Right. Okay. And you come here, I assume, because you're interested in philosophy.
Presumably you don't know a lot about philosophy or you wouldn't have come to a philosophy for beginners.
So I thought I'd start by telling you how I came to philosophy and why I adore it as much as I do.
And I was thrown out of school when I was 15. Truancy and disruption, if you're interested.
Bored to tears. And it was only when I was 26 when I started feeling that I needed some intellectual stimulation, that I started doing it.
Of course, with the Open University, wonderful institution. And part of that was philosophy one.
One unit of it was philosophy. And those were the days where you had to do formal logic.
And I thought this was the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life.
And I actually sat up all night working on it. And I thought actually I really enjoyed that.
And then I did quite well on it, which always helps, doesn't it? And I started reading more.
And the more I read, the more I thought this is what I want to do. And I ended up going full time to London University.
Then came on here to do my graduate work. And I just for three years at Bedford College in London, I was walking on air.
I couldn't believe that actually the government in those days was paying me to study this absolutely fascinating and fantastic subject.
And as I say, three years walking on air. I've come down to earth a little bit since then.
That was quite a few decades ago. But I still adore philosophy.
And my aim in these lectures is to convey to you some of the enthusiasm that I have for the subject.
Some of the love I have for the subject.
The thing I like most about it is that there are all these things that you might have thought about as your lying in bed.
The things like dust space come to an end. Is somebody the barman in a pub once told me that he often lay in bed wondering if space came to an end,
but actually never getting anywhere because how do you think about something like that?
If you haven't been trained to think about things like that and I explained to him that you could you know,
there was a whole subject devoted to the study of such things as that, and it's philosophy.
So does space come to an end? Well, if it does, it means you get to a point where you can't put your arm out, you know what's in its way.
There's just no space to put your arm into. Is there is space a box or does it carry on to infinity?
That's that's the question that fascinated him. But I'm sure you wouldn't be here if you didn't have a few things like that.
And I hope that sometime over the next five weeks I might address the question that bothers you.
And if not, just ask me about it, because there's plenty going to be plenty of opportunity for you to ask.
What's we going to do today is I build it and I continue to build it as a romp through the history of philosophy.
It really is a romp because look at all the things I'm going to do and we've got one and a half hours.
I could spend six weeks talking about this lot. So it really will be a romp.
But I hope what I'll do is, is show you a bit about how these people thought and why they thought what they thought.
And that'll introduce us to the different areas of philosophy, which is what we'll be studying after today.
Okay. We can start with the chap at the top, chap called Democritus.
He was a priest, Socratic. In other words, he lived before Socrates in the 5th century B.C. Those are his dates.
And he was an activist. I should tell you something about what is it that makes a philosopher?
The first philosophers were actually also the first scientists. They were the first people who looked for explanations of things that were natural.
So instead of looking to God or the supernatural in some form or another, they looked for explanations that were earthbound, if you like.
And so democracies. Democritus was the pupil of somebody called Opus, and he took most of his theory from him or started it.
But Democritus developed it in a big way. He came from the idea that nothing comes from nothing.
The idea that nothing either comes into existence or goes out of existence because everything that exists just exists.
It is or it isn't. And of course, anything that isn't isn't.
So it's not very interesting. I have a view of the universe like that, but nothing comes into existence and nothing goes out of existence.
Then you've got a problem, haven't you? You've got a problem with change. You know, things are changing all the time.
Surely things are coming out of existence, coming into existence all the time, I mean, I don't know how many grandchildren you have, but some.
There's somebody something that's come into existence. Surely it's complete nonsense to think that things don't come into existence.
Well, Democritus and the other activists explains this.
That was the question they set themselves. How do we explain change, given that nothing comes into or goes out of existence?
And their answer was that. And what exists is the void.
And within that void, there are individuals.
There there's a set number of things that have different shapes, different properties, et cetera.
But they exist and they are changeless. In other words, they do not come into existence or go out of existence.
But what they do do is form and reform into different sorts of aggregates.
So you have the individuals, the things that are as they are and don't change the atoms.
And they come together to create things like you and things like this chair here and things like this,
flip charts and things like this microphone and so on. So can you see how an atom becomes an explanatory particle?
It's it's what explains change. And can you also see that that explanation is a completely natural explanation?
It's not postulating God or anything supernatural.
It's just saying that there exist. There's the void and there are atoms within the void.
Why do you think they're indivisible these things? I've given you the answer in what I've said, actually.
So if you can, why are they indivisible atoms?
Cause we know these days that atoms aren't indivisible at all.
But why would they think they were?
Okay, well, if you can't come into existence and go out of existence, if you can't change, how could the atoms change?
How could they divide and come back together?
If these are the things that enter into new combinations all the time and then they can't themselves change, can they?
So they are the individuals that somebody else had.
Another way of describing this. Who was it? Zino said, take a stick.
Chop it in half. Chop it in half again. Chop that half in half.
Chop that half and half and that half and half and so on. Carry on and you can only get two possibilities.
This one is that it's infinitely divisible, isn't it?
You can keep on going into halves. And the other is that you reach a point where as you chop it, you no longer have wood.
What you have is is something that isn't wood. You've cut it beyond the point where it's wood.
And that was another argument for Atomism. OK.
So that's the priest acrostics. And you've had 10 minutes of the priest Socratic.
So that's your lot. I should tell you a little bit more.
This chap wrote over 60 books. He was hugely unpopular.
He was known as the laughing philosopher, which makes it sound as if he ought to be popular.
But he was laughing because he was laughing cynically at everyone else and their stupidity.
So he doesn't strike me as a nice sort of chap. But he wrote all these books and all we have of him now is the fragments.
They are literally fragments of parchment. We have a couple of of pieces by people who also propounded his theories.
But we have a huge amount of stuff by his detractors. The people who didn't like him.
So remember, as you're reading something like that, you've got to bear in mind that they don't like this chap.
Okay, well, that's that's the pre Socratic. So let's move on a bit here.
Let's move on to the post Socratic, if you like, Plato, of whom you will, of course,
have heard and Aristotle I Sutil was Plato's pupil and Plato was the pupil of Socrates.
Socrates himself didn't write anything ever.
Everything we know about Socrates comes down either from Plato or Socrates was
also mentioned by a few of Aristophanes and a few other people who wrote plays.
But Plato himself wrote in dialogue form, and he's very easy to read.
I really do recommend that if you like reading dialogue form, if you're interested in philosophy.
Plato is actually a good place to start and Aristotle's his pupil.
Aristotle is. He has the reputation amongst his peers of being very easy to read.
But the works that we have are his lecture notes. Sadly, we don't have any of his books.
We have his lecture notes. And if you were to read my lecture notes, you wouldn't find a very easy to read.
And Aristotle's work is also not at all easy to read.
It's a shame because Plato is fantastic and we believe that Aristotle was fantastic in the books he wrote.
But let's have a look at a dispute that they had between them.
Can you imagine instantly a school where Plato was the teacher and Aristotle was a pupil?
What must have been completely extraordinary, mustn't it? Okay, let's let's look at this patootie particular thing.
Think about the word read. Okay.
What's the meaning of the word read? How do you understand the word read?
