Ep. 307: G.E. Moore Defends Common Sense (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 307 is something like, can we be certain of the existence of the external world? And if so, how? We read two articles by G.E. moore, a defense of common sense from 1925 and a proof of the external world from 1939. For more information, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, certain that I'm not dreaming in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Seth: This is Seth Paskin with at least one hand in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Wes: This is Wes Alwan coming to you mind independently. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:46 Dylan: open to speaking with philosophers who are not exclusively human beings. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:52 Mark: I think for the first time we are 50% covidated that I'm on the tail end and Seth is on the beginning.

0:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah, Seth, you're a champion for being here.

1:02 Seth: Well, we've just put this off for so long and yesterday couldn't do it because my wife was sick and I'm trying to watch my kid. And then I'm like, yeah, let's bump it to tomorrow and I'll get coverage. And then I show up positive this morning. So I was like, I realize there's irony, but also I feel like I have to commit to the cause, so I'll hang in as long as I can.

1:22 Mark: Yeah, hopefully we caught it before, you know, like tomorrow you might be lying down all day.

1:27 Seth: But that's true.

1:29 Mark: We caught you quick enough. So GE Moore, the reason we're doing this, we wanted to do some Wittgenstein. His book On Certainty is sort of the major work of the three that we have not touched yet written right to the end of his life. And in just reading the first page of that, I saw he's responding specifically to these two articles from G.E. moore. There's another one also from 1959 called Certainty, and I threw in a really early one because I thought this was the most famous one. Moore had written the Refutation of idealism from 1903. Those last two were not required here.

We decided to focus on these two. But he has a common theme throughout all of his work, which is a defense of at least some things of common sense. The fact that can I seriously doubt that I am right now talking into a microphone, that you people exist, that the audience exists, just the sort of everyday thing that Descartes wants to doubt, that other philosophers. We've read the whole Problems of Epistemology have said, well, maybe we can't know these things for sure. All we have our appearances and those somehow stand between us and the real world.

Moore is on the side of just trying to defend your pre philosophical intuitions about these things.

2:44 Dylan: He wants to cast doubt on the characteristics of doubting in the past. He wants to move the problem of doubting to the analysis part.

2:53 Wes: We should say that this is one of these defenses against philosophical skepticism, which can seem quite silly to people. I think of skepticism mainly as a thought experiment to attempt to clarify our understanding about epistemology. Right. So even Descartes, he's methodological skeptic, famously so really he's trying to say that we can have certainty of clear and distinct ideas, but also of the existence of the external world. And he does that starting with the self Certainty, right? Certainty of one's own existence and then doing a proof of God from the self, from the existence itself, and then saying God guarantees the existence of the external world.

So the idea is that even if we doubt everything, we get certainty back. It's not like that's not motivated. Right. Part of this is about the advent of modern science and theories of perception and saying, hey, wait a minute, the color red is just waves, certain wavelength of light coming into our eyes and producing certain types of brain activity. So how do we account for that kind of separation from the world? And also, if everything is reducible to atoms that are qualitatively unlike macro level phenomena, it leads to that sort of thing. So in a way, you know, when you're dealing with skepticism as more is, you're also dealing with representational theories and maybe more at core you're dealing with the concept of representation in our relationship to the world and way that seems to put up this kind of wall between us and things as they are in themselves and us in reality.

4:25 Dylan: When you said, Wes, that something sounds really silly, did you mean skepticism sounds really silly or more sounds really silly or both?

4:33 Wes: No, no, I mean, well, more as a whole. Yeah, that's a. Say something about that. No, I was just saying that, you know, if we start out with hey man, do we really exist or do things exist outside of us? It can sound trivial and like why are we talking about this sort of thing? So I just wanted to remind ourselves of motivations for skepticism to say, well, actually it's well motivated. There are other reasons it's well motivated too. Right. The ultimate problem is political. It's about people having bad moral and political beliefs and being absolutely certain that they're right.

And then the question is always, I'm certain I'm right, but the other guy on the other side is certain he's right. Who's right? And it motivates doubt, and it motivates this attempt to say something about how we could verify what can we do to actually ensure or warrant our rightness, and how do we tell if we're on the right side or the wrong side and so on.

