In the last couple of sections, I've tried to say something about what I think philosophy is. In this section, I want to move on to starting to say some things about how philosophy is actually done. Now, here I want to go back to something that I said at the very start of this week's videos. Which was that the best way to get a sense of what philosophy is all about, and how it's done, is going to be to work your way through this course, and try and engage with the arguments, and topics, and problems that you find there. Well, we can make a start on this, this week. And the good news is that I'll bet everybody watching this has some idea of how to do philosophy already. And that's because we all in our day to day lives try to work out the best way of thinking about something at some point. It's something we do all the time. So, for example, suppose I'm trying to decide wether or not i should go to the cinema tonight. How do I do this? Well, I look around for evidence, either that I should or that I shouldn't. I think about what the evidence I find gives me reason to do. And then I try and come to a conclusion on the basis of what I've decided about that evidence. So, suppose in thinking about whether or not I should go to the cinima, I say this to myself. I say, they have good hot dogs at the cinema. I like hot dogs. Therefore, I should go to the cinema. So what I have just done is given a very simple argument that I should go to the cinema. The first thing note here is that argument in this context doesn't have to be something that is bad tempered or confrontational. When we talk about argument or arguments in the context of philosophy, we just mean evidence and change of reasoning that try to demonstrate the truth of some conclusion or another. In this case, the conclusion I should go to the cinema. To introduce quickly some jargon. In this argument we've got two premises. The first one, they have hot dogs at the cinema. The second one, I like hot dogs. And these premises are the claims that the argument makes in order to support its conclusion. So we've got those two premises in support of the conclusion. And then we got the conclusion that I should go to the cinema. Now, does this argument show that I should go to the cinema tonight? Well, if after thinking about it, you have some doubts about whether it does show that, then that shows that you already know something about how to do philosophy. So let's think about the ways that we can question that argument. We can question the way that the conclusion follows from the premises. So maybe just the fact that they have hot dogs at the cinema and that I like hot dogs doesn't mean that I should go to the cinema. And we can see that. Right? Perhaps I'm trying to become a vegetarian. Or perhaps I'm trying to save money. Or to lose weight. So we can think of all sorts of reasons why it might not follow from the fact that I like hot dogs and there are hot dogs at the cinema that I should go the cinema. When the conclusion of an argument follows from its premises, that means, when the conclusion has to be true if the premises are true, then the argument is valid. So because we can see that the premises in the above argument are true, so we can see perhaps that the cinema really does have good hot dogs and I really do like hot dogs. But the, it still might not be true that I should go to the cinema. We can see that that argument is not valid. So that's one where we can question a philosophical argument. We can questions whether it's valid by questioning whether or not the truth of the conclusion really follows from the truth of the premises. We can also question the premises. The premises might not be true. So, for example, in the argument we just gave, perhaps the hot dogs at the cinema really aren't very good. Or perhaps they do not actually stock them anymore. Or perhaps we could question the second premise by noting that the last time I had hot dogs they made me really ill and so I don't like them anymore. So that's another way we can criticize the argument by criticizing the truth of it's premises. To introduce one more bit of jargon. When an argument is valid with true premises, then we see that it's sound. So we can question this soundness of an argument either by questioning the truth of its premises or by questioning its validity. Let's take a more difficult argument to assess. One topic that philosophers have wondered about is what it means for us to be free or to have freewill. So, it seems that I've got lots of freedom from moment to moment over what I choose to do I can choose to keep talking to you now, or I could choose to go away and have a nice lie down or a cup of tea. But I choose to keep talking to you now. Philosophers have tried to construct arguments that put pressure on that idea that we're free to choose what to do from one moment to the next. Here's how one such argument might go. First premise: the way the world was in the past controls exactly how it is in the present, and how it will be in the future. Second premise: we're part of the world just like everything around us. Third premise: we can't control how things were in the past, or the way the past controls the present and future. Conclusion: therefore, we don't control anything that happens in the world, including all the things that we think and say, and do. Now, that's a really surprising conclusion. I hope everybody agrees. How can we question it? Well, we can question it in just the same ways as we questioned the argument about the hot dogs and the cinema. We can question the promises. We could question the first promise, we could ask. Perhaps the past doesn't really fix the present and the future. So, for example, we might think that some of the findings from quantum mechanics that I alluded to into the first video might show us that there might be fundamental indeterminacy and uncertainty in the universe. So perhaps, the way things are in the universe at one time doesn't really determine how everything has to be at all future times. We could question the second premise. So, perhaps we aren't really parts of the world just like everything else. Perhaps there's something very special about us. So some people have thought that we might have immaterial and immortal souls that makes us a very different sort of thing from all the things around us. Perhaps, we could even question the third premise. So perhaps we can control how things were in the past, or how the past controls the present and the future. And I don't really know how you would do that, but perhaps you can, perhaps some clever person can come up with an argument that, that is right. So we can question the premises, or we can question whether the conclusion follows from the premises. Okay we can question whether or not the argument is valid. So, one right way of doing this might be same. Perhaps there are two different senses of control that play in this argument. So, perhaps the true stuff about control in the premises, about the way that one physical state of the world controls how everything evolves in the future. Perhaps that's right, but that doesn't tell us anything about the different sense of control which concerns the sort of control that we have over our actions, that the conclusion tried to tell us something about. Now, I don't want to try to say between these different ways of responding to this argument here. Perhaps that would be something, it was interesting to