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Lesson 1.1: Intro to PHIL
10 Plays17 days ago
Philosophy begins the moment you stop defending what you believe and start asking why you believe it.
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Transcript
Introduction to Philosophy Course
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone and welcome to this course in introductory philosophy. This is RCM Garcia, I'll be your instructor.
00:00:13
Speaker
And we're going to begin today in what is pretty difficult, I think, for a college introductory course. We're going to answer the question, what is philosophy?
00:00:23
Speaker
Now, you probably will do this in a whole you know number of courses you will take, psychology, anthropology, what have you. The reason why the question of the demarcation of what philosophy is, is interesting and important is because there is, to spoil the fun here, no easy answer.
00:00:49
Speaker
So we'll get to that topic, why it's so difficult to answer the question, what is philosophy? Let me begin though by talking about why it is an important question.
Defining Philosophy and Its Influence
00:01:02
Speaker
Now it turns out that depending on how you answer this question, you will get different answers to all kinds of important questions to you, to society, etc. So depending on how you define philosophy, you might decide that different ancient civilizations either had or didn't have philosophy.
00:01:28
Speaker
For example, basically everyone agrees, obviously, that the Greeks had philosophy. What about the Aztecs? Now, this is obviously a touchy subject.
00:01:39
Speaker
Some people will say, you know what? I'm not sure that they did. Other people will say, well, you know, it's because you have a particular way of thinking about philosophy. Once you broaden that a little bit, they really are philosophers in the ancient world of the Aztecs.
00:01:57
Speaker
So there is a reason why the question of what philosophy is, is important.
00:02:04
Speaker
Here's another one. maybe a little closer to home. But depending on what philosophy is, and might either be compatible or not with, let's just say, your religion or the practice of science or whatever other important thing.
00:02:25
Speaker
Let's talk about religion and science for a second though. It really is the case that some philosophers basically saw discussing religious topics as not exactly, ah you know, psychobabble, but it is um a waste of time, right? Empty questions or pseudo-problems.
00:02:47
Speaker
is what they would call that. And of course, other philosophers think that the big religious questions are like, you know, the point of philosophy. Okay, so it matters how we define philosophy.
00:02:59
Speaker
Let's talk briefly about science.
Philosophy and Science
00:03:03
Speaker
Some philosophers, frankly, are really not interested in science. They're not compatible with, their research is not compatible with it.
00:03:13
Speaker
Other philosophers though, they are big fans of science and they think that philosophy done right is science first, philosophy second. So that is a big deal. It matters how we define philosophy. One more, how helpful is philosophy to us today?
00:03:34
Speaker
Well, again, if you focus on one kind of philosophy, it's not relevant at all, it seems like. But there's also... For example, the ancient ethicists like Aristotle or the Stoics, they are, you know for lack of a better way of putting it, a large part of their writings is about how to life, you know how to just be a human. And that is still not as relevant today in the modern world as it ever was.
Western Philosophical Tradition
00:04:06
Speaker
So, okay. Obviously, this question of what philosophy is Definitely matters. Now, here is sort of a the bad news.
00:04:18
Speaker
It's really, really hard to answer the question of what philosophy is. The best I can do, I swear, this is the best I can do. is during this course we're going to begin and more or less end with the western tradition and we'll get you a flavor of what philosophy is and has been and that's about it i can't give you an easy definition that says here's what philosophy is we just have to give you a taste and then that's how you'll know
00:04:55
Speaker
Now, some people will be upset that we are focusing so much on the Western tradition. Let me justify just for a second here why this is not a bad idea at all.
00:05:09
Speaker
Let me give you the first one, and it has to do with my putting Western tradition in scare quotes, but the Western tradition is actually not all that Western.
00:05:24
Speaker
There's been books recently talking about how, you know, the world made the West. It's not like the West was this island in Western Europe where no cultural influences from the outside ever made it in.
00:05:41
Speaker
course it wasn't like that. In the Western tradition, quote unquote Western tradition, that we will be discussing, there are influences from the East and from, you know, so let's talk about Persia.
00:05:55
Speaker
We'll talk a little bit about India, right? So these influences were there and are there in the Western tradition. So we aren't really excluding many points of view.
00:06:08
Speaker
We're just primarily talking about them through the writings and views of Western thinkers. But you you will definitely get a taste of non-Western ideologies in this course. Don't worry.
