irrational beliefs.
43:42
I mean again I'll just give you a few more just so because it's so startling, it's so startling.
43:49
The logical positives you're all these smart guys, the logical positives all these smart guys, who's the early Wittgenstein too right, he was.
43:57
And so what's their philosophy, their summary of their philosophy, their epistemology here's the summary of their epistemology,
44:06
all rational beliefs are either analytic or they're statements that have been verified by experience, that's just you know.
44:21
And you know anybody, anybody who studies logical positivism, the question that you ask is, what's the status of that very statement. And according to the statement it's either analytic or it's something verified by experience. And it seems clear to everybody it's neither one. That's the heart of their philosophy. How in the world are all these smart people
44:46
when they work all their, you know, everything they can do
44:54
and, and they come up with something which is actually
45:02
self undermining. I've heard, Bill, I've heard a logical positivist defend that proposition by saying that it's justified pragmatically, not rationally. Yeah you see, you see and this is, I what, I want you to do is, I want you to feel people struggling. I want you to see them struggling. And we would go on, if we went on I'd say what about pragmatism?
45:27
I don't have time to talk about it now but when they say justified pragmatically that's a kind of relativism remember earlier. And it's going to lead to other paradoxes.
45:37
But thank you for drawing my attention to Paul because these are smart people they always have something they can say. But what I want to know is why are they trapped? Why are they trapped that these are the only alternatives? Okay now what i'm going to do is i'm going to just very briefly. Make a little move to point us in another direction and then i'll stop and open the floor for discussion. Because what I want to say is once you've gone through all
46:04
these things and you see the moves. You know we could have talked about pragmatism, and then you see the moves. Then you realize they always end up just in more problems, more trouble.
46:16
And what I'm suggesting is there's a reason for that and the reason is that they're actually, they've been infected by certain intellectual pathologies which I call the five presuppositions of the proof paradigm. And once you've been infected with those you're trapped. Okay here's I'm going to go quickly through, oh actually you know there was Quince's Thesis of Indeterminacy of Translation only observation sentences have determined
46:44
meaning, that's what Quine actually says. This thesis is self-refuting, if we can understand, it is false because it is not an observation sentence. Now again Paul, somebody will struggle and say well wait a minute I'll explain why. But I'm just saying look right at it.
47:02
Okay Wittgenstein's way out the problem is the five presuppositions the proof paradigm. So what I want to do is I want to go back to the epistemological Garden of Eden and I want to point a pathway to another kind of epistemology, another pathway for epistemology. So here we go back and of course we now know is epistemology starts when people discover they can make mistakes. And suppose that when people discovered that they had made a mistake
47:29
instead of reacting with shame and anxiety they had responded with wonder and curiosity.
47:37
What a remarkable ability we have to correct our own mistakes, fallibly of course, right. We don't have an infallible, there's no infallibility anywhere in the whole thing. How are we able to do it? In other words they just say that's really fascinating that we're able to do it. How are we able to do it? If they had asked that question they would have built an epistemology not on proof but they would have focused on mistake correcting reasoning.
48:06
And instead of focusing on inferential reasoning which is monotonic. They would have focused on reasoning that can subtract beliefs as well as add beliefs that is non-monotonic reasoning. So they wouldn't have been drawn to inferences at all. Inferences are necessarily monotonic. They would have been looking at some other kind of reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning.
48:32
Okay actually this is a slide I'm just going to skip over because it's something that.
48:41
But I mean, I, suppose philosophy had been asking about mistake correcting reasoning. What I want to say is that what you could say to me, well but actually Bill in western philosophy they address mistake correcting reasoning. And I'm going to close by saying, yeah but here's how they address it. First of all, defeater reasoning. And you know defeat I think defeater the framework is actually a useful kind of framework for classifying reasoning, but it can't explain it.
49:10
And here's a simple example why, but there the deeper examples are it doesn't explain any of the changes. Even in this, everybody's here is familiar with the defeater where you believe that p and then the belief you get the belief that q and q defeats p. Okay? That's the simplest kind of defeater reasoning. Even in the simple case in which a belief that p is defeated by a belief that q, there is no explanation of why q defeated p rather than p defeating q. Remember
49:42
you started off believing p. Why in the world did you ever then believe q. Why didn't p defeat it?
49:52
There is no explanation to this. Now that's really the simplest case. And the deeper one is there's no explanation at all, in other words people do this whole structure but there's no explanation of why at any stage one thing gets defeated by something else rather than vice versa, or remember you can have p and then you have a cuter excuse me a defeater q for p. But maybe there's a r which is a defeater for q. And so then q doesn't defeat p.
50:25
But do you have the same problem, why does r defeat q rather than q defeating r?
50:32
And the whole defeater analysis can't explain any of that. Okay. The most popular kind of explanation of mistake correcting reasoning is Bayesian epistemology. And Bayesian epistemology is a great advance because by having degrees of belief
50:48
rather than beliefs, it does allow it can actually explain some mistake correcting reasoning.