5:25 Seth: Right.

5:25 Mark: And these epistemic papers were not concerned with things in the social and political realm like this. But, you know, the other thing that we read by G.E. moore in the past, he's, I think, more well known today for his ethical views, which is a form of ethical intuitionism. We have an episode from long, long ago where we read a little bit of more on that where he says, you know, if a philosopher comes along and say, gives you a theory of ethics, of the good, all good is just maximizing pleasure. You know, the fact that you can still coherently ask, but is maximizing the pleasure good?

That shows that that philosophical theory is wrong, that there's something more basic that we already know about goodness. So, of course that would raise issues. If you say goodness is just intuitive, well, then how could people disagree about it? You know, that raises all sorts of problems. So we have similar things here that, you know, he wants to say that we'll get into. It's actually a little more complicated than I thought. I thought epistemologically, that he was just known as a direct realist. And we actually talked to John Searle on this show, who gave a newer version of this.

And I feel like if I had read the Moore going into the Searle interview, I would have been a little more capable of. And we had, you know, Ayn Rand makes a similar point. And most recently in reading Hegel's Phenomenology, he urges us to doubt the doubt. Right. Makes pretty much exactly the same move that Moore is going to end up making here. But in fact, the only thing I thought I knew about more was actually wrong was I had heard this story about Berkeley's idealism and that somebody had kicked a rock and said, thus do I refute idealism. And that's actually Samuel Johnson.

It's not. This is a whole century earlier than. Than Moore, But Moore's arguments are. Yeah, there's probably a reason that I got those two mixed up is because what little I'd heard about Moore in graduate school, I don't know if I had that I definitely didn't have to actually read any of these papers, but was something like, you say that reality is only in our heads. You say that we could doubt the external world exists. Well, look, here's my hand.

7:27 Wes: Yeah. If you take the rock and you wrap it in like about 20 pages of analytic verbiage and then kick it, you have Moore. By the way, he was a direct realist for a little while, maybe for 10 years. I think Russell convinced him that it didn't work. And obviously the obvious problem is the problem of error. Right. And there are other problems too. Right. Because he was into sense data. And what do you see when you turn a Frisbee? But we know is circular on angle and we see what we see as an ellipse. And that ellipse is a sense data. For more, how do you say that that is a real thing outside of us? He was very puzzled about all that. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that he held, positions he held at various times that he was dissuaded from by Russell and others. So it's hard to pin him down, you know, depends on when it was written.

8:18 Mark: Well, and I guess just to throw out so we can dispense with it, since we're not going to talk about this refutation of idealism. It really is as simple as sensation of blue and sensation or green are different. Right. Well, they each have the sensation part, the mental part, Therefore the thing, the blue and the green that differentiates them. Therefore, that is not a mental thing. Therefore idealism is false. It really comes down to that. And, you know, thought that we must, in having any belief, the point of intentionality, that beliefs and perceptions are always directed at something outside.

And I think actually this is what Hegel's view, at least some of the time in the phenomenology is as well, that we are calling in something external whenever we have some mental act. So, Dylan, you were saying it sort of leaves open, pushing it to the analysis. And so I think this is something that more in the stuff we are talking about is open to. Like, well, whatever perception is, whatever belief is, they grasp something external to the mind. He wants to say, but then you could say more about like, well, what is exactly that mean? You know, so Barclay's idealism famously was not that reality is just in my individual head.

It's like in God's brain. So there actually is some objective thing

9:35 Wes: outside of any particular perceiver mind, independent reality. Yeah, and there is that for any of these guys. There's no philosopher that I know of who just said, oh, it's just in one person's head or each of our heads individually. Everyone has tried to ground it in mind independent reality. Even if that mind independent reality is supposed to be made of mind stuff, right? And mind object problems still crop up within that context. Even if you want to say, hey, it's a bunch of individual subjectivities related to one big mind terrain, you still have the problem of these subjectivities that are cut off from each other and have entities, you know, mental events that

10:12 Seth: are not public even in Moore's context. But going as far back as Descartes, ultimately what motivates this is you're trying to address the problem of being mistaken about knowledge. I mean, ultimately, because we know that we can be mistaken about something that seems to us to be external to ourselves, then there's a chance that we could be mistaken about anything or everything. And at the time Moore's writing, there's still this project to try to come up with a logical foundation for science or this, let's call it, a philosophical epistemological foundation for natural science.

