Is Standard Western Philosophy naive?
G'day. My name is Bruce Robertson and this is Pirate Philosophy. In this series of videos, I'll be presenting an original philosophy, one that you won't find anywhere else. But it is one that is logical, rigorous and dynamic.
Welcome to Pirate Philosophy. While I would like to get on and discuss in detail the philosophy I will be presenting, there needs to be some groundwork covered first. In the previous video, I discussed how philosophy is a paradigm and how it is based on assumptions and inferences and that any particular paradigm does not constitute the totality of philosophy, any more than what we know about science and the scientific approach constitutes the totality of the physical world.
So philosophy is a paradigm and today I want to discuss Standard Western Philosophy as a paradigm. In my opinion, Standard Western Philosophy has a lot of limitations, contradictions, inconsistencies and it is not a particularly good paradigm and has a number of aspects of it that I consider to be naïve.
So what is Standard Western Philosophy? What do I mean by it? I mean, the philosophy that you will learn at university, the philosophy that you will read about in all the books in the libraries of universities, it is the philosophy presented by almost all philosophers that you'll find in philosophy books. And what do I mean by naïve? Well, a naïve belief or theory is one that is simply based, without a lot of thought, or at least within the thought that is available at that particular time but in hindsight, is less than accurate or efficient. So for example, the idea many, many thousands of years ago, that the Earth is flat, because Earth appears to be flat; we would now consider that to be a naïve belief.
Science was naïve around 2000 years ago, when Standard Western Philosophy began. There were theories from Thales that everything was made of water. It had a certain quaintness, in the idea that water could be in the three different states of a solid, liquid and gas, it was a step forward. But we would certainly see that the idea that everything is made of water would certainly be considered naïve today.
And the same with Aristotle's theory of gravitation: that things fell to the ground because that's where they want to be. We, again, would see that as being a very naive theory. Science has moved on since then; it has developed, and those beliefs of 2000 years ago, have long been replaced and improved upon. Yet Standard Western Philosophy still has its foundations in the ideas of 2000 years ago. At that time, Plato had the idea about knowledge as justified true belief. (I'll come back to that point later). And there was Aristotle's logic, (again, I'll come back to that later) that is still considered to be foundational for Standard Western Philosophy .
The problem with philosophy, as opposed to science, is that there are so few facts. One has to look at the internal structure of philosophy in order to determine whether it's a good philosophy or not; whereas In science, there are so many different facts and experiments that are developed over time that the theories can be reworked and re-evaluated and improved upon all the time. In philosophy, this is not so much the case.
So, one really has to look at the logic of philosophy in order to get some evaluation as to how efficient it is. One of the laws of logic within the Standard Western Philosophy paradigm is that, "if A, then A" meaning if something, then something. It is supposed to be obvious and it is a foundational theory, if you like, for Standard Western Philosophy. But what does it mean? What is 'A'? 'If A', what does that mean? Is it a symbol? Can it be used as a word? Is it an idea, a belief? Or does it refer to reality itself? And, of course, Standard Western philosophers would say that it applies to reality itself. But then what is the correlation between 'A' or a word and reality itself? What is the logical connection between the two and if you don't have a logical connection between the two, then you can't really say that it's a logical law. Because it's not specific about what it applies to and it is not even clear how it is used. A lot of the time, it is used in a non-logical way. People say things like, 'if it is raining, then it is raining'. But what do they mean by that? 'If it seems to be raining, then it is raining', they go from a perception to an actuality, which is not really allowed within a purely logical system. Yet, that is the way it is used and you might just as well say, 'the Earth appears to be flat, therefore, the Earth is flat', or 'the Sun appears to go round the Earth, therefore, the Sun goes around the Earth'. It's not logical, there's no logical way whereby one can be differentiated from the other.
So then one comes across the second law of logic, 'Either A or not-A'. But again, what does this mean? What is it? What does it apply to? Does it apply to symbols, words, statements, beliefs, or reality itself? Again, standard Western philosophers would say it applies to reality itself. But then what is the connection between the symbols of that logical statement and reality itself? It is not logically defined. So it's not really justifiable to say that that is a law of logic. If you do say that, "Either the Sun goes around the Earth or the Sun does not go around with the Earth", how are you going to determine which is the case? And can you do it in a purely logical way? You can't. Therefore, you can't apply that particular logical law, to the actuality of whether the Sun goes around the Earth or not. The second law of logic is often expanded into the idea that every statement is either true or false. Seems logical but then how do you determine whether a statement is true or false? There's no logical process for determining whether a particular situation is true or false or the particular statement is true or false, then therefore it cannot be a part of logic that 'every statement is either true or false.' All you have left is a sort of hand waving opinion about whether statements are true or false.
