I have a question about philosophy itself that I hope is not too general, for you (as I feel it's important). I have my B.A. from an accredited University and am still trying to figure out how a philosopher explains the processes of intuition. I consider myself to be a philosopher in my heart---a manner with which I analyze and view the world from all different angles (surely, a logical process). I also have a side of me that is intuitive (or, that sometimes goes completely against logic, yet ends up being extremely accurate). It would seem that intuition itself sometimes (or usually) expresses a certain accurate knowledge of the universe in a different manner than logic; yet can (for some more than others, depending on giftedness in this vein) be depended on for things that logic alone cannot provide. What is the purpose and reliability of intuition, from a professional philosopher's vantage point? Do you feel this concept is tied into religion and God, or strictly to the former life experiences...

If we take 'intuition' to mean something like what just seems right or wrong, then philosophy often seems to rely on intuition. One kind of case is when we are trying to analyse a concept. Take the concept of knowledge. We convince ourselves that knowledge is not quite the same as justified true belief, since if you believe that it's 10:45 because your normally reliable watch says so, you don't know it's 10:45 if in fact your watch stopped exactly twelve hours ago, even though your belief is true and justified. But notice that here the argument relies on our intuition that in this case you don't know the time. That seems the right answer, and philosophers lean on that feeling. Another kind of example is a situation in ethics where you decide what is right by playing your intuitions off against each other. It seems right that one shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering, and yet it also seems OK to eat meat. Then you come to believe that eating meat causes unecessary suffering. So for the sake of...

Philosophers appeal to human intuition all the time as a sort of "data" on which to base various arguments. but what if we are simply possessed of intuitions which are plainly contradictory in an unintelligible way? I have to imagine that an appeal to thought experiments presumes that there is some underlying truth to our feelings, but what if there is no such truth? Might we simply be running in circles?

This sounds a lot like Descartes' demon scepticism in the First Meditation. There he worries that he might be mistaken even about things that seem most obvious, like simple mathematical sums. If one suffers from this kind of 'hyperbolic doubt', a doubt that even what seems obviously contradictory might be consistent, and that even what seems obviously consistent might be contradictory, then it is very difficult to see how one could reassure oneself by argument, since one might worry hyperbolically about that very argument. Perhaps if we did suffer from hyperbolic cognitive disability, then we wouldn't even be capable of thought; but that seems cold comfort. Let me make two slightly more encouraging points. The first is that the case for demon scepticism is not as impressive as the case for dream scepticism. For while the dream sceptic can construct a possible world where we are mistaken about the external world, there is a sense in which a demon sceptic cannot even describe the world she is...

When we talk about necessary truths, do we say that they are as such simply because we cannot imagine how things could be otherwise? (Does 2+2 = 4 simply because I cannot imagine that 2+2 could be equal 5 or 6?)

I would not say that necessity is defined by our powers of imagination. Maybe some people are better at imagining things that others, but necessity doesn't vary. Like many philosophers these days, I find it helpful to think about necessity instead in terms of 'possible worlds', in terms of different ways the world might be. To say that a statement is necessarily true on this way of thinking about these things is to say that it holds in all possible worlds. Those worlds are not defined by imagination, so neither is necessity. This is not to say that imagination isn't important here, because we use our powers of imagination in order to try to work out whether a statement is or isn't necessary. For example, I may convince myself that something is not necessary because I can imagine it being false. But on this view imagination is a fallible guide to necessity, not the definition of necessity. I might just that something is necessary because I can't imagine it being false, but in fact that's only...

My question is about the free will problem. I hope it is not too stupid or anything. Many philosophers seem to argue against free will like this: "Either everything has a cause or not. If everything does have a cause, then it looks like you have no free will, because the chain of causes leading to your actions began before you were born. And if not everything has a cause, if in particular some of your actions are uncaused, then that doesn't seem like free will either. It seems just like a random event." This is from what Peter Lipton wrote in another question. I don't understand why if it is true that not everything has a cause, it must also be true that an uncaused event must be a "random" event. Suppose that a Cartesian "soul" caused an event, but there was no prior cause for the soul's causation of the event. That doesn't seem like a random event, it seems like an event which was caused by the soul, but which was not caused by anything else. To me it looks like this would be compatible with free...

In your scenario, the soul caused an event, but nothing caused the soul. But presumably the cause of the event is some configuration of the soul, perhaps a decision it made. Well was this decision caused or not? If it was caused, then there still doesn't seem to be any free will in the frame; and if that configuration of the soul was uncaused -- just came out of the blue -- then that seems random and again not compatible with free will.