go up and discuss in the forums for this week. But I do want note that each of these strategies for responding to the argument has some more work attached to it. The strategy of questioning the first premise and suggesting that there might be some kind of indeterminacy in the way that past states of the universe control present and future states, might create just as much of a problem for the sort of control that we have over our actions as the original argument did. The strategy of questioning the second premise and seeing that there is something special or different about us, with respect to the rest of the Universe. This is the challenge of seeing what that special property is, and how exactly we're related to the rest of the universe. In fact, we're going to see some of the problems and costs associate, associated with that in a future weeks of the course, when we think about [UNKNOWN] and the philosophy of might. And if you go with a strategy of suggesting that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, because there are two different senses of control in play. Then you owe us a story about what those different senses of control are. And why the sense of control that is an issue when we're talking about control that we have over our actions is so very different from the sense of control that the premises are talking about. We just looked at an argument that was trying to help us think about the sense in which we might be free or in control of our actions. And this shows us that in philosophy, often what we're doing is trying to work out the right way of thinking about things with the help of engaging with arguments and positions that other people, other philosophers, have put forward. And so, again, I want to come back to this idea that this is how you're going to get the most out of this course. By going through all the different arguments and positions that you're going to encounter there and really trying to critically engage with them, and work out what you think about them. Now, in this section, we've been talking about how to actually do philosophy. And I've been talking about looking at arguments, identifying their premises, trying to work out whether they're valid. And this is a really crucial part of what it is to do philosophy, but I want to make two little qualifications about what I've said in this section. So, first of all, the arguments that we've looked at have been quite simple ones. So we looked at the one about going to the cinema that had two premises. Then we looked at the one about free will that had three premises. But we saw even in thinking about the argument from free will, that opened up a host of other issues. That was what we saw when we considered the different ways we might try and question the argument. And the different things that we'd have to do if we were going to make any of those ways of questioning the argument work. So, often in philosophy, what were thinking about and how were thinking about it is so complex that it's very very hard to try and boil down our thinking to straight forward series of premises and conclusions. But that doesn't mean that its not usually a good idea to try and do that. To try and make our thinking as clear and precise to ourselves as we possibly can. The second qualification is that I think there's something important that gets lost if we think of philosophy just in terms of trying to give clever arguments, where a clearly stated conclusion follows from clearly stated premises. Sometimes, the things that we're thinking about and how we're thinking about them just are too rich and complex for us to be able to just do that. There's a quote from the philosopher Hilary Putnam that I think sums this up really well. He says, philosophy needs vision and argument. There is something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains arguments, however good, which were not inspired by some genuine vision. And something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments. Speculation about how things hand together requires the ability to draw out conceptual distinctions and connections ,and the ability to argue. But speculative views, however interesting or well supported by arguments or insightful, are not all we need. We also need what the philosopher Myles Burnyeat called 'vision' and I take that to mean vision as to how to live our lives, and how to order our societies. Now I think this is a great quote, and I want to mention two aspects of the appeal to the vision that Putnam is making here. One aspect of the quote is suggest that I think, it suggests we need to keep in mind the big picture when we're putting forward or criticizing philosophical arguments. So, an example of failing to do this might be just being really impressed by how clever and nice, and neat the argument against us having free control over our actions that we saw earlier looks, and concluding, okay, so I simply don't have any free, free will. I don't have any control over my actions. It seems to me at least, that if you accept that conclusion on the basis of the argument, you are accepting something that is so crazy. That it can really correspond to the way that you see and understand yourselves, and the world around you. So, it seems to me that, that would be a case of paying too much attention to the details of the argument and not enough attention to the big picture that the argument is supposed to be illuminating for us. So it seems at least to me that the, what's useful about the argument about free will is not that it gets us to accept the conclusion that we don't have any. But it really helped focus the question of what it is that we mean when we think that we do have free control over our actions. So that's one sense, we need to keep the big picture in mind when we're thinking about whether or not we accept a conclusion, or what we think of an argument. And here's the second aspect that is closely related. When we're engaging with a philosophical argument, we need to do more than just try and identify and assess the premises that it's using, and see if it's a valid argument. I think we also need to think about the vision, the big picture that inspires that argument, okay. What's the person who's putting forward the argument really trying to say? What are they really trying to get at? And can we even perhaps do a better job of trying to articulate that and get at what they're trying to say than they can. Or perhaps thinking about the vision, the big picture, that's behind their argument, can help us in trying to articulate and trying to come to see what it is that we don't like, or that we disagree with. So, those are two senses in which I think paying attention to this idea of vision, or to put it more simply, paying attention to the big picture in which philosophical arguments are embedded can be really important for doing philosophy. In this section, we saw what we meant by a philosophical argument, as well as by bi-talk of premises, validity and soundness. We've also looked at how we can criticize or think about philosophical arguments by questioning their premises or questioning their validity. And finally, I with the help of Hilary Putnam, suggested that when doing philosophy or engaging with other people's ideas, we're not just interested acquiring arguments. We also need to think about the vision, or the big picture that we or the philosopher that we are engaging with might be driving at.