00:06:20
Speaker
The main players will happen to be, you know, mostly from Western Europe and towards the end, Americans as well. Okay, so that's one reason why it's fine that we're going to start with the Western tradition.
00:06:36
Speaker
It really is not necessarily omitting some viewpoints that might be of interest to us. Here's another thing that's really relevant here.
00:06:48
Speaker
Most of us, even if we're not originally, you know, having Western European descent, I, you know, don't have ah Western European descent in me, at least not for many, many, many generations.
00:07:01
Speaker
Even despite that, most of us are immersed in Western ideas. You will notice that some of these ideas, when once we question them,
00:07:13
Speaker
you'll get a little touchy about it. You'll say, I don't like questioning this idea. You know, there are some ideas that typically get regarded as quote unquote Western and people that typically say they want to, you know, they don't care about the Western tradition, they get touchy about them. So I think that those ideas are, they're in your head, ah they're in your mind.
00:07:37
Speaker
And it's really cool to explore their historical, you know, lineage, right? The the intellectual history that gave rise to some of these ideas. Speaking of history, some of these Western ideas are quite good.
00:07:52
Speaker
And frankly, we don't do a good enough job of celebrating them. While we're on that topic, some of these are quite bad and probably led to some harm.
00:08:03
Speaker
And we should probably talk about that as well. So I guess what we call this sort of introduction to the Western tradition is a
Course Structure and Perspectives
00:08:13
Speaker
critical introduction.
00:08:15
Speaker
Don't worry, i will give you multiple viewpoints on every topic, nearly every topic that we cover. So much so that you'll say, okay, I'll I don't need any more isms here, but we have to. That is the nature of a philosophy course.
00:08:34
Speaker
Let me tell you one more reason why i think it's a great idea to start your introduction to philosophy with the Western tradition. It really is a good story. And, you know, it's the way I treat my classes. It's almost like one big narrative. If you want to take all the classes that I teach, you'll get most of the story, to be honest.
00:08:57
Speaker
But even if you just kind of take it in different chunks, if you just look at, for example, this class, there is a good narrative to it. And for that reason alone, I think it makes a good course.
00:09:09
Speaker
It has some cohesion to it. So it'll be good. Don't worry. So we are going to begin with the Western tradition. And as I already mentioned, it really is difficult to give you like a once one sentence summary of what philosophy is. The dictionary might try.
00:09:29
Speaker
And it's just not very good, right?
Complexities of Defining Philosophy
00:09:32
Speaker
The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. You know, I feel like a physicist might read that and say, you know, isn't that what we do?
00:09:47
Speaker
So the problem with this ah definition is that it basically might include some things that at least some people will say, well, that's not philosophy.
00:10:00
Speaker
So it's a little bit more complicated than this. So what I want to do now is you're going to get your your very first story time.
00:10:12
Speaker
Now, the point behind this particular story time is to give you a little snapshot of the history of Western philosophy from, you know, ancient Greece to today and show you that really there is a ton of different methods and practices
Early Philosophical Schools
00:10:34
Speaker
relating to philosophy. There is no one way to do philosophy, in other words. So let's and's just dive in here.
00:10:44
Speaker
Let's start in Greece's classical period. Now, even at what many people call the very beginning, there was a couple of different ways of doing philosophy. um I really like the lifestyle schools of philosophy. So I mentioned the Stoics earlier, but we can also talk about the Epicureans.
00:11:06
Speaker
I am a fan for whatever twisted reason of the cynics, the skeptics. And so you'll learn about some of those in this course, but basically the lifestyle schools of philosophy were about how to live, how to live well, more precisely.
00:11:24
Speaker
There's also schools of thought like the Milesian school of thought that really is more science-like. And so, you know, you will look at them and kind of see hints of the beginnings of science there.
00:11:39
Speaker
And then there's, I don't know what else to call them, anti-schools and spiritual movements. So the anti-schools, they sort of opposed the other kinds of philosophy.
00:11:51
Speaker
And so and that's why they're anti-school. And so we'll talk about one of those in just a second. There's also, you know, in the early days of philosophy, these are wild and crazy times because some people,
00:12:06
Speaker
where essentially, you know what else can we call them? They are mystics, right? So it is it is a complicated time period in the history of philosophy.
