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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life Episode 307 Part 2. We've been discussing G.E. Moore's A Defense of Common Sense from 1924. 5. So let's jump right back into that.

0:19 Wes: We've gotten into why he thought it was self contradictory for philosophers to deny these common sense propositions. And that was because he thought that philosophers, when they made these claims were always talking about we in some way saying that none of these propositions are true for us, so to speak, and that if that were true, there would be no us, there would be no we. If there are no bodies, no. No other minds, there's no one to talk to. So somehow something is implicated in the communication. Something is implicated in even the very activity of making a philosophical argument. Something is implicated that ought not to be contradicted. That's section one, parts A and B, and then section two. If we want to make that transition, we could linger on the other stuff a little bit more, but. Or we could go into section two where.

1:08 Mark: No, that's.

That's probably good. So that's page 45 in our version. This is another just argument against idealists, against positions that he's not raising before us. Very clearly I hold, namely that there's no good reason to suppose either that every physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact, or that every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact, that these would both be positions. You get why he's distinguishing these two things. I mean, you can think that an idealist position would actually say that there are no physical facts, that they are in fact mental facts, not be making some causal claim between them, let alone a logical claim between them.

I thought A was against the idealists and B was against the skeptics.

1:53 Wes: When he says physical fact, we could say that that is agnostic as to a metaphysics about whether physical facts are matter or not. So if he says it's not logically dependent on some mental fact that's pretty straightforwardly against the idealist position. Right. In a way, what Berkeley is saying is that there's something implicit in the idea of. In physical facts as we understand them. We have to think of them as something that are mental. But the causal part. Yeah. What's the causal part?

2:26 Mark: Yeah. Just to elaborate. So just again, that to be is to be perceived. It is a logical fact. It's a fact about the concept of being a physical thing, that there has to be some sort of mind involved.

Yeah. And that's a B.

Every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact. It doesn't seem like skepticism to me. It seems like a different kind of idealism or a different point that he thinks idealism is maybe independently committed to that. We don't want to get rid of the ontology of physical facts. We want to still be able to do science. We want to be able to talk, you know, no matter what kind of idealist you are. But if you say that physical facts are somehow constructions and they arise in us, we are psychologistic, that there has to be some sort of mental process. And what a physical fact really is is, as I'm trying to describe, this is sounding like a logical breakdown rather than there is a mental act of thinking that there's a table in the room, for instance, and that causes a table to be in the room.

I took it to be Humean. I mean, in fact, up until just your last sentence, it seemed to me you were summarizing as a response to Hume. Causality is a mental fact. That's how I. One way I would say Hume's point about causality is it's something that we bring to the table and we have no reason except by the simultaneous juxtaposition that we take, that we attribute causality to events, that they aren't physical facts. And he's inverting that. He's saying that that's wrong.

3:56 Wes: Well, it sounds like I'm going to take your human and raise you a Kantian. But it's the same thing. I mean, it amounts to the same thing. I think we're getting at the idea that there are these mental faculties that do this construction work on reality so that when we say some physical thing is such. Right. So for Kant, and you know, if you assert some proposition about a phenomenon, the cat is on the mat. Part of what makes that proposition true is something that your mind has done right. And making it all spatial and making it temporal and making it logical with respect to, you know, Dylan, as you pointed out causality and any other categories that get applied.

So maybe that's what he's getting at here with that kind of. Because Berkeleyan idealism is very different from Kant's transcendental idealism, which is more like a souped up classical representationalist account. But in a way, the causal objection Moore gives here covers the Kantian version, the transcendental idealism.

4:56 Mark: I do see a bit of Marx reading that when you say the sentence every physical fact is causally dependent upon some mental fact, he's denying that. But if you say, well, what does it mean to say that a physical fact is causally dependent upon a mental fact? It kind of sounds like the chair is caused by my mind or the collision is caused by my mind, which sounds kind of weird. And maybe that weirdness is exactly why he would say you deny it, because he would attribute that kind of point of view to someone like Kant or to Hume.

5:30 Wes: I mean, this is why Kant needs things in themselves, right? And we talked about this with the German idealists in general. The data can't come from inside of us. The data has to be mind independent actually, and come from somewhere else. It doesn't make sense to say we're causing each individual one of us is causing a mantelpiece to appear. But it can make sense to say we're causing it spatiality.

5:49 Mark: But yeah, that means that if we assume that Moore has a reasonably generous interpretation of Kant and Hume and he doesn't think they're complete bozos, that he's denying that aspect of it, but he's not attributing the stupid thing, a stupid straw man to them.

I'm not sure.

This made me just look up what the fourfold root was for Schopenhauer, right? Our epistemology episode that was supposed to be a representation of what Kant's epistemology came down to. And the four classes of explanation are becoming, knowing, being and willing. And it seems like if you say these are parallel explanations that you can give, then becoming is going to be the one, you know, within the phenomena where you talk about causality. And in that case you wouldn't say physical things are caused by mental things. They could be like, I will to raise my hand and so my hand goes up.

