Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Common Sense Philosophy FAQ

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

What is Common Sense Philosophy?

Common sense philosophy is a branch of philosophy that places restrictions on the legitimate results of philosophical investigations requiring such results to be compatible with common sense. It views the appropriate role of philosophical inquiry as the codification and gradual extension of our pre-theoretical understanding of reality, rather than as the development of new and counter-intuitive worldviews that would overthrow some significant aspect of that common sense worldview.

How does Common Sense Philosophy differ from other branches of Philosophy?

Most philosophers believe that the purpose of philosophy is to get beyond our superficial understanding of reality in order to find out what the true, underlying nature of reality is. Common sense philosophers also want to acquire a deeper understanding of the nature of reality, but they don’t believe that one can have successfully discovered that underlying nature if it is significantly at odds with our superficial observations and our basic conceptualization of the nature of the world. Most philosophical methods place some restrictions on what sorts of views deserve legitimate consideration, but common sense philosophy is unusual in its insistence that cohering with our common sense view of the world is a pre-requisite for a view to be deserving of serious consideration.

What is Common Sense?

The phrase “common sense,” as common sense philosophers use it, refers to a broad set of foundational beliefs that are presupposed in human discourse and action and help to make possible our ability to engage in everyday life. For example, when you want to buy something at a store, you and the shopkeeper both assume a large number of things that you would never have to actually state: that the item you are bringing to the register really exists, that you and the shopkeeper both exist, that you both have minds capable of understanding what is happening, that time will continue to move forward throughout the transaction, that the floor beneath your feet is real, that you can choose whether or not you want to buy the item, that it would be wrong for you to torture and kill the shopkeeper and then steal the item for no good reason, that you have both existed for more than five minutes, and probably a vast number of other beliefs. A fundamental, shared understanding of the world is presupposed in all ordinary human action and conversation, and the elements of that understanding are the principles of common sense. Common sense philosophers believe that if your philosophical worldview is at odds with any significant portion of that understanding, then your philosophical view should be rejected.

Why Privilege Common Sense?

The reason that is most often appealed to in defense of privileging common sense centers on the nature and the structure of our evidence, or our reasons to form beliefs. When we come to know something, we do so because, in one way or another, it’s truth became apparent to us. Some things, such as that there are trees and buildings, are apparent merely by opening our eyes, and paying attention. Others need to be brought into the light in some way. One common way to try to make a claim seem true is by placing in light of a set of other claims that we might think are correct, and evaluating them in light of those other claims. This is why we give arguments for views. However, in any argument, the evidence we have for the conclusion depends upon the reasons we already had to accept the premises. Given this, we can never have more reason to believe something that isn’t obvious on its own than we have to believe the claims that we use in support of it. Common sense beliefs, however, are both obvious on their own and serve as a central component in what makes it the case that other things seem true to us. Given the dependence of our other beliefs on common sense, we can never have more reason to believe anything else than we have to believe the tenets of common sense. Therefore, if, in your attempts to explain things, you wind up saying things that are incompatible with them, it is always more rational to believe you made a mistake than to believe that common sense was wrong.

But isn’t it Still Possible that Common Sense is Wrong?

Yes. The arguments in favor of privileging common sense don’t show that it is impossible for common sense to be wrong. Rather, their aim is to show that it is not possible (at least in the absence of serious incoherence within common sense itself) to ever be justified in abandoning any significant aspect of common sense. No procedure for formulating beliefs, other than refusing to believe anything at all, can possibly guarantee immunity from error. What we need to find out is what our best means available are for getting at the truth. If it turns out that even when doing our best we are still wrong that’s unfortunate, but is not an objection to a philosophical method.

Who are the most Important Common Sense Philosophers?

The two most prominent figures in the tradition are Thomas Reid and G. E. Moore. Reid was a contemporary of David Hume, and started a tradition of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy that lasted for over a century. Reid’s works include An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind. G. E. Moore was an early 20th century philosopher who was influential in the early stages of analytic philosophy, and is the most commonly read common sense philosopher today. Others who have been influenced by this tradition include J. L. Austin, Roderick Chisholm, and, most recently, Michael Huemer, whose web page can be found by clicking on the link to right, and who was personally responsible for my interest in common sense philosophy.

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Arguments and Bias: An X-phi Experiment that should be Conducted

Friday, March 12th, 2010

Despite the fact that I am a thoroughgoing rationalist, I find myself liking a lot of experimental philosophy.  Since I’m an advocate of common sense, studies about what people actually believe seem like a good place to at least start in checking that we’re right when we claim that the folk think something is true.  Although it’s certainly not the end of the discussion, these experiments have a lot of value to contribute to the field.

One problem with x-phi projects, however, is that most philosophers aren’t trained in how to properly conduct experiments, and they don’t have a lot of access to the funding needed to conduct studies.  Certainly, the average grad student can’t just run out and do one of these experiments at the drop of a hat.  This is too bad for me, because I came up with an idea for an experimental philosophy project that I think would be very valuable.  I couldn’t find any papers where someone had already done it, though, and I don’t have the resources or the training to do it properly.

