The Cartesian Problem For Materialism
Rene Descartes is famous for his cogito ergo sum argument. Setting aside criticisms of that argument which I do so because they're irrelevant as far as I can tell, I would like to draw your attention to what Descartes actually achieved - proving the existence of consciousness, the thinker that thinks, the mind as it were.
What's to be noted here is Descartes' journey toward the cogito ergo sum. It's said that he began by doubting everything he possibly could and in the process he realized that, indeed, he could doubt the reality/existence of everything except the mind engaged in this exercise of doubt. Thus, he arrived, so to speak, at his destination of absolute certainty viz. the unquestionable fact of his mental being (mind/consciousness).
If so, there's a very big problem for materialism for the simple reason that all the physical, the meat of materialism, falls under the rubric of doubtable stuff in Cartesian terms. Descartes proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt in my humble opinion, that the physical could be an illusion, unreal but, the mind, for certain, is not. Cartesian skepticism undermines materialism by showing the reality of the physical can be questioned but you couldn't doubt the existence of the mind.
In conclusion, we can be certain of only one thing - the existence of minds - and we can always doubt the reality of the physical world, materialism.
What's to be noted here is Descartes' journey toward the cogito ergo sum. It's said that he began by doubting everything he possibly could and in the process he realized that, indeed, he could doubt the reality/existence of everything except the mind engaged in this exercise of doubt. Thus, he arrived, so to speak, at his destination of absolute certainty viz. the unquestionable fact of his mental being (mind/consciousness).
If so, there's a very big problem for materialism for the simple reason that all the physical, the meat of materialism, falls under the rubric of doubtable stuff in Cartesian terms. Descartes proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt in my humble opinion, that the physical could be an illusion, unreal but, the mind, for certain, is not. Cartesian skepticism undermines materialism by showing the reality of the physical can be questioned but you couldn't doubt the existence of the mind.
In conclusion, we can be certain of only one thing - the existence of minds - and we can always doubt the reality of the physical world, materialism.
Comments (91)
This suggests that you might characterise materialism as the belief that the the physical world is real. I don't think this adequately distinguishes materialism from any other monism.
For me, materialism is most accurately understood as a theory of consciousness. I think what people most commonly mean by 'materialism' is the view that consciousness is a latecomer to the universe, and the stuff of the universe (particles, fields, whatever) started out without consciousness, and that consciousness only developed as a result of a very particular set of circumstances happening to occur. I think what people most commonly mean by 'materialism' is pretty much 'emergentism'. But I'm happy to be corrected by those who identify as materialists.
If so, then the question becomes, Why is the physical world an illusion? If the external world isn't real, then why does it appear to be a physical world?
Other minds are only known by perceiving physical bodies. So other minds in this physical world would be part of the "illusion". There would only be your mind - solipsism. That is essentially all Descartes' extreme skepticism "proves".
The existence of Material Being is dubitably certain and contingent, whereas, the existence of Thinking Being is indubitably certain and contingent. Both types of Being, the dubitable and the indubitable, are CONTINGENT because they are experienced as "always being open to the possibility of complete cessation and non-existence."
Unfortunately, there is no NECESSARY being that can be experienced by humans which is experienced as "always being closed to the possibility of complete cessation and non-existence."
If, instead, Descartes had shown us how we could not doubt the NECESSARY existence of either thought or matter, then that really would have been an astounding discovery!
You see, it's not so much the INDUBITABLE CERTAINTY of the existence of what he is talking about that's crucial as it is the NECESSARY, rather than the CONTINGENT, existence of what what he is talking about.
But, as I said, it is impossible for humans to personally experience such a being.
The point is simple: materalism is reportedly a position of skepticism, skepticism of things belonging to the category of the immaterial and the like. I'm unsure how it all began but there's a very strong association between materialism and skepticism in this day and age and perhaps in the past too - it's as though people are under the impression that materialism is an offshoot of skepticism e.g. modern skeptics are fond of referencing and turning to science which, we all know, is the byword for materialism. What I mean to show here is that this is an egregious error; skepticism actually leads you away from, rather than to, materialism: we can doubt the reality of the physical/material world but we can never doubt the existence of our minds.
Don't you have to be a bit more conservative and say that you can't doubt the existence of your own mind. You can doubt the existence of mine. Descartes gives you permission.
Does the cogito ergo sum make sense to you? If it does, then you exist.
...all of this derives from Descartes' orgy of unreasonable doubt.
What can one do with this foundational intuition if everything else is to be doubted? You're giving me Cartesian anxiety.
If we move upwards from Descartes dirty basement (too much of the ol' philosophia), we can all put our clothes back on and have reasonable doubts in the living room.
I wrote in another thread recently:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Why unreasonable?
Quoting Nils Loc
What constitutes a reasonable doubt?
