Normativity

excellent well then let's talk about the problem of Norma today that's today's topic and so what I want to do is think about a problem that I think is a central problem throughout the 20th century it is in part a philosophical problem but it's not just a philosophical problem it's really a problem that affects people's everyday lives the way they think about their lives the way they think about themselves the way they think about their relationship other people into the world so let's take a look at what this problem is we have to go back to the Enlightenment the problems that are dealt with in the 20th century arise out of the Enlightenment and in particular in the Scientific Revolution there are two thoughts that emerge in the Enlightenment that sit somewhat uncomfortably together and Enlightenment thinkers I think don't fully appreciate the complexity of this but by the dawn of the 20th century people became well aware of the tension between these two Enlightenment ideals one of them is the gap between is a knot that's what I'm calling this problem of normativity what do I mean by normativity well norms the odd factor we evaluate the world as good bad right wrong just and unjust we also describe the world and there's a little bit of a tension between those two things in a traditional conception of the world they go together very nicely but there's something as we'll see about the Scientific Revolution that suggests at least to some people that science to be a complete description of the world and once that's the case you start thinking well wait then what is left over for these evaluative judgments the rights wrongs just unjust for that matter virtuous men bishops cowardly courageous and so on what is there left for that kind of language to do what's left for the art if we can give a complete description of the world in science in terms of just is and must so there's a gap between is a knot between description and prescription if you want to put it that way or description and evaluation between fact and value and it's that gap that is going to concern us now the thought really goes back to ancient times that yes there are these two dimensions of things I can simply describe or I can also evaluate I can talk about the the world is or the way the world ought to be however the tension between the tips is something that really arises as a product of the Enlightenment the second thought from the Enlightenment that is going to create the puzzle and do a lot to create the tension is the idea of a two-level theory we're going to see a lot two level theories throughout this course and so they arise for the first time perhaps in the Enlightenment they create a problem as we'll see about what it is to be human now what do I mean by a two-level theory well according to this sort of theory there is a surface level of things roughly the world as we observe it ourselves as we observe ourselves and then there's a depth level a deeper level that actually does all the explanatory work that explains why things that the surface level behave the way they do so a classic example is in science we describe what's going on in a chemistry lab for example by talking ultimately about molecular structures we talk about the microscopic level of things and we say that explains what's going on at the microscopic level the level of appearances that's one example of a two-level theory as we'll see throughout the course there are many others there's evolutionary theory that says aha yes you seem to be doing this in this book really you're serving a certain genetic purpose or we'll see a variety of versions for example Freudian psychology ah you think you're doing it for that reason but no no you're really doing it because you ain't your father and one of the things your mother or Nietzsche's idea that yes you think you're doing this for noble reasons but actually it's a will to power you're doing it to grab the additional power for yourself and so on and so so there going to be lots of examples of two-level theories will consider the purest you might take the most respectable is the thing that arises out of the Scientific Revolution the scientific conception the world is ultimately depending on the behavior of what micro particles but we'll see many other variants anyway what's key here is that what's happened hidden at this deep level determines what's happening at the surface level well to see why these get into tension and why we have a problem reconciling fact in value why we have a problem dealing with the two levels in their relation we've got to go back to the Scientific Revolution see what it does it begins with the work of these scientists Copernicus Tycho Brahe Johannes Kepler Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton all of whom do fundamental things to structure our understanding of the world as Galileo puts it he unveils the fact that God has written the world in the language of mathematics and mathematical laws can characterize the behavior of things in the world so the signal achievement you might save the Scientific Revolution is really the development of a system of universal and necessary laws of nature Universal because they apply across the board it's not just that hey you know the distant something is all 1/2 the gravitational constant times the square of the time here in Austin but you know in Bulgaria things just really fly around back no they're right these are universal they apply all over the place they are necessary so like yeah there's an exception my keys are really an exception when I toss them in the air and come down that you know they violate Galileo's law but there's special anti Galilean Keys no it's not like that and so Galileo's law is