50:55
And in my book, I have an extensive discussion of Bayesian epistemology, but here still just right here, we can look at it study it, and you'll find there's six kinds of mistake correcting reasoning that Bayesianism cannot explain.
51:10
Changes in one's logic. Changes in one's epistemology. Changes in extreme credences zero or one to non-extreme credences. Any credences other than zero or one. Changes in credence due to the discovery of a new theory rather than new evidence like the discovery of the Copernican hypothesis
51:34
Bayesianism can't explain why there would be a change in credences and theories just because of the discovery of a new theory. Changes in a priori the ultimate prior credences the credences that start the whole thing off. And then also the discovery that some of one's credences are irrational. And this is really important because when I want to get down to the real world, I want to say but can epistemology help us understand between rational and irrational credences beliefs.
52:07
And here, we can say and can't explain how it is that we could discover that we have irrational credences. Well as you know, for the Bayesian theory, Bayesian agents are ideally rational. They never have irrational credences so they could never discover that they have irrational credences. But that would be a kind of important kind of intellectual blindness, if human beings couldn't discover they had irrational credences.
52:37
Okay and, Mike says, 'sorry he has to go. Okay thanks for joining us Mike.'
52:45
Okay so anyway that's it, this is the last slide that i'm going to use but oh it just it just jumped away so let me get it for you. The alternative that I'm going to actually articulate and defend my book is that rationality is what makes someone a good learner. It's not primarily a logical ability has nothing to do with proving theorems. It involves, except that interestingly enough proving theorems involves this kind of rationality
53:07
too, and I give some examples in my book, it involves sensitivity to clues, imagination to envision new or surprising explanations of the clues, and the ability to evaluate alternative explanations by how good or bad they are as explanations. One important indication of how good a learner someone is comes from how able they are to correct their own mistakes.
53:31
And in the book I go on to develop an alternative to remember my three alternatives were platonism,
53:39
relativism, and skepticism. An alternative way of understanding rationality that doesn't, that avoids the problems with all three of those.
53:49
But my goal here today was to just draw to your attention, how many, how much of western epistemology is totally irrelevant to important real world questions. And why it seems to be so limited that it's all it's that for the the the people who advocate these different epistemologies it's almost impossible for them to avoid saying something that's self-refuting or self-undermining. Right. I mean think of all the ones that get rid of truth. You know and so
54:24
they say there is no truth and what you want to ask them is, is what you said just said true?
54:35
And if they're pragmatists and they say, well what's true is what works. And I say, all I want to say is, in order to be true by your criterion does it really have to work?
54:49
Does it have to be true that it works?
55:01
Okay ,thank you very much, and now i'm happy to open the floor discussion and questions.
55:09
Thank you Bill.
55:14
Well I have a question if, I'll have a question if to start, I guess, if no one else does. Okay. Why can't I say regarding an impression of the past
55:29
that I'm directly aware that my impression has an intentional object and that intentional object is last summer. So i'm thinking about my memory of last summer and it seems to me I'm directly aware of its intentionality and that intentionality is directed at an object that is last summer.
55:53
I mean that what you said sounds perfectly sensible to me. Okay. Sounds perfectly sensible right, but I'm just saying
56:03
you know what Hume is going to ask, where did you get the idea of intentional object.
56:11
I just, I mean just think about it he's going to say you can, you definitely can have a current impression of something and if you want to call it an intentional object, he says, I'm fine with that. But then you just also added to it, it's a the intentional object is something in the past. And I'm just asking where did it get that content.
56:41
That's all. But you're right you see this is the thing where it's so easy to think, oh but wait a minute there are ways out of this problem. And there are if you just use common sense. But if you do it, you know, with you know like under the constraints that Hume himself is operating on, I mean because I would just say, Hume I can have if you say I can have an impression of an intentional object
57:16
in the past, where I don't well, I better stop right here because I don't want to actually get going on intentional objects. Okay. What I want you to see is it's very, very, very limited collection of ideas that Hume thinks we can get from impressions.
57:36
I see Russ has his hand up. Yeah so I guess I'm curious why Popper doesn't show up among the mistake correcting epistemologies or or for that matter Socrates. And I think I have a kind of broader consideration behind that. And that is that at the level of our arguments are going to be monotonic right, arguments have premises they lead to conclusions so you're always adding something. But inferences and arguments happen within a broader process of rationality
58:10
and in that broader process you might be making adjustments accepting rejecting. It isn't necessarily adding on. Oh I'm with you in other words now you're saying let's talk about rationality as = a broader thing, okay. All I want to draw your attention to is
58:34
that what you just described. I want to go back and talk about Socrates and the thing about Socrates is, as we all know in most of the dialogues particularly the ones that I think are really Socratic dialogues. Socrates starts off thinking there's some important idea
58:53
and in order to be able to talk about it at all we have to have a definition of it.
