PHI 10: Introduction to Philosophy

What is philosophy?

It is fairly common to begin an introductory class in any discipline by asking for a definition of the subject matter of that discipline. What is it that we are going to be studying this semester?

The approach is a sound one generally but difficult in the specific case of philosophy. The problem is not that no one knows what philosophy is. It is a discipline that has a long and continuous tradition. Ways of thinking that clearly belong to that tradition date from about 800 B.C.E. and are present in many different cultures, though the Western tradition is usually described as beginning in Ancient Greece. There are characteristics that philosophical thought has always exhibited and that are present in the different cultures in which philosophical thinking occurs. It is these features that I am going to try to identify and that we will be working with in this course.

For a first attempt, let us say that philosophical thought is self-conscious. To say that it is self-conscious in the sense that I mean is to say that when we think philosophically, we are conscious of ourselves, aware of ourselves, in a way that we are not as we go about our daily lives. We question things that we usually take for granted. So for instance, we are all taught that in general lying is wrong. But if we were to think about this philosophically we might question what it is about lying that makes it wrong. Notice that you don't need to be a philosopher to do this. We all do this at those moments when we consider whether under some particular circumstances it might be okay to lie, even though generally we acknowledge that it is wrong. These are the moments in life when we stop to think about what it is about lying that makes it wrong. We consider this and then also consider whether the particular case we are worried about is a case that has the features that make lying wrong. If not, or if some other factors outweigh the wrong that we see the lie doing, we may think that this is a case when it is appropriate to lie, even though in general, we still agree that lying is wrong. So, for instance, it might be appropriate to lie in order to save a life.

In addition to this sort of self-consciousness, there is also thinking carefully and deeply about some basic principles that are important to the way we act in the world. And so we can identify another feature of philosophical thought: it involves thinking deeply and carefully about the the general principles that guide our choices about the things that are most important to us.

From what I have said so far, you can see that philosophy is unlike some of your other academic subjects in that it is not identified so much by a subject matter as by a method or an approach. Though this is correct, there still are certain topics that are more typically philosophical than others. The collection of readings that we are using presents those topics in terms of questions and by glancing through those questions you can get a pretty fair idea of the sorts of subjects that philosophy typically addresses.

We are all philosophers.

We are all philosophical at some time or another. I am sure that you have heard the expression ≥to be philosophical≤ about something. Generally when we say that someone is being philosophical we mean that they are taking a longer-range view about an issue or putting it in perspective. We are able to do this when we are able to think about the problem without being totally consumed by it. This kind of thinking involves a certain amount of detachment. To detach oneself from the problem at hand requires the sort of reflection that I discussed above.

Letπs look at a particular example to try and get an idea about how this might work. Suppose I have made a trip to a crowded shopping mall on a Sunday afternoon. I have circled the parking lot several times in search of a parking space and have not seen one, though I have been tantalized by seeing several other cars beat me to parking spaces. After about fifteen minutes, I begin to get very frustrated. Finally I see that there is a young woman walking purposefully down the lane that I am currently on. I follow her closely, realize that she is parked on the other side of the aisle, race around and manage to arrive as she unlocks her car door and climbs in. I am delighted until I look up and see that there is another car waiting, facing me, the driver signaling that he intends to take this place. The level of my frustration at this point could rise and keep me totally riveted in the moment and in my felt need for this parking space. Driven by this need, I could quickly dart into the space ahead of the other driver. Or alternatively I could leap out of my car and block the space with my body prepared to fight to the death over my right to park there. Or I could consider that there will ultimately be other spaces and that the fight over this one would not be worth the ill will between another human being and myself and so choose to move on and continue my search.

My description of the situation above is one in which the last alternative is the more philosophical one. Not because it is the right thing to do but because it is the option arrived at after reflection and after taking the whole situation into account. That response, as opposed to the others, is not driven entirely by an automatic reaction, but by thinking things through. With that response, I was ≥philosophical≤ about the loss of the parking space. I want to emphasize that describing this alternative as philosophical doesnπt depend upon it being the best choice, even though we would hope that such reflection will lead us, if not to the best choice, at least to better choices. This is part of the motivation for being philosophical and for doing philosophy. But the sense in which I am using the term at the moment refers only to the attitude with which the thinking about the issue is carried out. I might have reflected on the situation and come to the conclusion that if I do not fight for this parking space then my life will be worth nothing because this parking space is clearly a symbol for all those things that I was entitled to and did not get. If this is why I fight, then I believe that I would have to call my decision to fight a philosophical one as well. The point that I am trying to make here is that we are philosophical when we are reflective and when we look at something in a way that takes us beyond the emotions, thoughts, and beliefs that normally govern our immediate actions and we view those actions as examples of more general categories or cases described by more general principles. We all do this at one time or another and so we are all thinking like philosophers when we do.

In each of the different philosophical conclusions that I came to above there were general principles that I appealed to that shaped my decision. In the first case, I thought that it was not worth the strife with another human being. So I was appealing to some notion of what is valuable and what is not. In the second case, I was seeing this particular case as an example of all cases of this type and again appealing to what I believed to be valuable. To be philosophical involves reflecting in a way where we seek the most general categories to which the things around us belong and the most general principles that apply to what we are doing. We look for answers on a more fundamental level than we do when we seek merely practical solutions to problems.

The experts.

Though we may all be philosophical at some time in our lives, this course is really about those who have focused their attention on philosophical modes of thought and who have, in this sense, become experts. For there to be experts in any field or discipline there needs to be a clear sense of what the rules for participating in this discipline are and criteria by which to judge the practice of that discipline. If philosophy involves reflective thought, are there any rules for how to proceed with this reflective thought? What is the proper method of philosophy?

It is difficult to talk about the method of philosophy without talking about the subject matter, so I will combine my discussion of both. The key tool necessary for applying philosophical method is reason. Logic is the discipline that studies the proper use of reason and consequently some understanding of logic is necessary for understanding what is happening in philosophy. Consequently, one of the first things that we will be doing in this course is looking at some of the key concepts in logic and talking about how they are applied.

What about the subject matter? Since the kind of reflection that philosophers have traditionally carried out has been focused on certain fundamental sorts of issues, there are three main areas in which these issues give rise to philosophical questions. They are metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory (including ethics). Metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality, what there is (ontology) and how the things that exist are related to each other. Epistemology attempts to address questions of knowledge and belief. And then finally, there are also questions pertaining to values (value theory). These sorts of questions are about what we take to be good. Which things are better than others? What are values to begin with?

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of what there is. The philosopher Aristotle thought that it was the most difficult and most important part of philosophy, the First Philosophy. On the one hand, it might seem fairly obvious what there is. We can look and see the things around us and surely they exist. But not all things that we experience exist in the same way. For instance, though a dream is certainly a real dream, the things in a dream are not as real as the things in the world that we experience when we are awake. At least, it is typically thought that they are not as real. But why is that? What is different about dream things and real things other than the state of the "observer"? So that is one kind of problem, but another has to do with other kinds of "things". Abstract things like numbers, ideas, and so on seem to have a reality of some sort. But what sort of reality is this? It isnπt quite the same as the reality of physical objects. So, for instance, you don't see numbers the way that you would see physical objects. You can see two apples or two cars and you can see the numerals that stand for numbers like å1π and å2π but this is not the same as actually seeing a number (or is it?). Yet we think that there is something real about numbers and that they are connected to the things that we do see in important ways. Isn't mathematics the language of nature (as Galileo thought)? It is certainly the language of physics, which tells us a tremendous amount about physical world. How are numbers able to do this if they are merely ideas?

From the time of Ancient Greece through the modern period of Western philosophy (through the 18th century roughly), metaphysician described things that exist as "substances". But there seem to be different categories of substances. Some things that exist seem to be dependent on others and unable to exist on their own. So, for instance, red exists but doesn't exist independently of things that are red. Red doesn't float around all by itself, but instead there are red apples, red shirts, red stop signs, and red flags. One way of describing this relationship is to say that red is a property that things may or may not have. This way of thinking about the world suggests that there are substances, the things that have the properties, as well as the properties that they have. We still sometimes describe the world in this way today.

So far I have described two sorts of questions that might come up in metaphysics. The first is a question about what sorts of things there are: are there ideas and material things or only material things, or perhaps only ideas? The second has to do with the nature of the material world. Does it consist of substances and properties? If so, how real are these properties? Is there any way that the properties might exist independently of the substances? How do substances come into being? How do they get the properties that they have?

One other very important metaphysical question that philosophers have wondered about is the nature of change. How do things change and yet still stay the same? A primary example of this is the self. I am the same person that was born in 1951 but I have dramatically changed over the years. I am much taller than I was at birth, for instance! In what sense am I the same person? Does it even make sense to speak of me as the same person? This sort of question is a metaphysical question about personal identity.

