Ep. 308: Moore’s Proof of Mind-Independent Reality (Part Two)

0:08 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 308 part 2. We've just been discussing G.E. moore's proof of the external world. We're going to spend a little more time on that and move to certainty.

0:19 Seth: So you know, Moore's gone through his delineation of all these different ways of interpreting this and presented his two hand proof. He then goes on to say that he can make the same claim about the things in the past. So you can prove that things have existed in the past and not stuck in some kind of idealistic solipsism, but only present idealistic solipsism. Then he says, this is on page 168. He's given these two conclusive proofs of the existence of external objects. And he says, I'm perfectly well aware that in spite of what I've said, many philosophers will still feel I have not given any satisfactory proof.

And he says I want to say why this dissatisfaction should be felt. And he says one reason is some people understand proof of an external world is including a proof of things which I haven't attempted to prove and haven't proved. It's not quite easy to say what it is that they want proved what it is that is, such that unless they get a proof of it, they would not say that I've proved it. But I can make an approach to explain what they want by saying that if I had proved the propositions which I used as premises in my proofs, then they would perhaps admit I had proved the existence of external things.

So he's basically, I think, saying one place of dissatisfaction with the proof I've given is that I'm taking the premises of my argument as being self evident and that they want another level proof that those premises are. What's the right term sound valid? Something like that. So that's one objection that he says he's aware of.

1:46 Mark: So the premises are. Here's a hand, here's another hand. Those are premises and then the quotes that we were just reading before about. By identifying a particular physical object and asserting its existence with the normal level of certainty that one would have, when you're actually beholding it right there in front of you, then you have shown that there exist objects outside the mind.

2:09 Wes: The other premises which we've already talked about is just to say things to be met with in space are logically independent of experience. And that's just what we mean by mind independent. That's just what we mean by things outside of our minds. And then we just have to say if A physical object exists. It's a thing to be met with in space. And how do we say it exists? We just observe it, demonstrate it, do a little bit of ostension, and there it is.

2:33 Seth: So continuing on, 169, it says what they really want is not merely a proof of these two propositions, namely, here's one hand and here's another, but something like a general statement as to how any propositions of this sort may be proved. This, of course, I haven't given, and I do not believe it can be given. And if that's what's meant by the proof, the existence of external things, I do not believe that any proof of external things is possible. So, in short, what he's saying is, if what you're looking for is proof that any performative ostensive statement is true with respect to actually, probably with respect to anything, but particularly with respect to external objects, then you're going to be sorely disappointed and you might as well just sit there and suck on it.

3:19 Dylan: That external thing that you're sucking on your thumb.

3:23 Mark: Right? So to try to reconstruct what I didn't quite, you know, I only got 150 pages or so into the Some Problems in Philosophy 1911 lectures. But it is sort of a long treatment of this very problem where he's going through and considering all the different alternative epistemological accounts. But one thing at least, I got Washington. Yes, we directly apprehend sense data, but then we can also directly apprehend propositions, which is something that Hume, for instance, didn't seem to know about. It's just there's ideas, there's impressions, and then the impressions fade a little and we give them a different name, ideas.

But that's all there is in Hume's epistemological world, which he thinks is tainted. Kant and, you know, is responsible really for all this stuff that he has to argue against here. Instead, we just have to say that we somehow know the proposition. Not only am I beset with the image of the soap bubble or my hand, but I directly apprehend the proposition this hand or this soap bubble exists. Can I prove that? Well, no, but that's just something about the nature of proof. Proof has to stop somewhere. If you demand for every single proposition that there have to be an argument for it, that would give you an infinite regress.

So there just has to be some things that are basic, and this is basic.

4:44 Dylan: We brought this up with respect to the principle of non contradiction. Aristotle gives an account of this. We brought up the fact that we can even talk to one another. And that's one of the. He doesn't even call it a proof. He calls it a reason, a supporting understanding effectively. And Moore's making a similar kind of argument here. And I think that he would say the same thing about causality, that the kind of mistake that Hume is making about causality is just conjunction. That he would say, well, causality is what we mean when we say things are happening right in the way in which things not contradicting themselves is an element about the way in which we interact with and understand the world. So is causality. And there isn't a proof for it.

5:27 Mark: Right. If in order to prove any causal statement you had to actually perceive the antecedent and the consequent and then perceive them a bunch of times, we would never perceive that.

5:36 Seth: Right.

5:37 Mark: In the case of physical objects causing the qualia that we have of them, by definition, we can't. We have no direct apprehension of those physical objects. We only directly apprehend the sense data. So we never can get that causal connection going. So that either we just have no idea that physical objects exist or Hume's demand that this is what causality is is wrong, is unnecessarily restrictive.