Anyone prepared to have a go which read?
Well, I'm talking about the word read. Remember, there's a big difference between that and that.
Okay. That with the quotes refers to the words, doesn't it?
And that refers to the colour. Okay. So the person you said which read.
OK, what are you talking about, which colour? Oh, I see.
My apologies. I hadn't thought of that. I had that in mind.
OK. No, I mean that red. OK. The colour red. Yeah.
OK. So taking the word red. How do you understand its meaning.
What do you understand by the word red. Anyone prepared to tell me how in.
It's a colour, okay? But that's not going to help me much if I don't know the meaning of the word red.
Do I? I mean, let's assume I know the meaning of the word colour a certain way.
Would that tell me the meaning? Yes. That's interesting, isn't it?
Because the other thing is that here's a little thought experiment for you.
Did you hear the lady said it's a certain wavelength.
Which, of course it is. In one sense. But is that how you understand the word?
That's what people tell you. It's not how you understand it.
There may be people in this room who don't know that, and yet they understand the word read.
So that tells us that can't be the meaning of the word read. As you rightly said.
So you get ready.
Can we ask you? I mean, in one sense, I suppose you do.
And yes, if you refine that a bit, it's the colour of what comes out of you when you cut yourself.
Yeah. Okay, good. So you're talking about it by description.
It's not part of the meaning of it, though. I mean, is it the meaning in China, for example?
No, I mean, we've got two things here, haven't we? There's the word and there's the concept, which is what do you think when you understand the word?
OK. So when I say the word read, you're immediately entertain your concept of red.
Okay, if I say elephant, you're immediately entertaining your concept of elephant.
Okay. Even though there isn't an elephant within miles, that's what the lady there say.
Does it mean danger? I don't think it does mean danger because it might do in our society,
but I'm not sure it would in a society where there wasn't the correlation between red traffic lights, red berries, etc.
I mean, it means love in China, doesn't it? Isn't it the bridal colour?
Was that India? It's India, isn't it? Well, whatever it is, you're taught that it's okay to tell me what it is saying.
There's something else that's red. Okay. Let's let's take that one for a bit. His a way of describing red.
I mean, the lady of their described it. She said it's what. It's the colour of what comes out of you when you cut yourself.
Well, okay, that's that's a good way of understanding, isn't it. As long as somebody knows what comes out.
Here's another way. It's the colour of that gentleman's jumper, roughly.
I mean, maybe it's orange, but let's pretend it's certainly the colour of that gentlemens cardigan.
But he's wearing a jacket. So you can't see it. Okay.
I've given an all sensitive definition, but was it you who said it's the same as something else called red?
Why should you get the colour when I pointed that? I mean, I'm trying to get lots of things apart from the colour on tie green.
Image that we see with our eyes, it's something that we recruit. All we agreed on it.
Do you know that what you see when you look at this gentleman's jumper is what I see when I look at this gentleman's jumper?
Do you. You don't know what to say? Well, no, not necessarily, because that's exactly what I'm asking.
What is the colour of which you have a concept?
Because I point to that. Let's think about a child learning the concept red.
So what do you do when you're explaining what red means to a child?
You point to lots of other lots of different sorts of red. That's red.
That's the lining of your jacket is red. My skirt is sort of red.
Red. They're red there and so on. Do you pick lots of jumpers to point to?
Why not? No, I'm talk about red jumpers.
Yeah. So let's say they are all red. Why would you not point to lots of jumpers.
Exactly. You might think that red means jumper instead of or even red jumper rather than just red.
So you point to lots of different things and you also point to things that are not red.
What you're trying to do is to give the child the conditions under which that is red are true.
And you also want to say things like, is that red pointing to this lady's jumper?
And what do you hope the child says? No. Send that manner.
Yes. You heard the child says no.
So the way you do it is you point to lots of different things and you hope that the child abstracts out what it is you're talking about.
You know that you're not talking about a person. You're not talking about a jumper, that you're talking about that particular quality.
Now, Plato and Aristotle were interested in how you explain our ability to learn language and our ability to apply concepts.
Concepts are hugely important to human beings. Do you remember I said an elephant a minute ago and you all immediately had an elephant in mind?
Even though there isn't an elephant around here at all, that's the difference between a percept and a concept.
A percept is a constituent of a perception. So if I look at this chair, a constituent of the perception I have is the colour blue.
Okay, I can see the blue ness of the chair. And so can you, presumably.
But whenever you think of elephants, I'm not seeing an elephant at all.
My. Instead, I'm having a thought about an elephant.
And the search has a conceptual content. And part of that conceptual content is elephant.
So what makes us different from animals? Arguably, what enables us to think is that we can form concepts.
We can pull apart our thinking about the world from the way the world is.
So we can think about the way the world might be as well as the way the world is.
You can imagine me wearing yellow now, can't you?
Gone. Imagine it doesn't suit me at all, does it? Okay, but.
But what you're doing is you're pulling apart.
You're the percept you see of me wearing black and red and your replacing the black and red with yellow.
So you're pulling apart. That's what enables us to be creative. What enables us to be imaginative.
What enables us to form plans. So we can imagine ourselves going swimming this evening.
Whether we actually make that a reality. It depends on willpower. But we can indeed imagine it.
And that's what it is to form goals, goals that you can then put into action.
Sure. No, I'm not going to get into that.
I am. But I don't expect you to believe me at this point.
No, we will maybe get into that at some point. Okay.
So Plato said this is the problem he was dealing with.
How do we understand words? How do we form concepts?
Words obviously stand for if you like concepts. So the word read the meaning that you entertain when you think about read is your concept of read.
Okay. Not your percept, your concept. You've got to have the percept before you have the concept, perhaps.
And he says, well, how do we do this? And what he says is that when you look or when you as a child looked at different sorts of
red as your mother was telling you or father was telling you the meaning of the word red,
what you did is you were reminded of something you saw before birth.
Okay, this is. Saito's theory of an emesis or memory.
He thinks that before we're born, our soul exists before birth and it exists in the realm of being,
which is where the forms are formed with a capital F and the form is the meaning of the word read.
So there's the form of good, which is what we are reminded of when we see a good act.
When we see somebody do something good, we think, good, that's good.
And what we're doing is we're reminded of the form, which is pure goodness.
Okay. In the form of red is pure redness and the form of blue is pure blueness.
And so it goes on. And this, says Plato, is how you manage to teach your child read.
You point to that. You point to that. You point to that. You point to that.
Why just pointing to all these different things caused the child to form one concept answer.
It reminds him of the form. OK.
That was Plato's theory. What's wrong with that theory?
I mean, I'm telling you this theory now and I can see some of you are thinking, eh, well, why why are you thinking?
What's wrong with this theory? Well, you can't prove it, but a lot of theories you can't prove.
I mean, with theories, we tend to give reasons for believing theories rather than proofs of theories.
We hope to find proofs, but we're not always successful. There's no common failure.
It's completely remembering things.
No, they have to be reminded by the things that they see in this world. Yes.
No, they can't think of it without being reminded. But that's reasonable, as we'll see in a minute and a minute.
Carburettor, for example, subsequent to Plato, carburettor, feminism amongst them.
