ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Rationality

What is the epistemic significance of our being unable to convince other people of our beliefs? Or: Does being unable to convince someone that P give me reason to doubt that P? Let's say that a philosopher deploys all the effort and rhetorical skill he can muster, but is unable to persuade his opponent. Why has he failed to convince? There are two principle reasons I can think of: (1) the philosopher and his opponent do not share the same premises, or (2) the philosopher's opponent is irrational (biased, stupid, crazy, etc.). The problem as I see it is that there seems no way to tell who is in the right. Presumably, neither the philosopher nor his opponent can justify their premises, nor can either one show that he is the rational one and the other irrational (the philosopher could just say that his opponent is crazy, but the opponent could say the same thing of him!). It's problems like this which move me closer to the uncomfortable possibility that to be in the right is often simply to be in the...

I don’t think that the moral of your story would be that being right is just being in the majority, but it might be that we can’t know whether or not we are right. But even this fortunately won’t always be the case. Even if I can’t convince you, I may have good reason to believe that I am in a better position to know, because I have better evidence, because I am more expert in the area of our disagreement, etc. But the tough case is where we disagree and I have no reason to think that I am better placed to be right than you are. And this does seem a common plight when the disagreement is in philosophy, though it is by no means limited to that area. Suppose that Hilary Putnam and I could lay out all the arguments that either of us can think of on some philosophical issue – say the existence of numbers – and still we end up disagreeing. It seems to me on balance and after much reflection that (say) numbers don’t exist, and it seems to him likewise that they do. What am I to do? Not only do we disagree,...
Rationality

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. ...
Death
Rationality

Hello. I don't know if this is too vague or even if it is a philosophical question or not, but here goes. I am fourteen. In my english class today, we had a discussion about one thing or another and the question was raised, "Do you fear 'getting old'?" A great majority of classmates said that they did. I thought that it was going to happen anyway, so why fear it. Is it irrational to fear aging? Thanks.

A belief can be irrational, if you don't have a good reason for it. Can a fear be irrational? It seems so, if it based on an irrational belief. Thus to be afraid of ghosts is irrational. But I think you are asking whether it is irrational to fear something which, though based on a perfectly rational belief, is just something you can't do anything about. And here I am less sure that we should say that the fear is irrational. Impractical, perhaps, but irrational? Maybe it is helpful to compare this to something good that you can't do anything about. Suppose you know that, whatever you do, your parents are going to get you something you really want. Is it irrational to look forward to that? It seems not. But if it is not irrational to look forward to something good you can't do anything about, then why is it irrational to fear something bad that you can't do anything about? Maybe these two cases are importantly different. Looking forward to something is pleasant, so there is no...
Death
Rationality

Assuming that there is no afterlife -- that you lose the ability to think or feel anything once your body dies -- is it irrational to fear death? Asked another way: Was Larkin wrong when he described the philosopher's contention that "no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel" as "specious stuff"?

It's not irrational for me to fear that some harm will come to my children, even if I convince myself that if my children are in fact harmed, I won't find out about it. So Larkin was right. It's irrational to fear what death will feel like if you know it won't feel like anything; but it doesn't follow that it is irrational to fear death. It's not irrational to look forward to the pleasures of living, and if we know that death will take these away, the fear of losing those pleasures doesn't seem irrational either.