An odd post. You point to the "Official Doctrine" (yes, Ryle) which is down to Descartes, but pretend it is a problem for analytic philosophy. It isn't, and never was.

Explaining how the ghost interacts with the machine is your problem.

Are you saying that we must be certain — Bob Ross

I'm certain I am writing this reply.

Aren't you certain you are reading it?

When I say I am certain that I am writing this, I mean, more or less, that there is no room for doubt here.
I'm not just very confident that we are involved in a discussion. Any doubt would need to be manufactured, contrived - phoney.

What is "absolute truth" here? It's a strange notion to invoke some something as commonplace as replying to or reading a post on a forum. Statements are, generally speaking, true, or they are false. Sometimes we don't know which. There are exceptions, of course, but these need some explanation, some further account, to explain why we might consider such an antirealist position.

Why do we need to add "I am certain"? Why shouldn't I be certain? In order to get things done, one must hold certain things to be the case, not to be in doubt. One must hold some things as certain.

I think Midgley makes a good point, and I generally enjoy reading her work, but I'm always interested in discussions of Descartes. — Wayfarer

Well, I gather you more or less agree with substance dualism, a notion that I cannot see as coherent. I decide to move my hand, the damn thing moves; I take the drugs, the pain goes away. I can't see how such facts can be made to fit Descartes without folly.

But you are aware of my problems.

Meaning is not equivalent to behaviors. — creativesoul

No, but we see meaning in how someone uses words as well as with other things. The indiscernibility of identity is just using words coherently.

you and I are in near complete agreement when it comes to the OP — creativesoul

Yep. Turns out Chet's position was pretty shallow.

Ok. Thanks for the response. I think I see your point, but I'm not sure it addresses the argument I made. That you are reading this now is not just "plausible"; rather if that is to be doubted, we no longer have a footing for this conversation to proceed. At some point doubt undermines itself. Nor is arithmetic simply plausible. Bringing it into doubt would require at the least a vastly different approach to understanding the way things are.

Anyway, this is a discussion we have probably had before, an it is clear from Chet's posts that he does not have much of a grasp of basic philosophical terms, nor much by way of a capacity to engage in a coherent argument. Yet another case of someone spouting supposed "philosophy" with little to no background knowledge. I had you in that category for a while, but you have shown a capacity to develop and change your ideas. They are still mostly wrong, but they are less wrong than they were... :wink:

Midgley claimed that for Descartes other people's existence had to be inferred. I said she was wrong about this. — Fooloso4

Is that what you were saying? It all got a bit muddled. Do you have an account to offer? How does Descartes conclude that others exist, without making an inference? Will you be defending substance dualism? Rationalism in the face of empiricism? What did Descartes get wrong, and what right?

The pop story of Descartes, which may well be wrong, is that he doubted as much as he could, until he arrived at what he considered a certainty. He then used this certainty to conclude that there was a god who was not deceiving him, and so "derived" the world as we see it. And it is this story that the aggravating Grandmother is using, questioning the method in use here for taking an extreme and contrived view of our place in the world.

Rings and Books reads now as a precursor to more recent streams in philosophical thinking such as enactivism and embodied cognition. On such views the self is constructed as much by others as it is by oneself. This is at odds with the views offered by Descartes, along with very many of those who preceded and followed him.

There's a neat, short account at Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

At the very least, it is worth recognising the challenges to our casual conceptualisations offered here: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

‘A person is a person through other persons.’

Perhaps "this body doubts"? — Janus

:wink:
One of the consequences of the approach Descartes takes is substance dualism. It's not, for him, the body that does the doubting.

Meh. You are presenting a pretty stock pop version of pragmatism. You are unwilling to consider where it goes astray.

No helping some folk.

Cheers.

I will give the best example I have: being (viz., ‘to be’, ‘existence’, ‘to exist’, etc.). When trying to define or describe being, it is impossible not to use it—and I don’t mean just in the sense of a linguistic limitation: it is impossible to give a conceptual account without presupposing its meaning in the first place. — Bob Ross

To exist is to be the subject of a predicate.

I don't think this definition uses "exist" in a circular fashion. Instead it claims that to exist is to be ascribed, assigned, given, a predicate. If this is red, then there exists something that is red.

This is a sin against Quine, and perhaps against Kripke since there are things with proper names. But it might suggest that the situation is a bit more complex.

A good rule of thumb might be that what counts as simple depends on what one is doing, and so change form one case to another.

Getting back on track, I think that had claimed that there was no difference between belief and knowledge, and then we'd made some progress with him acknowledging that there was a difference - the things we believe being the things we believe to be true, the things we know being the things we believe to be true which are indeed true. But then he went to the fall back position that we don't know anything, and so that even if there is a difference between knowledge and belief, there is no knowledge so it makes no nevermind.

Or something like that.

To which the reply is simply to show that we do know things. Like, as pointed out, how to type a reply on the Philosophy Forum.

