Week 1: 

CLASSWORK:

1. Lecture: Epistemology & Rationalism

2. Lecture: Empiricism

3. Seminar: Kekule’s Dream

4. Seminar: Science & the Attempt to Observe Reality

5. Seminar: Historical Facts

6. Seminar: Getting to Know You: The Corporate Probe

HOMEWORK:

1. Reading: Plato, Meno, p.16-19

2. Reading: Descartes, Discourse, p.13-16 

3. Reading: Descartes, Meditations, p.1-17

4. Reading: Berkelely, Principles of Human Knowledge, p.31-45

5. Reading: Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, p.11-15

6. Viewing: Scientific Method

REVIEW QUESTION:

1. Is there any knowledge that you acquire that is independent of experience? How?

Kekulé’s Dream

How do we attain knowledge? By what means? Such questions address one aspect of epistemological inquiry: the sources of knowledge. 

The most obvious source is sense experience. How do you know that a book is in front of you? Because you can see and feel it. But sense experience is not our only source of knowledge. If someone asked you, “How do you know that if x is greater than y and y is greater than z, that x is greater than z?” What would you say? You don’t see or feel anything, but your reasoning tells you that the relation is true. Reasoning is another source of knowledge. 

But sometimes we clearly get knowledge by experiences not easily defined. “I had a flash of intuition,” we say, or “My intuition tells me it is so,” or “All of a sudden, in a flash of intuition, I saw things clearly.” It’s very difficult to define intuition, perhaps impossible. Nevertheless, the term does label certain kinds of experience characterized by a conviction of certainty that comes upon us quite suddenly. 

Take, for example, a most famous scientific discovery. Friedrich Kekulé, professor of chemistry in Ghent, Belgium, discovered that carbon compounds can form rings. Kekulé’s discovery did not come easily. For some time he’d been pondering the structure of benzene, but he couldn’t explain it. Then, one afternoon in 1865, he turned his mind away from his work: 

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in a snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke and this time also I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis. 

Kekulé had found his clue to the structure of benzene in his dream of the snake gripping its own tail. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Does this narrative tell you anything about how intuition can lead to knowledge? 

2. Before Kekulé accepted the validity of his intuitive insight, he subjected it to rigorous testing. Does this suggest anything about how intuitive claims should be handled? 

___________________________________________

Source: Quoted in Gardner Lindzey, Calvin Hall, and Richard F. Thompson, Psychology (New York: Worth, 1975), 320. 

Science and the Attempt to Observe Reality

Can we ever observe the world as it is, independently of ourselves? Or do our very attempts to observe the world always change the world? Psychologists and sociologists often face this problem, because the very fact that people are being observed leads them to behave differently from how they would behave if they were not being observed. The more accurately you try to determine how angry you feel, for example, the less you experience the anger you are trying to observe. 

Or consider the results of a famous series of experiments called the Hawthorne studies, which tried to discover what kinds of job conditions would improve the productivity of workers. Workers were observed under various different working conditions (including noise, darkness, bright light, music, silence). The Hawthorne researchers discovered, much to their surprise, that the productivity of the workers they studied always improved no matter what the conditions. It was only much later that the researchers realized that it was the fact that the workers were being observed and were being rewarded with so much attention that led them to be more productive. Making objective observations— that is, observations that are not contaminated by the observer’s activities and choices—is very difficult when observing the psychological or social world. 

But surely the physical world can be observed objectively—that is, without it being changed by our observations. Or can it? Consider the problem of trying to measure precisely the temperature of a volume of warm water: If we insert a thermometer into the water, the temperature of the thermometer will change the original temperature of the water. 

But it is when we reach the basic constituents of all matter—subatomic particles—that our attempts to observe the physical world most radically alter that world. For to observe that world, we must shoot some kind of radiation (light rays or gamma rays) at it and observe the reflected radiation. But the energy of the radiation always disturbs the subatomic particles, leaving us uncertain about what was there before the observation. In fact, modern physics explicitly holds that on principle it is impossible to observe subatomic particles without disturbing them so much that we cannot be sure where they are or how fast they are moving. Here is how a physics textbook explains the impossibility of observing the subatomic world in a way that would eliminate our uncertainty about that world: 

In Newtonian mechanics, still applicable to the macroscopic world of matter, both the position and velocity of a body are easily calculable; e.g., both the position and the velocity of the earth in its orbit can be known precisely at any instant. Inside the atom this is not possible. We have already learned that electrons orbiting within atoms can absorb light energy in units proportional to the frequency of the light and that in doing so they shift energy levels. Now suppose that we could “see” an electron. You need light to see it, but when you turn on the light to see it, the electron absorbs some of the light energy and instantly moves to another energy level with a different velocity. This is implied in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: It is impossible to obtain accurate values for the position and momentum of an electron simultaneously. In other words, observation causes a reaction on the thing observed. . . . This principle of uncertainty . . . sets fundamental limits upon our ability to describe nature. 