6:00 Seth: Yeah. What Moore is also doing here, and he gets into it in the next sentences, he's making a strong claim about the relationship between knowledge and proof. And he's saying, you might object that if I can't prove that I know something, then I don't know it. And he's saying, no, I know this thing. Now I can't tell you how I know it other than every single living experience of most of every day of my life and every day of your life. And if that's not good enough for you, well, then, you know, tough cookies. But just read the bottom of 169 onto 170 says you know, it's not merely that they want a proof of something I haven't proved.

If I can't give such extra proofs, then the proofs I have given are not conclusive. He says, I think this is a mistake. They would say, if you cannot prove your premise that here is one hand and here's another, then you do not know it. But you yourself admitted that if you did not know it, then your proof was not conclusive, therefore your proof is not conclusive. The view is that if I cannot prove such things as these, I do not know them. And he says, I think this view that Kant was expressing in the sentence which I quoted at the beginning, when he implies that so long as we have no proof of the existence of external things, their existence must be accepted on faith, he means to say that if I cannot prove there is a hand here, I must accept it as a matter of faith.

He says, this is very common among philosophers. But this view, I think, can be shown to be wrong and shown only by the use of premises which are not known to be true unless we do know the existence of external things. I can know things which I cannot prove. And among the things which I certainly did know I could not prove them, were the two premises of my proofs, AKA here's a hand, here's another hand. So he says, if you're dissatisfied with these proofs merely on the ground that I did not know their premises, I have no good reason for their dissatisfaction.

7:42 Mark: Of course, that's a misrepresentation of what the argument is. It's not that the two premises are, here's a hand, here's another hand. Therefore, no, it's the whole connecting tissue

7:50 Seth: that we already read the quotes of ostension. It's external, it's my hand, it's somehow connected.

7:55 Mark: Yeah. So that's the thing that you should potentially doubt.

7:59 Seth: He's just saying you're doubting direct experience. I don't think we should doubt it.

8:04 Dylan: And part of that is, and you're pointing it here, we talked about it from the previous paper as well, is that he's saying that the problem is in the analysis, that I can know something even if I can't prove it. He's denying that proof equals knowledge, that there is no knowledge without proof. He's saying, I have knowledge, but I may not have a satisfactory analysis of that knowledge.

8:28 Wes: Here's another way of getting at it, an analogy to Kant to show what he's doing differently, what he changes. This may be a bit of a stretch in my interpretation, but, you know, for Kant, what are the grounds for the possibility? We know we have coherent experience. That's part of the transcendental argument. We don't just say observe the. I think we observe the fact that we have experience. And experience, we can derive a lot of things from that. The conditions for the possibility of experience to be derived include causality, unity, plurality, whatever, you know, all the big categories and space and time.

So Kant thinks that you can look at the coherence of experience and derive all these mental faculties or aspects of the mental faculties and categories. And Moore is saying, well, actually we can also say a condition for the possibility of experience is the Fact that these representations that we make a distinction between what's logically independent of experience and not. Right. And we do that within experience and experience can't be coherent without that distinction. And it's not enough to say that the basis of that distinction is purely subjective.

That would undermine the very distinction like we can't have experiences unless this element of mind independence makes itself felt.

9:45 Dylan: Yeah.

9:45 Wes: Which I think is very powerful.

9:47 Dylan: I agree. And I like the way you link him up with Kant effectively as pointing to the external world as being in a condition for the possibility of experience.

9:58 Wes: Yeah. It's facts, it's pretty common sense. But it's a journey to return back to that.

10:05 Mark: So I think we could transition to certainty here. And we have a nice. So Dylan, you mentioned in comparing whether we can doubt, is there a hand here? Maybe there's something like that that are just foundational. You mentioned the law of non contradiction. There's an obvious disanalogy though, which is what he starts off with in the certainty thing that like there is a hand. He starts off, I'm at present, as you can all see in a room, not in the open air. I'm standing up, I'm not lying down, I have clothes on. I'm speaking in a fairly loud voice. I'm not singing or whispering. I have some sheets of paper in my hand. He gives a bunch of things like this and then wants to characterize what is it about all those things that. Which are kind of like there's a hand. Those are all contingent. Right. Unlike the law of non contradiction, which.

10:51 Wes: Well, there's going to be three things and the first thing is they're contingent. But yeah.

10:54 Mark: Yes.

10:55 Wes: Well, that's when you know, you're like, oh boy, this is going to be another rough one. He's talking about being clothed. It's like, oh my God. But yeah, like Mark, I like this paper.

11:05 Dylan: Ultimately it feels like it could have been like a third as long and it's not that long.

11:11 Wes: One of the really interesting things that he's going to do here. And again, also important, right, the traditional distinctions between necessary truths like 2 plus 2 equals 4 and so on and so forth. Or in Descartes, clear and distinct ideas that we can know with certainty and then all the contingent stuff that we can't know with certainty. And here he's going to say that actually doesn't line up. We can actually be certain of contingent experiences. So that's part of the overall argument. But he's going to make a lot of distinctions to get us there.