I consider something unreasonable iff it entails a contradiction or is in violation of the rules of deduction. Do you see any of the above in Descartes' inference?
Reasonable doubt is being willing to reject something in case reason to reject it should arise. Absent that, it's reasonable to believe whatever just seems most likely to you, even if you can't prove it from the ground up, so long as if there is reason to reject it, you will.
But Descartes proved his own existence, and by extension, the existence of anyone else capable of making the cogito ergo sum argument.
Except he didn’t; see Gassendi and Lichtenberg mentioned above.
Or else, to the same extent that he proved that some self exists, he also proved that some world exists, but he proved no particulars about either, and left no leverage for ever doing so.
Well, what reason did Descartes have for such doubt? Why do you need reasons for confidence, but will doubt without such reason? What leads to this curious asymmetry?
I'm afraid I have to doubt your certainty. Descartes showed that he had a brain, sure, but he has failed to show that the voice he could hear inside his head originated with him.
a thought experiment: you are lying on a beach. you can see the waves crashing on the shore. you can hear those waves crashing on the shore. in your mind you associate the sound you can hear with the waves you can see, so that it appears to you that the sound is created by the waves. this clearly shows that sounds inside your head can, or may, or possibly might sometimes, originate outside your head.
now close your eyes, and listen to the waves crashing on the shore. absent the visual signal, you are unable to tell whether the sound has an origin interior to or exterior to your head. there is simply no way to tell.
now explain how Descartes is able to prove, in your own words, "beyond the shadow of a doubt," that the voice he can hear is his?
I really don't have a problem if you want to claim that this is the most probable, the most likely, scenario, and that alternatives sound more like science fiction than philosophy. but to claim that Descartes "proved" this is simply not true.
Descartes showed that he had a signal processing organ inside his head that we call the brain. but you cannot prove where any of those signals originate.
Kaarlo Tuomi
Descartes was a dualist. I'm only concerned about difference in the level of certainty regarding his belief in minds and the physical world. The cogito ergo sum argument is a watertight, foolproof argument for the existence of minds. I've never heard of a Cartesian or otherwise physical counterpart to the cogito ergo sum argument and, for sure, it's because there is none. We're less certain of the physical than we are of the mind or, conversely, we're absolutely certain of the mind but serious doubts remain about the existence of a physical reality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Read the sentence: I think, therefore I am in your mind or aloud. If you fail to see Descartes' point then you would be saying that thinking doesn't entail a thinker (a mind that does the thinking) and I'll have to ask what's that thing that's doing the thinking? The correct answer to that question is, if you must be as conservative as possible, something but it's precisely this something that thinks we understand as mind.
Quoting Banno
The reason for Descartes' doubt is simple - it is possible (to doubt).
Quoting Kaarlo Tuomi
That's not a problem. Notice there is something that can be confused, baffled, misled, deluded. That something is Descartes or you or me or anyone else. That there's an illusion means there's something, the mind, that perceives this illusion.
That's a singularly poor reply. It is also possible to be confident.
I see no violation of logic.
I still haven't gotten the hang of the quote function here - bit of a counter intuitive platform...
Anyway, not that it is important at all, and I can happily live with absolute logical proof of the existance of my mind (if not for anyone else's), but surely there is still room for some doubt. I mean there is something there pretty conclusively, but we can never be absolutely sure of what it is. Some random noise creating a momentary illusion of a cohesive mind. Something exists, maybe it's my mind. And anyway, I really don't think any of this as any crucial matter. In all important things - and maybe even in this - there will always be room for doubt, mostly very insignificant and unimportant room but still.
What is the difference between material and immaterial? If you're willing to be skeptical of how the world is vs how it appears, then why aren't you skeptical of how the mind is vs how it appears? You're inconsistently applying your skepticism. What makes Descartes believe that his demon could only be fooling him about the nature of the world and not also his mind? And then what is the nature of the demon itself?
Sure, and the something that is the object of that thought is the world. All the details if the world are highly dubitable, but then so are all of the details if the self.
There lies the rub: to doubt there must be a doubter. You can doubt anything but you can't doubt the existence of the thing that doubts.
Quoting Harry Hindu
See my reply to hwyl above. If there's some kind of deception going on, it follows there's something that's being deceived and that's the thinking part. The skepticism is universal but the thing is to be skeptical implies the existence of a skeptic.
The existence of the doubter is certainly beyond doubt.
Only to the same extent as the existence of some world or another the details of which are being doubted.
All the details of the doubter are equally in doubt. Who am I? I have a bunch of memories and thoughts and feelings but are they really mine, or is someone else feeding them in to me? Someone is doubting when I doubt and I identify with that doubted but who is that exactly? What are they ("I"?) like? All of that is in doubt as much as anything about the world is in doubt.
