Philosophical Inquiries: An Introduction to Problems of Philosophy

Notes

207 notes 1. the task of Philosophy 1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 928b10. 2. There are, of course, very different ways of doing philosophy even as there are different ways of cooking food. But the enterprise itself is characterized by its defining objective: if one isn’t doing that sort of thing, then one isn’t pursuing it. (Sewing is not cooking food, nor is journalism philosophy.) 3. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans Green, 1897), 63–110, see esp. 78–79. 4. Quoted in Aristotelis Fragmenta Selecta, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), vii; for the text see page 28. But see also Anton-Hermann Chroust, Aristotle, Protrepicus: A Reconstruction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 48–50. 5. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 1. 6. Paul K. Feyerabend embraces the concurrent use of mutually inconsistent scientific theories within a “theoretical pluralism.” See his essay, “Problems of Empiricism” in Beyond the Edge of Certainty, ed. R. G. Colodny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 145–260, see esp. 164–68. 7. John Kekes, The Nature of Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 196. rescher phil inq text.indd 207 3/1/10 3:15 PM 2. Knowledge and scepticism 1. His clear awareness of this made it possible for the Platonic Academy to endorse scepticism throughout the middle phase of its development in classical antiquity. 2. Thus one acute thinker has written: [W]hat are my grounds for thinking that I, in my own particular case, shall die. I am as certain of it in my innermost mind, as I am that I now live; but what is the distinct evidence on which I allow myself to be certain? How would I tell it in a court of justice? How should I fare under a crossexamination upon the grounds of my certitude?·Demonstration of course I cannot have of a future event. (J. H. Newman, A Grammar of Assent, [London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1913], chap. 8, pt. 2, sect. I.) 3. Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 35. 4. It must be realized that the “certainty” at issue in these discussions is not the subjective psychological stare of a feeling of certainly at issue in locutions like “I feel certain that p.” Rather it is a matter of the objective epistemic circumstances, and the relevant locutions are of the impersonal character of “I is certain that p.” This is crucial to the sceptic’s case, “And once we have noticed this distinction, we are forced to allow what we are certain of is very much less than we should have said otherwise.” (H. A. Pritchard, Knowledge and Perception [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930], 97.) 5. As Keith Lehrer has put it: [I]t should also be clear why it is that ordinary men commonly, though incorrectly, believe that they know for certain that some contingent statements are true. They believe that there is no chance whatever that they are wrong in thinking some contingent statements are true and thus feel sure they know for certain that those statements are true. One reason they feel sure is that they have not reflected upon the ubiquity of . . . change in all human thought. Once these matters are brought into focus, we may reasonably conclude that no man knows for certain that any contingent statement is true. (“Scepticism and Conceptual Change” in Empirical Knowledge, eds. R. M. Chisholm and R. J. Swartz, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 47–58, see esp. 53.) In a similar vein, L. S. Carrier has recently argued, in effect, that since belief concerning material objects can in theory turn out to be mistaken, no one ever knows that he knows such a belief to be true. See his “Scepticism Made Certain ,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 140–50. 6. For scepticism and its critique, see Robert Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988); A. I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Peter Klein, Certainty: 208 notes to PaGes 20–22 rescher phil inq text.indd 208 3/1/10 3:15 PM A Refutation of Scepticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Peter...