Lately I’ve been reading Outline of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus collects the arguments for Skepticism as practiced by ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Since the notion of “skepticism” seems to play some small role here, I thought it would be fun to take a look at what Sextus means by it.
Sextus situates skepticism as the only reasonable response to “dogmatism”. The dogmatists he has in mind are Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism (“the Peripatetics”).
He observes, firstly, that the dogmatists all contradict one another — if Stoicism is right, then Epicureanism must be false; if Epicureanism is right, then Aristotelianism must be wrong, etc. What are we to do when dogmatism contradicts dogmatism?
Sextus then observes that none of these positions is “self-evident”, because all of them requires “going beyond the appearances” by making claims about what is “nonevident”. In order to do make claims about what is nonevident, the dogmatist must always either make a circular argument that assumes what they purport to establish or commit themselves to an infinite regress. On this basis he concludes that it is not reasonable to make claims about reality one way or the other. Instead the Skeptic endeavors to live only according to the appearances, and be guided only by what is immediately evident to the senses.
A nice corollary of Sextus’s arguments is that one cannot be a naturalist and a skeptic, since the naturalist does make positive claims about the nature of reality. Naturalism and theism effectively cancel each other out.
The dialectic between dogmatism and skepticism stretches out across the whole history of philosophy. The re-discovery of Stoicism and Epicureanism during the Renaissance re-activated the ancient quarrels between competing dogmatisms (though with a different political dimension, since by this time Aristotelianism had become, thanks to Aquinas and subsequent theologians, the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, which its entrenched power structure). So the quarrel between competing dogmatisms had a political dimension that it seemed to have lacked in antiquity. The revival of Skepticism, most notably (to my mind) with Montaigne, then leads to renewed efforts to establish dogmatism by refuting Skepticism. (This did not prevent some philosophers from attempting to integrate Christianity and skepticism, as Pierre Gassendi did.)
Descartes was, as we know, the most famous (or infamous) of attempts to refute skepticism. But as was pointed out even then, Descartes’ arguments do not avoid circularity. (I believe it was Antonin Artaud who first made this point in first, in his Objections to the Meditations. Descartes’ Reply is, to put it mildly, not convincing.)
The inconsistencies within Cartesian dogmatism led to multiple and contradicting attempts to repair it: Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Berkeley being the attempts that have since made it into the Canon (largely because they were all men). At the same time, Pierre Bayle is collecting the new Skepticism into what amounted to a new version of Outlines of Pyrrhonism for the modern era. Following on the heels of all of them, it fell to Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature to demolish all permutations of modern dogmatism by destroying their basis in Cartesianism.
Since then, the dialectic runs back and forth between competing dogmatisms and between dogmatism and skepticism. Kant was perhaps the first philosopher to even attempt a genuine via media between dogmatism and skepticism, but the fatal problems with Kant’s solution are well-known to most casual students of philosophy.
To this day it remains unclear whether there is a via media between dogmatism and skepticism. Some philosophers, including myself, think that the historical arc of pragmatism that runs from Hegel through Peirce and Dewey to Sellars should be understood as precisely an alternative to both dogmatism and skepticism. Others, of course, are not convinced. And so we have the persistence of both multiple forms of dogmatism — naturalism and theism alike — as well as new forms of skepticism.
Can a naturalist be a skeptic? Is skepticism more reasonable than any competing dogmatism? Is skepticism a viable philosophy as a way of life? Is pragmatism a dialectically stable alternative to dogmatism and to skepticism, or must it collapse into one or the other?
+1
Nice summary of the dispute.
That’s a completely absurd argument. That you quote yourself only indicates that you don’t understand how absurd it is.
For starters, “birds eye view” is a completely human term. It has nothing to do with birds. We know what we mean using that expression because it is completely human.
Secondly, we have no idea how an actual bird views the world. We are not birds. We cannot experience a birds perception. The best we can do is imagine what a birds view is. And the chances are that our imagination way off.
Alan,
You asked about the usefulness of the Sentinel Islander thought experiment. I linked to an OP that describes the thought experiment and explains its usefulness.
