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.
What are those bottom-up representations based on if not sensory data?
Sure, but this means that language-using animals have additional sources of information with which to adjust their models of the world. It’s a difference in capability rather than a difference in kind. Non-language-using animals are still capable of constructing mental models that align with certain aspects of reality. I think it’s reasonable to call that knowledge.
Calling baseless assertions evidence does not make them evidence.
Calling politically motivate lies evidence does not make them evidence.
Evidence is objective and empirical. To the extent that social constructs influence it, it is not evidence.
One that scientists and skeptics strive to minimize.
And yet you have never provided any objective, empirical evidence to support the existence of such an entity.
No. In this instance he is challenging you to support your claims. You haven’t.
You really can’t avoid projecting your authoritarian mindset on everyone else, can you? We’re not all like your church.
I am simply pointing out how you are failing to abide by widely accepted rules of rational and skeptical discourse. Since you seem to be unfamiliar with them, here’s a course you can take. There are also some good links here.
It seems odd that one would discuss the validity of ideas by taking opinion polls.
Imagine taking a poll on general relativity.
There are, of course, conjectures and hypotheses in science. We have names for them.
From what you are implying, it seems that it’s good that I haven’t.
How about yourself? Are you just like them, “monkey see, monkey eat” type?
Mathematic results in Japan were not significantly different from mathematic results in Europe, at a time when there was little contact between the two societies. The way mathematics was done often differed a good deal, but basically they both got the same results. There are mathematics that aren’t tied to observation now, it is true, but so long as mathematics (especially geometry) were more or less based on what was seen, it gave the same results in whatever language.
Social practices? Well, yes, but social practices based on a common human framework of intellection, plus the fact that much of math is more or less empirically based, unless one deliberately breaks from what we see. Empirical evidence is hardly independent of math, the two are rather intertwined, at least once science has become reasonably sophisticated.
Glen Davidson
Depends. What are we having?
wait a minute
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
1)you haven’t refuted that yet
2) You are assuming your conclusion. Ie that your senses are the result of an evolutionary process. there are lots of other explanations that are vastly more likely for example Boltzmann’s brains.
peace
This is hopelessly wrong.
Social practices define what it means to reproduce a result.
You eat some steak and enjoy. I see a movie and enjoy that. I have not reproduced your result. The result is defined, in part, by the practices involved.
Calling them “sensory data” invites the metaphor of a standard computer: the information enters the system, the system processes the information, and new information is generated. Clark’s point (building on many generations of previous philosophers and scientists, esp. Dewey) is that there’s a better model for how brains work: not by first passively taking in the information that is there anyway, but by first actively generating predictions about is there, and then using the modulation of sensory receptors to minimize predictive errors. In a very important way, action precedes perception. Classical empiricism can’t be right. (In fact I think Clark himself is still too empiricist, but that’s another issue.)
Indeed it is reasonable to call that knowledge, and at no point have I ever denied it.
I am been only been stressing that
(1) language makes possible the kinds of comparison-and-contrast of cognitive models that counts as the giving and asking for reasons, and
(2) reason-giving is central to justification as a social practice (though no doubt a species-wide one, deeply grounded in our evolutionary past), and therefore
(3) the knowledge of nonhuman animals, though certainly bona fide and not ersatz knowledge, is not justified — and it might not be true belief, either, since I am hesitant to say that nonhuman cognitive models count as beliefs in all cases.
I think of concept, thought, and belief as all deeply interconnected. Some philosophers have argued that the best way to think about these issues is in terms of problem-solving: if an animal can solve a problem, then it has concepts, hence can have thoughts, and therefore beliefs.
Some people here have taken my reticence at extending “justification” to non-human animals to be a tacit denial of their reasoning. I can happily accept that many animals can infer. Tomasello has done extensive work on the inferential abilities of chimps.
When I say that chimpanzees lack justified beliefs, what I’m saying is that they don’t engage in the social practice of sharing, correcting, and improving each other’s inferences. I am not denying that they think, infer, reason, etc. — I am trying to understand in a very specific, fine-grained way exactly how the acquisition of language transforms underlying rational abilities
Later
I guess I don’t get it, is not it your worldview that God justifies your worldview that God justifies your worldview?
