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Jenna Stimac
Apprentice
28 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
 Posted - Jun 28 2010 : 11:09:31 PM
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Ladies, the particular example of a reality you've decided to talk about in some detail -- the deskhood of a desk -- is a really illuminating one, I think. Desks are familiar to us. There's nothing mysterious about them. They've been around for centuries. They have a rich and interesting history. We ought to be able to say what they are. That's what we want to do here: we want to say what desks are. We want to answer the question, what is a desk? We want to try to put into words what being a desk consists in, what it is to be a desk.
Let's see.... Can we agree on this much for starters, that to be a desk is to be a piece of furniture of a certain kind? If so, the crucial thing is to try to figure out how to say what makes the various sorts of pieces of furniture that exist in human cultures different from one another -- what makes a bed a bed, for example, and what makes a chair a chair, what makes an altar an altar. I'd say myself that what's crucial here is what the furniture is for. Beds, for example, are for sleeping. Chairs are for sitting. What are desks for? First and foremost -- and that means: historically -- they're for writing and for doing at least many of the things that are ancillary to writing. (Not all the things that are ancillary to writing; filing is an activity ancillary to writing, and we usually want another kind of furniture, the file cabinet, for filing.) Now the whole business of writing has undergone some serious changes over the centuries, and so desks today are not invariably going to be pieces of furniture meant to be used by people who are writing things out by hand, though of course that purpose is still served by a great many desks. We therefore have to recognize pieces of furniture specifically designed to accommodate writers who are using typewriters or computers as well, and perhaps we even need to recognize the virtual furniture computers have made it possible for us to encounter: the desktops on our computers that we clutter with files just as writers have cluttered real desktops with papers for centuries. There are, to be sure, many different kinds of desks -- different types of desk, different desk forms, and so on. Here's a list of desk forms and desk types that hardly purports to be complete or in any sense final, but that will serve the purpose of enriching our thinking, and often, when you're trying to get clear about the being of beings of some specific sort, that enrichment is just what is needed. In any case: against this background, here's what I've got to offer tentatively as a tentative starting point (my first hypothesis concerning the reality of desks, all ready for Sokratic inspection): to be a desk is to be a piece of furniture -- part of the furnishings or fittings of a home or office or other human dwelling or work-place -- capable of satisfying at least to some extent the needs of someone who writes and/or engages in activities ancillary to writing.
What I'd want to do myself to deepen this and improve it still further is to think long and hard about just what's involved in something's being for something in the way in which beds are for sleeping, chairs are for sitting, tables are for eating, and desks are for writing. We ordinarily make do with a very superficial understanding of this, and superficial understandings are philosophically unsatisfying. My guess is that what we'd really have to do is answer the far more fundamental questions "What is a house?" "What is a workplace?" "What in general is the topology of human existence?" to get to the point at which we could offer a genuinely satisfying answer to the question of how human activities are related to places and to the things in those places, i.e., how those places come to be furnished, outfitted, equipped, supplied, provided with the amenities needed to facilitate those activities. It's somewhere in there, close to the neighborhood of the fundamental human reality -- what it is to be a human being -- that we'd stand a chance of really grasping the being of houses, schools, hospitals, inns, stores, offices, banks, factories, warehouses, bridges, roads, fields, barns, places of worship, cemeteries, and so on as well as the being of the furniture and other sorts of equipment one encounters in each of them. Anyhow, one could easily make working on even just some aspect of this sort of thing one's life's work. There are wonderful books on things like this -- not necessarily books by professional, credentialed philosophers -- books that just scratch the surface of the work that needs to be done to really articulate the being of things but that help one to see that the attempt to do so is hardly ridiculous or futile. Here's one I especially recommend: David S. Landes' Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. One could write a book like this about desks, attending not just to the history of desks and their place in human history, but thinking long and hard about what the very being of desks is and how it's interconnected with being human and the history of being human. Any one of you could do it if you felt so inclined.