00:12:16
Speaker
Some people just don't neatly fall into what you think of when you think of a philosopher today They would lock themselves in caves and try to communicate with the supernatural.
00:12:28
Speaker
they One of them actually, you know, I won't spoil the fun actually, but one of them basically started his own religious movement. So we'll get into all those. Let me give you a quick review of these.
00:12:42
Speaker
This is Marcus Aurelius, a very famous Stoic. And what is Stoicism all about? It's about reframing situations so that you know you achieve some sort of peace of mind.
00:12:58
Speaker
So that is definitely a lifestyle school philosophy. Because the whole idea here is that you want to... live in a way that is free of emotional disturbance.
00:13:14
Speaker
And so you have to adopt a certain lifestyle so that you can do this. So that's definitely a lifestyle school of philosophy. Typically they call this ethics. Then there's Thales of Miletus. He is, let's call him a proto-scientist.
00:13:31
Speaker
He was basically engaging and You know, i today we can call it like the beginnings of science. um You can definitely, you know, see his arguments and if you squint at it the right way, you can say, ah this is the beginning of like the empirical tradition or something like that. So, or at least the seeds of it.
00:13:53
Speaker
So there you go. There's Thales. Here is the anti-school I was talking about, or at least one member of it. His name is Diogenes. They called him the dog and he thought that the way that we're living now is completely wrong.
00:14:08
Speaker
You don't need a school of philosophy at all. You need to just become totally self-sufficient. Everything you need you should be able to provide for yourself and the way to do that is to radically reduce your needs. So he was a homeless man or he was almost homeless. He lived in that and know jar or whatever that is.
00:14:30
Speaker
And he had basically no possessions, just a cloak and that lamp apparently. And that's all you need. you know He can take care of himself and that's how he lived and that's how he thought that others should live.
00:14:45
Speaker
Okay, how about that spiritual movement I mentioned? Here is Pythagoras. He traveled through the Mediterranean and learned all these different practices from different groups.
00:14:56
Speaker
And what he did is that he combined them and initiated a movement in which people lived, you know, with in sort of communes, they would all live communally, according to the principles that Pythagoras established.
00:15:13
Speaker
So lots of different religious communes, quasi-religious communes, if you want to call them that, arose in especially in southern Italy, around Pythagoras' teachings.
00:15:25
Speaker
And of course, some people think that Pythagoras was one of the very first people to practice ethics, right? to To talk about how it is that one should live. And of course, his answer is the way that the Pythagorean Brotherhood lives, right? The way that these communes that he set up are. That's how you should live.
00:15:43
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's the very beginning of Western philosophy. I should mention two things about this. As I said earlier, a lot of these philosophical movements came from foreigners that you know showed up in Greek-run places, right? So that that's a complicated story. And if you take my ancient philosophy course, you will hear that story.
00:16:11
Speaker
But for example, the founder of Stoicism was not originally from Greece. He you know lived in regions that used to be run by Persia and he ended up in Greece. The point is that a lot of different schools of thought came from non-Greek origins, but once they made it to Greece,
00:16:33
Speaker
they definitely took on a different character. In particular, one very important practice was that of argumentation. That is very Greek for historical reasons.
00:16:46
Speaker
The Greeks basically had to argue um about argumentation you know, basically everything. They would argue about their, how they would run their colonies, they would argue about, you know, ah policies. For example, Athens was a democracy and so they would get together and argue about how it is that they should run a war or, you know, what sort of policy should they have toward this neighboring island and that kind of thing.
00:17:14
Speaker
So argumentation is very important to Greek culture. And as these philosophical movements took root in Greece and in parts of the world run by Greeks, this argumentation kind of seeped into those philosophical movements.
00:17:33
Speaker
And now when you think of philosophy, you basically, you know, a lot of people immediately think about philosophical arguments in particular. Okay, things were about to change though.
Philosophy in the Middle Ages
00:17:44
Speaker
If you don't know this, Christianity arose ah about 2000 years ago. It took several centuries, but eventually Christianity became culturally hegemonic.
00:17:57
Speaker
Basically, most of the population in Western Europe became Christian. Also, North Africa and I guess Central Asia. The point is that this changed philosophy.
00:18:13
Speaker
Whereas philosophy used to have spiritual movements and, you know, used to be a little more scientifically minded, at least sometimes, Christianity took charge and that was the main spiritual movement.
00:18:26
Speaker
And at least during some parts of it history of its history, Christianity was not particularly friendly to scientific type thinking. And so the only kind of philosophy that, ah you know,
00:18:41
Speaker
was around during what some people call the Dark Ages is kind of the dry, rigid argumentation that we now think of when we think of philosophy.
00:18:53
Speaker
So that's when that happened. And typically, the way people saw philosophy at this point, there might be, you know, just a kind of, there's only like a couple of points that there are to philosophy. Let me say that again.
00:19:08
Speaker
When you think of yourself when you think yourself, what is philosophy for in the Middle Ages? There's not that many answers. you know Earlier i gave you all kinds of reasons why people did philosophy. and By the Middle Ages, basically some people thought, you know what philosophy is for?
00:19:26
Speaker
The same thing that theology is for, arguing for God's existence, defending Christian doctrine, and that's it. So that's one view that took root in the Middle Ages.
00:19:39
Speaker
Another one is a little more, you know, hands-off. they These people would say, you know what, just let philosophy do its thing.
00:19:50
Speaker
And it might be the case that it actually arrives at some of the same beliefs as the Christians, or maybe not. And maybe there's just two truths and that's okay. So that took a while before it became popular, maybe around 1000 CE or the 1100s. That's when that was kind of um coming around.
00:20:12
Speaker
And by the way, I have here St. Thomas Aquinas pictured. He actually didn't believe in either one of those views. He believed that if you just do philosophy, and you don't have to, you know, kind of bend over backwards to defend Christian doctrine, but just do philosophy,
00:20:28
Speaker
you know, follow the evidence and if you keep doing that, you will eventually land upon Christian doctrine. So he believed that philosophy and theology naturally converge.
00:20:39
Speaker
So there are some different takes on what philosophy is from the Middle Ages. Philosophy is either the handmaiden to theology or it's this way of investigating the world that is separate from theology and you, it might yield a second kind of truth.
00:20:58
Speaker
Or they are separate, but if you just kind of follow each one to their you know rational conclusion, they both end up as a Christian doctrine. So those are a couple of views about what philosophy is from the Middle Ages.
00:21:13
Speaker
I hope you can see here the point of what I'm doing. There is no one point of philosophy. There is no one method. There is no one aim There's all kinds of different practices occurring at the same time, different ways of practicing philosophy.
00:21:31
Speaker
Okay, let's move forward here to the modern period, typically considered the 1600s through the eighteen hundreds And here we have pictured man ah man named Rene Descartes.
Modern Philosophy and Science
00:21:47
Speaker
And he believed that philosophy is autonomous. What that means basically is that you can pursue it for its own sake and it it basically can arrive at truths ah that you can't otherwise arrive at. So it's autonomous and unbounded. It doesn't have to listen to other fields and it can discover fundamental truth about reality.
00:22:12
Speaker
So that is a whole other view on philosophy. In fact, Descartes believed that philosophy can justify the practice of science.
00:22:23
Speaker
Now some people might say, you don't need to justify the practice of science. Well, Descartes thought so, and that's how he did it, through philosophy. So there is yet another goal of philosophy.
00:22:37
Speaker
Let's jump over to the 20th century. I find these people from the Vienna Circle quite interesting because even though they were philosophers, They argued that philosophy as a field is pretty much done.
00:22:52
Speaker
in other words, throughout the history of philosophy, there was all kinds of scientific extractions. So physics came out of philosophy, couple of thousand years later, psychology came out of philosophy. um But by the 20th century, they had just extracted logic from philosophy.
00:23:13
Speaker
Logic began and about about 2300 years ago with Aristotle. And then in the 1900s, it was turned into its own field or maybe a branch of mathematics, if you want to think about it that way.
00:23:29
Speaker
And the Vienna Circle said, yeah, that was it. That was the last scientific extraction. All that's left now in this field is pseudo problems. Interesting. Philosophy is done. okay that's another view.
00:23:45
Speaker
Let me give you someone that I prefaced earlier, the view of Patricia Churchland. She sees philosophy, by the way, it's like a lower case p philosophy, as continuous with the natural sciences. What that means is this whole science first, philosophy second deal that I mentioned earlier.
