10 ideas
| 8797 | The negation of all my beliefs about my current headache would be fully coherent [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If I have a headache, I could have a set of beliefs that I do not have a headache, that I am not in pain, that no one is in pain, and so on. The resulting system of beliefs would cohere as fully as does my actual system of beliefs. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §9) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a misunderstanding of coherentism. Beliefs are not to be formulated through a process of coherence, but are evaluated that way. A belief that I have headache just arrives; I then see that its denial is incoherent, so I accept it. |
| 8794 | There are very few really obvious truths, and not much can be proved from them [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: Radical foundationalism suffers from two weaknesses: there are not so many perfectly obvious truths as Descartes thought; and if we restrict ourselves to what it truly obvious, very little supposed common sense knowledge can be proved. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §3) | |
| A reaction: It is striking how few examples can ever be found of self-evident a priori truths. However, if there are self-evident truths about direct experience (pace Descartes), that would give us more than enough. |
| 8796 | A single belief can trail two regresses, one terminating and one not [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: A single belief can trail at once regresses of both sorts: one terminating and one not. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §6) | |
| A reaction: This makes foundationalism possible, while admitting the existence of regresses. It is a good point, and triumphalist anti-foundationalists can't just point out a regress and then smugly troop off to the pub. |
| 8799 | If mental states are not propositional, they are logically dumb, and cannot be foundations [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If a mental state is not propositional, then how can it possibly serve as a foundation for belief? How can one infer or justify anything on the basis of a state that, having no propositional content, must be logically dumb? | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §11) | |
| A reaction: This may be the best objection to foundationalism. McDowell tries to argue that conceptual content is inherent in perception, thus giving the beginnings of inbuilt propositional content. But an organism awash with bare experiences knows nothing. |
| 8795 | Mental states cannot be foundational if they are not immune to error [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If a mental state provides no guarantee against error, then it cannot serve as a foundation for knowledge. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §4) | |
| A reaction: That assumes that knowledge entails certainty, which I am sure it should not. On a fallibilist account, a foundation could be incredibly secure, despite a barely imaginable scenario in which it turned out to be false. |
| 8798 | Vision causes and justifies beliefs; but to some extent the cause is the justification [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: Visual experience is recognized as both the cause and the justification of our visual beliefs. But these are not wholly independent. Presumably the justification that something is red derives partly from the fact that it originates in visual experience. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §10) | |
| A reaction: Yes, but the fact that certain visual experiences originate in dreams is taken as grounds for denying their truth, not affirming it. So why do we distinguish them? I am thinking that only in the 'space of reasons' can a cause become a justification. |
| 1590 | The just man does not harm his enemies, but benefits everyone [Plato] |
| Full Idea: First, Socrates, you told me justice is harming your enemies and helping your friends. But later it seemed that the just man, since everything he does is for someone's benefit, never harms anyone. | |
| From: Plato (Clitophon [c.372 BCE], 410b) | |
| A reaction: Socrates certainly didn't subscribe to the first view, which is the traditional consensus in Greek culture. In general Socrates agreed with the views later promoted by Jesus. |
| 20595 | You can't distribute goods from behind a veil, because their social meaning is unclear [Walzer, by Tuckness/Wolf] |
| Full Idea: Walzer says behind the veil of ignorance there would be no way to know how a particular good should be distributed, because we would not know the social meaning of the good in question. | |
| From: report of Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice [1983]) by Tuckness,A/Wolf,C - This is Political Philosophy 4 'Communitarian' | |
| A reaction: Is Rawls actually proposing to decide details of distribution from behind the veil? There is just the maximin principle. What that means in practice would surely come once the society was under way. |
| 20592 | Complex equality restricts equalities from spilling over, like money influencing politics and law [Walzer, by Tuckness/Wolf] |
| Full Idea: Complex equality tries to keep advantages in one area (such as money) from translating into advantages in politics or before the law. | |
| From: report of Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice [1983]) by Tuckness,A/Wolf,C - This is Political Philosophy 3 'Complex' | |
| A reaction: Put like that, Walzer's complex equality becomes very interesting, and pinpoints a major problem of our age, where discrepancies of wealth have become staggeringly large at the top end. |
| 20549 | Equality is complex, with different spheres of equality where different principles apply [Walzer, by Swift] |
| Full Idea: Michael Walzer argues for 'complex equality', saying different goods belong to different distributive 'spheres', each with its own distributive principles. | |
| From: report of Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice [1983]) by Adam Swift - Political Philosophy (3rd ed) 3 'Egalitarian' | |
| A reaction: Sounds interesting. Equality seems to make different demands when it concerns basic food for survival, or fine wines. You can spend your money freely, but hording in a crisis is frowned on. |