The main features of Cartesianism are:
(1) the use of methodical doubt as a tool for testing beliefs and reaching certainty.
– A Companion to Epistemology, p 57
It seems odd to me that keiths, who denies the possibility of certainty, is a champion of Cartesian skepticism.
A Cartesian skeptic will argue that no empirical proposition about anything other than one’s own mind and its contents is sufficiently warranted because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it.
… A Cartesian requires certainty.
– A Companion to Epistemology, p 457
keiths is not a Cartesian Skeptic.
Cartesian scepticism, more impressed with Descartes’ argument for scepticism than his own reply, holds that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical proposition about anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason, roughly put, is that there is a legitimate doubt about all such propositions because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some cause (an evil spirit, for example) which is radically different from the objects which we normally think affect our senses.
A Companion to Epistemology, p 457
keiths is not a Cartesian Skeptic.
Is it even possible to be Cartesian Skeptic?
KN,
I’d encourage you to think about it some more. It’s not that difficult.
If our perceptions are generally veridical, then we can say that “the universe is 13.7 billion years old” is scientific fact, and that “the universe is less than 10,000 years old” is myth.
If our perceptions aren’t generally veridical, then all bets are off. If so, them’s the breaks. Reality is what it is, whether you like it or not.
I don’t see how it’s a retreat from anything that matters in human life. What specifically are you thinking of?
No. See the last part of this comment.
That position is profoundly anti-intellectual. It’s also self-defeating, because insights gained in one context can turn out to have unanticipated applications in another. That’s one reason why nations fund basic, as well as applied, scientific research.
Luckily, the world is full of people who are too smart to take your attitude.
keiths,
This is full of non sequiturs.
Especially this.
Alan,
Make your case, then.
keiths,
But it’s obvious. Honest!
keiths,
Hahaha. We’ve already talked about your heidi reduction, bill. She’s coming unless she isn’t. And you know something unless you don’t. Excellent.
Well you don’t know anything about this stuff, mary. That’s pretty clear.
walto,
If you’re hoping to be mistaken for a philosopher, it’s best not to contradict yourself left and right.
Which is it? Is my position impossible “to state or even contemplate”, or is it easily stated in a short sentence?
Hint: it’s the latter, and here’s how it’s done:
Please, enlighten us as to how skepticism with regard to the veridicality of the senses can have any unanticipated applications in any context. What are the possible implications of Cartesian skepticism? What avenues of inquiry might be opened up as a result of adopting your view?
I’m basically inclined to think that linguistic meaning is constituted by the norms of application in perceptual experience and the norms of inferential roles.
The meaning of “dog” consists in its being applied correctly to some objects and incorrectly to others, along with the material inferences in which the concept “dog” appears (e.g “if that’s a dog, it might bite me if I seem threatening to it” and “if that’s not a dog, then it won’t bark”)
If there’s a difference between know and know*, it would have to be in the circumstances of application, the material inference rules in which the words appear, or both. But thus far keiths hasn’t shown us any of those semantic differences. The asterisk seems idle. If it makes no difference in our discourse or thought, then why should it be accepted — let alone insisted upon?
By the way, it’s never been part of my view that Cartesian skepticism can be refuted. I am confident that it cannot be. My view rather has been that Cartesian skepticism relies on assumptions that we have no reason to accept. If one were to accept those assumptions, then the irrefutable conclusion does of course follow. But there’s no reason why those assumptions ought to be accepted.
Haha. I never said “your position” was impossible to state or even contemplate. I said your asterisked sentences are. And, uh, they ARE.
“Your position” OTOH, is easy to state and contemplate, as I said above it’s the old hat whack position that one must antecedently know that one’s source of knowledge is reliable in order to know anything else. And, since you obviously didn’t get this the last dozen times, I’ll repeat again, that it’s both as stupid and as irrefutable as the claim that Napoleon’s Ghost used to, but no longer occupies Patrick.
What I do love about you, Alexandra, is that you simultaneously insist that you don’t know anything of interest while being nevertheless hellbent on constantly correcting everybody on every single thing they post. As you (now, finally) admit you don’t even know your own name (though you earlier insisted you did), maybe you could stop sermonizing for five minutes?
Anyhow, Lonnie, you are my favorite know-nothing know-it-all…in spite of everything.