But it's not clear that every physical thing is result of some mental thing, whereas the knowing one might be the more idealist. Oh yeah, we only have concepts of space and time and, you know, putting things together, sort of making the Berkeleyan point that there is a perceivability Sort of built into. But there's no physical causation in that story about knowing. So it seems like this mental to physical causation would cross the different categories.

7:06 Wes: He doesn't say physical causation though, does he? He just says causation.

7:10 Mark: He says physical fact is causally dependent. I see, Mark, where you're coming from. I guess it just seems so much like I'm telling you that Hume is wrong. I don't see any reason why causality is a mental act for Hume.

Would it be weird, though, if his objection to that was that physical facts aren't caused by mental facts? In other words, you're using cause to be the explicanda. In other words, the physical fact is the causality. That's a lot of what we say are physical facts. Is this thing cause. But he's actually saying I'm explaining this physical fact of causation by saying it's not caused by something mental. So including causation causality in the explanation of causality seems like a weird interpretation.

7:53 Wes: Well, the example he uses, these are existential claims, like the existence of the mantle piece. Because there's a difference between. Yeah. Making an existential claim like that and then doing these other causal propositions or relational propositions. Right.

8:09 Mark: He does give examples. His repetitious nature. Right. He's going to tread over this a few more times.

8:15 Wes: This is in section two, capital B. So we've page 451.

8:21 Mark: Yep. It starts off, I hold that there's no good reason to suppose every physical fact is causally dependent upon some mental fact. By saying F1 is causally dependent on F2. I mean only that F1 wouldn't have been a fact unless F2 had been not. Which is what? Logically dependent asserts that F1 couldn't conceivably have been a fact unless F2 had been. The fact that the mantelpiece is at present nearer to my body than that bookcase is, so far as I can see, not logically dependent on any mental fact. It might have been a fact even if there had been no mental facts. But it certainly is causally dependent upon many mental facts. My body would not have been here unless I had been conscious in various ways in the past. And the mantelpiece and the bookcase certainly would not have existed unless other men had been conscious too.

Right. So some physical facts are caused by mental facts. In fact, quite a lot of them. But with regard to two of the facts which I gave as instances of physical facts, namely the fact that the earth has existed for many years past. The fact that the Moon has for many years been near to the Earth and to the sun. I hold there's no good reason to suppose that these are causally dependent on any mental fact. I mean, unless he's responding to some medievalists, this whole talk of the fourfold root of sufficient reason is going back to Aristotle and medieval philosophy and talking about the different kinds of causality.

So one might think that for anything, the existence of the moon, there has to be not only material causes, proximate causes, you know, something that caused the moon to be there physically, materials that make up the moon that in a sense cause it to be there. And there must have been some nous, some mind that gave the moon its trajectory and put it in that spot, and therefore there must be a God, blah, blah, blah.

10:00 Wes: I think Dylan was getting at this before. Maybe I'm not speaking to what you're actually saying here, but this dependence, it either has to do something with the existence of these things or the form in which they appear to us, right? So the existence part I've called, you know, the mind independent, the data which depends on a mind independent reality. And then the form has to do with the spatial intuitions that we impose on things under the point of view that he's rejecting. So, right. So that the moon takes a certain spatial trajectory in the sky.

It has to be due to something mind independent. It just can't be that we are making shit up, but that has that particular form, a spatial form, as opposed to some other form, that the mind independent reality displays itself in that particular way. Some would say, like Kant, that comes from inside of us. And that's the sense in which the physical fact, so to speak, the phenomena depend upon mental facts, which is to say, ultimately be facts about our faculties.

11:03 Mark: Part of what I see him resisting, and I think we alluded to this earlier when we're pointing out he's doubting doubt and he's pushing the question of our account away from whether we know things to whether we know how to account for them, which is an analysis piece. So he's saying, well, we know things, we just don't know how to account for them completely. And he is maybe broadly making the argument that not knowing how to account for something completely and having that synoptic account doesn't prevent us from knowing things and doesn't even implicate the fact that we don't know them, at least all of them.

And one of the things that he's along those lines that he's pushing on is again, this completeness thing. You know, when he says there's no good reason or it doesn't have to be the case. I think he's sort of right about the kind of argument you usually have in philosophy, which is a kind of completionist, foundationalist kind of thing where you have to account for everything. And then this is one of the reasons the skeptical argument gets hold is that you just are saying, but what about the thing that you just asked about? And in asking that, and he's sort of going after that, saying, well, you don't have to be a completionist in order to have a claim that you know something.

I might put this in terms just a foundationalism instead of completionism. Just unless you really know what you're talking about clearly and distinctly. Right. Per Descartes, then you don't know what you're talking about at all. And so Descartes gives in the rules for the direction of the mind. He talks about proofs that you know the foundations and you know each step of the proof. And this is how you get a synoptic view of the thing. It's just what counts as synoptic. It can't be knowing literally everything there is to know, but it has to be knowing the foundational things from which everything else is explicable. So you don't know science in advance, for instance. Right. You can do science. You don't have to know it.

