am I really asking this question?

February 17, 2009 9:03 AM

paper due tomorrow filter: I need some ideas about how to discuss Skepticism, G.E. Moore's "Proof of an external world," and Rene Descarte's "Meditations on first philosophy."

I'm taking a class on epistemology and I have a paper due tomorrow.

I'm looking for anyone familiar with G.E. Moore's essay "Proof of an external world" and Rene Descartes "Meditiations on first philosophy. I'm also looking for anyone familiar with philosophical skepticism.

Now to be clear, I'm not asking anyone to write it for me. What I'm looking for is some people to discuss these things with, either in here or on a chatroom somewhere. I just need some people to bounce my paper ideas off of and see if they make sense.

So if you're up for some heady "are we really here" type talkins then help me out!

posted by tylerfulltilt to religion & philosophy (20 comments total)

The paper requirements are that I discuss the concept of philosophical skepticism in general, then compare and contrast Moore and Descarte and their attempts at dealing with skepticism.
finally I need to pick one or the other and explain why I think they did a better job than the other.

I think I'm gonna back Moore on this one.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 9:08 AM on February 17

You are definitely on the winning team here. Descartes is full of BS. What do you want to talk about?
posted by kpmcguire at 9:15 AM on February 17 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think I'd like to discuss the idea of "defeating" skepticism. Descartes tries to actively prove that the skeptical challenge is null and void. But Moore just tries to argue that the skeptical challenge is kind of silly.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 10:05 AM on February 17

Well, the problem with Moore's argument is that he's equivocating on "human hands," but is able to get away with it because he appeals to an instinctive distaste for skepticism that many people have. When he held up two hands, he didn't prove their existence: he proved the existence of the sensation of two hands.

His argument works better against Descartes than Kant, who is his real target. Briefly, the difference between the two is that Descartes thinks he has a kind of access to his own subjectivity--the "I" that remains after all the body parts have been taken away--that he doesn't have with respect to other things. For Kant, on the other hand, there are "phenomena" (which are basically everything that you can access with the senses, including your own self, which you access through a sort of "sense" called apperception) and "noumena," the underlying reality behind the phenomena, which you can never access or know anything about, but can postulate intellectually. Kant isn't saying your hands don't exist--just that your hands are phenomena, simply by virtue of the fact that you experience them with the senses. None of your interaction with the world, for Kant, is separable from categories formulated by your mind (the understanding)--even time and space are imposed on the world by your mind. So Moore has proven that hand-phenomena exist, big whoop.

Anyway, there's no reason to go into Kant in your paper, just be aware that this context exists.
posted by nasreddin at 10:09 AM on February 17 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yes but Moore is the first to say that He can't prove that his hands actually exist. He doesn't even try to prove that they are really there. I think what moore was really up to was just trying to get us to think about what's really necessary for a proof.

He wanted us to see that skeptics wanted proof of things that can't be proven so why should we listen to them. Which is a very interesting take on the skeptical challenge. And to the best of my understanding, totally different from the way descartes tried to take it on, by disproving the skeptical propositions of dreaming, deception by god, etc.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 10:15 AM on February 17

He wanted us to see that skeptics wanted proof of things that can't be proven so why should we listen to them. Which is a very interesting take on the skeptical challenge.

That's precisely the conclusion the skeptics, along with Kant, want you to come to: that there's no possible proof of an external world outside of human experience. Moore is simply making the trivial point that if you forget about proving what you "know" to be true, then you can deduce his conclusion. But that's exactly what "taking on faith" means. So he doesn't really disagree with Kant, or Descartes for that matter--he just substitutes the term "knowledge" for the term "faith" (which, in Descartes' case, is faith in a God that wouldn't deceive you).
posted by nasreddin at 10:26 AM on February 17

he just substitutes the term "knowledge" for the term "faith" (which, in Descartes' case, is faith in a God that wouldn't deceive you).

It's precisely that sticking point with moore that I don't know how to deal with. Moore wants to kind of discredit skepticism, but he can't deny the logical possibility of the skeptical challenge, so in the end nothing has happened.

