Jane's belief might actually be wrong
Therefore, Jane's belief is false — Michael

But see this is not an argument.

If Jane's belief that P may be false in the actual world, that only says it is not necessary that P and P's truth-value is, at this point, unknown. It doesn't even get us the possibility that P in this or any world.

Then there's an issue with the claim "I believe p but it's possible that I'm wrong".

It shouldn't be interpreted simply as "I believe p and I'm not wrong but there is some other possible world where I am wrong".

And I don't think it should be interpreted simply as "I believe p but I'm not certain" as the claim prima facie says something about the subject matter of the belief rather than one's reasons for holding it.

So how do we make sense of such a claim? — Michael

I believe that P but I do not know that P.

If you acknowledge right off the bat that you might be mistaken, you pre-emptively abandon the claim to know, without waiting for the evidence to decide things either way.

You might even claim to have high confidence that P, but not, as you note, certainty. That really could be treated as a different issue, because there are cognitive claims we are inclined to make even assigning low confidence, given the totality of the evidence, but swayed by some sort of salience. I'm thinking of things like "I suspect it was Billy that left the refrigerator open, but really have no idea how it happened."

Here, I'll address this one directly, for all the good it will do.

I think our conflict is in regards to the prima facie difference between saying:

a. There is a possible world where my belief is false
b. It is possible that my belief is actually false

Given Kp ∧ ◇¬p I trust that you accept (a) is true even if my belief is true? — Michael

Absolutely.

But I suspect that you claim that (b) is false if my belief is true?

(b) is a misuse of "possible" in this context, because of the "actually" there.

There are no leftover possibilities in the actual world. It is defined by which possibilities it actualizes and which it doesn't. A statement that has a different truth value from the one it has in the actual world, is a statement that belongs to and partly defines a different possible world.

I tried to work around this issue by suggesting that the epistemic dilemma can be cast as trying to figure out which sort of world the actual world is. That might work, for all I know, but I suspect it's reinventing the wheel. @Kuro seems to be much more knowledgeable about this stuff than me.

Not quite, as it's not asserting p and then asserting that p might be wrong. It's asserting that there is this belief and then asserting that this belief might be wrong — Michael

Bob has a belief, called "Bob's belief", that it's Thursday.

Bob's belief is right if and only if it's Thursday.

Bob's belief is wrong if and only if it's not Thursday.

Such as

(p ∧ ¬□p) → ◇¬p — bongo fury

You would think, right? I did. But @Michael has been very clear that this is not what he means.

This says, perfectly clearly, that p holds in the actual world, and there is at least one possible world in which ~p. The second conjunct on the LHS says "p need not be true". What Michael wants is for p to "maybe" be false in the actual world, even though there's a premise that says it's true.

It's also clear that Michael wants wants p as a premise in addition to some premise along the lines of "S believes that P" because he wants to say something about true beliefs, about knowledge "possibly" being wrong. Even in recent formulations that don't have p as a premise, it's in the conclusion as a discharged assumption.

I think it turns out modal logic is not the right tool for this job and its introduction has just confused things. It may be possible to formalize the argument neatly, but it'll be in some sort of epistemic logic, and I don't know those. (That is, even less than the tiny bit I know of modal logic.)

The principal issue, so far as I can tell, has nothing to do with omniscience, nothing to do with knowledge, nothing to do with fallibilism, and nothing to do with modal logic.

The issue is what to make of arguments that go like this:

1. P.
2. (1) might be wrong.
...

No one raises an eyebrow on hearing "I think there are three left, but I could be wrong," or "I'm pretty sure there are three left, but I could be wrong," or even "I'm almost certain there are three left, but I could be wrong."

But no one ever says "I know for a fact there are three left, but I could be wrong."

Why not?

This entire thread has been devoted to confusing "I have knowledge of something that need not be the case" with "I have knowledge of something that may not be the case."

3. It is acceptable to say that we can have knowledge that is not necessarily true — Michael

The ambiguity here is crippling.

Let's say there need not be aliens, but there are. That they exist is a contingent fact, not necessary, and we can know this contingent fact.

• This is what (3) seems to say that most of us would agree with.

If you accept that Kp → p, then given Kp, you "must" conclude p, by modus ponens. That "must" is a sort of necessity, but it's logical necessity; it is different from the sort of necessity that the existence of aliens lacks. (Perhaps it would be more modern only to say that you may introduce p. In place of logical necessity, we would have logical permission or logical entitlement. In epistemic lands, that might be close to "warrant" or even "justification".)

