Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Final assignment

I have submitted my final assignment, hopefully I have made a respectable fist of answering the question!

I have also joined the OUDCE Oxford Philosophical Society, which should keep me in the loop.
http://oxfordphilsoc.org/index.html

Maybe I will be able to particpate in a course next term, but work commitments make this quite challenging during January to March. In the meantime I will also have a look for other online courses as I would very much like to continue with some formal study in philosophy.

Authenticity

When Prichard says that real life is clearly better than a Brain In Vat ('BIV') life, my immediate reaction was no, perhaps in fact it doesn't matter, at least perhaps not for the reason given. It could only matter to someone who is outside of the scenario. If my life is actually a BIV or 'Matrix' type setup then I'm not sure I really mind! The simulation is so good that I have no complaints.

It is not authenticity that turns me off the BIV scenario, it is the possibility of deception or manipulation and the quality of the copy or simulation. If governments decided that it was preferable to turn all citizens into BIVs, lack of authenticity is fairly low down the list of reasons why I would be uncomfortable.

If BIV was the only option - the only game in town so to speak, then it would be silly to "mind" that life wasn't "real", again we would not reject it for lack of authenticity.

Going back to Prichard's example of the two books (one a copy and one the original) - in many ways it is silly to prefer the original book, just as it is a bit silly to pay tens of millions for a work of art when you can purchase an indistinguishable copy for much less. Again, I think it is the deception or manipulation involved in copies which is the issue. Is it really rational to prefer the authentic book if it is completely indistinguishable from the original, and always will be?

Friday, November 23, 2012

Wittgenstein and solipsism

In Philosophical Investigations W. says:
"But in a fairy tale the pot too can see and hear" (Certainly; but it can also talk.)
But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense. - It is not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a pot talks?"
"What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel? Is it that my education has led me to it by drawing my attention to feelings in myself? That I recognise that there is something there (in me) which I can call "pain" without getting into conflict with the way other people use this word? -I do not transfer my idea to stones, plants etc.....
...Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains."

So W. might be saying that we cannot say that a zombie experiences pain, it is either false or meaningless. But I think that depends on whether we judge a zombie to be a fictional entity. I do, and in this sense I would say that it is either false or nonsense to talk about zombie's having feelings if it is meant to be a non-fictional account of reality. But zombie's do, in many respects "behave like humans" and people who do not believe that they are fictional entities could therefore talk of them feeling pain in a non-false or a sensical manner.

So I think the key question is whether we believe that zombies are fictional or real, and for me that is a scientific question. As I have said it is not really worthy of much serious consideration because we know why the concept was "created", how it is used in what contexts, and of course we have no evidence for their existence.

People who do believe in zombies do not fully appreciate how the concept was created, why it is used and in what contexts, and have not mastered the basics of the scientific method.

Zombies and the problem of other minds

How dow we know that zombies don't exist? How do we tell the difference between zombies and humans?

Almost no-one with a decent education seriously believes that there are zombies roaming the streets, unless perhaps you happen to come across the filming of a science fiction movie or it's Halloween.

If I were to encounter someone who tried to argue for the existence of zombies I would treat their arguments in the same way as I treat the arguments for the existence of god(s). They are impossible to completely disprove, but there is no good reason to believe that they are true. Furthermore, if someone did believe in zombies (or BIV as a true picture of reality) then I would assess their reasoning skills as deficient. Hume's rejection of miracles tells us that they are probably under a misapprehension.

Such beliefs are a good touch-stone for assessing whether someone has mastered the scientific method. It also tells us whether they have "grown up" in rational terms and moved on from pre-historic theist or deist myths.

I concede however that I am not really addressing the question of what criteria I use to judge that zombies don't exist.

I suspect that the reason I do not believe in zombies is inherent in what we mean by "zombie". A "zombie" is not a real entity, at least as far as I am concerned. The origin of zombie as a word seems to go back to West Indian origins and is now often associated with Haitian voodoo beliefs. As with all religious stories, they were invented to scare the credulous into submitting to the power of priests.
So the criteria I use to judge if zombies exist is the same criteria I use for all beliefs in the supernatural. In a sense I don't need any criteria, the default position is that they don't exist and I am unlikely to give any serious consideration to the possibility that they do exist.