something that applies universally applies necessarily the same thing for Newton's law this one if the sum of forces acting on an object is zero then the acceleration of the object is zero or force is equal to mass times acceleration or the sum of the forces from A to B is just the negation of the forces from B to a the one that's often expressed as every reaction every action has an equal amounts of reaction or the law of gravitation one of Newton's great achievements gravitational force is the gravitational constant times the product of the masses of the object divided by the square of the radius the distance between them those laws are things that apply universally applied necessarily and are the great achievements of the Scientific Revolution it didn't take long for science to become institutionalized by the 1640s the British Royal Society began to meet it was chartered in 1662 the French royal academy of sciences began meeting in the 1650s and was chartered in 1666 there were observatories in Paris and greenwich by 1675 and there's the Greenwich Observatory and scratch meantime by which we still calculate and scientific journals first made their appearance in 1665 so it was just after the time of new really during Newton's lifetime that science became an institutional structure and science as as a body that it socially became something like what we would recognize today well what sort of attitude that the Scientific Revolution from among other kinds of thinkers volaterrae for example developed the skepticism about anything beyond the realm of science he was a skeptic about religion but also is skeptic about all sorts of other ideologies and so his attitude was one recommending toleration there were certain things that were knowable by the scientific method we could discover for example the laws of motion the laws of gravitation however other things were really outside the sphere of science and there he said we're incapable of actually having knowledge people just have opinions but when it's a matter of opinion rather than knowledge the most we should do since we can't really settle that is to tolerate each other's opinions well we've seen some examples of things that he would place inside the sphere of knowledge things like the law of gravitation on the laws of motion what are some things that might lie outside that what sorts of things is he skeptical about and here's skeptical just meaning there's no way to know the truth of any of these other things what would be like that opinions oh ok religion is one on so yes is there a god well science presumably can't determine the answer that and so it will turn out that yes that's something where he says look in the end we can't know and so his conclusion is we should simply tolerate different opinions because they're just opinions there's no way to settle this in scientific terms there's no way to really know anything about this so one of you mentioned opinions in general what other kinds of opinions might we have no hope of settling by scientific means nor also boundaries moral boundaries ok somebody says premarital sex is wrong somebody else says no I think it's permissible somebody else's I think it's wonderful how do we settle the distinction among those views right we can describe things on the other hand if we're evaluating and saying whether this is right or wrong you might think there's no way science can settle that I mean I I don't encourage you to try taking a physics course and saying before we get started there something has really been bothering me about the world is premarital sex right or wrong good physics isn't going to settle that question and so there are lots of things that are going to be lying beyond the bounds of science and so Voltaire says there's no way to really know the best we can do is tolerate alternative opinions now it might be about sort of big things like the existence of God or the nature of morals but it can also be about small things what is the greatest football team in the history of civilization that's a textbook well not recently but you know yeah we have differing opinions about that right and in fact every October there are very strongly differing opinions about this uh you will see all sorts of had hear all sorts of chance oh you sucks okay does though you really suck well this is likely according to Voltaire he didn't have any opinions about the Red River Rivalry I don't think pocketed if he did he would say look there's no way really determined scientifically whether oh you sucks and so the most we can do is tolerate different opinions in any case truth yeah yeah well everyone thinks that my bean yeah never Bible you so in fact at one point yeah Thomas Hobbes says what's in common sense it must be the must be plentifully distributed among people how can you tell because everybody thinks they have enough of it and so everybody tends to think their own opinions are right and in fact obviously right now Denis Diderot who edited the French encyclopedia which really tried to systematize knowledge is the first encyclopedia it was an attempt to say well here's what we know it was a sort of victory lap for the Scientific Revolution and he took things further than voluntary he wasn't simply skeptical he felt that the success science proved materialism and so he concluded this world is only a mass of molecules all there is are the micro particles that science describes there are simply molecules they are simply material stuff those molecules behave according to physical law they interact in ways that science eater has described or is in principle capable of describing there is nothing left over well what might be left over what is he denying the existence of God for one thing right well