If you define knowledge that p to include a stipulation that p is true, then it is analytic that when you know that p, p is true, and that's yet another sense of "necessity", very close to logical necessity, but perhaps different, as no specific logical principle is invoked.

• Something around here is what (3) seems to want to deny.

And of course, if you have P in hand, either as a premise, or derived, perhaps from your knowledge that P, then at that point we can apply the law of noncontradiction to deny that P is also false, and we'll usually say, P "cannot" be false, or that it cannot not be true, which is either a case of logical necessity, or the law of noncontradiction (perhaps also double negation) merely expressing the meaning of "true", "false", and "not", in which case this is analytic. Whatever.

• And this is the part of (3) I've been trying to make clear: once you have, perhaps even as a premise, that there are aliens, then there are, really and truly, here in the actual world, and it no longer makes sense to say maybe there aren't, even though their presence is entirely contingent. It still makes sense, as others have pointed out, to say, in English, "there might not have been", but that's not a temporal usage, that's the English past subjunctive, expressing contingency. We all agree, in some cases, that what is might not have been, but none of us agree, for any case, that what is might not be.

(2) breaks down into cases, right?

(2a) I'm not wrong, and aliens do exist here.
(2b) I am wrong, and aliens do not exist here.

Are both of those cases consistent with premise (3)?

No, they are not. By disjunctive inference, we are forced into the (2a) branch.

I should add: if you don't like my translation of (2), and would prefer it to be something like "It is possible there are no aliens here, in this world" then, in the presence of a further premise that there are or are not aliens here, this can only be understood as an epistemic possibility -- that is, as a way of saying I don't happen to know.

"I might be wrong" here means, it is possible that aliens do not exist. That is, there is a possible world in which aliens do not exist.

If you add the further premise that aliens do exist in this world, you can draw two conclusions: (1) they are possible; (2) this is not one of the worlds in which they do not exist. That's it. If I suggested otherwise, I must have expressed myself poorly.

I think that's the converse of what I was at least trying to say.

Let's suppose aliens might not exist. Then there is at least one possible world in which they don't.

Can the possible world in which aliens do not exist be a world in which aliens exist? No.

Can it be true, in a world in which aliens do exist, that there are other worlds in which they don't?

That's the same as asking if there are worlds in which aliens don't exist. We are supposing that aliens might not exist, so by stipulation, yes, there is at least one world in which they don't, and that continues to be true even in a world in which they do.

1. I believe that aliens exist
2. I might be wrong

One of these is true:

3. Aliens exist
4. Aliens do not exist — Michael

These premises are not independent. The truth-value of (2) depends on which of (3) and (4) is true. If aliens exist, you cannot be wrong to think they do; if they don't, you cannot be wrong to think they don't.

The actual world cannot "possibly" be a different one. It simply is whichever one it is, just as all the others are. It is not a matter of which name goes on which world, because "actual" is not a name but an indexical.

If aliens exist, then it follows that you are not wrong to think they do.

Not being wrong won't stop you from thinking you might be, but it quite definitely stops you from actually being wrong.

If aliens exist, neither you nor anyone else can be mistaken in thinking they exist. That possibility is blocked by them existing.

You can still think they might not all you like. You'll always be wrong, though.

Except you seem also to want to say that your true belief "might be" false.

Are you trying to equivocate? Why not distinguish the issue of what sort of world you happen to be in from the issue of what sort of world you think you're in?

is the below true?

This world might be one of the ones in which aliens don't exist — Michael

If that's a way of saying, I don't know which sort of world I'm in, sure.

But if you know aliens are actual, then they are actual, and you know this is not a world where they're not.

If aliens don't exist in this world, then this is one of the worlds in which they don't exist, whether you know it or not. If aliens are possible, then they are possible whether you happen to be in a world where they are actual or not, and whether you know they're possible or not.

I think you're trying to ask if this world could conceivably be a different world, but that's already baked in. All the possible worlds are already there; the question for you, the epistemic question, is which one you're in.

There are possible worlds in which aliens exist and possible worlds in which they don't.

1. I believe that aliens exist but I don't know that aliens exist.

I believe this world is one in which they do, but I don't know it for a fact.

