Ciara asked:

What is Hume’s sceptical argument about induction?

Answer by Tony Fahey

David Hume was one of the first philosophers to point out the problem of induction. To accept an inference on the evidence that it has worked well in the past is illogical. One cannot infer a universal proposition from a particular one. While many of the scientific conclusions are drawn from this method we know from logic that an inductive inference is illogical and irrational. Thus, we can conclude that the success of science is based on a fallacious inference. This is known as the ‘scandal’ of science.

In inductive inferences we infer universal principles from particular ones. Scientists use the inductive method to justify or confirm their findings, or hypotheses. However, as Hume argues, since we cannot rationally infer ‘all propositions’ from particular propositions, scientific findings are always unsound – hence we have the scandal of science. John Stuart Mill held that the solution to this problem was to turn inductive inferences into deductive inferences. He did this by introducing a major universal premise, or ‘first principle’, into the inductive process. This major universal premise is the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature. That is, because something has always been the case in the past, we suppose that it will always be the case in the future. Moreover, because something occurs in a particular space or time in the universe, we can take it that the same principle will apply in all regions of space and time. In short, because nature is uniform, a causal relationship which holds in one place holds in all cases. For example, because the universe is causally uniform, we can take it because we know that heat causes copper to expand here in Ireland, we can take it that this principle holds throughout nature.

There are two weaknesses in this argument. First, how do we know that the premise is true? That is, how do we know that that which occurs in one region of space will occur throughout nature? Secondly, even if we accept that it is the case, the argument is not deductively valid. For it cannot be said that the Principle of Uniformity of Nature is self-evident truth. While it might be argued that evidence shows it to be the case, we know that empirical evidence is not deductive but inductive, and, as Hume has shown, as such it cannot be proven to apply at all times or in all cases.

Clynne asked:

If God is Good, why does evil exist?

Answer by Helier Robinson

One answer is that God is not all-powerful so, although He wants to prevent evil (being all-Good), He is unable to do so.

Another answer is that God is not all-knowing so, although He could prevent evil (being all-powerful), He does not because He does not know about it.

A third answer is that there are three Gods. One is all-good but neither all-powerful nor all-knowing; another is all-powerful but neither all-good nor all-knowing; and the third is all-knowing but neither all-good nor all-powerful.

A fourth answer is that there is no God at all.

A fifth answer if that evil is an illusion. What appears evil to us does so only because we have only an incomplete picture of reality.

There are other answers that seem to work but do not do so in fact. The best known is that God gave us free will, which some of us use to commit evil acts, but because free will is such a great good (better than all the evil put together) it is better that we have it than not. This does not work because God created angels, which have free will and which do no evil, and He could have created us similarly. This argument is a specific case of the general argument that evil exists in order to allow a greater good.

My preference, among what seems to be a very unsatisfactory selection of answers, is for the third, but I cannot go into my reasons for this here. If you want to know more, visit the website SharebooksPublishing.com.

Siddharth asked:

I was brought up on the stories of Buddha and his quest for truth. In fact, I got my name from him. His life has always been an inspiration and like him I feel a growing sense of disillusionment with the world as I engage more and more with it. Like him, I am intrigued about the meaning and purpose of life in the face of death, disease and suffering. I also feel a need to denounce the world not because I hate it but because I believe you need to shed off the monotony of daily chores and responsibilities, at least temporarily, to focus your mind’s eye on your quest for the truth.

In today’s world, what is the place to go for someone who genuinely wants to know the truth?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

How do you know that you genuinely want to know the truth and why should that matter to anyone else except you? What have you done so far to find out the truth and what sort of truth are you interested in? How do you know that you are not just a lazy person who wants to waste his time by pretending to contemplate the universe? How do you know that you are not just suffering from depression? How many books have you read in the last year? What truths have you discovered in the last year?

You are certainly filled with many illusions. For example you seem to imagine that it is easy to go to university and to get funding for a PhD. Try it, its not as easy as you think. It takes lots of hard work.

By the way when you talk about ‘denouncing’ the world, what you really mean is ‘renouncing’ the world. There is no reason why anyone should want to pay for you to renounce the world, you may have to pay for that yourself.