QUESTIONS:

1. What implications do the Hawthorne experiments and the uncertainty principle have for epistemology? 

2. Do the Hawthorne experiments and the uncertainty principle demonstrate that we can never hope to know the world as it really is? 

______________________________________

Sources: Verne H. Booth, Elements of Physical Science: The Nature of Matter and Energy (London: Macmillan, 1970), 327–328 

Historical Facts

What is a historical fact? Take, for example, what passes for a simple historical fact: “In the year 49 BCE, Caesar crossed the Rubicon.” This is a familiar fact, and one of some importance. Yet, as the most distinguished American historian Carl L. Becker pointed out more than a half century ago, this simple fact has strings tied to it. It depends on numerous other facts so that it has no meaning apart from the web of circumstances that produced it. This web of circumstances, of course, was the chain of events arising out of the relation of Caesar to Pompey, the Roman Senate, and the Roman Republic. As Becker states, 

Caesar had been ordered by the Roman Senate to resign his command of the army in Gaul. He decided to disobey the Roman Senate. Instead of resigning his command, he marched on Rome, gained the mastery of the Republic, and, at last, we are told, bestrode the narrow world like a colossus. Well, the Rubicon happened to be the boundary between Gaul and Italy, so that by the act of crossing the Rubicon with his army Caesar’s treason became an accomplished fact and the subsequent great events followed in due course. Apart from these great events and complicated relations, the crossing of the Rubicon means nothing, is not an historical fact properly speaking at all. . . .[It is] a symbol standing for a long series of events which have to do with the most intangible and immaterial realities, viz.: the relation between Caesar and the millions of people of the Roman world. 

Clearly, for Becker “the simple historical fact” is only a symbol, an affirmation about an event. And because it’s hardly worthwhile to term a symbol cold or hard, indeed dangerous to call it true or false, one might best speak of historical facts as being more or less appropriate. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Could Becker’s analysis be applied to this statement: “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941”? 

2. Would it be accurate to say that historians deal not with an event but with statements that affirm the fact that the event occurred? If so, what’s the difference? 

__________________________________________________

Source: Carl L. Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?” Quoted in Coming Age of Philosophy, ed. Roger Eastman (San Francisco: Canfield, 1973), 451–452. 

Getting to KnowYou: The Corporate Probe

Steve was surprised at the questions on the test he was given to fill out. The questions were odd and seemed to keep asking the same thing in different words: 

Do you think most companies take advantage of people who work for them when they can? Did you ever think about stealing money from places where you have worked? Do you believe you are too honest to steal? 

Steve was applying for a job at a well-known clothing store chain. He hoped to start working there as a clerk and to someday be able to work his way up to a management position. The “test” he was taking was supposed to be part of his “interview,” but it was making him feel that his potential employer questioned his honesty. 

If you knew that a member of your family was steal- ing from a place where he works, do you think you would report it to the owner of the company? Were you ever tempted to take company money without actually taking any? Do you keep out of trouble at all costs? Do you think it okay to get around the law if you don’t actually break it? 

Why such questions? The answer’s simple:Retail stores, banks, brokerage houses, and fast-food restaurants subject potential hires to a preemployment screen to determine whether they’d steal from the firm. Is such a determination possible? Yes, claim the sponsors of one such test, the Reid Report, originally developed by John Reid and now, in 2009, being sold and administered by Vangent Human Capital Management, who says on its Web page that “In addition to hiring and selecting the ‘right people,’ we help our clients instill and develop the ‘right behavior’ through award-winning learning solutions.” The Reid Report asks questions of the job candidate, which at best seem to relate only indirectly to the job he or she will be doing: 

How much money do you pay each month as a result of divorce or separate maintenance for the support of your wife and children? In the past five years about how much money, if any, have you gambled? 

Borg-Warner, Target, Best Buy, and the Gap are only a few of the 6,000 U.S. companies that use integrity or honesty tests to try to weed out dishonest employees who may steal from the company’s inventory. Like other honesty tests, the Reid test is based on a profile of what potential thieves are supposed to be like. Thieves are supposed to think about stealing more than other people, are more tolerant of theft, feel less punitive toward other thieves, and construct rationalizations for stealing. Honest people, on the other hand, are assumed to have high personal standards, want dishonest people to be severely punished, and believe that most other people are honest like themselves. 

Will everyone steal at work if the conditions are right? Do you believe you are too honest to steal at work? Do you think it is humanly possible for the average person to be completely honest on the job? 