I can’t help you with the laziness problem. You’ll have to work that out on your own.
Indeed, I’m not objecting to thought experiments in general. Einstein’s thought experiments on near-light-speed travel are iconic examples. Also Dennett’s thought experiment with Martian scientists (I was reading his Sweet Dreams a day or two ago looking for some reference) described in chapter 2 (A Third-Person Approach to Consciousness) makes sense. Later in the chapter Chalmers zombies get a good bashing. Dennett credits Rorty as a major influence on him but I may have already mentioned that. 😉
Neil makes the point well about starting with observed reality and trying to measure aspects of it. That’s pragmatic.
“Artificial doubt”. Yes, that phrase fits with “you might be a brain-in-a-vat”.
I think that is what I am saying.
keiths,
Fine.
Neil,
You’re making my point for me. You don’t need a bird in order to assume a bird’s eye view, and you don’t need a God in order to assume what you’re calling a “God’s eye view”.
The fact that things can be objectively true does not depend on theism. You made a silly mistake, Neil.
KN,
Let’s start with the second of those. You now reject the correspondence theory of truth??
When did that happen, and why? Your philosophical views change so frequently that I despair of keeping up with them.
Indeed!
Personally, I like to have positive reasons for accepting something.
Classic. Just classic.
Is there a point there?
I have said that you have a theistic view of truth. I have not said that you are a theist, and I’m well aware that you are not.
I’ve been asking what “objectively true” means. You are unable to provide a satisfactory answer that is adequate for the way that you use truth. In particular, you are unable to provide an answer that suffices to make sense of “veridical perception”.
The issue here turns on how one thinks about linguistic meaning and how linguistic act relate (or not) to the world. If one is a representationalist, then one can think about words as directly referring to objects by standing in for them. A sentence refers to a state of affairs just as a word refers to an object.
By contrast, an inferentialist thinks that the meaning of words lies in its inferential articulation with other words, along with the appropriate conditions of application.
To use one of Brandom’s examples, a parrot does not know the word “red” means just because it will always squawk “red” when it sees something red. That’s because it can’t recognize the correctness of “if something is red, then it has a color” or the incorrectness of “if something is red, then it is heavy”. Concepts are nodes in an inferential nexus.
But on the inferentialist view, sentences can’t be taken one at a time and lined up against the world, as if one were matching stickers with empty places in a sticker-book. This because inferentialism entails semantic holism, as distinct from semantic atomism.
Now, I do think that we can make some good sense out of “correspondence” once we adopt inferentially articulated semantic holism as a theory of linguistic meaning. But it can’t be done by taking each sentence one at a time.
Rather, I think that we would need to take whole conceptual frameworks as “corresponding” to the world, and indeed doing so to varying degrees of adequacy. Some conceptual frameworks correspond to the world better than others. Or if you like, some conceptual frameworks are better maps of the world than others.
(Of course there is no perfect map, no 1:1 correspondence, except in the fictions of Borges.)
If one were to insist that “truth” must be bivalent — that it cannot come in degrees — then I would say that what I’m urging is not so much a correspondence theory of truth as it is a a correspondence theory of cognition. The thought here is that any cognitive system, if it is be successful at guiding action in an environment, must contain states that correspond to features of the environment through which the system is attempting to navigate.
And that’s why I do not think that “the truth-value of a sentence can be determined by whether or not the sentence corresponds to a state of affairs,” even though I do think that any properly functioning cognitive system must have corresponding elements.
And this soon becomes painfully obvious when learning a new language.
keiths:
Mung:
You mean, like my argument for Cartesian skepticism?
KN,
Let me get this straight. You previously accepted the correspondence theory of truth (when did that change, by the way?), in which the truth of a sentence like “The car keys are on the kitchen table” depends on whether, in fact, the car keys are on the kitchen table.
What is it, then, that determines the truth value of the sentence “The car keys are on the kitchen table” since it no longer (in your view) depends on whether, in fact, the car keys are on the kitchen table?