The deskhood of desks is harder to put into words in a genuinely satisfying way than are the "easy" realities we spoke of before such as the circularity of circles. When we start to talk about deskhood, we're no longer in the realm of the purely mathematical, which has mesmerized us philosophers and perhaps in a certain way blinded us almost from the very beginning because of its transparency and simplicity, but it seems to me absurd to say that just because we can't give a purely mathematical description of the deskhood of desks -- one we could ultimately reduce to a mathematical equation in the way in we can do this for the circularity of circles thanks to the labors of a modern philosopher unfortunately far better known for other things, René Descartes (see the section titled "Equations" in this nice little piece on the circle) -- it's impossible to bring this reality to light in the context of an appropriate kind of reasoning. Hard, yes. Impossible? That I do not see. Declaring it impossible looks to me rather like a symptom of misology if it isn't just a mathematician's prejudice. That the essence of a thing should be capable of being "grasped fully" and "known for sure" is clearly a mathematician's prejudice, one that's been responsible for a great deal of mischief in the history of philosophy. Again, think of Descartes and the rationalist philosophers who were inspired by him. For that matter, think of Plato -- or at any rate of Aristotle's Plato. |
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Katie Contreras
Apprentice
29 Posts |
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Katie Contreras
Apprentice
29 Posts |
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Will Emmons
Moderator
47 Posts |
Posted - Jul 01 2010 : 01:18:30 AM
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Katie, I look forward to Tom's answers to the questions you have asked him, but I would also like to give each of them a shot myself.
First, I don't think Tom believes that mathematicians are the only ones capable of harboring such a prejudice, namely that the essence of a thing should be capable of being "grasped fully" and "known for sure." For a great while I believed this myself and I am not, nor have I ever been, by any means, a mathematician. All the same, it seemed to me that if something couldn't be known with mathematical certainty, then it could not be known at all. But then it occurred to me that this entails that only mathematicians and those who know things in the way that they do, even if they are not themselves mathematicians, know anything at all! Just think about all the different types of questions there are -- mathematical questions, empirical questions, philosophical questions, and so on. There are just as many types of answers as there are types of questions. Mathematical questions and answers simply make up a special class of questions and answers. If we find that certain questions are difficult to answer, and perhaps impossible to answer mathematically, should we conclude that these questions have no answers? To answer "yes," I think, is to be prejudiced against all sorts of questions and answers that are not mathematical questions and answers -- this is what I think Tom called the "mathematician's prejudice." I assume that you do not believe that it is only mathematicians and those who know things in the ways that they do who know anything at all, and that this is precisely why you have questioned Tom as you have. If this is right, then I am inclined to agree with you; not only mathematicians, and certainly not all mathematicians for that matter, believe that one must "know for certain in order to know at all," but this prejudice does seem to be fairly widespread. I think that this prejudice has a scientific counterpart; some hold that all that is known is known through application of the scientific method.
As far as mischief in philosophy is concerned, I think this prejudice has infiltrated philosophy, as well as various other disciplines, and that a great many unsolved philosophical puzzles have arisen in trying to arrive at philosophical definitions which are every bit as certain as mathematical definitions. This, I think, is in the neighborhood of what Tom means in saying "...this prejudice is responsible for a great deal of mischief...," namely that the belief that mathematical certainty just is knowledge has made it impossible to answer a great many questions which, if conceived alternatively, are not in any obvious sort of way impossible, even if they prove to be extremely difficult to answer.
Here's hoping that this has been helpful and that I have not obscured Tom's meaning.
[Very lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
Edited by - Will Emmons on Jul 01 2010 01:35:34 AM |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 01 2010 : 06:30:10 AM
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I have very little to add to what Will has said. He has captured my meaning wonderfully well. It isn't only professional, credentialed mathematicians who have the prejudice in questions (and no, I'm not saying that all of them have it either). All sorts of fans of mathematical knowledge have it too, and so do people who aren't fans of mathematical knowledge at all but who have been indoctrinated with the belief that "unless you're absolutely certain, you can't be said to know."