Okay. Just the same way this lady did explain, read by description a carburettors.
Actually, I've no idea what a carburettor is. Platers theory.
We have encountered only we. Well, okay. Think of unicorn. You certainly haven't come across any unicorns, but you've still got the concept unicorn.
So how do you how would Plato explain your acquisition of the concept unicorn, assuming that there isn't a form of a unicorn?
Come on. I was wrong. You couldn't disagree.
That's right. You come back to my previous question.
Can I come back to you in a second? I have not forgotten this question.
What was it like, unicorn? Don't be a fool. You know what?
That's a good question. Okay. Unicorns don't exist, do they?
But how can you think about a unicorn if they don't exist? Somebody.
And how did they imagine it? Remember what I said about concepts.
Pull them apart. We've seen pictures so perceived.
We've seen pictures. We haven't perceived a unicorn, though. We've perceived the combination of horse white porn, whatever.
Unicorns have wings. They don't, do they? That's Pegasus, right.
Okay. So what we've seen is the. Now think back to Democritus and the atoms.
Okay. We can't think of anything that we haven't come across, you might think.
But what we can do is we can take the bits of what we have come across and re combine them in various ways.
So you've come across birds that fly and you've come across me because you're looking at me right now.
You can now imagine that I could fly. I hope. I can imagine that I can fly.
Sadly, I can't do it, but. So what we're doing is we see the forms, the form.
There are only forms of the simple things and you put those back together again.
But Aristotle had a completely different understanding of this. Aristotle completely rejected the platonic forms.
He argued that we don't need to postulate such.
I mean, going back to the question I asked earlier. What's wrong with this theory?
Well, one thing that's wrong with it is its ontology. Okay?
Ontology is a section of metaphysics. Metaphysics is to do with the nature of things, what there is and what its nature is.
And ontology is your list of things that exist.
So who believes in ghosts here? Oh, you've got no imagination, any of you.
All right. Somebody over here. Okay. If you believe in ghosts, your ontology has things like chairs, people, glasses, necklaces, ghosts on it.
If you believe in God. God's on it. If you believe in fairies, fairies are on it and so on.
That's your list of what there is. And Aristotle says the thing about Plato's theory is it explodes your ontology.
Not only is there redness, which is a colour, there is also the form of red.
So we're doubling everything up. And so have you heard of a chap called Ockham?
What's Ockham famous for? His razor Ozcan, who wasn't born then, of course.
Or even sort of would have said, we've just got to slash through this ontology.
We mustn't postulate entities that we can x that are not needed for explanation.
And Aristotle thought, well, we can understand words and form concepts and so on because we see commonalities.
Sameness is similarities between objects that exist.
So instead of redness being a form up there that you were new before birth, as Plato said, redness is a commonality between different objects.
Much simpler, isn't it? And if that explains our understanding the word red, why should we accept Plato's theory?
Because that one's much simpler,
doesn't require us to postulate anything that is other than the things we can see in front of us, things we can touch.
But let me ask you a question to distinguish between these two theories. If redness didn't exist, could you still have the concept of red?
If you were. If retina's didn't exist at all.
Could we still have the concept of it? And whose theory does that favour Aristotle?
Yeah. Okay, so you only want Plato if you don't think Aristotle's theory can explain everything now.
There are some concepts and we'll get onto them in a minute that are very difficult to explain in terms of commonalities between things.
So any concept we have that can't be explained in that way might take us back towards Plato's theory.
Do you see why? Because if you have two theories, one of which is much simpler than the other, you definitely go for the simpler one.
But only if it can actually explain everything you want to explain.
If in order to explain everything you need to appeal to the richer one, then you have to go for the richer one.
It's no good having a theory that doesn't explain anything, is it?
This is a theory. Who's speaking the other?
That requires you to decide that you can exist before you born.
Well, it doesn't require you to decide.
It does say because any theory you postulate, whether it's scientific or philosophical, will have various ramifications.
I mean, it might postulate theoretical entities like forms or notice that Aristotle does postulate something.
He postulates the existence of what objects, certainly, but also something else.
No other commonalities. Who said that?
Absolutely right. He postulates commonalities, universals, in other words, properties.
Now, that's a huge question in philosophy as to whether universals actually exist.
Are there both properties. Sorry. Objects and things that have properties.
Sorry. And the properties or are there only objects and relations between them is not an object abstract.
Ah, okay. Abstract objects. I mean to suggest that you must be able to see things, you see the commonality at least or perceived as truth or love.
Loyalty is my master. So I wonder if you would.
Well a commonality actually a truth is a commonality between sentences isn't it.
There are some sentences that are true and others that aren't. OK, let's move on from Plato and Aristotle.
Are we going to get lost? But we're not going to leave this subject because we're going to move.
We've come quite a few centuries on now.
We're going to talk about the rationalists and the empiricists noticed that the empiricists were all British locked, Berkeley and Hume.
Is that jingoistic little cheer? No. Okay.
The rationalists. Descartes lied. Nitzan Spinoza.
The difference between these two sets of philosophers is that the rationalists believe that many of our concepts are innate.
In other words, we're born with them. Whereas the empiricists believe that all concepts come from experience, that we're born as blank slates.
You've probably heard that that's saying so. Okay, let's think about this for a minute.
First of all. Can you tie these people up with Plato and Aristotle?
Who do you think the rationalists are more like Plato? Yeah, absolutely.
Plato said that we're born with the memory of the forms.
The rationalist didn't say women. We remember the forms, but they do say that when we are born, our mind is already stocked.
Now there are different sorts of rationalists and instantly there are some modern philosophers, Chuck Kofoed or for example,
who actually thinks that we are born these days with the concept of car berretta and feminism.
What? No, no, you didn't to me. I did.
Yeah, I got that one. Okay. But the idea is we're born with knowledge.
We've already got some knowledge of what some things are and concepts that are
candidates for things like that are concepts like causality or rationality.
So let's take causality. This is something that Hume famously talked about.
If you're a rationalist, you believe that the concept of cause is a concept you're born with.
If you're an empiricist, you think that all your concepts come from experience.
Therefore, you must have some experience of causation that gives you your concept of causation.
Can you think of what your experience of causation might be?
Can anyone tell me what your experience of causation might be?
These very difficult questions and. I don't think there's some.
Actually, that's a complicated one, because you might want to say that that's a reason rather than a cause.
Actually, I don't. I think it is a cause. But can I leave that on one side and think about causation?
Not involving us. How about one billiard ball rolling into another and the other rolls off?
This is the. Okay. Do you experience causation when that happens?
Do you experienced do you see or otherwise experience the causal relation between the billiard balls here or not?
To you who said no? Why not?
Because you don't just say good.
That's right, isn't it? What you actually see is one event, which is a ball rolling and it's touching another.
And the other ball going off. Now, if you didn't know that there was force involved there.
Could you work it out from what you saw? Could you put your hands up if you think you can't?
If you could feel it? Yes. Well, that's why I wanted to use an example that we weren't actually involved in.
OK. Two billiard balls. So think about this. You would have called this a necessary connexion.
He said the idea of causation involves firstly events.
So the relator of the causal relation are events. And one event happens before another event.
