Readings (in the order I would like you to read them):
1. O’Hear, Chapter 1 (pp1-11)
2. Fay, Introduction (pp.1-8)
3. O’Hear, Chapter 2;
a. (optional) You may also want to read some of the work of Francis Bacon, the writer who is the focus of the first part of O’Hear’s Chapter 2. In fact, I think Bacon’s explanation of his famous ‘idols of the mind’ is clearer than O’Hear’s. Some of Bacon’s text Novum Oraganum can be found online at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/title.htm. The Preface is OK, but follow the link to the “Aphorisms” for the meat of his view. The ‘idols’ are briefly described in aphorisms 39-44, then in much greater detail in what follows. There is a brief biography of Bacon at http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/bacon.html.
4. Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sections IV, V (Part I), VII (Part II) and XII (Several online versions are listed below. I highly recommend the Bennett version of this text [#4 below] for its readability [relative to the original, that is!], but purists, masochists and intellectual athletes may prefer a version in Hume’s own words [#’s 1-3 below].)
5. You will almost certainly want some help making sense of Hume, so I urge you to consult one or more of the secondary sources listed below [#’s 5-9]. I also recommend a look at Professor William Uzgalis’ overview of the intellectual history of the early modern period at http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/stories.html and especially his account of the early modern philosophers’ worries about knowledge at http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/know.html. You may also find it helpful to look up the discussions of such terms as “induction,” “deduction,” “a priori,” etc. in an online source like x-refer. (Follow the imbedded links in the Oxford Companion article referenced below - #8.)
Resources for Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding
1. An HTML version of the text - http://eserver.org/18th/hume-enquiry.html#1
2. A more scholarly HTML version - http://www.etext.leeds.ac.uk/hume/ehu/ehupbsb.htm
3. A plain text version – http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/philosophy/1700-1799/hume-enquiry-65.txt
4. Jonathan Bennett’s modernized and simplified version of the text -- Bennett_Hume.htm
5. An interactive study guide developed by philosophers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee (in Scotland) - http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ddb/teaching/hume/enquiry/
6. A study guide by Professor Gerald G. Massey of the University of Pittsburg - http://www.pitt.edu/~gmas/HUME_SG.htm
7. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Hume (fairly advanced) - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
8. Oxford Companion to Philosophy article on Hume - http://www.xrefer.com/entry/552346
9. G. J. Mattey's lectures on Hume at http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/phi023/HUMELEC.HTM
Some notes on the readings (with writing assignments in
bold type):
1. The first assignment (on Descartes and the Matrix) was intended to function more or less as a teaser. You have now been confronted (and, if you actually watched the movie, confronted rather vividly) with one of the mind-boggling questions philosophers like to wrestle with: How do we know (if we do) that our ordinary experience is a reliable guide to what is real? How do I know (if I do) that I’m not a brain in a vat or in the Matrix? I say this was just a teaser because we are not going to go on and systematically explore the ways philosophers have tried to answer this question. (If this is disappointing to you, you might like to look at the lecture notes for James Pryor’s Princeton University course in epistemology, indexed at http://www.princeton.edu/~jimpryor/courses/epist/notes/index.html. There is also a site called “Philosophy and The Matrix” at http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/phi.html.) In fact we are not even going to explore the way that Descartes tried to answer this question, though I’ll say a bit about it below. Instead we are going to explore a different set of questions. The first two readings on the list above provide a pretty good overview of these questions. They are questions about the status of science as a ‘way of knowing’ and questions about the challenges to science that are posed by two contemporary intellectual trends: ‘relativism’ and ‘multiculturalism’.
Anthony O’Hear puts forward a fairly conventional view of science as the most successful and reliable ‘way of knowing’ around. According to O’Hear, science is universally admired, progressive (i.e., it’s understanding of the world gets better and better as time goes on), and objective. Brian Fay seems to think that O’Hear’s confidence in science is no longer widely shared. He says, “in the current intellectual climate natural science has lost this privileged position.” (p.1) And he attributes this loss of prestige to the challenges posed by relativism and multiculturalism. (As we will see later on, Fay’s own view is closer to O’Hear’s than it may appear at the outset.)
As you read these two selections, think about your own attitudes towards and beliefs about science. Do you think that the natural sciences produce universally valid and objective knowledge? Do you think that they constitute the best or the only way of knowing what the world is really like? Do you think (as Fay suggests at the top of page 2) that there are “alternative forms of knowing?” (If so, what are they?) Do you agree with what Fay calls ‘relativism’ that no perspective on the world is any better than any other perspective – that, for example, voodoo may be as valid as scientific medicine as a way of understanding diseases? (Notice that ‘perspectivism’ and ‘relativism’ are different. What, according to Fay, is the difference?)
Think, also, about your own attitudes toward relativism and multiculturalism. In my experience teaching college, it is very common for students to express relativistic ideas. “It all depends on your point of view.” Or “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion.” Or the recurring question, “Who’s to say?” Sometimes I get the feeling that people are actually offended by the idea that some opinions might be just wrong and other opinions simply correct. What do you think?
Write a bit (perhaps ½ to 2 pages) about your own beliefs about science, relativism and the possibility of objective knowledge and your reactions to what O’Hear and Fay say about these things.
2. Next we turn to Chapter 2 of O’Hear and to the writings of two early modern philosophers, Francis Bacon and David Hume. These materials begin our investigation of the nature of scientific inquiry. O’Hear finds in Bacon a plausible and popular idea about how scientific inquiry should proceed: Scientific inquiry should be a presuppositionless (completely unprejudiced) effort to gather and analyze all the available data. But, says O’Hear, this idea is a bad one. Every inquiry has to start somewhere, and every starting point involves some assumptions or presuppositions. (To say this is to accept an important part of the view that Fay calls ‘perspectivism’.)