Epistemology

Epistemology attempts to address questions of knowledge and belief. We can see that there are times when we are mistaken in our beliefs and other times when our beliefs are more reliable. This would seem to indicate that there is a difference in the degree of confidence we should have in what we believe. The ideal would seem to be knowledge, a circumstance where what we believe turns out to be right and we have and should have a strong confidence in that belief. Epistemology is the study of the difference between knowledge and belief, what reasons are legitimate reasons for being confident in our beliefs, and how our beliefs need to be connected to each other in order for us to have knowledge.

Epistemological questions are related to metaphysical questions but they are not the same kinds of questions. It could be, for instance, that we answer the metaphysical question about the existence of numbers in a positive way. We conclude that numbers do exist but that they are not the same as material things, but are rather abstract entities. We might then conclude that since they are abstract entities, we cannot know them through our senses but only through our mind. So the answer to a metaphysical question has implications for an epistemological question. What counts as evidence in the physical world is not the same as what counts as evidence in the world of ideas and so knowledge in these two realms might turn out to be achieved in different ways.

Value Theory

Value theory is the part of philosophy where what is valued, why it is valued, why it ought to be valued, and the implications of those values are studied. There are two main areas of value theory: ethics and aesthetics.

Ethics - Ethics is the study of what sorts of behaviors are right and wrong. Generally, it seeks for principles that guide us in our actions, but there is also a branch of ethics, metaethics, which considers the question of what "good" is. More generally we can think of ethics as the study of what is good and how we should act in order to be in line with what is good.

Aesthetics - Aesthetics is the study of beauty, what it is for something to be beautiful, how to achieve what is beautiful, and what the relationship is between the good and the beautiful (if any). Aesthetics is generally focused on art though there can be theories of aesthetics that also consider beauty in nature.

The answers to all of these philosophical questions are often interrelated. A philosopher who attempts to answer all of these questions in a way that reveals how they are interrelated is offering a systematic philosophy. Though earlier philosophers frequently did this, contemporary Anglo-American philosophers tend to focus on specific and sometimes narrow issues in epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics. Nonetheless, most people who are philosophers are seeking a coherent system in which all these parts are connected to each other in some way that makes sense.

In addition to these various areas of philosophy, it is also pretty clear that we can think philosophically about all sorts of different things. To do this would be to think deeply and carefully about the most fundamental aspects of those various things. So, for instance, we can do philosophy of science, philosophy of art, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, philosophy of love, philosophy ofä, well, you get the idea. There could be a philosophy of just about anything.

During this course, we will be doing some epistemology, some metaphysics, and some ethics. We will also be asking fundamental questions that arise in various ≥philosophies – of≤. So we will be doing some philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, for example. By the end of the course you will have been doing philosophy for a while and so should be able to give at least a preliminary answer to the question: What is philosophy?

Method: Reasoning and Logic

What follows is a discussion of logic. Logic is the study of the rules for correct reasoning, that is, reasoning that will lead to the truth. Some of it may be familiar to you or at least make sense, but this section introduces the technical language about reasoning that philosophers use. This is important to understand but for the purposes of this course what is even more important is what it is to give a reason for a belief, a claim, a position, or a point of view. I will be asking you to do this in everything that you write throughout this semester and so if you do not understand what it means you will have difficulty with all of the assignments.

To give reasons is to present evidence that counts for believing that some claim or belief is true. The way that we will discuss this evidence is in terms of language. So a statement or claim that describes the evidence or refers to the evidence will be what we call the reason. Personal information about how you came to believe such a thing or hold such a point of view is usually not a reason because it will not count in favor of someone else holding the same view. So, for instance, it is not a good reason to believe that pasta cooks more slowly at higher altitudes that my mother told me. This is how I came to learn it, but it is not a good reason for you to believe that it is true, since you do not have the relevant information about my mother. (It is true and she did tell me it, but that still doesnπt make my telling you that my mother told me a good reason for you to believe it if it is the only information that you have

Or letπs look at another example: Suppose that you claim that eating oatmeal for breakfast every morning is one of the key factors that leads to long life.

Here are two candidates. One of them is not a reason and one is. Which is which?

a. I believe that eating oatmeal is a key factor for long life because my mother told me this from very early on and so I grew up believing it.

b. I believe that eating oatmeal is a key factor for long life because it contains oatbran, which reduces cholesterol and low cholesterol is correlated with a lower risk of heart disease.

