Topics Philosophy

Question Why do I ask questions that I already know MY answer to? Why would I change my mind if I am already sure that, for example, 'knowledge comes from experience' or that, 'there is no life after this one'? Are there any instances in which any of the philosophers on this site have radically changed their minds or caused others to change theirs?

Accepted:
December 5, 2005

Comments

In everyday life, we change our beliefs all the time. In philosophy, belief change is less common, because the beliefs in question are often very deep-seated and indeed in some cases -- for example the belief tables don't disappear when you blink -- effectively unrevisable. But if you want a personal example of philosophical belief-change, I used to think that it was fine to eat veal and ordinary (i.e. not free-range) chicken. Then I made the mistake of teaching a couse on applied ethics, and I changed my mind. Or if that seems too ordinary for you, I used to think that the content of my beliefs must be fixed by what is going on in my brain or mind. Then I read Putnam and Kripke...

And I'll add that, yes, my views on some fairly fundamental questions have changed a good deal. I used to think, for example, that language was essentially a social phenomenon. In my case, it wasn't reading any one particular paper that effected the change. It was, rather, a result of my thinking about the nature of communication, as I worked on an ostensibly quite distant set of problems concerning reference. Over time, what I found myself wanting to say about how we communicate using demonstratives ("that", "this", etc) and indexicals ("I", "here", "you", etc) veered unexpectedly toward a very different conception. It was only then that I found myself returning to material I'd read long before and explicitly re-thinking my previous views.

What often drives change in my own beliefs about important issues like those you mentioned (knowledge, life, death, ethics, etc.) is learning that I didn't understand those complicated topics as well as I thought I had. That this sort of intellectual growth is possible, in turn, motivates me to test my own beliefs and to continue to investigate issues that matter to me even when I already have my own clear beliefs about those issues.

Many things cause this the sort of growth, including my own thinking about philosophical issues, my historical investigations into the history of crucial philosophical concepts, and many cases where my research or teaching leads me to pay close attention to others' philosophical perspectives. The growth commonly leads to small changes in my beliefs, and occasionally to radical ones (those are often extremely exciting moments); I think that, as an educator, I can lead many of my students to have the same same sort of change for the same reasons.