The argument from Analogy

Q - Why do you think that the argument from analogy doesn’t work? In particular why is it a bad inductive argument?

The argument from analogy is used to justify our belief in the existence of other minds apart from our own.

The argument from analogy runs as follows: I infer from the fact that certain mental states of my mind accompany physical states of my body that my mind and body are 'connected' i.e. there is a "symbiotic" link between my mental states and my bodily behaviour. I can observe other bodies behaving in a similar fashion to my own, I therefore infer that those other bodies have minds which are similarly connected with those bodies.

The argument is inductive by nature, it infers the existence of other minds from the similarity of bodily behaviour. From the specific case of my own nature I make a generalisation about other people's nature.

There are a number of potential weaknesses with the argument from analogy:
1. Challenges based on dualism - how we know that my mind and body are both distinct but "mine". We cannot experience anything other than mental states - physical entities cannot be experienced directly, only indirectly (the indirect realism argument). Therefore, if we cannot be sure of the existence of our own bodies, we cannot infer the existence of other people's minds from the un-knowable relationship between my own mind and body.
2. Challenges based on the supposed weakness of the form of inductive arguments (as discussed in the previous module). Why should we suppose that other people are the same as we are?
3. Radical scepticism about the existence of an external world. We cannot prove that an external world exists at all, therefore we cannot prove that other people exist at all. The Brain In Vat argument is an example of this form of challenge. This argument is similar in nature to 1.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

More thoughts on universal laws

My feeling is that if the concept of gravity becomes 'petrified' or a priori knowledge, then it must in effect become some form of 'law'. It does seem to become both nomological and axiomatic, both in the way we use the term and in its logical / rational meaning.

I am suggesting that statements such as "the law of gravity is not universally true" takes on similarities with statements such as "2+2=5". We can understand the statement but we instantly know it is false, in a scientific sense of false, just as we know 2+2=5 is false in a mathematical sense but still has a kind of meaning.

By law I mean something that is universally true, and as such any rejection of the law involves a contradiction. A universal law is a necessary rather than a contingent truth.

My understanding is that Hume wouldn't deny the existence of gravity, but he would deny that it is, in any sense, necessarily true. He would say that we appear to see a necessary connection between dropping an apple and it falling towards the Earth, but in fact this connection has been formed through habit. We have no other reason to expect that gravity will continue to apply in the future other than habit or constant conjunction of the ideas.

Having just disagreed with my favourite philosopher (Hume) I must admit that I am changing the rules slightly by which we use the term necessary. In effect I think I am trying to argue that there are either more types of knowledge than the traditional ideas of just a a posteriori and a priori, there is something in between, or empirical facts can mutate into a priori facts in the case of universal laws.
I agree that there is a lot of similarity with this and Kant's metaphysical ideas about space and time, but there are also significant differences.

The question I suppose is, what is my justification for saying that the law of gravity is a universal law that is necessarily true. There could be a number of justifications such as for example:
  • the weight of evidence for past events
  • the success of predictions using the law
  • the lack of any reason or evidence to suppose it to be false
  • a foundational belief
  • an inate idea
  • common sense
If we reject all of the above and stick with Hume, one further thought springs to mind. Why is Hume happy to accept that 2+2=4 will always be true if he is not happy to accept that gravity is a universal law for our universe?

'De re' and 'De dicto' modalities

There is certainly a lot of food for thought in this module, it is one of my favourites so far.

"What are we to make of these expressions of laws (axioms, properly basic propositions)?
We could either treat them as de re necessities - necessities that exist 'in the world'. Necessary relations between objects or events in the world. Or, we can conclude something else:...."

I hadn't come across the distinction between de re and de dicto before.

