I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.
According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.
There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.
I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
I say this because justification is itself a social practice — and one that we ourselves are taught how to participate in. (In the contemporary jargon, I’m a social externalist about justification.) For what is justification? It is a normative assessment of the evidence and reasons for one’s claims. But that normative assessment necessarily involves other rational beings like ourselves.
Think of it this way (taking an example from Wittgenstein): suppose I’m waiting for a train, and I want to know if it will be on time. I could look up the schedule. But suppose further that instead of doing so, I imagine the schedule: I look up the time in my imagination. Why isn’t that the same thing as looking up the actual schedule?
The answer is that there’s no constraint on how I imagine the schedule. It could be whatever I want — or subconsciously desire — it to be. But without constraints, there are no norms or rules at all.
Justification is much the same: it is a normative assessment of evidence and reasoning according to rules or norms, and there are no private norms. (Though Wittgenstein doesn’t put it this way, he might say that the very idea of a “private norm” is a category mistake — a category mistake on which Cartesian skepticism and several hundred years of subsequent philosophy have depended.)
So whereas the Cartesian skeptic thinks that we need to justify our belief in the world and in other minds, I think that this makes no sense at all. We cannot justify our belief in other minds and in the world because there is no such thing as justification at all in the first place without also accepting (what is indeed a manifest reality to everyone who is not a schizophrenic or on a bad acid trip) that there are other sentient-and-sapient beings other than oneself with whom one shares a world.
.A further point to make (and the subject of my current article-in-progress) is that justification and truth require both sentience and sapience.
The clue I’m following is Davidson’s triangulation argument: suppose there are two creatures who are each responding sensorily to some object in a shared environment. How is an onlooker supposed to know which object they are both responding to? If both creatures can compare its own responses with the responses of the other creature, then each can determine whether or not they are cognizing the same object.
The point here is that two (or more) sentient creatures — intentional beings that can successfully navigate their environments — can each have a grasp of objectivity if and only if each creature can
(1) represent the similarities and differences between its own embodied perspective and an embodied perspective occupied by another creature and
(2) be motivated to minimize discrepancies and eliminate incompatibilities between its own action-guiding representations and its action-guiding representations of the other creature’s action-guiding representations, and in the process
(3) attain the metacognitive awareness whereby it can take its own embodied perspective as an embodied perspective, and thereby be aware that how it subjectively takes things to be is not (necessarily) how things really are.
This process is facilitated by a shared language that allows each creature to monitor how each is representing the other’s representations and revise its own representations when incompatibility between representations is discovered. The function of norms — of discourse and of conduct — is to motivate each creature to revise its representations when incompatibilities are discovered.
One important implication of this argument is that sentient creatures cannot distinguish between their own subjective orientation on things and how things really are. They lack an awareness of objectivity and an awareness of their own subjectivity. By contrast, sapient creatures are aware of both objectivity — how things really are, as distinct from how they are taken to be — and subjectivity — how things are taken to be, as distinct from how they really are.
This line of thought also explains why I have been adamant that objectivity does not require absoluteness: sapient creatures can be aware of the difference between how things are and how they are taken to be, and thus be aware that they might have false beliefs, even though no sapient creature can transcend the biological constraints of its form of sentience.
I think I’ve said this before, but anyway: the work I’ve read by Wheeler, Clark, and a few others suggests that pretty much any sentient animal will tend to have action-guiding, affordance-detecting representations of those features of its environment that matter to it, relative to the goals that it has as the kind of animal that it is. That structural coupling between affordance-detecting representations and affordances is what “correspondence to reality” looks like when we de-mythologize and de-theologize that notion all the way. Put otherwise, any sentient animal is going to have cognitive states analogous to beliefs which “correspond to reality.”
But in the absence of a shared language that allows multiple animals to compare and contrast their representations, none of them can be aware of the difference between how they take things to be and how things really are — in Davidson’s terms, they can’t “triangulate” on objective reality. Hence none of them could ever be aware that any of their beliefs do correspond to reality, and couldn’t appeal to that as a reason for holding any of their beliefs.
Thus far, every attempt to stipulate some solid foundation other than the synchronic and diachronic processes of discourse has turned on claiming some kind of cognitive privilege stemming from an obscure capacity, the existence of which is utterly unverifiable by those who do not already claim to have it.