And in a weird way, the question of whether being mistaken about one thing implicates all knowledge is one thing aside, right? Because I think there's a legitimate question to be asked there. But then the second part is whether you, when you think about, and we've talked about this numerous times on this podcast, that the people doing science aren't worried about the state of their knowledge base, right? They're not worried about the philosophical underpinnings of the things that they're doing simply because there's a certain practicality, if you will, or what's the word?

I'm going blank here, Dylan. A pragmatic approach to the knowledge base. And in a weird way, more is recapitulating a pragmatic approach in some way, but doing it from the perspective of common sense or everyday experience, which ties in, of course, to Heidegger, who is a contemporary, and also doing it to try to address the broader if you can be wrong about one thing, you can be wrong about everything problem. So it's a very interesting exercise.

11:58 Dylan: I want to reiterate or re underline something that Wes said earlier about the background political question. It's not in more, but when you were talking Seth about this is the epistemological question that we're running into, it occurred to me to ask why is the question of error showing up now in the sense of effective with modern science? I mean, maybe you'd argue that something like Zeno's paradox is a different form of that error question. But this problem of I know I'm wrong, I figure out that I'm wrong, and now how do I account for that doesn't seem to be as big of a deal earlier.

And to me, it ties directly to this political question or a question of authority, of who's saying who's right about what. And when push comes to shove, you have something going on in the advent of modern science where you have a technique and you're fighting over a technique for how to decide whether you're right about anything that has nothing to do with individual people. It has to do with a method or a way that we're looking out at the world, and we're going to come up with a process or a technique or whatever to support our certainty about our judgments.

And that goes directly towards who and how we hold authority over other people in making decisions. And I think that in a very, very powerful way, this traces right back to that. That's what we're fighting about. And when you have a discussion about certainty, I can be certain about the world. I can have common sense about the world. There's going to be also the discussion about, well, I can also be wrong about the world. So how are we going to adjudicate that, especially for things that I'm really, really pissed off about? Or how are we going to adjudicate that when it feels like all you're doing is just saying that I'm crazy, but I don't believe I'm crazy?

13:48 Wes: You know, it's there. Ancient skepticism is a thing, and it's there. And the sort of. Dylan, you know, as you mentioned, Zeno's paradox, but there's also, you know, the stick that's bent in the water, all that classic ancient skepticism stuff. And. And then it's there in Plato as well, obviously. And the crisis that creates it is, as you've been saying, political and ethical, because society in general is full of shit. And the Sophists are like the most elite manifestation of that, people running around presenting as absolutely certain ethical truths, stuff that turns out to be a bunch of bullshit on Plato's view.

So. But the other aspect of this, the scientific aspect, and I think the reason it becomes really big in early modern times with the advent of science, has to do with two things. One of them is what we saw in Lucretius. It's sort of the founding principle of modern science, which is that the phenomena are not what they seem, they are reducible to. In the case of Lucretius, right, And Epicurus, Atoms. But the important part is atoms aren't just little bits of things as we know them. They are invisible and they are purely shape. Right. They're purely spatiotemporal, and they're not qualitatively like the things that they ground phenomenologically.

There's an emergence phenomenon, right? So blueness isn't caused, even for Lucretius, by a bunch of little blue atoms. It's caused by colorless atoms. That is what makes modern science so powerful. But that is also creates a skeptical crisis. And then that is enhanced by the related problem of perception and people thinking, wait a minute, there's primary and secondary qualities. My perception of color is actually based on an interaction between me and something which is really only matter and not in itself, the having of color. So I think all of this stuff, the motivation, is not only there, but it is actually connected to the development of modern science.

Or it's enhanced, let's say.

15:40 Dylan: Mm.

15:41 Mark: Shall we get into a defense of common sense? So he throws out these propositions.