For all the fault that can be found in Descartes argument, at least he tried to prove that he wasn't dreaming, being deceived, etc.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 10:30 AM on February 17

It's precisely that sticking point with moore that I don't know how to deal with. Moore wants to kind of discredit skepticism, but he can't deny the logical possibility of the skeptical challenge, so in the end nothing has happened.

Yes, that's exactly it. If you choose to take Descartes' side instead, I would focus on Moore's phrase "I can know things, which I cannot prove." I would ask myself the following two questions:

1) Is it really true that "knowing" something you cannot prove constitutes knowledge?

2) If we define "knowledge" to include things you cannot prove, how does that help us preserve the distinction between faith and knowledge? In other words, is there a "knowledge" that you have about the absolute existence of your hands that is stronger than the "knowledge" someone else has about the existence of God or aliens? After all, you have precisely zero credible evidence for either claim.
posted by nasreddin at 10:37 AM on February 17

I can't bring myself to defend descartes though because his argument is riddled with holes. His circular logic for the existence of god is the biggest problem.

I think I'd like to explore what moore was really up to, and how even though he didn't make any real headway against the skeptics, he at least did something a little more interesting and modest.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 10:49 AM on February 17

Also, to clarify, our discussion of Moore in class also covered Four Types of Skepticism and On Certainty
posted by tylerfulltilt at 10:55 AM on February 17

Just FYI, if you have a discussion here that you find useful, you should cite it in your paper. Even just a footnote thanking the MeFi community for helpful discussion is the difference between intellectual honesty and.... not.
posted by kestrel251 at 12:34 PM on February 17 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yeah, what kestrel251 said.
posted by notyou at 1:02 PM on February 17

On Certainty really does a good job of addressing this problem, but it really steps around the problem instead of solving it.

An analogy to religious faith: If Descartes believes in god, then Moore is an atheist. But Wittgenstein is an agnostic. He believes these kinds of questions can't, and shouldn't, be solved by philosophy. Which ended up being the most convincing argument to me when we studied it.

I didn't want to bring it up, since Wittgenstein can be sort of controversial and you hadn't yet mentioned him, but since you covered it in class, it's fair game.
posted by kpmcguire at 2:10 PM on February 17 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think, for the purposes of my paper, stepping around the skeptical challenge is just as good as confronting it. We also covered P.F. Strawson and his discussion of Hume, Wittgenstein, Moore, and Carnap and yada yada yada.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 4:33 PM on February 17

It sounds to me like you should do well on the paper, if you can manage to finish it in time, that is. Ahh, college.
posted by kpmcguire at 4:51 PM on February 17

I'm like 4 out of 6 to 8 pages in. I'm good.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 5:02 PM on February 17

I'm gonna post the actual paper here for comments in a little bit.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 7:47 PM on February 17

Here's a question, does anyone have an example of a disproof of Descartes "I think therefore I am"?
posted by tylerfulltilt at 8:42 PM on February 17

Well Hobbes, Gassendi, and lots of others complain that Descartes's claims that he exists as nothing more than a thinking thing are unjustified. This he inferred more or less directly from the "I think . . ." line.

Not exactly what you asked for as a counter argument, but perhaps it will help.
posted by oddman at 12:03 PM on February 18

I don't know Moore's argument in detail, but I think I get the point. Why should Descartes' paradigm of certainty-mathematical knowledge-be our paradigm for knowledge of the world? Why should we prefer the standards of this artificially constructed system to the way ordinary perception founds our beliefs? You need deduction to prove deduction, induction to prove induction, and perceptual evidence to prove perceptual evidence. Our epistemic systems are always circular in this way.

I think it gets down to what your strongest belief/principle is. If the idea that there must be a reason for everything (i.e. leibniz's principle of sufficient reason) is your strongest belief (as it is mine), then it may well be the case that should a better explanation for everything come along, you will abandon your belief in the external world. But other people may regard the belief that things are more or less as they appear to be as their strongest belief, and would abandon any reasoning or explanations that violate this. In neither case however it is obviously true that these strongest beliefs can be justified in a non-circular way- and so you might conclude that the project of building knowledge from certain foundations is undermined, or that ultimately you must just say 'well that's the kind of being I am'.
posted by leibniz at 1:26 PM on February 21