Philosophy, rationality, certainty -- you scared yet?
Philosophy is the investigation into what rationality is, whether in belief or in judgment or in action. It follows that philosophy is the most dangerous subject, for getting the answer wrong to the question 'What is it to be reasonable?' is the most catastrophic of errors. Nowadays there are more and more philosophy (and English and anthro and socio and psych, etc.) classes where you will be told the wrong answer and be required to memorize it for the final exam. For instance, that reason is only one among an infinity of 'perspectives' among which people should be free to choose whatever suits them; that it is no more than the arbitrary rules governing the 'conversation' which happens to be going on at a particular time and place; that it is only another male or upper-class or European weapon for oppressing females or the poor or the Third World. I think these global put-downs of rationality can be countered without begging the question, that is, without assuming that reason is a good thing in order to prove that it is.
G.E. Moore was delivering the Howison Lecture in Wheeler Auditorium, which had a handsome coffered ceiling inset with glass panels. Giving a local angle to his defence of common sense, Moore declared that among the things he knew there and then was that light from the sun from streaming through the roof. Most in the audience were aware, however, that the glass panels were diffusers for electrical illumination; the roof of the building was solid and opaque. Someone had the temerity to point this out to Moore in the question period. He responded 'Oh dear me!' and went on to the next question.
Some morals may be drawn from this debacle. One, which Wittgenstein has emphasized, is saying that you know, even emphatically and when you are eminent, does not add anything to the validity of your utterance. Another is that it is people who are certain, not the propositions they contemplate. A third is that, usually, certainty is not a status that people have to strive to attain; it is, rather, the condition in which we naturally find ourselves, nine times out of ten -- the default state of the human computer, as it were.
Snippet from Uncorrected Papers: Diverse Philosophical Dissents, by Wallace Matson.
G.E. Moore was delivering the Howison Lecture in Wheeler Auditorium, which had a handsome coffered ceiling inset with glass panels. Giving a local angle to his defence of common sense, Moore declared that among the things he knew there and then was that light from the sun from streaming through the roof. Most in the audience were aware, however, that the glass panels were diffusers for electrical illumination; the roof of the building was solid and opaque. Someone had the temerity to point this out to Moore in the question period. He responded 'Oh dear me!' and went on to the next question.
Some morals may be drawn from this debacle. One, which Wittgenstein has emphasized, is saying that you know, even emphatically and when you are eminent, does not add anything to the validity of your utterance. Another is that it is people who are certain, not the propositions they contemplate. A third is that, usually, certainty is not a status that people have to strive to attain; it is, rather, the condition in which we naturally find ourselves, nine times out of ten -- the default state of the human computer, as it were.
Snippet from Uncorrected Papers: Diverse Philosophical Dissents, by Wallace Matson.