Neil:
You said that I assume the truth of theism and dualism:
I do not assume those things, and I have demonstrated that my view of truth does not require them.
You made a mistake, Neil. Get over it.
That something cannot be refuted is not a reason to accept it, or if it is, then you are being terribly inconsistent.
For example, I don’t know how to refute the claim that dog ate baby head because there was no God there to prevent it. There’ was also no lighting strike there, no heart attack there, nor any number of other things that could be imagined the absence of which could be used to “explain” something that took place by their contribution to it’s failure to take place.
Can you refute the claim that if the moon were made of cheese mice would come out at night more often?
No, I don’t believe that I have ever said that.
And you don’t see the difference?
“Keiths is assuming theism and dualism” is asserting an implicit assumption that shows in the behavior. And, yes, I have said that.
“Keiths is assuming the truth of theism and dualism” is asserting an explicit assumption. I doubt that I have ever asserted that. I’m well aware that you explicitly deny both.
This becomes tiresome.
Head. Brick Wall. Pound.
And you don’t see that you are now questioning whether KN accepts a trivial tautology? Or don’t you even see that this is tautological?
Is measurement mathematics or is it really physics? You know, subject to the shape of the tool and all that, whereas math is beyond that, transcendent to physical limitations of measurement. I’d even suggest worse – measurement is engineering, subject to the understanding how to position the ruler, steadiness of hands etc.
Then you have missed the point. Maybe everybody misses the point.
Measuring a temperature is perhaps engineering, though I don’t actually think that’s quite correct.
However, thermometers do not grow on trees. Somebody had to invent a measurement system.
The physicists chose the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water to anchor the measuring system at two points. That’s physics. And then they divided into 100 parts (for Celsius) between those. That’s mathematics, using the methods of evenly dividing a line as in geometry.
As a correspondence theory guy, I have to admit that I don’t. I mean if one doesn’t descend to the quibble level.
I do think there’s some dualism packed into keiths’ posts, myself. He’s got ‘what is given to his senses’ juxtaposed with ‘the material world’ he either constructs or infers from the ‘given’ stuff.. That’s one of the big TWOSOMES. But I don’t think a correspondence theory of truth requires theism–although I know you and FMM do.
Yes, it’s his Cartesianism. I’m surprised he isn’t at least tempted by Berkeleyian idealism.
Neil,
Even if there were a difference between “assuming theism and dualism” and “assuming the truth of theism and dualism”, it wouldn’t help your case.
I don’t assume either of those, and my notion of truth doesn’t require it, as I’ve demonstrated.
walto:
I don’t see “what is given to my senses” as separate from “the material world”. I think* — assuming that my senses are veridical, of course — that I am part of the physical world, that what is given to my senses is part of the physical world, that my senses are part of the physical world, and that I myself am part of the physical world.
No dualism required.
keiths, to KN:
Neil:
Of course it’s tautological. It’s a frikkin’ definition, Neil. That’s what the correspondence theory of truth provides — a definition of what it means for a proposition to be true or false.
So yes, KN does reject the “trivial tautology”, because he rejects that definition.
Not as tiresome as teaching remedial philosophy to the self-styled Heretical Philosopher.
No, I’m afraid that’s not correct at all.
The correspondence theory of truth has always been understood as an explanation of what properties a thought or utterance must have in order to be true: it is the adequacy of intellect and reality (veritas est adaequatio intellectus et re). What is in the mind conforms to what is real.
At least within Scholastic metaphysics, it is understood that we human beings are not in the right epistemic position to see whether or not our intellect conforms to reality. We can’t see outside our own minds, after all. Therefore it is God who, given His absolute knowledge, and who can therefore see the relation between intellect and reality, who is the right epistemic position to see that our best justified beliefs are also true.
(I’m hoping that Erik will correct me if I’m misunderstood the Scholastic position.)
Getting the Scholastic position correct is actually crucial to Neil’s long-standing complaint that a correspondence theory of truth is implicitly theistic.