You don’t get it, Newton. Nobody does.
My worldview is simply my perspective. We all have perspectives
My justification has nothing to do with my perspective it has to do with a God who reveals.
think about it like this— claiming you are justified in your beliefs because your senses are reliable is not the same thing as claiming you are justified in your beliefs because you beleive your senses are reliable
peace
Put it in a syllogism.
But then, not all perspectives are based on made up entities, like yours is.
Glen Davidson
That’s right.
The difference here is between the fact of the reliability of the senses and one’s taking it to be the case that the senses are reliable. And those can be teased apart. It’s possible that the senses are reliable (and one falsely believes that they aren’t) and it’s possible that the sense are not reliable (and falsely believes that they are).
But those are merely logical possibilities, backed up by nothing more by nothing more than mere conceivability. .
Whereas if one is at all interested in what is actually true (and not just logically possibly true), then one has no choice but to use one’s senses. In the process we have (very gradually, over millennia) discovered that the senses are indeed reliable in some cases and not terribly reliable in others — highly reliable in situations similar to the ecological niches that shaped the evolution of our perceptual abilities, and less reliable in other situations.
The really interesting thing about human beings is our ability to notice the unreliability of our senses and take steps to correct it with technologies (telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, etc.) and techniques (controlled experimentation, double-blind studies, peer review).
I agree,
We do that by comparing inferences our with those of other persons.
The most important of which is God
peace
A claim like the one you are making is not evidence.
It’s only an opinion and opinions are like bellybuttons everyone has one and they are not very useful.
peace
I would add a condition to that statement: the unreliability of our senses in specific circumstances. As you noted previously:
There are a variety of situations in which we don’t care about the lack of reliability of our senses and in some cases, actually try to deceive them. Magic shows and movies are two great examples. So are the use of alcohol and mind-altering drugs. And note: the only reason we are able to make the movie special effects we make today and successfully pull off “magic” shows is because of the accurate perception of how our perception works and specifically where and how it can be repeatably fooled
I’m just totally at a loss as to how to accumulated assessment of successful human activity based on perception reliance isn’t sufficient justification for the overall accuracy of the perception in general. I can’t even imagine how humans could drive cars or better, fly frickin’ planes at all without some minimum perception reliability. Actually, forget driving or flying them..simply designing them requires an incredible coordination of reliable perception input. Perfectly sufficient justification in my book.
What a bizarre statement. It was never presented as if it were evidence.
An educated opinion, which is not something you’d recognize. More to the point, it’s an educated conclusion based on the evidence that you lack.
Your opinion isn’t. Manifestly not.
Glen Davidson
Forgive me KN
How do you know that we actually can do these things? Perhaps you just imagine that we can?
peace
LOL! Any “god” that engages in inferences would by definition not be a god…
Of course
Which is your perspective based on your presupposition of a God that reveals ,if not having such a presupposition is unnecessary
1.If an omnipotent God is real it can cause me to have a presupposition that an omnipotent God exists
2 I have a presupposition that an omnipotent God exists
3 Therefore an omnipotent God exists
One claims certainty the other is provisional. Fifth is justified in the belief that God reveals the truth because God revealed that truth ,the other is Fifth is justified in his belief God reveals the truth because he has faith that God reveals the truth.
What of it? If we just imagine all of this, then that is “reality” for us, and we have to deal with it regardless of whether or not it’s a simulation or if we’re brains in vats (or if just I am, in fact).
That’s exactly why sensory data are so important. Even if it’s all “not real,” it’s simply our reality. Your made up beliefs are not, as they’re simply one instance of many made up beliefs that fail to address what we perceive in any useful manner.
Glen Davidson
Oh…absolutely! No question…it could all be an illusion. Or “I” could just be a brain in a vat (BiV).
But here’s the thing…I don’t care about those scenarios, because they don’t actually defeat my point. If there’s no perceptible difference between this illusion (or Matrix or BiV or whatever) I’m in and “the REAL reality” (and here’s the important part you keep ignoring) within the illusion, then the illusion IS REALITY and thus, my perception (within the illusion) is a perfectly justifiable basis of my knowledge within the illusion.
So why should I care if I can’t justifiably know that I’m not in an illusion? What would that knowledge gain me in terms of living in the illusion?
