Introduction To Philosophy

These are just some bullet notes from the Coursera course Introduction to philosophy

  • What Is Philosophy
  • Working out the best way to thinking about things.
  • The philosophical question.
  • Philosophy: Difficult, Important and Everywhere
  • Is it 'Fundamental'?
    • No,.. Yes,..?
  • Is it 'Important'?
    • No,.. Yes,.?
  • How Do We Do It?
  • Arguments to your questions
  • Do we have free will?
  • Is there a right way to think about things?
  • How do we know we can get to the right way just by thinking,.?
  • What Is Knowledge? And Do We Have Any?
  • Basic Constituents of Knowledge
  • Propositional vs Ability knowledge
  • Conditions for propositional knowledge
    • Truth
    • Belief
  • Knowledge : Something more than just getting it right.
  • Intuitions About Knowledge
    • The Anti-Luck Intuition
    • The Ability Intuition
  • The Classical Account of Knowledge and the Gettier Problem
  • Classical definition od knowledge
    • Justified, True, Belief
  • Gettier CounterExamples
    • Knowledge cannot be merely justified true belief
      • It might just be a matter of luck that your belief is true, irreverent of your justification.
    • Examples
      • The Stopped Clock!!
      • A Sheep Behind a Sheep Shaped Object.
  • Formula For Creating Gettier Cases - is easy!!
  • Additional Conditions !! @@
    • NO FALSE LEMMAS : Farley complicated and boring
  • Do We have any knowledge?
  • Radical Skepticism, we don't know nearly as much as we think we do.
    • We have as much knowledge as we take ourselves to have.
  • Brain-in-a-vat Hypothesis : The Matrix
    • How do we know that its not true.?
    • Quite far fetched.
    • Lots of arguments.
  • And similar problems...
  • Still not answerable to a simple solution.
  • Minds, Brains and Computers
  • What is it to have a mind?
  • Theories of Mind
  • Cartesian (or Substance) Dualism, by Descartes
  • Mind is made of fundamentally different substance to the body.
  • The mind is made of immaterial stuff and the body is made of material stuff.
  • Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia & other problems of causation
    • Physical things can only be affected/changed by interaction with other physical things
  • Physicalism, all that exists is physical stuff.
  • Identity Theory of physicalism
  • having a mental state consists in being a particular physical state,
  • mental and physical states are identical.
  • Type identity and Token Identity
  • Type identity offers a strong research prograam, it says that type of physical states are identical to type of mental states.
  • A problem of type identity theory
    • Hilary Putnam, claimed that type-identity would find the identical physical state with mental state of being in pain, for humans
    • It might be something entirely different physical state for octopus for example, but the same mental state of being in pain.
  • Mental states are multiply realizable.
  • Functionalism
  • Chairs can be made of many different things, shapes, sizes, look completely different But what makes them identifiable as chairs is the job that they do.
  • Mind as a Computer
  • With Functionalism, it has become very popular to think about the mind as analogous to a computer.
  • It tries to argue that, like computers, minds are information processing units that take information of some kind and turn it into information of other kind.
  • Turing Machines
    • Identify the between machine and man.
  • When the machine is able to fool the interrogator, then the computer has reached the level of functional complexity required to have a mind.
  • Objections ,
    • A machine with a huge database with answers to all the questions. Would we call it a 'thinking' machine.?
    • There can be beings that cannot persuade the questioner that they are human, but who we nevertheless want to count as minded.
    • The Turing test relies on language, and a very narrow criteria for minds.
  • John Searle's Chinese Room
  • You get a symbol that you dont understand, you have a code book that tells what other symbol to respond with when you see a symbol.
  • On the other hand, there is a person who is conversing with you in Chinese. But you don't even know that you are in a communicative act.
  • Computers work by processing symbols.
  • Symbols have syntactic and semantic properties.
  • Computers are manipulating machines, more importantly, they are only aware of the syntactic properties of the symbol.
  • We program the computer to operate on the syntactic structure of the symbol.
  • The problem is that the computer does not 'know' the semantic content about the symbols that it is manipulating.
  • If our mind is indeed a machine, where is the 'programmer' who deciphers meanings of symbols that our mind process?
  • Representation is a three way relation.
  • X represents Y to Z;
  • the beer-mug represents my position on field to my friends.
  • However, in case of the mind
  • this neural activity represents a dog to ???
  • Morality: Objective, Relative or Emotive
  • The status of morality
    • Here we ask the question, what are we doing when we make moral judgments.
  • The Questions
  • Are they sorts of judgments that can be true or false - or are they mere opinions?
  • If they are true /false, what makes them true /false?
  • If they are true, are they objectively true?
  • Objectivism
  • Our moral judgments are the sorts of things that can be true or false, and what makes them true or false are facts that are generally independent of what are or what cultural groups we belong to - they are objective moral facts.
    • Objection : How do you account for moral disputes between two people then?
  • Relativism
  • Our moral judgments are indeed true or false, but they're only true or false relative to something that can vary between people.
    • Objections : How do you explain or keep track of moral progress then?
  • Subjectivism, a form of relativism
  • Out moral judgments are indeed true or false, but they're only true or false relative to the subjective feelings of the person who makes them.
    • "X is bad" = "I dislike X"
  • Cultural Relativism, a form of relativism
  • Our moral judgments are indeed true or false, but they are only true or false relative to the culture of the person who makes them.
    • "X is bad" = "X is disapproved of in my culture"
  • Emotivism
  • Moral judgments are neither objectively true/false or relatively true/false. They're direct expressions of our emotive reactions.
    • Objections : How do you account for the moral decisions that we make and conclusions we arrive at based on our cognitive abilities.
  • Should you believe what you hear
  • Testimony and Miracles
  • The Enlightenment : intellectual autonomy
  • Hume : naturalistic philosophy
    • Never believe that a miracle has occurred, on the basis of a testimony
  • What is testimony?
    • Any situation in which you believe something on the basis of what someone else asserts, either verbally or in writing.
    • A lot of what we believe about the world is based on the testimony of other people.
  • Hume assumes that you should only trust testimony when you have evidence that the testifier is likely to be right.
    • Evidentialism : A wise man,... proportions his belief to the evidence.
  • On Miracle,
    • A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.
  • Thomas Ried argued,
    • that trusting testimony is analogous to trusting your senses.
    • we don't only trust our senses when we have evidence that they're likely to be right.
  • Kant,
    • Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore : Have courage to use your own understanding.
  • Intellectual autonomy : Think for yourself.
    • Is your beliefs are based merely on testimony, they will not amount to knowledge.
  • Are Scientific Theories true
  • Time Travel and Philosophy
  • Reading

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