In the past people who went to the forest had to be able to survive in the forest and that is not easy. However now that I have poured all this negativity down on your head here are three practical suggestions for you.

1. Join a Buddhist monastery and become a monk. However this isn’t easy and will involve getting up very early every morning.

2. Undertake some further education. Find a course in something that really interests you.

3. learn to play a musical instrument. I don’t mean try to learn to play a musical instrument. I mean learn to play to a very high level. This will take extreme dedication and concentration for at least two years.

Answer by Helier Robinson

You need a ‘lonely job.’ A good example, which unfortunately does not exist anymore, is that of being a light-house keeper at some lonely outpost; you had to keep the light burning all night, but that was all. A lonely job in Canada is that of fire-watcher; you live at the top of a wooden tower, deep in the forest, miles away from anywhere, and you have to be on the lookout, all day and all summer, for smoke from a forest fire, so that you can radio in an early warning. Another kind of lonely job is working in the high Arctic, as a radio operator or a meteorologist. Lonely jobs usually give you lots of spare time to meditate on the truth, and as well pay well (because recruitment for them is difficult). So after a while you will be ready to return to civilisation, with enough money saved to go to university.

Answer by David Robjant

A prize question, though your remarks on forests and the funding of PhDs seem both wide of the mark. In fact doing philosophy need not require a private workshop, not even a roofless one. But doing philosophy does need moments of silence and access to the fruits of human intelligence, such as it is. If you are sufficiently well resourced to be able to live in a major city, membership of something like the British Library would be option A, meeting both requirements. Otherwise the internet is plan B, meeting about 20% of one requirement thus far, and I hope you look forward to open access as much as I do:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1844

Tom asked:

What is philosophy?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Hi Tom, whilst this is a question that is put to the panel of Ask A Philosopher from time to time, it is nonetheless one that is worth clarifying for anyone coming to the subject for the first time.

Philosophy means ‘love of wisdom’. In its truest sense it is a desire to challenge, to expand and to extend the frontiers of one’s own understanding. It is the study of the documented wisdom — the ‘big ideas’ — of thinkers throughout the history of humankind. However, even in our most respected institutions, Philosophy is often presented as theology, psychology, spirituality or religion. Indeed, many exponents of these respective disciplines seem to have no difficulty in identifying themselves as ‘philosophers’ when in fact they are ‘dogmatists’ (sic). What can be said, however, is that Philosophy is all of the above and none. ‘All’, in the sense that it will certainly engage with the views advanced by the exponents of these disciplines. ‘None’, in the sense that Philosophy can never be constrained by views that do not allow themselves to be examined, challenged, deconstructed and demystified in the realisation that ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ is not something that can be caught and grasped as one particular ism.

For those really interested in Philosophy, it is important to draw a distinction between ‘a philosophy’ and ‘Philosophy’ itself. There are abroad today many colleges, institutions, societies, schools of philosophy, groups, cults and sects promoting the view that they ‘teach’ Philosophy, where in fact what they are doing is promoting a particular worldview that they claim is superior to other worldviews or ‘philosophies’. What has to be said is that when a body claims that its philosophy has the monopoly on other worldviews it cannot be placed under the rubric of Philosophy — it is dogma. It is for this reason that those institutions that promote a particular religious ethos cannot, by their very nature, be said to teach Philosophy in any real sense: they are constrained by their own ‘philosophical’ prejudices from treating other worldviews impartially — particularly where these other approaches run contrary to their own. Moreover, by indoctrinating their students into a mindset that holds that it is their way or no way, these institutions show that their interest is not primarily in that which is best for the student, but that which is best in ensuring their own perpetuity. This approach (of using others as a means to one’s own ends), as Kant reminds us, is repugnant to Philosophy — the search for wisdom.

