Dowling College Spring 2003 PHL003 Introduction to
Philosophy
Dr Christian Perring
Course Notes
February 3, 2003
Saint Anselm
Define God as the
most perfect possible being
God*=that being than
which no greater being can be imagined.
Imagine two things:
1. The being with all perfections except
existence
Omniscient
Omnipotent
Benevolent
Wrathful to major
sinners
2. A being who is
Omniscient
Omnipotent
Benevolent
Wrathful to major
sinners
AND who exists
Anselm believes it
is obvious that the second one is more perfect.
We are imagining a
being which BY DEFINITION nothing greater can exist. So this “greatest being” has to be #2 because #2 is greater than
#1. The greatest possible being must have
the property of existence. So it must
exist.
So the greatest
possible being must exist. To be more
accurate, the being which is something than which nothing greater can be
imagined.
This is like a
mathematical proof, not a scientific proof.
It is “a priori” – it does not refer to our experience of the world, but
just of what the world must be like. It
is deductive.
David Hume in the 18th
century said: imagining #1 and #2 is imagining exactly the same thing.
Immanuel Kant made a
similar sort of criticism in the 19th century, saying existence is
not a property of an object.
Anselm and any
advocate of the Ontological Argument assume that existence is a property of
objects, but this is a mistake (according to Hume and Kant).
Aquinas:
The efficient
cause of an object is the thing that created it.
Radioactivity: the
splitting of radioactive atoms happens randomly. This is a phenomenon from quantum mechanics.
Einstein could not agree
that the event was genuinely random – “God does not play dice”.
“Nothing can cause
itself”
There can be no
creation ex nihilo.
People used to think
this was completely self-evident.
February 5, 2003
Paley: The
Argument from Design
The theory of
evolution.
Each generation of a
species is slightly different from the one before. There is genetic variation.
Some members of a
population are more likely to survive and procreate than others. This is the survival of the fittest.
So each species
evolves – changing to better survive.
So humans evolved from simpler species, going back to ape-like
creatures, and going back to sea creatures and one-celled organisms.
So this explains the
origins of human life without resort to an intelligent creator.
Paley’s analogy with
the watch is not a good one, because watches don’t evolve.
The aim of science is to explain all of nature without resort to any
supernatural entities.
Kierkegaard talks about “The Unknown”
It is folly to
attempt to prove that God exists. Any
proof of the existence of God will inevitably be circular.
K is saying that we
need to go beyond reason and rationality.
This theme is also in Martin Heidegger.
He embraces a kind of mysticism, going beyond ordinary rationality. The leap of faith says we must transcend
rationality.
Empricism: the
recommendation that we should purely base our beliefs on available evidence.
Scepticism: there is
no good evidence for the truth of religion.
Pascal’s Wager
Pascal recommended
believing in God in case he existed.
|
|
God exists |
God does not exist |
|
Believe in God |
Everlasting
happiness |
Wasted many
Sundays in church |
|
Don’t believe in
God |
Hell |
Sundays free. |
As a betting person,
which is the best option?
Believe in God, just
in case God exists.
On this, belief in
God is a bet or insurance policy.
Descartes: believed
in rationality and the power of pure reason.
He used doubt as
a method or tool to find certainty.
He finds certainty in his own knowledge of his existence. “I think therefore I am.”
This provides a
secure foundation for all knowledge.
Notes on
Descartes' Epistemology
He doubts everything
(or nearly everything). The existence
of the physical world and his own physical body, the truths of arithmetic and
geometry.
This is not a practical
doubt, it is theoretical. There
is nothing I can do to resolve the doubt.
He takes them
seriously enough so that they affect his philosophy.
Descartes only
doubts in order to find truth.
Eventually he does
find certainty. When he doubts, he
knows he doubts. He knows he is
thinking. So he knows that he exists. Whenever he is thinking and doubting, he is
certain of his existence.
In the rest of his
Meditations, he builds on this certainty, regains all of the beliefs he
previously doubted. He comes again to
be certain of mathematical truth, of the existence of his body, and the nature
of the world. His doubting is just
temporary, it was just a stage in his meditation.
20th
century work on this topic is Ludwig Wittgenstein: On Certainty.
Bouwsma says that a
complete deception is not a deception at all.
The constructed world is exactly the same as the real world, and so it
is real.
So it gets to the
issue of what is reality? It
preoccupied Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Immanuel Kant.