15:47 Wes: He does. He starts with. He wants to say, I differ from a lot of philosophers on these issues because I think there's a lot of common sense propositions that I know to be true and I know them with a certainty. And he calls these propositions truism. And they're really a set of propositions about mind or self, whatever you want to call it. And then matter, the world, that they have a bunch of properties which they're not dependent on context. We'll get into that. But, Mark, why don't you give a few examples? Sure, sure.

16:18 Mark: Yeah. So it's the top of the second page, page 33. Here exists at present a living human body, which is my body. This body was born at a certain time in the past and has existed continuously ever since, though not without undergoing changes. It was, for instance, much smaller when it was born and for some time afterwards than it is now. Ever since it was born, has been either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth. And at every moment since it was born, there have also existed many other things having shape and size in three dimensions, from which it has been at various distances.

Also there have existed some other things of this kind with which it was in contact. Among the things which have, in the sense, formed part of its environment, there have, at every moment since its birth, been large number of other living human bodies. Each which has, like it, at some time been born, continues to exist from sometime after birth to been at every moment of its life after birth. Either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth, many of these bodies have already died and ceased to exist. But the earth has also existed for many years before my body was born.

And for many of these years also large numbers of human bodies had at every moment been alive upon it. And many of these bodies have died and ceased to exist before it was born. Finally, to come to a different class of propositions, I am a human being, and I have, at different times since my body was born, had many different experiences, each of which have been of many different kinds. I have often perceived both my own body and, and other things which form part of its environment, including other human bodies. I've not only perceived things of this kind, but I've also observed facts about them, as for instance, things about its location, et cetera, and then goes on to talk about, you know, I've had dreams, I've had imaginations, so things about the physical world and about his mental life.

17:50 Wes: So some of the interesting things to observe about these propositions is that they are contingent, right? So these aren't analytic propositions or synthetic a priori propositions. The kinds of things we might want to say that we can normally know with certainty, right? Previous philosophers like Descartes were okay with certainty as long as it was with clear and distinct ideas or with tautologies or math. Right? Two plus two equals four, we know with a certainty. And it's not contingent, it's not dependent upon anything we observe. So these are contingent propositions.

But it's not the case that any contingent proposition can be thrown into this list of common sense propositions. It's not like when I say, hey, I see my laptop in front of me right now, that, that is a truism or that is an item of that that is a common sense proposition. Because in many contexts that proposition is not true, right? I go into the other room and that proposition, if I utter it in that other context, becomes not true. The things about these propositions, it doesn't matter where I am, doesn't matter what situation I'm in, I can say them and they will be true.

If I'm rejecting skepticism, why doesn't the

18:57 Dylan: laptop example just fall in with the truism that my body is at various distances from various kinds of things?

19:04 Wes: His mantlepiece question has been, I mean, it is, right? But he's leaving that in general form because that'll always be true. It'll always be true that my body is, oh, I see what you're saying. Various distances from something. But you have to leave it general for it to be context independent. If you start doing specific contingent facts, those things vary based on.

19:24 Dylan: Fair enough.

19:25 Wes: Your position within the world, what time it is, you know, what time in the history of him. He's not just listing, hey, anything that's an empirical fact that I've observed is common sense.

19:37 Dylan: But all of these in this section are related to his own individual experience. Let's call it his own individual point of view. The next section is what you can say about other human beings.

19:50 Seth: Yeah.

19:50 Wes: So he knows to be true. The certainty that there's this whole set of classes of propositions that resemble those in one. My body, the fact that I've had experiences, there are other bodies, all that stuff. But I can say that from everyone else's perspective. I know there are many other subjects who can say exactly the same propositions that I've just listed for myself and say that they know that with a certainty from their perspective.

20:16 Mark: Yeah. He considers on the next couple pages this view that he doesn't really outline, but I guess was held among some idealists that you might say, well, these are true, depending on your point of view, or these are partially true and partially not true. And it sort of depends on your perspective. And we could sort of construct what that would mean. Like, if you just think that the existence of human bodies is socially constructed. The only reason that we believe in human bodies and distances between them is because we have certain kind of perceptual apparatus. And if we didn't have that, then there would be a better description. So you could say that. You could interpret that as like, well, it's true, you know, from our point of view or something. But he wants to just say, no, these are just absolutely true. There's no benefit to be gained in introducing some sort of subtlety.

