Category: Knowledge

On Suspending Judgment Regarding the Big Questions

Does God exist? You can reasonably argue it both ways. The same goes for such other ‘big questions’ as whether there is personal survival of bodily death.  Now on many other issues where the arguments and evidential considerations  pro et contra are equally good and cancel out, it is reasonable to suspend judgment and unreasonable not to.  But not with respect to the big or ultimate questions. Or so I shall argue.   But first some terminological regimentation.

There are four different types of attitude one can take with respect to a proposition:  Accept, Reject, Suspend, Bracket.

To accept a proposition is to affirm it.  To reject a proposition is to deny it. One cannot on pain of embracing a contradiction accept and reject one and the same proposition.   LNC rules the discursive plane.

To suspend a proposition is to take no stance with respect to its truth or falsity, its ‘truth-value’ as the philosophers say.  It is neither to affirm it nor to deny it. One suspends judgment as to its truth-value. There is no doxastic commitment either by way of belief or disbelief.

What I am calling ‘bracketing’ is something different still. Consider the Trinitarian dogma,  “There is one God in three divine persons.”  Some will affirm, some deny, others suspend the proposition they take it to express; there is, however, a fourth possibility.

Here is a little speech someone might give.

“The Trinitarian sentence you uttered makes no sense; it is unintelligible, if not in itself then at least for me.  It strikes me as self-contradictory and thus expresses no definite thought or proposition. I cannot accept or reject since I do not know what I would be accepting or rejecting. For the same reason I cannot suspend: with respect to what proposition would I be suspending judgment?”

The fourth stance, bracketing, is a sort of suspension, but not with respect to truth-value but with respect to propositional sense. The sense of a declarative sentence (a sentence in the indicative mood) is the proposition it is used to express. And so the bracketing stance or attitude amounts to a suspension of commitment to there being a proposition the sentence expresses.

“I cannot evaluate a thought unless there is a thought to evaluate, and the Trinitarian sentence does not seem to me to express a thought.  The sentence, being self-contradictory, lacks a determinate propositional sense and therefore is unintelligible to me.”

That is surely a stance one can, and some do, take. Note that I mentioned the Trinity doctrine only as an example in order to explain bracketing.  The topic is not the Trinity. So please no comments on the coherence or incoherence of that doctrine.

With the above as background, I advance to my thesis.

THESIS: With respect to many propositions, both the theoretically rational  and the practically rational course is to suspend judgment; with respect to some propositions, however, it would be practically irrational to suspend judgment. It would be imprudent or pragmatically ill-advised. Among the latter: there is a God; the soul is immortal; we will be judged, rewarded and punished in the hereafter for some of what we have done and left undone here below. (I am presupposing a distinction between theoretical and practical (pragmatic, prudential) rationality.)

My point is that for beings  of our constitution it would be practically irrational and highly imprudent to suspend judgment on the questions of God and personal immortality. For if one did so one would not be likely to live here and now in such a way as to assure a positive post-mortem outcome.  After all, we do not know that the soul is immortal nor do we know that it is not. The questions are theoretically undecidable.

But man does not live by theory alone. We are not mere transcendental spectators but interested free agents, interested in the sense of embedded in real being. (inter esse) We have interests in this life and beyond it: we are concerned with our ultimate felicity, well-being, and continuance in being.

If we had no interests beyond this life, if we were pure spectators, we should suspend judgment on the ultimate questions and go back to the everyday and its proximate concerns.    That would be the reasonable thing to do — if we were pure spectators and the big questions were of merely theoretical interest.   Whether God and the soul are real or unreal would then be on a par with  whether the number of electrons in the universe is odd or even.  Since the latter question is theoretically undecidable, it would be practically irrational to waste any time on it.

This is essentially the attitude of the worldling when it comes to God and soul and the like. “Who knows?” “People say different things.” “The supposedly wisest among us have contradicted one another since time immemorial.” “Why waste time on this philosophy nonsense when you could be living to human scale by pursuing a profession useful to others, making money, buying a house, founding a family?” Remain true to the earth; make friends with the finite; don’t hanker after a hinter world; this world is all there is.

My thesis, however, is that while is is both theoretically and practically rational to suspend judgment on many questions, this does not hold for those  questions pertaining to our ultimate felicity and well-being. My thesis presupposes the real possibility of ultimate felicity and well-being.  And so, to appreciate my thesis you cannot have the mentality of a worldling. You have to have had the experience of the ultimate nullity  of the proximate concerns I mentioned. You must have the sense that this world and this life are ‘vanishing quantities.’ You have to have been struck and troubled by the transience of life and the impermanence of things. You have to take that troubling impermanence as an indicator of the relative (not absolute) unreality of this life.  You have to possess the Platonic sensibility.