12:57 Wes: So for Descartes, we can know the phenomena. The scientific phenomena are not clear and distinct ideas. They're based on that. Right. So we need a groundwork for Descartes of clear and distinct a priori ideas. But there are non clear and distinct ideas, many of them in science, that are knowable to us and are not perfectly certain. Descartes, they're certain in the broad sense, Right. That external things do exist because God guarantees it. But they're not certain in the narrow sense that we can know that everything is as it appears to be. And as we know as science advances, we have to account for that. Think of our Lakatosian Popper episodes. We have to account for the fact that part of science is being close all the time, but we're making progress. Right? So it's strictly speaking we're not certain and we're not spot on. We're always refining.

13:48 Mark: I don't know if Descartes would make the Lakatos point. It seems to me Descartes was always holding out. You're right that there are physical facts that we observe that we don't completely understand and that the path towards that certainty is mathematical physics is the mathematimization of it. And once we can mathematize it effectively, then we know it because we've completed the chain of thinking can do along the lines of mathematical formulation. So I mean, it's sort of quintessentially the conceit of early modern mathematical physics that by rendering it in those terms I can then know it.

But in that Lakatos Co. Would be drawing exceptions to that level of knowing and the kind of accretion of knowledge that you get and the way in which science works. They would disagree with Descartes that you can even do the thing that he is saying that you can do, that you can fully mathematize the physical world in a uncomplicated way.

I'm not remembering the exact relationship between Bacon and Descartes here. My impression was that Bacon's scientific method was supposed to be deductive, that we have established this is the experiment. By testing this we can then conclusively with certainty derive the conclusion. And this is the entire thing that Kuhn and Lakatos and those guys, the edifice that they're coming against. So maybe Descartes had some more subtlety and maybe Bacon even had more subtlety than him describing.

15:09 Wes: We have to distinguish between the in general versus specific. There's a sense in which clear and distinct ideas accrue to science, even though it's empirical, because as Dylan mentioned, you mathematize and you make your clear and distinct ideas serve the purpose and to explain all the dirtier, less clear stuff. But that in general accrues. Right. And in general we can be certain of the existence of external things, but on a, on a local level, error is still possible. It's not like I don't think Descartes or Bacon are ruling out the possibility of error on a specific level or being at a state of knowledge which is quite insufficient or non specific.

But I, I think that, you know, Dylan's point about foundationalism is the important one here, which is just that, you know, as we get into section four, Moore thinks that we can know these propositions like I'm perceiving a human hand. This is a human hand, I'm certain about that. But when I get into the analysis and what I think is, he probably means definite descriptions, but the analysis of what a human hand is, which will turn out to be in terms of sense data, then it gets very complicated. In the section four, he's going to tell us why it's complicated and about the different ways which we can interpret analysis into sense data and the ways in which we can present objections to all those forms of analysis.

So analysis in and of itself becomes problematic in a way that common sense macro level empirical propositions about there being a hand here are not problematic, but it reverses some of the priority in a way.

16:44 Mark: I'm sure people are not following along with the Roman numerals. But we talked about section 2. Section 3 is one paragraph that just throws in.

16:52 Wes: Yeah, I just skipped that entirely.

16:55 Mark: Just so you know, I don't think that there's any reason to believe that all material things are created by God. I'm interpreting this in context as just a specification of what he was just talking about. That if you say the physical fact of the moon you might say has to be caused by some mental fact that is at least in the same universe as being saying that it has to have been caused by God.

17:13 Wes: Or you could say, like Berkeley, that God is putting in your mind and that God's activity is the mind independent reality. It's still a bit unclear to me what that's doing there, but.

17:23 Mark: But yeah. So section four is what you had just started. Let me just read a little. As I have explained, I'm not at all skeptical as the truth of such propositions as the earth has existed for many years past. I hold that we all know with certainty many such propositions to be true. But I am very skeptical as to what in certain respects the correct analysis of such propositions is. This is a matter as to which I think I differ from many philosophers. Many seem to hold that there's no doubt at all as to their analysis, nor therefore as to the analysis of the proposition.

Material things have existed in certain respects in which I hold that the analysis of the propositions in questions is extremely doubtful and that some of them, as we have seen, while holding that there is no doubt as to their analysis, seem to have doubted whether any such propositions are true. There's no doubt that it's true, but we don't necessarily know what it means. Which is a kind of a weird thing. But it makes him very much like Socrates to me.

18:11 Wes: We can know what it means before we do the analysis.

18:13 Mark: Yeah, we have to say his last sentence in that paragraph. I, on the other hand, while holding that there's no doubt whatever that many such propositions are wholly true, hold also that no philosopher hitherto has succeeded in suggesting an analysis of them as regards certain Important points which comes anywhere near to being certainly true.