OK. And it's the event before that's the cause. So there's temporal priority.
There's spatial contiguity. OK. One billiard ball must actually hit the other before the other rolls off.
But then there's something else, isn't there? And this is something else is says Hume.
Necessary connexion. When you see one billiard ball hitting another.
The reason you think that one event causes the other event, you think the first what happens?
The second would not have happened either. Is that right?
Okay. Let me say that again, because that's a counterfactual. Had the first event not occurred, the second event would not have occurred either.
Now, that's a claim not about this world, because in this world, that event did happen and so did the other.
It's a claim about all possible worlds.
In other words, there is no world in which that second event would have happened without that first event having happened.
Does that make sense? So what you're seeing, if you're claiming to be able to see that, is a necessary connexion,
a connexion between types of events that covers all sorts of different possible worlds.
How can you see that? I don't believe you. I don't think you can see that at all.
I think that this is your theory of causation. In other words, we're suggesting that causation is a theoretical relation.
So if you think those of you know anything about the Higgs bows on the accelerator in CERN, the Higgs Posen on is a theoretical particle.
It's a particle that's postulated within a theory.
The theory says that if you do this, you will see the Higgs pose or at least see traces of the Higgs boson.
And if we do, that will confirm the theory. And we're so sure of the theory, we're spending millions of pounds to test it.
Well, in this case, we're saying the theoretical relation is causation.
We know we don't actually see causation. We postulate it.
OK, one question over here. Sorry.
Can you speak up the and it changes taking place and the consequence of something course the consequence of telling us something before.
Well, no, because you could believe with Liben, it's that there's no such thing as causation.
But what you have instead is lots of events that happen that are quite separate from each other and don't causally interact at all,
but which are arranged in such a way that we can predict them.
OK. That's what life it's thought. Yeah, it's a theory.
It's actually quite a convincing theory if you read like Nitz, but I'm not going to tell you.
Take us too long. The continuity. It was five long way away.
Yes, but does that mean there's nothing in between? Well, something has to be touching, actually.
I mean, this is open to question now the question of whether there is action that Haddix distance is disputed.
But why does the moon cause the tides to change? Can anyone tell us gravity?
Yeah. OK. Well, also so we've got one here.
We have this concept causation.
The concept involves several things that we can see and experience and this strange force or necessary connexion that we don't seem to be able to see.
This is the empiricists or the rationalists who are winning on causation, the concept of causation, doing it with me.
Ah, that's different. Okay, we've got here a concept that we seem to have.
Okay, it's not a problem. So if we have it, it must come from experience according to the empiricists.
But what I'm asking you is, can you experience necessary connexion?
Can you experience it to be the case that had the first ball not hit the second ball?
The second ball would not have run off. Do you experience that or not?
You don't do. Who's winning? The rationalists say, yes, sir.
Yeah, that's not what I'm asking. Let me ask you again. No. Come on, let's be precise here.
Had the first ball not hit it, the second ball would not have rolled off.
That's causation, isn't it? Okay. Do you see? That had the first ball not hit it.
The second ball would not have rolled off. You see that, right?
Yes, we are actually watching. Yes. Right.
I don't think you can.
And I think you should think about that, because what you're seeing and seeing that is things in different possible worlds, not in this world.
You're seeing had the ball not hit it. But of course, the ball did hit it, didn't it?
So in this world, you haven't got a situation in which the ball didn't hit.
And therefore the ball didn't go off. You can instantly if you don't see causation in one instance.
Can we see it in 100? So you might say, well, okay, it's not the first.
I don't see causation the first time it happens. You know, the ball hits full of rolls off.
But when I see this happen all the time, then I see causation.
Can I see in the hundred instance something I can't see in one see goods?
And that's exactly what Hume says. Hume. Now, look, if you're an empiricist here, you've got two ways of going here.
So you've claimed that all concepts come from experience. You found a concept that apparently doesn't come from experience.
What are you going to claim? Sorry, you could claim you do experience it only when some people do claim that.
But you could also claim that there's no such thing as causation. And that's exactly what Hume claims.
What Hume claimed is that causation is an idea in our minds.
It's the expectation we form when we've seen a hundred billiard balls hit each other
and roll off and we still haven't seen causation because if you don't see it in one,
you don't see it in one hundred either. But what we do form is a amental expectation that if a billiard ball hits, the other one will go off.
And to Hume, that was all that causation is. There's no relation in the world of causation.
No force. All there is is an expectation in our minds.
We project onto the world. This expectation. That's what causation is.
Who's winning the rationalists or the empiricists? Right.
No wonder the empiricists were British. I think it's got to be the rationalists at this point.
Unless you're prepared to believe there isn't any such thing as causation.
You're prepared to believe that tied to a actually, I'm not knocking that there are quite a few people who do believe that likeness is one of them,
which is interesting, given that he's a rationalist. Yeah, well, now, that's an interesting question.
Okay, let's pick up what the lady at the back said. Well, we ourselves are involved.
Okay, look, I'm moving this junk here. Now I can feel that force, Kantai.
Okay. I can experience the fact that I'm having an effect on the world, but I had a reason for doing that.
Okay. It was to show you that I can move something, too, and and have an experience.
Was my action caused or was it reasons?
Was it a rational action, one that I performed for a reason?
The other concept that the rationalists say can't be explained except through an innate concept is the concept of reason.
How do I form the idea of of a reasoned.
Where do we get the idea of rationality? I don't see your reasons for acting, do I?
I see what you do, but I can't see your reasons for doing them.
And how could I have a concept of my own reasons for acting unless I have a concept of your reasons for acting?
If we assume that a reason is a theoretical concept that I apply in explanation of your behaviour.
Actually, I lost myself in that sentence, so I probably lost you, too. Shall we start again?
Okay. Right.
If you remember, we're looking at Plato and Aristotle and the question we were posing ourself is where do we get concepts from?
How do we acquire knowledge of the meaning of a word?
If you explain knowledge of a meaning of word in terms of a concept, then it just pushes the question back.
One. What's a concept and where do we get concepts from?
Plato says we recognise the forms or rather we contemplate the forms before birth and then after birth,
we're reminded of these forms in instances we see around ourselves.
Aristotle says there's nothing before birth. We we come into being is a blank slate.
We see instances and that is the forming of a concept, rationalist and empiricists.
Here they are hundreds of years later, still quarrelling about the same thing.
And you better believe it.
We're still quarrelling about it because there is still rationalism and there is still empiricists and it hasn't been decided at all.
The rationalist Descartes, Liveness and Spinoza were really only quarrelling now about key concepts like causation, rationality.
Space is another one. Actually, space is quite a good one.
Do you think that when a baby is born as it first starts to to experience things?
Does it experience things at a distance or does it experience everything in two dimensions?
And it's only as it starts to move that it puts together things at a distance.
So here you are. You're a baby. You're lying in your cot. You see this two dimensional array.
There's the bars we know. The bars, the cot in your mother's face and so on and so forth.
But all the baby sees is this two dimensional array. But it's moving its limbs like this.
And at one point it hits out and something goes out.
Now the baby starts to correlate the owl with that bit of the two dimensional array and its movement like that.