Yes, I agree. If every knowledge statement is undetermined in the manner he claims, then nobody knows anything. Period. And if that’s right Jojo should just bite the bullet and admit that s/he doesn’t know anything at all and forget about this “know*” nonsense. And we should see quite a bit more modesty from his/her corner than s/he’s ever displayed on this site to date.
Well, since our perceptions are generally veridical*, we’re in good shape.
Where “veridical*” means “establishing the four-way relation between perceptual variants, perceptual invariance, bodily variants, and bodily invariance”. It’s because perception normally does establish this four-way relation that it makes any sense to distinguish perception from hallucinations and dreams, and to say that we can make sense of these distinctions is just what it means to say that perception is veridical*. If perception were not veridical*, none of us could ever distinguish between perceiving and hallucinating.
Presently I’m reading Guenther’s Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. In it she describes how social deprivation and sensory deprivation often do lead to inmates becoming unhinged from reality. Hallucinations, delusions, and perceptual errors are common; inmates are deprived of the ability to distinguish between what is objective and subjective. They’re no longer able to distinguish between perceiving and hallucinating, between when someone is talking to them and when they’re hearing voices. (It’s horrific, and she does an excellent job of arguing that solitary confinement is a kind of torture.)
If it weren’t the case that we can distinguish between normal and pathological functioning of our sensorimotory systems, Guenther’s descriptions of the psychological harms of solitary confinement would have no traction.
There is a certain irony in a supposedly Cartesian skeptic showing very little of the epistemic humility that has long been the distinguishing characteristic of skeptics from Sextus Empiricus through Montaigne to Hume.
No, it is not. Gawd.
No, I didn’t. I clearly stated that I consulted a number of sources, only one of which was the one I chose that quote from.
keiths:
Mung:
Make your case, then.
I dismiss the claims you make that you cannot defend.
No, you didn’t.
You wrote:
No, we’re talking about whether we can always express doubt. If there is one thing that is certain, is that we can always choose to doubt.
Do you claim there is any one thing that is beyond all doubt, keiths?
No, it doesn’t. And further, yet more reason to believe that you are not a Cartesian Skeptic.
Wow. Just wow.
What is the good argument for Cartesian Skepticism? Do you actually have one that does not beg the question?
Alan, a demon may be causing you to believe that keiths actually exists and has a compelling argument that there is no external world.
I just love this one.
How can we know that we are being honest with ourselves?
This seems to be the root of the problem.
1. How do we know that or senses tell us anything about the external world?
2. How do we test whether or not our senses are veridical?
3. How do we know that or perceptions tell us anything about the external world?
4. How do we test whether or not our perceptions are veridical?
5. What is the difference between sense and perception?
6. Why believe at all that an external world exists?
keiths:
What is the problem? Is it our senses or our perceptions?
Can you defend your claim that sense and perception are identical?
In the Elon Musk thread keiths was claiming that it is our senses that are not veridical.
Now he has begun to claim that it is our perceptions which are not veridical.
What does he really think?
Mung,
Jesus seems to enjoy watching you fail, again and again. At the very least, he does nothing to prevent it. Are you sure he loves you?
Alan was too lazy to read the Musk thread, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.
Good grief, keiths.
KN,
I’m showing enough ‘epistemic humility’ for both of us. Remember, I don’t think that either you or I know anything about the external world. How could we, when we don’t even know that our senses are veridical?
It’s your position, not mine, that lacks epistemic humility.
Does keiths know the difference between sense and perception?.
What you wrote is:
KN,
I’ve already addressed this issue. Why do you keep repeating the same confused points?
From July 18th:
KN:
keiths:
KN,
Come on, KN. The asterisk makes all the difference in the world.
I don’t know that my cat is sleeping on the bed, but I know* it.
If the “circumstances of application” were different — that is, if I knew that my senses were veridical — then I would actually know that she is sleeping on the bed.
This isn’t difficult.
KN,
Your position has been all over the map. I’ll summarize in a later comment.
KN,
Um, KN — if I could tell you what the unanticipated applications were, then they wouldn’t be unanticipated, would they?
But history is replete with accidental discoveries and with discoveries whose applications were not recognized until later.
As I said:
So Mung, what side of what issue were you planning to bet your $10,000 on? It was left totally unclear.
Just pointless navel gazing.
My response from last month is still pertinent:
keiths June 12, 2016 at 9:17 am
Alan,
1. Some of us are curious about the world, even when the questions we ask have no obvious practical consequences or applications.
