Apr. 3rd, 2005

apolliana: (Default)
Philosophers would not have to make arguments if they what they said was clear to begin with. It seems you can either show the map of the issues, in all explicitness, upfront; or you can have a thousand specifying arguments in attendance. But in the latter the details left out in the formerl viewpoint are divided (rather artificially) into arguments, and subdivided into premises and conclusions. (If you were to advance theses in "philosophy"--when "philosophy" just lays things out in full detail--everyone would agree to them.)

Parallel: if everyone witness to some situation were to describe it in full detail--including acknowledgment of their background, perspective, etc., no one would disagree about what "really" happened. The latter might be epistemically odd: it requires you either to incorporate 3rd person sizing-up of your perspective into your perspective--; then again, common humility ("well, that's the way it seemed to me, from where I was standing") has the same effect. Enough qualifications = infallibility. But do these qualifications add "content" to beliefs or subtract it? Support for falliblism: a belief can be infallible only if it has no content. Possible response: an infallible belief would have content; a lot of content--maybe too much. But it isn't clear how much qualification we can do and still be sane, and still have "beliefs." That is, beliefs (of the kind that purport to be right about things) have an element of 3rd person-ness; but if we have to believe something, it's because we don't know for sure. God has no beliefs--but perhaps only God could articulate in full perspectival detail what everyone saw such that they would agree about what happened.
apolliana: (Default)
This is a thought I had a few weeks ago, spurred by White's inexplicable simultaneous discussion of Quine and external & internal skepticsm. It goes like this: You cannot doubt all your beliefs simultaneously (and that's what would be required by external skepticsm). There could never be evidence for or against external skepticism, because such evidence would constitute a belief. White's transcendental argument against external skepticism runs that such skepticism is based on a (Humean) picture of the world wherein our knowledge all comes by inference, and we just receive some amorphous sense-data from the world. But the picture is wrong. Beliefs do not come by inference, in at least some cases. So we can't be skeptical about them, really. (And this means we can't be skeptical about them practically. After all, I can still, as a mental exercise, "doubt" that there's a chair over there. But such doubt has no place in the ordinary scheme of doubt and justification.)

Now, if it is impossible to doubt all my beliefs simultaneouly, there must always be at least one that I don't doubt. And, on a coherentist view, it's this belief with which further candidates for belief have to "cohere." But if there is one, or even a group, or basic beliefs against which the others are tested, this looks rather foundational. On a contextualist view, there are different basic beliefs or groups of beliefs for different practices, different contexts; so the view would properly be described as a "shifting foundationalism." And then there's foundationalism, which is itself, and which for some reason no one thinks they support. I'm not sure how many people think it's necessary to foundationalism that the "founded" beliefs be derivable by inference from the "foundational" ones; but I don't see the importance of inferential relations anyway--the important thing is that we recognize that not all our beliefs require them (direct realism is possible). But neither am I sure how to describe the relations between individual beliefs on a coherentist view (except by making a hand motion to indicate "cohere"). The only sensible way to do so is to compare two and see if they contradict, in which case one belief is held firm. You'll have to make something the foundation: like the principles of the practice in which you're engaging.

Profile

apolliana: (Default)
apolliana

April 2017

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
910111213 1415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 14th, 2025 10:48 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios