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《知乎哲也》- 我怀疑我怀疑的就是我怀疑的!






About 「Doubt」



Agrippa’s five tropes

阿格里帕的5种论证


No.1

Disagreement or dissent among experts.

专家之间的异议.



No.2

Relativism.

相对主义.



No.3

Foundationalism

基础主义.



No.1

Infinite Regress

无限后退.



No.1

Coherentism

融贯论.




Bite the bullet. To accept the truth is a little bit different than what we thought it was.


Truth with a capital ”T”, so be pragmatic, deal with the problem when it happens.





第565期节目全记录文本


TJ

Lulu


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Welcome back to 【Let's Philosophize】. 欢迎回来《知乎哲也》。

In the previous episode, we were talking to TJ about “doubting and knowing”, let’s continue with that topic.

Yeah. Depends on the context, depending on what you represent, depending on the historical limitations, geographical limitations, cultural limitations, political limitations, you see, kind of like a relative fact or relative truth. So this is the argument of whether there is ultimate truth in the world.

Yes, exactly. And how do we find that truth if things are quite relative?So… this already sounds quite difficult and it's… but there's three more to go. The next one is criticism of any theory like Descartes. He's very critical…

Foundationalism.

Yeah, it's a very big challenge because if you have a foundation, then you have to prove that foundation.

Exactly.

Actually this was what I wanted to ask you when you mentioned Descartes’ foundationalism.

刚才TJ讲笛卡尔的基础主义的时候, 我就特别想问, 就是说If you assume, for example, the foundation of all the other things, of your entire belief system, for example, is “he loves me, we have a good relationship” , if this is your foundation, then all of your subsequent thinking is built on thinking he definitely loves me, this is the truth. But what if that is not the truth. Then your entire belief system collapses, right?

Right.

So, isn't that the problem with foundationalism?How can you make sure that foundation is solid?

Exactly. Exactly. And this is the problem with all of philosophy really is that we just keep doubting. You try to find some foundation, but then you have to doubt the foundation. And you need more proof.

It's difficult being a philosopher, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. It's quite difficult.

So far, we’ve talked about the dissent among experts, 专家之间的异议; Number two, we talked about relativism, 相对主义, so people are restricted by different context, their background; Number three is foundationalism, 基础主义, so you have to doubt the foundation.

There’re two more.

I think the next one to talk about is infinite regress.

This is just what happens if we don't have a foundation. If we can't have a foundation, then you just keep asking why.

Infinite regress是无限后退.

Does that mean, for example, you say, fundamental belief he loves me.  How can you be sure he loves you?Then you doubt that. And then you just keep going down that rabbit hole. Keep asking yeah, but how can you prove that?But how can you prove that?But how can you prove that?

Exactly.

That's the infinite regress.

Yeah, the best way of thinking about the infinite regress, I think is children, because children are often the infinite regress, you say Go to bed and they say Why.

They ask difficult questions.

Right. Go to bed. Why?Because you need to sleep. Why do I need to sleep? To be healthy. Why do I need to be healthy? Otherwise you get sick. Why will I get sick?Right...You can see that this will go on for a very long time until like Descartes, you eventually say because I told you so, right? Or for Descartes because God told you so, you need…

Exactly.

You need some authority.

This does sound like a rabbit hole that you just fall into. Yeah, so we have one more.

Right. And the last one is usually called coherentism.

融贯论. What is coherentism?

So this is when you try to have a set of beliefs that fit together, you say something is… we know this is true because we look at all of the different things and we can reach a conclusion by looking at them altogether, like the example of friendship, if your friend calls you every week and they spend time with you and they do things for you, then all of these things add up together to make a friendship.

So if something strange happens and your friend gets angry, then you say this doesn't fit with all the other things I know about them. This doesn't fit. So maybe this is not true. It's not coherent and it doesn't fit.

It's a little bit like you have an entire… instead of just have a foundation of one firm belief, you have a set of things that you believe in, and they fit nicely together. And anything that is outside of that logic is wrong, is something you should doubt.

Right. Something you should doubt. And then obviously, if your friend keeps shouting at you, then you have a new set of things to believe, right?You have a new… some more information to add to this set.

But this is a solution.  Then Agrippa is, he likes to talk about the problems. Problem with this is… it is what we call circular.

So it just goes around in a circle. You say they are all my friends I say, how do you know they're your friends, you say well, they call me, they spend time with me.

Actually, I am a bit confused about what's the difference between coherentism and infinite regress. I thought coherentism is more like a self-serving sort of an entire set of logic, isn't it?

This is what… we're getting to the grip of it now. So what would Agrippa say about coherentism, he likes to cause the trouble not to solve it. And for Agrippa, this coherentism is really just a big circle.

We often say this about the Bible. So we say, how do you know the Bible is true? They say, well, because God wrote the Bible or God inspired people to write the Bible, and then you say,  how do you know God inspired people to write the Bible?And then you say well, it says so in the Bible, so…

So using your argument as your own proof.

Right. This is the same thing. All coherentism has this kind of problem that your proof is your argument. It goes round in a circle.

Yeah, but then you're not really proving anything if using circular logic.

Exactly. That's what Agrippa would say.  The infinite regress just goes forever in a straight line, whereas the circular logic just goes around in a circle forever.

You know what I would say? I would say infinite regress is going down a rabbit hole.  And coherentism is chasing your own tale over and over and over again.

That's a very good example, very good apt metaphor.

So far you have shared with us these five ways, originally they thought… through these five ways, they could find the ultimate truth and get rid of all doubts.

But Agrippa is saying these five ways, they're not good ways. All of these are wrong. You can't really find truth and get rid of all the doubts in these five ways.

That makes me a bit depressed because it sounds like really, how can we stop the doubts?Because it sounds like we will not be able to find the truth or to know things.

Um. Right. Welcome to the clubs.

But then how do we live our lives knowing that we probably won't know the truth.

I think most people you have two choices.

The first choice is to… in philosophy we call it Bite the bullet. So you have to either say maybe foundationalism or coherentism are not as bad as they seem. There's some kind of way that we can solve this problem. You have to accept the truth is a little bit different than what we thought it was.

Or alternatively, the other thing you can do is be pragmatic. Yeah, that's a very common choice.

Pragmatism, 实用主义.

Right, right. So you don't think about truth.

In philosophy we call this Truth with a Capital T, so you don't think about this big kind of truth. You think more about the small kind of truth, right?Every time I put the eggs into the pan and turn up the heat, they always turn…

They'll fry.

Right. They will always turn into fried eggs.

It will get cooked.

If tomorrow, I throw a ball and it goes up in the air instead of down to the earth, then I'll deal with that problem when it happens. This is very down to earth way of dealing with it.

I think it's really just a coping mechanism. isn't it?

Yeah. We have to, you kind of forced into…

We have to make do.

Exactly.

But what about science?What about things that we tend to think?We say oh this can be scientifically proven, we use the word “proven” to say that there is no room for doubts.

Right.

How do philosophers think of science?

This is a very big question, but we do have this idea in science of repeatability that even if we are a pragmatist, we can be more certain of something, we can doubt something less.

If we can doubt something less, if we do it over and over again, so like the eggs example, if you make the eggs according to the recipe and it works the first time, you'll think this is a good. But if you've done it 100 times or 1,000 times, then you'll be very sure that it doesn't matter about the weather or the pan or any of the other things that could change.

The more you repeat something, the more you do it in different circumstances and look at it in different ways, then the more certain you can be. So science is all about this repeatability, right?You can get the same results.

Yeah, experiments and doing experiments, eventually then to sort of distill an equation or mathematical truth.

Right. Right.

OK. I think to prevent this podcast from confusing people, confusing our audience even more. I think we're going to wrap up here.

So in the past 2 episodes, TJ and I, we were talking about knowing and doubting. Obviously, this is a huge topic. Hopefully we've given you some of the basics.

Remember philosophy, they don't really talk about the categorically what is right and what is wrong. The most important thing is we are giving you all of these food for thought, and it's up to you to make your own decisions.

I probably will choose pragmatism, because I can't cope with this anymore.

Right.

Alright.

I doubt that listeners will have any trouble understanding. I'm sure they're all very intelligent.

OK. That's a philosophy joke. Right. Thank you TJ for coming to the studio.

Pleasure as always.

Cann’t wait to have you for our next talk. Alright. We'll see you next time.

Bye.

Bye.



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