Just remember, you don't want to simply explain why it is that you believe something but rather to give a reason why you are justified in that belief and so why others should seriously consider believing it as well (or come up with a reason why your reasons are not good ones).

b. is the correct answer because this reason puts forward evidence that supports the claim that eating oatmeal increases longevity. a. just tells us something about the speaker's personal life and though it may explain why the speaker has the belief that she does, it does not give a reason why anyone else should have that belief.

Arguments

A key ingredient of the methodology of Western philosophy is the reliance on reason for answering philosophical questions that are raised. The discipline that studies the art of reasoning is logic. A more formal definition for logic is that it is the study of arguments or the study of correct reasoning. When we use "argument" in this context, the context of reasoning and in relation to philosophy, we do not mean to imply that there is any dispute that is involved. In philosophy, any giving of reasons in support of a claim is called an argument. So when you decide that you ought to go to college because you will be more likely to get a higher paying job, you are giving yourself an argument for going to college. A still more more formal definition is the following: an argument is a series of claims, one of which, the conclusion, is supported by the others, the premises. In general, we can think of claims as being expressed by statements (declarative sentences) and so we can write arguments out as collections of statements, where one is the conclusion and the others are the premises.

Traditionally, arguments are divided into two sorts, ampliative and nonampliative. In ampliative arguments, the conclusion takes us beyond the information presented in the premises. These arguments are also sometimes called "inductive". An example would be the following:

Dr. Crasnow was very demanding in her Critical Thinking course when I took it. But I worked hard and I got an A. She is also the teacher for my Introduction to Philosophy course and she seems as though she will be demanding in this course as well. Therefore if I work hard in this course I have a good chance of getting an A.

This argument would be considered ampliative because although the premises give us good reasons for believing that the conclusion is true, the claim in the conclusion takes us beyond the claims of the premises, into new informational territory. Because it does this, it is always possible for the conclusion to be false, even though the premises are true. There might be something very different about this course so that it is harder to get an A and you have not taken this into consideration.

Ampliative reasoning differs from nonampliative reasoning in that nonampliative reasoning does not take us beyond the premises in any real sense (though it sometimes may seem to by revealing something that was implicit in the premises of which we were not yet aware). An argument that is nonampliative is also referred to as a ≥deductive argument.≤ An example of a deductive argument would be the following:

Dr. Crasnow is always fair in her grading. She is teaching and grading the work for this intro course. This course will be graded fairly.

Notice that in this argument, if the premises were true, then the conclusion would have to be true as well. This is because the information that has been stated in the conclusion was already implicitly stated in the premises.

Western philosophy has been particularly taken with the power of deductive arguments. The power that I am referring to here is their truth-preserving characteristic. The truth that is contained in the premises in preserved and carried through to the conclusion. Of course, to take advantage of the truth-preserving nature of deductive reasoning one must start with truth or else there will not be any truth to be preserved. To go from true premises to a true conclusion is the goal of any argument whether it is ampliative or not. Nonampliative arguments are arguments in which the reasoning assures us that if we start off with truth we will end up with truth. In nonampliative arguments, though the premises make the truth of the conclusion more likely, they do not ensure its truth.

How to evaluate arguments

In order to evaluate arguments, two different critieria need to be considered.

* Do the premises support the conclusion in the way that they are intended to?

* Are the premises true?

The first of these does not depend on the second. This means that the question of whether reasons are good reasons is in part independent of whether they are true reasons. We need to ask ourselves, "If these claims were true, would they give me reason to believe that the conclusion is true as well?" and then ask separately, "Are these reasons true?"

Corresponding to these two questions are two different standards that must be met for an argument to be considered good. The evaluation of the argument is done differently, according to different standards, depending on whether the argument is considered to be inductive or deductive. If the argument is inductive, then it is strong if the premises provide reason for believing that the conclusion is true. Of course, a strong argument is not necessarily a good argument. The premises may not be true. I am not going to discuss these concepts further in relation to inductive arguments as most of the arguments we will be examining are going to be deductive.

Validity and Soundness

A deductive argument in which the premises if true would lead us to accept the truth of the conclusion is called a valid argument. More correctly, the definition of a valid argument is that it is one in which if the premises are true, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. But again, just as with inductive arguments, an argument is not good just because it is valid. The premises of the argument also must be true. An argument that is valid and also has true premises will have a true conclusion because the validity of the reasoning and the truth of the premises will necessitate the truth of the conclusion. Such an argument is exactly the sort that we want. Such an argument is called sound.

The following examples illustrate the different types of arguments that you might have:

Sound Valid with true premises All whales are mammals. All mammals are animals. _____________________ All whales are animals.