21:04 Dylan: Like on the bottom of 36, this is. You read a big chunk at the beginning, Mark. But there's a kind of. I mean, Moore is very repetitive, but he also. He has a kind of curmudgeonliness or a sort of like, for crying out loudness about him. So at the bottom of 36, he says, in what I've just said, I have assumed that there is some meaning which is the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions as the earth has existed for many years past. And this, I am afraid, is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing. They seem to think that the question, do you believe that the Earth has existed for many years past?

Is not a plain question which should be met either with A plain yes or no or by a plain. I can't make up my mind. But is it the sort of question which can be properly met by it all depends on what you mean by the earth and exists and years. If you mean so and so and so and so and so and so, then I do. But if you mean so and so and so and so and so and so and he goes on with a lot of so and so's then I don't. Or at least I think it's extremely doubtful. So this, this kind of way of talking I found delightful.

22:15 Mark: Yeah, I think the other bit of idealism. And eventually we're going to read some F.H. bradley, which is one of the people he's reacting to, so we'll see what this means. But you know, it's British people trying to interpret Hegel. But is the idea that all properties that something has, including relational properties, are actually internal? We kind of got into this a little bit or considered this in our Aristotle's categories episode. But if you're a daoist or something, you. You feel like the only way that something makes sense is by its contrast with other things.

Right. The only reason that individual objects exist is because there's other objects to contrast them with. Then that individual object to give its definition is to really. To give a full definition is to refer to every single other thing in the universe. And you know, you could say that that is going back even to like Leibniz's metaphysics. We have these weird. Every little thing reflects everything else. To just say, well, what I mean by Earth is just this thing. And we can all talk about this thing. You know, we could do that in a context, but there's no absolute reference or definition for the Earth or something.

And Moore just sees again all this as confusing nonsense and something that in this context would interfere with by being able to say, I have certain knowledge that the Earth did exist before. There you go.

23:35 Wes: He doesn't want to say the Earth is empirically real, but transcendentally ideal, right? No, he doesn't want to say, okay, you know, like Kant and other philosophers might say, yes, of course it's true that there's an Earth and it's existed for many years, but qua phenomenon, you know, within the phenomenal realm. And we use that when we say such things are true. We use that with a grain of salt. We use it in quotation marks. We mean that insofar as it belongs to the phenomenal realm, but that's cut off from this world of ultimate reality, things in themselves that we cannot know in itself. The idealists, of course, are trying to solve that problem. But.

24:12 Dylan: Yeah, right. For what I was reading, he says, anyone who takes this view, I suppose, is confusing the question whether we understand its meaning, which we all certainly do, with an entirely different question, whether we know what it means in the sense that we are able to give a correct analysis of its meaning. That's partly what I mentioned earlier, but also I think it ties into what Mark was pointing to, that the interconnectedness that one might observe between things that then might, in some analysis mean you need to understand everything in order to understand anything. He just thinks is baloney.

24:48 Wes: Thinking specifically of Russell there and definite descriptions, right? So Russell's idea is that whether or not you're skeptic about the other stuff, you can say with a certainty how to analyze those propositions, right? You give definite descriptions of them and you just break things down into their parts. And we saw with someone like Carnap, right, You get down to the sense data and you can just say, okay, there are these. Or maybe with Wittgenstein, atomic facts, right? You can say, here are the bedrock facts into which everything can be analyzed. And he says, that's the thing that I'm not sure about. I'm skeptical about that we can actually successfully do that analysis. Those guys think we definitely can do that. Not me.

25:28 Seth: I wasn't thinking of Russell. Definite descriptions here. And Dylan, I'm glad you read, because I think that passage immediately following is important. What he says is, I know this with certainty. That doesn't mean that I can explain in every case where that proposition is used, how it's used. And it doesn't necessarily mean that I could explain how I know it with certainty. All I can do is simpliciter, say, I know this with certainty. That was the way I read it.

25:58 Wes: Yeah. But the foundationalist project at the time is to say I can know those propositions because I can analyze them into atomic propositions that I can know with certainty. That's what Russell's definite descriptions do. And he's saying, no, you don't have to be able to analyze those propositions to know them. So that's an important intuition he's having.

26:17 Seth: Yeah, I'm not saying he. He wasn't addressing that. I'm just saying that's what it sounds like he's saying there. And then he goes into talking about the wholly versus partially true, the idea that you need a qualifier in some sense. Certain knowledge is not dependent on Being able to enumerate all of the conditions in which a proposition possibly be, in other words, a definite description, or knowing all of the things in the universe that are true of it at a certain point in time, but rather you can have this direct, certain knowledge of something without that.

26:49 Dylan: Yeah.

26:49 Wes: So do you believe the Earth has existed for many years past? Some philosophers will want to say, well, what do you mean by years? What do you mean by earth? What do you mean by exists? And they'll say, give me your analysis of those concepts, right? Do some semantics for me and boil it down to the ultimate semantic particles. He's saying, you don't need to do that. You can just stay at that intuitive macro level and know it without the analysis.

27:13 Mark: So it's anti foundationalist in some way. And the question though, in interpreting more is, is that because he is something like a direct realist, right, that you can just, I just observe that there are bodies, or is it that, well, it's still the case that the existence of bodies is a matter of theory. Like that's the way that Quine puts it later. But it is not something that we do, or maybe even that we can do explicitly. It is not a matter of describe the sense data and then put them together to say, yes, the Earth exists.

27:51 Dylan: That's one of the big parts of it, is that the analysis doesn't have the corresponding synthesis. Right? He would be denying that that synthesis activity that someone like Kant would refer to is grounded in that analysis. Like that you can add up all of those parts into something that gives you that whole.

28:14 Wes: There's a further problem here, which is that we ourselves in particular don't know that the Earth existed for many years before us because of sense data or any sort of evidence other than what other people have told us. So we have history, we have photographs, we have, you know, whatever you want to call this secondhand evidence. But we have to be able to believe that others have not systematically deceived us about that. And that goes for most of our knowledge.

28:44 Dylan: He would completely disagree with you about that.

28:46 Wes: Why would he disagree? This is one of the big implications here, is that we can trust that. So, I mean, it'll turn out to be part of the whole language game and the whole form of life that grounds these pre theoretical conditions that allow us to think and to say anything in the first place.

29:08 Dylan: I guess I'm wondering the way you're formulating sense data is one that is temporally constrained to the moment so that my understanding of the past is opaque. Because I can't hold up the shape of the earth or the contour of the land to my eyes. The way I can hold my hands up to my eyes and say, this is a hand.

29:34 Wes: Yeah, because this is about the past.

29:36 Dylan: But my whole point about that is that there is other sense data. This is what I thought that someone like Moore would go down, is that there is other sense data like glaciation and all that stuff that would get you your understanding of the past and how your understanding of the present then.

29:52 Wes: Right, But I haven't done the science. Other scientists are reporting that to me, and I accept that. And I may understand that I may know some of it, but I have to trust in the community. I have to be able to say that others are passing on knowledge. Anyway, I didn't think this was going to be that controversial. I was just trying to give a preview of where we might go later on. So let's not get bogged down on that because he's not talking about it directly and I was just giving something speculative. But it is significant that he includes in the truism things that we're not directly perceiving at the current time. That's important to say that I know that the Earth was around in the past forever and ever because it implicates our reliance on the community.

30:32 Seth: Yeah, well, since Wes dismissed his own bringing up with this, that was actually, I was going to agree with him. You know, the difference between saying, I have a hand, I know I have a hand and I have a body that has existed over time. Right. Because you have a direct experience, you can from that infer not just a body, but time. And you could say, well, I know the Earth has existed at least as long as I've been around. But making the leap to, you know, the Earth existed before I was born and will exist after without having that link to direct experience is pointing to some, what I would call second order experience that, you know, Wes, you said community, but it's pointing to a second order experience. It's not the same direct experience.

31:12 Dylan: Yeah.

31:12 Wes: This stuff doesn't have to be based on my individual experience. In large part, it's based on me being plugged into, you know, when you use the phrase language game, we'll get to that with Wittgenstein. But plugged into a form of life and into communal knowledge, into exchanges with other human beings and reliance on other human beings in a chain of custody. Right. Of evidence that's been passed on from, you know, generation to generation.

