The Space of Reasons
Committing Philosophical Homicide, One Argument at a Time! |
|
Statistics
Unique Visitors:
Total Unique Visitors:
Outgoing:
Total Outgoing: |
13
0
34
3843
|
|
|
Articles from The Space of Reasons |
Shopping for the Sui Generis
2007-10-01 06:09:00
In this post I will be further developing the reply to Reid adumbrated in my previous post; what I will refer to as the sui generis thesis. This thesis is not in tension with Reid’s observation that all the cognitive faculties are equally susceptible to “disorders of the body”. To wit, I am not claiming that reason is somehow less fallible than the faculty of sense. For example, we can imagine someone in the exact opposite position to Nash; someone whose schizophrenia utterly undermined the reliability of their rational faculty while leaving their sensory faculty perfectly intact. I do not wish to deny such a possibility.My point is that if someone’s reason were so corrupted, there would be no way for them to use their sensory faculty to discover this fact. By contrast, in the case of someone whose sensory faculty is compromised by schizophrenia, it is nevertheless conceivable that they could discover this fact using their rational faculty (in fact, this is precisely what ...
|
Reid's "Same Shop" Argument (Part 2)
2007-09-24 12:48:00
The central contention of the Shop Argument is that our trust in our sensory faculty (along with the other cognitive faculties) is a first principle just like our trust in reason. The reliability of both faculties is derived from the same place—i.e., how we have been designed by Nature—and neither is therefore better than the other. In a slogan, all first principles are created equal.However, pace what Reid has to say on the matter it seems to me that there is in fact something special about the rational faculty that sets it in sharp contradistinction to the sensory faculty. Specifically, there appears to be a unilateral relationship between the two faculties such that our rational deliberations can be employed to evaluate the reliability of our sensory deliverances, but our sensory deliverances cannot be used to evaluate our rational deliberations.This claim is illustrated by the Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind, which is loosely based on the life of the mathematician and winner ...
|
Reid's "Same Shop" Argument (Part 1)
2007-09-15 07:48:00
External-world scepticism is the thesis that we cannot know that the external world exists or that it is as we perceive it to be. The canonical summary of Reid’s reply to external-world scepticism is that found in chapter 6 of the Inquiry: The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe in the existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine: I even took it upon trust, and without suspicion. Reason, says the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception?—they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another?[Inquiry, VI, 20: 168-9]Reid notes that ...
|
The Nagel Lectures
2007-09-12 21:57:00
Columbia University's Philosophy department will be hosting its annual Nagel Lectures on Thursday, September 27th. The first lecture, which will be delivered by Anita Feferman, is entitled "Uncovering Tarski", and begins at 4:00pm in room 716, Philosophy Hall. The second lecture, entitled "Gödel, Nagel, Minds and Machines", begins at 6:15pm in the same venue and will be delivered by Solomon Feferman (winner of the Rolf Schock prize in logic and philosophy). There will be a short reception between the two sessions. ...
|
An Argument for Atheism (Martin)
2007-09-10 15:48:00
The following is the second installment of a two-part cross-post written by Martin Cooke from Enigmania:I shall, in this post, take atheism to be the belief that there is (probably) no God, where God will be defined to be an omniscient and omnipotent being that is also totally good (much as Richard defines Him), and I shall argue (as I did briefly in a comment on this post of Richard's) that such a God is (probably) impossible. There are of course other definitions, e.g. atheism is sometimes regarded as the absence of a belief in God, so that it would include both atheism (as defined above) and agnosticism (the absence of a belief either way, which includes the belief that knowledge either way is impossible, which is another definition of agnosticism), and God is sometimes defined to be the Creator of this Universe.Such a Creator would know (more or less) all that could be known about this Universe, just as an author would know all about her story, or a painter all about his painting ...
|
New Philosophy of Mind Blogs
2007-09-06 23:18:00
I am pleased to announce that both Tim Crane and Colin McGinn have joined the philosophy blogging world. Go have a peek! ...