18:35 Wes: Yeah. And that's just, you know, saying. And then he gets into it, and you can see why. The sense data. I mean, the sense data thing and Russell's project, all that stuff, carnap. It's just fucking weird, really, when it comes down to it, when you really look at it. This is one thing I like about Moore. It's just, of course, because we don't

18:51 Mark: have analysis, we don't really know what it means. We've even gotten that. I recall, you know, we did our episode about the existence of God, arguments for it against the existence of God, and someone said, you know, you really can't do that unless you first get into what does God mean? I thought, no, no, it's sort of an everyday notion that's, you know, not enough. There's philosophical work to be done. If you believe that there is a God, then how do we explain it? Maybe it's not explicable at all. You know, there might be way more to say, you know, so we distinguish sort of an everyday sense of meaning versus a philosophical sense of meaning.

And so, yes, of course we know what it means. And this is sort of where it begs to my mind Wittgenstein's terminology of we can play the language game where if somebody asks me, did I leave my bag in the other room? We all know what that means. We know what we're arguing over. We know how to go check. But do we understand in the deep philosophical sense, in the sense of what is a bag? Is it a material object? What is space? Is it in our minds, all this stuff?

19:50 Wes: We'll also. Can we fill out the extension of the concept? We know the intension, but can we fill out the extension? So there's a relationship between meaning and reference. And what Russell and those are claiming is that we can make the concept pick out all the right reference and none of the wrong reference unless it's fully analyzed.

20:10 Mark: Is this in the same space or related to more saying something like, I can build an awful lot of houses without knowing everything there is about how materials work, that he's making a point about the truth value of. Mark, you using the phrase sort of everyday understanding or common understanding? I don't want to use the word pragmatic because it's sort of technical in a way in this context, but I can know how to build a house that stands up was around for hundreds and hundreds of years. Any engineer nowadays would say, well, you didn't really know how a house actually goes.

20:49 Wes: Together, I think your example is apt in the sense that we're getting at meaning as use. And for Heidegger, it would be not the present-at-hand, but the ready-to-hand. This is about procedural knowledge as foundational to knowing. And this is, I think, is a very important strong insight that we start with procedural knowledge and then we do the analysis and.

21:12 Mark: Right.

21:12 Wes: And this goes back to Meno's paradox. Right. Knowing things in a certain way before we fully know them in some analytical sense. But it also goes to the paradox of analysis, which more in the refutation of idealism paper tries to hang that on idealism, which you'll realize later. But no, it's a much broader problem. Right. What is analysis good for if you already know? But if you don't already know, then how do you even begin analyzing in the first place? The analytical version of Meno's paradox?

21:39 Mark: Should we continue? The text seems to be quite evident that my knowledge that I am now perceiving a human hand is a deduction from a pair of propositions, simpler still propositions which I can only express in the form I am perceiving this, and this is a human hand. It is the analysis of propositions of the latter kind which seem to me to present great difficulties. While nevertheless, the whole question as to the nature of material things obviously depends on their analysis, it seems to me surprising thing that so few philosophers, while saying a great deal as to what material things are and as to what it is to perceive them, have attempted to give a clear account as to what precisely they suppose themselves to know when they know or judge such things as this is a hand, this is the sun, this is a dog, et cetera.

22:20 Wes: Yeah. The nature of material things depends on that analysis.

22:24 Mark: That's his next paragraph. Right. There's always some sense datum about which the proposition in question is a proposition. Things exist outside of ourselves. But nevertheless, what I am knowing or judging to be true about this sense datum is not that it is itself a hand or a dog or a sun, as the case may be.

22:44 Wes: Yeah. The sense datum is the surface of the hand. Right? And the hand, it's a part of the surface. It's not even the whole surface. And it's not the inside of the hand, it's not the interior. And so you do phenomenology at this point, and the sense data are little pieces of the object. And in a way they signify, right, the object. They're the elliptical sense datum that you're looking at, which is really a round Frisbee. At an angle in your mind that signifies a circle, you know, you have an ellipse. Because we understand it as the object and not simply as the sense datum, it does the work of standing in for the object. So more is going to claim there's always going to be mediation in that sense. Whatever your epistemological theory is, the sensatum is always going to be a mediating thing in that sense, because it can't be the entire object.

23:30 Mark: Which makes it strange that, I mean, I guess if he's talking about the specific proposition, this is a hand, in other words, an ostension, then that could be talking about a sense datum that I'm pointing at, basically. Whereas if it's some other proposition about my hand, like my hand is attached to my wrist, my hand is in my pocket right now. I'm not just talking about the perceived surface of the hand at some particular moment. I'm talking about my hand.