That's correct of course but the point is this isn't about the who? - the personhood of the doubter, although I suspect it'll be important later on; this is about the what? as in physical or non-physical nature of the "something that's doing the thinking". Given that we can cast doubt on the reality of the physical, the entire human body could be an illusion, including the brain but the part that's doing the thinking can't be doubted regarding its realness. If the brain and the body could be an illusion and there certainly exists something that's doing the thinking, is it proper to attribute something certain, the thinker, to something dubitable, the brain/body? For instance, if I know for certain that you exist, it's ridiculous, if not insane, for me to think you're someone who could be an illusion, say a person that I meet in my dreams.
Augustine in City of God said:
...anticipating Descartes by quite a few centuries.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I take your point, but remember the saying in Latin is: cogito ergo sum. In English, it is expressed as 'I think, therefore I am', but in an inflected language, it is much nearer to 'thinking, therefore being'. Which is also nearer the point.
'The soul' it has been said, 'is whatever it is that can say "I am" '.
Of how many types of beings is that the case?
I just want to run this by you for your opinion.
You're right about the translation of "cogito ergo sum" as "thinking, therefore being". All Descartes claimed was proof of a "thinking thing". I want to take it a step further, if it hasn't been done already, by showing that this "thinking thing" can't be a material/physical entity with the aid of the fact that everything physical/material is dubitable i.e. the physical/material could be an illusion. If the physical/material could be an illusion, it can't be that the "thinking thing" Descartes proved as real is a physical/material because that leads to the contradiction the "thinking thing" is real AND the "thinking thing" could be an illusion (the physical/material).
Perhaps we need to consider what we mean by saying that the physical could be an illusion. We're aware of physical reality by a single means - through our senses. It is possible that our senses are being deceived or that we're hallucinating everything. Thus, it's possible that physical reality is an illusion, a hallucination. Ergo, everything physical is doubtable in re realness.
The Cartesian "thinking thing", however, is real and to doubt it is to confirm it (as the doubter). The question that naturally follows is whether this "thinking thing" is physical or non-physical. It can't be physical for the simple reason that the physical could be an illusion but we know the "thinking thing" is not all illusion.
1. All physical things are things that could be illusions
2. No "thinking things" are things that could be illusions
Ergo
3. No physical things are "thinking things"
What do you think?
The possibility of the world as a grand illusion is not a new idea in philosophy, either, but has been entertained for as long as philosophy has been contemplated. However Descartes' approach is very rigourous and thorough.
He goes on from that foundation to develop his doctrine of 'clear and distinct ideas'. I'd have to brush up the details, but I think he was driving at, in particular, mathematical concepts, which are capable of a far higher degree of clarity and distinction than, say, your happiest childhood memory, or what you like about New York (or whatever). By that means, being a Rationalist, Descartes wishes to assemble a kind of indubitable rational structure. No coincidence that Descartes is for this reason regarded as one of the founders of modern scientific method. He devised algebraic geometery, after all, which is fundamental to many of the sciences.
The problem with Descartes' conception of res cogitans was precisely that it was conceived of as a 'thinking thing'. And the reason that is a problem, is because it objectifies 'the thinking being' as something objectively real. And I don't think it is that - I think it transcends the subject-object distinction, because it is the very being within which the subject-object relationship arises in the first place - a critique which Husserl elaborates in his Crisis in the European Sciences ('Husserl regarded this objectivism as one of the greatest tragedies to befall philosophy' ~ ref). But the upshot is, I agree with your conclusion - that the notion of 'thinking things' is self-contradictory.
thank you.
Kaarlo Tuomi
Premise 1 seems to be a contradiction, since under one understanding of "physical" things that are physical simply by definition are not illusions. The argument might need to be rephrased as
1. Anything that can be taken to be physical could be an illusion.
2. No thinking things are illusions
3. Thinking things cannot be taken to be physical things.
However, the argument thus stated does not rule out the possibility that thinking things are physical things, just that they cannot be taken to be such. Materialist philosophers love to point out this kind of epistemological/metaphysical distinction, as if it were clear cut. Anyway, to get to a conclusion that thinking things are not physical things, you would need an extra premise to the effect that if something is F then it can be imagined/conceived/taken to be F, which might be a little difficult to defend.
What does this have to do with the material vs. Immaterial distinction? I asked what the difference was between them. You can claim to be a doubter, but what makes doubting immaterial and the world material? I wasn't asking if thinking exists or doesn't. I was asking what makes something immaterial which you claim makes material things nonexistent. If you are a doubter, then why not doubt that the mind is immaterial - whatever that means? Why couldn't I just say that the mind is material and therefore material things exist and the immaterial world doesn't exist, because you haven't defined what it means to be immaterial or material.
