Philosophical Starting Points
I'm curious about how participants here factor a starting point into their own philosophical position(s).
For me, when I took up philosophy, I figured that one's position ought at least be agreeable to known facts. Thus, in short I basically attempted to set out all the things that are known and looked for a means to tie them all together, so to speak...
And you?
For me, when I took up philosophy, I figured that one's position ought at least be agreeable to known facts. Thus, in short I basically attempted to set out all the things that are known and looked for a means to tie them all together, so to speak...
And you?
Comments (56)
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I think this puts the cart before the horse. A better place to start woud be to ask "What makes something a "fact"?"
Well Mitchell...
How one defines fact has a major effect/affect on the rest of his/her philosophy... assuming coherency/consistent terminological use.
On my view, facts are states of affairs; events; happenings; the way things are/were; etc.
If the question is about what makes something true, then my answer is correspondence to fact. What sorts of things can be true is yet another important consideration, as well as what makes them so.
No argument from me there. My point was we ought not to take "the facts" as the starting point for our philosophy, when the prior question about the nature of a fact hasn't been addressed.
Sapentia is using "fact" to mean a true statement. That has consequences that differ from using it to mean states of affairs...
Once language enters into the picture we form linguistic concepts that are rule-based (language-games), and many of these concepts serve to describe reality - concepts such as fact, truth, knowledge, justification, objective, etc. Thus, what I've done is try to build an epistemological system that rests on foundational beliefs that are outside of any system of justification. This epistemology rests on, or is grounded in very basic kinds of beliefs, which solves the problem of an infinite regress or circularity caused by other kinds of epistemological theories.
I don't believe that any theory of knowledge can capture every possible situation in which it can be said that we know X, no more than a definition of game can capture every possible use of the term game. So my theory is more of a guide, or a general rule that's meant to give us some measure of confidence in terms of how we use the term know, and what it means to know.
I don't believe knowledge is restricted to any one area of study. For example, science provides only one way of attaining knowledge, but I also have knowledge based on sensory experiences. I have knowledge that I'm sitting at a desk typing quite apart from any experiment done in a lab. Furthermore, much of what we come to know is based on testimonial evidence, which comes to us in a variety of ways, and this also is quite apart from any deductive or inductive reasoning.
There is a problem with a starting point, since we are full of conceptions and convictions prior to the start, the reality we experience is already structured for us, in us. The realization of my own bias, and my need to try and understand it got me re-started.
So at any rate, it is more like digging my self out of a hole.
I regard philosophy as the attempt to build an edifice and to get yourself out of any holes that you might fall into, once they've been explored. If you stick at it long enough and you're a philosophical type, then you will likely find that what you build is prone to attack, you will likely find yourself defending what you've built from attack, and you will likely find yourself attacking what others have built. You'll also find that there are quite a lot of holes, and quite a lot of diggers. You don't always have to begin in the middle of a muddle, but being in a muddle is almost inevitably something that you're going to encounter in philosophy.
No?
Hm. Kinda looks that way. Looks can be deceiving. How are you defining/using the term "fact"?
Looks like the beginnings for many here were reality checks... It has a way of imposing itself upon us.
That is actually where it began for myself as well. Thought things were a certain way. Things weren't. Wanted to know how and/or where I'd went wrong and didn't wanna do that again.
Hard to remember specifics. I remember that we're both autodidacts. I remember admiring your ability to assume a tenet and see it through. I remember not however which of those exercises were exploration, and which were actually arguing a position you hold, as compared to one that was just being considered/entertained...
;)
Exactly.
At the beginning of Wesleyan University's MOOC on Social Psychology, I asked for a conceptual framework of the field, and was met with silence (there is none).
So, I decided to construct an informal domain ontology of Cognitive Psychology (because it is foundational to Social Psychology). Ultimately, it requires extending to Moral Psychology.
This project is both scientific and philosophical in nature, requiring that I collect and review facts, and proceed with conceptual analysis. The intent is to produce a coherent model which is easily formalised.
