PHIL 336

8/15/22, 7:58 AM Reading 1.3: How to Do Philosophy Well - PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

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How to Do Philosophy Well

As a kind of inquiry, philosophy is aimed at establishing knowledge and understanding. Even where certain knowledge about a particular issue can’t be had, there are often interesting things to learn about why we can’t have certainty and what sorts of less-than-certain reasons there are for or against holding a position on that issue. So, rational inquiry may be interesting and fruitful even when we are denied straight-forward answers to our initial questions. Once we raise a philosophical issue, whether about the nature of justice or about the nature of reality, we want to ask what can be said for or against the various possible answers to our question. Here we are engaged in formulating arguments. Some arguments give us better reasons or accepting their conclusions than others. Once we have formulated an argument, we want to evaluate the reasoning it offers. If you want to know what philosophers do, this is a pretty good answer: philosophers formulate and evaluate arguments.

Your introduction to philosophy should be as much a training in how to do philosophy as it is a chance to get to acquainted with the views of various philosophers. To that end, we will be devoting our second week’s module on Logic and Argumentation.

Once a philosophical position is considered, we want to ask what arguments can be advanced in support of or against that issue. We then want to examine the quality of the arguments. Evaluating flawed arguments often points the way towards other arguments and the process of formulating, clarifying, and evaluating arguments continues. This method of question and answer in which we recursively formulate, clarify, and evaluate arguments is known as dialectic. Dialectic looks a lot like debate, but a big difference lies in the respective goals of the two activities. The goal of a debate is to win by persuading an audience that your position is right and your opponent’s is wrong. Dialectic, on the other hand, is aimed at inquiry. The goal is to learn something new about the issue under discussion. Unlike debate, in dialectic your sharpest critic is your best friend. Critical evaluation of your argument brings new evidence and reasoning to light. The person you disagree with on a philosophical issue is often the person you stand to learn the most from (and this doesn’t necessarily depend on which of you is closer to the truth of the matter).

Truth

As varieties of rational inquiry, it’s natural to think that science and philosophy are mainly concerned with getting at the truth about things. There are some interesting and some confused challenges to the idea that philosophy and science are truth oriented. But for now let’s assume that rational inquiry is truth oriented and address a couple of questions about truth. Let’s focus on just these two:

What is it for a claim to be true?

How do we determine that a claim is true?

It’s important to keep these two questions separate. Questions about how we know whether something is true are epistemic questions. But the question of what it is for something to be true is not an epistemic issue. The truth of a claim is quite independent of how or whether we know it to be true. If you are not sure about this, consider the claim that there is intelligent life on other planets and the claim that there is no intelligent life on other planets. I assume we don’t know which of these two claims is true, but surely one of them is. Whichever of these claims is true, its being true doesn’t depend in any way on whether or how we know it to be true. There are many truths that will never be known or believed by anyone and appreciating this is enough to see that the truth of a claim is not relative to belief, knowledge, proof, or any other epistemic notion.

But then what is it for a claim to be true? The ordinary everyday notion of truth would have it that a claim is true if the world is the way the claim says it is. And this is pretty much all we are after. When

8/15/22, 7:58 AM Reading 1.3: How to Do Philosophy Well - PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

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we make a claim, we represent some part of the world as being a certain way. If how my claim represents the world fits with the way the world is, then my claim is true. Truth, then, is correspondence, or good fit, between what we assert and the way things are.

Is Truth Relative to Meaning?

There is a further potential source of confusion about truth that might be worth addressing at this point. Words and sentences can be used in lots of different ways. Even if we are not being inventive with language, there is lots of vagueness and ambiguity built into natural language. A tempting pitfall in thinking about truth is to think that truth is somehow relative to meaning or open to interpretation.

We’d all agree that it’s true that dogs are canines. But suppose we used the word “dog” to refer to house cats instead. A word is just a sound or a string of letters. We can, in principle, attach any meaning we like to the word “dog”. If we used the word “dog” to refer to house cats, then the sentence “Dogs are canines” would be false. Doesn’t this make truth relative to meaning or interpretation? Well, in a way yes, but not really.

The truth of sentences, bits of language, is relative to meaning. But the relativity at issue here is entirely linguistic. It’s simply the result of the meaning of words and sentences being relative to linguistic convention. But our everyday notion of truth is not about linguistic convention any more than it is about knowledge or belief. Our notion of truth is fundamentally about the correspondence between what is meant by a sentence and the way the world is. Philosophers often refer to what is meant or expressed by a sentence as a proposition. While a sentence is a piece of language that has a meaning, the proposition it expresses is not itself a piece of language. Consider “Schnei ist wies” and “Snow is white”. The first sentence is German for snow is white. These are distinct sentences and this is clear because they belong to different languages. But they say the same thing. They both express the proposition that snow is white (we are stuck with using English to refer to the proposition. But that doesn’t mean the proposition is linguistic. We use English to refer to lots of things that aren’t themselves part of language; dogs and cats for instance).

So the proposition expressed by a sentence is not itself a linguistic thing. Being a non-linguistic thing, the proposition does not have a meaning. Rather the proposition is what is meant. For a bit of language to be open to interpretation is for us to be able to attach different meanings to it. But the meanings themselves are not open to further interpretation. And it is the proposition, what is meant by the sentence, that is the fundamental bearer of truth or falsity. A proposition is true when it represents things the way they are. So when I speak of arguments consisting of claims you might bear in mind that its propositions, not sentences I’m talking about. If we misinterpret the sentence, then we haven’t yet gotten on to the claim being made and hence probably don’t fully understand the argument. Getting clear on just what an argument says is critical to the dialectical process.

Even if you are exceptionally bright, you probably found the last couple paragraphs rather challenging. That’s OK. You might work through them again more carefully and come back to it in a day or two if it’s still a struggle. The path to becoming a better critical thinker is more like mountain climbing than a walk in the park, but with this crucial difference: no bones get broken when you fall off an intellectual cliff. So, you are always free to try to scale it again. We can sum up the key points of the last few paragraphs as follows:

We use sentences, bits of language, to express propositions.

The proposition, what is meant by the sentence, represents the world as being some way.

The proposition is true when it represents the world in a way that corresponds to how the world is.

8/15/22, 7:58 AM Reading 1.3: How to Do Philosophy Well - PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

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Therefore, Truth, understood as correspondence between a claim (a proposition) and the way the world is, is not relative to meaning, knowledge, belief, or opinion.

Hopefully we now have a better grip on what it is for a claim to be true. A claim is true just when it represents things as they are. As is frequently the case in philosophy, the real work here was just getting clear on the issue. Once we clearly appreciate the question at hand, the answer seems pretty obvious. So now we can set aside the issue of what truth is and turn to the rather different issue of how to determine what’s true.

The common sense everyday way to assess a claim for truth or falsity is to consider the reasons for holding it or rejecting it. Sometimes good reasons take the form of simple observations. I have a good reason for thinking my bicycle has a flat tire when I see the tire sagging on the rim or hear air hissing out of the tube. But often the business of identifying and evaluating reasons is a bit more involved. Since philosophy proceeds by formulating and evaluating the reasons for and against holding various positions, we will want to take a close look at just how this goes. Logic and Argumentation is the subject of our second week/module.

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Source: Payne, Russ W. “How Philosophy Is Done.” Introduction to Philosophy (2015), Chapter 2. (CC BY NC 4.0).