2. I claim that I might actually be wrong.

This world might be one of the ones in which aliens don't exist.

3. My claim that I might actually be wrong is true even if aliens happen to exist and I'm not wrong.

This world might, for all I know, be one of the ones in which aliens don't exist, even if it is one of the ones in which aliens exist.

The problem here is that we still have subjunctives, because we're layering the epistemic issue on top of the, let's say, metaphysical one. What we want is all indicatives, so we can quantify properly:

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist.

That looks fine. Can we also say this?

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist, but I am wrong and there are no aliens in that world.

Of course. What about this?

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist, and they do, I'm right, and (new scope here) there are possible worlds in which they don't.

Yes.

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist, and they do, and I think, in that world, there are possible worlds in which they don't exist, and I'm right (or wrong, whatever).

If the sorts of available possible worlds are clear enough, but the problem is knowing which sort this one is, then you can still analyze it as sets of possible worlds in which you're right about which sort of possible world this one is, and possible worlds in which you're wrong.

I'm not just saying that. I'm saying that she might not be 30 in the actual world. When we admit to the possibility of being wrong we're not saying "I'm actually right, but in some possible world I'm wrong". We're saying "I might actually be wrong." That's fallibilism. — Michael

Try this: there are possible worlds in which she is 30, and possible worlds in which she is not; if you do not know whether she's 30, you do not know which bucket this world goes in.

To say, I know she's 30, is to say, I know this is one of the worlds in which she's 30. You can happily say I think she's 30 but maybe I'm wrong, because that's just saying, I think this is one of the worlds in which she's 30 but it might be one of the others.

But if you want to say, I know she's 30 but I might be wrong, then you're trying to say, I know this is one of the worlds in which she's 30 but I don't know if this is one of the worlds in which she's 30. That's a tough sell.

If one specifies the conditions under which a sentence is true, one specifies the meaning of that sentence. — Banno

Then you don't get to be deflationary about truth. Which is it?

if "aliens exist" is true then "aliens exist" is not false, and it could not possibly be false without negating "aliens exist" being true — Janus

Possible-worlds semantics makes this all clearer:

• "Aliens exist" means [ Aliens exist in this world ]
• "Aliens do not exist" means [ Aliens do not exist in this world ]
• "It is possible that aliens exist" means [ There is at least one possible world in which aliens do in fact exist, and in that world it would be true to say "Aliens exist" ]. This might or might not be our ("this", "the actual") world.
• "It is possible that aliens do not exist" means [ There is at least one possible world in which aliens do not in fact exist, and in that world it would be true to say "Aliens do not exist" ]

Therefore

"Aliens exist and it is possible that aliens do not exist" means [ Aliens exist in this world, and there is at least one possible world in which aliens do not exist ]

If you like, you can say, "There exists at least one possible world -- not this one, obviously -- in which aliens don't exist."

It is emphatically not the case that aliens existing makes it impossible that they don't exist. That would mean everything that exists exists necessarily, and every proposition that is true is true necessarily. If you want to claim specifically that, go ahead, but don't get there just by misinterpreting the now generally agreed understanding of the modal operators.

"Necessarily" always includes our world because it always includes all possible worlds. "Possibly" is explicitly non-committal on whether our world is the one described. If aliens are known to exist here, they are known to be possible; they may even be necessary, who's to say? But if you claim their existence is contingent, you're explicitly not claiming that in addition to existing here they don't exist here; you are claiming there is a possible world (maybe nearby, maybe accessible, whatever) in which they do not. Again: in that world, they do not; in this one, they still do. "Possibly not" just isn't about the facts here being different here. That rather misses the whole point.

our tribal conceptual norms — Pie

Not one of those paid private teachers, whom the people call sophists and consider to be their rivals in craft, teaches anything other than the convictions that the majority expresses when they are gathered together. Indeed, these are precisely what the sophists call wisdom. It's as if someone were learning the moods and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he's rearing—how to approach and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most gentle and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what sounds soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through tending the beast over a period of time, he calls this knack wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft, and starts to teach it. In truth, he knows nothing about which of these convictions is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, but he applies all these names in accordance with how the beast reacts—calling what it enjoys good and what angers it bad. He has no other account to give of these terms. And he calls what he is compelled to do just and fine, for he hasn't seen and cannot show anyone else how much compulsion and goodness really differ. — Republic 493a-c

This talk of norms, is it an advance on Plato, or is it sophistry in modern, perhaps even scientific garb?

