[The following is, admittedly, 99% drawn from Ayn Rand. After thirty
years of reading, and wandering all over the religious and
philosophical MAP, I have decided that, on the ABC fundamentals I
cover below, she was right. I have larger disagreements with her on
ethics and politics. -JBH]
INTRODUCTION
What is philosophy?- The word "philosophy" comes from Greek
roots
meaning "the love of wisdom." Philosophy is the effort to
answer
those questions that everyone MUST answer.
What is real, what is not real, what kind of world am I living in? - Metaphysics.
How can I know what's true? How do I separate the true from the
false? - Epistemology. (Includes logic, mathematics, and the methods
of science.)
What should I do? What's good, what's right? What's it all for? -
Ethics.
How do I deal with other people? How can we live together in peace,
what should we fight over, and how shall we fight? - Politics.
What's beautiful, what's essential, what's meaningful, what's
insightful, what's inspiring? - Aesthetics.
Everybody MUST have and use SOME answers to these questions, to live
their lives. Lots of people get their answers by just "picking
them
up"... they hear answers from other people, but never think too
hard
about them. The love of wisdom is what motivates the effort to make
all your answers consistent with each other, to know where they come
from and what they are based on.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Everything else in philosophy is based on the answers in metaphysics
and epistemology: "What do I know?" and "How do I know
it?"
What can you know for CERTAIN? Exactly three things. (1) You exist.
(2) You are conscious, you are aware of something. (3) Whatever may
exist, whatever thing you may be aware of, it is what it is, it has
the characteristics that it has. To be, is to be something in
particular; existence is identity. A thing cannot both have a
particular characteristic and not have it at the same time in the
same way.
Why can we be certain of these three things? Because you cannot deny
them without first assuming them true. If you say "I do not exist",
who is speaking? If you say "I am not conscious", how can
you speak?
(Of anything?) If you say that a thing is not itself, then what are
you speaking of?
Why are these three things important? If things are what they are,
then contradictions cannot exist in reality. Every part of reality is
what it is, and so is the whole Universe at once; the whole cannot
contradict itself, the parts cannot contradict the whole. All the
parts necessarily fit together.
If we are conscious, then we are conscious OF something. We receive
sensations from our eyes, ears, fingers, and so forth. We then
INTERPRET those sensations; we use imagination to form a mental model
of the world that we are sensing. Our minds do some of this
automatically; we sense areas of brown, some straight lines and
angles, and we "see" a wooden table. Some interpretations
are NOT
automatic; we have to work deliberately, think about what we have
seen, to make a mental model that fits all we have seen.
Why can NOT we be certain of anything else, besides those three
things? Because we can make mistakes, and sometimes do; we are not
infallible. We get sensations, from our eyes, ears, fingers, and so
forth, but sometimes we make errors, mistakes, in interpreting what
our senses tell us. We make mistakes in our thinking about what we
have seen, and our memory is also sometimes mistaken.
SCIENCE is the practice of eliminating contradictions between our
mental models and what we observe with our senses. We say what we
expect to see, if our mental model is correct; we make a "testable
hypothesis", we predict what we ought to see, and (by implication)
what we would NOT expect to see (anything strongly different from
what we predict.) We then go and look, to TEST our hypothesis. If we
see what we expect, our mental model survives; if we see something
NOT consistent with our model, we have a problem; our mental model
must be adjusted, or perhaps thrown out and replaced with a different
model altogether.
LOGIC is the practice of eliminating contradictions in our thinking;
it is the practice of making all of our mental models, of all parts
of the world, consistent with each other. Since there can be no
contradictions in reality, then we know that if we have
contradictions in our mental models, we must have made some mistakes
somewhere. Reality must be consistent with itself, so if we want our
mental models to reflect reality, our mental models must also be
consistent with themselves.
Though we cannot be CERTAIN of anything beyond those three things
stated above, testing our mental models justifiably makes us more
confident that they reflect reality. The more testing our models have
survived, the more confidence we can have in them. We can make
mistakes, we can also remove mistakes by changing our mental models
and doing more testing. Models that have survived a LOT of testing,
which reliably predict new observations, can be regarded as
"practically certain".
SO: What do we know, and how do we know it? We are, we are aware, we
are aware of the world. The world is itself; there are no
contradictions in reality. We learn about reality by applying
imagination and logic to the evidence of the senses, and testing to
find and remove our mistakes.
MORE ABOUT LOGIC
Logic is the practice of finding and eliminating contradictions in
our thinking. It does this by assuming some statements to be true
"for the sake of argument", then working out what else MUST
be true
if those are true. Logic goes from the assumed "premises"
to new
"conclusions" by "rules of inference", rules which
by thorough
testing have been found to "preserve truth". If we assume
some
premises, and derive a contradiction, then at least one of the
premises MUST be false.
If the statements assumed to be true "for the sake of argument"
contain any contradictions between themselves, then ANYTHING AT ALL
can be proven from them.
For example:
(1) sentence A is true. [assumption]
(2) sentence A is false. (Sentence NOT-A is true) [assumption,
contradicting the first]
(3) Either sentence A is true, or sentence X is true. [This follows
from (1).]
(4) Therefore: Sentence X is true. [This follows from (3) and (2).]
If we allow ourselves to hold contradictory beliefs, then logically
ANYTHING FOLLOWS; we cannot rule out anything; we cannot predict
anything, because the opposite may just as easily be true. If we hold
contradictory premises, our means of understanding the world is
short-circuited and blown.
If our mental model of the world contains internal contradictions,
then we cannot make predictions about what we will and will not
observe. The model will just as easily predict NOT-X as X, so the
model is not testable. Untestable models are useless; the entire
purpose of our mental models is to tell us what we can expect to
happen, and what we can expect NOT to happen, when we try to do
something in the world.
|