59:01
And we have, and I think what you have is a really exemplary example of rational inquiry
59:10
and the conclusion that I think Socrates should have drawn was, notice I started off thinking we had to have a definition of this idea in order to be able to even talk about it. And yet we've done this whole dialogue of rational inquiry into you know friendship, you name it whatever it is, knowledge. Even though at the end we don't have an adequate definition. Is that the conclusion that Socrates drew? No, the conclusion for him it's always despair.
59:40
In order for us to even be able to talk about it we have to have the definition and at the end we find out we don't have a definition. And that's why I say he's, you know a skeptic, and he's trapped. And I liked even the way that you put it because you said arguments are monotonic. I think that's a mistake but I think Socrates was trapped by that, because what we should see is, and this is something this is something all students of philosophy
1:00:07
should learn certainly in their epistemology class. Anytime anybody gives you an argument to the conclusion and a conclusion is insane, or just you know. Even if you actually believe all the premises, okay you believe all the premises and the premises logically imply the conclusion.
1:00:30
Rationality does not require you to accept the conclusion, right, isn't that right. And that's a way of seeing even arguments are not monotonic. In the, you know, it's just people, philosophy always
1:00:43
reconstructs them as monotonic because they have these damned rules of inference. But they aren't, they're always, we're always trying to make the most sense and that means if we get to a really crazy conclusion and the argument is valid. We better go back and find out which one of the premises are a problem. Or and that to me is that's my whole approach to western epistemology if they keep coming up with these conclusions that are sometimes literally insane, sometimes
1:01:13
self-refuting, sometimes self-undermining, what are the presuppositions that are driving them to these conclusions. So I agree with you 100 percent that's a model of rationality I can embrace. As soon as we say even arguments are not monotonic. But do you see how Socrates couldn't do it.
1:01:31
He couldn't do it. He was so trapped by this picture. All he needed was a definition and then he could start reasoning from it. And so he missed what was actually going on the dialogue, which was this fascinating display of rationality. And by the way a display of showing that they did understand what they were talking about even though they had no definition of it.
1:01:57
So what what comes to mind at this moment is that Socrates maybe had the wrong target in mind he thought he was going for knowledge, but what he actually got was understanding. Ah I love that idea too. Curiosity for me is that these are not really the same thing. Man you, you could have written my book Russ because that's what I propose I propose we replace knowledge with understanding.
1:02:21
And knowledge, understanding doesn't require truth. Actually you can get a lot of understanding as long as something is true enough. And so that's a technical term of Catherine Elgin uses it. I think it's great. And so it means and it just changes so much because then you can say, well look, we now know like Newtonian mechanics is not literally true, but it's certainly true enough to enhance our understanding of a lot of stuff, right. And philosophy too, philosophy, I think any
1:03:00
self-aware philosopher should always be able to write a preface to whatever they write and say, there are lots of mistakes in this. We know there are lots of mistakes. My hope, my goal is not to you know, only write things that are true, I'm going to do the best I can, but my goal is to help promote understanding by saying things that are true enough. That would reorient philosophy. Okay and then what about Popper. I have to say something about Popper because these
1:03:34
are tragic figures, Socrates is a tragic figure in philosophy because he represents a model of rational inquiry and he himself can't recognize it. Popper another very influential guy and remember at the talk yesterday, and you and Mark gave your presentation there was a talk about, oh yeah, well but at least you know, we have the Palparian idea of falsification, rather than verification, you know. And I say yeah these are really important ideas but what about Popper.
1:04:08
Popper called, his method, the method of critical rationalism.
1:04:14
And what did he say when he addresses, I can give you the passage if you want it, he says, what can I say in defense of critical rationalism itself. The whole method,
1:04:28
he says since I'm going, I'm not going to be dogmatic. I, the only thing I can say is for me, it's a matter of irrational faith. His whole philosophy is a matter of irrational faith.
1:04:45
This is tragic but do you see, do you see, if somebody suppose somebody you know has the craziest view, they're creationists or something like that, and you say to them yeah, well, but is your creationism falsifiable. And they say oh you must be a Popparian but don't you know Popper himself says his whole method is based on irrational faith. I base mine on what I think is rational faith, so I'm better than Popper. And you smile and you cry, you have to
1:05:15
cry. I have a question. I'm trying here. Yeah thank you so much for the talk it's definitely thought provoking. As I was here as I was listening to you, one of the things that I would like to get try to get a little sharper is your difference from the pragmatists. And the reason I say it is this, because you start out your narrative with what I a lot of what I think Dewey would agree with right. That western philosophy is motivated by this anxiety,
1:05:50
this quest for certainty, as Dewey puts it and so it adopts this kind of, this kind of rationality, which is, which is truth directed, right? And it both has this feature that it's really emphasizes mathematical proof. And it has this conception of truth as, hey we're trying to get the beliefs, that match the world, so we're trying to figure out what does it really mean to give evidence. What does it really mean to justify and to answer that
1:06:21
question in a way that gives us correspondence to the world. And of course the Deweyian emphasis is a kind of mistake correcting rationality, right. He wants to adopt these general norms of science that you see vetted and expand them to ethics, expand them to other areas of culture.