It doesn't matter. Something exists that hears voices. By convention this something is called "I" in English. You can call it Tartenpion if you want to.
If you speak of such things as "under one understanding", you draw a distinction between one sense of a word/term and another. Ok, although I'd like to know, if possible, what the various senses of meaning there are for "physical".
Google definition of "physical":
1. relating to the body as opposed to the mind.
2. relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete.
I'm focusing my attention on 2, but do include 1 in this, specifically the part where it says "perceived through the senses" and we know the senses are unreliable (think hallucinations) and can be deceived; if so, the physical could be an illusion.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Please read my reply to jkg20 and Wayfarer.
1. All sensory perceptions are things that could be illusions
2. All physical things are sensory perceptions
Ergo
3. All physical things are things that could be illusions
4. No "thinking things" are things that could be illusions
Ergo
6. No "thinking things" are physical things
7. All "thinking things" are non-physical things (6 obversion)
8. All non-physical things are immaterial things
Ergo
9. All "thinking things" are immaterial things
Good question. I've been asking the same question to others without getting a proper answer. I guess you could say that an immaterial thing is something that can't be perceived through the senses in the way our bodies are. The immaterial then lacks all the properties that we assign to the material/physical e.g. the familiar qualities of mass and volume of matter are absent from the immaterial world.
One issue I have difficulty with is the meaning of "exist" when applied to the immaterial. The definition of "existence" is intimately tied to perception through the senses and perception through the senses has a deep association with the physical with the end result that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to talk of existence without referring to the physical. Given this is the case, what could existence mean when used on the immaterial? What does it mean when I say that an immaterial "thinking thing" exists? A way out, the only way out perhaps, is to say that immaterial things are things that can't be perceived through the senses but are as "real" as the things that can be perceived through the senses, the physical world. Why don't you have a go at a definition of "exist" that includes the immaterial?
All the particulars of the physical, but not any physical whatsoever. One cannot imagine experiencing nothing at all — that is simply to not imagine — and the physical world just is the world of experience, so one cannot imagine there being no physical world at all, only that all the particulars one believes about the physical world should turn out to be different.
The stuff about the identity of the doubter is just a parallel to that. We can’t imagine being nobody to experience anything, and we can’t imagine not experiencing anything, so indubitably someone exists to experience and something exists to be experienced, even though all of the details of both of those are dubitable.
That has been attempted already, by Descartes himself. It’s the whole foundation of Cartesian dualism.
Any ideas how Descartes argued for a non-physical "thinking thing"?
This is questionable. There is no necessity for the physical - it could be an illusion.
Pretty much exactly how you did. "I can doubt that there is anything physical, but I can't doubt that I exist, so I can't be just a physical thing".
Quoting TheMadFool
All of the particulars of it could be an illusion, but so could all the particulars of yourself. That there is something you are experiencing at all cannot be doubted, and more than you can doubt that someone is doing the experiencing; and the physical world just is the world that is accessible to experience, as opposed to supernatural things that are not amenable to experience.
I made a long post explaining this earlier in this thread, I'll quote it here again since I keep repeating this summary of it...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Or to quote from an essay I wrote in college:
Quoting Inconceivable, or: You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well, it all turns on the nature of experience. In my humble opinion there are three parts to experience which I'll explain with sight and a flower:
1. The experiencer (sentient beings with eyes)
2. Experiencing (seeing the flower)
3. That which is experienced (the flower seen)
Descartes accepts the truth of 2, experiencing, but he realized that 2, experiencing, could occur without 3, that which is experienced, as when an evil demon manipulates our minds which I assume is Descartes' way of saying that experiencing is possible without 3, that which is experienced: we could see a flower even when there's no flower at all.
When I talk of the physical, the material world, I'm referring to existence of 3, that which is experienced, independent of both 1, the experiencer, and 2, experiencing. Since 2, experiencing, is possible without 3, that which is experienced, it follows that 3, that which is experienced, the flower, could be an illusion, unreal, the evil demon playing tricks on 1, the experiencer.
Of the 3 parts of experience, Descartes' cogito ergo sum proves, with 100% certainty, the reality or the existence of 1, the experiencer. 2, experiencing, is self-evident to all. What's neither self-evident nor inferable is 3, that which is experienced, as existing without 1, the experiencer, and 2, experiencing.
So you can't really have 2 without 3, you can just have 1 misinterpret 2 to get at the wrong 3, but there's still some 3 or another that 2 is the experience of.
I understand what you mean: you identify experiencing with that which is experienced as the following statement
Quoting Pfhorrest
indicates.
My question is how do you explain hallucinations which are instances of 2, experiencing, without 3, that which is experienced?
More importantly, how can you prove, with certainty, that our senses are 100% reliable, which you must if you believe that "you can't really have 2 without 3"?
