Category Archives: Epistemology

The importance of assumptions

22 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Michael Reidy and the recently returned Thill raise an important point in response to last week’s post, on the assessment of philosophy from analytic and “continental” perspectives. I argued that analytic philosophy judges philosophical on argument and continental philosophy on the depth of interpretation – interpretation “that could explain not merely what Kant [for example] said, but why he said it.”

Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. Continue reading →

Logic and truth as normative

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Social Science, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seventh chapter in a splendid book called The Ancients and the Moderns, by a fascinating Boston University professor named Stanley Rosen. I read the book over two years ago, but the ideas of this chapter have since continued to percolate in my brain.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. Continue reading →

How to answer the perennial questions

18 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Dialectic, Epistemology, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

It’s often said that philosophy is about questions rather than answers. Yet it is in the nature of a question that one who asks it at least wishes to find an answer, even if that answer remains elusive. Even rhetorical questions are rhetorical because they imply an assumed answer.

And so with the perennial questions, to which I regularly return on this blog. Central to the idea of a perennial question, as I have expressed it, is that the answers have never come easily. People across cultures, in different places and times, have asked the question – but in each place, people have come up with opposing answers.

To observe this diversity of opinion is humbling. Here are some of the greatest minds in human history, people smarter than I will ever be, reading each other’s work and still coming to opposite conclusions. Can an answer then ever be found? Continue reading →

Internalism and externalism, in epistemology and ethics

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Judaism, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Sophists, Truth

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Is man the measure of all things? Or at least, are creatures with subjective internal consciousness the measure of all things? In ancient Greece, the Sophists answered yes. In so doing, they inaugurated Western reflection on a perennial question that stretches throughout both theoretical and practical philosophy, epistemology and ethics.

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. Continue reading →

Multiple perennial questions

07 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, East Asia, Eastern Orthodoxy, Epistemology, Flourishing, Free Will, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Politics, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

≈ 115 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m returning today to the idea of perennial questions: questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy, where both sides of a debate keep getting articulated in many different places. The key feature of these perennial questions, to my mind, is that they are large: they cannot be narrowed down to a single precisely defined question within a single philosophical subfield, of the sort that analytic philosophers aim to ask, but extend their ramifications across multiple fields of theoretical and practical inquiry.

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? Continue reading →

How may we tell true from false?

24 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Truth, Vedānta, Virtue

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

How can we, or should we, learn what is true and what is false? This is one of the most enduring and basic questions in philosophy – “basic” because it is fundamental to so many others, not because the answers are in any way easy or simple.

The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.

That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. Continue reading →

Of the plausibility or reliability of “common sense”

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia, Truth

≈ 92 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

This week, another foray into the debate over “common sense.” Apologies in advance to those readers who are not interested in this particular topic, or who will find this post’s precision rough going. Common-sense advocate Thill has been by far this blog’s most prolific commenter, and I think advancing the debates in the comments requires taking his views on directly and systematically. Moreover, I think the topic is an important one in its own right. The claims made by Thill, Jabali108, Neocarvaka and Ramachandra1008 in their comments, if they were true, would rule out the vast majority of South Asian philosophical thought (and a great more besides): probably all the philosophy originating in the subcontinent except for the shadowy Cārvāka-Lokāyata school of thought. Only the Cārvākas can be thought to completely exclude “religious” ideas from their worldview; but there is little if anything left to be learned from this school now, since all we have from them is the scantest of fragments. (The only surviving complete text attributed to a Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, which these commenters have already dismissed as not really a Cārvāka text.) If South Asian thought is worth bothering with at all, then we’ll need to defend those conceptions of the world that are in some respects at odds with various elements of “common sense” – which, according to Thill, excludes all “religion.” Continue reading →

Is common sense merely plausible?

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

≈ 98 Comments

Tags

,

This week I’m going to continue the discussion of “common sense” from two weeks ago. I think it’s an important discussion because an overreliance on the concept of “common sense” can be (and seems to have been repeatedly) used to challenge the value and viability not merely of “religion” but of philosophy itself. I’m going to assume that readers of this current post have read that previous post – but not that they have read the comments on it, which have been the most numerous of any post on this blog so far (a full hundred!)

In those comments I challenged Thill to define the term “reliable,” which he had previously introduced to the discussion. I structured the post around the term “reliable” because in Thill’s previous comment, it had been at the centre of his only serious response to the point that “common sense” can be wrong (as in the case of sunrise and sunset). He said: “The fact that it is not infallible does not support the conclusion that it is not reliable!” No doubt I should have probed the definition of “reliable” further in the post – examining what Thill could have meant by it; I did not. I tried to make up for that lack in a later comment, where I asked Thill to define “reliable.” Thill responded that the onus was on me to define “reliable” since I had advanced a thesis relating to it; but my supposed thesis was intended as a response to his own thesis about the reliability of common sense, a word which, again, he introduced to the discussion. So I noted that I am happy to drop the term from the discussion as long as he, too, is willing to refrain from using the term “reliable” to refer to the epistemological status of so-called common sense. (That also applies to the others, Jabali108 and Neocarvaka, who have been exalting “common sense” in recent discussions.)

If we drop “reliable,” where are we left? Continue reading →

Lack of training is not reliable

26 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

≈ 103 Comments

Tags

Several of this blog’s frequent commenters find significant philosophical value in the concept of “common sense,” and find it helpful to refute a claim on the grounds that the claim contradicts “common sense.” These commenters include not only Thill, whom I challenged on the topic several times before, but Jabali108 and Neocarvaka. (See the comments on this post for examples.) So the concept is worth revisiting if those debates are to get anywhere.

Let me start out by noting that I see some philosophical value in appeals to common sense defined in a certain way. This is the sense that I outlined in my first post on the topic: the prejudgements one brings to a given inquiry, especially as they come out of shared assumptions of one’s own society. My commenters seem to have something quite different in mind, however. Continue reading →

Can collectivities be virtuous?

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Action, Buddhism, Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, Virtue

≈ 67 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

There’s been a great discussion going on in the comments to last week’s post on humility and science. This week I’m going to focus on only one of the themes mentioned, which takes us in a different direction from that post but is interesting in its own right.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble? Continue reading →