But the first thing that he does is say that contingency doesn't imply that it was possible, that the proposition was false. Because if we know P to be false in the present, right in the past. So you can say of my iPhone is on the table in front of me. And I could say, well, it might have been the case that it wasn't. That's what makes it contingent. It's not a necessary truth. But once it is on the table in front of me now, and I know it's on the table, then it's no longer possible that it's false. So possibility and contingency come apart at that moment.

Is that the right characterization of that?

12:18 Seth: Well, yeah.

12:19 Dylan: I mean, the way you framed it also makes it clear how it's related to non contradiction. Contingency and possibility are linked to one another, but that doesn't mean that there aren't definite relations. And his sort of exhaustive discussion is you can get contradictories that are dependent on the contingency, but that are contradictory in a way that means that they're not possible, they're not logically possible. He's sort of analyzing the contingency to reveal that there are logical dependencies in them, even though there is contingencies. And philosophers may make a mistake. And I have to find exactly the example. And maybe, Wes, you have it in the front of your mind of asserting that there are more possibilities available just because of contingency, that anything goes just because that things are contingent.

13:09 Wes: I left out kind of the first step of the argument, which maybe we should state.

13:12 Mark: Can I give up one preface? So I said, this is from 1959. I mean, that's his publication date according to the PDF that we're looking at. But he died in October 1958. And so I'm googling around and it looks like this was written 1941, so only a couple years after Proof of the External World. The reason I bring this up is I was trying to read in that maybe he's more on board at this point with the ordinary language philosophy thing, right? He'd been interacting with Wittgenstein even though Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was not published until after his death.

They were very much aware of each other's work from my understanding. So in talking about, he leans heavily in this paper on like, how do we use the word certainty? What is it? You know, it looks more like, I don't know if you guys saw this as distinctly different in any way from Proof of the External World in terms of its emphasis on ordinary language as opposed to common sense.

14:01 Wes: Right, yeah, I agree with you, which I'm not a fan of myself. But I think it's not overbearing in this. Like the way he begins, you know, he always has these interesting, ultra precise way of putting things. Right. So in the beginning when he says, tells us what contingent means, which is that it might have been false. Right. But the way he puts it is the negation or contradictory of the proposition asserted is not a self contradictory proposition. So that if you say it doesn't follow from the fact that if I'm standing up, the negation of that I'm not standing up is not a self contradictory proposition, but that doesn't mean we can't know them to be true.

Right. So from the fact that it's contingent that I'm standing up, it doesn't follow that I can't know that I'm standing up. And then the second step to the proof is contingency doesn't imply that it was possible that the proposition was false because of the previous step which I showed is that I could know it. That's false. It's not possible.

14:53 Mark: Well, and this is why I wanted to say this is kind of like in his treatment of possibility, it is very much unlike Frege or Russell or you know, a very, a pseudo mathematical thing and very much like later Wittgenstein in ordinary language, because it seems like either something is possible or it's not. And it doesn't matter who says it, it's just, it's a metaphysical claim, you know, it's a logical claim, I should say, such that if something is not possible, that means that there would be some contradiction that would occur. And he wants to say that saying whether something is possible depends on the speaker. So I could still actually give an interpretation of that. Well, if the speaker already knows that it is happened, that it is true, then it's not possible for that speaker to truthfully say that it could be false.

15:39 Wes: There's a temporal element, right. So it's possible it could have been false. I mean, it might have been the case that it's not right now from the past perspective, but once you get to the present, it's no longer. It is possible that I'm not standing up because, you know, you're standing up. It's not possible that you're not standing up.

15:55 Seth: There's a temporal element and there's a positional element. I don't know if it anticipates or if it's influenced by. Because I don't remember the history, but I kind of alluded to this in the previous episode. It's like speech act, you know, he's talking about something performative. He doesn't call it that, but he's talking about being cognizant of the assertions being made by an individual, by a particular person in a set of circumstances. And that's important. And he says, you know, we want to say there's a sense in which when we're trying to find, quote, unquote, absolute truth and absolute knowledge and certainty, you say, like, oh, well, the only things we can know with certainty are the things that fall under the law of non contradiction, typically called tautologies or statements of identity.

I don't remember what the. All the different terms, you know, like, oh, you can't have a square circle or something like that. And that's looking for knowledge. That's a positional and atemporal, which is fine. It's fine to talk about things that we know regardless of where we are or what position we're in or whatever. But that doesn't exclude the possibility of knowledge about things which don't fall under that rubric. It's again, that same thing of because there's a possibility, because it's not completely locked out by the logical structure of the proposition or what have you, then somehow we're afraid to talk about knowledge in that context.

And I think he's right in saying that that seems like a wrong move.

