Episode 14: Edward Witherspoon discusses skepticism
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What is philosophical skepticism and how does the episode introduce it?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Edward Witherspoon, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University, and he is here to talk about skepticism. Edward Witherspoon, welcome.
Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.
I guess maybe we can begin with a little stage setting. Skepticism, at least of the extreme form that we'll be considering here, is the act of doubting that the external, real, physical, mind-independent world that surrounds me, for example, the table in this room, really exists. So why would I doubt that the table is really in front of me, that there really is a table? Isn't that something I know more certainly than anything else?
Good. Well, let's put it this way. If there's anything that you know about the world at all, the environment around us, then certainly you know that there's a table in front of you. Now, the skeptic wants to say, well, okay, it's certainly true that you believe that there's a table here. What kind of justification can you offer for that belief? And the answer the skeptic imagines is, well, we'll say it's based on sense experience. The feel of it, the look of it. We get a lot of sensory information about the environment and about this table in particular. Then the standard skeptical argument is to try to raise a doubt about that basis for my belief. To say, well, you have this experience that's serving as the basis for your belief.
Couldn't you be having just the same experiences while you were dreaming? Couldn't you have a dream? In fact, haven't you had dreams that you're sitting at a table or running across the lawn in your underwear or what have you? And in the course of that dream, you're having experiences which seem to present reality to you as the dreamer. And in the context of the dream, you don't have any tools for determining whether what's going on is really happening or not. The skeptical argument is an attempt to bring that thought to bear on your current experience and say, well, since the experience you're having now could be dreamt experience, whether it's dreamt experience or not, you can't right now tell whether you're dreaming or really experiencing the table.
Because you can't tell that, you don't count as knowing. Because certainly if you know, you'd have to be able to rule out the idea that you might be dreaming it. And if you can't that there's a table in front of you, something as basic as that, such a best case of knowledge gained through the census, then you can't know anything at all about the environment.
One parable put forth by the philosopher Hilary Putnam is how do I know that I even have a body, that anything that I'm experiencing now is real? Because, you know, for all I know, maybe I'm just a brain in a vat somewhere and an evil scientist is making my neurons fire in such a way that it seems like I'm having this experience of an external world. But whereas in reality, I'm just part of a science experiment.
Yeah, good. That's a nice up-to-date sort of sci-fi version of the argument that I was sketching a moment ago. The argument that I was giving in terms of dreaming is, of course, the argument we found in Descartes' first meditation. And Putnam updates that, or maybe it's a slightly different argument from Descartes. Maybe it's a version of the evil genius argument from Descartes. That doesn't really matter for our purposes. But yes, precisely as you were saying, we're supposed to imagine Descartes The following rather chilling series of events were to imagine that we go to sleep one night, unbeknownst to us, mad scientists sneak into our chamber, anesthetize us, carefully excise the brain from our skull, put it in a vat of life-sustaining nutrients,
They hook up the input and output neurons to transducers controlled by a powerful computer. When all this is done, the scientists use those computers to stimulate the brain so as to produce the same brain activity that my brain would be performing were it still inside my body.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is philosophical skepticism and how does the episode introduce it?
0:12–4:15
2
How does the classic ‘brain‑in‑a‑vat’ thought experiment generate skeptical doubt?
4:15–8:40
3
Why does Edward Witherspoon argue that a disembodied brain cannot truly think?
8:40–12:27
4
What role do brain‑scan correlations play in the debate over mental states?
12:27–15:57
5
How do intentions acquire normative content and why does this matter for a brain‑in‑a‑vat?
15:57–20:18
6
What is the anti‑skeptical strategy proposed to undermine the brain‑in‑a‑vat scenario?
20:18–24:50
7
Why should everyday listeners care about philosophical skepticism?
24:50–28:23
8
What are the broader implications of defeating the brain‑in‑a‑vat argument for law, science, and free will?
28:23–32:52
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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Episode 156: Oliver Traldi discusses political expertise
Episode 155: Rebecca Lowe discusses speaking freely
Episode 154: Greg Salmieri discusses free speech, "cancel culture," and "academic freedom"
Episode 153: Sam Enright discusses lifelong learning
Epsiode 152: Luca Gattoni-Celli discusses the housing crisis