23:57 Wes: Yeah, which, you know, cashes out. If you want to cash that out in terms of sense data, you have to give a bunch of hypotheticals. You know, what if I turn my hand over? What am I going to see? What if I open the hand up? What, what am I going to see? What is it going to do if I punch someone? What is it going to. So if you really want to analyze it in terms of phenomena, you have to get very complicated. The object is very complicated relationship across time to whatever phenomena there are, whatever we might potentially experience it as in one, any given moment. So anyway, the way he concludes that part is to say, so I do not directly perceive my hand. I see a surface that I treat as representative of it. He then transitions to these points 1, 2, and 3.

24:39 Mark: Just because we had a whole episode. Wilfrid Sellars on the myth of the given. Moore thinks that he's using sense data. This is the bottom of 54. Some philosophers have used the idea of sense data that there could be some doubt as to whether they exist. Sellars was specifically arguing there's no such thing as sense data. We even got this in Kant that, you know, when we perceive something, we don't perceive the skin of it and then conclude something about it. It's a more complicated process. It has the concepts and things built into it. The only time we could really say we only perceive sense data is when we just don't know what the thing is at all.

Then we're just like, well, I, I'm seeing colors, I'm seeing, you know, you just take it's LSD or whatever and everything is confused. But he says there's really no doubt that there are sense data in the sense in which I'm now using that term at present, seeing a great number of them and feeling others. In order to point out to the reader what sort of things I mean by sense data, I need only ask him to look at his own right hand. If he does this, he'll be able to pick out something with regard to which he will see that it is at first sight a natural view to take that the thing is identical, not indeed with his whole right hand, but with that part of its surface which he's actually seeing, but will also, on a little reflection, be able to see that it is doubtful whether it can be identical with the part of the surface of his hand in question.

So, in other words, the point you just made. So do we buy this? Just as a matter of phenomenology, I think Sellars and Kant and these other folks were using phenomenology to say we don't have sense data. And he's saying, obviously we do.

Well, let's make sure that he says we have sense data. But in a way, and it's not clear to me which versions of sense data he's disagreeing with compared to Kant or Sellars.

I guess you're right that they probably see sense data as a technical term. And he's specifically saying here, I'm not giving it a technical term. I'm not saying the sense data are something that is opposed to the full object. I'm just saying what you can gather from the phenomenology, whatever that is. So it's, in other words, making that same kind of distinction in meaning as like, well, you know what it means, even though you don't know what it means. You know, we don't have an analysis of it.

That paragraph, I take him as saying all sense data means, and the way I mean it more is the stuff from the things that exist outside ourselves and the way in which we get information about that. And that sense data is as sort of loose and as specific as that. It's the mechanism by which we perceive anything.

I think you would say that's what I don't know. If you're talking phenomenology, then I don't know if you're talking about mechanism, because I think that might be the thing that these guys are arguing against is some idea that they're first, as maybe Locke says, I don't know, we perceive sense data, and then there's a mental process where we infer the existence of objects or something on top of that. And I think that's the kind of thing that Sellars is maybe I just

tripped over using a technical term inadvertently.

27:36 Wes: The myth of the given right says that we're not getting the raw data. This is always theory laden. There's always some conceptual quality to it, categories that have already been applied to it. So if you think that means the mind has done something to it, this I think more might object to as, as saying that a physical fact is somehow dependent on a mental fact. So I think the discussion gets quite complicated, you know. So is a sense datum something that's already been worked over? Well, yeah, for Kant and for others, yeah. It's not a raw manifold anymore once it becomes a sense datum. And the raw manifold isn't even accessible to us because it's already worked over by intuitions and concepts.

28:19 Mark: And does Moore really disagree with that insofar as so much of this activity is linked to working together as a community and communicating with one another? I mean, it just feels like he would admit when I say this is a hand, that act is a communicative act that has something in common with other human beings, that there's structure to that. And I don't know that he would disagree with that.

This makes it looks like what he's saying about sense datum being the subject of propositions is just wrong. That's why I said he must be saying it's the this that's referring to the sense datum. And when I say this I'm actually referring to some sort of private mental act. You don't know exactly what I mean by this. Like only insofar as the social cues, how specifically am I pointing? But this is in illimitable ambiguity. Unless I say, you know, by this I mean. And then I specify, you know, exactly what aspects of it I'm picking out. And even that is going to be vague because it uses language. So to say that the proposition is about this intangible private thing seems very strange to me.

29:24 Wes: Well, he wants sense data not to be private. Although as we get when we get into this ontological section, he's going to admit to being unclear about it. It is weird. Yeah. Like I don't know either what it means to say the proposition is about a sense datum. Proposition is about the hand. The hand is not a sense datum. You know, you could maybe say the hand is a complicated. You get very locking about it and say it's a complicated collection of sense data related and complicated ways across time and all that, you know, is the proposition about that collection? I don't know.