17:22 Wes: The next step here is to say that, you know, often when we use possibility in the. In my brackets in my notes, in the present tense, we're doing it to assert our own ignorance. So if it's about the future, right, that's one thing. It's possible that I'll be sitting down. Possible I won't be sitting down. But in the present, it's really about asserting our own ignorance, which is quite different. This is just to show it doesn't follow from the contingency of proposition P that it's possible that it's not the case. It's true that every contingent proposition that is not known to be true by someone, it's true that it's possible that it's false and it breaks modal logic

18:01 Mark: because it should be that if P is true, therefore P is possible. Like if you learned about the logical possibility. But he wants to say, according to ordinary language, if I say it is true that I'm standing in this room right now, it would be at least really weird to Say it's possible. I'm standing in this room right now because that implies that you don't really know.

18:21 Dylan: Well, and I think related to that, he's clarifying that this lack of absolutely knowing is not the same thing as saying something isn't true. So just because you don't absolutely know something doesn't mean that it's false.

18:35 Wes: We're on 1.2. Right. So contingency, second step.

18:39 Dylan: The third thing was the one about absolutely. About being absolutely certain. And I thought that's where you jumped to. Because the second one was from the fact that things are contingent. It does not follow in the case of any single one of them that it was possible that the proposition in question was false.

18:54 Wes: So contingency is compatible with absolute certainty. That's what we get to in three. So he's shown that. And then he brings up the objection. Well, the difference between knowing and knowing with absolute certainty.

19:06 Dylan: Yes.

19:06 Wes: And he's basically just going to say at least in some cases, if I don't know with absolute certainty, then I don't know. And then he just says in any case. So he doesn't really get into discussion. He just says in any case, I'm going to be concerned with the uses of know in which knowledge implies absolute certainty. So let's, let's move on is what he says. So knowledge of absolutely certain for necessary truths is different. He says, and he doesn't deny that and that only necessary truths can be known in that specific sense. And then he gets into certainty of these distinctions between.

And this is where it really gets hairy. But four main types of expressions in which we. This is like the ordinary language thing that Mark was talking about. I feel certain, I'm certain that I know for certain that it is certain that I feel certain that P. Right. I can feel certain of something, but it still turned out that it's not true. But if I know something with certainty, it can't be the case that it's going to turn out not to be true.

20:06 Mark: Right. We wouldn't even use that expression, I feel certain that I'm wearing clothing right now. Like under what circumstances would you actually. I mean, I guess somebody has challenged it.

20:14 Wes: Well, he brings up a blind person.

20:16 Mark: Right.

20:17 Seth: His examples are actually, I think, future tense. He says I feel certain that so and so will come. But he didn't. And he says that's naturally used in a way. It's not self contradictory. Because when you say I feel certain, you're not making an assertion about knowledge versus I know for Certain or it is certain.

20:36 Mark: It's good that he's making this distinction here because it sounded like in the last paper, like, this is a hand. I'm certain this is a hand. I mean, it seems like that's a case of feeling certain. Right. But he wants to say, no, that there is some difference between.

20:52 Seth: That was my point of talking about. He doesn't use an example. I feel certain that I have a hand. He says, I feel certain that something will happen in the future and that it doesn't. So I'm wondering about that.

21:03 Wes: Yeah, I think it comes back to that temporal thing again where you might feel certain that something's going to happen and it doesn't. But if it's like I'm looking at my hand, I know it and therefore I know it with certainty. But go ahead.

21:14 Seth: So he's not saying, I feel certain this is a hand. He says, here is a hand. It is certain that here's a hand.

21:22 Mark: Okay, I don't know if I was saying this right before, but if you were being critical of that paper, you might say you say that you're certain that you have a hand, but you merely feel certain. And it sounds like you're saying, well, the really strong feeling of certainty is all there is to certainty. And so here he's clarifying, no, no, no. You could feel very strongly that you're certain and still be wrong. So the question then is then, well, how then did he know in the previous paper?

21:46 Wes: The next step is, you know that there's this ambiguity in when you say I am certain. That's a special case because it's ambiguous between feel and know and can lead to fallacious reasoning, which he doesn't get into an example of that. I think it comes out in the rest of this. But the next step is to say that it is certain. Seems unlike the other examples. The other uses to be context independent, even though it requires that someone know it. Right. To say it is certain requires that somebody knows it to be certain. We can get into the details of that, but it turns out to be context dependent because someone else could know it and yet truly say it is not certain. So that's my big summary of this chunk. So let's go. It doesn't make sense, I guess, until we go into it.

22:29 Seth: The key is that when you say it is certain, there's no Persona attached to it, so to speak. And then he says, if you say it is certain that what's implied by that is that somebody knows that it's true. But that is still, as he says, saying it is certain does not necessarily bring you back to I am certain because it is certain is a statement about any particular or multiple people could

22:55 Dylan: know that it's true and ought to

22:57 Seth: know and ought to know that it's true.

22:58 Wes: But then he's going to say that, that in fact, in spite of appearances, that's what it seems to be the case. But then, in spite of appearances, it is certain that he will turn out to be relative to the person who says it.