My hypothesis is that people are irrationally drawn toward conclusions of arguments merely because they are presented as a conclusion.  There is some everyday data to support this contention.  Students in intro classes tend to want to accept every argument they see, even when they are incompatible.  Most people I know have found themselves drawn into the process of reasoning in an argument to a degree that makes them less questioning of the premises than they ought to be.  And then there’s the fact that otherwise sane and rational people can find themselves believing crazy things simply because they can’t see any way to avoid the conclusion of an argument.  I take all of this as evidence of a strong appeal we have for conclusions.  But there is a way to test this to be sure.

The experiment is based on the fact that arguments are logically interrelated.  In any valid argument, the conclusion will have to be true if all of the premises are.  That means that if the conclusion was false, and every other premise was true, the remaining one would have to be false.  So, for any argument, there are as many other logically related, valid arguments as there are premises.  You can construct these arguments by replacing the premises one at a time with the negation of the initial conclusion, and replacing the conclusion with the negation of the premise in question.  Each argument will be valid if the others are, but at most one of them can be sound.

To do an experiment on people’s biases toward conclusions, one could present various versions of logically interconnected arguments to separate groups of people, and ask them if they think the arguments are sound.  Since the arguments are mutually exclusive with respect to soundness, if people are rational, the sum of the percentages of people who answer “yes” to each version should be around 100%.  If people are biased away from conclusions, it will be lower, and if they are biased toward conclusions, it will be higher.  I suspect, given the aforementioned considerations, that while it will depend to some extent on the topic, the average set of arguments will garner far more than 100% collective support.

Since arguments are one of the central tools of philosophy, if people have a natural bias when evaluating them, then this poses a difficulty for how we do philosophy.  This would especially be true if philosophical training didn’t adequately correct for these problems, and so an experiment among professional philosophers would also be worth conducting.  I am of the opinion that philosophers put too much emphasis on arguments, and are too willing to change their minds in the face of an argument they don’t know how to respond to.  Perhaps if there were empirical data supporting the view that how we evaluate arguments isn’t fully rational, we could fight against this trend.  If our ability to evaluate arguments is not as good as we thought, then there are fewer issues on which rational debate would be the ideal method for pursuing the truth.   If we stop fighting over every little thing that we should already know from our basic capacity to understand the world, we can once again focus on the big, traditional questions that drive people toward philosophy in the first place.

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Why Waving Hands?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The title of this blog is drawn from one of my favorite philosophical arguments: G. E. Moore’s Proof of an External World.  Moore gave the following proof of the existence of things outside our minds:

  1. Here’s one hand (waves his hand).
  2. Here’s another (waves other hand).
  3. Therefore, there are external objects.

Moore’s proof may sound like he was trying to be a smartass, but he was entirely serious.  He believed that this argument proved that there were things outside our own minds that we could have knowledge of.  The hand gestures are a key part of the proof.  Moore was proving that a certain sort of thing existed (external objects) by providing examples of them.

For centuries, philosophers had been trying to provide a rational argument for the existence of the external world.  They didn’t think that simply giving examples would be enough.  However, this sort of proof is accepted all the time.  If someone claims to have the newest iGadget before it’s out on the market, they can prove it by showing it to you.  Most people don’t believe that the Loch Ness monster exists, but if we actually dragged one out of the loch, that would be enough to end the debate.  Ordinary standards of evidence legitimize the sort of proof Moore offers.

So why did philosophers wonder for so long if they could know that there are tables and chairs, and waving hands out there in the world?  The historical story is too long to go into in detail, but ultimately the reason is that they believed that before we could trust our senses, we needed reasons to believe that they could be relied upon, and that the only way we could offer such assurance was by using reason.

Part of what Moore was doing with his proof was arguing that this is the wrong way to look at evidence.  When we care about the truth, we accept the evidence of our senses as a good reason to believe things.  We take eyewitness testimony seriously, and would laugh at someone who still claimed something didn’t exist after seeing it with his own eyes.  We don’t do this because we haven’t taken enough philosophy to learn that real evidence is philosophical evidence.  We do it because standards of evidence already exist in ordinary life, and they correspond, more or less, to the actual strength of the reasons they provide.

Philosophy should be engaged in the rational pursuit of truth.  But not all rationality is a matter of philosophical arguments.  Good reasons for belief can come in a variety of forms.  In fact, as a matter of logical necessity, arguments are one of the worst sources of evidence we can have.  Arguments depend upon the strength of their premises for the evidential support they offer.  But that means that we must antecedently have good reason to accept those premises on which they depend.  Barring an infinite set of arguments behind them, these premises must depend on ways of knowing that are legitimate independently of philosophical reasoning.  It is only because we have so many other ways of knowing that we can engage in philosophical reasoning to learn more about the world.  The view endorsed by people like Moore and Thomas Reid that philosophy is dependent on common sense isn’t some arbitrary proclamation.  Philosophy should grow out of common sense because philosophy is entirely dependent on it.  Arguments, reasoning, and debate can take us beyond where we began, but they can’t fundamentally change or overturn our foundational view of things without losing its own credibility.

Moore’s proof helps remind us of this.  It helps us see the place of reasoning in understanding the world, and helps keep us from becoming so enamored of our clever arguments and skillful reasoning that we are willing to ignore what we have always known, and have always had far better reason to believe.

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