Banno
Location: Dow Nunder
Bio
I may well be the only member remaining here who openly calls their approach to philosophy Analytic. Worse, I think it incumbent on anyone with pretensions to doing philosophy to be clear and coherent, before being comprehensive and complete.
I'll take this a step further and say that at least arguably, supposing that analytic methods are exclusive to Analytic philosophy is to misunderstand the state of philosophy today. Analytic methods haven’t disappeared—they’ve become ubiquitous. Their success in clarifying argument, uncovering presuppositions, and enforcing rigor made them so effective that even their critics adopted them. The real consequence is not that philosophy is split into Analytic and non-Analytic camps, but that the distinction itself has lost relevance. What matters now is not whether someone is ‘Analytic’ but whether they’re philosophically serious—and that seriousness nearly always involves some analytic rigor.
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Statements are grammatical combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.
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Beliefs range over propositions or statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.
“Jeff believes in democracy” looks like a counter example to beliefs ranging over propositions, but the superficial structure hides the proposition: “Jeff believes governments ought be democratic” or some such
Beliefs are stated as an association of an agent to a proposition. The proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief. Hence beliefs are referential opaque, subject to substitution-failure.
If an agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.
Beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
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We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and it is true.
Discard Gettier. The definition is not hard-and-fast.
It does not help to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.
If you cannot provide a justification, that is, if you cannot provide other beliefs with which a given statement coheres, then you cannot be said to know it.
A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty. We get on with life by holding some things as certain - that you are reading this, that the bishop moves diagonally.
In order to doubt, we must hold some things as certain. One can doubt anything, but not everything.
Faith is not subjecting a belief to doubt despite the facts.
Without a difference between belief and truth, we can't be wrong; if we can't be wrong, we can't fix our mistakes; without being able to fix our mistakes, we can't make things better.
I'll take this a step further and say that at least arguably, supposing that analytic methods are exclusive to Analytic philosophy is to misunderstand the state of philosophy today. Analytic methods haven’t disappeared—they’ve become ubiquitous. Their success in clarifying argument, uncovering presuppositions, and enforcing rigor made them so effective that even their critics adopted them. The real consequence is not that philosophy is split into Analytic and non-Analytic camps, but that the distinction itself has lost relevance. What matters now is not whether someone is ‘Analytic’ but whether they’re philosophically serious—and that seriousness nearly always involves some analytic rigor.
______________
Statements are grammatical combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.
______________
Beliefs range over propositions or statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.
“Jeff believes in democracy” looks like a counter example to beliefs ranging over propositions, but the superficial structure hides the proposition: “Jeff believes governments ought be democratic” or some such
Beliefs are stated as an association of an agent to a proposition. The proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief. Hence beliefs are referential opaque, subject to substitution-failure.
If an agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.
Beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
______________
We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and it is true.
Discard Gettier. The definition is not hard-and-fast.
It does not help to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.
If you cannot provide a justification, that is, if you cannot provide other beliefs with which a given statement coheres, then you cannot be said to know it.
A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty. We get on with life by holding some things as certain - that you are reading this, that the bishop moves diagonally.
In order to doubt, we must hold some things as certain. One can doubt anything, but not everything.
Faith is not subjecting a belief to doubt despite the facts.
Without a difference between belief and truth, we can't be wrong; if we can't be wrong, we can't fix our mistakes; without being able to fix our mistakes, we can't make things better.
Favourite Philosopher
Terry Pratchett
Favourite Quotations
First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favoured alternative method. (Austin, J. L. “A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957: 181–182)
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