23:10 Dylan: Even when they're saying it is certain, then that implies a kind of objectivity that everyone should have access to. It's still a claim from the point of view of the person doing the speaking.

23:22 Wes: Because someone else could say that it's not certain.

23:24 Seth: Right. So he says here in the middle of 265. The fact is then that all that follows from somebody knows that P is true is that somebody could say with truth it is certain that P. It does not follow that more than one person could. Nor does it follow that there are not some who could say with truth it is not certain that P2 different people, blah, blah, blah, right?

23:44 Mark: So truth is relative.

23:46 Wes: So in spite of appearances, it is certain that P is relative to the person who says it.

23:50 Seth: Yes, if anybody asserts it is certain that P. Part of what he's asserting is that he himself knows that P is true, so that even if many other people do not know it, yet his assertion will be false if he himself does not know it.

24:00 Wes: So the upshot of that in the next part is that I can't say something is not certain just because I don't know it. Someone else might know it. And similarly, I can't say something is possible because I don't know it to be false. Someone else may know it to be false. In other words, he's trying to get from knowledge, and this is certain stuff. It is certain stuff to the concept of possibility and this idea that philosophers have had that if I don't know something not to be true, I can

24:31 Mark: say so if I don't know Hitler's dead. That's the example he gives. I could say it's possible Hitler is alive, but really I should say, since other people probably know for sure whether he's dead or not, it may be possible. It seems like you, if you say if it's relative, then I should be able to say just out of my own ignorance, it's possible, but we understand. I'm just talking about my own level of knowledge, not about the really about the truth of the matter, just because

24:55 Wes: I don't know it's false, it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't. So it doesn't mean that it's possible that it's true.

25:01 Seth: I'm sure people listening are completely confused. I don't know that this is going to help, but. Bottom of 266, first column.

25:08 Dylan: Yeah. To sum up this digression. Yeah.

25:09 Wes: You should read that paragraph to mercifully

25:12 Mark: put an end to this digression.

25:14 Seth: Yes. To sum up this digression, what I have said about the consequences of the fact that all those seven propositions with which I opened this lecture were contingent. So I'm sitting down, I'm wearing clothes, I'm in a room with windows, et cetera, that this fact does not entail the consequence that I did not when I made them, know them to be true. In other words, there's nothing about the fact that they're simply contingent that means that I don't know that they're true, that it does not entail the consequence that I could then have said with truth about any of them. It is possible that this is false. In other words, if I know them to be true, even if they're contingent, I can't say with truth that it's possible that they're not true.

25:51 Wes: So contingency does not entail one, not knowing, two, possible falsity, and three, lack of certainty.

25:59 Seth: Right. And it does not entail the consequence that I could then have said with truth about any of them. It is not absolutely certain that this is true. Now, he's not saying that he's proven that he can say with certainty. He's just saying, you can't tell me I haven't.

26:10 Wes: So, and then the next. Moving on to two. So we're going through what the seven propositions have in common that he earlier mentioned. And we've done contingency, which is, I think, the roughest one. The second thing is that this is similar to what's going on in the proof of the external world. They imply the existence of an external world. So that if I know them, these seven propositions, then the existence of this external world is certain because my knowledge, if I know them, I know them with certainty, and they imply the existence of the external world that I know the external world with. And the way you know the existence of the external world, he just says, means logical independence of the mental, just like in the proof of the external world. And then three is evidence of the

26:51 Mark: senses, which is another pedantic little Point of if you say based on the evidence of my senses, I'm not deceived. But then if you were deceived, it actually wouldn't. Like if you're dreaming, it wouldn't be the evidence of your senses. It would only seem to be the evidence of your senses. In other words, your eyes are actually closed, they're not gathering. So your dream imagery.

27:14 Seth: I thought he was actually introducing this particularly as a wedge against that dream defense or dream attack.

27:21 Wes: Well, he's going to use it in part four.

27:24 Seth: Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

27:25 Wes: Because our evidence of our senses, someone's going to, the skeptic is going to come back and say, well, we don't know. You can't just say it's evidence of the senses. It might be evidence of the senses, it might be a dream.

27:35 Dylan: Just like in number two, where he's saying things like a proposition which implies the existence of my body does for that reason alone, with this use of terminology, imply the existence of a world external to my mind. And this is what we were talking about before, that kind of pointing. And here it doesn't say that it's because of the evidence of my senses that I know that I'm standing up or I don't have any clothes. But in all seven cases, what I said was at least partly based on the then present evidence of my senses.

28:06 Wes: So evidence of the senses is not conclusive necessarily, and it's not the only evidence.

28:11 Mark: So this is, you know, a short way of saying what I was saying before about how the evidence of our senses is only giving us direct apprehension of the sensory material in front of us. There has to be something on top of that that is somehow related to that we holding the sense data, but it's actually us grasping the proposition that this actually exists.

