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Openness to View
Nov. 9th, 2004 01:32 amIf the use of 3rd person facts makes sense only insofar as they are 1st person-knowable, then only things we can 1st-person know (to talk of one thing we do with one kind of thing--a fact--that people call "3rd person") are 3rd person facts. Then the perspectives are continuous. And they are so not for a metaphysical reason, but from the way we talk about these things, or, one might say, from the way we interact with certain posited entities. But in ordinary language philosophy, there is another 3rd person that consists of the data about how we and others use words. All the same relations will hold here: if we want to talk about knowing, and about what is a fact, the things that are facts will just be the ones we take them to be. (What other words do we use philosophically (bad sense) to stimulate 1st/3rd person problems?)
I want to find in continuity of perspectives reasons to support conducting one's relationships in a certain way. I want to say that Hume should act the same within his study as without. We cannot make sense of how we would use the facts the external world skeptic tells us we cannot, in principle, know about because we cannot in principle know about them, and just what it means to be a fact is to be something we can know, take into account in our actions, etc. So it makes no sense--and probably leads to a strange inconsistency in behavior--for one to try to take the purported unknowable fact, say, that one is really a brain in a vat, into account in one's actions. If the unknowable fact is consistent with what we experience either in light of it or in ignorance of it, it simply isn't a fact, even potentially. When would we call someone worried about some fact? Certainly not when it makes no difference for him. If it doesn't, and he claims to be worried, he is mistaking something factlike for a fact.
In experience, I find myself skeptical when others act differently in some environments than in others. Because I am going outside the room to see how things are as to some hypothesis I'm forming, and the results are inconclusive. What I am skeptical about is whether some things are facts. If they are reflected inconsistently in others' behavior, they are not. (I am looking to see how others, if they do, take them into account.) But there are many ways of taking something into account, depending on what thing we're talking about. So the results are often inconclusive, for we're guessing not only how someone might take something into account in a given circumstance. But if our ...theory is, as it were, ...underdetermined by the data--then both it and its negation are consistent with our experience. And then? But how we will act whether we believe one or the other will be different (presuming this is some belief about, say, others' mental states). The indeterminacy might be troubling in a way that external-world skepticism is not; and the difference is that we could imagine what it would be to find out for sure.
Certain hypotheses about other minds demand more consistent behavior than others.
I seem to have lost the injunction I wanted. To prevent preventable skepticism through openness. Because the continuity of what we can know and what is knowable somehow demands it.
I want to find in continuity of perspectives reasons to support conducting one's relationships in a certain way. I want to say that Hume should act the same within his study as without. We cannot make sense of how we would use the facts the external world skeptic tells us we cannot, in principle, know about because we cannot in principle know about them, and just what it means to be a fact is to be something we can know, take into account in our actions, etc. So it makes no sense--and probably leads to a strange inconsistency in behavior--for one to try to take the purported unknowable fact, say, that one is really a brain in a vat, into account in one's actions. If the unknowable fact is consistent with what we experience either in light of it or in ignorance of it, it simply isn't a fact, even potentially. When would we call someone worried about some fact? Certainly not when it makes no difference for him. If it doesn't, and he claims to be worried, he is mistaking something factlike for a fact.
In experience, I find myself skeptical when others act differently in some environments than in others. Because I am going outside the room to see how things are as to some hypothesis I'm forming, and the results are inconclusive. What I am skeptical about is whether some things are facts. If they are reflected inconsistently in others' behavior, they are not. (I am looking to see how others, if they do, take them into account.) But there are many ways of taking something into account, depending on what thing we're talking about. So the results are often inconclusive, for we're guessing not only how someone might take something into account in a given circumstance. But if our ...theory is, as it were, ...underdetermined by the data--then both it and its negation are consistent with our experience. And then? But how we will act whether we believe one or the other will be different (presuming this is some belief about, say, others' mental states). The indeterminacy might be troubling in a way that external-world skepticism is not; and the difference is that we could imagine what it would be to find out for sure.
Certain hypotheses about other minds demand more consistent behavior than others.
I seem to have lost the injunction I wanted. To prevent preventable skepticism through openness. Because the continuity of what we can know and what is knowable somehow demands it.
