Western Philosophy. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ have really held views incompatible with (2). And the philosophers who have done so may, I think, be divided into two main groups [A and B respectively] …

      A… . Some philosophers, belonging to this group, have held that no propositions belonging to any of the classes in (2) are wholly true, while others have only held this with regard to some of the classes in (2) … All such views, whether incompatible with all of the propositions in (1), or only with some of them, seem to me to be quite certainly false; and I think the following points are specially deserving of notice with regard to them.

      (a) If any of the classes of propositions in (2) is such that no proposition of that class is true, then no philosopher has ever existed, and therefore none can ever have held with regard to any such class, that no proposition belonging to it is true. In other words, the proposition that some propositions belonging to each of these classes are true is a proposition which has the peculiarity, that, if any philosopher has ever denied it, it follows from the fact that he has denied it, that he must have been wrong in denying it. For when I speak of ‘philosophers’ I mean, of course (as we all do), exclusively philosophers who have been human beings, with human bodies that have lived upon the earth, and who have at different times had many different experiences. If, therefore, there have been any philosophers, there have been human beings of this class; and if there have been human beings of this class, all the rest of what is asserted in (1) is certainly true too. Any view, therefore, incompatible with the proposition that many propositions corresponding to each of the propositions in (1) are true, can only be true, on the hypothesis that no philosopher has ever held any such view. It follows, therefore, that, in considering whether this proposition is true, I cannot consistently regard the fact that many philosophers, whom I respect, have, to the best of my belief, held views incompatible with it, as having any weight at all against it. Since, if I know that they have held such views, I am, ipso facto, knowing that they were mistaken; and, if I have no reason to believe that the proposition in question is true, I have still less reason to believe that they have held views incompatible with it; since I am more certain that they have existed and held some views, i.e., that the proposition in question is true, than that they have held any views incompatible with it.

(b) It is, of course, the case that all philosophers who have held such views have repeatedly, even in their philosophical works, expressed other views inconsistent with them: i.e., no philosopher has ever been able to hold such views consistently. One way in which they have betrayed this inconsistency, is by alluding to the existence of other philosophers. Another way is by alluding to the existence of the human race, and in particular by using ‘we’ in the sense in which I have already constantly used it, in which any philosopher who asserts that ‘we’ do so and so, e.g., that ‘we sometimes believe propositions that are not true’, is asserting not only that he himself has done the thing in question, but that very many other human beings, who have had bodies and lived upon the earth, have done the same. The fact is, of course, that all philosophers have belonged to the class of human beings which exists only if (2) be true: that is to say, to the class of human beings who have frequently known propositions corresponding to each of the propositions in (1). In holding views incompatible with the proposition that propositions of all these classes are true, they have, therefore, been holding views inconsistent with propositions which they themselves knew to be true; and it was, therefore, only to be expected that they should sometimes betray their knowledge of such propositions. The strange thing is that philosophers should have been able to hold sincerely, as part of their philosophical creed, propositions inconsistent with what they themselves knew to be true; and yet, so far as I can make out, this has really frequently happened …

      B. This view, which is usually considered a much more modest view than A, has, I think, the defect that, unlike A, it really is self-contradictory, i.e., entails both of two mutually incompatible propositions. Most philosophers who have held this view, have held, I think, that though each of us knows propositions corresponding to some of the propositions in (1), namely to those which merely assert that I myself have had in the past experiences of certain kinds at many different times, yet none of us knows for certain any propositions either of the type which assert the existence of material things or of the type which assert the existence of other selves, beside myself, and that they also have had experiences. They admit that we do in fact believe propositions of both these types, and that they may be true: some would even say that we know them to be highly probable; but they deny that we ever know them, for certain, to be true. Some of them have spoken of such beliefs as ‘beliefs of Common Sense’, expressing thereby their conviction that beliefs of this kind are very commonly entertained by mankind: but they are convinced that these things are, in all cases, only believed, not known for certain; and some have expressed this by saying that they are matters of Faith, not of Knowledge.

Now the remarkable thing which those who take this view have not, I think, in general duly appreciated, is that, in each case, the philosopher who takes it is making an assertion about ‘us’ – that is to say, not merely about himself, but about many other human beings as well. When he says ‘No human being has ever known of the existence of other human beings’, he is saying: ‘There have been many other human beings beside myself, and none of them (including myself) has ever known the existence of other human beings’. If he says: ‘These beliefs are beliefs of Common Sense, but they are not matters of knowledge’, he is saying: ‘There have been many other human beings, beside myself, who have shared these beliefs, but neither I nor any of the rest have ever known them to be true’. In other words, he asserts with confidence that these beliefs are beliefs of Common Sense, and seems often to fail to notice that, if they are, they must be true; since the proposition that they are beliefs of Common Sense … logically entails the proposition that many human beings, beside the philosopher himself, have had human bodies, which lived upon the earth, and have had various experiences, including beliefs of this kind. This is why this position, as contrasted with positions of group A, seems to me to be self-contradictory. Its difference from A consists in the fact that it is making a proposition about human knowledge in general, and therefore is actually asserting the existence of many human beings, whereas philosophers of group A in stating their position are not doing this: they are only contradicting other things which they hold. It is true that a philosopher who says ‘There have existed many human beings beside myself, and none of us has ever known the existence of any human beings beside himself’, is only contradicting himself if what he holds is ‘There have certainly existed many human beings beside myself’ or, in other words, ‘I know that there have existed other human beings beside myself’. But this, it seems to me, is what such philosophers have in fact been generally doing. They seem to me constantly to betray the fact that they regard the proposition that those beliefs are beliefs of Common Sense, or the proposition that they themselves are not the only members of the human race, as not merely true, but certainly true; and certainly true it cannot be, unless one member, at least, of the human race, namely themselves, has known the very things which that member is declaring that no human being has ever known.

      Nevertheless, my position that I know, with certainty, to be true all of the propositions in (1), is certainly not a position, the denial of which entails both of two incompatible propositions. If I do know all these propositions to be true, then, I think, it is quite certain that other human beings also have known corresponding propositions: that is to say (2) also is true, and I know it to be true. But do I really know all the propositions in (1) to be true? Isn’t it possible that I merely believe them? Or know them to be highly probable? In answer to this question, I think I have nothing better to say than that it seems to me that I do know them, with certainty. It is, indeed, obvious that, in the case of most of them, I do not know them directly: that is to say, I only know them because, in the past, I have known to be true other propositions which were evidence for them. If, for instance, I do know that the earth had existed for many years before I was born, I certainly only know this because I have known other things in the past which were evidence for it. And I certainly do not know exactly what the evidence was. Yet all this seems to me СКАЧАТЬ