Now I can’t argue you into that sensibility any more than you can argue me out of it. Argument comes too late. Or rather it comes too soon. What I mean is that argument and counter-argument disport upon the discursive plane which is foreground to the ultimate background, the Unseen Order.  What breaks the standoff for some of us is a glimpse into the  Transdiscursive, a peek behind the veil.  But only some have had the Glimpse. It is  a divine gift, a gratuitous granting ab extra.  Others will say that the Glimpse experience has zero noetic quality; it is something on the order of a Spinozistic  experientia vaga, or a random neuronal swerve, a ‘brain fart.’  There is no resolution to this dispute over noetic quality on the plane of theoretical reason. You will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

In sum:

You are violating no canon of theoretical or practical rationality if you decide to live as if God and the soul are real.  And since the questions are theoretically undecidable, you will decide either by an explicit act of will or willy-nilly (nolens volens) how you will live. The will comes into it. Why do I say you will decide? Because if you don’t decide, that non-decision amounts practically to a decision for the other side of the question.

The atheist and the mortalist who abstain from taking a stand  cannot help but take a stand, practically, though not theoretically, for atheism and mortalism.

Gettier Cases and Epistemic Infallibilism

I wrote this a year ago, but never posted it. It is relevant to the preceding post. Epistemic infallibilism (EI) makes short work of Gettier cases.  But is this a compelling reason to accept EI?  You can guess what I will say: here we have another insoluble problem.

…………………………..

In an earlier thread, Elliot writes:

I’m inclined to agree with you and Butchvarov that [propositional] knowledge entails objective certainty. Why? For one thing, the thesis of epistemic infallibilism seems immune to the epistemic luck present in Gettier cases. Or as Socrates might put it, objective certainty tethers true belief so that it doesn’t run away (Meno) at the sight of epistemic luck. For another thing, epistemic infallibilism explains why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

The Gettier problem is old hat, and not just since 1963. The following from SEP:

Few contemporary epistemologists accept the adequacy of the JTB analysis. Although most agree that each element of the tripartite theory is necessary for knowledge, they do not seem collectively to be sufficient. There seem to be cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowledge. Here is one kind of example:

Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water, or so we think. In fact, we are not seeing water but a mirage, but when we reach the spot, we are lucky and find water right there under a rock. Can we say that we had genuine knowledge of water? The answer seems to be negative, for we were just lucky. (quoted from Dreyfus 1997: 292)

The above example comes from the Indian philosopher Dharmottara, c. 770 CE. The 14th-century Italian philosopher Peter of Mantua presented a similar case:

Let it be assumed that Plato is next to you and you know him to be running, but you mistakenly believe that he is Socrates, so that you firmly believe that Socrates is running. However, let it be so that Socrates is in fact running in Rome; however, you do not know this. (from Peter of Mantua’s De scire et dubitare, given in Boh 1985: 95)

A Chisholmian example from IEP:

The sheep in the field (Chisholm 1966/1977/1989). Imagine that you are standing outside a field. You see, within it, what looks exactly like a sheep. What belief instantly occurs to you? Among the many that could have done so, it happens to be the belief that there is a sheep in the field. And in fact you are right, because there is a sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. You cannot see that sheep, though, and you have no direct evidence of its existence. Moreover, what you are seeing is a dog, disguised as a sheep. Hence, you have a well justified true belief that there is a sheep in the field. But is that belief knowledge?

A common objection to epistemic infallibilism is that it eliminates much of what we ordinarily take ourselves to know. For example, I justifiably believe that I am now looking at a lamp with a blue lampshade. But since it’s possible that I’m wrong, I don’t know that I’m looking at a lamp. Some will want to say that I know I’m looking at a lamp. The infallibilist can say that I know I’m having an experience as of looking at a lamp, or that I know I’m being appeared-to-lamp-bluely, but I don’t know (precisely speaking) that I’m looking at a lamp.

One point to discuss further: What is meant by “impossibility of mistake?” What sort of possibility is at work here?

Disagreement in Philosophy

Substack latest.

That philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge. Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs says it doesn’t. I say it does.

Gettier Cases and Epistemic Infallibility

I wrote this a year ago, but never posted it. It is relevant to the preceding post. Epistemic infallibilism (EI) makes short work of Gettier cases.  But is this a compelling reason to accept EI?  You can guess what I will say: here we have another insoluble problem.