1:06:42
And so as I was listening to you I was I was one noticing a lot of overlap with the pragmatists that you that you they seem to scorn, right. So I kind of want to, kind of want the explanation of that, but the second thing I and I think this really gets to the heart of my question about your approach. You in place of a proof paradigm suggests that we have a notion of rationality that's mistake correcting,
1:07:08
but operating in the background here is some notion of truth. Oh yeah.That a mistake right and so but, on one hand you start out saying there's these three paradigms, there's platonism, there's skepticism, there's relativism, and then so what's the conception of truth you hinted at that in your book that you come up with a fourth right. So what's the conception of truth that's operating here, you gave me true enough a minute ago, but I think for most of us true enough is a little
1:07:36
little, but okay. But anyway thank you for this question for sure because just like Poppers see Popper one of my favorite epistemologists Dewey one of my favorite epistemologists. And now you're going to hear of course remember I just said Popper it turns out it's like a tragic story, okay well get ready. Because Dewey again he looks out and he diagnoses this problem with western epistemology. It's very similar to the diagnosis that I'm giving.
1:08:04
And so what does he say and this only way that you could think this is, if you're trapped. The problem is we have to replace truth with something else.
1:08:15
And once we do that all of our problems go away. And then but I'm just saying, before I get to
1:08:22
and he then, he then gives a theory of learning in terms of problem, situations it's a beautiful theory of learning, absolutely a beautiful theory of learning. And it's really so in other words, when we're at the level at the level of looking at what his proposal is.
1:08:43
I'm saying go for it go for it, but then he steps back and he gets philosophical. And when he gets philosophical, he says yeah, for example but how in the world can we take this approach, and then have a role for truth in it. And when he asks that question he has to already be subject to certain presuppositions about what it is because when you approach it from my direction, truth isn't some unapproachable
1:09:15
absolute that's. Truth is we're committed to truth, just in thinking that we make a mistake.
1:09:23
You see that it's the idea of a mistake includes an idea of truth, and by the way for the big fancy kinds of beliefs like, you know scientific theory, I think often they're true enough is is is quite good enough. But even that it essentially involves truth. It's not something that substitutes for truth, but for a lot of other things truth is absolutely crucial. And for a pragmatist every time
1:09:54
you always ask for the pragmatist what are you going to substitute for truth. Okay, yeah. And it's some kind of standard of you know, satisfying something, you know, and you just ask them
1:10:11
do you care whether, you know suppose it's like making you happy, I don't care what it is, but for actually for see, for Dewey it's really interesting because once you do understanding, it's not just like being happy, or something like that, it's actually an epistemic goal. And understanding, I mean is going to require some connection to truth, but right now all I want to say is this, for all the pragmatists whatever the goal
1:10:40
is that they identify is something they really care about. And so I say, so in order to be
1:10:48
true in your sense, does it really have to satisfy that goal? In other words does it have to be true that it satisfies that goal? Or does it have to just satisfy believing that it satisfies the goal satisfies the goal. In other words you see that all of them are somehow so scared by the idea of truth, that they think there's just some easy way out. But all of them, ultimately
1:11:18
have to care about the truth of something. Otherwise the whole thing is trivial. Why if I could just ask that one follow-up? Yeah. So what's the problem with this response
1:11:35
in order, you could imagine somebody responding to you like this look it's all good and well that we'd be concerned with truth but in order for truth to be action guiding, we need to be able to say something about it. We need to be able to have a theory of it, under the assumption that in order to hit it, you need to have an idea of your target, right. You need some clear sense of what you're
1:11:55
what you're aiming for, otherwise you're unlikely to hit it. And if you do hit it you're not going to be able to tell when you get there. But the problem is we can't say a whole lot about what truth is, I mean you can say it's a relation of correspondence between intellect and object. You can say it's a relation between you can say that it's a relation between our sentences in the world. You could say it's the additional thing beyond justification, but it's empty and I take it to
1:12:23
be the pragmatist's point that look, what we should be talking about instead of truth is justification. Because we can tell when we can tell when a belief has a bunch of evidence in its favor. We can't tell if it matches the true nature of the world, but we can tell if it's justified. We can tell if there's a if there's a bunch of proof for it if there's a demonstration for it. If there's reasons to believe it and you can take that in the broadest sense of the term you want.
1:12:48
And so what about this proposal that just says yeah of course there's a world out there. Right, the problem is getting yourself in a position where you can tell when your norms of rationality your norms of justification produce utterances that actually matched the world.
