I'm doing a philosophy degree for two reasons. The first is that I enjoy philosophy (and a philosophy degree gives me plenty of opportunities to discuss it with others). The second is that Philosophy is my best prospect of getting the marks I need to get into a Law course. Both of these are fundamentally pragmatic.
1: Any Coherentist system could be remade as a Weak Foundationalist system, but the Weak Foundationalist would be asked why they give their starting axioms special priviledges (hence both sides of my discussion have dissed on them massively).
The Coherentists in the argument have gone to great pains to say that "consistency" and "coherence" are different things- their idea of coherence is complicated, but basically involves judging any belief by how well interconnected it is with other beliefs. The Foundationalists have said that although they ultimately resort to axioms, those axioms are self-evident axioms that any system must accept.
2: Could you clarify this point please? Superficially it seems contradictory (as it is a principle that cannot be demonstrated empirically itself), but I'm presumably missing something.
3: About the basic philosophy of language I agree. What I need here is empirical evidence to show that this applies specifically to the Contextualist v.s Invariantist question.
For 1) the answer is basically to figure out what bets you're willing to make. You don't know anything, for strong definitions of know. Absolutely nothing, not one single thing, and there is no possible way to prove anything without already knowing something. But here's the catch; beliefs are probabilities. You can say "I don't know that I'm not going to be burned at the stake for writing on Less Wrong" while also saying "but I probably won't be". You have to make a decision; choose your priors. You can pick ones at random, or you can p...
I have naturally read the material here, but am still not sure how to act on two questions.
1: I've been arguing out the question of Foundationalism v.s Coherentism v.s other similiarly basic methods of justifying knowledge (e.g. infinitism, pragmatism). The discussion left off with two problems for Foundationalism.
a: The Evil Demon argument, particularly the problem of memory. When following any piece of reason, an Evil Demon could theoretically fool my reason into thinking that it had reasoned correctly when it hadn't, or fool my memory into thinking I'd reasoned properly before with reasoning I'd never done. Since a Foundationalist either is a weak Foundationalist (and runs into severe problems) or must discard all but self-evident and incorrigible assumptions (of which memory is not one), I'm stuffed.
(Then again, it has been argued, if a Coherentist were decieved by an evil demon they could be decieved into thinking data coheres when it doesn't. Since their belief rests upon the assumption that their beliefs cohere, should they not discard if they can't know if it coheres or not? The seems to cohere formulation has it's own problem)
b: Even if that's discarded, there is still the problem of how Strong Foundationalist beliefs are justified within a Strong Foundationalist system. Strong Foundationalism is neither self-evident nor incorrigible, after all.
I know myself well enough to know I have an unusually strong (even for a non-rationalist) irrational emotive bias in favour of Foundationalism, and even I begin to suspect I've lost the argument (though some people arguing on my side would disagree). Just to confirm, though- have I lost? What should I do now, either way?
2: What to say on the question of skepticism (on which so far I've technically said nothing)? If I remember correctly Elizier has spoken of philosophy as how to act in the world, but I'm arguing with somebody who maintains as an axiom that the purpose of Philosophy is to find truth, whether useful or useless, in whatever area is under discussion.
3: Finally, how do I speak intelligently on the Contextualist v.s Invariantist problem? I can see in basic that it is an empirical problem and therefore not part of abstract philosophy, but that isn't the same thing as having an answer. It would be good to know where to look up enough neuroscience to at least make an intelligent contribution to the discussion.