And it soon starts to learn that actually, in order to touch something that looks like that, I've got to move like this.
Do this. And if I touch you hard enough, you'll go out. Or you might say, if I say say something when I touch you.
Well, let's say it works. But you see,
I could either be born seeing things at a distance or I could construct my concept of space from the experience of correlating what I see,
how I move and what I hear, touch, etc.
Maybe more fully. Fully.
Oh, yes, I read about it. Yeah. Well, that's one argument for that would be rationalism, that there's some sort of innate fear of falling.
Okay. Let's move on from sorry. This is a wimp.
If you want to know more about these people, you're gonna have to come and do some lectures. Right.
Let's move on to something completely different. Let's move on to ethics or ethics and politics.
Okay. The Utilitarians and the de ontologies,
it's the Utilitarians believes that the right action is the action that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Okay. Let's think about this. What does this mean?
This means that, okay, if we're looking at what is it for something to be right.
Okay. What is it for an action to be the morally right action?
Utilitarians say look for the action that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
And that will be the right action. Okay. What do people think about that theory?
It's certainly true. We've got to start defining things because what is happiness?
There's a question for you. What is happiness? Anyone want to have a go at that?
I can't I can't resist this. We're having a romp. So I'm going to do it anyway.
Okay. Two theories about happiness. One of them is that it's a subjective experience.
Okay. A certain feeling. And the other is that it's both a certain feeling and the beliefs that cause that feeling.
OK, so the beliefs that caused the feeling must be true. Here's an amazing answer.
You think you believe yourself to be very happily married. Okay.
Your your delirious, everything's going well for you, etc. Then you discover that your partner, your spouse has been playing away.
Okay. Has that taken away the happiness you had before?
In other words, were you happy and then you stopped being happy when you learnt this, or were you not happy all along?
Put up your hands if you think that you were happy before and you're not.
Now. OK. Anyone prepared to take the Aristotelian view pop for me?
No. You've got no no courage.
Okay. That actually to a concept.
I mean, there isn't one unitary thing, which is what people understand as being happen.
It's not true. Think about it. I mean, there are lots of things that make us happy.
No, I would say I mean, happiness can be, for instance, a temporary experience, a sense of joy.
Well, that's what I'm talking about is a subjective experience. It can also be a general contentment.
Okay, well, I'm putting those together. Business. Yeah.
Contentment. Long term. OK.
Different from feeling elated. Enjoy it.
OK. But do you see that there's a subjective experience in both of them.
Let me put the Aristotelian question to you another way.
You see, Aristotle comes up everywhere and let's say that some famous scientist comes to the government,
comes the prime minister, and says, I have a machine such that if we attach everybody to it, they will become deliriously happy.
We can either let them off the machine every now and again so that they can do things
that can keep people alive or we can leave a few of them off the machines permanently,
do all the stuff and leave everyone else attached to the machine.
Now, if you were a utilitarian prime minister, ought you to say yes to attaching everyone to this machine?
Okay. Now, let's say that this machine causes you to believe that you're doing things like going to philosophy lectures,
listening to people talk about philosophy.
I don't know what else is seeing your grandchildren or making weddings for your children, all that sort of thing.
Okay, so you believe that you've had the sort of life let's make it exactly your sort of life.
These are the beliefs you have. But actually, all you've ever done is be attached to this machine.
Okay. Because that's making you happier than anything else would.
Are you happy? Who thinks you are.
Happy. Oh, well done.
OK. Only two of you now.
But listen, if happiness is nothing other than a subjective feeling in your own head, you must be happy because you've got that.
New, so those of you who thought that happiness was a subjective feeling inside your own head ought to be putting your hands up here.
If you're going to be consistent. But actually, none of us believe that you are.
I'm sorry to have you believe that you would be happy under that circumstance.
Of course it does. And that's what we're actually doing.
These thought experiments are precisely designed to test what happiness is or what you understand by the word happiness.
I'm with our Sutil on this one. I think that if you were attached the happiness happiness machine, you would falsely believe you were happy,
but you wouldn't be happy because happiness involves the truth of the beliefs on which your happiness is based.
Okay, that's Aristotle, you element the judgement average.
Yes. As I said when we moved, I mean, we all romping through.
Yeah, we've been doing metaphysics and epistemology and philosophy of language and we're now doing ethics and political philosophy.
OK. 18TH century. No,
I'm just at random picking out things that I think you'll find interesting
because my job is to enthuse you with the idea that philosophy is a good thing.
So this is entirely arbitrary, the choice. I'm choosing things because I think you'll enjoy them.
Actually, philosophy is quite hard work, as you might have already discovered. You have to do a lot of thinking.
But yet we've moved to ethics here, ethics and politics. OK.
That's the utilitarian and the right action is the action that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
And you said, what's happiness? And we then dive, digressed for ten minutes on what happiness is.
So I couldn't resist it. It's a good one, that one, isn't it? Let's go back.
This is the right action. The one that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Why not? Can anyone think of a counterexample? For example, people if you took a poll.
Right. And that's the greatest number of things.
You could make them happy. Okay. You could say that to bring back happy hanging would make more people happy than not.
Does that make it right? Well, if you're a utilitarian, you would presumably have to say that it would.
But if you don't say that your you might prefer to be a day ontologies, a day ontologies.
Is someone who says that there is something called the moral law.
And the right action is that which accords with the moral law.
So you might say, let's take an example like.
There's a sheriff in a western town, I hate this example, but it happens to have come to mind, so go on with it.
There's been some raping and pillaging around this town and everyone's very upset and there's bound to be riots and so on.
And you have in your cells a tramp who doesn't have any family.
He's very depressed. He wants to die. And you think I.
I know. Sorry. I've got to write in to the person who's been perpetrating these rate rapes has died.
And you can't prove that. But what you do think is if I hang this tramp, I'm giving him what he wants, he's gonna be happy.
I'm giving everyone else what they want. I'm going to say he committed the rapes and I'm going to hang him.
It's going to make everyone happy. Should I do it? Should I hang an innocent man?
No. Okay. So utilitarianism has got to be wrong.
What are we going on? Always saying thou shalt not kill an innocent person.
Don't get me on to that. The moral law is universal. That would be the idea.
It pertains to everyone whether they know it or not.
Okay. Whether they believe it or not. Many would not be true happiness based on the death.
You mean if they knew that he was innocent, they wouldn't be happy? It's certainly true.
You're right. You've got to build in certain epistemological things.
In other words, things to do with knowledge. Yes. If you found out that he'd hung an innocent man, you wouldn't be happy, would you?
So you've got to write into the thought experiment that you wouldn't find out, which I agree is.
Yes. OK. A dance ologists, the right action is that which accords with the moral law.
Thou shalt not kill. And that looks to be the moral law on which the you shouldn't hang an innocent man is based, doesn't it?
Well, is it true? Should you not kill? I mean, is there any circumstance in which killing would be the right thing to do?
Do you think more? Let's let's put more on one side, because we let's look at the laws.
You shouldn't kill an innocent in peace time, shall we? How about that?
Is there any situation which killing an innocent in peacetime would be the right thing to do?
All right. Let's scrub animals, too. Let's talk about human beings.
