I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the philosophy department and they never answered. While I was waiting, I checked out some books from the library to read over Christmas. Among them were two from the department chair, David Sosa, and an anthology on epistemology by a group of Objectivists. I cannot see myself engaged in such meaningless discussions based on unstated, arbitrary assertions. I actually think well of philosophy and invest time in it and if this is the best that they can do, then I confess to hubris here: It is not that I know more than they do but that I think more clearly.
The Mantis Shrimp sees things that you do not. It is the same universe for all of us. |
When I say “red” and you say “red” are we talking about the same thing? People who are color blind adapt to the world around them. It is only by the application of a special visual test—given to aircraft pilots, medical doctors, and others—that we can establish that a person is color blind. These philosophers seem to be disengaged from the experiential world. Their limiting cases are people with eyeglasses. And they gloss over the problem of what it means for tree to appear “fuzzy” as if bark were made of acrylic sheets.
Microscopes at right reveal details not visible to the naked eye. It is the same universe. |
Is Perception Infallible?
Consider Salmieri’s instructive example of the myopic man looking at a tree without his glasses. While he sees the same tree he would see if he was wearing them, he sees it blurrily, and this blurriness is part of the way or form by which he sees the tree. As Salmieri notes in his section, “Epistemology and the Nature of Awareness,” “An especially naïve realist would take the blurriness to be a feature of the very tree in front of which the man is standing.” Such a naïve realist is, of course, mistaken, for he mistakes a way he perceives an object for a feature of the perceived object. -- Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology, Allan Gotthelf, Editor; James G. Lennox, Associate Editor; Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, University of Pittsburgh Press; 2013; page 217, “In Defense of the Theory of Appearing: Comments on Ghate and Salmieri,” by Pierre Le Morvan.
Onkar Ghate is resident expert in Objectivism at the Ayn Rand Institute. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1998 from the University of Calgary. Gregory Salmieri completed his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. Pierre Yves Le Morvan earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Syracuse University in 2000.
Orion Nebula (Messier 42) and the Moon and the consumer goods that bring them to your iPhone camera. |
Spectroscopy kits for amateur astronomers and other citizen-scientists. |
It is not only my Objectivist comrades who are lost in the woods. This passage starts off sounding very technical, promising close analysis. In the end, though, it comes down to a sophomoric failure. It is well known that so-called “natural language” allows nonsense. And this is an example of it.
If philosophers were pursuing new knowledge, they would be formalizing the integration of perception across many transducers from your own senses to the most sophisticated instruments. How and why do all of these outputs describe the same objects?
“A simple account teaches us that argument validity is a matter of truth-preservation: roughly, an argument is valid just in case the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. A bit more precisely, a set of sentences G of a language L entails a sentence s of L just in case, (for any model M), whenever all elements of G evaluate to the truth (in L, and M) so does s. Then we can say that an argument is valid, just in case (for all models), the premises entail the conclusion(s). On this account, then, entailment is characterized as a relation between sets of sentences and a sentence (a conclusion); and arguments are individualized as sets of premises and conclusion(s).
“But this simple account becomes instantly more complex once we are dealing with inference patterns in natural languages. One immediate problem is ambiguity. For instance, consider the following:
(1) Ambiguity
a. If John is at the bank, he will deposit a check
b. John is at the bank.
c. He will deposit a check.
“Suppose that ‘the bank’ in the big premise, (1-a) refers to a financial institution and in the small one, (1-b), to the bank of a local river.”
Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Language (2 vols), edited by Ernie Lepore and David Sosa; Oxford University Press, 2022. Vol 2. 7; “The Anatomy of Arguments in Natural Language Discourse,” by Una Stojnic, page 184.
Ole Miss journalism interns working for ESPN use parabolic reflectors to capture voices on the field. If a tree falls in the forest, they will hear it. |
The failure of so-called “natural language” to explain the truly supernatural is an old lesson. To hang an argument on a pun--bank versus bank; and no mention of turning an aircraft-- seems frivolous.
(ii) Yet sometimes men are led by a natural tendency to think and speak of God as if He were a magnified creature — more especially a magnified man — and this is known as anthropomorphism. Thus God is said to see or hear, as if He had physical organs, or to be angry or sorry, as if subject to human passions: and this perfectly legitimate and more or less unavoidable use of metaphor is often quite unfairly alleged to prove that the strictly Infinite is unthinkable and unknowable, and that it is really a finite anthropomorphic God that men worship. But whatever truth there may be in this charge as applied to Polytheistic religions, or even to the Theistic beliefs of rude and uncultured minds, it is untrue and unjust when directed against philosophical Theism. The same reasons that justify and recommend the use of metaphorical language in other connections justify and recommended it here, but no Theist of average intelligence ever thinks of understanding literally the metaphors he applies, or hears applied by others, to God, any more than he means to speak literally when he calls a brave man a lion, or a cunning one a fox.
“The Nature and Attributes of God”
New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm
It is a fact that if all of the boulders, rocks, and stones between Mars and Jupiter were gathered into a single body, it would be the size of our Moon, hardly a planet, and yet we still call them “asteroids” as if they were star-like. The first quasar was identified as a pulsar. And Pluto is no longer a planet. And that is just one science.
I have several books from the library on genetics. As much as we know, we still describe basic knowledge with footnotes and exceptions. Just for one fun fact: sometimes for a gene to be replicated the transcription RNA must “read” the molecule backwards. And yet here we all are, even if we do not know everything about how and why.
Science proceeds by accepting ambiguity. Philosophers want to argue it away—in English. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole of analytic philosophy, read what many philosophers think that Immanuel Kant meant by “Das Ding an sich.” The problem is the word “an.” It sounds like “on” but it means “next to” or “nearby. “ Hans ist an den Wandtafel. (John is at the blackboard.) And it could be “in” “of” “with” and so on, depending on the context and the acceptance of idiomatic expressions.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Galileo and Saturn: Epistemology not Optics
An Objective Philosophy of Science
Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It
The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy