Hello and welcome to Believing in a Social World. I hope you've all had a good break, etc. Just quickly, if you are still a bit unsure of how to navigate asynchronous courses or you haven't had me as a professor before, please do go under content and take a look at the course reading list and next to it there should also be a document entitled how to approach this course.
that will just lead you through the ways you navigate the things to make sure you check off your list every week. And it'll give you a sense, the course reading list will give you a sense of what the readings are and also what the assignment deadlines are. So I will be posting these in a few places over the next week.
But do make sure you take a look because it is your responsibility to make sure you know when your assignment deadlines are. Okay, just before we jump into this video. I will say this is going to be a bit longer than my normal videos each week. I do try to keep them short and to the point, but we have a lot to cover and it's the beginning of the semester so this may run about 10 or 12 minutes. We'll see.
By the time you're watching this you'll be able to tell. But I'm doing my best. I've already gotten a question about whether or not you're required to do all the readings.
It is a good idea. to do the readings if you can. That is what you would do in an ideal world.
We do not live in an ideal world. We live in non-ideal circumstances where we're all too busy and we have too much to do. So here's what I'll say about that.
When you are going through this course, it is important to keep up with the material because if you don't, you're going to be in trouble. But having said that, here is how I suggest you approach the material. First, I would recommend watching the videos. and then going through the lecture notes.
The lecture slides should not be more than 20 slides a week. It's the basic information, and the lecture videos will give you a kind of like personalized narrative of a quick overview. So I'm giving you less detail in the videos than I'll be giving you on the lecture notes. Those slides are what you want to reference when you are studying for tests, and the readings themselves are sometimes long. They're sometimes not that long.
Sometimes they're harder to read. Sometimes they're easier to read. What I will say is I would suggest you do at least one to three pages of reading a week.
If you could even just, even if you only have time for the motivation to look at one page, that is better than nothing. Because sometimes even just looking at one page, you think, oh, like this writing is actually pretty easy to read. And you read more than you think.
Maybe you'll read one page and you'll be like, this sexist empiricus guy. is a little much for me, and you only get through one page, that's fine. You've gotten a sense of how the author writes. Reading anything is better than reading nothing. So, all right, let's move on to the actual material.
Presumably, you have all taken philosophy from the inside out, either with myself or with Dr. Bromhall, but just like philosophy, learning is a process. So let us review. Philosophy is a process of inquiry.
When doing philosophy, we ask questions. We question current beliefs, we consider alternatives, we analyze arguments, and we create arguments. We also do our best to make ourselves aware of those starting assumptions we often don't notice we have.
So, for example, if we're talking about whether or not chocolate is better than vanilla. You might argue this based on personal flavor experience, how versatile the flavors are, what kinds of things you can make with them, etc, etc. But some starting assumptions would be that it makes sense to have this debate at all. Maybe we shouldn't think it's a meaningful debate to compare chocolate and vanilla.
Or maybe we decide that it is for other reasons we come up with mindfully. In the last course, Philosophy of the Inseparable, Inside Out, we also look at slightly more complex questions of metaphysics, which are to say questions about the nature of reality. That is, what's our nature?
What kind of beings are we? How do we know we exist? How can we know the nature of reality? Et cetera, et cetera, right?
There's a lot of stuff about computer simulations, if you remember. This course, we're turning to another branch of philosophy, which is pretty big, called epistemology. epistemology is a fancy word that means theories of knowledge so what is Knowledge. Can we know anything? Can we be sure of our knowledge?
What are good methods of information gathering? What kinds of mistakes might we make when we gather information or learn new ideas? While the ethical questions came to the end of the first course, they will be more woven throughout this one. So, we've covered assumptions. Philosophy also investigates beliefs.
For our purposes, beliefs are basically statements that are true or false. Some beliefs you might have are chocolate ice cream is delicious, or I don't think God exists, or I think that Timothee Chalamet is an excellent actor. These beliefs might be true or false. They also might be justified or unjustified.
That is, does it make sense why someone would have this belief, even if we know it to be false? This is easy to see when we look at the past, when we look at... the way that they used to understand nature or biology or physics. They were more limited in their understanding and the frameworks they had and how to parse the evidence. So even though a lot of things people believed in the past about physics or the nature of the universe are wrong, that doesn't mean they were unjustified.
Some of them may be well justified, given the information they had at the time. Make sure you're looking at the lecture slides, though, because there's a lot of different distinctions, as you may be noticing. So those will be clear as well on the lecture notes. Okay, so there are many different kinds of beliefs. One way of parsing beliefs is this.
First order beliefs. These are beliefs about the world. Beliefs like it is raining, the grass is green, Trudeau is our current prime minister.
There are also what are called... Second order beliefs. These are beliefs about our beliefs. So, for example, I am sure that it's going to rain today.
That expresses how you feel about the statement, it is going to rain today. In philosophy, you get a few schools of what is called skepticism. And these different orders of belief are important to keep in mind when we're thinking about kinds of skepticism.
So let's review some Descartes. If you read all the way through, or if you know anything about Descartes, you know that he isn't actually a radical skeptic about the world. Instead, he was using, he was looking for a rational basis for scientific knowledge. The doubting was a tool he used, right?
It was a means to an end. And eventually he works through all these skeptical questions about the outside world and the evil demon, and he gets to a point where he can no longer doubt. Remember what that is? Anyone?
Anyone? He knows that he is a thinking thing, and that is the thing that he cannot doubt. But we can imagine another kind of skeptic, one that's worried about us living inside a computer simulation, like Nick Bostrom suggested. That skeptic, if he's determined to be skeptical, will never be satisfied. There will never be evidence that sufficiently supports the idea we are not in the matrix.
And the closure principle will never be satisfied. If you want to know what the closure principle is, go and check out the lecture slides. That might be on the test.
Okay, for these skeptics, we cannot have first order beliefs. That is, we can't ever really trust our beliefs about the world itself. They might say something like, I do not believe that I can know for sure the nature of the universe. And that would be okay because they're talking about the...
kinds of beliefs they have, not the world itself. Notice the distinction. Now, Sextus Empiricus, reading for this week. First week, first week back in the semester, we're looking at an even more radical kind of skepticism.
He is a Peronian skeptic named after Pyrrho of Elis, but who lived 50 years before Sextus Empiricus, who was also part of that group of thinkers. So Sextus gives us modes of thought. These are pseudo-arguments.
They're not quite full-fleshed out arguments that are strung together in a straightforwardly, linearly, linear, logic way. But they are thought exercises designed to get us to see that skepticism is the only right conclusion. So, some modes he has for the outside world are that animals of different species perceive the world in different ways. Does anyone have a dog? Right?
They can hear. so much more than we can. They can also smell so much.
There are two ways they get so much more information from the world than we do. But we can see way more color. So who's to judge which perception is correct?
They're different. Your dog has a totally different understanding of the world than you do. So what's the real understanding of the world? That's right, sexist empiricus would say, there is a group. Never mind.
So let's move on to the second mode. Never mind different species. Humans themselves see the world totally differently.
People see things radically differently all the time. Some people love Taylor Swift's music. Sometimes they love it so much they think it is the absolute best. Other people can't stand it.
Some people love olives, which is because olives are delicious. Other people can't stand them. Some people are conservative. Some people are liberal. Some people are sensitive.
Some people are less sensitive. Some humans literally see colors when they look at words or numbers. They literally see them. This is called synesthesia.
But the point is, we all have such radically different perspectives. There's no way to pin down the right one or how to perceive reality objectively. OK, when it comes to inside modes, everything is disputable. Nothing has a clear answer.
you can give multiple arguments for multiple different kinds of contradictory beliefs you might have. We are also very limited by our perspectives. And when we do have hypotheses, these hypotheses inform how we absorb information.
They bias us. We will get to biases later, but basically, if you did a study of how miserable rainy days make undergraduate students miserable, you're already assuming in your hypothesis that it will make them miserable. That's built into how you are going around, asking questions, and gathering information. You are not allowing a framework in which rainy days make some people happy. All right, what does this all mean?
It means that for sexists, we cannot have beliefs about the world, but it also means we cannot have beliefs about our beliefs. We cannot have first-order or second-order beliefs, in other words. Okay, don't worry, I'm not going to abandon you at this point, and I'm sure you're wondering what the point of this all is.
Why even care about sexist empiricists? So here's one thing that skeptics get right. They are right to be skeptical.
As we'll see, often our beliefs, or at least many of them, are wrong, or at least unjustified. We could all really stand to be a bit more wary of how certain we all feel all the time about really basic things. You might also notice that a lot of people on the internet these days are overly certain and in fact are extremely righteous about their beliefs.
So you know, it might behoove us all to be a little more wary of the certainty of others and also our own. However, just because we cannot achieve objective certainty or objectivity does not mean... that beliefs aren't useful. And so this is what the skeptics kind of leave out. A lot of beliefs are hard to prove without a shadow of a doubt, yes, but I'd have a really hard time driving a car around Toronto if I didn't believe certain basic things about physics and how cars work and how to follow traffic laws.
So something is working about these beliefs that mean they're useful enough and probably true enough anyway. that it's worth continuing to believe in them. Okay, that's it for now. Make sure you check out the lecture notes, the course schedule, and how to approach this course under the content tab.
And make sure you know the deadlines and test dates, and I will be posting the instructions for the first part of Project 1 very soon. I may also do a video just about the assignments, so stay tuned for those. And in the meantime, have a great weekend, be well, and take care. good care of yourselves.
Bye!