28:30 Wes: And by the way, just to reiterate, you know, when he says these propositions imply the external world, so if I know them, the existence of the external world is certain. He hasn't proved that I know them yet, or he hasn't shown that I know them, however you want to put it. And that's going to come out in four. And to show that he knows them, he's going to have to deal with the whole dreaming.

28:47 Seth: Right. 268. In other words, those seven propositions of mine seem to be as good test cases as could have been chosen for deciding between what seems to me to be the only real alternatives, namely the alternative that none of us ever knows for certain, the existence of anything external to his own mind and the alternative that all of us, millions of us, constantly do. And it was because they seemed to me to be as good test cases as could be chosen. That's why I chose them. So how do we decide between these two alternatives? I actually think this is a brilliant

29:18 Mark: move, which I think we've summed up several times before, which is just that. Which is more likely, right? That these things that seem really obvious really are the case or that I might be dreaming?

29:32 Wes: What he wants to do is he wants the license going from the particular to the general, right? So if I know one of these,

29:37 Seth: that's a really great frame, Wes, by the way.

29:39 Wes: Yeah, if I know one of them, then everyone knows all of the propositions and every other proposition that is of a kind of those propositions. Because it's not going to work unless you can generalize. And the next step is the dreaming. You know, which he's going to say, this is my high level summary. It's true that we don't know we're not dreaming. We can't know that we're standing up. And that goes even if we are and that we think we are in the dream, right? So we're having a dream in which we think we're standing up and we are standing up, we're sleeping standing up. That doesn't mean we know that we're standing up.

30:09 Mark: True belief is not justified true belief.

30:11 Wes: Yeah, it's got to be justified true belief. But that cuts both ways. So if I do know I'm standing up, then I know that I'm not dreaming. So the question is, you know, if we can get some other way around this and say I do know I'm standing up, then we get out of that. Like I said, we reach escape velocity when we break out of the dream bubble.

30:31 Dylan: He ties this back to me.

30:33 Seth: Evidence of the senses.

30:34 Dylan: Yeah, evidence of the senses and Contradictoriness in the second column on 269, you know, he says, you know, I have evidence of my senses about not about dreaming or standing up. One thing that seems to me to be quite clear about our use of this phrase, evidence of my senses, namely that if a man at a given time is only dreaming that he is standing up, that it follows that he has not at that time the evidence of his senses in favor of that proposition. To say Jones last night was only dreaming that he was standing up and yet all the time he had the evidence of his senses that he was is to say something self contradictory.

But those philosophers who say it is possible that I am now dreaming certainly mean to also say that it is possible that I am only dreaming that I am standing up. And this view we now see entails that it is possible that I have not the evidence of my senses that I am. If, therefore, they are right, it follows that it is not certain even that I have the evidence of my senses that I am. It follows that it is not certain that. That I have the evidence of my senses for anything at all.

31:39 Wes: Yeah. And the way he's going to get around that is to say, if that's true, if what seem to be sensory experiences and dreams are indistinguishable from real ones, then I don't know that I've ever even had a dream. Right. I might have only dreamed that I've had dreams. I can't know that I've actually had dreams. And that falls out as a motivating factor for skepticism. Skepticism can undermine its own motivations.

32:07 Seth: Another way to say it is it would be meaningless to say that you're having a dream which in every way, shape and form reflects having lived wake experience. Without being able to say, I have had lived wake experience. I can characterize it. And then I can say that I'm having a dream that is exactly like that.

32:26 Dylan: Yeah. The fact that you make the distinction proves that there's a distinction to be made, even if you don't know which side of the distinction you're on.

32:34 Wes: He then admits that the premise is nevertheless true. I can't really know with certainty that any particular experience is not a dream. But that doesn't mean that I can get to the overall skeptical conclusion. So it doesn't follow that just because some dream images are exactly like sensory experiences that all of them could be indistinguishable from sensory experiences. He relies on this idea of comparison to memory over time. I think it's better to talk about coherence. Right. How do we end up knowing things are errors or dreams or whatever? We detect contradictions within experience. We detect incoherence over time across experience. But we know that we can do that. We know that even if you start out assuming the genius or whatever, we still know that those distinctions are successfully happening within that matrix.

33:24 Seth: Yeah. There's an interesting move there too. 271 he says, Let me grant the premise that it's possible, therefore, that all the sensory experiences I am now having are mere dream images. And it might be thought that the validity of this step could be supported to some extent by appeal to matters of fact. Though only, of course, at the cost of some Sort of inconsistency, which I've just pointed out. And he says, when they say you may be dreaming, they're not making a claim about the empirical facts of this particular case. They're making a logical claim.

It's logically possible that you might be dreaming. They're not saying because of this fact or that fact or because of this, they can't point to anything specific, because if they do, then they'll get caught in the contradiction we just described. So he says, okay, great, let's grant that it's logically possible. And he says, can any reason be given for saying that it is logically possible? So, yeah, lots of things are logically possible, but so far as I know, nobody ever has. And I don't know how anybody ever could. How could anybody prove that it's logically possible that I'm dreaming?

Because that's the only claim you can make. You can't counter me on my experience. You can't counter me on my sense data. All you can do is say it's logically possible that I'm dreaming.

34:35 Dylan: Well, I just want to read the end of that second to last paragraph, which is right where you were just finishing off. You said, seth, so far as I know, nobody ever has. And I don't know how anybody ever could. And he says, it's so long as this is not done. My argument, quote, I know that I am standing up, and therefore I know that I am not dreaming, remains at least as good as his. You don't know that you're not dreaming, and therefore you don't know that you're standing up. Yeah, and I don't think I've ever seen an argument expressly directed to show that this is not.

35:06 Wes: I want to just fill in one more little piece to this, which is that, you know, my memory, conjunction of my memories of my immediate past with my current sensory experiences are sufficient to enable me to know that I'm not dreaming. Right. But someone might say, well, how do you know you're not dreaming the coherence? And at that point he's saying, well, that's on you to show that that's possible, that we could even do that, that we could dream the coherence. At that point, it's not clear that it's possible that we could dream the coherence. Right?

And so you really have to do some work to show that it's possible with that one. All the other stuff he'll grant, it'll say, grant, it's possible that for any given experience it might be a dream experience, but this is more complicated. This whole idea of coherence over time is much more complicated. And it's not clear that it's possible. You have to show me that it's possible and no one has. And if you don't, can't show that, then I know I'm standing up is just as good as saying, I don't know.

36:04 Dylan: It's better. Yeah, because what he's done is he's taken the teeth out of the skeptical argument by saying that it doesn't have any more power than the non skeptical version. That's sort of what he's doing with his mark. You didn't call it direct realism. It was his strong realist argument. It's basically saying the strong realist argument or the skeptical argument isn't any better than the strong realist argument. He spent a lot of time making a kind of equivalence between them saying, yes, I admit that I don't know a bunch of stuff, but look, what you're saying, you don't know doesn't have any more strength to it.

36:36 Wes: Right.

36:37 Dylan: It's not any more powerful. You haven't won anything by doing that. Yeah. So therefore you have to make a judgment about which one you're going to pick on different grounds.

36:46 Mark: So, yes, I've been waiting for you to say the word pragmatism here.

36:49 Wes: Well, before you do that, I just want to say the way I was putting it before is that the possibility of local error does not imply the possibility of systematic or global error. So you can say all you want that a particular sense of experience might be a dream. But that doesn't mean you can say everything is a dream.

37:04 Seth: Dream.

37:04 Wes: You can't just utter the words, it is possible. It's not even clear that it's possible. But yeah, pragmatism comes in.

37:11 Mark: Yeah, But I do feel like Moore is arguing here specifically against local error. He doesn't want to admit that it's possible right now when it's just so clear to me that I'm actually standing up and I'm not dreaming that I really could be that.

37:27 Seth: No, no, no, he's not arguing against local error, but he is arguing, as Dylan said earlier, in favor of local truth.

37:33 Mark: How's that not the same thing?

37:35 Seth: I absolutely can make mistakes, but I absolutely know things to be true all the time.

37:41 Wes: I could be dreaming at any particular moment, but I find out, I always find out. And so I find out that I knew. So the example, I know that I'm standing up that might turn out to be dreaming and fall apart, but that's local to a particular time. Eventually I'm going to know whether it's a dream or not, and I'm going to know whether I knew that I was standing up.

38:02 Dylan: Being certain is not the same thing as saying, I am definitely not wrong.

38:08 Seth: Being certain is not the same thing as saying, I'm infallible, I'm not in

38:12 Dylan: error, this paper in particular, but the other ones are wrapped around undermining that equivalence.

38:18 Wes: Yeah, to say, I know that I'm standing up and therefore certain of it, that involves justified true belief, which happens over time. So it can't just be in that moment, that I have sense data in the moment. And therefore.

38:32 Mark: Well, I guess we'll see whether you know what Wittgenstein makes of this. And I think having actually read these three papers, we're in so much better position than many people who have written books, written commentaries on On Certainty that did not bother to go and read more papers, you know, So I think we'll be in good position to even say whether Wittgenstein is characterizing more adequately, especially

38:55 Wes: given the Stroll book. Something like more than half of what's in of the little aphorisms in On Certainty are directly about Moore, Moore's proof of the external world in particular. And then some enormous percentage of them refers to the whole. This is a hand. We would have been lost if we hadn't done these papers.

39:19 Mark: But that is Avrum Stroll. His book is called Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty.

39:23 Dylan: There's also the Routledge overview on On Certainty. Has whole sections of it summarizing more.

39:32 Wes: Yeah, I'm going to try to get to some of that. I love the Routledge guides.

39:36 Seth: Maybe after this we should also just throw in Gettier's Is Justified True Belief Knowledge after this to keep the ball rolling.

39:43 Mark: Well, that's been recommended a lot of times. Another thing that's been long on our list, at least my list has been William James Essays in Radical Empiricism. I'm really interested to see. You know, I know we were just saying, well, then we pushed the burden of proof to the skeptic on practical grounds. Like, just think about how topsy turvy your world would be if you did not accept that we're not dreaming. You know, when we make these, even on individual claims that, you know, we are very certain in many individual circumstances and justifiably so.

So that sounds very pragmatic. You know, we're making this decision on pragmatic grounds, you know, that there's still a theoretical possibility I could be dreaming, but on practical grounds I can rule it out. But then clearly there are other things Moore would want to say about the pragmatist theory of truth. That is actually what I think more than the idealist thing. Last episode I was pointing at an offhand comment that Moore made in the first paper that we talked about there about is it completely true or is it only partially true? And I guess there was something in the idealist that allowed us to say that no, no, no, no statement is completely true.

And in fact we see in this paper like when you say something is possible, well that's relative to the speaker and the speaker's current state of knowledge. So in that case you could say the statement in itself cannot be completely true, you know, without specifying these conditions. But the pragmatist William James view of truth specifically is notorious. Maybe more thought it was beneath contempt. I don't know why he doesn't feel the need in anything that I've seen to specifically say like Bradley is worth my responding to his idealism. But James is pragmatism.

But the idea of something being the statement that I'm standing up is true insofar forth right, it's true insofar as no experiment in the future will ever contradict it. Like no, in this paper it just looks like it is true. I'm certain of it and I don't have to say it is true until something disproves it or something like that. The pragmatist would say, yeah, it does

41:38 Dylan: make me wonder if he ever engaged with like Dewey or James because by the time you get to here, I'm feeling like they have a lot of overlap. And Dewey is another example of someone who was a Hegelian idealist who gave

41:52 Seth: it up, found religion.

41:54 Mark: Any other final thought. I mean, I guess I'll repeat and since I've discovered this some problems in philosophy book that was just referred to enough in the other things that we were looking at. I feel like if you have any sentiment toward objectivism and you found our account of these three papers to be confusing and well, I want a more definitive smackdown of all things Kantian, an idealist in favor of common sense. I would say absolutely, go read more. It'll just give you a much better version of what Ayn Rand in her epistemology was trying to do.

Like a just a much more educated, much more, you know, somebody who actually read Kant. Even though I'm sure if we got into it we would have picky things to say about how he's not characterizing Kant that well either. But I think I might have characterized more last time as not having at least what I could see as an overall worldview, unlike Wittgenstein who at least has this language of language games and things like this. But I think the reputation Moore has for just common sense, common sense holds pretty well and it doesn't make him a dogmatist and it doesn't make him a jackass and just be flippant about dismissing skepticism and idealism and all the other things throughout these papers and these lectures very carefully considers them.

It's just he's very nicely modest in the strength of his conclusions, but yet allows us to feel like, you know, especially if you're a beginner in philosophy and feel like why is it Descartes or Hume or why are these people asserting these things that they're turning my world upside down. Like this is a way of fighting back against philosophy as a whole.

43:36 Seth: Yeah, I would agree. He's not just a dogmatic crank or it's a very nuanced and very considered but also making a strength out of our experience over against reason driven possibility, driven skepticism. It was really great.

43:52 Wes: I mean I think we always get mind independent reality back in philosophy. This is what Descartes is doing, right? He's entertaining. He's doing a reduction skepticism. Let's assume it's true. Then what happens? I can get everything back, but the God part is very weak. So if you can cut out that middleman and just do it straight from the coherence of experience to mind independent reality made an enormous improvement.

44:18 Mark: One of these articles was comparing him to Merleau-Ponty and you know, so I'd like to do more of him of course, but I think we'll, by finishing this up with the Wittgenstein, we'll be able to complete the lens that we're working on. I don't know how to put it. I feel like this is a distinctly different thing from even what I associated as like Russell's empiricism, you know, sort of the latter-day Humeanism or whatever. And yet different from phenomenology and different from pragmatism. So I'd love to read several more things from like this exact time period that, you know, 1900 to 1940 we got to read.

44:52 Wes: Bradley as well.

44:53 Mark: Yes, absolutely. Thanks everybody. I hope you enjoyed this. There will not be a part three to this. I think we've had quite enough. But there'll be goodies for supporters soon. If not already, be sure to reach out to us and let us know what else you'd like us to cover or any comments you have have on this. You can do that through the website partialexamlife.com through Facebook, through Twitter, through Instagram. Many ways. Good night, everybody.

45:19 Seth: Good night.

45:20 Wes: Good night.