…………………………..

In an earlier thread, Elliot writes:

I’m inclined to agree with you and Butchvarov that [propositional] knowledge entails objective certainty. Why? For one thing, the thesis of epistemic infallibilism seems immune to the epistemic luck present in Gettier cases. Or as Socrates might put it, objective certainty tethers true belief so that it doesn’t run away (Meno) at the sight of epistemic luck. For another thing, epistemic infallibilism explains why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

The Gettier problem is old hat, and not just since 1963. The following from SEP:

Few contemporary epistemologists accept the adequacy of the JTB analysis. Although most agree that each element of the tripartite theory is necessary for knowledge, they do not seem collectively to be sufficient. There seem to be cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowledge. Here is one kind of example:

Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water, or so we think. In fact, we are not seeing water but a mirage, but when we reach the spot, we are lucky and find water right there under a rock. Can we say that we had genuine knowledge of water? The answer seems to be negative, for we were just lucky. (quoted from Dreyfus 1997: 292)

The above example comes from the Indian philosopher Dharmottara, c. 770 CE. The 14th-century Italian philosopher Peter of Mantua presented a similar case:

Let it be assumed that Plato is next to you and you know him to be running, but you mistakenly believe that he is Socrates, so that you firmly believe that Socrates is running. However, let it be so that Socrates is in fact running in Rome; however, you do not know this. (from Peter of Mantua’s De scire et dubitare, given in Boh 1985: 95)

A Chisholmian example from IEP:

The sheep in the field (Chisholm 1966/1977/1989). Imagine that you are standing outside a field. You see, within it, what looks exactly like a sheep. What belief instantly occurs to you? Among the many that could have done so, it happens to be the belief that there is a sheep in the field. And in fact you are right, because there is a sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. You cannot see that sheep, though, and you have no direct evidence of its existence. Moreover, what you are seeing is a dog, disguised as a sheep. Hence, you have a well justified true belief that there is a sheep in the field. But is that belief knowledge?

A common objection to epistemic infallibilism is that it eliminates much of what we ordinarily take ourselves to know. For example, I justifiably believe that I am now looking at a lamp with a blue lampshade. But since it’s possible that I’m wrong, I don’t know that I’m looking at a lamp. Some will want to say that I know I’m looking at a lamp. The infallibilist can say that I know I’m having an experience as of looking at a lamp, or that I know I’m being appeared-to-lamp-bluely, but I don’t know (precisely speaking) that I’m looking at a lamp.

One point to discuss further: What is meant by “impossibility of mistake?” What sort of possibility is at work here?

A Design Argument From the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood

Anthony Flood writes,

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.

BV: Not so, and for two reasons.  Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines.  Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them.  That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression. 

A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative.  Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question.   For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?"  Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation.  He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.

Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey).  The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical.  Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.

And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation.  By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours.  The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks.  (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)

After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could  hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well.  And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a  unitarian Christian.

So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity?  That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis. 

Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated.  The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved  when a person knows — if he does know — that Christianity is true.

Is Empiricism Self-Refuting?

Russell says it is; I examine his claim. Substack latest.

Russell Old Man with Pipe

Addenda (11/19)

Tony Flood writes,

Brian Kilmeade mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion to Christianity  quickly as he introduced her, one of his guests tonight, but I heard it on TV which was on in the background; I thought I had misheard Kilmeade. I've always admired her courage and considered her professed atheism in the context of her experience of Islamic terror. 

But her Wiki entry says she "converted to Christianity" (by which I hope she means that she received Christ as her savior), citing this and this. 
 
She blogged about Russell last week (as you did today): 

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian.” It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.
In high school in 1970 along the road to my Communism, I had read Russell's essay and decided I would study philosophy. I remember catching his obit in the papers, marveling at the longevity of this stellar Victorian intellectual who had been my contemporary for over a decade-and-a-half and therefore could have met. 
 
Anyway, Ali's now firmly in my Hall of Hero(in)es. Feel free to share this, which may come as news to others as it did to me.
 
Thanks, Tony. I share your high opinion of Ali. The Unherd article which I excerpted earlier is important.  I too read Russell's Why I am not a Christian in high school.  Russell was a logical and philosophical technician of high rank, but unlike his pal Wittgenstein, he wrote popular works as well. Wittgenstein, as you know, took a dim view of Russell's popular writings. Russell was secular to the core; Wittgenstein, I could easily show, had the heart of the homo religiosus despite his bladed intellect.
 
