Six Anti-skeptical Strategies - Epistemology Video 24
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2024
- This is video 24 in an introductory course on epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge. In this video, we discuss six strategies against skepticism:
1. Moore's two hands
2. Sensitivity and the denial of closure
3. Contextualism
4. Wittgensteinian contextualism
5. Externalism
6. Kantian doubts about the coherence of skepticism
Victor Gijsbers teaches philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. You can follow him on mastodon: @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place.
This video is part of a lecture series originally recorded for my students during the 2023/2024 spring semester. The entire playlist is here: • Course in Epistemology
I know that I liked this video. Hence there is an external world. QED.
Exactly!
I really like how these videos address the elephant in the room!
What's interesting to me is that nobody actually believes in Cartesian skepticism, even if they say they do. Nobody seems to hear about Cartesian skepticism and say, 'Well, I guess that means that I can behave immorally now, because I have no reason to believe that anyone around me is real. There's no way for me to hurt anyone with my actions, so I might as well behave as selfishly as I want." The reason nobody says this is that no one actually believes that they are a brain in a vat. It's simply not a sustainable belief; you cannot believe it and go about your normal daily life. It seems to be repugnant to the brain to believe. I wondered if this could be used to argue that Cartesian skepticism is wrong, but I'm not sure that it can be used that way. Just because we aren't capable of believing something, that doesn't mean it isn't true.
do you White any boks. love this and your a priori/posteriori- analytical-synthetic vid was fab
Not yet, unfortunately, but when I do I'll be sure to let the channel know! (I've translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but in Dutch, so probably not too useful to most of you.)
It seems to me that the belief "I have hands" might be sensitive in ordinary, non-skeptical cases (like losing your hands in real life), but the sensitivity condition fails exactly in simulated worlds where the belief is false (so you don’t have hands) and you still believe it's true that you have hands. So for sensitivity to work, don't we already have to presuppose that we're not in a skeptical scenario?
I know Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street in London, which is true within the fictional domain, even though Sherlock is not real.
So, even if I'm a brain in a vat, things in my mental domain would also be true, regardless of whether they are real or not. Truth for me is always relative to a domain.
I think that's Putnam's Internal Realism?
how do skeptics know of brains?
you should know you're not a brain in a vat because the sheer amount of information that would need to be simulated would require extreme technology and a power source nearly infinite.
Yeah, that's what the people who programmed our simulation *want* us to think, which is why they've created a virtual world where it's true.