terror is simply saying what there's no way to know um he's saying I actually and science gives us a complete description of the world there's nothing else now for science itself doesn't establish its own completeness this is a claim made on behalf of science but as we can see it didn't take long roughly a hundred years actually that's less than 100 years after Newton but by 100 years after Newton people began to think yeah science isn't just describing one dimension of the world it is describing the world full-stop there's nothing left over and so people took the Scientific Revolution not to prove that there is no god but many of them thought what more do you need there's no need to go beyond this in fact in a famous episode two people were disputing talking about the nature of science and at one point the king who was listening to this disputation said um I don't understand I didn't hear you refer to God in your explanation and he said I have no need of that hypothesis um and so that was the point really I don't need this okay I don't need religion but of course there are lots of other things you might think you don't need if science gives you a complete description of the world if the world is just a mass of molecules what else is left out thoughts aha yeah actually I'm not sure whether you said thoughts or odds but they're both right okay the aughts right all that stuff normative that I was talking about the odds just I'm just right wrong all that gets left out but moreover thoughts get left out if I am really just a mass of molecules then wait a minute what about I'm thoughts what about my feelings what about my desires what about everything about me that constitutes my mental life where is it in this picture once again if you go to the physics class and say um what's what is I don't understand how desire fits in this picture what is a desire in physics um the physicists really has no way of explaining right it's just left out of the picture so it isn't just God that's being left out of this or just morality or something like that it's unclear how we fit thought itself into the picture and that means it's unclear how we fit ourselves into the picture barren doba goes even further he says really well he you might say he draws the conclusion he says yes Petera was right the world merely consists of material particles is just material thing and so he draws explicitly the conclusion so there is no God so morality doesn't make any sense so we are not in fact the beings we think we are we think we're free agents acting on the basis of reasons huh we're merely beings driven robotic ly by physical law it's just that somehow we're unaware of our robotic status now that is a common enlightenment view is by no means the universal reaction of the Scientific Revolution another group of thinkers says wait a minute I can take the methods of the Scientific Revolution and apply them to morality apply them to politics so I don't have to give up I don't have to say all of this is nonsense in fact there's a conception of rationality that emerges from the Scientific Revolution and I can use sorry I can use that idea of rationality to give shape to morality and to give shape to politics and so there are a number of classical Enlightenment thinkers John Locke for example remain yule college who take this is a brief for liberty they take it as a brief of the respect for respect for individual rights and they basically think here's what I can do to make sense of these odds I can think in terms of rationality what is it rational for me to do what is it rational for us to do together so walk for example justifies the legitimacy of government by saying a government is legitimate when it is rational for people to submit themselves to its authority and cogs will say morality ultimately comes down to the same thing we obey certain moral laws and we impose on ourselves ultimately because it's the rational thing to do so it is not as if everyone tends in this atheistic direction and in this anti normative direction these thinkers don't they remain religious and they take the conception rationality emerges from the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution as something they can apply to the normative sphere nevertheless there's a sense in which they too are skeptics walking cause were both Protestants and so they didn't have a great deal of respect for religious authority as such and they believed in tolerance for different viewpoints and so they didn't think morality and religion went away completely but nevertheless within those fears they thought it was important to be tolerant of alternative views some things maybe could be known other things had to be left to individual judgment all of the Enlightenment thinkers nevertheless hold to four basic principles and these are going to recur throughout the course we'll see them challenged throughout the 20th century in various ways and by various figures the first of these theses of the Enlightenment is lungis labeling the thesis of truth there are truths that are absolute they are independent of any individual mind and thus they apply universal so these truths are absolute independent of individual Minds they are universal here is the title page of Galileo's dialogue on two world systems where he has two people debating basically the structure of the solar system and he sees it as ultimately a question of well as figuring out what is the truth does the earth revolve around the Sun does the Sun revolve around the earth and there's a debate ping-pong in this they're trying to find some truth that both sides would agree if you can find it it's absolute is independent of your mind or my mind and applies universally what are some examples besides scientific laws which were taken as the paradigm of these sorts of truths the law of gravitation the laws of motion these were thought to be things that are absolute Universal independent of any individual mind can you think of other things that might have that steps things that would actually be true absolutely and independently of what you were I think about yeah oh good Descartes comes up with that one in the 17th century I think therefore I am indeed he says look there are certain things I can doubt in fact he thinks I can doubt almost everything right now it seems to me that I'm speaking to a classroom full of people but Descartes said I could be wrong about that maybe I'm really asleep and dreaming all of this you know maybe got conked out in my office and I'm by I'm guilty we'll find out what this with Freud later and so I wish I were in class and so I dream that I'm in class lecturing even though I'm not or maybe there's an elaborate illusion maybe you're not a group of students maybe you're all robots or maybe maybe an evil deceiver an evil demon is tricking me into thinking this is messing with my brain and giving me this elucidation anyway there are lots of possible explanations so I could doubt but that's true but can I doubt that I exist can I doubt that I think Descartes says no so he would say that sort of thing I think I am those are things that are now are they universal well every time they have thought or other uttered they're true on the other hand I am is that really universally true is it necessary that I am no I mean once I'm here and I say I am it's got to be true on the other hand it's not a necessary truth but then ba Novak exists I mean I could easily not have exist why Paris is not actually if my father had not got this furlough and gone to st. Louis for the weekend huh gosh I wouldn't exist so they're on a cruise I better edit that out but anyway yeah so that's something that is not quite the same as a scientific law and therefore as it shares many of the same properties anytime you think or you utter I exist or I think you're right are there other patterns yeah hey equals a hey Issei good the law of identity everything is what it is and not another thing a special put it that seems like something that is a basic truth of logic and so something that seems to be absolute independent of any individual mind and thus universal so logic in general is going to look like that other things yeah of evolution yeah that might be true so a principle of natural selection or something like that could have this status it could have a scientific character that would make it universally applicable in absolute other things yeah gravity good the law of gravitation is an example of that um I gave you the Newtonian version the relativistic version is somewhat more complicated but whatever the actual true law of gravitation is it would be like this yes other examples mathematics maybe yeah oh yes good the laws of light um the speed of light for example being 380,000 whatever it is yeah I forget now rats I love time is this how to but yes just read of what is that whatever it is that's something that would have this universal para circle and in fact a nice way of thinking about this is that in Einstein's theory of relativity what are the things that are absolute independent of any individual reference frame those are the laws of nature and so although he called it the theory of relativity actually the laws emerges the things that are not relative the length of an object that's dependent on your reference frame but the laws of nature those hold across all reference frames the second principle is a principle of knowledge it is possible to have objective knowledge about these summer these truths so there are absolute truths that are independent of us and are universally applicable and it's possible to know what some of them are so here for example is Newton principles of the mathematical principles of nature okay that's something that he takes to be outlining things that are these truths and he's showing you why they have to be true he gives you proofs he gives you demonstrations he solves problems he is showing you that it is possible to have objective knowledge of some of them and that's something that people took the Scientific Revolution to have established a third principle is a principle of reason how do you do it how do you actually gain objective knowledge of these absolute truths answer is reason is the best way to achieve and justify such knowledge use reason to figure these things out sometimes that reason will be something that operates necessarily through a reflection as with the I think I am or as with the principles of mathematics sometimes it involves careful observation of the world as with the motions of the heavenly bodies or the laws governing motion projectiles falling objects in the light but in any case you use reason to do this that was reason the only way maybe not maybe some people can simply in twoa truths there might be some truths that are really introspective truths like the I think or I am but nevertheless the best way to achieve this is through the use of reason and finally a principle of progress there is a bathing beauty showing off a brand new fire engine okay acting rationally in response to objective knowledge improves our chances of achieving our aims if we actually gain knowledge through the use of reason of these universal truths that is something that will enable us to apply our knowledge to develop new technologies to in general improve human life and throughout the early stages of the Scientific Revolution this was really primarily a matter of faith it wasn't clear what knowing the law of gravitation was going to do for