00:24:09
Speaker
And Churchland sees science as having several, you know, conceptual problems, abstract problems. You have to define things like consciousness.
00:24:23
Speaker
And guess who's used to arguing about concepts? Yeah, you guessed it, philosophers. And so philosophy is sort of like a theoretical wing to the sciences. They figure out, you know, in science, there's basically just two questions.
00:24:40
Speaker
What are we talking about and how do we measure it? And so Churchland says philosophers can help with that first question.
00:24:51
Speaker
One more here. I heard this from a professor that I had and he basically thought that there just is no such thing as philosophy. There is no standard methodology.
00:25:06
Speaker
This is what he calls a legacy department in universities. Universities allow philosophy departments to exist precisely because there is such a rich history of past contributions But really, there is no philosophy anymore.
00:25:26
Speaker
Now it's just a department that allows people to explore topics that, you know, basically aren't being covered by other disciplines. And so that's what philosophy is. It's not really ah thing anymore.
00:25:42
Speaker
Okay, well I hope you can see that if we're trying to answer the question, what is philosophy, there is no easy answer to that question because every single view that I just covered about what philosophy is has some claim.
Exploring Philosophical Problems
00:26:01
Speaker
on what that word philosophy means. So what is philosophy? It's tough to say. It's been different things at different times.
00:26:14
Speaker
Nonetheless, of course, we have to do this introduction to the course. By the end of this course, you will get a sense of what the discipline is ah about, sort of.
00:26:25
Speaker
So let's switch gears now and start prepare ourselves for what comes ahead this course.
00:27:05
Speaker
So obviously we find ourselves in a pickle. How can you teach an introduction to a discipline which is different things at different times?
00:27:18
Speaker
Well I'm not like reinventing the wheel or anything. ah pretty standard approach is just to cover what are pretty commonly regarded as philosophical questions.
00:27:32
Speaker
So yeah, maybe we don't know what philosophy is because it is different things at different times, but there's certainly some questions that are philosophical and they always have been, and they still are today.
00:27:46
Speaker
And you know what? Maybe in the future they'll be solved, but currently people still debate them and talk about them. So that's what we're going to do in this class. Cover 10 big very standard philosophical questions.
00:28:03
Speaker
So let's begin this endeavor with some important concepts.
Logical Reasoning in Philosophy
00:28:10
Speaker
The thing is that when we do this, we do kind of have to follow the Greek style because sort of the currency in philosophy is arguments. We decide whether or not we accept a view based on the quality of the argument for that position.
00:28:33
Speaker
So for example, if you want to have a view about free will, whether or not humans have it, It would be nice to just believe whatever you want, but the expectation is that you will be able to provide a reason for why your view is true, set of reasons, an argument, and a set of arguments or a set of reasons for why the other positions are not true.
00:29:03
Speaker
so that's going to But this is not an emotional endeavor. there's a You can be passionate, but there's sort of a disciplined passion that you know is at the heart of philosophical arguments.
00:29:17
Speaker
Because for our for philosophers, I should say, arguments are just like a pile of sentences that support another sentence, the conclusion. So you give these premises, that's a member of the set of sentences that support the conclusion.
00:29:34
Speaker
You give a these reasons for why you should accept a conclusion. And of course, the conclusion is the sentence being argued for. Now, I'm going to give you a quite boring example of what an argument looks like.
00:29:50
Speaker
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Not super fun, not super surprising. But this, you know, gives you the basic idea of the anatomy of an argument.
00:30:05
Speaker
Those are the premises. They are numbered, one and two. and you put them on top the third item there is the conclusion it is the sentence being supported by the premises sometimes people kind of think about it as a i don't know an upside down building right the premises are the foundation for the conclusion so yeah that's that's one way to think about it The way I like to picture it, though, is to basically think of the premises as, you know, being the hooks that, you know, support the idea that is a conclusion.
00:30:46
Speaker
i think of ideas as like, you know, in the sky or something. And some of them have support. They have very strong premises. Right. So they are they're there. And no matter how windy it gets, they stay there. So i don't know. Sometimes that's a better visual for me.
00:30:58
Speaker
Whatever. That is the basic idea of an argument. Let's think about another very important philosophical concept. Two or more statements are logically consistent if it is possible that they are all true simultaneously.