Edward writes,

Interesting, and overlaps with a central theme of the book, as follows. Assume

1 Knowledge is propositional. That is, whatever counts as knowledge has to be expressible in language as a proposition.

2 Propositions have two terms and can be affirmative or negative, universal or particular. Thus to any two terms there correspond exactly four propositions.

3 There are a finite number of term types, as set out in Locke’s classification of ‘ideas’ in Book II of the Essay.

4 The meaning of any term is derived from experience. Locke assumes that every word either signifies a simple ‘sensible idea’, or signifies a complex idea that can be analysed into simple parts.

These assumptions define what Bennett calls meaning-empiricism, and Hanna calls semantic psychologism. It follows from them that every object of human understanding is defined by a proposition whose meaning depends on experience.

In this way we can set a limit to human understanding.

Note that the empiricist project differs from the scholastic-Aristotelian one. The scholastics generally did not believe in meaning-empiricism, because they thought that the proper signification of a term is an object, not an idea. So I think to settle your question we must look at whether words signify ‘ideas’, i.e. affections of the soul, or not.

Ad (1). Is all knowledge propositional? You are making a very strong claim here: necessarily, nothing counts as knowledge that is not expressible in declarative sentences.  But knowing what something is like counts as knowledge. I know what it is like to be punched in the stomach, but not what it is like to undergo a menstrual period.  I know some people by description only, others by acquaintance only, and still others by description and by acquaintance. Isn't knowledge by acquaintance a counterexample to your thesis?  And then there is 'carnal knowledge.' Does it not count as knowledge? There is also 'know how.' My cats know how to open doors, but they would be hard-pressed to verbalize that knowledge.

Ad (2). "Thus to any two terms there correspond exactly four propositions." Since copulae are typically tensed, there have to be more. There have to be at least twelve. 'Every animal in the house was/is/will be a cat.'  4 categorical forms X 3 simple tenses = 12 different propositions.  And then there are the tenseless uses of copulae, e,g, 'The cat is an animal.'   'The triangle is a three-sided plane figure that encloses a space.' Yogi Berra joke: "You mean now?"  'God is' is either eternally true/false or omnitemporally true/false, and tenseless either way.

Ad (3). OK.

Ad (4). "The meaning of any term is derived from experience." My question is: how could we know that this proposition is true if it is indeed true? To know that it is true, we have to know what it means. But it cannot mean anything if it is true. Do the terms of this proposition signify a sensible idea? No. 'The meaning of any terms' does not signify a sensible idea.  The same goes for 'a meaning derived from experience.'  Meaning-empiricism is meaningless on its own theory of meaning.

David Benatar on Epistemic Injustice

An excerpt from The Uphill Battle of Unpopular Ideas:

Regarding epistemic matters, many of those who identify themselves as progressives speak about “epistemic injustice” – the injustice that occurs when certain people, typically women and darker skinned people, are accorded less standing or authority as knowers or transmitters of knowledge. This is a profound and important concept.
 
The problem is that progressives have missed a key, but obvious, dimension to epistemic injustice. The more somebody is actually the victim of epistemic injustice, the less likely and less widely they are to be recognized as such. Indeed, the absence of that recognition is precisely what feeds the epistemic injustice. Not only are you not taken as seriously as you should be, but it is not widely recognized that this is the case.
 
The corollary is that the more widespread the recognition of a particular manifestation of epistemic injustice is, the less likely it is that the purported victim actually is a victim. This is not a logical point but rather a psychological one. It is logically possible for X, Y, and Z to recognize that W is the victim of epistemic injustice while continuing to take W less seriously than W should be taken. Psychologically, however, those who regard W as a victim of epistemic injustice are more likely not to inflict that injustice themselves, either because they are sensitive to the potential problem or because they compensate (and not infrequently overcompensate) for it.
 
One upshot of this is that while those espousing orthodox views are likely to be given more credence, even when the orthodox views are flawed, those expressing unpopular but well-founded views are likely to be given less credence than they should be given. That is a stark form of epistemic injustice – and one typically not recognized by those who are concerned about epistemic injustice.
 
Even mentioning this comes at a risk. This is because there are orthodox views about who the victims of epistemic injustice are – and they do not include those who hold unorthodox views (for example, about epistemic injustice). Everybody can agree that it is unseemly to claim epistemic injustice when it does not exist. However, the difference between orthodox and unorthodox views about when this applies is that the orthodox views are, by definition, dominant. The point of this observation is not to elicit sympathy, but to articulate the ironies and paradoxes.

A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson

Husserl Leonard Nelson Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge despite its relevance to Husserl's project of founding philosophy als strenge Wissenschaft, as strict science.