2. Some of us like to separate truth from falsehood and justified beliefs from unjustified ones, and this desire extends to beliefs with no apparent practical import.
3. There may be unanticipated benefits to considering these questions. For example, the awareness that we might be living in a simulation is stimulating physicists (e.g. Martin Savage) to think about how we might actually detect this (by observing the behavior of high-energy cosmic rays, in Savage’s case).
Who knows what the long-term implications might be? If we’re living in a simulation, perhaps we can learn to hack it from the inside — for our benefit.
It’s real uncertainty, not faux uncertainty. If you disagree, you’re welcome to give us a definitive answer, along with your justification.
I’ve given reasons above.
Non-sequitur and insulting. (Par for the course.) Curiosity drives science. Curiosity is unaffected whether a curious person adopts your consequence-free stance or ignores it.
Non sequitur and insulting. (Par for the course.) People can make judgements without needing to adopt your stance on certainty. One merely needs to be pragmatic.
I wonder if Martin Savage would consider it important to read your pretentious verbiage before putting his lab coat on. I suspect not.
Well, sure. Let’s all get to work now! You never know! So, what’s the plan?
I can’t disagree with something that is not even wrong. When you come up with some coherent reasons to not pragmatically regard evidence from sensory inputs including shared experience and so on as provisionally reliable, then maybe I’ll start taking you seriously.
Nope. Reasons*, maybe! 🙂
I moved a few comments from this thread and the “What is the Plan” thread to Guano. With Elizabeth absent and hotshoe_ nowhere to be seen the testosterone level is affecting the discourse. I don’t mind, personally, but She will one day return wielding her terrible swift sword.
The rules are reasonably clear. If you’re not sure when commenting, get in touch with your spiritual side and ask “WWED?”
That seems right to me as well.
I know that Cartesian skepticism is a science-stopper, because I have, in fact, made careful study of Descartes, Hume, Kant, and also Barry Stroud, and Michael Williams.
The only reason why you don’t believe that skepticism is a science-stopper is because of this meaningless distinction you’ve invented between knowledge and knowledge* that makes sense only to yourself.
The guanoed comments can be found here.
Here’s the full exchange that KN is referring to:
keiths, to phoodoo:
KN:
keiths:
keiths,
Do you think there are lurkers out there following this stuff?😨
Lizzie, the Abominable Snowman, and My Little Pony.
Mythical beings love it.
Glen Davidson
Asks Alan, who is following this stuff closely.
Don’t shatter my illusions. Lizzie is real. If we only say thé right words she’ll reappear!
KN, now:
That’s odd. It made sense to you back on June 12th:
KN,
You’re tripping over your own shoelaces. Isn’t it time to slow down and think things through?
keiths,
I find that our uses of “knowledge” and “the senses” are sufficiently different that I’m constantly seeing us as talking past one another.
On one interpretation of your view, it entails “external world agnosticism” (EWA).
EWA says that we should be agnostic about whether there is an external world, because we cannot tell if our senses are veridical (in which case there is) or not (in which case there isn’t). (It’s a nice question why we shouldn’t also endorse internal world agnosticism on the same grounds.)
We can massage the sense of “external” here to mean “what would still be the case if no cognitive agent existed”, just to get away from the implicit Cartesian dualism of most ways of framing the skeptical problem.
It follows from EWA that we’re not justified in believing that we directly perceive physical things. (It is not clear what the advocate of EWA thinks we do perceive, then “sense-data” has been the popular option in the history of philosophy.)
In contrast, I defend direct realism in philosophy of perception and I think that we really do (fallibly) many things about the world as it is. The fact that there’s an implicit certeris paribus clause of infinitely disjunctive logical possibilities only entails that I would not be entitled to my knowledge claim in all possible worlds. It does not mean that I am not entitled to claim that in the actual world I am directly perceiving physical things.
In my remark on June 12, I thought you were defending the latter view — that one I outlined in the above paragraph. But since then I’m worrying that you really mean to defend EWA. And I think that EWA is a science-stopper.
KN,
Stop making excuses.
You directly contradicted yourself, as every reader can see. You can’t even keep track of your own position.
Take a break, think things through, and come back when you have a coherent and stable position to defend.
Good grief!
KN has extended you far more consideration than you deserve. A lesson all soon learn when discussing with you is that it is pointless. You only seem interested in winning arguments.