Challenges to Skeptical Arguments: Philosophy Forums

Philosophy Forums » Metaphysics and Epistemology » Challenges to Skeptical Arguments » Challenges to Skeptical Arguments

Challenges to Skeptical Arguments

Page: 1 2 3

Challenges to Skeptical Arguments

oag
banned

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jun 13, 2009

Total Topics: 2
Total Posts: 555

Posted 07/15/09 - 08:35 AM:	#21
treysuttle wrote: oag: If we are BIV then we are not in the same epistemic position as someone who is not a BIV. Theoretically yes. The practical fact of the matter is that you wouldn't know you were a BIV. We may be in the same belief position -- have the same experential states, but knowledge (as I understand it) requires that the content of the belief be true. The problem is that the truth behind it is only ever based on subjective perception. You simply cannot confirm the mind-independent, actual, objective (however you want to say it) truth of your perceptions. We only come by truth through observation. Absolute knowledge is beyond any of us. We manufacture truth statements to represent the universe as we see it, as we believe it to be. You know that the sky is blue. I know that it is not. I know that if our eyes could see the colors just outside, on either side, of the limited spectrum they do see that the sky would appear purplish. That is why I answer that way whenever some smart ass asks me what color the sky is in my world. I answer with what I know to be scientifically based rather than just how I see it. The content of my belief is not the state of experiencing hands, although that might justify a belief in hands, but the content is about the hands themselves. Yes, I know. You want to say that you have the means to determine if you objectively have hands or not. You don't have the means to determine that. You believe you have hands because you experience having them and that is the end of the story. You cannot confirm that you are not a BIV. A claim: 'I have two hands' is not the claim 'I experience myself as having two hands'. I'm afraid that it is. It is nothing more than a belief statement. It cannot be anything more. You may want it to represent something objective and mind independent but it does not, it cannot. It is a statement originating in your mind and based entirely on your perceptions and your beliefs. You cannot step out of yourself and declare that you have hands even if you don't believe that you do because you obviously already observe that you do. Hypothetically removing your belief is nonsense. If we are BIV, then the former is false, although the latter may be true whether we are BIVs or not. If you are a BIV then the statement "I have hands is true." The statement represents nothing more than your observation of that. It is true that you observe that you have hands. It may or may not represent objective reality but you have no way of knowing that so it doesn't matter. If you hypothesize one way or the other on the objectivity of it what does that get you? You get to have a nice conversation with some idiot solipsist calling himself [b]oag]/b] about how you can't justify that belief and go around and around about it. If this is the case, does it follow thereby that we cannot know facts about the world -- assuming that the facts about the world that we believe would be false if we were in fact dreaming? That, is the question. This is where the semantics comes into play. We cannot know objective facts about the world. What we know is what we believe to be factual about the world. Our statements of fact or truth are never anything more than a statement of perception and belief. "There is a rock ahead.", translates as, "I see something ahead and I identify it as a rock and I believe it to be real and I believe running into it will hurt so let's not do that." To try to remove the perception and belief from the statement and make it objective requires a God's eye view, a knowledge of what is objectively correct. We don't have that. We have knowledge of what we perceive and experience and nothing more. I think I have given at least one good reason to think that the skeptics conclusion does not follow...even if we accept the skeptical scenario and its direct implications. Good is in the eye of the beholder. From where I am sitting you desperately want to be able to present an objective perspective. You believe with all of your heart that there is an objective reality out there and that our senses give us good, correct/correspondent information about it. You actually present yourself as sure of this but I'm telling you that you can't be sure of it any more than you could point to something and declare that it is infinite or perfect. You would have to have access to something infinite or perfect and demonstrate an exact match. It is the same with reality. You have to be able to demonstrate that your perceptions are an exact match for objective reality. You can't ever do that so you are guessing and hoping and striving for something you can't ever have. You are presenting an indefensible position.

treysuttle
Graduate

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 07, 2003
Location: Phoenix

Total Topics: 5
Total Posts: 213

Posted 07/15/09 - 08:44 AM:	#22
Hi squeeco, no problem on the slow reply...its always worth the wait. I get the impression that you are holding to a real high standard when it comes to knowledge...why is it the case that because we are judging based partly on intuition that we could not have knowledge -- can't intuitions be correct? Can't I have a vague understanding of some process and yet my belief be true and justified? I say..sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. The pudding is in the evaluation of said intuitions. Not all intuitions can, at least it seems, be evaluated - even in principle. This is what makes the philosophical skeptics position unique. We are both looking at a bird in the back yard...I think it is one kind of bird and you think that it is another. We can get a book or pull up google and see what kind of bird it is. You think we might be BIVs and I think that seems too incredible to be the case -- there seems to be no way to evaluate this scenario. I think you are also holding justification to a real high standard. I don't require that a belief be 'fully' justified in order to be justified. I'm getting the impression that you do. Justification is a general method for selecting beliefs not because justification would imply that the belief is true (or that the justification would somehow settle once and for all whether the belief is true) -- I think that is much too strong and results in problems of its own that ought to be avoided. Justification is on the epistemic side (not the metaphysical) -- a claim is put up for consideration as justification when it is asked why someone believes something to be the case. To offer justification is not to imply that such an offer must be accepted. This is what makes justification rational -- it is providing an account for why one believes a belief...and it can be challenged by others. If you ask me why I believe in God, and I say because the Bible says that God exists and the Bible must be true because it is the inspired word of God.......I have not really given you a justification for my belief -- my position is irrational on this point. If I say: Because everything has a cause, therefore the world must have a cause, and that cause is God -- I have given you a justification for my belief...you may challenge my reasoning for my belief....my claim...true or false at this point, is rational nonetheless. I don't see the possibility of justification resulting in an infinite regress as crushing for a justificationist conception of knowledge. Knowledge requires a justified true belief. As I have said, I don't require that justification be so strong that it implies the truth of the belief, nor do I require that our epistemic position towards the belief be one of certainty. Justification is always only provisional (otherwise...we would be dogmatic!). When I have provided a reason for why I believe something to be true...I have submitted a candidate for knowledge -- and my claim very well may be knowledge even if we do not know that we know. When we question justification for beliefs, I think our epistemic position has greatly improved...the result is the possibility for a deeper understanding of why we believe what we do. That justification is conjectural is no boon against rational inquiry....all claims about the world are conjectural -- this doesn't mean that such claims cannot be knowledge and it doesn't mean that we cannot decipher better and worse reasons for our beliefs. It just means we are never certain, any claim is open to questioning and demands some account if believed to be true. For me, that is the core of what it means to be rational.