Roman Ingarden, Husserl's distinguished student, has  the following to say about Nelson (a German despite his very English surname) in his On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism: 

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge. (footnote #1o:  Cf. Leonard Nelson, Ueber das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem. Die Unmoeglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie, vol. III, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule, also in the Acts of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, 1911. Husserl's ideas must have been completely crystallized in this period. Nelson was a Dozent in Goettingen from the year 1909.)

We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing the error of petitio principii. Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson's book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl's lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the "nonsense" (Widersinn) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. — as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century — we appeal to "physical stimuli" which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about "secondary" qualities of material objects. It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso removes the danger of petitio principii in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world. After having carried out this reduction we find ourselves, nevertheless, ipso facto in the area of pure transcendental consciousness inside which we are to carry out all epistemological investigations; but, in addition, it has to be agreed that every being (real or ideal or purely intentional) is to be deduced from the essence of the operations (acts) of pure consciousness. It seems to be that from the point of view of a valid epistemological methodology a certain kind of priority is to be demanded for pure consciousness, and that this is possible is also shown by the theory of immanent perception and the results of the analysis of primary constitutive consciousness constituting, for example, time. But, along with this, this "priority" of pure consciousness begins to assume a metaphysical character in the form even of a thesis of the absolute existence of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of an existential dependence of all other being, and, above all, of the real world, on pure consciousness. The danger of petitio principii in epistemology is removed by the phenomenological reduction but it leads to an account of the existence of the world which (in spite of all differences, from, for example, Berkeley's position, which Husserl himself constantly and emphatically stressed) comes alarmingly close to the Marburgian Neo-Kanti[ani]sm, of which Husserl was often accused on the grounds of similarities between his Ideas and [Paul] Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912. (pp. 11-13)

On Perceptual ‘Taking’

Ed writes,

Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”.

This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake.

But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to be a person occupying the space behind the mirror, thinking it to be a window. In that case there is also no Y (because no such person) but is there an X? That is, does “I take a mirror image to be a person” imply that there is some X such that X is a mirror image and I take X to be a person?

It is the ‘ontological’ (=referential) questions that interest me. I have never had any interest in epistemology. Is a mirror image a τόδε τι, a hoc aliquid, a this-something?

Over to you.

BV:  I don't believe anyone who knows English would ever say, 'I take a tree root to be a snake' as opposed to 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'  If you see something that you believe to be a tree root, then you cannot at the same time take it to be a snake.  If, on the other hand, if you take something to be a snake, and further perception convinces you that it is a tree root, then you can say, 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'

Suppose we try to describe such a situation phenomenologically. I am hiking in twilight through rattlesnake country. I suddenly stop, and shout to my partner, "I see a snake!" People say things like this. What we have here is a legitimate ordinary language use of 'see.'  Sometimes, when people say 'I see a snake,' there is/exists a snake that they see.  Other times, when people say, 'I see a snake,' it is not the case that there is/exists a snake that they see.  In both cases they see something. This use of 'see' is neutral on the question whether the seen exists or does not exist. Call this use the phenomenological use. It contrasts with the 'verb of success use' which is also a legitimate ordinary language use. On the success use, if subject S sees X, it follows that X exists.  On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. On the phenomenological use, if S sees X, it does not follow that X exists. Mark the two senses as sees  and seep respectively.

I seep a snake. But as I look more closely the initial episode of seeing is not corroborated by further such episodes. The snake appearance of the first episode is cancelled. By 'appearance' I mean the intentional object of the mental act of seeingp. This appearance (apparent item)  is shown to be a merely intentional object. How? By the ongoing process of visual experiencing. The initial snake appearance (apparent item) is cancelled because of its non-coherence with the intentional objects of the subsequent perceptual acts. The subsequent mental acts present  intentional objects  that have some of the properties of a tree root. As the perceptual process continues through a series of  visual acts the intentional objects of which cohere, the perceiver comes to believe that he is veridically perceiving a tree root. He then says, "It wasn't a snake I saw after all; I took a tree root to be a snake!"

Clearly, I saw something, something that caused me to halt. If I had seen nothing, then I would not have halted. But the something I saw turned out not to exist.

So my answer to your concluding question is in the affirmative.

Finally, if you have no interest in epistemology, then you have no interest in the above question since it is an epistemological question concerning veridical and non-veridical knowledge of the external world via outer perception.

You are some kind of radical externalist.  But how justify such an extreme position? 

I Know My Limits

I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. 

(Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)

Know-Your-Limits-1