29:57 Mark: I mean, maybe it's in the middle on 54 can help us. He says that when I know this is a hand, this is a human hand, is not that it is itself a human hand seems certain to me because I know my hand has many parts which are quite certainly not parts of the sense datum. I think it's certain, therefore, that the analysis of the proposition this is a human hand is roughly at least of the form there is a thing and only one thing of which it is both true, that it is a human hand and that this surface is a part of its surface. In other words, to put my view in terms of the phrase theory of representative perception, I hold it to be quite certain that I do not directly perceive my hand. And that when I am said to perceive it, that I perceive it means that I perceive something which is representative of it, namely a certain part of its surface.

Well, this is maybe explaining why he said I have to divide. I'm perceiving my hand into. I'm perceiving this because I'm perceiving this really is about the private thing, and this is a human hand, which he just gave the analysis of. So it's to say this private thing is related to a public thing that I'm saying something about.

31:13 Wes: Why is this a private thing?

31:15 Mark: Because it's demonstrative, for the reasons I just gave that. If you say what I'm referring to in this, this is at least why I'm saying he's distinguishing these because he has to make the link between the demonstrative, which is the private thing, and hands, which are public.

31:29 Wes: Private mental representation.

31:32 Mark: The act of ostension is private. Is that what you mean?

31:34 Wes: This is referring to an external, an object that's supposed to be outside of you.

31:38 Mark: I wasn't saying a private representation. But it's a selection, Right. My particular sense data are going to be different than your sense data, even if they are of the public world.

31:49 Wes: But this is a human hand, Right? Okay. There is a thing and only one thing which is treated as both a human hand and that this surface is part of its surface. So the this in the original, this is a human hand is the hand and not the sense to this sense datum is a part of the surface of this hand.

32:06 Mark: Aha. I discovered after this that he actually, at the end of his life, wrote a whole other article called sense datum. You know, so it goes a little more.

32:13 Wes: Yeah, let's never redone ever.

32:17 Mark: I think he's still kind of inconclusive about it, although you're correct, Wes. He comes down as an indirect realist that we are not in grasping sense datum, grasping the object in the world itself. He's, as he's saying here, it is something that is representative of the whole

32:31 Wes: object at this point. Now he gets into. Starting on page 53. Yeah. You know, it's the beginning of these three different options for the ontological status of sense data. And the first option, I think, is the direct realist one. Right. So direct perception of part of a surface of a hand, not a representation, then you have problems, of course, obvious problems. And the one he brings up has to do with the microscope and the fact that things will look different if you zoom in on them, which I think is hilarious. He always just has to choose these weird ways of getting at a point that philosophers have made many, many other times in a different way. But.

33:09 Mark: And I don't get quite that, because at least the way I was just describing it, if you take my personal this as being a private thing, then my this is going to be a different this than someone who uses a microscope.

33:20 Wes: Well, he's laying out the direct realist position here, and he's saying this is an objection to the direct real. So the direct realist has to claim that the sense datum is a public real thing. Not.

33:31 Mark: It's just. Why would you expect it to be the same public real thing?

33:34 Wes: Right.

33:34 Mark: In other words, just like me looking at the front of something and you looking at the back of something, we're going to both see different parts. But, you know, if you're a direct realist, we're both seeing the thing. It's just. We can explain very obviously, I don't see how a microscope introduces anything fundamentally different than that.

33:49 Wes: The way he puts it is it doesn't actually have the qualities that it appears to have. So if you take a red thing and you zoom in on it and it's no longer red at a fine grain level, what does that mean? How do you. How do you say that the part of this red sense datum is not red if you zoom in on it? I think that's the problem he's having. Although he, you know, he says it's not a fatal objection. And then he. I don't know why he says it's not a fatal objection. Maybe Mark, he has in mind, you know, what you're saying. But then he gets into the double image problem, which he sees as more serious, which is just the problem of error and hallucination and illusion. Right. You know, we're not always seeing things that are there, but.

34:33 Mark: Well, and specifically, that if you see a double image of something, it's like you say you're seeing the thing, but which image is the thing?

Right.

Like, clearly there have to be. I'm somehow seeing multiple aspects of it at the same time. Again, I don't see this as any more worrisome than I'm looking at the thing, but then there's a mirror behind it. So I also see the other side of the thing through the reflection. And he would be. But wait, which of the two images, the one that you're looking at, are the one that's in the mirror, which is the. Like, a double image is a. Is a weird. Clearly there's something going on with your eye when you see a double image.

How is it different than the bent stick? Right?

35:08 Wes: I mean, Mark, are you still. You're still into direct realism?

35:13 Mark: Well, I had at least thought that he was like, this was our champion of direct realism. This was the guy that he was

35:19 Wes: at a certain point, point that Searle

35:21 Mark: was most influenced by. And even when we got Searle down, I forget exactly what Searle's equivalent of sense data was, but it was like, no, of course we don't perceive the whole thing. And he didn't understand. When we were encountering him, Dylan was saying, well, you don't have a complete access to the thing. And Searle's like, I don't know what you're talking about. With completeness, of course there's room. You know, science can, you know, find out more stuff about. We don't need completeness, but I am perceiving the thing. I'm not perceiving my image of the thing. I'm not perceiving, you know, some representation of thing. I'm perceiving the thing.