Chet suggested there was some virtue in saying one believed but didn't know. Such virtue resides in being able to correct one's opinion, to change what one believes from what is false to what is true. But if there is no way to know what is true, then all we can do is change our beliefs, true or false; it makes no difference what we believed. If there is virtue in correcting our beliefs, then there must be correct beliefs. Humility is different to ignorance in that humility admits truth.

The content of the cat's belief is meaningful to the cat. — creativesoul

Sure. The meaning is just what the cat does.

Yawn.

Forty-two pages ago, I posited:

This argument is interminable because folk fail to think about how they are using direct and indirect. — Banno

You continue to think of belief as a discreet "thing in the head", as mental furniture. We each have innumerable beliefs that we have never articulated, indeed which we never will articulate, but which nevertheless we do hold to be true. There are unstated beliefs. Each and every one of these can be set out as a proposition that is held to be the case.

Perhaps you believe that you have more than 28 eyelashes, but until now that belief has never been articulated. The belief is not a thing in your head.

It would be absurd to suppose that each of one's innumerable beliefs exists somewhere in your mind.

That a belief can be put into a proposition is a grammatical point about the way the word "belief" is used. If you can't put it into a statement, then you can't be said to believe it.

"The cat believes the mouse ran behind the tree" shows exactly that - "the mouse ran behind the tree" being the content of the cat's belief. What is not claimed is that there a thing in the head of the cat that somehow is named by "the mouse ran behind the tree". Rather there is the cat's capacity to recognise, chase, anticipate, and so on. It is humans, you and I, who benefit from setting this game out in terms of belief and intent.

It also shows that the cat and the mouse are participants in our language games, which are never confined just to language, but show how language is part of our interaction with the world

I think folk have had enough of this dead horse.

That is exactly the issue, and what I was trying to convey to Janus. — Bob Ross

I'm not so sure that we are in agreement. Take:

It is not that we have no knowledge, it is that we only have probabilistic reasons to support the truth of things. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this: the alternative is absolute truth....

The only way this negates my position, is if you could validly claim to it is absolutely true; and you can’t. The things you know, are based off of probability: all you are noting is a high probability. — Bob Ross

Follow your own argument and apply this to itself. Are you going to say that we only know that, say, P(A) = n(A)/n(S) is probably true? How could one find the probability of such a thing? But there is a step further here: the whole framework of a probabilistic theory of truth must be taken as true in order to function as an account of truth... that is, the sentence "n(S) is the total number of events in the sample space" must also be assigned a probability, but this cannot be done without our having already assigning a probability to that very statement.

The only way out of this is to suppose that there are statements that are true outside of this game of assigning probabilities.

And this does not just apply to the supposed "analytic" statements. What is the probability that you are now reading this sentence? How can we even make sense of such a thing?

Pragmatism, probabilism, correspondence, coherence... Whatever substantive theory of truth is chosen, something will be left out, something must remain ungrounded. We are left with T-sentences, and descriptions of how sentences about truth function rather than theories about what is true and what isn't. And that should not be a surprise.

Well, in my defense, those words left your keyboard, not mine. — creativesoul

I'm arguing from the standpoint of evolutionary progression. — creativesoul

Yes, I hinted at this myself earlier. — Tom Storm

Ok. nice.

Ok. The notion that evolution 'progresses" is somewhat problematic. Take care.

This infatuation with evolution is new, isn't it? Why should we kowtow to evolutionary "progress"?

I agree—absolute certainty is not possible except relative to some context or other. — Janus

Ok, cheers. But I would go further and suggest that "absolute certainty" is a nonsense formed by concatenating two otherwise innocent words. Trying to make use of such a term leads immediately to misunderstanding.

Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? I doubt that Midgley would have disagreed with your account of Descartes.

'...enlightenment' or mystical experiences... — Tom Storm

Notice that these are things we do, not statements about the way things are.

The advice is not to talk about such things, but to enact them - whereof one cannot speak, thereof one can do.

, , all of this speculation and discussion takes place in a context that involves there being language and other people with which to chat.

Midgley, amongst others, points to that. See Rings & Books

Perhaps the problem is not, not being able to find "absolute certainty", but the framing of these issues in terms of "absolute certainty". Garbage in, garbage out.

Philosophy was for Descartes public... — Fooloso4

From were we are now, it was not public enough. Wittgenstein and others have shown us how the enterprise of doing philosophy emanates from our place in a human community. It is a game played by people, plural.

A look around the forums shows folk looking for first principles in ethics, ontology, epistemology; firm ground on which to stand, Aristotle's stoa. But of course that very search already has a beginning; it takes place in the stoa of our discussions, our language games and our way of living.

Midgley is recognising this, explicating it in the particularly obvious case of Descartes, and asking for a broader recognition of the place of philosophy in our day to day encounters.

It is not that thinking or doing philosophy is a necessary condition for existing, it is that existing is a necessary condition for thinking is this broad sense of the term. — Fooloso4

Are you engaged in exegesis, or advocacy? Sure, Descartes' ideas made sense for Descartes. but do you agree with them?

But I wonder if Descartes is the target? — Moliere

Isn't the target here more the method to be adopted in doing philosophy?

Roughly, is philosophy to be public or private?