00:31:17
Speaker
Basically, can these sentences all be true at the same time? So let me talk a little bit about this. The first thing is that if you have a view that you wanna support, one way to know if it's weak or maybe even false is if it contains logical inconsistencies. Basically sometimes, you know parts of the view conflict with other parts of the view and that's actually a pretty good signal
00:31:52
Speaker
that it's not true. So logical inconsistencies are undesirable in a view. It points at least to a weakness, right?
00:32:03
Speaker
And so what you really want is views that are logically consistent, views that all the parts of the theory can be true at the same time. There's no internal tension between the sentences that make up your theory.
00:32:20
Speaker
So that's one thing that's very important. Now, let me talk about why it's tricky. So it really is a case that early on people equate logical consistency with truth.
00:32:35
Speaker
In other words, I'll give them a set of sentences and I'll say, hey, are they consistent? But instead of answering that question, they'll answer the question, are they both true?
00:32:46
Speaker
Now, that's not what we're asking, right? I mean, truth is important and that's its own test, right? But, you know, sometimes you want to just know, can these even be true together?
00:32:58
Speaker
And so it's very important to realize that two statements can be consistent while both being false. So here's an example of that.
00:33:09
Speaker
The present king of France is bald. Baldness is inherited from your mother's side of the family. So the present king of France is bald. That sentence is...
00:33:21
Speaker
and not true because there is no King of France right and the other one i mean I guess people used to believe this but now they know it's a little more it's a little bit more complicated than that and apparently drinking and smoking play a role in epigenetics which don't ask me to explain that to you but the point is they can both be true at the same time so I know that ultimately you don't want to build theories out of false statements, obviously, but when you are checking theories, philosophical theories for quality, you have to do a couple of different tests.
00:33:59
Speaker
Of course, check if, you know, the statements are true, but also check if they're consistent and it's a separate test, right? So Yeah, I do have here this that I really have to stress. So the notion of logical consistency is useful because it is almost universally accepted that views and theories that contain logical inconsistencies can't be true.
00:34:26
Speaker
Or in the very least, as I said earlier, they're weak. There's something about them that you have to change, right? You haven't fully worked out the view. For example, you can't believe a person that states both that they've always known everything and that they've been wrong in the past.
00:34:44
Speaker
These views are inconsistent, right? These sentences, these themes are inconsistent. Either you're infallible you're not. So, you know, that's kind of an obvious example.
00:34:58
Speaker
When we're looking at some theories later on checking for their inconsistencies will be more difficult than you think. You gotta really flesh out what each, you know, even a word in each sentence means.
00:35:13
Speaker
What are some other common mistakes in philosophical views?
Fallacies and Biases in Reasoning
00:35:17
Speaker
Fallacies are it, basically. I mean, there's there this happens this happens a lot in like regular life.
00:35:26
Speaker
you And it even happens in philosophy, to be honest. Because sometimes you don't realize it's a fallacy until someone points it out. But in any case, a fallacy is an error in reasoning.
00:35:37
Speaker
they There's two flavors, formal and informal. Formal fallacies are sort of what we usually study more so in a symbolic logic course. They have to do with the structure of an argument. that There's a basically an erroneous pattern of reasoning.
00:35:57
Speaker
In this course, we're going to focus a little more on informal fallacies. And that if those have to do with the relationship between the evidence or the premises and the conclusion. Let me give you...
00:36:10
Speaker
your first informal fallacy so you can get a feel for what these are like. And we're going to begin with a classic, the argumentum ad hominem. Usually people just call this an ad hominem. They leave out the first word there.
00:36:28
Speaker
This is a fallacy in which this is a fallacy in which one attacks the arguer. rather than the argument itself now i think that these are quite common someone makes a stellar point right number one in this event timeline someone presents an argument the other person event number two says you know what i don't like that i don't like it at all But instead of critiquing the argument itself, they attack the person, which is not, you know, it's it's not a lot of things, right? It's not polite.
00:37:10
Speaker
But more than anything, it's not intellectually rigorous. You want to be persuaded by reason and evidence and arguments. not by personas, right? So similarly, when you want to defeat a set of, you know, arguments or a view, you want to attack the arguments or the view, not the persona that are attached to that view.