He's.

35:54 Wes: It's just a bad book.

35:55 Mark: But. And so I was hoping to get some robust defense of that in here, but maybe because Moore was so intellectually honest about it and saying, look, there are problems with all three of these versions. Like, there's a problem with direct realism, but there's a problem with indirect realism, and there's a problem with this dispositional account, which is the third.

36:14 Wes: Well, from what I read, he did have a direct realism phase that Russell talked him out of. So this is just obviously after a lot of talking with Russell and stuff. But. So I don't know if that paper you referenced, Mark, is an actual defense. It might be because apparently he did hold on to that position for quite a while, that direct realism position.

36:33 Mark: I mean, I think that's just like the refutation of idealism paper.

36:37 Wes: The second option is the sense datum is not itself part of the hand. Rather it has a relation R, which he doesn't tell us as representation. But can we assume R means representation? This is what I hate about analytic philosophy. Just use the word sense datum, not itself part of the surface of the hand that has relation R to part of the surface of the hand where R is an ultimate and unanalyzable relation. Xry means X is an appearance of Y. That's my note. I mean, that's my note on it.

37:04 Mark: It doesn't say that he says Rs. There is one and only one thing of which it is both true that it is part of the surface and that it has R to the sense datum.

37:14 Wes: That's reference, which is even more.

37:16 Mark: Yeah, but I like that he's going to say, if he's going to say really that it's primitive and unanalyzable, that he would not want to load it with any of the associations that other philosophers have brought, whether it's by reference or representation or any other word. Just say R. Yep, it's a relation. It stands for relation to me.

37:34 Wes: And he says there's grave objections to this view, which is how can we know that there is something the representation is related to? That's the thing in itself problem. Mm. Right. Like if all we have access to is this immediate appearance, then how do we know what's beyond that? How do we know? The mind, independent reality. And then the final one is actually the coolest, I think, where he quotes Mill, and I had no idea Mill ever said this, but that material things are, quote unquote, permanent possibilities of sensation. That goes to all that hypothetical stuff that I was talking about before and our pragmatism episode with Blackbird, which was a really good book.

But yeah, this idea that we actually have to think in hypotheticals, hypothetical experiences that we could have. Right. So if we want to say what it means that the cat is on the mat, we think about all the possible future interactions, you know, what would happen if I step over the cat, step on the cat, we have to cash it out in terms of future experience. So the way he puts it, what is known is a whole set of hypothetical facts, each of which is in the form, if these conditions had been fulfilled, I should have been perceiving a sense datum intrinsically related to this sense datum in this way.

The way I cash that out is as per the CAT example. But then he gives us objections.

38:55 Mark: Well, and that's from our conversation with Searle. One of the things he said, he didn't want to say that material objects are merely the things that are causally cause these perceptions in us. But he wants to say we perceive them as. As being caused by the objects. So we directly perceive something which he's just going to say is part of the object, and we perceive it as being part of the object. In other words, as being caused by the object. And we were trying to push on that, well, something like this. That also what objects really are is just mere potentialities to cause in us things.

And he wouldn't say, no, no, no, no, they're more than that, but that's at least one of the properties they have. I think he's more saying that Mill's view here is that they are really just. This is again what I'm kind of seeing as. I keep describing Quine's view of objects as theoretical entities. And one of the qualities that these theoretical entities have is that they cause the perceptions in us of the entities. You know, so what is a hand? It is whatever it is that gives me and anybody else that senses it, hand impressions.

It's handedness.

39:58 Wes: Yeah. This is the theory that I like the most. What are objections to it?

40:02 Mark: I think to both of these. Both the second and third one is just like they deny common sense. And I like common sense better. What does he actually say here?

40:10 Wes: He says there to me, this is the bottom of 57. There seem to me to be very grave objections to it. In particular, the 3A. That though in general, when I know such a fact as this is a hand, I certainly do know some hypothetical facts of the form. Blah, blah, blah. He has to repeat the whole fucking thing.

40:30 Mark: If these conditions had been fulfilled, in other words, do I know this is a hand? Do I actually know, not the simple declarative, that there is a hand, but a bunch of hypothetical.

40:40 Wes: Well, he says that in general, you know, I do know that. But even though I do know all the hypotheticals, it seems doubtful whether any conditions with regard to which I know this are not themselves conditions of the form. You know, where it's a bunch of hypotheticals. In other words, this is a regress problem and it's got to stop somewhere. So at some point it doesn't just keep cashing out in hypotheticals, it cashes out in bedrock.

41:04 Mark: That's the kind of attempt to refute something like pragmatism by saying it's not foundational. Right.

41:10 Wes: Hypothetical conditions are put in terms of something, and then we got to take those terms and say, well, what are those? And then we're going to do the hypothetical thing again with those and ad infinitum.