:meh:

Misogyny will carry a thread only so far, but perhaps too far to drag it back to something more interesting.

Descartes is Midgley’s exemplar of the philosophical bachelor. He famously spent large expanses of time isolated and, doubting the certainty of knowledge about the external world. ‘I am here quite alone,’ he wrote in the First Meditation, ‘and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.’ Descartes does just this, demolishing the certainty of all knowledge, except (of course) the existence of his own thought. — Ellie Robson

One way to think about the Cogito is suggested by the word "ergo", "therefore", that we are to infer our existence from the very act of doubting. On the face of it, this inference is invalid. Elsewhere there was a recent extended discussion of the value of p⊃q, which we might try not to repeat here. The most we seem to be able to conclude from more sophisticated parsings of "I doubt" is that "something doubts", and not what that something is.

Hence a second way to think about the Cogito, that it is a definition of "I"; that the thing doing the thinking is the self of the philosopher. This has the uncomfortable result that one ceases to exist when not doing philosophy, or at least when one is asleep.

Broader considerations lead one to see doubt as only one aspect of our lives, one game we occasionally play. Descartes had a preference for solitaire, but he could only play that game using the words he had learned as part of a community. He brought that community with him into his room. His private reflections are ultimately public, and not just in being published.

That is to say, the deadly serious idea of accuracy is not being treated properly at all when we say we 'know' something. — Chet Hawkins

But we do know things, all sorts of different things, often with good reason.

Science is not the world. Limiting your examples by presuming that science is the only, or even the best, way to determine truth will lead you astray.

You want a moral argument.

As I already pointed out, if all we have is belief, then there is no correcting ourselves. If there is only opinion, then one cannot be mistaken, for to be mistaken is to believe something that is not the case, not true. In the place of learning, there would only be changing one's opinion. If there is no difference between believing and knowing, one cannot cease to believe a lie and so know the truth.

You claiming this with no explanation at all shows the depth of your intent or lack of it. — Chet Hawkins

Dude, check out my posts on page three. I think I've set out enough to be getting on with.

That has no bearing on what we are discussing, except that knowledge is the same. Ergo knowledge is only belief. — Chet Hawkins

I'll take that argument to be facetious.

Here's where I think we stand. You said that knowledge is just belief. I've pointed out that in addition to being believed, the things we know also have to be true.

You might come back by asserting that in that case we only have beliefs, and do not know anything; this because we don't know what is true and what isn't. My reply to that is that we do know some things - examples given previously; and that further you are treating your explanation as something of which you are certain, as something you know, giving only lip service to your doubt.

That would be much better than the alternate account, asserting in the face of evidence to the contrary that there is no difference between belief and truth.

Truth and perfection are synonymous. — Chet Hawkins

Well, no they are not.
But you thinking this might explain your error.

There can be accidentally true statements. — Chet Hawkins

So you are saying it is true that there can be accidentally true statements?

Or is that also an accidental truth?

Think a bit further. If you say you believe something, then you say that you believe it to be true.

You cannot get by without truth.

,

But I am self confessed as 'knowledge is only belief', and sadly I DO believe it is ONLY belief. — Chet Hawkins

Again, the difference between the stuff you know and the stuff you merely believe is that hte stuff you know is true.

we know that knowing requires perfection — Chet Hawkins

No, it requires truth.

Which other country could maintain the satellites and earth studies? — Athena

The US does not have a monopoly even here.

The decline of democracy in the US will have much less of an impact on us than you might suppose.

The United states likes to think of itself one of the strongest democracies. But it does not rank with Europe, Canada and Australia, as much as with India, Brazil and Indonesia.

Elsewhere, there was an extended discussion of the logical structure of the Cogito - "I think, therefore I am". The slogan appears to be a deduction, but if so, it is, at least as it stands, invalid. Some, when pressed, supose it to be an intuition. If it is an intuition, would it be shared by a pregnant women?

Some see the question as unfair. But perhaps it is its framing within the Second Meditation that is unfair. Descartes had a room of his own, complete with an "oven".

The addition of the poll about shifts the focus of the thread — Jack Cummins

Yes, but in its defence misogyny and sexism do tend to increase the length of a thread.

The podcast linked above, which sparked my interest in the titular article, is about public philosophy. Consider:

The trouble is not, of course, men as such – men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about […] It was clear that we [the women students] were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down. — Midgley

Not that any of us would ever do such a thing on this forum. Nice of Hanover to point out yet another similarity between plumbing and philosophy - the gender disparity.

Further, an androgynous ideal tends to emerge from Greek culture, but is this true of philosophy elsewhere? In places like China or India? Somewhat, but probably less so. — Leontiskos

I had close ties with a group of Nepalese folk in the Eighties, with whom I would discuss many cultural differences. I recall being perplexed when they discreetly ask where our meti were. Times change.

, you and make much the same point, taking the thread in an unexpected direction.

Nice.

I don't know what that emoticon means as a proposition. Or the absence of one. — Paine

I'm much the same with regard to your post.

It is also remarkably recent in the history of philosophy — Leontiskos

Stoicism is not therapeutic?

:meh:

Why would you think that?