Twentieth century
philosophers very preoccupied by the relation between language and
reality.
How do words
acquire meanings?
Platonic view: there is a separate world of meanings, and
words correspond to objects in this world.
One to one correlation between words and meanings.
Platonic view of
mathematics: number words refer to objects in the world of numbers.
Geometrical objects:
square refers to the perfect square, in a separate world.
The attraction of
the view is it helps to explain why mathematics is true.
Obvious problem with
this view is understanding what we mean by another world. It is mysterious.
What determines the
correct use of words?
Mathematics: The
truths we express in our language correspond truths of the Platonic world.
Grammatical errors
are ones that break the rules of the language.
What about
facts? Factual errors are due to
sentences not corresponding to facts.
Empiricist view: the meanings of words is derived from our
experience: words correspond to our ideas, and our ideas come from
experience.
Simples ideas
correspond directly to experience.
“red” corresponds to
ideas of red.
“mountain” corresponds
to an experience, not necessarily directly of a mountain, but of an image of a
mountain.
We can make complex
ideas:
Unicorn: flying
horse with a pointed horn.
It is a complex idea
made up of simple ones: horses, wings, horns
John Locke held the
empiricist view. 17th
century philosopher.
Beginning of the 20th
century, there was a lot of interest in the meanings of mathematical terms and
also in scientific terms.
For example,
Bertrand Russell, and his work with Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
Wittgenstein, "Meaning as Use" (p. 275 of Twenty Questions)
The initial quotation from St Augustine is a proposal for the use of objects to convey meaning that is similar to Swift's. Wittgenstein uses this to characterize an approach to understanding meaning that he aims to criticize or undermine.
Wittgenstein
rejected both the platonic view of language and the empiricist one. He was rejecting the idea that words get
their meanings from corresponding to abstract objects (platonic theory) or that
the correspond to ideas in your head (the empiricist view).
Naming is only a
small part of language. He emphasizes
that language has many uses, words are used in many different ways.
He says we use
language-games and there many there are many kinds of games.
Wittgenstein looks
at the concept of a game. He says there
are many different kinds. He asks if
they all have something in common.
One possibility:
they all involve competition.
Wittgenstein says playing solitaire and playing ball by oneself (throwing
a ball against a wall) don’t involve competition. There is no essence to games.
He wants to do away
with trying to find a single essence to games, family resemblance, and the way
that words acquire meanings.
Different language
games give words meanings.
Different games have
different rules: there is no single way that words acquire meanings.
Wittgenstein is
suspicious of any attempt to have a “theory of meaning.” We understand words through their ordinary
usage.
Wittgenstein’s approach
is often summarized by saying that meanings are determined by human practices,
not sensations or “other worlds of meaning.”
Why does 2+3=5?
Wittgenstein’s
answer is that it is true because that’s the language game we play. It’s true because that’s how we use those
words. Not because it corresponds to
some external “eternal” truth.
There have been many
interpreters of Wittgenstein, and he has been very influential. People have turned his remarks into
theories.
One of the main
theories is that meanings are determined by society.
Whorf: Conceptual
relativism: Different societies have very different understandings of the
world.
Eskimos have many
words for different kinds of snow, while we have only one.
Their language is
strongly connected with their experience.
It is not just that experience determines meaning, but also that words
determine experience.
Language constructs
our reality. It determines the thoughts
we can think. We can’t have thoughts
that are not expressible in language.
Different societies,
with different language, have different realities.
This is a kind of
cultural relativism.
Whorf claimed that
the Hopi Indians don’t have any words for time, or at least, their concept of
time is utterly different from our Western one.
This implies that
Hopi physics could be done without using concepts of time, velocity or
speed.
We normally think of
our physics as universal truths about nature, independent of our culture. But if Whorf is right, they are very
dependent on our culture, and tell as much about us as they do about the
world.
Steven Pinker argues
that the main ideas of Whorf are wrong, and that language does not
significantly determine the thoughts that we are able to have.
Descartes
The relation
between mind and body
Dualism
Mind and body are
entirely separate and different things
They are made of
different stuff. The mind is not made
of physical matter at all.
Descartes believes
knows his mind very well. The mind is
transparent. It is not mysterious. Your thoughts are not physical things. Conscious thoughts and stored thoughts. Conscious thoughts don’t really have a
location. They are nonphysical.
The mind cannot be
divided.
