[lit-ideas] Re: two hands
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 06:24:04 +0000
Dear ms McEvoy D, your point is serious. Would you describe what you take a
proof to be? In the vast majority of cases the prime requirement is non
circularity, it is met by G E Moore argument.
You may decide that soundness is in question (why? You believe that Moore did
not have two hands? That is an original view)
Or you may have another ground. Babbling about the character of the interior is
irrelevant till or unless you set what you take the standard of proofs. You
made several claims to the effect that a rational procedure need set
falsifiability conditions. This is your case at hand: what falsify your claim
that “x is not a proof”?
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Donal McEvoy
Sent: 20 May 2015 19:25
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: two hands
Proof of an External World, a common sense argument against skepticism>
Moore's point or "argument" reflects "common sense", but it is far from a proof.
Commonsense favours the view that I do not merely experience objects in my
internal world but that there are objects in a world external to my experience
(and my experience pertains to these objects). So when I experience a fist
hitting me in the face, commonsense favours the view that ordinarily that is
because there is a fist 'out there' in the external world that is hitting my
face. Likewise when I experience something that I might describe by saying
"Here are my hands", commonsense favours the view that as well as my 'internal'
experience there is also 'out there' in the external world "my hands".
But this is far from a proof - and adducing something as commonsense does not
prove commonsense right. The main reason it is far from a proof is that there
is nothing in the character of the 'internal' experience from which it must
follow that there is anything 'external' to it. If we appeal to something
beyond that 'internal' experience - by, for example, claiming that the
'internal' experience stands in need of a causal explanation that must involve
something 'external' to it - then we are no longer arguing merely from
'internal' experience. So to claim my experience of "Here are my hands" stands
in need of actual "my hands" (out there in an external world) to explain it, is
no longer to rely merely on my experience of "Here are my hands" but on an
assumption that our internal world here stands in need of explanation in terms
of something 'external' to it. But this assumption cannot ever be proved by the
character of our internal world. Commonsense people sometimes think otherwise
but they are mistaken. In their mistake they are liable to overrate Moore's
point and even mistake it for some kind of "proof".
Moore's "Here are my hands" argument is similar to but much, much worse than
the Johnsonian 'refutation' of idealism ["I refute it thus"] by kicking a stone.
Dnl
On Wednesday, 20 May 2015, 2:04, Adriano Palma
<Palma@xxxxxxxxxx<
mailto:Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Just in case, before the idiocies about grice take over, Moore has a serious
argument in my view.
Proof of an External World, a common sense argument against skepticism by
raising his right hand and saying "here is one hand," and then raising his left
and saying "and here is another". Here, Moore is taking his knowledge claim (q)
to be that he has two hands, and without rejecting the skeptic's premise,
proves that we can know the skeptical possibility (sp) to be not true.
The argument is not circular & it is not at all clear that the truth grounds of
what could be the case (the hallucination of the hands etc.) are in sense
stronger than the truth grounds for having two hands and having a perceptually
based knowledge of such a fact.
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