The worry here is that, by setting up truth as a relation between mind and world that we human beings cannot epistemically access (since we are confined to one term of the relation), one would have to be implicitly relying on a View from Nowhere (or Everywhere?) as having the epistemic access to the relation itself.
This is, by the way, absolutely central to the worries about the very nature of truth that we find in Nietzsche, William James, and John Dewey.
And these debates about the metaphysics and epistemology of truth are quite different from the debates about the semantics of truth which vexed Tarski, Ramsey, and Davidson. The correspondence theory of truth goes far and beyond the anodyne, deflationist, “‘snow is white’ if and only if snow is white” that would be agreed upon as giving us the correct semantics of the predicate phrase “is true” in a natural language.
The correspondence theory of truth isn’t a definition of truth; it’s an explanation of it. As is, for that matter, coherentism and other theories (if there are any).
The Mungian theory of truth: It’s true if I want it to be true.
Trump already put his personal brand to that. Trumpian Truth. You now owe him $34,217.32 in lost revenue.
No, it doesn’t matter if your perceptions are veridical or not. The point is, that you’ve got two worlds going: the world of sense and the world of things. If your senses are trustworthy, they TELL you about the world of things: but there’s still two worlds.
It’s epistemological dualism. http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405106795_chunk_g97814051067956_ss1-95
walto:
No, there’s still only one world: the real world.
My model of the real world — veridical or not — is part of the real world.
There’s nothing mysterious about this. By analogy, a book might contain either truths or falsehoods about the real world, but either way the book itself is part of the real world.
keiths:
KN:
No, the correspondence theory of truth, like many other philosophical theories, is an attempt at capturing and formalizing a pre-existing intuitive idea. There’s nothing new about the intuitive idea that true statements correspond to actual states of affairs. The only (relatively) new thing is the attempt to capture that idea precisely and analyze it further.
I’m still curious — when did you make the huge leap from accepting the correspondence theory to rejecting it, and why? It must have been within the last year or so. Whence this momentous change?
And even more curiously, what have you replaced it with? In other words, what is your answer to this earlier question of mine?
True but it part of the world only you have access to. The private and the public world.
Strictly speaking, a book contains neither truths nor falsehoods about the real world. It just contains ink marks on paper.
We interpret some of those ink marks as truths or falsehoods. But remove the humans, and you also remove the “about the real world” part.
newton:
By that definition, who here isn’t a dualist?
And in any case it’s not the kind of dualism Neil had in mind.
Way to miss the point, Neil.
Granted that a “measurement system” (a mathematical thing) must be invented (as in thought up), but this alone doesn’t measure anything. Additionally, measurement tools, such as a thermometer which you mention, must be invented (as in manufactured), which makes it all an engineering problem.
You are clearly missing your own point.
We are not in position to judge the ultimate reality (100% of the universe and that which is beyond, extra-sensory, supernatural, etc.) but we are quite in position to talk about the immediate reality, our own town, fellow people, the planet and our individual minds. And if we make right judgements about the immediate reality (“right” in the moral sense more importantly than in the empirical sense), then we evidently have been granted a mind that is rightly attuned with regard to the ultimate reality, which in turn means being rightly attuned to God which in turn may grant explicit glimpses of the ultimate reality (revelation, beatific vision). This in turn makes the ultimate reality accessible to us, but it’s not given lightly and not a topic for small talk.
It’s not that we cannot epistemically access truth. Everybody can epistemically access some kinds of truths and not other kinds. Dogs have a dog kind of truth. And not everybody is as smart as Einstein, don’t you agree? Then again, philosophically or logically (if one is logico-philosophically inclined) there are certain givens: If truth is a relation between the mind and the world, and we take the mind and the world to be ontological realities, then truth in that sense and on that level is easily observed by shifting the point of view between the mind and the world. In one sense, we are minds, in another sense we are objects in the world, and that’s why truth has implications on us just like the rest of ontology does.
We may speculate and theorize as we like, but the ultimate truth (i.e. concerning the ultimate reality) cannot be approached as a purely epistemic problem bypassing ontology. Truth may be nominal to mathematicians, but it cannot be merely nominal to cosmologists and theologians. The last two have a lot in common and that’s not accidental.