So, where you start with philosophy very much depends on your agenda.
Both of whom are worthy of admiration...
Well my friend, philosophy can cause one to dig themselves into a hole... The good thing is we can get out and actually do things. Tends to make being in the hole much less important.
;)
Ah Sam... Witt's influence is strong, is it not? On Certainty in particular.
Something tells me that you appreciate making a difference of a good kind in this world. I just want you to know that for more than a decade, you've played a significant role - as odd as it may seem given the circumstances - in some very good changes within my own personal life.
You're clearly considerate of others. Worthy of emulation. A role model for how to appropriately respond to inappropriate interlocutors. I've held you in high regard since ephilosopher. I appreciate people like you being in the world Sam. We need more of you.
Hey, ya know... I do know a bio-engineer. Kidding.
;)
Here's an interesting thought related to this - have you ever noticed how sometimes people's jokes reveal what they really think of you? The joke seems to be a way of telling people in a non-confrontational way that they're an idiot. Listen to people's jokes about you, they sometimes reveal how people really feel about you.
Sorry, this is way off topic.
You're very welcome Sam. I've been mainly remarking about your actual replies, especially when following clearly rude remarks. In that, your behaviour is remarkable. Admirable, even...
Regarding fiveredapples...
Banno is my own personal equivalent to your fiveredapples. On the old ephilosopher site, I followed the Gettier threads and almost anything that Hypersonic was involved in. I often find myself wondering if I've actually communicated with anyone from the older sites who may be now using a different avatar...
But everyone can choose different starting points. Disagreement may just be traced back to differing preferences on which premises to take for granted. Hence why I think we should be tolerant to each other. Although you could also just disagree with this as well.
If I go way back to when I started doing philosophy without calling it that, I'd say it was a response to the trauma of growing up. A cynical person might call it rationalization. How can a painful or confusing situation be made less painful and confusing? I think of a mind exploring perspectives on a situation. It can't outright deny all of the unpleasant facts, but it can connect failings to virtues and disasters to opportunities. What I have in mind might be call folk philosophy. A person thinks about what he can and should know and do before he's heard the name Plato in many if not most cases.
Within our folk philosophy operating system we can decide the philosophy proper is a virtuous pursuit (or just find it interesting).
All of that said, I really like your description of tying known facts together. I'd only add that there's the individual's known facts. I can't believe in afterlife or God. Others can and do. So my known facts (strong beliefs that function as facts in this regard) lead to a different sense of the whole than theirs do, it seems.
Philosophy is for figuring it out.
Edited.
I prefer acceptance over tolerance. Either we can can decide/choose a starting point or we cannot. You've said both here. I'm left wondering which you hold to be the case. I think I see your point though...
I would disagree, to some extent, that one cannot really decide a philosophical starting point. Doing philosophy is a metacognitive endeavor. It is thinking about one's own thought and belief. As such, it requires that one first have thought and belief, otherwise there is nothing to think about. One has no choice in either the socio-economic situation they are born into, nor their own cognitive capabilities, nor their initial world-view. So, in that sense, one does not decide their starting point.
However, that is not doing philosophy.
I think of a mind exploring perspectives on a situation...
Coming to acceptable terms with one's own experience?
X-)
I would say that you've put it on display for all to see. Philosophy is for figuring it all out.
I want to note here that by "fact" I mean events, happenings, the case at hand, the way things are and/or were, states of affairs...
So, in that sense, people do not have their own facts as you've described them. I think that you're calling one's own beliefs "facts"...
Right. We can think of a reactive folk-philosophy mode for coming to acceptable terms. Then there's also the active or inspired mode. For instance, I think religion is spontaneously generated by human beings. Lots of this is joyful, and it comes with the urge to share it.