Note the "tangible or concrete" in definition 2. Things which are tangible and concrete are generally put in opposition to those that are merely illusory.
No materialist is going to accept this premise. The most you will get them to accept is that physical things can be objects of sensory perceptions.
Agreed but I didn't contest that.
Quoting jkg20
That means the statement "all physical things are sensory perceptions" is false which implies the truth of the statement: some physical things are not sensory perceptions. Please name some.
No, it means it might be false and certainly a materialist is going to claim that it is false.
I'm not a materialist, I invite those who are to respond fully. However, let's kick the ball rolling by offering up "the football in my shed". Seems like a reasonable candidate to me. After all, when I look at the football in my shed there might be a sensory perception of that football, but that does not entail that the football is that sensory perception.
[s]Prove it.[/s] Sorry. Ok
Quoting jkg20
Quoting TheMadFool
Is the following argument better?
1. All physical things are things perceived through the senses
2. All things perceived through the senses are things that could be illusions
Ergo,
3. All physical things are things that could be illusions
4. No thinking things are things that could be illusions
Ergo,
5. No thinking things are physical things
The problem with your argument is that materialist believe matter is not an illusion!
Matter could be an illusion.
Their position says it can't be an illusion lol
What's their argument?
It's their premise so your argument doesn't work. It's a consistent position
So, if I take a proposition, even a controversial one, as a premise, it shuts down the opposition? I could make atheism cease to to "work" by making "god exists" a premise. :chin:
But the "certainty" Descartes arrives at isn't knowledge! KILPOD - knowledge implies the logical possibility of doubt.
Please explain.
Is Descartes' position justified or not?
1. Isn't the mind part of the body, or are you saying that your body is an illusion? If so, then what is the cause of your pain when you experience it?
2. Other minds are perceived through the senses, therefore other minds are part of the illusion and all you are left with is solipsism.
Quoting TheMadFool
By what means are you aware of your own mind if not by sensing it? What does "perceived" mean? In what manner are you aware of your thinking? What form does thinking and perceiving take to say that you perceive your mind?
Absolutely not. His big mistake is to think that a foundation of indubitable certainty is required for knowledge. The kind of indubitable certainty he finds in the privacy of his own mind rules out the possibility of discovery, which is a necessary condition for knowledge. What Descartes takes to be knowledge is nothing of the sort, precisely because it rules out the logical possibility of doubt.
Well yes, the logical possibility of doubt exists here, because to know that no ant is an elephant it's necessary to know what an ant is and what an elephant is. These are cognitive achievements. If it's (logically) possible to doubt what an ant is or to doubt what an elephant is, then it's (logically) possible to doubt that no ant is an elephant. Descartes would certainly have said that this sort of proposition can be doubted, which is why the Cogito arrives at the proposition that it does. But for Wittgenstein, "No ant is an elephant" would count as knowledge, because the possibility of doubting it is logically possible. Ants and elephants are things to be discovered in the world.
And how do you justify the proposition that things are not simply what is meant?
I can just say "that" is definitely not "this". Just look at the letters THAT THIS. You see the difference, right? What is different cannot be the same. It requires changing the subject from the concrete thing in question to it's essence to doubt this. But why would I want to change subjects?
But it is precisely the meaning of "no ant is an elephant" that is open to the logical possibility of doubt! Knowing what the terms "ant" and "elephant" mean is integral to knowing whether this or that is an ant or an elephant. The word "ant" happens to refer to a certain type of insect, and "elephant" to a certain type of large, ruminant mammal, but it might have been otherwise (that it might have been otherwise is a logical possibility). It is logically possible that there might have been a type of ant called an "elephant", where the "ant" element of the word refers to an ant and the "eleph" prefix is a technical description of the type of ant it is. You know very well (as do I) that this is not the case, but that does not alter the logical possibility it might have been. You and I know that snow is white, but the logical possibility remains that it might not have been. (KILPOD = knowledge implies the logical possibility of doubt).
For Descartes, this logical possibility of doubt means that we don't actually know that "no ant is an elephant". Hence, the Cogito takes us beyond empirical propositions like that to a level of "certainty" that is logically immune to the possibility of error. Even if all my thoughts are false, including the belief that no ant is an elephant, the very fact that I think at all proves that I do at least I think. And I cannot think without existing, so all the while I think I must exist. I cannot doubt that I think, since to doubt that I think is to think.
But for Wittgenstein, this solipsistic elimination of the logical possibility of doubt eliminates the possibility of knowledge itself, because it takes us beyond the bounds of sense. What cannot even in principle be wrong cannot be right either. Language itself would gain no traction because no rules for the determination of meaning could be generated. Hence, contrary to Descartes, we do know that "no ant is an elephant" as well as we know anything. Such a proposition is part of our "world picture"; part of "the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false". But that is only because what happens to be true might have been false, and vice versa.
