There seems to be one thought about Moore's proof that Landesman does not explictly articulate, but that I have always taken to be at the heart of the argument. When Moore claims, in appropriate contexts, that "here are two hands," the reason he thinks both he and the rest of us know this to be true beyond reasonable doubt is that it is an evident fact which is already more certain than than any arguments for or against it could possibly be. That is, if I needed a further argument to convince you that these are in fact two hands, or appealed to a different argument to call it into question somehow, in order to do so I would have to appeal to other matters of fact and inference which are themselves less evident, certain, and known than the fact that these are two hands. On this account Moore does not need to establish "here are two hands" to an absolute certainty, but merely to a greater degree of certainty than any competitors.
If this analysis of what Moore is doing is correct, Moore does not after all defeat the skeptic in open battle, as it were, but rather covertly. By engaging the skeptic in a conversation using a shared language in which ordinary terms for objects (such as hands) are understood, and thus are understood as having the ontological and epistemic significance that they do in ordinary discourse, he lures the skeptic into using such words in the ordinary, commonsense manner. When the skeptic demures at the ontological or epistemological conclusions Moore draws, Moore can justly cry foul, since the skeptic, in agreeing to have the conversation, had agreed to the ordinary sense of its terms. The skeptic is free to quit the conversation, but at the expense of abandoning the use of words to mean what humans ordinarily take them to mean, which would condemn the skeptic, if not to all-out solipsism, at least to an extremely lonely "existence" (scare quotes to indicate that the skeptic gives a special, non-ontological or -epistemic, meaning to this and most other words).
Such a strategy seems better calculated than Descartes' actually to defeat the skeptic. Descartes, by giving the skeptic as much leeway to doubt as possible (with the dream and evil genius arguments), seems to give away the store, since the only remedy for such radical doubt Descartes can then muster is an a priori (and modal) proof for the necessary existence of an all-good and non-deceiving god. If that argument fails, as it seems to do, Descartes is left stranded on his tiny island of certainty (the cogito), not only a confirmed skeptic about everything else, but a solipsist to boot.
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4 comments:
And there are no reasonable solipsists. Or at least no solipsists who are convinced by anyone but themselves that they are reasonable.
I'm still wondering whether these commonsense rejections of skeptical claims are powerful--certainly what I've read on the matter is convincing, but the classic stone-to-foot refutation as an argument seems reminiscent to be of theologically involved friends urging me to look at the natural world and see god as an argument against atheism. Still considering, but still more convinced by common sense (in this scenario) than skeptical refutation.
If there are in fact any solipsists, of course, there is only one, and I am he...
I take Moore's "common sense" appeal, as I reconstruct it in this post, as rather different in kind from Samuel Johnson's kicking the stone, and I don't see that such an argument could be turned into a case for theism...
It can't, reasonably, I think. I was musing about the fallaciousness of the latter.
From the IEP:
Some have attempted to defend Moore, or at least Moorean style rejoinders to skepticism, by taking seriously Moore’s claim that he was not trying to disprove skepticism, and his admission that this would be a very hard thing to do. If we put aside the issue of proof, we can interpret Moore’s new approach as first, making a clean division between the ontology of cognition and what has come to be recognized as the other main aspect of epistemology—criteriology; and, second, attempting to deal with skepticism solely in terms of the latter. Whereas the ontology of cognition deals with the problem of how we know, criteriology deals with the problem of what we know, in the sense of what we are justified in believing. On this view, then, the issue is not whether commonsense realism is certainly true and skepticism certainly false; rather, the issue is what we ought to believe or regard as true given that we can neither prove nor disprove either position. On this interpretation, central to the Moorean approach is what has come to be called “the G. E. Moore shift” (a term coined by William Rowe). Consider a standard sort of skeptical argument:
If I cannot tell the difference between waking and dreaming, then I cannot be sure that I have a body.
I cannot tell the difference between waking and dreaming.
Therefore, I cannot be sure that I have a body
Employing the G. E. Moore shift, we rearrange the propositions of the skeptic’s argument, thus:
If I cannot tell the difference between waking and dreaming, then
I cannot be sure that I have a body.
I am sure that I have a body.
Therefore, I can tell the difference between waking and dreaming.
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