[deleted]

I think perhaps a lot of the time the philosopher is in the job of classifying the habits of thinking which accompany our particular forms of life — Isaac

This is an interesting and valuable enterprise but I would call it "cognitive psychology" rather than "philosophy". A whole lot of what I post, including almost* everything in this thread, also isn't philosophy, but "psychology of philosophy" -- at least as I'm inclined to use the terms, which is no doubt idiosyncratic.

You seem to have "bracketed", as they say, the issue of whether a classification, or a classificatory scheme, is "correct", in any sense. You might do that (1) for scientific reasons -- that is, that you don't care, since what you're investigating is the landscape of human classificatory habits. You might do that (2) for another reason, one we might call "logical" or "philosophical" or even "mathematical", that given any set of phenomena (or objects, whatever), there is no single way to classify them. (Which sounds like a theorem.)

Either is sufficient, but it's still slightly odd, since philosophers generally worry quite a bit about their classificatory choices and would never consider them all equivalent, as you implicitly do. You also imply that a classification is, shall we say, "external", "imposed" on the set:

The librarian noting that "How to make Curries" is a book about cookery is not discovering something about the book, they are classifying it, it's not a necessary part of the process, the book didn't need classifying to be understood, and used. — Isaac

The librarian has discovered that the book contains instructions for cooking; the predicate "... is a cookbook" is true of it, while many other predicates are not. It doesn't completely determine your final decision on how to classify the book (because there are many predicates you can use to partition your set, and many combinations of them), but it's now available. (As a bookseller, I can tell you I wouldn't trust the title alone: it could absolutely be a novel, and not unlikely a memoir.)

All this does relate to the sorts of things I've said earlier in this thread, like this: the usual way of classifying classificatory schemes is by their purpose. You pick the overlapping axes of your partitions based on suitability and usefulness for your purpose in so classifying items. (There is one section of the bookstore where I work that I have arranged, believe it or not, by the color of the book.) It might matter a great deal that "purpose" takes a possessive there -- any classificatory scheme might be treated sort of functionally, as itself the definition of "a" purpose, some purpose, but the issue in choosing it is whether that purpose is the same as yours.

And I've been suggesting that philosophy has no purpose, not in itself, so to speak, even though pointless activities, as a group, including, you know, art and all that, may have some purpose. Whether that's so, I've bracketed. I just take it as a fact that people do lots of pointless stuff, which kinda suggests there's a reason to do something pointless so I'm walking a bit of a tightrope here -- we need to do something we don't need to do, but that doesn't mean that something has to be philosophy, and philosophy only fits the bill if you don't need to do it.

And my reason for going through all that rigmarole is to bring us back to the moment of wonder, the moment of questioning, of curiosity. What is my purpose in watching a spider build its web? If there's survival value in that, it's a long, long way away. I don't think it's there at all. I can do that, because of how natural selection built me, but that doesn't mean I am constrained to act in ways that enhance my ability to survive and reproduce. And I am free not only of that purpose but of purpose as such. I don't have to have a reason to watch the spider build its web. That activity need have no purpose at all.

Which is not to say that there aren't psychological explanations for my spider-watching available. Of course there are. But they don't count as reasons for me. (We are still very close to the prompting thread after all.)

--- Anyway, this is all beside the point, because reasons and causes play no part in the moment of wonder itself. I can and do experience the world without there being any particular reason for my doing so. If philosophy ends up being striving to understand, it requires a beginning where understanding is absent, even if that must be relative rather than absolute. Which means I should backtrack a little: curiosity is a clue, a retroactive experience of recognizing that you have already not understood something. It is a valorization of that failure as the proper starting point.



* There is a single word in what I've posted here that, as I wrote it, I felt like I was verging on actual philosophy. There are a couple other points where I was at least in the neighborhood. The rest is chit-chat.

Can you perceive of any purpose for the universe during this time apart from its happenstance progress towards a lifeform capable of asking questions? — universeness

What, indeed, is the point of it all?

Some time back, there was a thread that amounted to attempting to answer this question:

Where is the universe?

Okay, there are some problems there, and it's not hard to see that there are problems there. And yet we ask. Why? Why are we so inclined to ask questions that don't quite make sense?