The subject here is Cartesian doubt, which I am not trying to justify. Quite the reverse. According to Descartes the only certainty I have about THAT THIS is that I am aware of an image which appears to me as THAT THIS. It's open to doubt (according to Descartes), whether there is anything outside my own mind corresponding to the image (e.g. a computer screen with THAT and THIS written on it). It seems to me there's a difference between THAT and THIS, but my eyes could be deceiving me, or I could be imagining a difference that isn't really there, or I could be dreaming. These are all logical possibilities. But that doesn't mean they are real, sensible possibilities. I agree with Wittgenstein that entertaining such doubts is nonsensical; it undermines the very possibility of meaning, truth and knowledge. So I agree with you that the difference between THAT and THIS is as obvious as anything is. It makes no sense to doubt it. It is so manifestly obvious that it lies "outside the route of enquiry", as Wittgenstein would say. To say "I know that THAT is not the same as THIS" seems somehow ridiculous. It's the sort of knowledge that is so taken for granted that it wouldn't usually occur to us to claim it as knowledge. But it is still open to the logical possibility of doubt.
The case of "no ant is an elephant" is more complicated because reference is being made to things outside the words "ant" and "elephant" themselves. Just because there is a manifest difference between the words doesn't mean (necessarily) that there is a difference between the things that the two words refer to. It's a logical possibility that they could have referred to the same things, even though, in fact, they don't. This has nothing to do with essences. It has only to do with the distinction between what is in fact the case and what is logically possible.
And this already is where he changes subjects. He is not aware of the words anymore but silently makes the proposition those are perceived images. This changes the nature of things. But where did he get that undoubtable insight?
We know for sure there is THIS and there is THAT. And we know they are different.
Quoting Bunji
Again, that is talking metaphysics. You do not take the things as they are anymore, but subsume them under some essence. But how would an assumed essence make THIS and THAT identical?
Therefor:
Quoting Bunji
No. The ability the differentiate the two is an obvious indicator of their difference. If you have
A = A and say "but in this case the A was a B" this leads to B = B. It is still the same. Even if I (obligingly) wrote A=B with "B not= A" this would only prove that such a thing cannot be - logically.
This seems a little beside the point. The sentence "Ants are not elephants" might have expressed a different proposition to the proposition that it actually expresses. No one is denying that, why would anyone deny it? But admitting that is not the same things as admitting the possibility of doubt concerning the proposition that the sentence actually does express. It is merely to allow the possibility that words used to express that proposition may have meant things other than they actually do. That is not doubt, that is just accepting alternative linguistic possibilities.
In any case, if you are attempting to lay down a necessary or sufficient or necessary and sufficient condition for what counts as knowable, you are not being very Wittgensteinian, at least not under one interpretation of what Wittgenstein was trying to do.
Matter is not real anyhow. At least not in the naive way our senses lead us to believe. A hydrogen atom is only a geometric condition that energy happens to be in. All that is really there is energy. The physical atom is only an image, a conjuring trick. A sophisticated trick but a trick nonetheless. Likewise with all physical things; they are a condition, not a substance. Reality is energy and mind.
It seems to me that none of the five senses are required to make us aware of our minds. The mind is conscious over and above the senses. In fact the senses are only a crude imitation of consciousness. Real consciousness is of the mind.
Then by what means are you aware of your mind? What does it mean to say that you are aware of your mind? What is the relationship between you and your mind? Thinking takes the same form that your senses provide. To say that you are thinking about your trip to the lake means that a visual, auditory and tactile image of the trip to the lake takes form in your mind. If the world is an illusion, then so is thinking.
What would be the nature of Descartes demon? Is the demon not part of the world that is doubted to exist? Does not Descartes doubt the cause of his own doubt away?
It's not the senses that should be doubted. They work just as they were designed to work. It is our interpretation that should be doubted. Mirages don't go away when we realize what they are. They still persist. It's just that we now have a proper interpretation for why they exist and what causes them, to where it is predictable - it no longer is an illusion, but what is expected to happen thanks to the nature of light and how it interacts with our eyes.
The crux of Descartes' argument is that everything physical, that includes the body, could be an illusion. The experience of pain can't be thought of as deserving a special status, as I reckon you're implying, different from other sensations or sensory perceptions. The fact that people can hallucinate in visual, auditory and tactile modalities should inform you that all sensations, including pain, could be illusions.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm aware of my own mind through thinking: I think therefore, I am. The mind becoming aware of itself in Cartesian self-reflective fashion is distinct from sensory perception in the sense that in the former there's no intermediary, no middle man so to speak, the mind sees itself through itself, but in the latter, our senses are interposed between our minds and the so-called physical, if it even exists.
Quoting Bunji
I'm only concerned about the cogito ergo sum argument. Is it a sound argument or not?