00:37:42
Speaker
That's very important. too ah This is so incredibly shockingly common in politics and in everything, to be honest. Once you realize the existence of informal fallacies, I don't even know what to say, man. It sucks.
00:38:00
Speaker
they're They're all over the place. But also, don't be that person that's always pointing out fallacy. That's that's also obnoxious. But, you know, I guess tread softly, tread lightly, right? You don't want to be that person. However, for now, let's be that person.
00:38:16
Speaker
ah Here's a, I think, a YouTube comment that i clipped. i don't know how long ago. This is pretty old. There is some guy named Bernie Sanders and he wanted to um be president.
00:38:28
Speaker
yeah But in any case, there was this battle between um Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And then eventually, you know, Clinton got the nomination. And so people were supposed to back her. But here is a nice comment that someone left on a message board or a video.
00:38:49
Speaker
The Bernie or bust people are the most annoying cancerous people in the world. Just vote for Clinton and shut the fuck up.
00:39:01
Speaker
Okay, that is not very nice. The response though, hopefully it is sophisticated, right? And intellectually rigorous. No, condescending asshats who think they can bully people into changing their votes are more annoying.
00:39:18
Speaker
You shut the fuck Okay, not not great reasoning, right? this If you're trying to persuade someone through reasoning, this is awful. You're just calling into their names, right? So I'm actually going to put this into standard form for you and give you the argument.
00:39:36
Speaker
And you can see, premise one, you are annoying. Premise two, you are cancerous. Conclusion, therefore, you should vote for Clinton, not...
00:39:47
Speaker
terribly persuasive. I hope you can see that, right? So that is not how you want to argue, my friends. But speaking of not wanting to argue in that way, here's another problem.
00:40:03
Speaker
And it has to do with our cognitive bias of the day. To be honest, we don't have many of these cognitive biases in this class, but it is fun to learn about, right? It's called the confirmation bias.
00:40:15
Speaker
And I'll give you another bias that's related. But the confirmation bias, sometimes called my side bias, is the unconscious tendency to seek, interpret, or selectively recall information in a way that confirms one's existing beliefs.
00:40:35
Speaker
In other words, the way you look at the world, the data that you pick up, sometimes, maybe most of the time actually,
00:40:46
Speaker
sort of unconsciously gets auto-corrected so that you only remember the parts that back up your views. In other words, you're looking at the world, right? And you have views already and your mind kind of secretly and surreptitiously interprets everything so that what you already believe gets supported by what you see.
00:41:13
Speaker
And you just, that's what you remember. So it's pretty wild. The reason why I'm bringing this up now is because of this other related bias, belief bias.
00:41:24
Speaker
The tendency to rate the strength of an argument on the basis of whether or not we agree with the conclusion. What does that mean? Literally, when I present arguments to you, you're gonna have to really slow down and think about each individual premise because depending on whether or not you agree with the conclusion, you will evaluate the argument in a certain way, right? So if you agree with the conclusion,
00:41:56
Speaker
you will say the argument, oh, this is really good, sort of naturally and and um unconsciously, maybe for no good reason, actually. And if you disagree with the conclusion, then all of a sudden, hey, I don't really like this premise must be false. And this line of reasoning doesn't really follow and that kind of stuff. So this will happen.
00:42:17
Speaker
We have to watch out. What can we do, right? We just have to be careful. So you have to be patient and and, you know, take each argument very slowly. Don't let yourself slip into lazy thinking where you just say, yeah you know, this sounds right to me.
00:42:36
Speaker
Really think about each individual premise and whether it actually supports the conclusion. Let me give you a couple of examples of confirmation bias and its cousin belief bias.
00:42:51
Speaker
um based on you know the literature, right? And some findings that psychologists have documented. i really like this one. Volunteers given praise by a supervisor were more likely to read information praising the supervisor's ability than information to the contrary. Basically, if your boss thinks you're awesome and just told you so, what do you want to hear about?
00:43:18
Speaker
About how they're awesome or about how they suck? You want to hear about how they're awesome, right? They must be awesome. They recognize the awesomeness in you. And so there is a little bit of confirmation bias.
00:43:31
Speaker
You want to hear that someone who just praised you is obviously correct and right and accurate. And so that's what your mind naturally prefers.