In other words, while I’m a radical agnostic about the God-question, I’m not going to hold my breath or stop working on a naturalistic epistemology just because I might be wrong.
Perhaps the problem is with your verification process.
If you arbitrarily restrict yourself to synchronic and diachronic comparison you will not be able to recognize any incongruities to the indissoluble standard whether apparent or not.
On the other hand if you open yourself up to the possibility of a tripartite comparison. You might be surprised at how easily such a foundation might be verified.
In the end the choice to arbitrarily limit your epistemic options is entirely in your hands.
Bring a horse to water and all that.
peace
Here is another good “read” that you might want to check out.
😉
quote:
Deaf children whose access to usable conventional linguistic input, signed or spoken, is severely limited nevertheless use gesture to communicate These gestures resemble natural language in that they are structured at the level both of sentence and of word. Although the inclination to use gesture may be traceable to the fact that the deaf children’s hearing parents, like all speakers, gesture as they talk, the children themselves are responsible for introducing language-like structure into their gestures. We have explored the robustness of this phenomenon by observing deaf children of hearing parents in two cultures, an American and a Chinese culture, that differ in their child-rearing practices and in the way gesture is used in relation to speech. The spontaneous sign systems developed in these cultures shared a number of structural similarities: patterned production and deletion of semantic elements in the surface structure of a sentence; patterned ordering of those elements within the sentence; and concatenation of propositions within a sentence. These striking similarities offer critical empirical input towards resolving the ongoing debate about the ‘innateness’ of language in human infants.
end quote:
from here
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6664/full/391279a0.html
peace
Interesting.
It does not change the fact that pre-linguistic deafness results in a severe handicap in competition with hearing people.
Well, that was my point. Sorry for not being clearer that I was agreeing with you. Had Keller been born deaf-blind, the outcome for her would have been very different
Of course deafness is a handicap did anyone say otherwise?
Deaf people are innately disadvantaged in that they are unable communicate in a major way that everyone else in their community communicates.
On the other hand we all communicate with other people in lots of ways that have nothing to do with hearing and speech. Those born deaf must learn to rely on these other alternative ways to justify their beliefs. It’s not easy but it can be done
peace
How is trial-and-error with feedback from reality not a means of triangulation? Being able to demonstrate empirically repeatable results is a perfectly valid reason for holding a belief.
But are you a radical agnostic theist or a radical agnostic atheist? 😉
Perhaps I have failed to make my assertion clear that the mind with which we do science and philosophy is constructed interactivel with a verbal community. We are embedded within a community.
I watch these debates and see little evidence of communication. I rather cynically suspect that the problem is deeper than lack of effort or lack of good faith on the part of the participants.
I suspect it is because key words, such as truth and true have no referent. They are jello, and resist being nailed to the wall.
I definitely feel like I’m missing something important in my discussion with KN. I’m reasonably confident that the core issues will be clarified through discussion, given his generally admirable history here.
See, that’s the problem right there. Jello is nailed to trees, not walls.
There are suitable alternatives to your presuppositions? For instance?
Yes, you are.
KN says he is a pragmatist. And you are trying to sell your brand of pragmatism to him. I don’t think that will work.
You are giving example after example of making pragmatic decisions. And then you are arguing that these establish justified true belief. I expect that there’s an extensive literature on why pragmatic virtue is distinct from truth.
That may be the, or one of the, root causes of our disconnect. I hope KN will chime in. I’m still not sure I understand what he means by “justified”. Hopefully we can unpack that.
One of my objections to “justified true belief” is that it is far from clear what “justified” means. (Two other objections are that it is far from clear what “true” and “belief” mean).
However, to me, justified implies some sort of moral evaluation. And it is hard to see how that can apply to an isolated person who is not part of a society. “Justified” seems to imply that we could persuade other people that we at least had good reasons. Absent any possibility of other people, I don’t think it has a meaning.
Interesting. In the context of my discussion with KN I don’t see “justified” as having any moral component. I think of it more as “reliable” or “confirmed”. Much of the disconnect may simply be an issue of definitions, although a couple of things KN has said indicate otherwise.
I suspect that the problem you’re describing has much to do with the inherent limits of Internet-based communication. Face-to-face dialogue has a very different character.
Some animals are more equal than others.
[Sorry. Couldn’t resist.]