Man…beat me to the same point by a minute!
Thanks. I like syllogisms. This one isn’t valid.
walto,
Right. The conclusion from 1 and 2 is that an omnipotent God can exist, not that one actually does.
Ok:
1. Only an omnipotent God could be responsible for my presupposition, should I have it, that an omnipotent God exists.
2. I have the presupposition that an omnipotent God exists.
3. Therefore, an omnipotent God exists.
Valid, I think. One of the premises has trucks driving through it, though.
Glen Davidson
Fifth:
rrrr…rrrrrr……rrrrrrrrrr…….. click…whirr…ticka ticka ticka ticka….*spoink*:
“How do you know that we actually can do these things? Perhaps you just imagine that we can?”
You just can’t go two posts without violating your own claims: you’ve been insisting for ages that one cannot rely on his own inferences or those from others, that only revelation can justify beliefs.
Under your worldview you can’t even cross the street safely unless god reveals to you that the light is green. You can’t know what time it is by asking someone with a watch, etc… That’s the kind of nonsense that your worldview leads to
Sure, I agree. I was simply trying to distinguish between the types of formal systems that have rules defined by humans and empirical systems where reality is the final arbiter.
I forgot to add:
So apparently FMM doesn’t have know that he’s not a BiV either…
Please show your calculations supporting that claim of likelihood.
Yep, that’s basically modus ponens.
“Hopeless” is a bit judgmental…. 😉
Not at all. Reproducing a result means what it says. Perform the same experiment, observe the same result.
It is unsurprising that comparing two different experiences yields different results.
You should read about under-determination.
Well, thank goodness we didn’t spend too much time getting to the point where I understand what you’re saying. (Seriously, I’ve enjoyed the interaction.)
Do you see an observable, operational difference between knowledge and justified knowledge?
I suspect you’ll enjoy this not particularly complimentary review of Naomi Klein’s latest.
Is your usage of “bucket list” here a philosophical term of art, as in “the list of ideas to be incorporated in my theory before I die”?
Note even the validity of the idea that most people believe philosophy is bunk?
I’m guessing you don’t mean “conjectures” and “hypotheses”.
ETA: more snarkiness
Thanks. That review does indeed look really interesting.
I guess so, yeah. We all try to be follow-it-wherever-it-leads types, but most of us also all fail at some point by having desires regarding what we’d kind of like our views to look like. Presumably, Ryle thought bike riders should get credit for knowing something, that knowers aren’t all Oxford tutors. Turns out that sentiment isn’t enough anymore.
There is the fact that justified true belief typically is more tentative, because, of course, a person could be wrong, or even everyone could be wrong. In most cases (no magician about, not tripping on ayahusca, etc.), “If I see it, I’ll believe it.” Not perfect (doesn’t the earth look flat to you?), but usually one of the best ways to establish a fact.
That’s why I don’t especially like putting the two into different categories. They are often interdependent (we do see according to our expectations to some degree, although the whole bit about predictions preceding observation and invalidating empiricism seems to have more to do with presupposition than with our senses that often are just taking things in), while perceptions are what properly justify beliefs. The aim is generally for knowledge, not justified knowledge.
How is justified knowledge not simply a necessity for meaningful speech? But it remains at least somewhat tentative until we “see” that it is true.
Glen Davidson
“Justified knowledge” is handled by our Department of Redundancy Department.
I would expect, if philosophy makes progress, that something approaching consensus would be reached, at least on some key issues. Some kind of agreement that transcends upbringing, nationality, religion, and such.
Perhaps I have the wrong standard for progress.
Hey, “appeals to me” is a kind of standard! (I mean since “TRVTH” has been bounced around here.)
Careful there — by that standard theology doesn’t make any progress either.
Then reproducing experiments is impossible. If it is the same experiment, then it is not a reproduction.
How about:
1. An omnipotent God can reveal stuff so I am sure
2. I am sure of stuff
3 Therefore God revealed stuff
The “so” is kind of ambiguous, but (putting the best shine on it I can) if it means
1. Anything that is an omnipotent God could reveal things in a way that allows me to
be sure of stuff
2. I am sure of stuff
3. Therefore God exists
Then No, it’s not valid.