Write a brief explanation of O’Hear’s reasons for rejecting Bacon’s model of scientific inquiry. Do you think O’Hear is right to reject this model? (Explain)
3. So far (through page 25) O’Hear’s critique of ‘inductivism’ has focused on the problems involved in gathering data and formulating hypotheses. Next he turns to another set of problems: Supposing that we have some data, how do we know what conclusions we are entitled to draw? The problems here have been lumped together under the label “the problem of induction.” Basically the problem is that we want to generalize from some set of observed cases to conclusions about cases we have not (yet) observed. In order to do this we seem to need to make some assumptions: that the future will resemble the past; that the observed cases are representative of the unobserved ones; that we understand what it is that the observed cases have in common, etc. But how do we know that these assumptions are correct?
A classic discussion of this problem is found in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, especially Section IV. In this section Hume argues in detail for the claim that no valid reasoning supports our tendency to draw inductive conclusions from our experience. In Section V Hume claims that our tendency to reason in this way is just a habit, and that it is part of human nature to develop this habit. He also seems to think that we are lucky to be the kind of creature who develops this habit – it is a beneficial habit to have – but he does not seem to think that the habit is therefore justified or rational.
Write a page or two explaining what ‘the problem of induction’ is and explaining Hume’s reason’s for thinking that inductive inferences cannot be justified by any rational argument.
Hume’s work also serves as a classic example of the philosophy known as empiricism. Empiricism says that all knowledge of the world comes from sensory experience (observation and experiment). This contrasts with rationalism. Rationalism says that some knowledge of the world can be obtained by reasoning alone.
[Note: Descartes was a rationalist. We read the part of his Meditations wherein he used various skeptical arguments to demolish all his beliefs (leaving unscathed only his belief that he exists and that he is a thinking thing). We did not go on to read the part wherein he tried to build up a secure structure of knowledge on this foundation. There was a hint of his strategy, though, at the end of the second Meditation, in his discussion of the lump of wax. He concluded from the fact that the wax remained the same thing even though its sensory qualities changed, that his senses were not a reliable guide to the nature of the wax. The nature of the wax was discovered, rather, by his understanding (that is, by his rational faculty). In the third Meditation Descartes uses his rational faculties to ‘prove’, first that God exists (this is supposed to follow from several self-evident propositions) and then that his own rational faculties must be reliable whenever they are used within their proper limits (this is supposed to follow from the fact that God is – by definition – good, hence, not a deceiver, hence he would not have given His creatures an intrinsically defective rational faculty). As Hume points out near the beginning of Section XII of the Inquiry, however, Descartes seems to be reasoning in a circle. He has to use his rational faculties to prove that God exists, but only then does he have reason to believe that those faculties are reliable.]
There are some terms and concepts
it will be useful to learn in connection with these topics. Hume uses the term “a priori.” The opposite term is “a posteriori.” These terms are used to distinguish truths
that can be known by reasoning alone (a priori truths) from truths that
require observation or experiment for their discovery (a posteriori
truths). Study the explanations of
these terms in the interactive study guide to Hume and/or in the Oxford
Companion to Philosophy (items 5 and 8 on the list of resources above). Then complete the attached exercise on a
priori vs. a posteriori truths.
It is characteristic of empiricism to insist that no fact about the world can be known a priori (only observation and experiment can tell us what the world is like). So empiricists need to explain what a priori truths are about. The usual story is that they are all ‘analytic’. That is, they are true by virtue of the meanings of the words that compose them. We know a priori that no bachelor is married, because “unmarried” is part of the definition of “bachelor.” In a sense, then, a priori truths are not about anything, they simply reflect our determination to use words in a certain way. So says the empiricist, anyway. But rationalists characteristically deny this. They want to say that reason can tell us something about the world, not just about our own words or concepts. So rationalists hold on to the idea that some a priori truths are not analytic but synthetic. A synthetic proposition is not true by virtue of the meanings of its component words. A synthetic truth is one that gives us genuine information about the world. The problem for rationalism is to explain how we can know that any such proposition is true without actually looking at the world, can know it just by thinking, can know it a priori. Some of the propositions that rationalists have believed to be synthetic a priori truths are: that God exists; that every event has a cause; that substances are never destroyed; and many propositions of mathematics and geometry.
Part I of Section IV of Hume’s
Inquiry argues the empiricist case on this issue. Then, at the end of the book he returns to the topic claiming, in
a famous passage, that only quantity and number (i.e., mathematics) can be
known a priori, that all matters of fact must be known through
experience (experiment and observation), and that any claim to know other sorts
of truth must be “sophistry and illusion.”
(end of Section XII) Optional,
extra-credit assignment: write a page or so discussing whether, by Hume’s
criteria, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding should be cast into
the flames.
For your convenience, here are
all the parts of the writing assignment, assembled in one place:
1.
Write a bit (perhaps ½ to 2 pages) about your own
beliefs about science, relativism and the possibility of objective knowledge
and your reactions to what O’Hear and Fay say about these things.
2.
Write a brief explanation of O’Hear’s reasons for
rejecting Bacon’s model of scientific inquiry. Do you think O’Hear is right to
reject this model? (Explain)
3.
Write a page or two explaining what ‘the problem of
induction’ is and explaining Hume’s reason’s for thinking that inductive
inferences cannot be justified by any rational argument.
4.
Complete the attached exercise on a priori vs. a
posteriori truths.
5.
Optional, extra-credit assignment: write a page or so
discussing whether, by Hume’s criteria, An Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding should be cast into the flames.