Maybe by now you’ve grown accustomed to or disappointed by philosophers’ approaching issues via their “intuitions” or via various “isms” assumed for argument’s sake. Here we’ll try to work out instead how things go if we start assessing cognition from scratch. None of the familiar intuitions or competing isms allowed as assumptions. I hope that quest strikes you as a fun and refreshing challenge, poised to help find common ground even among extremely distant disputants.

I think we can get shockingly far from shockingly close to scratch. Maybe you’ll decide not to go where starting from scratch would lead. Even if so, imaginatively proceeding from scratch enables you better to locate the nature and operation of your countervailing presuppositions, and of their alternatives. It is very worth trying, once in your busy and short life. This may be your best chance to declutter and refurnish your own mind.

Here are the main questions we’ll try to answer, from as close to scratch as possible. (Compare with this term’s Phil 383. It has ~25% overlap, but it may usefully be taken jointly.)

• What sorts of psychological states are theories: all-or-none convictions, degreed credences, guesses, estimates, hunches, intuitions, hypotheses, etc.?
• If you start out without a method for testing theories, how can you best reach an initial method? What method? Can it outcompete skepticism, e.g. about the external world or the distant past?
• What is it for a theory to be more or less probable? What factors impact this? And so what?
• How would you (or a robot) get basic ethical concepts, shared even among thinkers who disagree completely about which things (if any) are ethical? What is it for something to be ethically required, or forbidden? Which things (if any) are which?

Class Format:

Class will meet synchronously online.