Physical matter can
be divided.
Descartes wanted to
be scientific. But did he succeed?
What do people
believe in 2003? Do people believe in a
soul? Yes, many believe that the soul
can survive the physical death of the body.
Descartes’ idea is still popular, at least among the general
public.
Because of our
fallible bodies, we are bound to make errors in our understanding of the world.
What makes humans
different from animals?
Humans have reason
and language. Animals don’t.
Descartes seems to
be wrong about this difference – some animals do have language use. E.g., apes learning American Sign
Language.
He thought that
animals are just machines, with no minds at all.
What is a language?
It is more than just
responding to stimuli.
Language is being
able to combine words into sentences.
Broad definition of
language: any use of signs for communication.
Very narrow
definition of language: the ability to combine words with meaning.
The relation between
mind and body is very close (closer than that between a machine operator and a machine). But he does not say exactly how the
operation works.
-----------------------------------
Since Descartes,
there have been many other views of the mind-body relation. Most philosophers now defend Monism. According to monism, the mind is nothing
over and above the brain or its organization or processes.
William Lycan
defends monism. In particular, he
argues the idea that minds are like computers.
Empirical
questions: questions that
can be decided by our senses or experiment.
Philosophical or
conceptual questions. Need to be investigated by thinking
abstractly and theoretically, examining our concepts.
The following seem
to be more than just empirical questions, but also have a strong conceptual component:
Could computers ever
have properties characteristic of human minds?
Lycan is arguing that
there is no reason to suppose that the composition of a being or how it was
created should be relevant to the question of whether that being is
conscious. In particular, he uses
thought experiments featuring Harry and Henrietta to make the point.
His discussion
raises the question of how we know other human beings are conscious. This has been called "The Problem of
Other Minds".
Linked to this
question is a skeptical worry: would it not be possible for a being to act as
if she or he were conscious, but not be?
This has been posed as the problem of zombies. Zombies would act like humans but have no internal life. How do we know other people are not in fact
zombies, in this sense.
We can’t get inside
someone else’s head. We can’t know
exactly what it is like to be someone else.
Couldn’t it be
possible for some people to have no “internal life” at all. They would have human behavior but no
internal life.
We can’t know for
certain whether anyone else is conscious.
We can’t see inside their heads.
The only evidence we
have for consciousness is the link between our own behavior and our own
consciousness, and we generalize from that.
We base our decision
or judgment on other people’s behavior.
So if we built a
computer that behaved just like humans, then we would have just as much reason
to think that the computer was conscious.
The fact that Harry
is made of different stuff and was designed MAKE NO DIFFERENCE (according to
Lycan)
His argument is
based on a challenge: why should those things make a difference? He can see no good reason why they should.
Lycan’s central idea
is that consciousness and mental properties depend only on the functions that
we are able to perform. This view is
called functionalism. The human brain is
a machine like other machines.
Computers may be
unpredictable as a result of defects or else as a result of programming.
Lycan thinks the
burden of proof is on the other side.
---------------------------------------
John Searle. This is a book review of The
Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul
by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C.
Dennett
Searle is against
Strong AI.
Weak AI simply says
that understanding computers may help us understand some mental functions.
Strong AI is the
claim that the mind is a computer program.
According to Strong
AI we could make a computer simulation of thirst, where different parts of the
model simulated what it is for humans to become thirsty.
Searle says it
outrageous to claim that a computer simulation of thirst actually IS
thirst. That’s what strong AI is
committed to.
Searle distinguishes
between syntax and semantics.
Syntax is to with
the symbols and words we use.
For example, my
computer can tell me when a sentence is ungrammatical.
Fred wrongly on
the ceiling.
Does my computer understand
English?
This is
ungrammatical, and there are rules for grammar that can be spelled out with
lists. This is basically syntax.
Computers deal with
syntax, not semantics. Computer never
really understand.
Translation computer
programs don’t really understand languages, they just manipulate symbols.
Simply being able to
manipulate words appropriately is not the same as understanding.
Consider translation
programs; are they intelligent? Do they
require that the program understands the languages? Do the programs understand the words they
are translating?
Link:
http://ets.freetranslation.com/
Searle would say
that computers can be programmed to tell you when a sentence is ungrammatical
and maybe can do some simple translations, but they do so with no
understanding of language.