Is there a philosophy of 'Generalisations'? I've heard the phrase 'all generalisations are wrong' and, after getting over the irony of the generalisation (surely it should be 'THIS is the only true generalisation', wondered if it were true. Generalisations seem to be at the heart of a lot of misconceptions, including all manner of prejudices and 'isms'. There seems to be a tendency for people to see a few random events and imagine a they see a patern which everything else must follow - I notice myself doing it sometimes, and do my best to stop it! On the other hand, what if a generalisation is a sine qua non of a thing? for instance 'all female mammals are warm blooded and give birth to live young' must be true because both assertions are essential characteristic for an an animal to be classed as a true mammal. So where do we stand in relation to generalsations? What are they, where do they come from, and how do they relate to 'truth'? - Mark

This doesn't address all of your question, but notice that if (as it seems) we can truly say that certain things do not exist, then there must also be true generalisations, since 'There are no A's' is equivalent to the generalisation that 'Everything is a non-A'. Thus 'Griffins do not exist' is equivalent to 'Everything is a non-griffin', and 'There are no non-black ravens' is equivalent to 'All ravens are black''.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once told a story that one of his philosophy professors asked, "What is time?" Young Mr. Sheen had responded that he knew what it is but wasn't sure he could explain it, to which the professor responded, "If you cannot explain it then you do not know what it is." Is it or is it not possible to know what something is and not be able to express it in language?

This is not an easy question to answer, in part because it's not clear what it means 'to know what something is'. Still, various sensations may be candidates for things we know better than we can describe, sensations like headaches, the taste of pineapple, or the smell of rotten eggs. The reason is that we know what sensations are like by having them, not by having them described to us. It may seem harder to see how we could know what something like time is better than we can say, since time is not an experience. But there probably are things other than experiences that that we can know better than we can say. For example, I may be better at recognising a person in a crowd than in describing her.

If humans are not born with "reason" and the rational faculty develops over time and therefore through experience, isn't "a priori" essentially an impossible concept, as the rational faculty itself is developed "a posteriori"?

Exactly how 'a priori' should be defined is a delicate matter. Maybe if a newborn were put in a sensory deprivation tank it would never develop the ability to think at all, because the relevant parts of the human brain only develop properly with the help of a reasonably normal course of experience. Would that mean that there is no a priori knowledge? It seems like there might still be an interesting sense in which sentences like 'All bachelors are unmarried' or '2+3=5' are a priori. One proposal is that we distinguish what experience it takes to understand what a sentence means from what it takes to know that it is true. We can then define 'a priori' so that however much experience it takes to understand what a sentence means doesn't count. The question becomes this. Once you understand what a sentence means, do you need additional special experience to know whether it is true? If not, then that sentence can be known a priori. One might try a similar move in answer to your question. ...

I have a question/argument that straddles the free will debate, philosophy of mind and evolution. I hope it is not too bad. Suppose all of our actions are determined by the conjunction of natural laws and the history of the world and thereby we are deeply misguided in our view of ourselves as free, autonomous beings. My question is then, from an evolutionary perspective, why would we evolve to have this illusion about ourselves? Wouldn't philosophical zombies with no consciousness be simpler entities and thereby more likely to evolve? If consciousness does not really have any causal efficacy (in the libertarian sense), why do we have it?

It is difficult to see why a zombie couldn't do all the behavioural things we do, and indeed just as efficiently and effectively as we do. But that wouldn't show that consciousness could not arise through evolution, since it might be that we do what we do with the help of consciousness. But maybe consciousness doesn't even help us do what we do: it's just a by-product of the way we do what we do. But even in this case, it might arise through an evolutionary process, just like the lub-dub sound of a beating heart. But suppose now that consciousness does play a causal role in the way we do what we do. Is there any reason why the specific consciousness of ourselves as a free agents might arise through natural selection? Well (and here I am just speculating) maybe a creature that feels in control tends to do better in the world, and that feeling of control leads naturally to an idea of free will, even if it turns out that the idea is ultimately incoherent. This takes us back to the by-product...

Dear Philosophers, When philosophers write about scientific method, are they proposing a description of the actual practices of scientists or are they attempting to produce a normative theory of what science should be like? If it's the former, then shouldn't this be answered by historical study and not philosophy? If the latter, why do philosophers talking about scientific method bother to look at the history of science at all if one cannot gurantee an 'ought' from an 'is'? BMW

Here is another way in which the normative and factual mix in the philosophy of science. One of the central normative issues is whether we are justified in saying that our best scientific theories are (at least approximately) true. The best known argument for saying that our best theories are true is the miracle argument, according to which the truth of our best theories is the only account that avoids making their remarkable predictive successes miraculous. The best known argument for saying that our best theories are not true is the pessimistic induction, according to which the fact that so many of the best theories in the history of science have turned out to be false (even when they were predictively successful at the time) makes it very likely that our current best theories will turn out to be false too. The miracle argument and the pessimistic induction address the normative question of whether we are justified in believing our best theories to be true, and they depend on factual claims about the...

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