Wikipedia defines de dicto as 'of the word' and de re 'of the thing'. According to Stanford Encyclopedia, the distinction can be drawn in several different contexts. I suspect that the context of epistemological modality is most relevant here?

Stanford gives the following explanation: "Humans have a natural tendency to modalize. A tendency to think about, assert, and evaluate statements of possibility and necessity. To modalize is to either entertain a modal thought or to make a modal judgment. Modal thoughts and judgements either explicitly or derivatively involve the concept of possibility, necessity, or essence. Prima facie there exists a plurality of kinds of modality. Our natural discourse and theoretical discourse allows for various things to be spoken of as being epistemically possible (necessary), logically possible (necessary), conceptually possible (necessary), metaphysically possible (necessary), physically possible (necessary). And even when we speak of things being physically possible (necessary) we speak of physical possibility in a number of different ways, such as the difference between theoretical physical possibility and technological possibility. Although philosophically controversial, we intuitively distinguish between de re and de dicto modality. De re modality is modality that is predicated of an object, and attaches to the object independently of language. De dicto modality is modality that is predicated of a statement, and attaches to the statement."

My thoughts are that, taking gravity as an example, once it becomes a universal law it must (attempt to) express something about the world. I am therefore leaning towards the de re modality. However, having taken on board that Wittgenstein argues there are no de re necessities, I am left wondering if this is correct.

Science could be characterised as a search for the truth about the physical world. In a similar fashion, philosophy could be characterised as truths about something else - knowledge, reasoning, virtue etc. In my view, most of "ologies" are not just seeking "models" which abductively are "best fits" to experience, or useful to us in one way or another. What we are trying to do is explain the way the world actually is, i.e. arrive at necessary and not contingent truths. The question then comes back to what do we mean by necessity?

If there is in fact a real world out there, which operates according to universal laws, then surely it must be possible in theory to find out what these laws are. Once we have done this, our work is done. On this basis, I think an argument can be constructed for de re necessity?

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Inductive and deductive reasoning and gravity

I am inclined to think that if we accept certain physical laws as foundational beliefs that are necessarily true, then the argument for unsupported objects falling towards the Earth does seem to become more deductive in nature. The issue then is how you justify your foundational belief in gravity without relying on inductive reasoning.

Hume would say that just because we have always in the past witnessed unsupported objects falling down, it does not necessarily follow that they will in future. We assume that they will, through habit, as this is useful to going through every-day life.

Perhaps the solution is to reclassify the law of gravity from a "matter of fact" to a "relation of ideas". To some extent this is what Kant seems to do with his metaphysics. Space and time, for Kant, are not matters of fact but are a priori ideas which give the structure to our experiences.
Could the law of gravity be regarded as inherent in our idea of space? I personally think this is doubtful, but I still want to be able to say that the law of gravity is somehow "necessarily true".
Is the law of gravity falsifiable, in a Karl Popper sense? My initial response answer is "yes, obviously it is" and as such it is a scientific fact. But could we really find evidence to falsify the law? I think the answer may in fact be "no". If we were to find circumstances where objects did not obey the law of gravity we would not abandon the law but would modify it for those unique circumstances. An example I have in mind is quantum mechanics, where some quantum objects do not in fact obey the law of gravity.

So in one sense I don't think the law of gravity is falsifiable, at least in the world that we live in on a non-quantum scale. Anybody who claimed to witness an apple which didn't fall towards the Earth when they dropped it would not be taken as having found evidence against gravity, we would have to assume that they were under a misapprehension, or there were some other physical conditions preventing the apple from falling of which we were not aware. Evidence for absence of gravity must take on the nature of Hume's idea of a miracle, where the natural order is temporarily suspended. Hume rejects miracles as being, by definition, virually impossible.

In conclusion, I personally think there are some physical laws which are 'necessarily true' because they are how we make sense of the world. This is not to say that they cannot be modified or extended in certain unique circumstances, but for "regular" circumstances they must apply.
Could we then have a third form of argument which sits somewhere between induction and deduction? What would it be called?

Lawrence