Week 3

It is easy for me to agree with empiricists that all of our knowledge comes from sense experience. Someday, I think we will prove that we are born with certain "innate" ideas or prior structures in the mind. For now, though, there is absolutely no evidence that people know anything when they come into the world. 


Let's take my little sister, Sylvie, for example. When she was 3 years old, she burnt her hands on the stove not once, not twice, but three times. The only previous experience she had with the stove was that macaroni and cheese came from it. She had no way of knowing the feeling of a hot pot on bare flesh. No one else's knowledge (my mother's, in this case) can prove to your own senses the truth. So, she touched the stove the first time and burnt her fingers. How was she to know that it was not a one time thing? She needed regularity in order for it to become a certain truth. The third time she finally pieced together the puzzle. This is a silly example, I know, but as adults we do the same thing everyday on a less severe scale. We have to teach ourselves something through our own senses, rather than getting it secondhand from someone else's.


So yes, I believe we get most of our knowledge from the use of our senses. This does not mean that knowledge does not exist outside of our senses though. Before we realized that the Earth revolved around the Sun, before we created the science of Geometry, and before God blessed us with linear equations (sarcasm)....all of those truths were already true. Just because I can add one block and one block to make two blocks, does not mean that those blocks do not still equal two when my senses aren't around. That claim would mean that all math and science cease to exist unless there is someone there to observe. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Yes, it absolutely does. 

Week 2

A) If I walk over to the table and sit in a chair, the seat will be there to catch my bottom. If the chair is not actually there, I will fall to the ground.

B) If I walk over to the table and sit in a chair, the seat may catch my bottom, but how do I know that something is actually supporting me? I think I am sitting in the chair, but who is to say that something is just making me think my weight is being supported by an object?

Which statement makes more sense? 

Obviously, to Rene Descartes it would be statement "B". Methodological Skepticism bathes all ideas in doubt, until it can raise the idea back up with absolute certainties. Nothing except our own existence is safe from this shower of disbelief. For example: "I think I am sitting in a chair, because I am not on the ground. However, I may be dreaming and actually be lying down in my bed." How in the world are we supposed to apply this form of philosophy to any sort of normal activity? 

Most people, myself included, would say that statement "A" makes more sense. We, as a current people, tend to believe something, anything actually, until we are given some reason not to believe it. No one uses skepticism on a regular basis. For example: If a friend tells you "I am going home to work on my homework," you would have no reason to doubt that claim unless you read on Facebook that your friend was going to the movie theater just five minutes after that conversation. 

Methodological Skepticism is a radical idea, but it really cannot be used in our daily life. Sure, anyone can sit down and reduce all of their beliefs to doubts, but it simply does not make sense to use this as an everyday strategy. This does not mean, however, that this form of skepticism has not shaped philosophy/epistemology over the past 400+ years.

SIDE NOTE: Descartes three stages of doubt led him to believe that the only thing we can truly be certain of is our own existence. "I think; therefore, I am." To what level can we actually be certain of our existence? To be honest, a lot of Descartes writings sound like the junior high school journal of a mad man. So I am going to go out on an equally as insane limb. The fourth stage of doubt: the imagination. How do we know we exist? We could simply be a figment of someone else's imagination. A background to another person's dream. Would there be any way for us to know if we were just a molecular spark in the back of someone's mind? Anyway...just a thought. (no pun intended)

Week 1

After re-reading Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we are reminded how easy it is to choose to see only the surface (or shadow) of things. Can you imagine how many people in our society do not even wish to see what is beyond the shadows, but would rather stay in their comfortable, warm caves? Narrow-minded people (or even people that don't care enough to expand their horizons) are prisoners of their own decision to remain in chains. 

When Plato speaks of these "prisoners" he is speaking of people who are not yet (or choose not to be) enlightened by wisdom. Philosophy is represented by the light, color, and dimension of the world just outside the cave walls. Philosophy (allegorically speaking) freed Plato's prisoners from their chains and brought them to the truth. 

Socrates is right to be pessimistic about life without philosophy, because life without philosophy is ignorance. In Plato's writings, the prisoners who had not yet escaped to see the real world denied the new ideas brought into the cave. Even if we do not understand the true shapes of shadows, if we can admit that there is something more than what we have always known, we have already begun the enlightenment process. 

SIDE NOTE: While reading, I had an odd thought. If you think about it, The Wizard of Oz is a sort of variation on the Allegory of the Cave. Kansas is a "cave" in which everyone sees the world in a narrow-minded, dark perspective. Once Dorothy "escapes" she see starts to see things as they actually are, though she has some resistance at the start. She eventually returns to the "cave" because of the guilt she feels for leaving her fellow prisoners (her family) only to be told that what she saw could not possibly be reality. It totally is the Allegory of the Cave!

Philosophy 100

 I had such a hard time coming up with a name for my blog, so I decided on something silly. I look forward to posting on "Neutral Nonsense" and learning throughout the semester.