Freedom of the
will
Determinists say we are not free because our actions are
determined. (To be accurate, note that
the label of "determinist" is a little misleading, since some
compatibilists are happy to concede that determinism is true. The heart of determinism as defined here is
that determinism is true and it is incompatible with freedom.)
Compatibilists say that determinism and freedom are
compatible. Some ever say that freedom
requires determinism.
Nietzsche: God is dead, we are on our own. Nietzsche is very suspicious of talk of free
will, and argued that it was invented in order for slave morality to employ the
concept of guilt, which plays a prominent role in Christianity (especially
Catholicism) and Judaism.
Jean-Paul Sartre
defends freedom. He argues that human action should not be
understood in the space of
Existentialists: humans have complete responsibility for
themselves.
The issue of whether
God exists is crucial – they ask where do our values come from?
They write with a
real sense of crisis, with angst. We
can create value in our lives. We can’t
just find value in the world.
Some Links
http://members.aol.com/DonJohnR/Philosophy/Sartre.html
http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/sar.html
http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc39.html
Nietzsche
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
http://www.pitt.edu/~wbcurry/nietzsche.html
http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/nie.html
BF Skinner
Behaviorism
http://www.bfskinner.org/index.asp
Class presentations:
What is the main
idea in the passage?
Does the writer
provide an argument for that idea?
What parts of the
passage are difficult to understand?
Personal Identity
John Locke
Personal Identity:
what makes you the same person today as the person you were when you were born?
We are interested in
the numerical identity of person.
We are not interested in mere qualitative changes unless they
constitute changes in the numerical identity.
Legally, we understand
what it means to be the same person over time.
There are physical
and mental changes in a person over time, but he or she remains the same
person.
DNA does remain the
same. Some may think this is what
constitutes our personal identity, although of course Locke would not have
agreed.
Locke's view is that
what makes you the same person is having the same consciousness over time.
The main view he is
arguing against is that having the same soul makes you the same person. By a soul we mean an immaterial substance –
ie. Non physical.
Identity is not made
by physical substance. Cut off your
hand – you still remain the same person.
Locke is NOT against
the possibility of souls. He was a
Christian.
(Thomas Hobbes did
not believe in a soul, and thought that the mind was based purely on physical
substance.)
He thinks the idea
of the soul is mysterious and does not know what the soul is like, or even if
there is one.
He uses a thought
experiment: imagine that you have Nestor’s soul but not his memories. Are you the same person as Nestor? No.
Another thought
experiment. Suppose you remember
experiencing Noah’s flood. Then you can
be sure you were there.
Consciousness is a
flow of images in the mind – the “theatre of ideas” derived from
sensation.
What matters in
personal identity is extending consciousness back into the past. Having the actual memories of someone who
lived in the past means that you are in fact that person.
Whether you have the
same physical or immaterial substance does not tell us whether you are the same
person.
So what about cases
of amnesia or blackout during drunkenness.
Morally speaking, Locke thinks we are not responsible for actions we
can’t remember, because then we didn’t actually perform those actions. Legally, it is impractical to make such a
change in the law, because it is too easy to fake this defense.
http://www.acton.org/images/sketches/lockelarge.gif
David Hume
A skeptic about
religion – one of his most well known works, On Miracles, in which he argues
there can never be compelling evidence that a miracle occurred.
Hume does not
believe in a soul.
Hume’s understanding
of consciousness is very similar to Locke’s.
The mind is full of impressions and ideas. Impressions come from sensations. Ideas are faint copies of impressions.
He thinks there are
three main relations of ideas:
One of Hume’s
central ideas about the self :
We have no idea of
self – it does not correspond to any sensation. There is no self.
Our minds are
constantly changing and nothing remains the same over time.
Personal identity is
a convenient fiction – it does not really exist. All truths about identity are purely conventional, like the rules
of grammar. There is no deep truth
about identity.
Test Review:
Baron d’Holbach
Are we free?
No.
Why not? Because he
thinks all our actions are determined by the laws of nature.
Which laws of nature?
The laws of physics and the laws of psychology.
So he thinks we are just physical objects, with no
immaterial soul.
The will, in his view, is simply a brain process. Human
action is almost mechanical. We are
like machines. In fact, he seems to
think we are machines. Our actions are
a result of our environment, our temperament, your beliefs, your education, and
your experience. Once those factors are
determined, your actions are determined.
We have no real choice in our actions – they are inevitable
results of our temperament, psychology, and circumstances. Free will is an illusion in his view.