1:13:09
And this proposal would have just been let's just talk about justification. This doesn't mean just matching whatever your beliefs are to your culture. But
1:13:20
it wouldn't mean, it's kind of deflationism about truth rate it wouldn't mean aiming for truth as a goal. Thank you for that excellent, excellent, statement of what it's like
1:13:33
to be able to be trapped by certain presuppositions, that make it look like the solution is to get rid of truth. Notice you said, well we have to be able to say something about it. We have to be able to, but really what I'm going to try to do is something else, which is to say if you could get rid of all those presuppositions that in order to be able to aim at truth we'd have to have,
1:13:54
because whatever you substituted we're going to have the same problem, you see. Suppose you say it's
1:14:01
proof or something like that and I can say well but you know maybe you're we're just all really terrible at proofs. So we're always taken in by proofs, and actually and and you see well it's it's the same structure. You see, the structure it's always the same but let me say, but I have to go beyond it now. Because always these always sound like skeptical arguments but they're not. What they're meant is to say, instead of thinking that at the outset like Socrates we have to have a
1:14:29
definition or something like this let's be open to exploration. Let's just be open to exploration and we can start the exploration by saying well what's the difference between rational and irrational belief, i'm fine with that. What happens when we start the exploration with an open mind is that we find out that that exploration itself depends on our being able and again fallibly to be able to access some kind of true, access as a funny word because I don't have any direct access
1:15:02
to them, but the truths are not trues about like the form. But they're like this, suppose you say, I mean I just did it for proof, or I suppose you say, well look at the evidence for evolutionary theory.
1:15:15
And you be the the one who believes in evolutionary theory and I'll be the creationist and you say notice all this evidence that supports evolutionary theory. And I'm the creationist and I say, no it doesn't it supports my creationism.
1:15:30
And there what we're disagreeing about is what's true about what that evidence supports. And at some point when you you reach the bottom you're going to find well you know that and someone like Popper because of his model of what rationality requires says, I just have to sort of take it on irrational faith that the evidence that we have of course he wouldn't say it supports anything. But I'll you know do a version of it, supports evolutionary theory rather than creationism,
1:16:01
and a pragmatist might say well yeah, you know, well but if you believe in evolutionary theory somehow that's going to have better consequences or something like that. But each time whatever they say I always want to say is, are you saying that it'll really have better consequences? At some point, just all we're doing is doing the exploration and we find ourselves confronted with oh yeah, I'm committed to certain things being true. But then we don't throw it out or anything
1:16:29
like that and say because we don't have any high fulenting ideas about what truth is. It's just
1:16:36
whatever makes it the case that the evidence that we have supports evolutionary theory and doesn't support creationism. Even though creationism has been designed to be compatible with all that evidence. And it's a really interesting question why it supports one rather than the other. And let's explore it.
1:16:55
But what we see is that all, as we're doing the exploration,
1:16:59
we keep coming back to, yeah okay, to do the exploration, to make sense of what we're doing,
1:17:05
we are committed to certain things being true. And as opposed to thinking we prove them or we get them on irrational faith. Ultimately the story is one of fitting together all these different relevant considerations in this kind of, you know, story that I'm
1:17:23
trying to tell. And there isn't any way to get outside, so some people want to say well you know, Talbot that sounds like a coherence theory it's not but any kind of adequate theory will sound somewhat like a coherence theory, because the reasons are going the supporting reasons are going in all directions they're not unidirectional as in inferences. And the reasoning goes through lots of other beliefs. But then you can say oh, so you know with the coherence theory,
1:17:58
how do you ever get outside to tell what's true. Here's absolutely key insight that everyone who studies philosophy should get in their first philosophy course.
1:18:10
There's some false presupposition in that question, how do you step outside? Right goes back to Berkley, you know you said you can't step outside. There's a false presupposition, what would it be to step outside. Is it's like something that other people can do but you just can't do it. No because to step outside means you, you leave behind all of your cognitive faculties, so when you step outside
1:18:34
how do you cognize anything. The only answer must be you use some other cognitive faculties, okay. And the same problem arises for that, but the idea that somehow to believe in truth requires you to think that you could step outside to check or something like that, that's a false presupposition about truth it doesn't require it at all. As a matter of fact instead if you just do inquiry and find where it leads you. You find out, oh yeah, now I mean, I mean look.