What this means is that Philosophy cannot condone any body of knowledge that advocates a closed view on wisdom or truth — one cannot take an a la carte approach to Philosophy. As the Dalai Lama, in the prologue to his book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality advises, where scientific discoveries are made that expose weaknesses in long held traditional beliefs, these beliefs should be abandoned, and the new discoveries embraced (would that all spiritual leaders or ‘philosophers’ were so open minded!). Philosophy, then, must operate on the premise that its conclusions should ever be open to what Karl Popper calls, ‘the law of falsification’. That is where its conclusions are found to be questionable, it is imperative that these views are revisited, re-evaluated and, where necessary, either re-formulated or abandoned. Unfortunately, as history shows, many systems of belief either will not entertain such an approach, or, if or when they do, it is often so far in time removed from the initial discovery that much harm has occurred in the interim.

What should be realised is that the wisdom to which Philosophy aspires is not attained by the practice of uttering self-hypnotising mantras or prayers, nor by being initiated into some select group, sect or cult that promises that its ‘road less travelled’ is the one true road. Philosophy is not love of ‘a truth’ or ‘some particular approach to wisdom’, but a love of truth and wisdom. However, this wisdom or truth does not come pre-wrapped and packaged as one ism or another, rather it involves the courage and preparedness to engage with, to challenge and to expand the boundaries of one’s own knowledge and experience — one’s own wisdom.

Mich asked:

Why do we dream?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

No one is really sure. What we do know is that if you sleep you dream and if you don’t sleep then you die.

Freud suggested that the purpose of dreams is to keep us asleep and certainly many dreams seem to fall into this category. A more important question is why do we need to sleep?

There may not be just one answer to this question but sleep seems to be important to the functioning of brains in humans and in many other animals.

Melania asked:

What is the main point of Descartes first meditation and what are the arguments for and against it?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Just before the Meditations begin, Descartes gives a 2-page Synopsis summarizing the main points of each. He says:

‘In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things and especially about material things…’.

Also, he begins each Meditation with a preliminary summarizing sentence. For Meditation 1 this reads ‘Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful.’

So, the main point of Meditation 1 is to introduce his method of doubt (methodological scepticism). He feels that the best way to reach clear and distinct knowledge is to begin by doubting the evidence of his senses that there exists an external world including other people and his own body. He then goes on in Meditations 2-6 to establish what is left that he feels can’t be doubted, concludes that it is the ‘cogito'(I think therefore I am’), and attempts to reason his way back from that to knowledge of all that he doubted. He is a rationalist rather than an empiricist – reason rather than observation is the royal road to sure knowledge.

He gives 3 arguments in Meditation 1 in favour of his methodological scepticism.

1. Senses sometimes deceive us
2. Dreaming argument
3. Evil genius argument

To deal briefly with each:

1. It is commonplace that our senses sometimes deceive us regarding things far away or hardly perceptible. Maybe they always deceive us – see arguments 2. and 3.

2. Descartes sits by the fire with a paper in his hands, and reflects that sometimes he dreams he is doing this when really he is asleep in bed. How does he know, right now, that he isn’t dreaming. He can’t be sure, and, in general, we can’t be sure at any time that we are really awake rather than dreaming, so that the fire, the paper, his hand may all be figments of his dreaming imagination.
Descartes feels (I agree) that whether awake and asleep, we are not deceived as to truths of maths/logic. His example, we know that 2 + 3 = 5 in our dreams.

3. An evil genius with godlike powers could be controlling his mind so that the heavens and the earth and all in them are illusions. Here he could be deceived in thinking 2+3 = 5, the evil genius sees to it that he makes a mistake every time he attempts addition or counting.

In Meditation 1 he gives no argument against methodological scepticism beyond hinting at his belief in an all powerful, benign God who is no deceiver. Such a God is the key bridge from the cogito back to knowledge of the external world, and in Meditations 3 and 5 he gives two arguments for God’s existence which both fail. Hence, his methodological scepticism has been of enduring philosophical interest and value, but his attempts to reason his way out of it are generally judged a failure.

At the end of the last Meditation, he counters the dreaming argument by suggesting he can distinguish the waking state (from sleep) by the fact that memory connects the events of our waking life but doesn’t connect dreams with one another or with the whole course of our lives. And, of course, he counters the evil genius argument by claiming clear and distinct knowledge of a benign, omnipotent God who is no deceiver.