What about abstract thought? If you have a pain in your foot and you go to the doctor s/he might tell you that the pain is not really in your foot at all, it is in your brain. Why then, you could ask, does the pain seem to be in your foot? The doctor might go on to say that the brain contextualizes the pain and 'places' it in your foot. But it is not really in your foot...
But this argument can be extended to the mind: the pain is not really in your brain either, it is in your mind. From this it can be argued that the entire physical body is no more than a context; a physical context in which the mind experiences. In fact the entire brain-body-senses context is a physical context in which the mind's experiences are framed. But the mind can also think independently of the bodily context, as The Mad Fool points out.
"I think, therefore I am", is not a logically valid argument. To be valid it would need to take the form "If I think, then I exist. I think, therefore I exist." (modus ponens). If the premises of this argument are true, then the conclusion must also be true, but that is a mere tautology. The conclusion doesn't tell us anything more than the premises already tell us, so it doesn't give us any knowledge. Since the purpose of the Cogito argument is to provide a sound foundation of knowledge, it fails in that purpose even when transposed into a valid argument.
1. I think
2. If I think then there's a thinking thing
Ergo
3. There's a thinking thing
1 can't be denied. To deny 2 you'd need to have thinking without a thinking thing. Any ideas how to go about denying 2?
"A=B & B not = A" is a logical contradiction. It doesn't provide us with knowledge because it's nonsense. But if I say "Elephants are different from antelopes", that is either true or false as a matter of empirical enquiry, not of logical necessity. It provides us with knowledge because is true, but is not true of logical necessity (it is open to the logical possibility of doubt).
Who's trying to deny it?
An assumption is made that everything would need a cause.
Quoting Bunji
Exactly.
Quoting Bunji
First of all, you have again shifted the subject of discussion from "an elephant" to elephants. This again is asking for essence. I do not need to /say/ what the difference between two objects is, it is enough for them to be distinguishable. To subsume particular objects under some concept of "type" is not necessarily a valid starting point. And yet this seems to be what you are always trying to do here.
This simply begs the question of what proposition is actually being expressed. Knowing that x is an ant is not separable from knowing what "ant" means. The truth-conditions for the proposition "x is an ant" give the meaning of "ant", as Donald Davidson would say. To question whether or not x is an ant is to question what "ant" means. Suppose I say "The evening star is not the morning star." We know very well that this proposition is false, because as it happens "the evening star" refers to Venus, and so does "the morning star". But it might have been otherwise. The logical possibility of doubt exists there (i.e. of doubt that the proposition is false in this case). If I say "kestrels are not windhovers", how would you go about finding out if that is true or false? You may know already, or you may know what a kestrel is but not what a windhover is. If you didn't know what a windhover is, you'd need to look up the word "windhover", and then you'd find out that "windhover" is an alternative name for "kestrel". So then you'd know that "kestrels are not windhovers" is false. But it might have been true, just as "Ants are not elephants" might have been false.
Admittedly KILPOD does sound like a (proposed) necessary condition for knowledge. But then you'd have to accuse Wittgenstein of not being very Wittgensteinian. Here's a quote from Andy Hamilton's Wittgenstein and On Certainty (Routledge 2014): "KILPOD is stated at OC 58: " 'There is no such thing as a doubt in this case'...it follows from this that 'I know' makes no sense either" (also OC 41, 121-23). And OC 10 rejects the Cartesian view: "One thinks that the words 'I know that...' are always in place when there is no doubt, and hence where the expression of doubt would be unintelligible" - that is, where there is no logical possibility of doubt. His implication is that they are not in place in such a situation."
In other words, if "Ants are not elephants" were beyond the logical possibility of doubt, then "Ants are not elephants" would not count as knowledge. But because it's an empirical proposition, it is open to the logical possibility of doubt, so it does count as knowledge.
First of all, the subject of discussion to which you refer was between myself and jkg20. Only you are insisting that I keep shifting the subject from "an elephant" to "elephants", even though jkg20 has also gone from "no ant is an elephant" to "ants are not elephants". That's because jkg20, unlike you, understands that the two propositions are logically equivalent. You can't say "no ant is an elephant" without subsuming particular objects under the type-concepts of "ant" and "elephant". "No ant is an elephant" means not a single object of the type "ant" is an object of the type "elephant". This of course is a true proposition. But we have to understand what ants in general are and what elephants in general are in order to know that it is true.
Secondly, to talk about "elephants" (as opposed to "an elephant") is not "asking for essence". To assume that concepts of type involve "essences" is a specifically Platonic assumption, against which Wittgenstein is well known for arguing in his later philosophy. You may have noticed my frequent references to Wittgenstein in my discussions with jkg20 (the purpose of which is to establish an anti-Cartesian position. Descartes was an essentialist.