Okay, well, we might even put that on one. I let let's make things really hard for the day ontology lists.
I'm looking for a time when it would be right to kill a perfectly healthy, ordinary adult human being.
Have I left anything out? Not in war time. Who is innocent?
So it's OK. I think that counts as war.
Actually, let me tell you, a circumstance does I think this might go on too long.
Okay. This was a true story. There's a there was a ship that was on fire just off the coast of Australia.
This was a few years ago.
And the only way of saving the ship on which there were hundreds of sailors was by turning off the oxygen in the engine room,
turning off the oxygen in an engine room and killing the four sailors who were in the engine room.
Should the captain have turned off the oxygen in the engine room?
Put your hands up if you think he should say yes.
Okay. I'm amazed that not all of it usually everyone puts their hands up.
But okay, if you think that he should kill those sailors, they're innocent.
It's wartime. But the fact is, killing those four means saving the hundreds.
And most people at that point swing straight into utilitarianism. Yeah, that's true.
But the fact is, you're still killing. You're breaking the moral law.
If that's what the moral lawyers by saying, by killing those four, in which case we're moving over to utilitarianism.
The utilitarian thinks that the only rights that you have as a human being are not inviolable.
In other words, that you have the rights that you have because it leads to the greatest happiness,
the greatest number for you to be treated as if you have rights.
But if killing you is what's going to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then you're right.
Disappears, okay? In fact, it becomes my duty to kill you if your life is standing in the way of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
It's my duty to turn off the oxygen in the engine room. If that's the only way I can save the hundreds of other people.
So what we see is, whereas the day ontology lists can recognise a right that's inviolable.
The Utilitarians can't. For the utilitarian, it's always secondary to the great happiness to grace.
No. Here is thinking that they're a utilitarian.
Put your hands up. If you don't know. I've done my job, actually.
So for example, if you hadn't turned it off, they would affect you killing everybody.
So you'll be. Well, I wouldn't because I wouldn't have done anything, would I? Yes, why not?
And he's not happy with the way you take your choice. Well, would you violate your moral right?
It depends whether you think of acts and omissions as the same thing.
Actually, if you're in day ontologies and you go for don't kill.
You probably also have a distinction between acts and omissions where your acts can be morally culpable, but your emissions can't be.
Which is an interesting one. Well, if you think about it, my eucalyptus tree died, it died of lack of water.
Queen Elizabeth didn't water it. So she's to blame for the death of my eucalyptus tree.
I mean, had she watered it, it would've lived, isn't it? Isn't that true?
Isn't that a causal relation? Therefore, Queen Elizabeth is responsible for the death of my eucalyptus.
That's true. But she's still responsible if you're responsible for your emissions.
I mean, it's true. She didn't water it, isn't it? It's true.
It's dead. Okay.
This is not comparing like with like.
I mean, the ontology introduced the concept that somehow you're not utilitarian.
You know what we are discussing.
Do you remember before we were talking about what the question was, is how do we get the meanings for all words?
How do we form concepts? The one we're looking at here is what is it for an action to be right?
OK. We all distinguish between actions that are right and actions that are wrong, don't we?
That's a very human thing. Humans are moral agents. We divide the world up into things that are right and things that are wrong.
And the thing that a philosopher wants to know is how do we do this?
What what is it that makes an action, right? What is it that makes an action wrong?
And these are two different theories about that.
One theory says what makes an action, right is that it's produces the greatest happiness, the greatest number.
And the other theory says no. What makes an action right is in effect, just that it is right.
It's laid down by the moral law. As you say, you do see that.
So they are talking about the same thing,
but they are you're also right that they are different because they're giving different explanations of the same thing.
And they're contradictory explanations, so they can't both be true then, whether the moral or moral law you said was universal once well before time.
The moral law. The idea if you can't for free. I mean, if you're if you believe in the Ten Commandments,
you think that the moral law comes from God and that it's revelation that tells you what it is.
If you're a Kantian, you believe that the moral law is something that's perceived by human beings through intuition.
In other words, we have five senses sensory that enable us to perceive the world.
But we have another. It's not a sense, but it's it's a way of discerning what's right and wrong.
So you actually you see something you see in action and you get a strong feeling of approbation or disapprobation.
That's your moral intuition at work and it's your moral intuition that tells you what is and what isn't.
The moral law, in a sense that seems to have the same difficulty as the issue about Plato in the form it's acting in an unnecessary person.
Well, if it's on Nesson, no, hang on.
In a sense that this so-called moral law, rather than a sixth sense or something, is derived from God, postulate something which is unnecessary.
It could actually just come through experience and empathy.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the moral law, you might say, okay, here's another way of looking at the moral law.
If you think of absolutism versus relativism, the relativist says that.
All moral truth is relative to something or other relative to an individual or relative to a community or a culture or something like that.
Whereas the absolutists will say that there are certain things that are true everywhere for everyone at every time, whether they know it or not.
Now, if I ask you whether your relatives saw absolutists, most of you will probably put up your hand.
Say you're relativists.
But what all then point out, you'll see that I'm speeding up because I've got two things to get through and it's not gonna happen.
Okay. Here are two different sorts of moral law.
Don't kill all. Produced the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Notice that you did utilitarianism is an absolutist moral creed.
It's not a relativist moral creed. And here's the Kantian one.
Never treat yourself or another solely as a means to your own ends run out of room.
What can says is that the categorical imperative. The only thing that is the moral law is the claim that I must treat you as an end in yourself,
which means I must allow you to make up your own mind about how you want to live your life.
If I want you to carry my suitcase for me, I can ask you to do it.
That's treating you as a means, but as if I'm allowing you to say no.
I'm also treating you as an end. Whereas if I trick you into carrying my suitcase, I'm treating you as nothing more than a means to my end.
It's my ends that are important. And what the Day Ontologies says is that if you're in and in yourself, you have intrinsic value.
And in virtue of having intrinsic value, you have rights that are inviolable, that that can't be overruled.
And that's the utilitarian won't say that because there is no such thing as a right that can't be overruled for the utilitarian.
And just to put this in a slightly different way of looking at it, the utilitarian is thinking of actions when they think that something's right.
They're always thinking of actions, whereas the de ontology ist are always thinking of will willing an intention.
If you think of an action as goes back to what we're saying about reasons.
Every action has an intention. The action itself and a consequence.
OK, you don't get an action that is hasn't gotten intention. I mean, where you have causation, there isn't intention.
But that when there's a reason there is intention on the utilitarians are concerned only with consequences.
Whereas the day ontologies are concerned only with intentions. So Kant, for example, says that a good will is the only thing that's good in itself.
OK. Consequences are only good. Secondarily. The intention is there anything that's good in itself.
So what your job is, is to obey the moral law as you understand it sincerely.
In other words, you mustn't be self-serving in doing that. We mustn't. Say, you know, well, lying is going to get me out of a hole here.
Therefore, I'm going to lie. That is not the moral law. OK.
You think, what's the right thing? What should I do here? And you do that thing.
Okay. It's your. It's the duty that takes you into the area of morality.
And that's another big difference between these two. But let's go back to to the core thing linking up with what this gentleman here said.
What you've got is a question. What is it that makes an action, right?