anyone however as time went on and certainly within a hundred years of the revolution people began wreak nything that actually you can use this knowledge that Newton Galileo and others provided to actually do things to accomplish things to develop new technology machines to make possible fire engines and factories and all sorts of other technologies that as we'll see played an increasing role in the 20th century well we already mentioned the theory of evolution as a later version of this as it were a second scientific revolution that changed that brought some of the methods of the other Sciences to biology that was something that developed as you might say well we think of it as Darwin's development actually several people were in a close race to publish this and so it was an idea that was common at the time but in any case the theory was that random mutations together with natural selection can explain the transformation of species and also is the title of the book suggest the Origin of Species now the theory of evolution is in some quarters today controversial it's really not because of the transformation of species part which is not very controversial is because of the Origin of Species part which is not something easily observed so that's something that is you might say beyond ordinary observations though people use the fossil record in other ways of trying to determine that in any event all of these views and by those views I mean materialism in its various forms as it emerges from the Scientific Revolution evolutionary theory and then a number of subsequent theories that we work at are two level theories there is a surface conscious level there is also another lying explanatory level and they do change our concept of what it is to be human they suddenly make us think of ourselves as a mass of molecules moving according to scientific law or as a biological being driven by certain kinds of biological imperatives we normally these things suggest are not aware of the ultimate explanations of our behavior why are you in this room right now you might think well because I'm taking your class and the class is scheduled for this time in this room subs of us be here right but notice that is something that physics doesn't I mean talk about supposed to be here is that a term of physics no well you signed up for this class is signing up a term of physics no and so this suggests ultimately the explanation actually isn't it doesn't involve reasons of that kind it doesn't involve where you're supposed to be or what you're ought to be doing it's a question of the biochemistry of your brain let's say and the way in which it interacts with the rest of the world so we might picture two level theories in this sort of way there's a surface level to be explained there's a hidden deep level which is supposed to be doing the explaining of things at the surface level and the real question is how do we fit ourselves into that kind of diet okay yeah let's take a look at somebody whose stresses the gap between isn't ops who really first notices what I'm calling the problem of normativity David Hume and this is his great work the treatise of human nature where he talks about the problems that were going to be discussing it was something he published when he was only 23 it didn't make much of a splash um he later said it fell stillborn from the press he was disappointed so he wrote a condensed version called the inquiry concerning human understanding that actually did a much better job of attracting attention to this Hume was an atheist and that prevented him from getting a university position nevertheless he was a great writer and supported himself throughout his life by writing when he turned his attention to ethics he ended up concluding that ethics was something that was really outside the bounds of science but also outside the bounds of Reason altogether and here's his argument in a nutshell morals have an influence on the actions and affections affections in other words our feelings when I say that murder is wrong for example one hopes that influences my action so I don't do it and also influences the way I feel makes me treat murder with repugnance makes me shy away from it makes me deplore it reason alone he says can have no such influence can reason all by itself make me apt can reason by itself through certain feelings in me now what according to a traditional conception answers well yes but you denies it what I'm doing when I reason is drawing a conclusion from other things I'm simply going logically I'm saying this therefore this therefore this therefore this and nothing about that generates feelings nothing nothing about that generates action she says so morality is not a conclusion of reason it consists of no matter of fact one way of thinking about this is to say what looks science tells us what's involved in the world we use reason on the basis of science what do we do we go from certain propositions known or believed to be true to other propositions that we then take to be true or we are reasoning hypothetically we say what if this and then we suppose that and on that supposition we derive certain conclusions nothing about that actually suggests anything about what we ought to do none of that involves an action it's just propositions going on in a head and that is something that he says doesn't have any influence on morality or actions at all so he says in every system human Scottish so I feel so I should really do this in his accent in every system of morality of net worth I've noticed that the author proceeds for some time reasoning in the ordinary way to establish the existence of a God or making points about human affairs and that he suddenly surprises me by moving through