6349
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I can prove a hand exists, by holding one up, pointing to it, and saying 'here is one hand' [Moore,GE]
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Full Idea:
I can prove now that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, 'Here is one hand', and adding, as I gesture with the left, 'and here is another'.
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From:
G.E. Moore (Proof of an External World [1939], p.1)
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A reaction:
The words need to be spoken, presumably, so that what he is doing fits into the linguistic conventions of what will normally be accepted as a proof. In fact, just holding the hand up seems enough. The proof begs the question of virtual reality.
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19509
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The indexical aspect of contextual knowledge might be hidden, or it might be in what 'know' means [Schiffer,S]
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Full Idea:
One might have a 'hidden-indexical' theory of knowledge sentences: they contain constituents that are not the semantic values of any terms; ...or 'to know' itself might be indexical, as in 'I know[easy] I have hands' or 'I know[tough] I have hands'.
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From:
Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.326-7), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5
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A reaction:
[very compressed] Given the choice, I would have thought it was in 'know', since to say 'either you know p or you don't' sounds silly to me.
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