treysuttle
Graduate

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 07, 2003
Location: Phoenix

Total Topics: 5
Total Posts: 213

Posted 07/15/09 - 08:54 AM:	#23
oag: "You simply cannot confirm the mind-independent, actual, objective (however you want to say it) truth of your perceptions" I have conceded this to the skeptic...not because I believe it, but I want to be as favorable to the skeptics argument as possible. My point on this thread is that we can concede this to the skeptic....we don't have to answer the question of whether there is a mind independent world , nor do we have to answer the question of whether all truth is subjective...whatever that is supposed to mean. The skeptics conclusion does not follow from her argument...regardless of how you answer to the issues that you are bringing up. Please go back to my original post and read closely my concerns on this thread. My concern is with a problem that I see in a particular version of the skeptics argument....nor whether skepticism is true or not.

John Kievlan
Aspirant

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Sep 05, 2006

Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 21

Posted 07/15/09 - 01:11 PM:	#24
treysuttle wrote: Hi John, The certainity required is not on the BIV premise, but on the claim: 'I know that I have hands'. True; but the claim (C) is that whether or not I have hands depends on whether I am a BIV. Thus if I cannot apply any justification whatsoever to the claim, "I am not a BIV," then I also cannot justify that I have hands (if we grant C). That is where the skeptic's argument gets its weight. If the skeptic were merely saying, "There is a minute possibility that you are a BIV," then he wouldn't be saying much, and one could reasonably ignore that possibility. Instead, what he's saying is, "It is no more likely that you are 'real' than that you are a BIV." If that is true, then belief that you are "real" is an arbitrary belief in one of several equal possibilities, and therefore isn't justified. treysuttle wrote: John: "Why do you take this to be uncontroversial? More to the point, why do you assume that if we are BIVs, we don't have hands? It simply depends on what you mean by "I have hands." If we take "hands" to be a summation of (1) the sensations of having hands, and (2) the capacity to alter our own experiences in the unique ways permitted by the having of hands, then the means by which those hands are implemented (whether by low-level physical processes, or by a piece of software that runs our BIV experiences) does not change the essential fact that, manifestly, we have hands." It is uncontroversial that we do not know that we have hands if we are brains in a vat, because that is how the thought experiment is set up. When we say 'BIV' we mean to say that you do not have hands....you are just a brain...in a vat. You may experience yourself as having hands, but this does not mean that you actually have hands. The skeptic is not concerned with denying that you are in an experiential state and the non-skeptic is not concerned with affirming that you are in an experential state....you see? I do see, but my contention is that the skeptic is mistaken to assume there is an epistemic difference between my experiencing hands and my having hands. Let me back up. If the skeptic's claim C (as stated earlier in this post) is true, and if it's also true that a subject can't distinguish between a BIV and a non-BIV state (which we both grant), then I think I have shown why it logically follows that we don't know that we have hands. The answer? C is false. When I say, "I have hands" I am making a statement that is true independently of the composition of those hands, and thus independently of whether I am a BIV. It does not matter whether my hands are an emergent function of a brain-vat interaction, or an emergent function of a more familiar, "physical" process. This is true for the same reason it doesn't matter whether my hands are made of cells or tiny magical fairies -- in either case, I have hands.

oag
banned

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jun 13, 2009

Total Topics: 2
Total Posts: 555

Posted 07/15/09 - 03:06 PM:	#25
treysuttle wrote: oag: "You simply cannot confirm the mind-independent, actual, objective (however you want to say it) truth of your perceptions" I have conceded this to the skeptic...not because I believe it, but I want to be as favorable to the skeptics argument as possible. My point on this thread is that we can concede this to the skeptic....we don't have to answer the question of whether there is a mind independent world , nor do we have to answer the question of whether all truth is subjective...whatever that is supposed to mean. The skeptics conclusion does not follow from her argument...regardless of how you answer to the issues that you are bringing up. Please go back to my original post and read closely my concerns on this thread. My concern is with a problem that I see in a particular version of the skeptics argument....nor whether skepticism is true or not. I reread your OP and I fail to see what it is you are actually after. We skeptics do not have the burden of proof. Our position is based on the inability to prove one way or the other. You said, "...the mere logical possibility alone of being a BIV is not strong enough to undermine the substantive evidence that one has in favor of knowing that one has hands." There is zero evidence in favor of knowing beyond Cartesian doubt that you have hands. The way in which you know that you have hands is by evidence of perception. Perception within BIV and any other possible objective reality would be identical. You are trying to compare apples to oranges. Within any possible objective reality oranges would be oranges. You would observe, believe and know that you have hands. You cannot possibly know, epistemically, whether you do or not. You don't have the proper evidence for that determination. Your evidence is observation and belief. I only have to demonstrate that your observation and belief is subjective and would be the same within any objective scenario and I "win".

Page: 1 2 3

Sorry, you don't have permission to post. Log in, or register if you haven't yet.