41:21 Mark: And so it seems to me that in a. He's turning the arguments that he said he was going to reject, like a lot of philosophers say this, and applying it to Mill's example, because he's been stridently anti foundationalist all the way up to this point. But the A argument, the a grave A objection amounts to, well, it's not foundationalist enough. Right. You're going to get into a regress problem. And to me, arguing that regress is a problem is really raising the foundationalist flag. But you have to have a place to stop.

41:57 Wes: Yeah, I think he's right, though, because we need qualia ultimately and there's elements of our experience that we just can't cash out in terms of. I haven't thought enough about this, but I'm thinking out loud. There's something appealing about what he's saying there. Even if you're anti foundational, one of

42:12 Mark: the questions is, can you have knowledge without knowing that you have knowledge? Can you know a fact without being able to also say, I know that I know that fact. And so maybe it's that you can know that there's a hand there. But to know that you know that you have a hand there may also be to know this dispositional stuff. And so animals can identify their own hands and things, but they can't say they have no knowledge of. If I were to move my hand over here, then it would look this way. And if I were to have it in the dark that you know that they have. No.

42:45 Wes: Well, I would say that's precisely what they have knowledge of. Like, because it's procedural. Like, cats do have concepts, but they don't have them in a linguistic way. They just have them in a procedural way without thinking about it.

42:59 Mark: So you could have the procedure without the theory, even though the theory is what underlies the procedure.

43:04 Wes: You know, you'll see a cat have all the sorts of. Right. Hypothetical relations to an object. They understand what the object is, but it's all behavioral.

43:11 Mark: And you wouldn't say that the theory underlies the procedure. You would say that the procedure implies some kind of theory. And that's along the lines of what Moore is saying that in fact, all these other philosophers are making the mistake that the things that I know based upon my procedure are not true or unknowable or I'm not certain about them because I can't articulate the theory. And he's saying that's baloney. That I can know with certainty all kinds of things procedurally, even though I can't articulate it with a theory that says more about why it's true from some underlying.

43:51 Wes: And this is part of what I got about out of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, that episode where, you know, when we have a concept, if you think about what you're doing and you're reading and you're going very fast word by word, and you see the word dog, you don't understand that concept by way of you don't even do it by an image, usually. Right. You don't even call into your mind the image of a dog, much less go even further with analysis or whatever. You just know that, you know that you have the feeling that you know it and that you could do whatever you need to do with that word and that concept.

Right. If I would know what sentence it works in and what sentence it doesn't. If someone said the dog took the baseball bat and hit the ball, I would. No, conceptually that doesn't work. But I have to be put to the test first. I don't have to think about all that stuff. In fact, I think about none of that. I may just think of absolutely nothing except that there's something I understand. So I like this concept of potentiality and the hypothetical. And it's at a procedural level. So that's what I do when I know. It's like knowing how to play tennis without necessarily talking yourself through every move, you just know.

And you're going to be able to respond in the right way when the circumstances greet you in a certain way. And then, yeah, then we can do the other stuff and get analytical and thoughtful and philosophical about it. But we have to start with the procedural and we can't. And I think the overall common sense argument is we can't get rid of the procedural. We can't throw that out. So if our skeptical analysis or whatever leads us to try to throw that out, then we're engaged in a self contradiction because our whole understanding is based on that.

45:30 Mark: Right. And so Moore doesn't seem to have gotten to this realization about the procedural, that he's talking about the visual almost exclusively. And in making that, talking about saying that a sense data is part of a proposition, again, that's exactly the point that Wittgenstein is arguing against, I think, is that even though we've tried to figure out that maybe he doesn't really mean that, that, you know, we've reached the end of the essay, the conclusion is really just a repetition of what he said before, that there haven't have been material things.

These propositions are quite certainly true, but the analysis, I don't know. I've given you some options. I think there are problems with all of them. I just think that other philosophers, in being so confident with their analysis and yet so dubious about the truth of these things, just have things back. So that's his thesis. And I think, Wes, you won the prize originally when we, you know, approached these articles, you said we're going to need to episodes for this. And so let's do, let's say we're not going to have a part three of this episode.

This episode, part one and two. We're on this essay and we'll have the next episode, which we'll be able to do soon because we already read it on the other essay. And I would love to throw the certainty essay in there as well because that's, because that's short now that we won't need 20 minutes of our general impressions of more. We've already done that. We've got that out of the way. We can just get right down to business. Next episode.

46:49 Wes: Yeah.

46:50 Mark: Hey, thanks for chiming in. I know many of you after this are not in your mind saying do

46:56 Wes: a whole other more episode.

46:57 Mark: But we're doing it. And then hopefully we'll spend just as long, at least on Wittgenstein for those of you that favor Wittgenstein. But we of course love to hear what else you would like us to cover. So feel free to email us, be l@martialexaminlife.com or chime in via our Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or where what have you. Thanks so much. Good night, everybody.

47:19 Wes: Good night.

47:20 Mark: Good night.