1:19:18
Here's the kind of thing that again, I always want to bring it back to, you because to me, it's really very powerful. And it's for whatever the pragmatists say about what they replace truth with,
1:19:33
that means all, I suppose they replace it with you know, just what works for me, or something like that. I just have to use a simple one. That means all of a sudden all of you lose your reality and you only get your reality back to the extent that it works for me to believe in you. But that isn't reality, that's just like phenomenalism. That means you're just a kind of a construction of my mental state. But look
1:20:06
if I say, it's true that you exist. I may be mistaken but that's an extremely important fact that colors all of life. Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore when they were undergraduates you know they were philosophy students and it was just part of the air that you're phenomenalist. They were also they were both phenomenalists, and Russell in his autobiography describes one day we decided let's just pretend that the world really existed just the kind of world that we think it
1:20:36
is. And they were delighted all these things which it seemed sort of two-dimensional all of a sudden seem robust. And all i wanted to say is that but even they couldn't imagine the biggest difference which was before for Russell, Moore was just this two-dimensional blob, and for Moore Russell was just, and all of a sudden they were really friends. And they were sharing this, and all I'm saying is that
1:21:04
that's part when you, when we engage in this kind of inquiry then we find out oh truth plays an important role but it's not the kind of role that philosophers thought where yeah we had to be able to first figure out how we get to it and how we get outside our cognitive equipment to check.
1:21:20
Does that help? I appreciate that it looks like Monica has a question. Yeah I see Monica's question.
1:21:27
So I'm trying to see if I have the conception of truth that you're talking about here Bill which is so for me it helps to step inside. So my students sometimes ask me, you know well is someone's opinion true. And I say well absolutely if my opinion is that I Monica Alfred like chocolate ice cream that is true. Okay. And to me that connects with you know the Cartesian there's a thinking thing. Is that the kind of truth you're talking about?
1:22:01
No I'm talking about Monica do you exist are you just a figment of my imagination.
1:22:09
Hmm. You see I don't see how you could be wrong about whether you like chocolate ice cream, but you could, I could definitely be wrong that you don't you know the thing you exist. But it needs to be fallible. I'm just fallible but you exist I'm not worried about your existence. It's just what I'm worried about is all these philosophies that say there's no, well you know so what on my philosophy you give up Monica's existence
1:22:32
but you still have this two-dimensional blob that behaves exactly the way she does in your mind.
1:22:41
And i say that's a huge loss, that's a huge loss.
1:22:56
Do you think I would spend, Monica, people as students with me. Do you think I would spend all the time that I do writing comments on papers if I thought my students were just two-dimensional blobs in my mind.
1:23:16
Sure but the pragmatists don't say that. What? I said, sure but the pragmatists don't say that. No the pragmatists, but I'm saying why don't they say that, because now they say oh but it really matters. And, to the course of your experience, it really matters whether or not you write those comments or not. And I say
1:23:41
really it matters the course of my experience now. If I mean or here's a simpler example,
1:23:51
I read about a, you know it definitely happened, tsunami you know in the South Pacific. I send money aid to the victims of the tsunami, if I thought they were just two dimensional blobs in my imagination would I have sent money to the, and you know people. I'll come up with some crazy theory about my psychology but, I'm telling you no I would not have done it.
1:24:14
I could imagine issues here there's two different issues here. There's one is the conception of truth,
1:24:22
and the other is how should we act towards the external world, if it's the case which you're denying that we can't be certain that there is an external world. To that
1:24:37
couldn't it be a kind of Pascal's wager. Do you do you think I'm saying that we can't, that we can be certain. I'm not saying we, certainly has nothing to do with it. I'm thinking if you're if you're thinking about in terms of certainty, you're still trapped by one of these at least with presuppositions. Certainly has nothing to do with it all I'm saying is, is it rational for me to believe that you exist. And, and it's a long, it's a long answer
1:25:03
to why it is, but I just think without but without, to do the inquiry, to do the inquiry, we would be saying yeah, this would be a classic example of the kind of belief. That we would be interested to know, yeah, why is it rational to believe that other people exist. All I'm saying is if you convince me that it's not rational that's a big that's a be a life-changing event for me. Because then they're all these things that make no sense for why I'm doing them you know.
1:25:32
I could have, I could imagine a Solipsist saying to you of course, I realize there's a problem there. But I can imagine yeah, but I can imagine a Solipsist saying to himself, well I'm just playing a video game with myself. I'm playing with myself it's my mind is this little video game. I don't know where it came from but I'm having fun all about myself, talking to Bill Talbott and playing other games on my little machine in my mind. Yeah, and I say you know
1:26:06
it would be really sad if that were the only aspiration you had for your life. Now you're a solid system that's the only aspiration you have for your life, and to me I just say it's really sad.
1:26:17
I think let's consider another alternative just be open to it, in other words. I'm not let's be open to the possibility that you've misunderstood rationality and so your misunderstanding has trapped you in that world of video games. I think I can, I mean let me venture this thesis then. To see if I can get this difference between you and the pragmatist sharp. See if you agree with this so, for me the pragmatists, they like you think we should get rid of this quest for certainty.
1:26:52
They think we should focus, we should really focus on mistake correcting rationality, right. But your, but your idea is their change to the conception of truth just is insane right, it just throws them off of the proper path. And what they would emphasize is well, look what we can really talk about is justification. You can't really say anything about truth. So let's just talk about whether our beliefs are justified, and maybe you would too. Maybe you would agree with that too.