Quoting creativesoul
Right. I understood that. But is the absence of an afterlife a case at hand? How does one interpret seeing someone buried or an urn of their ashes? Is there such a thing as theory independent observation? And then there's also the way language functions. People use 'fact' in lots of ways. I respect your definition, but I do think there's a limit to trapping the meaning of particular words. I personally try to get across a cloud of meaning that is independent from the individual words. For me everything is pretty smoky. We somehow muddle through, without ever perhaps being able to make what and how we do explicit to ourselves.
The absence of an apple is. The difference here, of course, is that the absence of an afterlife is unverifiable. However, we can surmise what it would take for an afterlife to be possible. I find no reason to believe that thought and belief is possible without physiological sensory perception, and as a result, I do not believe that disembodied cognition is possible. I would say that in order for an afterlife to be possible - at least as the same person we are/were while living - thought and belief would need to be somehow preserved even after physiological sensory perception has ceased. That would require disembodied cognition. So, I do not believe that an afterlife is possible, at least not as the same person/being/entity.
Quoting dog
By virtue of attributing meaning to the event. The meaning would vary according to the particular correlations that the individual has drawn and maintained throughout their life involving such things/events.
Quoting dog
Of course there is. Observing is an act that is not existentially contingent upon a world-view. Theories are. Therefore...
Quoting dog
The term "trapping" here... what is it doing? I agree and respect the fact that words have multiple accepted uses(meanings). I also caution against equivocation...
Quoting dog
Certainly.
Living life doesn't require understanding one's own belief system.
Starting point?
A metaphysics should be based on, start from, something inevitable. No brute facts, no assumptions.
I suggest that abstract if-then facts, and therefore complex inter-referring systems of them, are inevitable.
Someone could say, "But would there be those, if there were no experiencers? If not, then they aren't inevitable".
That doesn't follow. Among the infinity of complex systems of inter-referring abstract if-then facts, there are inevitably some (like the one whose events and relations are those of your experience) that consist of a life-experience possibility-story.
Those systems of if-then abstract facts are inevitable. They don't need objective or global "reality" or "exisitence", or any medium in which to be. They're mutually applicable and valid in their own local inter-referring system.
For the purpose of this discussion, we can ignore the other abstract facts and systems of them, and skip the issue of whether, without an experiencer, they "are".
Michael Ossipoff
Transcendental arguments are notoriously fickle. Placing them at the heart of philosophy can't be a good idea.
Even during death, you never reach a time when there isn't experience. You don't experience the time after your complete shutdown. Only your survivors experience that time.
For you, there's no such thing as a time when you don't experience.
"To sleep, perchance to dream"
That could (and eventually must, pretty much everyone agrees) consists of entry into a deep sleep in which there's no knowledge or memory that there was, or even could be, such a thing as life, identity, events or time.
Quiet peaceful sleep.
Of course complete shutdown soon follows, from other people's point of view, but not in your experience. Anyway you won't know or care about your temporariness then, having reached timelessness.
Since none of us have been there (at least not that we remember), it would be difficult to reliably say more.
It depends on your metaphysics If there's a reason why you're in this life, and if that reason remains at the end of this life, then what would that suggest?
Michael Ossipoff
"Take your most solid arguments and build a castle on them".
At the moment my nagging question is to do with the 'wisdom' in the name of philosophy and how that's somehow become about 'facts' and 'knowledge' and so forth. I learned more from a 3 minute record baby than I ever learned in school. I am especially interested in how language works, which I think is strangely (mis-)described by analytic philosophy.
I am trying to link in my head, because to my intuition they are linked, the strong feeling of wrongness I experience in rereading a remark Frege made,
with this provocation, which opens the door to an entirely different world-view than the one advocated:
Hello everyone, haven't posted here in awhile. Thought I'd say hi!
My philosophical background is mostly in phenomenology and existentialism. To that end, my methodological starting point tends to be phenomenological.
When a philosophical question is posed, I look to the phenomenological data that manifests itself in our everyday world for a starting point. From there, I can use other tools and methods like logical analysis to make sense of the phenomenological data and see if what manifests itself at first blush holds up under stricter scrutiny.