I've already identified the mathematicians I chiefly blame: Aristotle's Plato (Aristotle blames Plato for trying to reduce philosophy to mathematics, and the charge has to do, among other things, with the very prejudice we're talking about here); above all René Descartes; and those rationalist philosophers whom he inspired, chief among them, Benedict Spinoza (the author of the Ethica more geometrico demonstrata) and G.W. Leibniz (the thinker whose dream was a mathesis universalis embodying a lingua characteristica akin to the notation of modern mathematical logic). Among twentieth-century philosopher-mathematicians, Bertrand Russell should perhaps no doubt be mentioned. All these mathematicians hold some version of the view that "the essence of a thing should be capable of being 'grasped fully' and 'known for sure.'" Perhaps Pythagoreanism is the first manifestation of the prejudice. Pythagoras is yet another mathematician who clearly tends to identify mathematics with all learning. The basis of that identification is, indeed, fossilized in our language. You may not have picked up on this, but the very word "mathematics" comes from the Greek word for the kind of learning that Plato is talking about in the Meno. That learning is called, in Greek "hê mathêsis" and the things that are learnable by way of that kind of learning are called "hê mathêmata." Knowledge of the sort that's acquired in that way is called "hê epistêmê mathêmatikê," and the adjective "mathêmatikê" is, of course, the root of the words "mathematical" and "mathematics."
As for just what all the mischief that this prejudice has created is, there's no short answer to this at all. We'd need to review the entire history of philosophy to get clear about that. If you'd like to do it, let me recommend our two-semester sequence for starters: PHIL 260, History of Ancient Philosophy, and PHIL 261, History of Modern Philosophy. Those two courses would shed considerable light on what I'm talking about, especially if you badgered the instructor to address this particular question at least from time to time during the course of the year. But Will has put his finger on what is at the center of it in saying: "a great many unsolved philosophical puzzles have arisen in trying to arrive at philosophical definitions which are every bit as certain as mathematical definitions[;]...the belief that mathematical certainty just is knowledge has made it impossible to answer a great many questions which, if conceived alternatively, are not in any obvious sort of way impossible, even if they prove to be extremely difficult to answer." |
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John Koban
Apprentice
40 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 03 2010 : 10:04:31 AM
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The whole question of the reality vs. the non-reality of the realities is one I suggest we leave for another day -- indeed for some other course! We're using the word "reality" in this thread simply to refer to what philosophers are trying to articulate when they try to answer all those nice "What is it?" questions (i.e., what I've suggested we think of as the being of beings), and the question of whether or not philosophers are in touch with reality in this sense of the term is really the question whether or not philosophy, and perhaps only philosophy, concerns itself with the being of beings, the essences of things, the natures of things, the quiddities of things. The question of whether universals are real or not was debated extensively in the middle ages, and then, in the modern period, we get the whole dispute between realists and idealists for which Descartes's distinctive approach to philosophy set the stage, but in the context of these disputes, the term "real" has completely different (even if related) meanings. In the middle ages, the question was roughly this: are the quiddities of things themselves things? Is the substantiality of substance itself a substance? Is the reality of the real itself real? Is the thingliness of things itself a thing? In the modern period, it begins to look as if this is a settled question. Almost none of the moderns can be said to be a realist in the medieval sense of the term. But a new puzzle arises, and that's the puzzle whether anything -- substances or their attributes or their essences can be said to be substances strictly speaking, i.e., things that exist outside the mind. As I say: let's leave these questions for other courses, courses in the history of medieval philosophy and modern philosophy, say.