I’m not saying you’re an ontological dualist. You’re an epistemological dualist. You can still believe that everything is physical, although it’s hard not to be a property dualist if there’s some part of the world people can have special access to. As we’ve discussed before, Dennett and other property monists don’t like priveleged access Cartesianism, presumably because it’s hard to understand how reductions of privileged events to the stuff of physics makes sense.
You make understanding the world START with grasping sense-data. Eliminativists generally prefer a different sort of epistemology and are anti-Cartesian. They “naturalize” epistemology, as Quine has recommended.
We’ve been through all this before, however, and I’m not terribly interested in trying to convince you.
You’re making me think of Venn diagrams and hierarchies. Ultimate total reality surrounds everything else. Within that is the limit of observable reality from and on Earth, the past and future light-cones. Inside that is the limit of what humans collectively are capable of comprehending, inside that is the sum of all shared human knowledge at this moment. Inside that is what individual humans are capable of knowing and inside that is what they know at this moment.
No, a measurement system is not a mathematical thing.
It really ought to be a philosopher’s thing.
I have grave doubts as to how “intuitive” that idea is. The history of philosophy and science is a graveyard of ideas that seemed “intuitive” at the time.
It’s less of a momentous change than you’re making it out to be. I never found the traditional correspondence theory of truth to be attractive, owing no doubt to having read Nietzsche and Rorty in my formative years — esp Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie In an Extra-Moral Sense”, which I must have read for the first time in college, or possibly high school.
About three or four years ago, when I discovered Sellars, I read his “Truth and ‘Correspondence'” (1962). When I first read it, I thought it was an inspired defense of the correspondence theory of truth. But I had a serious difficulty understanding what “picturing” really meant. I understood it had something to do with the nature of cognition, and that soon led me back to cognitive science.
Last summer I read Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty (2016), and that — together with recent work by Tomasello and also Rouse’s Articulating the World (2015) — have helped me better understand that picturing is better understood as theory of cognitive activity than as a theory of truth per se. And that in turn allowed me to understand the virtues of deflationist approaches to truth as regarding the normative pragmatics of the predicate phrase “is true”. It also helped that a friend of mine carefully explained how the prosentential strategy is supposed to work.
This means that I’m now in a good position to see what’s right about deflationist approaches about the semantics of the predicate phrase “is true”, and also the normative pragmatics of the phrase “is true” or “that’s true”” or “is that true?”, while retaining what was right about “correspondence” — understood now as a theory of cognition.
On my view (though of course not just my view), the pragmatic difference between “the car keys are on the kitchen table” and “it’s true that the car keys are on the kitchen table” is that the latter is just re-asserting the first assertion. So the question is, under what conditions is “the car keys are on the kitchen table” a reasonable assertion to make?
That would be the case if asserting that utterance can function as a reliable guide to actions that lead to locating the car keys (e.g. if one doesn’t know where they are and wants to find them), assuming a whole host of background know-how, such as knowing how to reliably identify objects as car keys and as kitchen tables, which involves in turn knowing how to use the concepts car key and kitchen table (and many others) to select some soliciting affordances as relevant to guiding specific actions and pushing other soliciting affordances (and also non-soliciting affordances) into the ‘fringe’ of consciousness.
In other words, concepts function to individuate objects from the whole field of soliciting and non-soliciting affordances. The great power of linguistic concepts is that they allow us to identify objects of joint attention. Thus, in a conversation: “where are the car keys?” “I left them on the kitchen table”, the speakers are using their shared linguistic know-how to coordinate their actions.
Hence all the real work is being done by the activity of asserting itself. The predicate phrase “is true” functions as re-asserting, or as re-authorizing the assertion, hence “it’s true that the car keys are on the kitchen table” just re-authorizes “the car keys are on the kitchen table”.
All the hard work of “correspondence” is carried out at the level of the mapping relations between neurodynamic representations and features of the environment.