Or what is it that makes an action wrong? And as with any question, you're going to have postulated answers.
People are going to put forward answers. And these are answers are theories that you're putting forward in the hope of answering your question.
Now, once again, this is alive debate. We don't know which is the right theory.
But there are arguments.
I mean, I've just given you a tip of an iceberg of the arguments giving you organs for and against these two different theories.
As a matter of fact, we have no idea which is the right theory.
Sometimes in one situation, one theory looks right. Sometimes in another situation, another theory looks right.
And your job as philosophers is to look at the arguments on both sides and weigh them up against each other.
And you'll probably find, as I have over my philosophical career, I started off as a utilitarian.
I then became a Kantian. I went back to utilitarian. I then went back to Kantian ism.
And at the moment I have absolutely no idea,
because the thing about the more you learn about the theory and the more you learn about how it works, the more strengths you see in it.
So it does become actually quite difficult to decide. But at least, you know, you're not setting up straw men.
You know, sometimes people say it's blindingly obvious that utilitarianism is wrong because of that sheriff example.
OK. That seems pretty conclusive, didn't it? But think about utilitarianism.
Could it justify genocide? I think you could say communism was at the time.
Oh, yeah, absolute. Well, I mean, maybe Hitler was a good utilitarian. It's just that he didn't count Jews.
Do you count animals? I mean, maybe our grandchildren are going to say all of us.
Oh, they come for Sunday lunch.
You know, it depends on who you count as a unit of or, you know, something that can have happiness if you don't count Jews than Hitler.
You know, did he do the right thing? You know, if you don't count women, surely it's all right to abort females just because they're female and so on.
And you said, well, now you're into the area of moral truth, which is a major area case.
You didn't guess that. And I'll just leave you with one thought before I move on to utilitarianism.
What's your name, sir? Michael.
Michael. I don't think you said that first study that you were being kind to me, weren't you?
Okay. Michael believes that Marianne is wearing black.
Okay. There's one sentence there, isn't there?
And then there's another sentence there. So man is wearing black is one sentence that could be true or false.
And Michael believes that Marian is wearing black is another sentence. Right.
Could they both be true? And that's probably the actual situation, isn't it?
Could they both be false? No, no.
Come on. I mean, if Michael wasn't here, he wouldn't have any beliefs about me, would he?
So it would be false that he believes I'm wearing black. So that that what could I be wearing?
Yellow. Right.
Okay. Yes, I could be wearing yellow so they could both be false. Okay.
Could that be true and that false. Yup.
So Michael believes that Marion's wearing black. But Marion isn't wearing black.
He's colour-blind or something. And could that be true and that false?
Yes. OK. So it's true. Marans wearing black. But as Michael didn't turn up today, he doesn't leave on wearing black.
OK, now let's change that to mugging elderly ladies is okay.
OK, so we've got Michael believes that mugging elderly ladies is okay.
What was that? Let's leave that on one side.
We're doing logic at the moment. So we're looking at possible worlds rather than the actual one.
Okay. We've still got one sentence within another, haven't we?
OK. Could they both be true? Could they both be false?
Could they both did it? We've got exactly the same possibilities, haven't we?
The thing is that the truth of that belief, whether it's Marianne is wearing black or mugging elderly ladies is okay,
is determined by something quite different from what determines the truth of that.
That sentence is made true or false by Michael's beliefs, whereas that sentence is made true or false by what I'm wearing.
Well, by whether it's okay to mug elderly ladies.
So you've got to distinguish the epistemology. In other words, what we know or believe from the truth of our beliefs or what actually is the case.
OK, so so you mustn't become a relativist just because you've made that logical blunder, must you?
No, definitely not. OK. That's it. It's that sort of distinction that that philosophers have to use.
Next week, we're going to look at logic and argument and we'll be looking very much at that sort of thing,
because if you're not thinking clearly, you can't think about this sort of abstract thing at all.
It's philosophers do it in the head. You know, they can't go into the into the laboratory and apply the rules of nature.
What they're applying the whole time is the rules of logic, the laws of logic.
And that's a good example of how logic can help you clarify something.
Okay, let's let's move on to Vic Einstein. Okay.
This early, it can start late. Vic Einstein. There's no such thing as Big Einstein.
Well, there was, but, sir, he changed his mind all the time. Which, of course, is a sign of intellectual honesty.
The early book Einstein said and noticed. We're back to the Plato Aristotle in Paris.
This rat rationalist problem early begins. I thought words get their meaning by standing for objects.
So what does chair mean? That.
Okay, what does person mean that? What does purple mean that.
And so on. And he believed that language is the reason we get meaning is we pick up something he called strict and literal truth conditions.
Okay, we. Okay. Why do we think this.
Let's take her. What's your name. Right at the back.
Margaret. Let's say this is the fifth lecture.
Margaret has come in late to every single lecture. Okay.
So we've sorted the fifth lectures. Ten minutes into it. Door flies open.
I say hello Margaret. Early again. Okay.
What's the meaning of what I've said? That she's late, isn't she?
Now, isn't that interesting? What you've got here is you all understood a certain meaning.
But it was put in a certain context. And what you do is you took one meaning and inverted it, didn't you?
How do you explain language, if that's what you can do? Well, here's one way you might explain it.
Language is composed of strict and literal truth, conditions, conditions of truth and falsehood.
So do you remember I said talking about read your teaching a child to learn the conditions under which this is read is true.
And this is read is false. And then you say you've got esoteric sentences like this is read.
Then you've got the work force. So you can say this is read.
Or is this read or make that read or. So you apply a different force.
You do something different with the sentence. Then you can add tone.
So. Early again. Okay, the tone, the sarcasm in that case.
But I mean, there are all sorts of other ones. I'm not angry. You see, we turned it around again.
And in this context, you all laughed because I told you the story about Margaret coming in late every session,
which is why when I said early again, Margaret, you you laughed. Okay, so the early Kingstone sort of thought that meaning was made up only of that.
Okay. And what that did was link a word with an object.
Okay. So if you go back to Atomism, the democracies and the atoms, the idea was that every word gets meaning by standing for an object.
And Vic and I drew huge metaphysical claims from this.
He said words get meaning well. So words have meaning.
It's a necessary condition of words having meaning. That word stands for objects.
Therefore, words must sorry. Objects must exist. So much for scepticism.
That's the end of scepticism, isn't it? Words do have meaning.
And if it's a necessary condition for words having meaning that objects exist, well, then we know that objects existed.
They play bingo. It's good arguments, actually.
As long as you do know that your words have meaning. But of course, if we.
If they didn't. How would you be understanding the word that I'm saying now?
OK. The later Vicky Einstein thought this was rubbish.
What he thought is that words get meaning from the way they used.
In other words. All of this is meaning. OK.
So it isn't just that there's weak meaning and strong meaning, which is the way I put it.
So here's a sentence. Can you read that?
OK. James is tall, is what it says. Okay. Do you understand that sentence?
Yeah. Okay. So it has meaning, does it? Okay. Do you know whether it's true or false.
Why not. You don't know.
I'm talking about do you. In fact, I'm not talking about anyone. I'm not even if there is someone called James here, I'm not talking about them.