1:27:25
But you're saying their talk of justification necessarily presupposes some thicker intuitive conception of truth, which they don't want to have. Yeah. And further, here and here I think is the real point, their idea of what's rational and here that maybe this is why you hate Wittenstein,
1:27:49
their idea of what's rational when it hits bedrock doesn't get grounded in the world out there. What it gets grounded in, is a sociological fact about the inquirers, who are inquiring. So they're going to say yeah, of course, there's going to be norms of rationality. But at the end of the day, there's nothing that you can get those norms of, there's no question of what would ultimately ground those norms of rationality other than some cultural facts about
1:28:21
the community of inquirers that we're dealing with. And you want to deny that claim, you want to say rationality ultimately gets grounded not in a sociological fact, but in some fact about the world. Ah, that's very that's a really nice way of putting it. And because you did it so briefly, there are potential ways of misunderstanding it. But what I want to do is, I want to say but there's also a
1:28:44
potential way of understanding it as being correct and here's a quick. Every time you say because if it gets grounded arbitrarily in some sociological facts. Then it's a kind of relativism right. And what you have is, you say well we have our conception of rationality, and whatever it is you grounded, and you tell me what you're grounded in and then i'll tell you oh and okay here's this
1:29:05
other kind of this is other community and theirs is grounded. And you're telling me that neither one of them is better than the other they're both just grounded in certain kinds of sociological facts. Well, I think, I think the pragmatists would respond like this it's not that I'm saying, truth is relative, I'm saying there's not a whole lot to say about truth, that what we should talk about is
1:29:28
justification. Yeah, I'm just like I just translated rationality. Rationality is absolutely key. If rationality, that's why I said earlier their their relatives about truth, and relatives about rationality. And both of them are really equally nihilistic, because ultimately then, what you say, is. There could be this other culture or whatever, and in this other culture, I mean again I'll just you know, I did do my kinds of examples in our culture. And by the way I'm not sure
1:29:57
which culture we live in to tell you the truth. But in our culture the evidence that we have is evidence for evolution, in this other culture it's a religious culture, the evidence that's the very same evidence is evidence for creationism. And what's interesting about rationality
1:30:15
is that if you understand rationality, those but can't both be true. Because that evidence relation
1:30:25
isn't something that you can just arbitrarily fix.
1:30:32
But I would agree, the problem is, though when you have these two different norms of rationality what to appeal to? Ah yes, what to appeal to. So you want to get outside but I think that what's, what's really fascinating to me is that the
1:30:49
what I would recommend instead is let's do some exploration, let's do some exploration. Let's try to understand better what's involved you know in making judgments about rationality and so on and see where that leads. As opposed to some place you want to stand outside and say here I have a firm place to stand and from here i can adjudicate the disputes. But you can't ever get outside. on the other hand, some people say yeah it is all arbitrary. And I'm just thinking
1:31:21
again for right now, because I don't, we don't have time to do all the exploration. Well let's not just assume that it is from the beginning. Let's actually do the exploration and see where it leads. But if the pragmatist agrees with you that getting outside isn't the right thing. That's why they say stop talking about truth, talk about justification. That's why I'm right with them for so much, you know. I'm right with them until they just then say
1:31:42
oh throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know. And yeah I appreciate that, I think that's clear.
1:31:53
Yes thanks that's helpful. Okay.
1:32:03
The thing that struck me when you keep referring to what it would be like for phenomenologists to take their view really seriously is that on any of these views where
1:32:21
the other is just the figment of my own imagination or my mind.
1:32:29
I have no reason to care, okay, no reason to send money for example. And so it seems as if though as though there's a there's a kind of a an ethical commitment, an ethical commitment to take to
1:32:50
taking things as true.
1:32:57
That the phenomenological approach misses. I'm not sure I'm putting this very well. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to say is there you can say there are all sorts of things including our ethical beliefs that actually when we explore them we find they actually are committed to their things being true. And it's not that we're committed to being infallible about anything. But it makes it's really important and
1:33:26
if somebody throws that out they lose something really important. You know that's exactly right and I agree with you 100. but it's not just ethical in other words if they were just ethical. Then you would be sort of understating because that you find it every, every area you find places where it actually makes a difference in my self-understanding, my understanding of my life, and so on. Of whether or not certain things are true and then
1:33:59
somebody says to me yeah but, Bill you realize you're not infallible. You could be mistaken, you could be, you know, hooked up to an experience machine. And I say yeah I know and if that's true,
1:34:11
it's tragedy. It's absolute tragedy because then my life has much much less significance than i was hoping it would have. And
1:34:23
for the what blows me away is that well you know people who say, well then it's just you, just live your life like it's a video game. And I think
1:34:38
that would be like, I mean, I might play a video game for like an hour or two. And then after that it would be total despair. If I really believed it. Bill, I have a question. Yeah. But you seem to be using the concept of tragedy as if it has some kind of cognitive aspect to it.