31:38 Mark: So, I mean, interestingly, this whole thing is about belief rather than perception. But we really want to, because the things that he thinks are so obvious are a matter of perception. We want to do the kind of thing that Locke did in his Treatise on the Understanding and talk about how we could just what we're saying, how we could know the present, how we could know the immediate past, how we could infer from that things about the longer past. And he doesn't really get into the nitty gritty of that perceptual stuff. Maybe it's just that, well, there's going to be some account of perception.

But we can set that aside. We're not talking about the psychology of perception here. We're talking about the rationality of holding certain beliefs. And ultimately this is going to end up being, I think by talking about certain d. This ends up being something that is more about what is a rational starting point. Do we need something like the justification of anything we believe down to first principles as somebody like Descartes or another foundationalist thought? Or is knowledge to be understood on some different model?

32:41 Wes: The next step in this argument is to kind of put the burden of proof on the skeptic and to say, well actually your position is self contradictory. And Mark, as you pointed out, this has kind of been a recurring theme and Hegel was one of the guys to do this. Why not doubt the doubt? But the deeper position is that if you have skeptical ideas, we have them because they're motivated. We talked about some of those motivations, advent of modern science. Perception atoms this that the political. But those motivations include a lot of assumptions about the world, including common sense assumptions.

And if your skepticism goes so far that it calls into question the very assumptions that motivated your skepticism in the first place, then you've undermined the whole project. So your skepticism is self limiting. It can't simply kick the chair out from under itself. It can't deprive itself of its own motivations by getting too radical. I think that's not exactly what he's doing in the section, but that's part of the larger picture of this.

33:45 Dylan: It's sort of the argument that the fact that you're having this discussion means that something about what you're talking about is true.

33:52 Mark: Page 42 in the middle he's talking about skeptics. Some of them have spoken of such beliefs as beliefs of common sense, expressing thereby their conviction that beliefs of this kind are very commonly entertained by mankind, but that they are convinced that these things are in all cases only believed, not known for Certain, and that some have expressed this by saying that they are matters of faith, not knowledge. Now the remarkable thing which those who take this view is that in each case a philosopher is making an assertion about us, that is to say, not merely about himself, but about many other human beings as well. When he says no other human being has ever known of the existence of other human beings, he's saying there have been many other human beings besides myself, and none of them, including myself, has ever known the existence of other human beings.

34:34 Wes: I'm not sure what to make of this particular formulation. Right. This is why Descartes wants to stick with the I. I think philosophers would want to make those arguments by referring simply to their own experience so that they don't imply that they know that there are a bunch of other minds out there.

34:50 Mark: I mean, isn't this kind of like Heidegger's point about the social being just paramount and indubitable? That the fact that we are using language means that words have objective meanings that I can't just change? You know, and this is of course something that Wittgenstein is going to run with in his argument against private languages. Just our participation in the social community at all means we already believe, we are already committed, whatever we might say, to the existence of other people and of time and the physical world and all this stuff that we're claiming to doubt.

So at the very least this could be, you know, the kind of point that Hume makes like, yeah, I understand as soon as you leave the armchair, that you believe in causality in the ordinary way, but come on, philosophy is a special realm. And I think at least one of the secondary sources I was reading was just saying that Moore just denies this. Like the armchair is just as much of a part of world as everywhere else. There's no real value in this fantasizing, you know, that you don't actually believe

35:52 Dylan: in other people and this point about other people and the import of these things. And maybe it's directly related to the against the private language argument. This is how Aristotle tries to prove the fact that logic works, right?

36:07 Wes: Yeah, the law of non contradiction.

36:09 Dylan: Yeah. So he's going through all the ways in which we used to figure things out, like syllogisms and stuff. Like he tries to do something like I'm going to try to prove logic. And in the end he doesn't prove logic. He admits he's coming up with plausible arguments for it. But the fact that we even speak to one another and understand one another is a reasonable thing that supports the fact that logic works and there's more to it than that.

36:35 Wes: Or if you assume that the law of non contradiction doesn't work, then nothing's meaningful.

36:41 Dylan: Yes.