propositions with the usual copula is or is not tones that are connected box or odd young pastor who was from Glasgow and so I picked up I heard him every Sunday so how are you doing huh well anyway yeah is that intelligible I mean can you understand me I I enjoy doing that but sometimes I get the impression he's like oh he's like a Scotsman happy and nobody can understand a bra safe you can accept good okay yeah I want to get to other figures of German I would I don't know how far I'll take this anyway yes yeah well he goes on that seems like a very small change but it's highly important for us this art or odd not express it some new relation right summation it needs to be pointed out and explained that a reason should become from how this new relation shall be in conceivably a deduction from others that are entirely different from it so you go from well back to Bible so you go from it is I say look this is like that face is like that and then I say so you shouldn't do it wait how do I get there right I say all right I know you're angry at your roommate you're thinking that you would like to put rat poison on the doorknob okay sometime when he's there and you're not however I say you know what that will do that's very bad it will you know cause him harm it will make him very sick he might even die besides you know that rat poison is going to end up who knows where what if somebody else comes in and they're the first one to touch the knob then they will die and so on so I can say all these facts but then you might sit there and say so right and that's humorous so what you've given me a description of things yes you will get sick you will either completely and going the seizures so what at some point you gotta say so don't do it curve it so it's bad you've got to go from there to the otter ought not to the evaluation to the action or in this case the avoidance of action and yeah what from the purely is statements gets you there now it's not that there's no way to get there but this reason will not do it reason can't get you their moral reasoning or what's called reasoning toaster is and is not too often odd not but there's no way to get there in terms of reason itself so how do we go from is and is not too often ought not reason supplies no connect and indeed if we think about that case look here's what would happen here is what the effects of that would be I give you a description then you're supposed to say oh that would be terrible ok and not do it what takes you from the description to the evaluation ah experience well I hope you haven't had much experience with poisoning your room ah so at least I thought your experience um yeah I works but that's just gets you in a more description right this is what happens on the basis of experience well if you say so what is an experience that really replies yeah well good ethics does that that's the point of ethics on the other hand he's worried that what's taking us there isn't something rational it isn't reason that's getting us there so you're right ethics is doing it but what is that explain what is that fix based on yeah well like it says like reasoning it has nothing to do with it you can't make a decision from that but if you have intelligence you can do that you don't have to have dealing from it you can just say this is a smart thing to do I have no feelings towards it oh good okay the smart thing to do good there are basically two ways of going once he's taking you this far one way is to say what she just said look I'm a smart person I can see what the smart thing to do is it or is or is not on the basis of this information you've given in other words she says well at a certain point that action becomes irrational and so that would be one way to do this that's the way that lock or contour a variety of other Enlightenment thinkers would approach this they would say hold on a second I admittedly it's not just reason in the sense of drawing conclusions it's reason in the sense of what it is rational or irrational for me to do and so they would think rationality supplies the right kind of connection Hume doesn't see how it and so he's looking for something else yep the basic thing is it as fear awesome rally because what's the stomach could meet up a HIPAA pain if y'all didn't give me an Aurora system I punch them known of care but you say I ought not do that and that's because society as a whole has a fear that if we allow the Invictus to occur that'll become the norm so we want to encourage morality such that we will be randomly punched in the face okay yeah Wow this law is it's fear okay fear in this case of consequences maybe fear that it might not work in that he might poison me fear fear all sorts of bad effects right of this and so indeed that's one way we look at we say so question of rationality so much or maybe is connected it's right on a connected to fear but now yes what is fear fears an emotion here is a passion here is so all this rationality and morality that we created stems from whether we feel good about doing something or we feel uneasy about doing something so it's emotional good that's exactly what Hume says it's ultimately emotion emotions like fear but also approval or disapproval I think about those consequences and maybe I'm afraid of getting confident maybe I just think about my roommate they're lying I think oh man II borrowed my favorite shirt but I don't really want to kicking and dying on the floor yeah okay and so you might think in those two terms and say well alright yes um it's emotion feeling of some kind might be here might be some other kind of emotion that all in the end is dooms answer he says why is cruelty wrong why is generosity good the answer is not to be found in facts of the matter