A.J. Ayer

Originally posted by epiphinehas
If we cannot know with certainty even the putatively self-evident, then what can we know with certainty? I guess what I'm trying to get at is, what is the practical effect of such uncertainty? In our every day lives we take many so-called facts for granted, e.g., that the car is where I left it, that I will wake up in the morning, that orange ju ...[text shortened]... f we cannot rely upon logical absolutes to be absolutely certain, then of what use is logic?

We cannot be certain about the truth of any proposition, even the proposition that nothing is certain. Sometimes uncertainty is totally unthreatening and practically irrelevant, other times it is not. I have such overwhelming evidence that my apartment will be where it was this morning that it would be unreasonable for me to be doubtful on my way home, or to call my neighbor to confirm that it is still there, or... But different propositions can be more uncertain than this, and this will be practically relevant in obvious ways in deciding what to do. Deductive logic is useful because, as far as we can tell, it invariably gets things right. We have no reason to doubt that deductive inferences are necessarily truth-preserving. In fact, we cannot imagine these inferences not being necessarily truth-preserving. We have little reason to doubt that strong inductive inferences will yield false conclusions, as long as we take the appropriate steps to ensure that our inductive base is broad and not confounded. Both seem pretty clearly useful.

Originally posted by Palynka
If you have seen my arguments with vistesd and Bosse about Zen, you would know that I don't find poetic thoughts necessarily good philosophy. My views are much bleaker in that sense than you suppose. 🙂

My beef with such a view is that almost anything is potentially verifiable in the future because we cannot meaningfully predict the state of science in 1 ur! Yet our understanding of economics cannot be considered anything else than knowledge.

If you have seen my arguments with vistesd and Bosse about Zen, you would know that I don't find poetic thoughts necessarily good philosophy. My views are much bleaker in that sense than you suppose.

😉

They aren’t good philosophy—although they may be informed by good philosophy, which, in the case of such pathways as Zen, is informed by something else. Your problem with Seng Tsan, however, was not so much that he used poetic speech per se, but that he used mightily condensed speech that is difficult to understand outside its Zen Buddhist cultural context. On the other hand, it may well have been some striking poetic expression that originally got me to spend so much time in that context, rather than dismiss it. You didn’t dismiss it either (I’m not saying that)—you mounted an argument. You preferred my attempts to put it all in a more “western” context—but my source for that was Seng Tsan’s Zen!

Poetic speech used in such a manner is intended to be (or ought to be) evocative or elicitive. It is using words to point to what is prior to all our words/thoughts/concepts about it.

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Meditation of the “Sudden Enlightenment” School


One resounding sneeze!

And all the idols
in the temple
are blown to smithereens!

(Now there is just
sweeping the dust
from the empty-headed
holy of holies.)

—Zenwa

______________________________________

If you shrug it off as just a poem, you’re not paying attention.

If you try to make a philosophy out of it—for God’s sake, sneeze! (And all will be clear.) 🙂

EDIT: And by now you do have a whole lot of words-about-words context vis-à-vis Zen to play out this poem, if you wish, to what it’s aimed at. Then you might realize the Big Sneeze. 🙂 (Well, that's presumptuous of me: perhaps you already have...)

Originally posted by bbarr
We cannot be certain about the truth of any proposition, even the proposition that nothing is certain. Sometimes uncertainty is totally unthreatening and practically irrelevant, other times it is not. I have such overwhelming evidence that my apartment will be where it was this morning that it would be unreasonable for me to be doubtful on my way home, or to ...[text shortened]... to ensure that our inductive base is broad and not confounded. Both seem pretty clearly useful.

"Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible."

~ William James

_____________________

Is all life, then, faith?

Originally posted by epiphinehas
"Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible."

~ William James

_____________________

Is all life, then, faith?

Have you read the James lecture from which that quote was taken? It provides the religious with cold comfort. If you want to discuss The Will to Believe, it could be interesting, but I doubt you will find James' pragmatist epistemology palatable. In any case, if you define faith in James' manner, then it certainly follows that all our beliefs are instances of faith, but this is practically irrelevant since (1) the distinction between faith and belief will thereby collapse (e.g., it will be a matter of faith that your home is where you left it in the morning), and (2) we can still ask all the same normative questions about instances of faith that we used to ask about beliefs (e.g., is faith that P reasonable, or justified?). The redefinition of basic epistemic notions like 'belief' does not yield any interesting philosophical results, it just yields rephrased versions of the same philosophical questions.

Originally posted by bbarr
Have you read the James lecture from which that quote was taken? It provides the religious with cold comfort. If you want to discuss The Will to Believe, it could be interesting, but I doubt you will find James' pragmatist epistemology palatable. In any case, if you define faith in James' manner, then it certainly follows that all our beliefs are ins ...[text shortened]... hilosophical results, it just yields rephrased versions of the same philosophical questions.

