From MMILES@scripps.claremont.edu Wed Apr 6 22:41:25 1994 Received: from Ymir.Claremont.Edu by ponyexpress.princeton.edu (5.65c/1.113/newPE) id AA19479; Wed, 6 Apr 1994 22:41:24 -0400 Received: from SCRIPPS.CLAREMONT.EDU by ymir.claremont.edu (PMDF V4.2-15 #6083) id <01HAV7BRDG008WWOC9@ymir.claremont.edu>; Wed, 6 Apr 1994 19:41:19 PDT Received: from SCRIPPS/SMTP_QUEUE by SCRIPPS.CLAREMONT.EDU (Mercury 1.0); Wed, 6 Apr 94 19:41:43 GMT+7 Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 19:41:29 PST8PDT From: lissa Subject: Re: More on intuition To: Bryan Douglas Caplan Reply-To: lissa Message-Id: <01HAV7BRDPN68WWOC9@ymir.claremont.edu> X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail/Windows v1.11 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Priority: normal Status: R Try just ssp or your editor might want you to write In%"ssp" One of the above really should work, because you can reply to a letter that has Joe Bloe...So you must be able to send a message with the same syntax.. make sense? --Melissa I've been arguing with Mike Huemer about epistemology for quite some time now, so I hope I won't be mis-interpreted as an instant and uncritical convert. Philip Dodds' objections are common ones, and I don't think that they are too difficult to answer. (Moreover, Mike has a paper, presumably available by e-mail, which answers all of the common objections. I suspect he would be delighted to send it...) 1. At the outset, I would note that you appear to be making _knowledge claims_ about problems with intuitionism, but then seem to land yourself in a fairly incoherent skepticism. I could understand if someone with a _different_ foundation claimed to know a refutation, but I can't understand a proposed refutation that seriously doubts the possibility of foundations. 2. Now to begin the substantive critique. Intuition is no more arbitrary than any other sort of knowledge. Granted, that someone could _say_ that any belief at all that they possess is intuitive. But then again, someone could also _say_ that they have accurately deduced their views from clear and distinct axioms, or they could _say_ that they have seen it with their own eyes, and so on. Is the fact that intellectually dishonest people could abuse a form of legitimate knowledge any reason to doubt the means of knowledge itself? The whole idea that Mike is proposing is that intellectually honest people subject their intuitions to the same critical, cautious scrutiny to which they subject their deductions, their perceptions, and so on; and that if they do so, then intuition (or direct reason, as I prefer to term it) is just as valid as any other form of knowledge. Indeed, I would argue that if you admit the validity of deduction, you will be inevitably drawn to admit the validity of intuition/direct reason. Why? Well, introspect at how you perform a mathematical proof. You will notice that at some point, you do not produce a proof of a step, but simply see that the step is valid and make it. A frequent concomitant is a kind of mental "click," when the validity of the step becomes evident to you. Thus, if 2a=b, and a=6, you can deduce that b=12. Now suppose that a deduction skeptic came along and demanded a proof of that last step. If he didn't see it, you would find it very difficult to give it to him; and even if you could prove that step, suppose he endlessly demanded a proof of each successive proof. I think that the only coherent solution is that sometimes you simply make a perfectly valid step from one proposition to the other without proof; and so much the worse for the other person who doesn't get it. (Although fortunately most math students eventually do "get it.") 2. Why is intuitionism supposed to rest on a re-definition of knowledge that makes everything we want to believe true? I don't see any re-definition of knowledge at all, but rather a synthetic claim about our means of acquiring knowledge. And what evidence is there for Mike's alleged desperation? He seemed perfectly sober to me. 3. Here was one of the most interesting lines: "We should not start with conclusions and work backwards." Frankly, why not? It frequently happens that we know the conclusions with certainty, but lack and explanation. For example, most scientific hypotheses begin with _very_ well documented facts; and the theory must explain them by implying them (among other things). Similarly, a highly useful form of argument known as the reductio ad absurdum in effect starts with a conclusion and works backwards. Not exactly, of course. But it disproves a premise by showing that it implies something we know to be false with greater certainty than we know the premise to be true; hence, we rationally reject the premise because it contracts our better-known conclusion. I submit that the incoherency and indeed self-contradiction implied in skepticism gives us an enormously strong reason to believe that we possess knowledge, and that therefore good epistemological theories will not tell us _whether_ we have knowledge, but _how_. --Bryan