there's no fact of the matter to be found of them he says just the object of feeling not reason it lies in yourself and not on the object okay I have this feeling of fear or disapproval or affection or approval or something it is a sentiment or it's a feeling that takes us from is to aught I describe the way things are and I get an emotional reaction to that yeah we're just Union material yeah good question so one of these feelings one of these sentiments they're part of our mental life right Hume is interesting in this respect because he's not a materials in fact he thinks what is it that I know what is it then there's really ultimately before the mind my own thoughts my own sensations my own feelings and so actually he thinks that what is inside the head is what we really know um and does the material world even exist ah Hume thinks yeah I don't actually know how to understand that question huh so Hume starts from inside the head so in that respect he's in some ways philosophically the opposite of people like Diderot and all Locke he in fact at one point he describes himself as trying to be the Newton of the mind trying to give you the psychological laws that govern the way we think and behave and so in that respect he isn't buying into the materialism at all he starts from a mental place and in some sense is the first psychologist now here's his famous line reason isn't ought to be the slave of the passions okay it's only the passions only feelings that can tell us ultimately what's right or wrong what we have to do and what we are not to do and so he ends up saying imagine our sentiment or character is virtuous or vicious why because it's view causes a pleasure or non the easiness of a particular kind so in the end we have a core sort of moral sense a moral sense that is involved with our feelings we react to the world yes we describe the world in terms of reason but we also have as it were built in as assert the kinds of creatures we are we have certain kinds of reactions we think about suffering and we recoil from after all I can describe pain or I can describe pleasure but that's not in some sense the whole thing right I need to know what pain how good I want to avoid it pleasure oh good I want to seek that and that's something that doesn't come from reason alone that comes from feeling that comes from emotion or sentiment well I'm going to skip a couple of things here and get to a twentieth-century version of this that generalizes the picture we're talking about it gives us some so we're going to use throughout the course this is a contemporary well almost contemporary 20th century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who taught at Iowa at Minnesota at Yale and then for about the last two thirds of his career at the University of Pittsburgh and he gives a very famous definition of philosophy the aim of philosophy abstractly formulated he says is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term ok so what is philosophy it's really the attempt to say how everything fits together how things hang together now what kinds of things well anything ok all of this is understood very very broadly it doesn't have one specific field of study in fact when I told my grandmother that I was going to back to my hometown to study philosophy uh she said oh that's nice Danny huh what's philosophy and I said I I haven't started with selling with sellers yet so I couldn't give her that I don't think it would develop anyway but it is puzzling right if I say what is astronomy you know right funny of the heavenly bodies if I say what is sociology you know it's the study of society biology the study of life but philosophy ooh that's hard to say and here's this point really we don't have as philosophers a special subject matter our job is to explain how the rest of it fits together so there's an additional problem not just how the whole picture fits together he says the philosophers confronted not by one complex many dimensional picture like all those given by the special sciences the unity of which such as it is you must come to appreciate but by two panes of essentially the same order of complexity each of which purports to be a complete picture of man in the world and which after separate scrutiny he must fused into one vision let me refer to these two perspectives as the manifest and scientific images of the world so those are the two key terms we're going to be using struggling horse the manifest image that is the world as we ordinarily perceive it and also ourselves as we ordinarily perceive ourselves and then the scientific image of the world the image given to us by the sciences and especially ultimately by physics how do we fit those two perspectives together he says it's really a task of stereoscopic vision we've got one view that is the view on the base basis of common sense roughly on the basis of our ordinary perception of the world and then we've got two views supplied by the special sciences and as we'll see especially about the sciences that take us beyond the maker level of observations of the world to the micro level and postulate laws at some microscopic level how do we fit these two visions of the universe together what is the manifest image well it's just basically as he says characterize them in two ways first of all it's the framework in which we encounter ourselves in terms of which VAD came to be aware of himself as man in the world it's the framework in terms of which to use in Excise existentialist term phrase man first encountered himself which is when he came to be man and so basically this is well how you find yourself what are the basic objects in the manifest image well people animals lower forms of life and merely material things like