There are few lines from The Will To Believe which I found interesting:

"There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing,--the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is."

James asserts an "indefectibly certian truth" here. Do you find this to be problematic and why?

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"He who says, "Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world."

"I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

After statements like these, James must be the penultimate black sheep of Philosophy.

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"In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider."

Pragmatism, in this sense, I find palatable. If a living option cannot be resolved intellectually, e.g., if I cannot affirm or deny the reality of Jesus Christ with the intellect, then it seems only reasonable to investigate the results of belief (i.e. faith) in him.

Show me how I err.

Originally posted by epiphinehas
There are few lines from The Will To Believe which I found interesting:

"There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing,--the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff able to investigate the results of belief (i.e. faith) in him.

Show me how I err.

I find the first claim problematic because it overlooks the possibility that we are irremediably conceptually confused, and that our application of the concept 'consciousness' to our experience may be in error. If it is possible that our concepts fail to refer, or do not have the content we think they do, then it is possible that even claims about how it currently seems to us will be false (or, in the case of reference-failure, lack a truth-value). Of course, we are directly acquainted with our conscious states, and this gives us very good evidence for the truth of claims such as "there is consciousness here", but this direct acquaintance does not entail that such judgments are certain.

James is not a black sheep of philosophy, he is one of the most well known American pragmatists. Most analytic philosophers take pragmatism pretty seriously. I guess I am uncertain why James thinks that we can will to believe, since that seems to presuppose a form of doxastic control I think we lack. I just find myself believing various things for which I have good evidence; I cannot recall ever choosing to believe anything. I have chosen to investigate various claims, to amass evidence and look for countervailing evidence, but after the evidence is in belief formation tends to take care of itself. I often find myself believing things that I can perfectly well imagine may be false, and even things for which I have some evidence to the contrary (though in these latter cases I tend to try and suspend belief until more evidence is in). So, I wonder whether James is here worried about an epistemological bogeyman; an imagined rule that one should not believe P unless there is overwhelming and decisive evidence for P. But few philosophers think that anymore.

If P and Q are both living options but mutually exclusive, then it follows from James' account that the question of whether P or Q is irresolvable on intellectual grounds. If 'irresolvable' means we cannot establish either P or Q with certainty, then it does not follow that it is equally epistemically responsible to believe P or Q. It could be that P have much evidence in its favor and Q has only a little. But, if 'irresolvable' means that P and Q are equally likely given the evidence, then one should believe neither. If the choice between P and Q is important, then one should investigate the options.

Originally posted by bbarr
I find the first claim problematic because it overlooks the possibility that we are irremediably conceptually confused, and that our application of the concept 'consciousness' to our experience may be in error. If it is possible that our concepts fail to refer, or do not have the content we think they do, then it is possible that even claims about how it curr . If the choice between P and Q is important, then one should investigate the options.

Regarding your take on consciousness: I've had this odd idea stuck in my head lately, having to do with the apparent group intelligence of flocks of birds, schools of fish, the hive behavior of bees, etc., as it may or may not pertain to human consciousness. What appears to be evidence of a "group mind" or higher intelligence when large groups of a certain species coalesce, is probably merely an illusion. For instance, within a flock of birds an individual bird swerves causing the birds next to him to swerve in a similar manner, each bird effecting the fellow next to him in slightly varying ways, relative to the environment. The casual observer might conclude that the birds are operating as a single, conscious, group mind. Yet, the birds are really moving relative to one another according to precise physical laws, demonstrable in computer simulations. I've been toying with the notion that the human mind operates similarly. What we call intelligence and consciousness may well be no more significant than a flock of birds multiplied a billion-fold, i.e., the electro-chemical communication between neurons in the brain. The illusion of intelligence arising from the dedicated physiological aspects of our creaturehood operating within a specific social/linguistic/intellectual/physical environment; our sense of being 'conscious' arising mainly from our sense of sight and the subsequent processing of sensory information, which involves memory and the introspective ability to reflect on prior perceptions/emotions/impressions. It makes sense now how these internal processes could be mistaken as being 'self-evident' of a 'conscious state' even if a conscious state may, in fact, be something perpetually imminent though never quite occurring.

I'll post later regarding James' will to believe and your skepticism of doxastic control, after I begin to wrap my mind around some of it.

EDIT: Warning: thinking aloud. I read a line recently, though I can't remember where. It went something like, "the natural order may well be at bottom a moral order." I think it was quoted in the context of comparing empiricists and absolutists. Perhaps you've heard it before. It's interesting that the natural order does, in a sense, give rise to a certain, though imperfect, moral order. There is the scientist's attention to detail, teasing out the underlying processes of the natural order (if it can be called 'order' ), and on the other hand there is Plato's theory of forms (I imagine a theory of moral forms). Could it be that our intuition is our doxastic control? Putting two and two together; reading between the lines, etc.