|
An Argument for Agnosticism (Martin)
2007-09-03 06:50:00
The following is a cross-post written by Martin Cooke from Enigmania:Either the world was deliberately created, so that some sort of theism is true, or else atheism is true, but both options involve us in such mysteries (as the two below) that to choose either, given only such evidence as is publicly available (and so worthy of being called ‘evidence’), would be to favour irrationally one mystery over another, whence agnosticism (i.e. the absence of a belief either way) is to be preferred.The obvious problem with theism is that, when we look at the world we see only mundane things, no gods and not even angels or fairies. We don’t even see any clear evidence that the world was deliberately created, or is being guided from above, or even watched over. But more importantly our language is so orientated towards the world that we are unable even to form a clear idea of what its creator might be like.Conversely we know a lot about the world. We even know that our brains are composed of ...
|
Goodbye Scotland...Hello New York!
2007-08-23 14:48:00
I’ve finally submitted my M.Phil dissertation (‘viva’ pending), which brings my research career at the University of St Andrews to a close. I begin my Ph.D at Columbia in less than two weeks. This entry represents my very first post from the American continent. The geographical transition will also mark a transition in the content of this weblog. From now on, The Space of Reasons will be a full-fledged LEMMing, taking in a wider range of philosophical topics and issues. (The most recent posts on Naturalised Epistemology represented my initial steps in this direction.) However, McDowell’s theory of knowledge will continue to figure prominently here. And while we’re on the topic of McDowell, I am pleased to announce the appearance of a brand new McDowell blog, spontaneity&receptivity. This new philosophy weblog (or ‘philog’) focuses on McDowell’s philosophy of language and mind, particularly as set forth in his book Mind and World. (This fills in the gaps left b ...
|
Naturalising Epistemology: Quine vs. Crumley (Part 2)
2007-08-19 22:45:00
In my previous post I outlined two objections presented by Jack Crumley to Quinean naturalised epistemology. While I’m not altogether unsympathetic to Crumley’s process, I believe that as they stand, Crumley’s objections require further defence.Crumley claims that nature may favour belief-forming mechanism that form false beliefs. However, Crumley seems to be overstating the case. (Here, Quine’s frequent admonition seems quite apt: let's not overreact.) The survival value of being overly cautious is limited to certain special situations and circumstances. However, a general paranoia is as equally destructive as the alternative. For example, the individual that runs every time the bush rustles because she assumes it is a lion will prove less adaptively fit than the one who learns to tell the difference between the bush rustle caused by a lion (potential predator) and a rabbit (potential prey). While being overly cautious may prove evolutionary valuable in specific circum ...
|
Naturalising Epistemology: Quine vs. Crumley
2007-07-30 09:13:00
Thus far we have established that naturalised epistemology is no longer concerned with providing some justification for science that is prior to science. However, defenders of traditional epistemology point out that this still leaves room for sceptical worries that find their starting place within science. Science, remember, informs us that our theoretical conception of the world is underdetermined by our sensory evidence. Thus, even if we give up first philosophy, Quine still needs to account for the gap between "meagre" input and "torrential" output. Of course Quine can easily account for such a gap in causal terms. That is, science can, at least in principle, provide a complete causal account describing how sensory stimulation is eventually translated into theoretical posits. However, it is not the causal gap between evidence and theory that bothers defenders of traditional epistemology, but rather the inferential gap. In other words, the problem of the underdetermination of ...
|
Naturalised Epistemology: Quine vs Stroud (Part 2)
2007-07-23 04:31:00
In his notoriously laconic reply to Stroud, Quine treats Stroud's dilemma as merely an instantiation of the sceptical worry that reality might be very different from how we perceive it to be. If the first horn of the dilemma, that science is wrong, obtains then it naturally follows that reality is not as we perceive it to be. If the second horn of the dilemma, that all our theories are merely unverifiable posits, obtains then there is no way for us to rule out the possibility that reality is not as we perceive it to be. Both horns of Stroud's dilemma, then, amount to the sceptical worry. I take this conclusion to be uncontroversial, and I will therefore treat a successful reply to the sceptical worry as a successful reply to Stroud's dilemma.Quine maintains that the meaning of words is determined by their usage within a linguistic community. When we say: "there is a spoon," we are simply referring to a certain set of sensory stimulation’s to which our linguistic community has inte ...
|
|
|