Of course it could be that I'm misunderstanding you altogether. Perhaps you should clarify for me what it is to be a philosopher who does not agree with the view that "there is a solid reality"? I assume you're thinking of philosophers who have their doubts about the existence of anything "outside the mind" -- people such as, say, George Berkeley. Let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that those are in fact the folks you're thinking of. They still wonder about what things are. Berkeley, for example, was really interested in the really basic question "What is a being?" or, put differently, "What is it to be?" So he was definitely interested in trying to put into words the being of beings. Indeed, he was interested in trying to answer this question absolutely in general. And this is the answer that he famously gave: "esse est percipi" -- "to be is to be perceived." So Berkeley certainly appears to have been interested in articulating the sort of thing Sokrates has in mind when he speaks of the realities in his sense of that polysemic word. Whether the realities in this sense of the term or anything else can be said, from Berkeley's point of view, to be a "solid reality" if what that means is something that is even though it isn't perceived is a totally different question, one that makes use of the word "reality" in a sense in which we simply have not been the least bit interested. To take that question up in this context would be to muddy the waters in a really serious way. Berkeley would obviously answer that question in the negative, and yet he's still interested in what Sokrates calls the realities. It's that now they go by a different name. Now they're called "concepts" or "general ideas." |
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Katie Contreras
Apprentice
29 Posts |
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Andrew Koziuk
Apprentice
34 Posts |
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Richard Mikel
Apprentice
32 Posts |
Posted - Jul 04 2010 : 1:01:49 PM
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| At this point, my question is what is the point of embracing something we don't know for certain? Are we talking about being in the process of understanding, or being open to finding an answer through non-mathematical reasoning? We've certainly been over not claiming to understand things we don't know for sure. I might be confusing claim and embrace. |
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Richard Mikel
Apprentice
32 Posts |
Posted - Jul 04 2010 : 1:17:18 PM
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| In hindsight, that might be a very silly set of questions. One has to be open to understanding in order to find one's way to an answer, otherwise one would never be willing to learn, or have even thought about what one didn't know in the first place. I'm reminded of the section in the Meno where Sokrates has to talk about how we "must find out about what we do not know" and the argument that precedes it (85D-87A, Rouse 49). |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 04 2010 : 7:27:00 PM
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| I don't think, Richard, that we have been over not claiming to understand things we don't know for sure. Sokrates talks about not thinking he knows things he doesn't know. Is that what you were thinking of there? He doesn't talk about not thinking he knows things he doesn't know for certain. He also doesn't say "my way is and always has been to obey no one and nothing except the reasoning that enables me to know for certain what I should do." All he says in the Crito is "my way is and always has been to obey no one and nothing except the reasoning that seems best to me when I draw my conclusions" (46b, Rouse 536, emphasis added). If we aren't prepared to believe things for which we've got really good evidence even though we don't know for certain that they're true, we're going to have to abandon the entirety of empirical science. Or is what you're tempted by merely the idea that we should have a higher standard in philosophy, where certainty might conceivably be possible? |
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Cassie Vrooman
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32 Posts |
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Jenna Stimac
Apprentice
28 Posts |
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Jenna Stimac
Apprentice
28 Posts |
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Christine Gylling
Fledgling
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Richard Mikel
Apprentice
32 Posts |
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Aaron Mund
Apprentice
37 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 06 2010 : 11:29:37 AM
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Richard, concreteness is one thing; certainty is another. I think that if we restrict our attention to empirical claims, it's probably true that nothing is certain. It's possible, of course, that we're all operating with different understandings of what certainty is. How about the following as a definition? To be certain that a statement p is true is to know that it is impossible that p is false.
I think that it is possible to be certain about some truths, but they're all necessary truths instead of contingent truths, and it may be that they're all analytic truths (statements the truth of which is entirely a function of the meaning of the expressions that make them up). We can be certain, for example, that all statements of the form "If p then p" are true. We can be certain that all statements of the form "If x is a bachelor at time t, then x is unmarried at time t" are true.
If certainty is possible in philosophy, it would be because philosophical truths, unlike empirical scientific truths, are analytic truths -- or a mix of analytic truths and other necessary truths the necessity of which can be known in some other way than the way in which we know the necessity of analytic truths. (Philosophers who think that there are other necessary truths besides analytic truths speak of "synthetic truths capable of being known to be true a priori" or, for short, of the "synthetic a priori." This usage -- this use of the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" as well as of the terms "a posteriori" (or "empirical") and "a priori" -- is, in case you're getting interested in the history of philosophy, due to Immanuel Kant.)
Certainty may also be possible in mathematics. Just about everyone thinks that mathematical truths are necessary truths. Whether mathematical truths are all analytic truths or not is also a matter of considerable controversy.
By the way: to call a truth a necessary truth isn't to say it's a truth we can't do without. It's to say that it's a true statement that couldn't possibly be false. More precisely still: p is necessary if and only if not-p is impossible. |
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Are Philosophers in Touch with Reality?
