I arrived early for my first full Monday “Knowledge and Reality” class only to find that there’s another class that takes place beforehand. I was the second person there and so I sat for a while on the floor with my back to the wall. I went to the washroom and when I came out more students had arrived and someone was in the spot where I’d been sitting so I went to stand by the entrance to the lecture hall. I looked around and noticed that 90% of the fifty or so of my peers who were waiting had a smart phone in their hands with which to pass the time, either texting or gaming. The other class, which should have ended at noon, went on for an extra five minutes. I took the same aisle seat at the front that I’d sat in last week and while I was getting my notebook and pen out the professor came in with bed hair, looking like she’d slept in her clothes. Coincidentally, I assume, the TA who got up to help her connect the projector to her laptop also had his hair in chaos and he spit when he talked. Professor Dickie began with the definition that knowledge is true belief plus justification. She told us that there are two warring accounts of justification that vie for the prize of knowledge, and those are the correspondence theory and the coherence theory. She added that unless you are unusual you are probably a correspondence theorist, who says that belief must correspond with the facts that match the world. To the question of “What is a fact?” and “What is correspondence?” she said that one way to answer this comes from The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by the German-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and finished it when he was a prisoner of war in 1918. There are seven main propositions in the text. These are: “the world is everything that is a fact; facts are arrangements of entities and properties; a logical picture of facts is a thought; a thought is a proposition with a sense; a proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions and an elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself; the general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function; whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Of Wittgenstein’s first proposition that the world is everything that is a fact, he says: “the world is the totality of facts, not of things; the world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts; for the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case; the facts in logical space are the world; the world divides into facts; each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.” She gave the example of the hat that her mother sent her from New Zealand “because she thinks that Canada is cold.” Brownness is a property of the hat. The hat being brown is a fact. A proposition is a configuration of symbols. She added, “Wittgenstein’s not an idiot. This sounds pretty good, but it needs an opposition. The coherence theorist says that truth coheres with a specific system of beliefs. Which begs the questions, “What system of beliefs?” and “What is coherence?” She said that the two main answers are that truth has to cohere with a fundamental fragment of our current system of beliefs or that the truth must cohere with the beliefs of an ideal scientific inquirer who exists hypothetically at the end of science. Then she touched on one of the concepts that have been hardest for me to grasp since I started this course, that of validity. Validity is a technical term that is a property of arguments. An argument is valid if and only if it is not possible for its premises to be true while its conclusion is false. Two contradictory premises can’t be true. If two premises are contradictory they can’t be true and they are trivially valid. If the premise is true and the conclusion false it is also trivially valid. Arguments with tautologous conclusions (conclusions that are true in every possible world) are automatically valid. An example of a valid but not necessarily good argument is, “Premise 1: Grass is green; Premise 2: grass is not green: Conclusion: God exists.” “Possible” here means “logically possible” as distinct from epistemically possible, physically possible or metaphysically possible. It is epistemically possible that it is snowing outside, though we don’t know for sure. She then said that it is physically possible, though not likely, that if she punches the podium her hand will go through the wood. What is metaphysically possible is relative to right metaphysics and what is right metaphysics will be dealt with in the second half of the course. Right after class I rode up to St. George and Bloor to talk to my TA in the Jackman Building. I was the only one who came to see him, so I had a full 45 minutes to get an explanation of validity. So we started with the standard definition of a valid argument: An argument is valid if and only if there is no possible (imaginable) situation in which the premises can be true and the conclusion false. So possibility seems to be the key here. He gave me some example arguments: Premise: I am tall; Conclusion: I am good at basketball The premise is true but the conclusion is not necessarily true so the possible situation of the conclusion being false is met, and therefore the argument is invalid. I was starting to get it. Premise: 2 + 2 = 7; Conclusion: Winnipeg is in Alberta. The premise is false and the conclusion is false so it is not possible for the premise to be true and the conclusion false, therefore the argument is valid. I was arriving, but like all new arrivals, disoriented. Premise 1: All men are mortal; Premise 2: Socrates was a man; Conclusion: Socrates was mortal. The premises are true and the conclusion is true, so there is no possibility of the premises being true along with the conclusion being false, therefore the argument is valid. I’m in town but still a stranger. Premise: James is a woman; Conclusion: James is a horse. It is possible to for James to be a woman so the premise can be true but since the conclusion is unavoidably false then it is possible for both the premise to be true and the conclusion false, therefore the argument is invalid. Will I ever learn to speak like a native? If one believes, accepts or agrees to the premises one has to accept the conclusion. Validity plus truth in the premises equals a true conclusion. Soundness is validity plus true premises. Sound arguments always have true conclusions but valid arguments don’t. James said that it’s better to prove to a philosopher that his argument is invalid than unsound because if his argument is invalid you haven’t let him get to second base.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 10:34:27 +0000
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