So, take a question in metaphysics as an example. i.e. "Do numbers exist?" The place I would tend to start is by examining how numbers show up for human beings in everyday life. What role do they play in our world?
Places I would not start are methods such as listing out necessary and sufficient conditions for being a number, or, looking to physics and the natural sciences to answer the question for us.
This sounds a little bit like American Pragmatism, yeah?
I like a lot of what you say here. I think Heidegger described what you are talking about as our "thrownness" into a pre-made world that we always are already starting out from. Philosophy is an endeavor to rise above our pre-given belief structure and examine its integrity. Does it hold up under scrutiny or do we need to revise our beliefes?
X-)
I just saw this...
A gem, and something I do far too often... particularly in real life with those people who aren't so welcoming of someone questioning their worldview...
It is worth noting here that being able to identify where a position goes wrong requires a level of understanding and critical thinking that isn't innate...
;)
No assumptions? Really now. A metaphysics that does not contain a single assumption?
Show me. By the way, "if" IS followed by an assumption.
Indeed.
Yeah. I've been critiquing the analytic notion of belief, which in turn, sheds light upon the inherent inadequacy of the analytic notion of JTB(knowledge) as well as how language works.
Correct.
It's the metaphysics that I've been describing here and there. I described it in the post that you're replying to..
You're referring to the "If " premise of an if-then fact.
I call it a "premise".
The metaphysics that I propose doesn't assume that the if-then facts' "if " premises are true.
If I say, "if you strangle your neighbor, you'll go to jail", does that mean that I'm assuming that you're going to strangle your neighbor?
"If you win Power-Ball, you'll be able to buy a 100 foot yacht." When I say that, does that mean that I assume that you're going to win Power-Ball?
No, you probably won't strangle your neighbor or win Power-Ball. I certainly don't assume either of those things.
Michael Ossipoff
Saying "if" is to assume it happens as means for further extrapolation...
nothing is wrong with a belief, the question is whether you are fixed or still want to explore mystical/super natural things?
Quoting creativesoul
if all you have are definite answers or belief, then you have no philosophical position because philosophy explores the unknown. In other words, you need to have questions that are not satisfactorily answered by any knowledge so far. That should be a very good starting point.
1. The "if" premise and "then" conclusion of an if-then fact aren't necessarily facts. If the "if " premise is a fact, then the "then" conclusion is a fact.
But the overall if-then fact can be reliably a fact, regardless of whether or not the premise is a fact.
2. You can call the "if" premise an assumption (of the if-then fact, but not of a proponent of the metaphysics) if you want to, But, even if so, it's only the if-then fact that uses that tentative assumption. The metaphysical proposal based on if-then facts doesn't make any assumptions.
Proposing that metaphysics, I don't assume or claim, or ask anyone to assume, that any of the "if " premises that I mentioned are true. In fact, I specifically said that none of them are objectively true. because metaphysical reality consists only of those hypothetical, abstract if-thens, and they're about things that have no objective existence.
So--far from assuming that all of the "if " premises are true--I'm saying that none of them are objectively true.
Want an example of a metaphysics that makes an assumption? Materialism assumes the objective, fundamental, existence of a physival world. Materialism assumes and believes in that physical world as what fundamentally is, the ground of all being. That's a brute-fact assumption.
My metaphysical proposal neither has nor needs any such assumption or brute-fact.
Do you see the distinction?
Michael Ossipoff
What is a fact? Philosophy's job is to begin by unpacking those taken for granted things like facts. Philosophy ought to, and does, challenge endemic assumptions.
Reflections on history and anthropology are more likely to reveal alternatives ideas that make you facts look parochial and idiosyncratic.
Anyway, something that Banno said about "where does it go wrong?" as a good starting point.
I take issue with this because this was actually raised in one my academic report writing projects -- that before you 'could' ask this, you must have already had some exposure to some first principles and had formulated an 'opinion'. In other words, I believe asking "where does it go wrong" is a step-up from the question of philosophical starting point.
I'd say instead that we are prone to using universals. Someone may have already alluded to it in this thread.