Moore's Puzzle
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Moore's Puzzle
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.
- LuckyR
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Re: Moore's Puzzle
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).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.
- chewybrian
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Re: Moore's Puzzle
- Leontiskos
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Re: Moore's Puzzle
I agree.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".
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.
Socrates: He's like that, Hippias, not refined. He's garbage, he cares about nothing but the truth.
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Re: Moore's Puzzle
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023