The thing is, this is a sentence that could be used, but it's not being used.
Do you see what I mean? I'm talking about a sentence rather than using a sentence.
And because I'm talking about a sentence, it doesn't actually have meaning, does it?
It has potential meaning. Maybe so you could call that meaning the week, meaning the strict and literal meaning.
Or you could say that that actually doesn't have meaning because it doesn't have conditions of truth or falsehood.
You don't know the meaning of that sentence because you don't know how to determine whether it's true or false.
And the fact is, it's not true or false. It's neither true nor false because I'm not actually using the sentence at all.
So the early Vic Einstein thought that that would that had meaning because each of these stood for an object.
OK. It could only have meaning because there was something that was being picked out by James.
And there is something of property, as Aristotle would say, that's being picked out by is tool.
Therefore, this has meaning the later Vic Einstein says, no, that's not true.
It doesn't have meaning until you actually use it.
It doesn't have meaning at all. It's only in use. So what's the meaning of.
Hello, Margaret. Early again. No, no, the use I made of that particular token sentence had the meaning.
You're late again, Margaret, didn't it? I asked you, what's the meaning of Hello, Margaret.
Early again. I mean, actually, it has a different meaning, doesn't it?
Depending on the context in which I use it and depending on the tone I use, so I'm not angry.
What does that mean? Yes, that is all in the tone, isn't it?
Yeah, in that one. So that's why the early vic. So you can see I mean, you went for his theory when I asked you if that had meaning.
But then you went for the other theory when we put it in context.
So once again, you have a question, which is how do words get meaning?
What's what's the nature of the meaning of a word?
And we have two different theories this time postulated by the same chap at different times in his life.
And the question is, which is the right one? And there are good reasons actually on both sides.
And of course, you've got to ask yourself, could it be that these two theories are actually consistent,
that you need both of them for different aspects of meaning? I think in this case that that certainly is a.
A real runner. It hasn't been in some of the other things we've seen.
But on this one it is. I was thinking that they might stop.
Yeah, the context. You're up to.
Right. That humour, humour depends utterly on logic. I mean, this is logic.
This is philosophy of language and logic. And you don't get to humour without the logic being.
Right. The grammar being right. Again, perhaps next week we'll give you some example of that.
Okay. I'm going to move on to the last one. OK.
Let's link this with what I was saying earlier about happiness.
Let me ask you a question. Okay. Do you all have a belief about me?
I mean, I have several beliefs about me, but just one will do any belief about me.
Okay, fine. Do you think you could have that very belief even if I didn't exist?
Okay, so if I didn't exist, you couldn't have that belief, your belief would be different.
It made maybe it wouldn't exist at all. But at least it would be different. Yeah, remarkable consensus that.
Okay. Let me tell you another story. You've heard of Descartes.
I should imagine. Okay. Descartes argued that the world could be completely other than we take it to be.
Okay. So we all think that we're in a lecture room.
We're looking at a lecturer. We're listening to a lecture cetera. Could it be with you exactly as it is now?
And yet that belief be false. OK, so what's your reason for thinking your intellectual?
Because you are well, do you know that your senses tell you?
Okay. You can see me. You can hear me, et cetera. That's another way of the testimony of others.
Yes. Okay. Now, could it be with you that you believe you see me.
But you don't. Okay. Could you give me an example?
I mean, let's make it realistic. Well, maybe you could be.
You could wake up any minute and think, oh, God, I've got to go to that lecture this afternoon.
What a bore. So you could be with you exactly as it is now.
And yet you're not being in the lecture theatre. You're having a lucid dream.
Descartes went one first, not because you believe, don't you, that you're having experiences and that your experiences are being caused by something.
Okay. You're having an experience as of a lecturer. And that experience is being caused by a lecturer.
Don't you? What makes you think that? Can you get outside your experiences to see what's causing them?
No. Well, then how do you know you wouldn't be I wouldn't be here if you didn't want me to be.
Believe me, I wouldn't be here if I didn't want you to be here.
We will leave. No, that's not true either.
You might not need me here at all. Nine, but still be. No, no, no.
We're all. Because there's only two minutes to go.
I'm going to draw this. Okay. Do you remember we talked about causation.
If you're going to know that that causes that, OK, you need to see that they're correlated, that these types events are correlated.
If you think that this is similar to that, you need to be standing here, don't you?
You need to be able to see both. Now, you think that your experiences of P are caused by P?
Okay. Can you stand here with respect to your experiences?
No. Where are you standing with respect to your experiences here? Okay.
You cannot get outside your experiences to determine what's causing those experiences.
So nevertheless, you believe very strongly that not only are your experiences being caused by something external to them,
but also that your experiences are a good guide to the cause of those experiences and what Descartes did, he said.
Why do you believe that not? Why do you believe that?
But what's your justification for believing that?
Could it be that instead of your experiences being caused by a philosopher sounding lecturing to you,
there's an evil demon of some kind who is twiddling your thought processes and causing you to think so.
Your experience is all caused by something, but the cause is completely offers a new take it to be.
Is that a possibility? Can you tell me that that isn't the case?
It could be neurological reasons. I mean, this is why.
Well, let's think about your own body, okay?
You think you've got a body, don't you? Could the demon get in between you and your body?
Could it be that that you although you think you have a hand.
Actually, you don't. You think you have a body and actually you don't.
There's just your thoughts and experiences. And the causes of them, which is the demon, do you see what I mean?
The brain isn't going to help you here. And neither are other people, actually, because your brain is on the other side of the demon.
And so's you. So are your sir. Other people.
So what Descartes did is he he opens up a gap. It may look like a pussycat, but it's a demon.
And this is the world. And this is your mind.
And Descartes showed that this could be or at least he argued, rather this could be exactly as it is lost.
This could be totally other or might not even exist.
So was Descartes an intern list or an external list?
Is he what? He's an intern. Exactly, so he believes that our thoughts could be exactly as they are.
Even if the world were completely different. Now, let's go back to the question with which I started this little bit of the session.
You have a belief about me. Could you have that very belief if I didn't exist?
What would you have to say if you were an intern list? Yes.
OK. Does that make you an extern less than.
Yes. You're sort of nodding, but you're not very sure about this. Okay.
Does that mean you're rejecting the Cartesian thought experiment? You are if you're an externals.
That's right. Do you think the Carthusian thought experiment is incoherent?
You do? Would you like to tell me what's incoherent about it?
Can you be sure that the world is as you experience it?
Sure, that is. We're talking about certainty here. Not just. It's unknowable.
Yes, Molly, if it is unknowable, then your you're with the ense, the intern lists, aren't you?
Because if you're an extern list, your beliefs are the way they are, because the world is the way it is.
In other words, your belief about me is a relation between you and me.
OK? It's not something that's going on in your heads completely independently of me.
It's a relation between you and me. Therefore, if I don't exist, you couldn't have that belief and all your intuitions were that way initially.
But then I told the Descartes story, the Cartesian story, which is pretty convincing, isn't it?
So your homework this week is to go away and worry about the Cartesian story and ask yourself whether you're an internal list or an external list.
OK, we've gone slightly over time. If there are any questions, I'm happy to take them.