On the edge
On www.edge.org, a while ago, a very interesting question was suggested for its contributors: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Well, what do you think?
Labels: Fun
posted by Anonymous at
1:46 AM
The Web of Belief
facing the tribunal of experience as a single body.
Weblog of those who have done or are doing graduate study in Philosophy at Tufts University. Posting is limited to members; comments are open to the public, but you must sign in with a Blogger ID.
May 10, 2005
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2 Comments:
The gap between Analytic and Continental philosophers will be closed. The former will learn that writing Anal-ytic prose is not a virtue in itself. The latter will learn that writing inContinent-al prose is not an expression of wisdom.
Hi Charles,
I am interested in seeing if you could elaborate on some of these points, as they are very interesting, but I find them a bit obscure.
For example:
The answer is that they are the self-evident, primary, inescapable facts that are the base of all cognition.
Does that mean these are a priori, by which I mean that they are not justified by any given perceptual experience? For example, I may have learned how to add "2+2=4" by seeing certain numbers in a book when I was three, but what justifies my believing that proposition is independent of any experience that I have ever had (as opposed to justying the belief that "there is a cat on the mat," which does require adducing a perceptual experience).
You mentioned in Philosophy of Mind this semester that you did not think any siginificant principles of knowledge are "hard-wired" into us.
If not from perception and not from our innate constitution, where do we get these organizing concepts of thought, especially if they are, as you say, presupposed by all thinking yet not provable by thinking?
I am also a little bit confused about what you mean by "law of identity." "A is A" strikes me as a formal principle. It says that insofar as something falls under the concept "A," we must treat it as an A.
I do not think anyone denies this; I think what they might deny is that entities, as opposed to entities as viewed under the aspect of a concept, are incapable of instantiating contradictory properties at the same time (the most common scientific examples are quanta).
Certainly I have often thought myself to be incredibly funny and clever on an occasion, but then been told by others later that I came off as a bore and an ass--was I not, on these occasions, instantiating contradictory or at least contrary properties?
Perhaps these are not "real properties," or their relational aspect makes them problematic, but I wonder exactly what kind of work this law of identity is supposed to do in helping us sort through these cases.
Also, how does the activity of proof presuppose existence? I think can I prove that the following is true:
(1) If Bambi is a deer, then Bambi had a mother.
But does this presuppose the existence of Bambi or his mother?
I think you may mean something different by the presupposition of existence than I am indicating here. What do you mean, exactly? Could you give some examples (or apply them to the above)?
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