If I point to a thing and label it an elephant I do not need to know what an elephant is besides the one thing I pointed to. So the proposition system you cite is not the criteria to call things elephants in the first place. So with Descartes. If we call the environment we live in "world" this is the definition of "world". It cannot be something else as this would imply a definition would be different from the thing. But the thing was the definition to start with.
If we take the proposition system of "elephantness" (see the essence) and /ask/ if a given object is an elephant this must either be true or not. If this is true and the object /later/ turns into an ant this just means the elephant turned into an ant. Nothing more nothing less.
In order to correctly label it an elephant, you need to know that the thing you point to is an elephant. So you at least need to know what an elephant looks like. Otherwise you're just talking about pointing to something, which could be anything, and labelling it an elephant. If you didn't know any facts about ants or elephants, you wouldn't know to label an elephant as an elephant rather than as an ant.
Well, that depends on the reference of "x" doesn't it? I can imagine being uncertain whether a particular thing referred to by x in the expression "x is an ant" is indeed an ant or whether in fact a termite, for instance. That would be a case of questioning whether x is an ant or not, yet it is not, at least not clearly, a question about what "ant" means. It would be more natural to think that it was a question as to whether, given that the meaning of "ant" and "termite" are agreed, the x should be classed as one or the other. There might be cases where it really is not clear even to experts whether the x should be classed as an ant or a termite, and there one might think that it is actually the meaning of the terms that is being brought into question as well, but that is a very specific kind of case.
Then we have no disagreement. :up:
I don't think this is Descartes' assumption. It looks like Descartes is supposing that thinking has a cause and that cause is the "thinking thing" but, in my humble opinion, this is an incorrect application of the axiom of causality. When we investigate the cause of a fire (the cause of thinking) we must first accept 1) there's a fire (thinking) and 2) something that's on fire (the thinking thing). We then try to find out what caused the something that's on fire (the thinking thing) to burn/catch fire (thinking). The something that's on fire (the thinking thing is part of the event (something is thinking) and can't be used as part of the causal explanation for the said event.
I think you are right that my defence of KILPOD does threaten to collapse that distinction, and that threat is present in Wittgenstein's own account in OC. It think there is a distinction to be made, but it is more a question of emphasis than anything clear cut. Donald Davidson's theory of meaning, for example, defines the meaning of a sentence in terms of its truth-conditions. To understand the meaning of "x is an ant" is to know when, and if, "x is an ant" is true. So, conversely, Davidson says: "to give truth conditions is a way of giving the meaning of a sentence" (Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation, pg. 24). Clearly, then (in so far as this is a plausible theory of meaning, which I think it is), the question of whether or not "x is an ant" is true, is not really separable from the question of what "ant" means - or, to be properly Davidsonian, what "x is an ant" means. One may look at x and say, "That is definitely a termite rather than an ant", but only because one already knows how to distinguish the meaning of "termite" from the meaning of "ant", in terms of the conditions which make "x is a termite" true. The only difference in the special case you mention is that the expert is dealing with a borderline case; the consequent difficulty in classification is both empirical and semantic, and might lead to a revision of the criteria for classifying ants and termites.
Borderline cases in the use of "I know that..." are of particular interest to W, with particular reference to what he dubs "Moorean propositions". Moorean propositions occupy an interestingly ambiguous area between the empirical and the non-empirical. An example would be "I have a head". Normally this would be treated as a non-empirical proposition, and would be senseless to doubt (in fact in normal conversation it would be a senseless thing to say). Normally, it would be senseless to say "I doubt I have a head", and consequently (according to W) it would be equally senseless to say "I know I have a head". But even here, one can imagine a special case in which "I have a head" is treated as an empirical proposition (i.e. by questioning it): a small child says "Do I have a head, daddy?", to which the reply is "Of course, everyone's got a head". As Andy Hamilton says: "A Wittgensteinian response to this...is that, here, the child is learning the meaning of "head", rather than enquiring whether she has one; indeed that there is no clear distinction here between learning facts and learning the meanings of words." (Hamilton 2014, pg. 203). So, strictly speaking, the logical possibility of doubt exists here, but that doesn't mean doubt is normal in this case. It only takes a special case for a logical possibility to exist. But Cartesian doubt goes much further than the Moorean propositions and arrives at a level of certainty that cannot logically be doubted. The Cogito takes us to the point where I cannot doubt my own existence (as a thinking thing) because the very act of doubting guarantees my existence (as a thinking thing). But W would say it is, for that very reason, nonsensical to say "I doubt I exist" and consequently equally nonsensical to say "I know I exist". The Cogito does not furnish us with knowledge or any foundation for knowledge. Cartesian "certainty" and its attendant scepticism about everything that doesn't have the same indubitable certainty, is the real target of KILPOD.