And that is part of the thing about Standard Western Philosophy: a lot of it is hidden; it's an opinion. And what is an opinion? An opinion is an idea that one has in one head and that one puts out for other people to consider. But it is not one for which the logical processes or foundations are clearly stated or clearly shown, or can be followed by other people. So it's merely an opinion, an awful lot of standard Western philosophy is nothing but opinion.
Standard Western Philosophy focuses on language on statements, propositions, justifications, judgments; that sort of thing. But they are all part of opinions, there is nothing particularly logical about it. Other people cannot follow the particular line of reasoning that it supposedly has. Take, for example, 'knowledge is justified true belief'. What does that mean? All that it is really doing is defining one word in terms of other words; and that's a job that's best left for lexicographers. And if you want to try to define knowledge more precisely and if you have put it in terms of 'justified true belief', or sometimes just 'true belief', there needs to be a process by which it can be evaluated, to determine whether something is 'justified', whether it's 'true', or whether it's a 'belief'. Yet none of those can be achieved in Standard Western Philosophy without a hidden opinion. And their focus on language also leads to linguistic tangles when they try to determine whether particular statements are 'true' or 'false' and it doesn't make a lot of sense; for example, in the what they call the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, where a particular ship is, over time, repaired and every bit of it is changed. Is that still the same ship as it was originally? Or the paradox of the pile: If you have a pile of rice, and you say something like: 'it is a pile or a heap of rice', and then you take one grain of rice away; is that still a heap? At what stage does it change? If you keep taking grains of rice away until you've got just one grain left? Is that still a heap? It's a matter for lexicographers; it's not a philosophical problem. It is only a problem for the Standard Western Philosophy paradigm. That's all, it's not a problem for philosophy. Because who really cares whether you call it the same ship or whether you call it a heap of rice? It doesn't matter. It's not important. Yet, because of the particular logic that Standard Western Philosophy uses, it becomes a problem for them.
And the other thing about Standard Western Philosophy is that they talk a lot about truth. They say 'this is true'; 'that is true'; 'that is not true'.; 'that is false'. But they don't have a well defined theory of what is 'true' or 'false'. There's no definitive process for defining or deciding what is 'true' or 'false' and all you're left with is an opinion. My opinion is that it's true, your opinion is that it's false, so what?
If you really want to have truth, you need an explicit axiomatic system, which will generate theorems in the way that mathematics is a logical, rigorous axiomatic system, whereby it can be proved, given certain axioms and rules of inference, that three plus two is five and we might say that is 'true' within that axiomatic system. And because it's all so explicit and obvious, we all accept that '3+2=5' is 'true' within that axiomatic system. It is not true if I use different symbols or different rules of inference. It is labeled as 'true' within that axiomatic system of mathematics. And the thing about truth is that it needs to be provable, however that is typically not the way it's done in Standard Western Philosophy. If you want to claim something is true, you need to prove it and if you don't have a proof, one has to consider the possibly that it is not provable. And if something is not provable, then it is possible that it is not true. And therefore, if it has the possibility of not been true, then it is very naive to claim that it is true. Yet you will find claims of truth throughout Standard Western Philosophy with nothing resembling any sort of proof.
If something has not been proven, it is naïve, within philosophy, to claim that it is true.
Because what is truth? Truth is certainty. In mathematics, it is certain that within that axiomatic system '3+2=5'. We don't need to think about it anymore. In the real world, lots of things are subjectively said to be true. It is an opinion that it is true and it means that I don't need to consider that anymore. I know, I've done as much research as I want to do on that particular topic and that for me, is a 'truth'. And because Standard Western Philosophy claims so many truths as being objective, i.e. a fact for everybody, when that is clearly not the case. They've gone down this path of language and their own sort of wordy logic and a number of these sorts of ideas and their ideas about truth that they have found themselves, from my perspective, up a blind canyon with walls on each side and big wall in front, so that they can't go any further. That is how I perceive Standard Western Philosophy. There is no way forward except to retrace the steps back to some starting position and start again.
So can anything be salvaged from Standard Western Philosophy? Well, there are a lot of good ideas, gems if you like, buried within it within the thousands and thousands of books that have been written. I mean, there are some very good ideas, certainly and the opinions are certainly useful, particularly in politics or sociology. I mean, people's opinions are important. But it is not philosophy. It's not objective. It's not truth. And its claims of truth are naïve. And claims that Standard Western Philosophy is the same as the whole domain of philosophy is again, naïve.
So apart from the opinions and the few gems that are buried deep within it, probably Standard Western Philosophy is best ignored. There's not a lot that can be done with it. And it is detrimental to any other philosophical paradigm to try to fit it within the confines of Standard Western Philosophy or even to take note of Standard Western Philosophy very much. What needs to be done is to start afresh and that is what I have done and what I will continue to present in these videos. Though there's a little bit more groundwork to cover before we can actually start.
In any case, that's all I have for you today. Thank you for watching. If you have any interesting comments, or questions, please leave them in the comment section below and if you would like to continue this journey with me, then please subscribe and give it a thumbs up.
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