Not sound Invalid but true premises All whales are mammals. All whales are animals. All mammals are animals.

Not sound Invalid and false premises All mammals are whales. All animals are whales. __________________ All mammals are animals.

Not sound Valid with false premises All mammals are whales. All whales are animals. ______________ All mammals are animals.

In the examples above the conclusion was true in each instance, but if the argument is unsound either because there are premises that are not true or because the reasoning is invalid, the conclusion could turn out to be either true or false. This is precisely why these arguments are not wanted. They do not give us any assurance that the conclusion is true.

From what has been said you should also be able to see that a valid argument might have any combination of true or false premises and a true or false conclusion except for true premises and a false conclusion, because the definition of a valid argument requires that if the premises are true then the conclusion must be true as well.

Giving reasons why an argument is not to be accepted.

From what has been said about what makes a good argument, we can make some general remarks on how to reasonably reject or criticize an argument. You will see very quickly that it is not considered good enough to simply say that you disagree, you need to say why you disagree. This means that you need to give reasons, which would amount to giving a counterargument, an argument against the original argument. Basically, what that means is that you need to say what is wrong with the original argument and why. Since a deductive argument can be flawed either by being invalid or by having false premises these are the features that you need to look at when thinking of the reasons why you will not accept the conclusion. (For an inductive argument the situation is similar. It can be flawed either by not being strong, being weak, or by having false premises.)

A good way to reject an argument is by giving a counterexample. A counterexample is an example that goes against what is being claimed. There are two types of counterexamples that we will use frequently. The first is a counterexample to the truth of a premise. In other words, an example that shows that a premise is false. So for the third argument above, the premise "All mammals are whales." is false and we could point this out by giving a counterexample: "Dogs are mammals and they are not whales."

Another kind of counterexample is one that shows that an argument is invalid. We can show that an argument is invalid in a variety of ways and one thing that we might do in a logic class is explore these ways. However, the basic idea is always to show that the argument is one that could have a false conclusion in spite of having true premises. You can do this by finding an argument that has the same form of reasoning but clearly has a false conclusion and true premises. Let's do this for the second argument above.

All snakes are animals.

All snakes are reptiles.

All animals are reptiles.

Here the premises are true but the conclusion is false. Since this argument has the same logical structure as the second argument above, it serves as a counterexample for that argument.

Reductio ad absurdum

There is another technique for refuting arguments that we will be coming across in the first few lessons. It is called reductio ad absurdum, which means "to reduce to absurdity". The idea behind this way of arguing is that you show that if one were to accept the premises of an argument as true then you would come to a false, impossible, or absurd conclusion. But since the conclusion that is arrived at is absurd, that would show that, in fact, at least one of the premises is false. This is because if you reason validly from true conclusions you must come to a true conclusion. If the conclusion cannot be true, then one of the premises must be false. Here is an example:

Let us so suppose for the sake of argument that all mammals are whales.

If it were true that all mammals were whales then I would be a whale, because I am a mammal.

But this obviously false (absurd).

Therefore my assumption that all mammals were whales must be wrong.

Paradox

Before we leave this section on logic and reason, it is important to understand that the cornerstone of reason is avoiding contradiction or self-contradiction. Logic is based on the belief that it is not possible for the same claim to be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect. This is called The Principle of Non-contradiction. Western philosophy proceeds so that if we come across a contradiction that indicates that something has gone wrong with our reasoning and we have to rethink the problem. This can be seen in the particular way in which Western philosophers deal with paradox. Here are some examples of paradoxes.

The Liars Paradox: In a particular city it is known that everyone in that city lies. If you ask a liar (a citizen of that city) if he is a liar, what will his answer be?

Russell's Barber's Paradox: In a particular village, everyone who is not shaved by the barber shaves himself. Who shaves the barber?

The paradoxical sentence:

The sentence in this box is false.

Western philosophy treats paradoxes as indicators of a knot of some sort that reason has yet to unravel. But there is a confidence always that reason will eventually resolve the puzzle. In contrast, Eastern philosophies sometimes take a paradox as an indication that the limits of reason have been found. Since it is reason that leads us to the paradox then the way to resolve the paradox is to go beyond reason or at least recognize that there are some problems that human reason cannot help us with. The difference in approach highlights the special role that reason has traditionally been thought to play in Western philosophy. Though we will ask questions about reason, its limits, and its nature, we will start with the assumption that has traditionally been made by Western philosophers. Whatever else we may demand of the solutions that we seek to problems we will begin by demanding that they conform to reason.