1:35:05
Am I interpreting you right, you're using it as some kind of pointer to truth. Well, I mean. The fact that something would lead to tragedy is evidence against it.
1:35:18
Well I just, it's just to, I mean you could use. I actually do have it with a cognitive aspect, that's right, yeah. You know I mean but however people use tragedy that you should be able to recognize, oh this would really be tragic. So in other words I don't want to actually go into my cognitive theory of tragedies. I don't think it depends on it, but you're exactly right. Oh yeah for me, I mean in other words for me, it's really true
1:35:48
that Socrates is a tragic figure in philosophy, because he represents something that he himself can't understand. He represents a kind of rational inquiry and he can't recognize that it's rational.
1:36:03
Now it seems to be that there's something behind this. If tragedy has a cognitive aspect to it, that it points us away from, well that it it tells us something about reality.
1:36:18
It's, it seems to me that behind that is a presupposition that the world isn't tragic in some sense. Some presupposition about the nature of reality that it's non-tragic. Why does it have to be a presupposition? Maybe it's just it because we're saying so far
1:36:37
I mean, there's a lot that's tragic, but so far the whole thing isn't utterly tragic. That's just it's not a presupposition, it's just like I'm saying, so far I'm still alive, you know. I could have died before now, so far I'm still alive. It wasn't a presupposition of anything that I'd be alive now but as long as I can keep going, and still avoid tragedy I'll keep trying. I agree with that but anti-natalists would would jump right now on this claim. That there's something
1:37:12
non-tragic about life. Oh well, I mean people can disagree yeah, no. Yeah that's interesting.
1:37:28
Well maybe I've worn everybody out now. What do you think? Can i ask you one more question? Sure. Okay you don't, I noticed ,you don't talk about inference to the best explanation.
1:37:42
Oh I meant inference the best explanation I meant to mention it. Inference it's even called inference. There are no inferences, so when you say inference the best explanation. I'd say to you oh come on, if that's your explanation of science you've got to allow for what happens in science all the time which is they threw out some of the evidence. Inference would be you start from the evidence you
1:38:04
go to the best explanation. But if anybody who's ever done scientific experiments, particularly when you're like calibrating your equipment, sometimes you get these really anomalous results. And the best explanation the results would be the world is chaotic, but that what you should do is throw out some of the data, because your your measuring instruments weren't well calibrated.
1:38:27
So if you say explanatory reasoning understood in this holistic way, which I think of as equilibrium reasoning. I'm right with you but if you say inference the best explanation. You're just showing the influence of this paradigm again. It's no inference. You know and then the big, the bigger thing is, there are no inferences. And that that's part of that comes from my earlier discussion
1:38:50
with with Russ, where once you realize that no matter what kind of reasoning somebody gives you. It's always open whether the rational thing to do is to accept the conclusion or give up one of the premises or something like that. There are no inferences it's always that kind of thinking, which to me is holist thinking. You know and it's what makes the most sense. Thank you. Thank you
1:39:21
folks are we in is this ending. Yeah, thank you very much and the questions were excellent, and they really gave me great opportunities to help you know sort of explain more my view. And they showed that you are really thinking and I love it when we have a discussion where I can get people thinking, that's my that's actually my goal in life. Thank you for a wonderful talk.
1:39:51
And you can see why my life would be a total tragedy if there weren't any other people, that's my one of my main goals in life is to get other people thinking and then somebody persuades me you're all just figments of my imagination, and you can't even think. Oh no wonder I'd be suicidal, okay.
1:40:12
I look forward to the book. What? Yes Okay yeah, well. What was the title again? It's called Learning From Our Mistakes, so you see now you'll never you're learning from our mistakes you'll never forget that. And then it's Epistemology For The Real World and I didn't really talk too much about the epistemology for the real world, except to show you how irrelevant the real world a lot of epistemology is western epistemology. But you know I will talk in that
1:40:38
book about all sorts of, you know like, racist and sexist beliefs. Things like that irrational beliefs that western epistemology until relatively recently has had nothing to say about it all.
1:40:53
You know. Well thank you, Bill and I know everyone else agrees with me, we really appreciate your taking the time to present to us and we really do. Anyone else want to chime in before we end this session. I thank you, thank you so much. Yeah so much. , Thanks for coming, a lot of fun, thank you very much Bill and I hope we see you again. Oh yeah sure. Who knows yeah I mean. I'm well maybe at the northwest philosophy conference next year.
1:41:30
Yeah we'll see what happens I mean yeah, life is going to get back to normal. I think so again you see, I am sort of an optimist you know so these people who think life is overwhelmingly tragic. They probably just you know say yeah. You know Talbott but he's incurable. Okay thank you and everyone take care and I'm gonna send an email later just a debriefing.
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