One common answer is that we are misled by the surface similarity of this question to a question like "Where is Belarus?" As it happens, Ryle's original example of a "category mistake" was a visitor being shown libraries, dining halls, classroom buildings, and so on, and then asking, "Yes, but where is the university?" We know that we can engage some little sentence generator within us to produce "Where is X?" for any token X, but why would we? What did that young student want to know that he was not getting from his tour guide? Why do we think of the universe as being somewhere? Why do we think it might or might not have a purpose?

There are two sorts of responses to questions like these that I want to head off:
(1) Your question is just a mistake; don't do that.
(2) It's a question, so let's start arguing for one answer or another.

Answer (1) often involves an argument that some canon of logical, or, more often, semantic, purity has been violated. Answer (2) generally presumes that a sufficiently pure (logically and semantically) analysis is available, and once discovered will yield an answer. (Thus if you've never beaten your children, you should cheerfully answer "no" when asked if you've stopped -- because logic.)

If your suspicion is that something like answer (1) is appropriate -- that, say, it makes no sense to ask where the universe is -- how will you proceed? Well, that's a curious point, because the natural thing to do in many cases is look for situations where answer (2) is appropriate -- that is, where we believe we are already in possession of the correct analysis, like "Where is Belarus?" -- and then point out that our situation is not enough like these. Hence the violation. But that's a pretty weird place for philosophy to end up -- are we only to ask questions we already know the answers to, or at least know how to get the those answers? "No one's ever asked that before," should be about the highest praise we can give, but that's not the vibe here at all.

If answer (1) shows, in some sense, too much humility, is too deferential to received wisdom, answer (2) shows too little: we presume we can or already do understand what's at stake, what the question means, where it comes from, why it's asked, how to go about answering it, what the answer will look like. It's impatient, which ought to be a sin in philosophy. (It was Kafka who said that all sins spring from impatience.)

I started this thread with the idea that we should stop turning away from the phenomena that puzzle us in our rush to have some explanation or some answer to the questions we begin with, but more and more I seem to have been defending the moment of questioning itself, that engagement with the world in wonder and curiosity; I also want us not to be in such a hurry to get un-puzzled.

I'm genuinely sorry this is all so meta, but actual philosophy is hard.

Does the universe have a purpose? If it makes sense, that's a yes or no question, so three options are immediately available. Must we choose among those? Must we simply choose among those?

I'd counsel not thinking much about the answer yet at all. It's a question people can and do ask. Even philosophers. What's going on there? Why do we ask the question? Is it a matter of psychology? Before even getting to the why, maybe we should spend some time just thinking about the situation the question implies -- here we are, considering our home, the universe in which we evolved, and on the one hand this is unquestionably where we belong, and yet we have this doubt, or uncertainty, about what that belonging really means, a doubt so strong we wonder if this is our true home or whether we have come from elsewhere. ("I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world. I've got a home on high.") Which word in "Why am I here?" gets the emphasis?

@apokrisis has a charming just-so story about this, which I'm sure he'd be willing to tell: what I call "unnecessary", he'll call "hastening the heat-death of the universe" -- that's why if there weren't people, the universe would need to invent them, and why people need to do (for the universe) things they don't need to do (for themselves).

Should I object that my use of "necessary" was pretty clearly circumscribed in what I wrote? It's just about the oldest move in philosophy, to climb up a rung or two toward greater abstraction -- "maybe we are ourselves unnecessary ..." What are we doing now? Are we trying to understand what it means for something to be "necessary", or, as we might say, "necessary in general"?

As it happens, the idea of "necessity" sits right in the middle of the issue that prompted this little thread: causes are supposed to be "necessarily" linked to their effects, somehow. But reasons are part of a constellation of concepts that seem to presume some sort of "freedom", since you are not forced into a particular course of action by your reasons. (But then it gets even squirrelier, because reason has its own version of necessity -- if x + 2 = 5, then x must be equal to 3. And we see this further as some sort of obligation on us, that we "must" so conclude, or that we "should" so conclude, and those feel oddly equivalent in this case.)

Questions of "necessity" play an outsize role in our cultural history, in a way that many people find particularly valuable. "Must it be so?" is a powerful question. Must we keep Black people as slaves? Must some have so much more than others? Must we kill one another in war?

We forget how pious, even traditional, Socrates was and remember that he asked a lot of questions it turned out no one could answer. When that looks like social activism, we applaud; when it looks like playing with words, we boo. But underneath is the same questioning impulse.

