Moore's Puzzle

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WanderingGaze22
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Moore's Puzzle

Post by WanderingGaze22 »

Suppose you are in a windowless room. It begins to rain outside. You have not heard a weather report, so you don’t know that it’s raining. So you don’t believe that it’s raining. Thus your friend, who knows your situation, can say, “It’s raining, but MacIntosh doesn’t believe it is.” But if you, MacIntosh, were to say exactly the same thing to your friend—“It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is”—your friend would rightly think you’d lost your mind. Why, then, is the second sentence absurd? As G.E. Moore put it, “Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”

The problem Moore identified turned out to be profound. It helped to stimulate Wittgenstein’s later work on the nature of knowledge and certainty, and it even helped to give birth (in the 1950s) to a new field of philosophically inspired language study, pragmatics.
I leave you to ponder a solution.
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LuckyR
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Re: Moore's Puzzle

Post by LuckyR »

WanderingGaze22 wrote: January 10th, 2022, 4:12 am Suppose you are in a windowless room. It begins to rain outside. You have not heard a weather report, so you don’t know that it’s raining. So you don’t believe that it’s raining. Thus your friend, who knows your situation, can say, “It’s raining, but MacIntosh doesn’t believe it is.” But if you, MacIntosh, were to say exactly the same thing to your friend—“It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is”—your friend would rightly think you’d lost your mind. Why, then, is the second sentence absurd? As G.E. Moore put it, “Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”

The problem Moore identified turned out to be profound. It helped to stimulate Wittgenstein’s later work on the nature of knowledge and certainty, and it even helped to give birth (in the 1950s) to a new field of philosophically inspired language study, pragmatics.
I leave you to ponder a solution.
Well if you ask, what is the difference between the friend and Macintosh, the answer is perspective. The friend can see the rain, Mac cannot. Thus the friend can know it is raining, Mac can believe it is raining. Therefore when the friend describes the rain and Mac's beliefs (assuming he can hear Mac from his position, even though magically Mac has no expectation of being able to hear the rain, otherwise the problem becomes a trick), the friend is describing what is known to him. Since Mac knows his beliefs but cannot know the status of the weather, he cannot logically know it is raining (though he knows his belief).
"As usual... it depends."
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chewybrian
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Re: Moore's Puzzle

Post by chewybrian »

This one doesn't seem like much of a problem. The second sentence contains a contradiction, since when I say: "it is raining", that is the same as saying "I believe it is raining". Holding contradictory positions as true does make me bonkers, or I am lying, even if they are only contradictory based upon my mistake rather than fact.
"If determinism holds, then past events have conspired to cause me to hold this view--it is out of my control. Either I am right about free will, or it is not my fault that I am wrong."
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Leontiskos
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Re: Moore's Puzzle

Post by Leontiskos »

chewybrian wrote: January 10th, 2022, 5:43 am This one doesn't seem like much of a problem. The second sentence contains a contradiction, since when I say: "it is raining", that is the same as saying "I believe it is raining".
I agree.

It is mildly interesting that MacIntosh can never know the truth that his friend knows, but the only reason that he is excluded from knowing it is because the proposition is dependent on his own belief-state.
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Alan Masterman
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Re: Moore's Puzzle

Post by Alan Masterman »

How did we get from the fact that "I don't know it's raining" to the situation "I don't believe it is raining"? If I don't know whether it's raining or not, what ground do I have to assert that "I don't believe it is raining?"
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