101 Interesting Things, part fifty-four (a): The WizKID Epistemic Framework - Intro & Advantages

Philosophers as a discipline are still stuck on the Justified True Belief (JTB) model of knowledge, even though Gettier showed pretty effectively where that breaks down.  But even better, information scientists have made a replacement model that works, is quantifiable, and more accurately reflects how we construct and use knowledge in real life.  I hope that one day philosophers manage to bring this better model over to their side, but I'm not interested in doing that because I'd have to fight against the tide and I'd really rather just do my own productive work.

But if you wanna know how knowledge really works, and get in on the ground floor of cutting-edge epistemology, then have I got something for you!

Loose Ends in Philosophology: The Master Argument

Bishop George Berkeley (pronounced "BARK lee") was the first person to discover that CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME.  Unfortunately, he was not also the first person to discover that EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL, YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER.  Seriously, this guy used capitalization for emphasis - and he emphasized a lot.

He was also an idealist, in the sense that he thought that the fundamental "stuff" of reality consisted in ideas (in the Lockean sense).  The easiest way to describe it to a modern audience is that he thought reality - the "real" world in which we all actually live - was like a giant MMO, where God plays the role of the server.  What makes things "be real" is "being perceived," it's just that God perceives all in order to keep things running.  To prove this idea that reality is fundamentally ideas instead of fundamentally stuff, he set out to establish that the idea of a "physical" object is incoherent, insofar as it entails a contradiction (a "manifest repugnancy," as Berkeley wrote).  He wrote a bunch on this, but he presented one "Master Argument" on which he said he was "content to put the whole," as in wager everything.  Unfortunately for him, he trades on an ambiguity - depending on what exactly he meant, it might be either equivocation, conflation, or amphiboly.  I think this threefold nature of the ambiguity is what made it go undetected for centuries.

Either that, or nobody really feels obligated to comb through the old ramblings of Irish bishops except for philosophy undergrads.  Y'know.  One or the other.

Bishop George Berkeley’s “Master Argument” is a thought experiment meant to show that it is absurd to believe in mind-independent physical objects.  While the argument itself is clear and appears well-structured, it rests on an underlying ambiguity that Berkeley may well not have noticed.  Additionally, the link between inconceivability and impossibility is not clearly established in this case, and breaks down on closer examination.  Despite these flaws, Berkeley’s physical arguments still show something interesting about the link between the world and what human minds think of it, but it is not the illustration that Berkeley imagines it to be.

Loose Ends in Philosophology: The Multiple Realizability of Water

Robert Pirsig coined the term "philosophology" to describe the strange habit philosophy departments have of teaching philosophical history without teaching philosophical method - teaching "what it's been," in other words, without teaching "how to do it."  Many people don't see a difference, but it's as big as the difference between learning music theory from a book and composing your own actual music (again, Pirsig's example).

When I went back to school, some of the "problems" in the history of philosophy struck me as insulting - not because they were stupid questions (they were excellent questions at the time), but because apparently philosophers hadn't been keeping on top of their science in the intervening centuries.  So at least a couple of my papers were dedicated to actually settling these so-called "unanswerable" questions.  This one is dedicated to John Locke's question about multiple realizability - what if what we think of as one thing, and treat as one thing, is actually many different things that merely appear the same to our senses?  In one way, this makes no sense when you're up on your science - but in another equally important way, it's actually the case.

(All citations refer to the 1975 edition of Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch.)

John Locke defines the meaning of a word as its associated ideas, a superficially innocuous definition which becomes problematic in the details.  Because ideas are conscious states, we cannot define our terms with the unseen corpuscular structures that inform these conscious states, but must instead resort to the conscious states themselves, using words as symbols for them.  However, as there is always more than one way to skin a cat, this may lead us to the apparently absurd conclusion that more than one corpuscular structure could lead to the same set of ideas, and so we may be forced on this analysis to call two things with distinct real essences by the same word.  A more thorough analysis of this kind, with some understanding of modern physics and chemistry, dissolves the problem:  while Locke could not have known quite how, we are in fact able to escape the absurdity while still endorsing a Lockean conception of meaning and essences.