Topics Philosophy

Question Although they cannot pretend to have "solved" the problem of induction, scientists have no qualms whatsoever about making inductive inferences in their work. Likewise, I take it that judges and lawyers agree that murder is a terrible crime, even if they are at a loss to explain why one's death is a harm to one. Why is it that we feel totally comfortable in going about the various activities of human life, even when there are (seemingly) gaping holes in the philosophical theories which are supposed to underwrite or justify those activities?

Accepted:
January 11, 2009

Comments

It is perhaps worth asking whether our commonsensical beliefs that the regularities in nature will be much the same tomorrow as today and that it is wrong to murder someone actually need 'underwriting' or 'justifying' by philosophical theories? What could that possibly involve?

And what would underwrite those philosophical theories? If you are a sceptic about induction, say, why not equally be a sceptic about any theory that purports to justify it? If I come up with some long involved argument whose conclusion is that, indeed, we are right to believe that the regularities in nature will be much the same tomorrow as today -- as occasionally philosophers have tried to do -- would that actually increase your confidence in that belief, or make it any more sensible? Will the premisses from which the long involved argument starts -- if they don't in fact already smuggle in the assumption that the future will be like the past -- actually be any more secure than the belief that they are supposed to support? Unlikely! Similarly for systematic moral theories: are the principles these depend on in the end any more secure than our ground-level moral beliefs that murder is wrong, etc.? If anything it is the other way about: we will endorse a systematic theory just because it nicely integrates enough of our ground-level moral beliefs into a coherent enough story.

Philosophy has its place, in making connections, seeing how things hang together, dispelling confusions, sorting out apparent inconsistencies, looking at the big picture. Some of us quite like that sort of thing. But this sort of enquiry doesn't have any special authority with respect to "the various activities of human life" -- philosophy is just one human activity among many, and can't either underwrite or justify the rest.

It is not obvious to me that we - we philosophers, that is - do feel totally comfortable about the activities of human life. We worry about induction, whether death is an evil because it deprives us of some good, and so on. But there is no absolute requirement to worry, and most people don't. And that is perfectly rational. In just the same way, I am not worried at all about the fact that I have no idea why gravity works. I can walk happily about on the surface of the earth without really understanding why I don't fly off it. Physics is a specialist activity that most people don't need. We don't have to understand too much of it to go about our daily lives without a lot of intellectual discomfort. But we can if we want, or we can try to!