Someone (I forget who) described the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy as a neat little man, wearing a bowler hat, carrying an umbrella, and standing at a slight angle to the universe. Philosophy should aspire to stand at such an angle, and then to look.

"Are we necessary?" is an excellent question, and that's so even if it turns out to be unanswerable, even if it turns out not quite to make sense. My real concern was to counter the assumption that it, and all such questions, are to be settled simply by argument, by arraying the case for "yes" against the case for "no", rather than spending a little time in the moment of questioning, and then seeing where the question itself might take us.

The universe can exist without us. — Jackson

And did, practically forever.

Should that bother us?

Everyone examines their lives at some point - usually in the late teens - early twenties. They question their existence and their purpose. The real question is how much of an examination does your life need before you can get on with just living it? — Harry Hindu

And the answer come back: "Just enough."

That looks like fear to me. If we're not careful, we'll all turn into Chidi Anagonye. Henry Miller called it "Hamlet", the excessive questioning and analyzing that gets in the way of living, that can cripple you as it cripples Chidi.

If I have a point, it begins with the opposite assumption: people do manage to walk across rooms, even though I have an analysis that suggests this is impossible or illusory, and in figuring out where my analysis fails -- as it evidently does -- I can come to understand more about how people do that than I did before. I don't wonder whether it's possible, and my puzzlement about how it's possible doesn't prevent me from walking across a room anymore than it does anyone else.

So why does the specter of Chidi/Hamlet in that ivory tower hang over philosophy?

You ask, "How much of an examination does your life need?" There are a couple ways to go here. (Analytical habits die hard.) Maybe a little reflection is good, but too much is Chidi. Chidi is just immoderate in his reflection. But (second way, now), at what point do we call this philosophy? Not that it matters, but there's a hint here that maybe philosophy could be defined as: excessive and unnecessary reflection. Maybe in some cases, just unnecessary, but in some unnecessary and positively harmful, disruptive, crippling, Chidi.

Anecdotal interlude. W. H. Auden named two sorts of poets: "Prospero" poets have something to say; "Ariel" poets like playing with language. The response to a bad Ariel poem is, "This needn't have been written"; the response to a bad Prospero poem is, "This shouldn't have been written."

Is poetry necessary? Painting? Music? Is philosophy? Once they're about in the world, the answer becomes "yes" to many people, who find their lives thus enriched. But for all that, it's still perfectly clear that there's little "survival value" in such undertakings. I'm perfectly happy to say that art and philosophy are unnecessary in exactly this sense. They are a bonus, above and beyond survival. And I'll say more: it seems to me that human beings need not, individually or in aggregate, engage in any one such enterprise, taken by itself -- not everyone needs to paint or play music or engage in philosophical reflection -- but it also seems to me that human beings, both individually and in aggregate, do have an actual need to do something unnecessary. The evidence for this view seems, strangely perhaps, overwhelming, because my god look at all the stuff people get up to, and have gotten up to down through the generations. First chance we got, we began doing all sorts of things we didn't have to just to survive and we've been doing more and more of that extra stuff ever since. No one needs to know how the universe began and gave rise to fundamental forces and matter and all that, but damned if we aren't bending heaven and earth to find out. Good for us. And so it is with philosophy, says I.

So what about that fear of the ivory tower? What is that? Why does it haunt philosophy? I think you can see it at work whenever someone claims, as they will around here, "Everyone has a metaphysics, just mostly unexamined," that sort of thing. People want to insist on the importance, on the relevance, of philosophy -- and claiming that everyone is actually doing philosophy all the time, though they may not realize it, is one way to do that. The great fear is that we'll all be taken for Ariels, just playing with words, or Prosperos, declaiming our ridiculous and embarrassing theories as if anyone wanted to hear them, as if they could possibly matter to anyone. (For the record, Auden thought only those who begin as Ariels have any chance of becoming great poets.)

My suggestion in the OP was that what we should really worry about is a methodological ivory tower, where we shut ourselves off from the phenomena we realize we don't understand and attempt to turn philosophy into either a branch of mathematics (which has its own ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds PR issues) or a branch of literature, a sort of hyper-intellectualized belles lettres. I want us to remember that what we do as philosophers springs originally from a certain unusual sort of curiosity about the lives we are actually living, an unnecessary curiosity, to be sure, but valuable for that very reason, I say, rather than in spite of it.