00:43:43
Speaker
Here's a potpourri of examples. Kitchen appliances seem more valuable once you buy them. Jobs seem more appealing once you've accepted them.
00:43:55
Speaker
And high school students rate colleges as more adequate once they've been accepted into them. Basically, you know, once you already have something, a job or some appliance that you bought, to or once some institution accepted you into it, then you're like, obviously, this is a great move. this is I'm glad I did this. This was the right thing to do all along.
00:44:20
Speaker
But you weren't that sure before, right? So once you already have something in your back pocket, you're now going to whatever, you know, state university, then you're like, yeah, this is a great choice. That's confirmation bias. if you you know You kind of have to squint at the problem, but you already decided you're going to go there.
00:44:41
Speaker
And all of a sudden, you're really confident that that was the right decision all along. right So that's confirmation bias. And here's maybe the most damning study I have here about confirmation bias.
00:44:54
Speaker
This is fascinating, by the way. In a 2006 study, researchers gave participants a variety of arguments on controversial issues such as gun control.
00:45:07
Speaker
They divided the participants into two groups, those with low and those with high knowledge of political issues. The low knowledge group exhibited a solid confirmation bias.
00:45:20
Speaker
They elicited twice as many thoughts supporting their side of the issue than thoughts going the other way. Okay, Yeah, that makes sense, right? So people that don't know a lot about political issues, they have a lot of confirmation bias, right? So um maybe that's not too surprising.
00:45:39
Speaker
Low information voters are more carried away by their biases. Okay, that makes sense. Kinda, maybe. How did the participants in the high knowledge group do?
00:45:53
Speaker
Well, they found so many views. so many thoughts, so much evidence supporting their favorite position that they gave none going the other way.
00:46:07
Speaker
So you were asked to you know examine an issue and the people that knew a lot about this issue could give no reasons, none for the other side's view, right? So if you're a Republican, they couldn't come up with a single Democratic, you know, Democratic Party supported idea, right?
00:46:33
Speaker
That is bananas. What this in effect shows is that if you have a lot of knowledge about some domain of inquiry about some field, some topic, that doesn't at all protect you from confirmation bias. In fact, greater knowledge appears to amplify our confirmation bias.
00:46:56
Speaker
That is frightening. You think you're sitting there reading a bunch of books, getting super smart. You're like, oh yeah, I'll be able but ah you know, see clearly. Probably not.
00:47:07
Speaker
Thinking well is in incredibly challenging and it requires that we challenge our biases head on. It's not just acquiring information. That might make it worse.
00:47:20
Speaker
Why am i telling you about all this? Well, here's the point. Maybe my favorite slide that I have. Philosophy begins where bias awareness meets curiosity.
00:47:37
Speaker
We have to really work on doubting our certainties and that is a skill. You have to slowly kind of work on it. And it's not even something you do in a semester, right? It takes a long time to do this.
00:47:52
Speaker
To try to overcome biases, I will provide multiple viewpoints on most issues, and I'm really going to drive home sort of two sides of the issue every time, hopefully to dislodge you from whatever, you know, entrenched view you're in.
00:48:14
Speaker
Your job is to follow the arguments where they lead you and notice if certainty slips away.
00:48:26
Speaker
Hopefully that is enticing to you. To recap, philosophy has been different things in different time
Focus on Philosophical Problems and Arguments
00:48:35
Speaker
periods. Thus, what we're going to do is focus on traditional philosophical problems, philosophical issues that have arisen basically throughout its history.
00:48:46
Speaker
And the number we'll focus on is 10. There'll be 10 different dilemmas. we will be focusing on arguments. We have to look at arguments as as a proxy for you know understanding and evaluating philosophical positions.
00:49:04
Speaker
So I will present the position, of course, but really the real determinant of whether or not you should accept anything is the argument that supports that philosophical position.
00:49:15
Speaker
as a general rule, reject any philosophical view that contains items that are inconsistent and reject arguments that commit informal fallacies, right? If there is some sneaky business there where there, you know, there's a set of premises that don't really connect to the conclusion,
00:49:38
Speaker
Well, then you have to say, well, you know, this argument, even if it's valid, right? It's not really supporting this conclusion. So we'll talk more about what validity means later on For now we have to make our way to ancient Greece so that we can start this story.