TSZ meetup in NYC?
While I don’t treat “justified” as a moral evaluation per se, I think that the two are species of the same genus: they are both kinds of normativity. Justification refers to epistemic norms, or norms of belief. Morality is species of norms of conduct. (Other norms of conduct would be etiquette, taboos, social conventions, and so on.)
That is, a belief is justified if one ought to hold that belief, and that ought-ness consists (assuming non-theism!) in only the synchronic and diachronic dialogical and collective interactions as we keep track of each other’s commitments, entitlements, avowals, acknowledgements, and other pragmatic statuses for instituting propositional content.
On that account, while a sentient animal can have — and mostly do have — highly reliable affordance-detecting, action-guiding representations of its environment, and especially of those features of its environment that are relevant to the satisfaction of species-specific goals, that reliability is distinct from what I am calling justification per se.
I am suggesting that good faith and hard work cannot overcome the limits of human communication. I’m with Elizabeth (I presume to think). The moment you allow any form of the verb to be, you fuzz things up and guarantee misunderstanding. I guess I’m a radical pessimist on this.
1) I was referring to alternate means of communication (gestures rather than speech for instance)
2) There might very well be suitable alternatives to revelation but I have not seen any. KN appears to agree with me on this except he would limit the process to only finite beings.
peace
😉
If you don’t assume non-theisim you can add interactions with the indissoluble.
Check this out for an idea of how it might work
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24473-entangled-toy-universe-shows-time-may-be-an-illusion/
in that case there would be three different but equal perspectives which can dialogue.
the synchronic—– the point– in time and space
the diachronic——-the wave—as evolving over time
the indissoluble—–the system—- as an unchanging whole viewed from the outside
peace
Now demonstrate that by empirically repeatable results, please.
He can always fall back on faith.
Patrick, would you kindly set forth for us all the ways in which you are in fact a man of faith?
Why aren’t you more skeptical of the things you write?
There are various positivistic or scientistic positions that have been taken re ‘correspondence with reality’. If meaning requires verifiability must skeptics be phenomenalists and give instrumental defs of all physical object terms or cast them out? Neurath thought that we can only verify experience logs with other experience logs, for example. There’s also Quine’s take in Word and Object regarding ‘the web of experience’ and the elimination of the analytic/synthetic distinction. There’s also Carnap”s use of the internal-external distinction to make ontological pronouncements. In any case, when ‘skeptics’ talk about ‘correspondence with reality, eyebrows should definitely go up.
Are there even really facts of the matter?
Pardon, though communication of a presupposition of a certain God seems problematic through gestures.
It would be interesting to know what if any their concept of the divine is. If revelation actually occurs to everyone, one might expect an universality.
why?
1) American Sign language is just as rich as any spoken language
2) There are myriads of ways to communicate, speech is only one.
You could just ask if you like. The written word would seem to be the easiest way for a hearing person to communicate with the deaf.
And there is some universality in the knowledge of the divine but like everything else our individual understanding is shaped by our own culture and experience and proclivities.
Just as common knowledge of newton is shaped by those things.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Good point
Sounds subjective
Perhaps I’m missing something, but this sounds like you are, in fact, defining justification as requiring social interaction. My view is that one can be justified in a belief solely through empirical means. Is this an accurate description of the root of our disagreement? Do you hold that justification requires both empirical evidence and social interaction of some sort?
Sure. Here is a list of those things I take solely on faith:
If you would like an answer to that question, you’ll have to provide a little more context.
My view is not that justification always requires social interaction. My view is that acquiring the ability to justify anything at all requires social interaction. Once that ability has been acquired, then and only then would one be able to justify a claim to oneself by empirical evidence.
And even then we would need to unpack what “empirical evidence” really means. I take it mean something like:
“patterns of sensory stimuli as interpreted through the conceptual framework that one has internalized as a result of becoming a competent language-user and as evaluated by prevailing epistemic norms for warrant, assent, etc shared with a community of sapient agents”
That is, both the semantic (“as interpreted through the conceptual framework that one has internalized as a result of becoming a competent language-user”) and epistemic (“as evaluated by prevailing epistemic norms for warrant, assent, etc shared with a community of sapient agents”) features of ’empirical evidence’ depend on linguistic communities.