36:41 Wes: And you can't even communicate that the proposition itself that there is no law of non contradiction cannot be properly meaningfully formed within the context of that rejection. I think you're right, Dylan. It's a very similar sort of argument saying the relativist is self contradictory and here it's that the skeptic is self contradictory.

37:00 Dylan: Before we go a lot further here, is there something to say about the distinction between skepticism and idealism that's worth pointing out? Because he's sort of going after them both. They're kind of related, but he's going after them both. The idea of radical doubt that we can have certainty about things and then also that those things are real and not just in our minds.

37:22 Wes: Well, the idealist tries to solve the problem of skepticism by saying that hey, there is no matter idea divide because it all is just ideas anyway and we have immediate access to that. There you go, skepticism, you've been defeated. But we've had to take this radical step which is unsatisfactory to a lot of people. But yeah, you could say that the

37:45 Mark: common sense position according to this is that we, we perceive material objects. And Berkeley says no, that's not common sense at all. Material object is a weird philosophical term of art that you came up with. Just say I perceive tables and chairs and then we can give an analysis of that. And my analysis is going to be an idealist one. And I think that ultimately Moore is more nuanced is not just rejecting that kind of Berkeley's full explanation out of hand, but he does want to say that things are pretty much how we perceive them. And sort of filling in the gaps here with what John Searle said to us directly is well, to find out more about them you use science.

You wouldn't discover with science that actually these are just ideas in our head. I mean maybe some kinds of quantum physics, you know, if you take the Copenhagen interpretation and you can say oh well there is actually mentality. But putting aside that kind of stuff that a lot of hard nosed philosophers want to say, we cannot accept that kind of interpretation of what science might be telling us. It would be very strange to either say well you think you have a pretty good idea of what perceiving a table, perceiving a chair, perceiving another person is.

But actually either you can't actually know that, so we're skeptics or they're actually just a bunch of swirling ideas. You thought they were atoms and molecules and things, but actually those are. So either way, it's supposed to be a very counterintuitive interpretation that he's arguing against. So he's trying to chop all the counterintuitive ones off.

39:17 Wes: Let me just interject this real quick because we're going to get to this in section 4 on the analysis in terms of sense data. He's not a direct realist, as far as I can tell, in this paper, because he understands, Right. That phenomenologically we're seeing ellipses standing in for things that are circles. Right. It's a very basic thing. That's a huge problem for direct naive realism.

39:37 Seth: Trying to address Mark's point about the nuance over Berkeley's position, I think it's the step where he says, you know, I know with certainty that I have existed over time and that I have this certain knowledge, and I know that there are others like me. When everything becomes idea in some sense, you lose this connection to the possibility of other subjectivities.

39:57 Mark: So I think we're going to move on to more of that in part two here. I understand your Covid is getting the better of you, Seth. Do you have any if to end part one here? Any closing words about this? Maybe we'll get you back for part three, but I'm not counting on it.

40:11 Seth: Yeah, yeah, we'll try. Well, typically this question doesn't interest me. And so I expected to just be like. And Moore can be delightful and tedious at the same time as a writer, which is interesting, but I do want to participate in the conversation about Wittgenstein. I'm not in love with the guy, but it's important to me to be a part of this later Wittgenstein conversation about On Certainty. So I'm willing to slog through the Moore if it's going to help inform that conversation.

40:38 Mark: Yeah, I think Wittgenstein's also. Even though Wittgenstein is known later Wittgenstein as not being a systematic philosopher, still the fact that you can talk about stuff in terms of language games, whereas Moore doesn't offer us, I feel like something that we can just say, oh, well, in the language game context of, you know, our everyday experience, of course, tables and chairs exist and they are approximately what you know, that he doesn't give us. He's more consistently analytic, by which I mean anti systematic. We're going to consider each sentence by itself.

We can trace these patterns in the way that Moore argues against various pretentious philosophical or skeptical conclusions. But it's not like this is what in the area of epistemology, this is Moore's philosophy, like even had a hard time. He sounds like a direct realist, but he's not going to be a direct realist. So you know, it's more subtle. As we've said, let's shut this down for the moment. We're going to come back on part two. If you are a Partially Examined Life supporter, you'll hear that this next thing in your feed. Thank you so much.

See ya.