Before completing the Reid Report, Steve will have answered questions about his loans and debts, outside income, and personal habits (including drug and drink- ing habits). He will have confessed to any past acts of theft, to his own feelings about people who steal, and to any crimes he has committed in the past. Indeed, by the time he’s finished, he will have revealed to his prospective employer many important details of his financial status, his physical and mental health, and his personal life. What will become of this information? Reid will keep the inventory dealing directly with theft. The rest of the information will be returned to the employer. And, oh yes, Reid and Associates will or will not recommend that Steve be hired. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Does an employer have a right to subject a potential employee to such tests? What if 2 out of 10 times the test erroneously identifies an honest person as a potential thief so that he or she is denied a job? What if it erroneously identifies 2 honest people as dishonest for every 5 dishonest people it catches, but companies that use the test inevitably reduce theft by 20%? 

2. Is it proper for employers to know the details of their employees’ personal lives? Do such tests violate the employee’s right to privacy? 

________________________________________

Source: Velasquez, Manuel. Philosophy: A Text with Reflection readings, 9th ed. Thomson Wadsworth, 2010

Week 3: 

CLASSWORK:

1. Lecture: Kant & Transcendental Idealism

2. Lecture: Theories of Truth

3. Seminar: The Egocentric Predicament

4. Seminar: Knowledge and Gestalt Psychology  

5. Seminar: Society and Truth

6. Seminar: Can a Scientist Pray

HOMEWORK:

1. Reading: Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p.7-14

2. Reading: Velasquez, On Hume, p.1-5

3. Reading: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p.1-20

4. Reading: Velasquez, On Kant, p.1-9

REVIEW QUESTION:

1. Is it skeptical to say, that we only obtain knowledge of how things appear, not their true nature? 

Egocentric Predicament

In 1910 U.S. philosopher Ralph Barton Perry published an article titled "The Ego-Centric Predicament." In it he makes apoint about "objects/events" outside us--that is, real objects. Perry addresses a question that Western philosophers have long debated: What is the metaphysical status of objects/events? What are things like outside our perception of them?

Perry reasoned that we can never observe things apart from our perception of them. This was obvious enough to Perry, because we must perceive any real object/event in order to know it. If we can't know things apart from our perception of them, then we can never know whether our perception of things changes them thus, the egocentric predicament.

Professor of philosophy James Christian has extended Perry's point by suggesting that the egocentric predicament entails an illusion. This egocentric illusion lies in the fact that all our mortal lives we must occupy a physical organism--that is, we must occupy a point in space and time. As a result, ti appears to each of us that we are the center of creation. Conversely, it appears to each of us that the whole cosmos revolves around that point in the space-time that we occupy. What's more, wherever we go in space-time, this egocentric illusion pursues us, because we move our center. In a word, every living, conscious creature experiences itself as the true center of the cosmos, when in fact the cosmos has no true center.

Christian observes that when al humans take themselves as the center of things, we make aristocentric claims that is, inordinate claims to superiority for ourselves or our group. Aristocentric claims arise because we fail to correct for the egocentric illusion. Taking ourselves as cosmic centers, we may claim that our existence has special meaning, that we have a special knowledge or message, or that we have special powers. Rarely, however, do we make these claims in the singular. This is not surprising, for our arrogant pride would invite scorn and ridicule. But we do make aristocentric claims in the plural: W"e are something special," "We are favored people," or "We have a unique destiny." The beauty of such claims si that they're so easily reinforced by group members. Sociologists have a word for any form of aristocentrism, ethnocentricity, the preoccupation with and belief in the superiority of one's own culture.

When Ralph Barton Perry spoke of the egocentric predicament, he had in mind a timeless metaphysical concern. But, as so often happens, purely philosophical musings have a way of slipping into our everyday lives.

QUESTIONS:

1. The great historian Arnold Toynbee once observed that a human self cannot be brought into harmony with absolute reality unless it rids itself of self-centeredness. Why is this so?

2. Are the epistemological theories of John Locke and Immanuel Kant unable to overcome the egocentric predicament?

____________________________________________

Source:  James Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction of the Art of Wondering (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1973), 50-58.

Knowledge and Gestalt Psychology

Some patterns of visual stimulation are more meaningful to us than others. Consider the following pattern. How would you describe it? 

    __________

    __________

    __________

    __________

    __________

    __________

Probably you’d say that you see three sets of two horizontal lines each rather than six separate lines. This is so because you perceive items close to each other as a whole. Now consider this pattern: 

    o x o 

    o x o 

    o x o 

Because we perceive items that resemble each other as units, you’d probably describe what you see as two vertical rows of circles and one of Xs rather than three horizontal rows of circles and Xs. 

Why is one pattern of visual stimulation meaningful while another is not? One answer lies in past experience: Patterns that outline shapes are meaningful if they match shapes that you have experienced and remembered. But meaningfulness also seems to be imposed by the organization of the visual system. 

Some years ago, a group of German psychologists, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler among them, studied the basic principles of organization in perception. They insisted that a perception of form is an innate property of the visual system. This group of psychologists became known as Gestaltists, from the German word gestalt, meaning “form.” Gestaltists focus on subjective experience and the exploration of consciousness. They see the most significant aspect of experience as its wholeness or inter- relatedness. Thus, Gestaltists believe that any attempt to analyze behavior by studying its parts is futile because such an approach loses the basic characteristic of experiences: their organization, pattern, and wholeness. For Gestaltists, no stimulus has constant significance or meaning. It all depends on the patterns surrounding events. For example, a 510 basketball player looks small when seen as part of a professional basketball team but of normal size as part of a random group of individuals. 

As part of their focus on subjective experience and the exploration of consciousness, Gestalt psychologists formulated a number of descriptive principles of perceptual organization. Two are illustrated previously in the two simple patterns: the principles of similarity and proximity. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Do Gestaltists owe anything to the theories of knowledge that preceded their investigations? 

2. What connections do you see between Gestalt psychology and the views of Kant? 

________________________________________

Velasquez, Manuel. Philosophy: A Text with Reflection readings, 9th ed. Thomson Wadsworth, 2010

Society and Truth

In The Art of Awareness, J. Samuel Bois reports the following experiment: 

A psychologist employed seven assistants and one genuine subject in an experiment where they were asked to judge how long was a straight line that they were shown on a screen. The seven assistants, who were the first to speak and report what they saw, had been instructed to report unanimously an evidently incorrect length. The eighth member of the group, the only naive subject in the lot, did not know that his companions had received such an instruction, and he was under the impression that what they reported was really what they saw. In one-third of the experiments, he reported the same incorrect length as they did. The pressure of the environment had influenced his own semantic reaction and had distorted his vision. When one of the assistants, under the secret direction of the experimenter, started reporting the correct length, it relieved that pressure of the environment, and the perception of the uninformed subject improved accordingly. 

QUESTIONS:

1. To what extent does our sense knowledge depend on what we think we should be seeing? 

2. How does technology affect our sense perception?

______________________________________

Source: J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown, 1973). 

Can a Scientist Pray?

A 2007 study of scientists conducted by sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, found that two-thirds of university-based scientists say they are religious and practice a spirituality. One of them is John Polkinghorne, a respected British scientist who made significant contributions to the field of elementary particle physics. While Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University (one of the most prestigious universities in the world), he became an Anglican priest. When asked once by an interviewer, “Can a scientist pray?” he replied: 

Well, that depends on what you mean by prayer. Scientists, I think, very often pray without knowing they’re praying. A sense of wonder at the beauty and fruitfulness of the world is a very common scientific experience. Actually, that’s a sort of tacit prayer of adoration to the Creator, but of course many of my scientific friends wouldn’t be able to see it that way. I suppose the real point of the question, “Can a scientist pray?” is in terms of petitionary prayer: can we actually ask God for something? I think we’ve come to see a picture of the physical world that is open, is subtle and supple. We’re beginning to see a picture of the physical world in which we can understand ourselves as its inhabitants, because we know we have powers to act in the world; hence the world must really be open for us to act within it. It seems to me likely also to be open to God to act within it. In other words, God’s providential interaction with history is not ruled out by what we know about scientific process. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Do you agree that a scientist’s “sense of wonder” at the world is “a sort of tacit prayer of adoration to the Creator”? 

2. What do you think Polkinghorne meant when he said that “God’s providential interaction with history is not ruled out by what we know about scientific process”? What does this imply about the question he was asked: “Can a scientist pray?” 

______________________________

Source: John Polkinghorne, “Divine Action: An Interview with John Polkinghorne,” by Lyndon F. Harris, Cross Currents 48, no. 1 (1998) (http://www.crosscurrents.org/polkinghorne.htm). 

Week 5: 

CLASSWORK:

1. Viewing: What Is Truth? Part 1 & 2 videos and answer the following video questions...

Part 1

1. What is the first thing that these 2 philosophers will try to account for in relation to truth?

2. What is the 2nd thing they will try to account for in relation to truth?

3. What 2 things does Strawson say, that Ramsey said, makes belief true?

4. According to Strawson, how does the current investigation of semantics attack this problem?

5. According to Evans, what is the application of truth?

6. According to Strawson, what does truth transcend?

Part 2

7. According to Strawson, what would truth account for, if were not for language?

8. According to Evans, what is a more substantial interpretation?

9. According to Strawson, what are philosophers sensitive to?

10. How does Strawson extend truth?

11. According to Strawson, how do mathematical formulae have a certain utility?

12. According to Evans, what does the undifferentiated notion of truth lead to?

HOMEWORK:

1. Reading: Russell, On Denoting, p.1-10

2. Reading: Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, p.1-12

REVIEW QUESTION:

1. What is the difference between Strawson's extend definition of truth and Evans' undifferentiated definition of truth?