Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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or knowledge then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is is set by the subject and the external reality has nothing to do with it the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it instead just reality smacks that person in the face and as you put it uh the story doesn't need to be told it wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is
What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those. We have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality. It's an inherently relational phenomenon. And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality.
What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some sort of
representationalist model or they start going internal and then they start talking about motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have and once you make that divide there is no way to get out subject out of the subject and back to reality on the other hand if you try to react to that and say the subject has can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge
then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject right to pretend the subject doesn't exist to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject but that also is an impossible model so what i want to say is the empiricist commitment and historically the empiricists have struggled to work with uh work this out this is this is the ongoing project
In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem. And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.
What I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it starts. But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can't do
the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to reality. And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon. And that's a philosophy of mind claim. Let me just say, it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality.
It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself. It's a response mechanism. And all of these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. I think we talk a lot about epistemology and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.
And I think that's fine to... You should define that for people, epistemology. The theory of knowledge. So we try to figure out... So the ology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of. In this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around.
But the difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and... Falsehood. That's right. And just having been conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know something? And when should I say that I don't really know something? And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.
And this involves some reflection on sense perception, as we're starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language and grammar, logic. And then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story. What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?
We've been thinking through those things very systematically. Now that though is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological. But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation. We always have to do it in context with metaphysics.
That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.
That's right. What's the furniture of the universe, so to speak? What's real and what isn't real? So the question is, anytime I want to say, you know, this is true or this is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality. And then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that? So you're making the claim, but you're also making a justificatory claim.
So reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics. The special sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology, but if we can step back and say, Are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions? Does a god exist or not?
Those are all metaphysical questions. So to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about, when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics,
all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind that is to say what is this thing that we call the mind and one of the things that early modern philosophy now this is 1400s 1500s on into the 1600s was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being.
And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let's say a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul, or a physicality plus a spiritual element, and that these are two very different metaphysical things. One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.
And that they have different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, how do those two come together? How do they work together? How do they fit together? What's the proper understanding of those two? But that... metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.
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