This is very close to Mary Midgley's idea of philosophy as plumbing. We don't need it until things start to leak or smell. — Banno

That's awfully close to Dewey's conception, as I understand it. Problems. Problems that are live for us, that engage us, problems that maybe we think need to be solved, or think maybe we could solve.

I'm not sure I want to be quite that single-minded. I like peculiar questions, and I've asked a few on this forum. (Why do we want to avoid being wrong? Why don't we understand nature completely, why do we have to work at it?)

There are also questioning sorts of interests that are hard even to formulate as simple questions. For instance, language seems to work, but what it even works at is not clear, what it even does is confusing. And there are ways of conceiving of language that suggest it cannot possibly work at whatever it's doing, which we still don't know. I don't think I'm ever going to shake my fascination with that little knot.

So here the plumbing is, to all appearances, working fine, at something. But it's easy as pie to show how little we understand it. Why is it so easy? That's a new problem. I mean, it takes some pretty heavy physics to show that various things about the world are actually pretty odd -- but with language, it takes no more than a few questions to pull you up short, and those questions occur even to a six year old.

The germ for this thread is something I've tried to address before, the ongoing problem of causes and reasons. It looks to me now like one of those "antinomy of pure reason" sorts of things. But I also think we are foolish to dive right in making arguments as if we know perfectly well what it means for one event to cause another, or for a person to have a reason for what they believe or what they do. I don't think we do, and I don't think arguments that take such things as given get us anywhere.

Take a week off. Take two. Not just not posting; don't even login to see what's going on.

In mil-speak: Do not allow the forum to dictate the tempo of your actions.

paranoid nuclear scenarios — Manuel

Thomas Schelling's Nobel Lecture is interesting viewing. As I recall, he doesn't talk about himself or his work at all, but goes incident-by-incident from 1945 to 2005, times when we almost had another nuclear war but didn't. I think he offers a tentative theory for why too, but it escapes me.

Maybe there's a difference between having no choice and thinking you have no choice. (For some sorts of analysis, that difference won't show up at all.) What's needed then is what Seamus Heaney calls

a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances

(And you can safely assume he had the Troubles in mind when he said that.)

War is death and destruction on a massive scale carried out by people who would rather not be doing what they're doing.

On some readings, Putin believed he had no choice but to invade Ukraine. And then his army believed it had no choice but to do as he commanded. Perhaps earlier Ukraine believed it had no choice but to seek alliances to the west. And so it goes. We can point at any link in the chain of events and say, but you did have a choice, or say, it's understandable that you thought you had no choice, or both.

The material conditions, then, might come down to this: are the options more than theoretical? Can you come to believe that you do have real competing options, requiring a choice? I want to say that this is what you see with the most effective government programs, the most effective NGOs, that they make options real for people. That's true, of course, but it's not like those things fall from the sky; that's still just people. At some point, people have to create their own possibilities.

My oldest son recently read 1984 and reminded me (decades since I read it) that the state is not in fact all powerful -- it just makes people believe it is. And this is always the trick.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell — FreeEmotion

Yes, that is an apposite quote. Is it true? If it is true today, must it always be so?

Those men on the wall, is what they are doing noble? As members of the non-fighting caste, we are inclined to engage in nuanced, systemic analysis of the role of the fighting caste, but many of them are not so inclined. Many people in uniform actually believe what we might dismiss as propaganda.



The "not built for this" issue has another side. Whether people wear the uniform and take up arms willingly, even eagerly, they will pay a price. I think we ask more of soldiers and police officers than should be asked of any human being. It is not only a question of the harm they might do, which is considerable, but of the harm to them.

They wouldn't even dream of resisting an invasion by a force that threatens their existence as a people without great powers "convincing" them to fight. — SophistiCat

(Just to be clear: I put "powerless" in quotes in my first sentence and called this "a can of worms" for a reason.)

My gut reaction is to feel a sort of pride and wonder at Ukrainian willingness to fight: they are the underdog; the aggressor is autocratic while they are at least trying to be democratic; and, since the war has a great and obvious material cost, it is fought not for material gain but for ideas, for feelings -- country, family, neighbor, home. @Benkei says we should never send anyone else to fight for abstractions, but to be willing oneself to fight for, if not abstractions exactly, non-material goods seems noble, so long as what you're fighting for is worth it. (Keeping in mind the myth of the lost cause, which is still powerful in my part of the world.)