Jean-Paul Sartre.
We do have freedom, in his view. He simply assumes that we are in complete control of ourselves,
not determined by laws of nature.
His main emphasis is on our responsibility to act on our
freedom. We cannot escape this
responsibility.
Sartre is very interested in the phenomenology of consciousness – what it is like to be a free
agent. He is analyzing the appearance
of freedom.
In acting, “I decide myself.” He thinks that people create themselves. He does not think we are a product of our
circumstances.
He emphasizes how individual must take responsibility for
their circumstances – even in times of war.
(Maybe he is really just considering adults, although he does not say
this.) You can never just be a
bystander to a situation, you must always take a stance. Saying nothing is taking a stance.
For people in a war, they have to say “the war is
mine.” Every day your choose how your
life will be, and you can’t just say you are a victim. You have to choose yourself in relation to
world events.
Similar we choose our lives. You can’t just say “I didn’t ask to be born.” You are always responsible for your life and
for the rest of the world. In a sense,
you even choose being born. What this
seems to mean is that you are responsible for your attitude to your place in
the world.
We are abandoned in the world – there is no one who can take
our responsibility away from us. No
god, no other person can do this.
When people say they are not responsible, they are deceiving
themselves. Sartre calls this “bad
faith.”
Someone who said that they were just an innocent victim and
had nothing to do with the war would be acting in bad faith.
People who say their actions are compelled and they are
unable to stop (drinking, eating, cheating) are acting in bad faith.
Another view on free will: Compatibilism.
This says that freedom and determinism are compatible.
It says that even if we are determined by the laws of
nature, we can still be free.
The basis of the argument is that freedom simply means not
being forced to do what you do not want to do.
So, for example, when you decide what to have for lunch, you
are free in your choice so long as no one forces you to choose one meal.
(Well known compatibilist: David Hume)
Robert Kane: The Significance of Free Will (pp. 822-8)
Kane defends freedom of the will, but not through
compatibilism.
He thinks that freedom is incompatible with
determinism. But he argues that we are
not determined.
For at least some of our actions, there is genuine
indeterminacy. The laws of physics and
psychology can not predict what we will do.
There are limitations to their predictive powers when it comes to some
human actions.
Kane thinks that the important cases of indeterminacy occur
when we make difficult decisions and have to weigh different factors. Turning points in your life – personal
relationships, major moral decisions (abortion, divorce, having children), or
career choices where one is not sure what to do.
He thinks that we in some ways create ourselves in those
decisions. We make one set of reasons
overcome another set. (Look at his
discussion of the business woman’s decision at the end of the article.) The individual’s decision decides the future
– not just the laws of physics or psychology.
He thinks that compatibilism does not capture an important
sense of what it is to be free.
He thinks that the compatibilist account of freedom is
problematic because it does not show what is wrong in cases where people’s
wishes are manipulated.
He uses Brave New World and Walden Two as examples. In both those novels, people’s desires are
manipulated by the government, and so we think they lack freedom, even though
nobody forces them to do anything they don’t want to.
John Locke: Of Identity and
Diversity (pp. 343-8)
Locke’s main concern is to
investigate what makes a person that particular individual. His answer is that it is having the same
consciousness, and so being able to remember past experiences makes you the
same person as the person who had those experiences. So memory is what make you the same person over time.
His main argument for this is
through thought experiments. Fantastic
examples are used to elicit the readers intuitions.
Suppose you remember Noah’s
flood. Then you could conclude that you
had been present at the flood. He
thinks it is obvious to us that we would think this.
He thinks it is clear that
substance is not essential to our identity.
Material substance: we can
lose parts of our body and still remain the same person.
He uses the example of a
prince and a cobbler. If a cobbler
wakes up and has no memories of being a cobbler, but has memories of being a
prince, when asked who is this person, we would say: this is the prince in the
cobbler’s body. We could change bodies
completely.
He also wants to say that
one’s soul or immaterial substance is not essential to one’s identity. He again uses thought experiments. Suppose you have the same soul as Nestor. Would you think you were Nestor if you had
none of his memories? No.
With personal identity goes
moral responsibility. If you are not
identical with a past self, then we should not punish you for the actions of a
past self. So if you can’t remember
doing something, then you are not morally responsible for it. (Note that this is not the same as just
pretending you can’t remember doing it.)