One might be reluctant to call that truth if one thinks that it’s really only assertions that can be true or false. After all, many (all?) animals are able to navigate their environments by virtue of implementing mapping relations between the dynamic states of their central nervous systems and the soliciting affordances of their environments even though, since they lack language, they cannot perform assertions as such.
On the basis of those considerations, I’ve come to think that while Sellars is right to say that it’s a serious problem with semantic theories of truth that they throw correspondence under the bus, and also that there’s a real need to rehabilitate correspondence within a naturalistic framework, and also that I’m satisfied with using Sellars’s term “picturing” to indicate this dimension of naturalized correspondence, nevertheless what “picturing” gives us is not “the correspondence theory of truth” within a naturalistic framework (as I had once thought) but rather a correspondence theory of cognition that is consistent with a prosentential account of the normative pragmatics of the predicate phrase “is true” within natural languages.
Whereas at first you said that measurement system is a science and math thing, “Science starts with ideas such as measurement. —- And when a way of measuring is invented, it is usually done in a very systematic method. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” is really the mathematics of the systematicity of that invented system of measuring, so it is not actually unreasonable.”
Can I safely conclude that you don’t know what you are saying? Another interesting quote,
So the most important scientific concepts are grounded. Are there any that are not grounded? The scientific concepts that are not grounded, are they unimportant? Any examples?
In truth, there is no difference between your operational definitions and the concepts that philosophers (i.e. most people?) start out with. An operational definition is not just a word to denote something “grounded”, but also a label to distinguish it from other things that it must not be mixed up with. Meaning, a definition makes a distinction at the same time. Incidentally, that’s how philosophers proceed – they draw distinctions. They don’t merely wonder about concepts, but analyze their content, distinctions, and their relevance and applicability.
Scientists occasionally fail at the conceptual work. They occasionally come up with terms that get superseded. If they were “grounded from the get go”, then it should be impossible for them to be superseded.
You can safely conclude that you failed to understand what I wrote.
Dennett doesn’t like privileged-access Cartesianism because he’s a Sellarsian and understands what’s wrong with the Myth of the Given. If you were to ask Dennett, “can I even be justified in taking my senses to be reliable?”, he’d say, “I don’t know, let’s get you into a psychology lab and run some tests!”
Yes, the eliminativists (though not only them) are doing epistemology from the third-person point of view from the very start. They don’t even bother with the subjective starting-point, the ego-centric predicament, and all that jazz. Though one can do that without throwing intentionality and normativity under the bus, as Quine does.
What if you asked him “Can you be justified in taking your senses to be reliable?” Would he answer, “Let’s get me into a psychology lab and run some tests!”
Doesn’t he see the obvious problem with that? Namely, what do the test results tell you what your own senses (and friends and mother and your own best judgement) don’t?
Erik,
I suppose Dennett (or someone like Dennett) would be tempted to say something along the following lines:
“In the course of human experience and even science, there can be conflicts between what we each individually perceive. We are often (but not always) able to detect those conflicts. When the conflicts arise, we are often (but not always)n able to resolve them. In doing psychology and cognitive science, we’ve been able to map out much of how the brain processes information, we have some compelling (though competing) theories about how it does so, and we’re able to explain much about why our senses are reliable, to the extent that they are, and also why they aren’t, to the extent that they aren’t. But if someone wants to know whether it’s possible for all human beings to be systematically deceived about the nature of reality, and if reality could have a structure radically different from what any human being could ever possibly know, then that person isn’t doing science or philosophy — he’s a mystic.”
In other words, he would reply with an insult, deliberately missing the point.
Charitably, this response can be paraphrased as “I don’t know everything, but whoever claims to know more than I should reconsider and be like me.” The question remains: If the central statement is that the senses are unreliable and need to be tested (where the tests provide nothing but more of the same fodder for the senses), then how can he know his knowledge is historically the best? Or at least currently the best? And why should everyone accept his method and go no further than his level?
Because the scientific method works?
Doing one thing doesn’t prevent you from doing other things. Where further do you suggest one could go?