That a few saints might come up with some genius method of passive resistance — Isaac

Like Leymah Gbowee?

Leymah is best known for leading a nonviolent movement that brought together Christian and Muslim women to play a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s devastating, fourteen-year civil war in 2003. — Nobel site

Why the dismissive tone, Isaac? What if nonviolence works and violence doesn't?

There are so many layers here -- including @StreetlightX's interesting points about "legitimacy", which I'm sorta passing over only because it's the whole thing, and I precisely don't know what to say about the whole thing -- but I'm not sure I want to discount the ethical as you do. "It's up to you not to heed the call up," you know? We talk of dictators sometimes, but no dictator ever single-handedly terrorized a nation; there must be others willing to do his bidding. Any of the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine could have refused, could have not joined the army in the first place. You can say that, if you're inclined, to mark them as morally culpable; but it's another way of saying that these people, as a group, if they acted as a group, if they acted in solidarity with those they are charged with doing violence upon, have more than enough power to make Putin irrelevant. He is not, himself, fighting a war in Ukraine.


But all of that just leads back to my questions. What are our options in a world with people willing to use violence? Here's a different problem: is it violence that we should be concerned with, or control? But is there genuine control that is not backed by the threat of violence?

Thanks @StreetlightX, @Benkei, @FreeEmotion, @Isaac for thoughtful responses all.

(Just on the practical side here, might come back to the more philosophical point about violence later.) — Baden

I can't contribute anything on the practical side. Even on the philosophical, all I can manage is asking some questions.

@Baden, @StreetlightX

Recent posts from you both (you'll forgive me for not quoting) have made undeniably powerful points about power and how those we might identify as "powerless" -- that's a bit of a can of worms, though, right? -- inevitably suffer, and particularly suffer when they're caught in the middle of a fight between one power and another. I appreciate how clearly and forcefully you have reminded us -- well, me, at any rate -- of how the world is made to turn.

With that as a given, I think I can also understand @Isaac's disgust for one great power encouraging some relatively powerless nation or people to take on some other great power, and offering them support to do so, in essence convincing them to be complicit in their own inevitable or continued pummeling. It is conceivable that the misguided powerful might do so out of ignorance, but if we have reason to believe they know exactly the sort of outcome they're pointing someone else toward, and if they offer their "support" in the name of "solidarity" or some such idealism while actually pursuing their own ends, not only getting it wrong, but getting it wrong on purpose, deceitfully, and exploiting the admirable courage or patriotism of others -- unforgivable, and it's understandable that one might find such underhandedness even more distasteful than forthright if appalling aggression.

So much for the status quo. It is abysmal. The dinosaurs died (again tonight on RadioLab) to clear the way for us to do this.

I want above all to ask you impractical questions. What is our relationship to violence? What is the place of force in human society? Can it change? How could such change be brought about?

Is violence inherently illegitimate? I genuinely don't know, but it's a question even the luckiest of us are compelled to think about almost every day now, possibly the most important question there is. (If it's not obvious, I have not only war but policing on my mind.) No one in this thread, I think, has suggested that Ukraine, or Ukrainians, ought simply to turn the other cheek. We tend to believe in the legitimacy of self-defense, and, even if we didn't, it's unseemly to suggest that someone else submit to force, just as it's unseemly to suggest that they fight back at risk to themselves. It is a situation in which we will tend to find either choice understandable, perhaps even laudable in the circumstances, but somehow we are barred -- by our conscience, I mean -- from giving advice (much less encouragement or inducement). In the same way that it's at once appalling to deny aid to the aggressee, as if we had hearts of stone, or to offer aid to the aggressee, thus prolonging their suffering. Violence, once set in motion, transmutes all choices and all outcomes to bad ones. You would think we would have learned by now how to avoid it. Is it conceivable that we will ever do so?

ban — Isaac

suppression — Isaac

Can you explain how you're using these words?

I have seen many responses directly rebutting the claims at issue.

I have seen many dismissive non-responses (that the claims need not be discussed, much less rebutted, because they are irrelevant, unimportant, overblown, etc.).

Does any of that qualify as "banning" or "suppressing" discussion for you?

What I cannot understand — ssu

I'm surprised that the American and European sympathy for Ukrainians, but not, say, Yemenis, isn't taken at face value, but counted as racist.

Reuters.

<nvm>