Without those, patterns of sensory stimuli are just that — they can be reliable sources of information about features of the environment, but patterns of sensory stimulation cannot, all by themselves, have the authority of functioning as evidence, which is to say, they are not intrinsically, all by themselves, original sources of rational constraint on belief-choice.
Instead, patterns of sensory stimulation can function as rational constraints on belief-choice only insofar as they are interpreted and evaluated according to norms that have their “foundation” in the linguistic community into which one has been inducted through the process of learning a first language
It is that sense alone that empirical evidence relies on social interaction.
However, those of us who begin with Dewey’s pragmatist critique of classical empiricism, and who have followed the whole Sellars-Davidson-Rorty-McDowell line of rejecting the dogmas of logical empiricism, can find talk of “correspondence with reality” far less objectionable.
Then again, I am not and have never claimed to be a “skeptic”.
Bullshit.
By some arbitrary definition it might be. Might have equivalent rules of syntax.
Does not have anything like the vocabulary of a written language, and no one disputes that pre-linguistic deaf people seldom reach a high school level of reading ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaf_people#Notable_deaf_people
Look through the list of notable deaf people and try to figure out how many were pre-linguistic deaf. Clicking on a few names, I do not see many.
My post wasn’t directed at you, KN.
My apologies. I thought it was directed at me because you and I are (I think) the only participants at TSZ who have any background in professional-grade analytic philosophy.
Not sure if that is a valid comparison, written languages tend to be more complex as to vocabulary than spoken languages but no one would say that being preliterate is some kind a mental handicap.
Just how many pre-linguisitc deaf people would you say there are as a percent of the western population? How many of those would have no other birth defects as well? I would think the number would be pretty small. Too small to say that being born deaf has any kind of effect on the intellect.
I’m not sure what it is you are getting at with this criticism.
Do you think that hearing and speech is the best possible way for communication to happen?
Do you think that a non human animal without a sense of hearing would be unable to justify it’s beliefs if it communicated by other means?
I’m a little confused please elaborate
in the mean time you might find this to be interesting
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_deaf%20speech.html
Peace
Kantian Naturalist,
No prob. My post was directed against primitive verificationism, a position I don’t connect with your views.. I just wanted to indicate that, naive as it is, it comes in several versions, though all of them are alike in having been decimated by cogent critiques many years ago.
I’m not sure that’s a distinction with a difference. It seems to me that you are still making social interaction a requirement for a belief to be justified, even if that belief is empirically demonstrated to be (approximately) correct.
And again, you’re insisting on the ability to use language as part of your definition of “justification”. It doesn’t appear that it adds anything to the concept, though. A belief that is supported by empirical evidence but that is not interpreted by a language user (e.g. a non-human animal) is no different in practice from one held by a human. Both are justified by the evidence, not by the language.
I contend that a belief that is empirically demonstrated to be reliable is justified by that reliability alone. Recognizing that evidence of reliability does not require language. A number of non-human animals are capable of such justification and demonstrate the utility of their justified beliefs.
Is there any operational difference between this definition of “justified” and yours?
Has that belief been empirically demonstrated to be reliable?
peace
Does a entity that does not have language even have beliefs? How would you know?
oops there is that obvious question again
sorry
peace
About two people in a thousand are born deaf. There are 4-6 hundred thousand people in the United States who were born deaf.
What percentage of those suffer from other birth defects?
What percentage were given a quality education that was equivalent to their hearing peers but tailored to their situation ?
And what does “demonstrated to be reliable” actually mean?
It seems to me that there is a distinction between “I am persuaded to believe P” and “I am justified in believing P”. You appear to be ignoring that distinction.
quote:
These investigations indicate that there is no relationship between degree of hearing loss and IQ or age of onset of deafness and IQ.
and
In sum, the implication of the research of the last fifty years which compared the IQ of the deaf with the hearing and of subgroups of deaf children indicates that when there are no complicating multiple handicaps, the deaf and hard-of-hearing function at approximately the same IQ level on performance intelligence tests as do the hearing.
end quote:
from here
http://jdsde.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/3/225.full
peace
What is the difference between justified to believe and persuaded that I am justified to believe?
Among other things It’s about truth
A schizophrenic might be persuaded that he is justified to believe that the government is spying on him through the fillings in his teeth but he is not justified in believing this…………Because it’s not true
peace