rivers and stones cabbages and kings okay the objects of the ordinary world like my cattle then that's partly a memorial she died on Monday but I thought that would bum you out so I decided to cheer you up with the next slide anyway your other image is the scientific image it arises out of a manifest image by careful observation and experimentation those observatories were their part need to convert our manifest image common-sense observations of the heavens into a scientific theory and so we carefully observe we carefully measure we test hypotheses we experiments but he says then something new happens something dramatic happens with the introduction of theoretical entities things like atoms micro particles genes all of those sorts of things fields all of those are unobservable but nevertheless cause we acted all of the first part you might say most of astronomy and so on it's really a matter least in the early stages of refining our manifest image observation of the world but then we actually introduced that second hidden level and that changes things dramatically so the manifest image is our maker level image of the world the scientific image is our micro level image of the world what physics ultimately describes as this world of micro particles waves fields and other things that are interacting according to scientific laws at a base level so here's one way of thinking about this as we now turn our attention back to ourselves in the manifest image we talk about rationality we think of ourselves as behaving as rational people as making decisions for reasons we think morality applies to us sometimes we make the right decision sometimes the wrong one it might really be a moral thing it might be a different kind of normative thing there are times when I do something it's not immoral but just stupid and so there are all sorts of evaluations they're not just moral evaluations in that the image we take responsibility or fail to take responsibility for our actions we think of ourselves as free we think of ourselves as capable of making decisions and so we think of ourselves as exercising what philosophers are called practical reason but in the scientific image it looks like I'm simply this clunker is this cloud of micro particles of waves of fields that are governed by causal laws that description he is completely value-free and I seem to be paying in a way that's purely determined or if you think quantum mechanics is to be understood in in deterministic probabilistic ways then there's some element of randomness thrown in too but read on this mm plus some degree of determination by law don't really feel like they asked a freedom so well I'm going to skip this part since we're low on time but the idea is these images are just two rival images they clash they differ in certain ways what makes it tough is that the scientific image seems to claim to be a complete description of the world and yet if we think of it as complete description we're left out of it then we as we are think of ourselves we as free beings as beings at least so to think of ourselves as free who think of ourselves as acting according to reasons as thinking of ourselves as doing what we ought to do or failing to do what we often do all of that seems left out of the picture altogether so it looks as if there's really a clash and the problem is how we fit them together how do we evaluate the conflicting claims of the manifest image in the scientific image well that is indeed the problem and Sellers identifies the core of the manifest image what is really special about it what is unique what makes it itself well when he says when we say that a certain person desired to do a thought in his duty to do B but was forced to do see we're not describing him as a scientific specimen we're describing him of doing something more and that's the irreducible core of the manifest image it is in our Terms normativity the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the off to the is so in the end he says it's really Humes problem that is dividing these the manifest images shot through and through with the often with norms of a variety of kinds with evaluations but the scientific image seems to be strictly in terms of the is how do we fit them together he says really in the end science is describing the realm of law the manifest image do you think of ourselves as belonging to the space of reasons but now how do we combine a view of law with a view of reasons how do we think of the realm of law as it with the space of reasons he says it's not really a different realm it's a different way of seeing the same realm but how do those ways actually combined into one vision of what a human being is so here to just summarize in the manifest image we think of ourselves as free acting for reasons acting rightly or wrongly we take responsibility in the scientific image we're just determined by something we are conscious of our reasons are mere rationalizations morality is either nonsense or reduces to something else and so we have no responsibility so I'll leave you with this problem this is a statue a statue called molecule men in Berlin and it seems to me to illustrate this these beings are striving they're doing things it seems and yet you get the impression they're just made out of steel - just made out of micro particles and so how do we fit those two visions of ourselves together well that's the big theme for the course so next week we'll start looking at the 19th century background and see how people got to at the beginning of the time

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 42,007

Keywords: Enlightenment, Is-Ought

Id: spBaumdWlgQ

Length: 46min 45sec (2805 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2013