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Intro to Philosophy – Spring 2024

First Paper Assignment

Address one of the following in a paper of no less than 1500 and no more than 2000 words. Brevity is encouraged whenever it is consistent with addressing the question fully. Your submission must be fully anonymized, so that it is impossible to know your name by inspecting the file or its contents.

1. Hume and Carroll. Hume holds that all of our conclusions about matters of fact not immediately present to the senses are based on claims, which we have derived from experience, asserting a causal connection between one kind of happening and another. Hume then presents arguments that raise “skeptical doubts” for the possibility of our having any rational basis for deriving such causal claims from experience. (Instead, we derive those causal claims from another, nonrational basis—namely, habit.) For this assignment, you should:

a. Spell out the arguments Hume uses to raise these skeptical doubts as precisely as possible. There are at least two: (1) about how referring to past regularities to rationally justify the relevant principle would be circular, and (2) about how if there is a relevant rationally justified principle, its justification must be obvious to infants.

b. Identify the premise common to Hume’s arguments that Lewis Carroll challenges in “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.”

c. Explain how Lewis Carroll’s dialogue presents a challenge to that premise.

d. Do you think that Lewis Carroll’s challenge successfully undermines Hume’s skeptical doubts about causal claims? Why or why not? If you agree with Carroll that the premise of Hume’s arguments that he challenges is false, how can it be rational for us to believe causal claims? Justify your answers with reasons.

2. Hume and Sellars: Sellars holds that much “empiricist” philosophy (a category that definitely includes Hume) has proceeded under the influence of an idea that he calls “the Myth of the Given,” which, frustratingly, Sellars never defines, although he does say that it involves a conflation of two different ideas about “inner episodes” that he distinguishes at the beginning of section III. He says that this conflation of ideas gets a lot of aid and comfort from a certain way of thinking about sentences of the form “x looks F to S” according to which they involve sense-data, little immediate knowings of (for example) red that appear in the mind without requiring any background learning about the world. For this assignment, you should:

a. Describe Sellars’s account of the meaning of sentences of the form “x looks F to S.” In particular, how does Sellars’s account differ from the “sense datum theory,” and why does it have the consequence that (for example) being red is prior to looking red?

b. Explain why the consequence that (for example) being red is prior to looking red might present a challenge to Hume’s skeptical doubts about matters of fact not immediately present to the senses.

c. Do you think that Sellars’s theory of the meaning of “x looks F to S” is closer to the truth than sense datum theory? (In fairness to Sellars, you should consider the second paragraph of section 17 in answering this question.) If not, why not? If so, do you think that the consequence that being red is prior to looking red successfully dispels Hume’s skeptical doubts about causal claims? Justify your answers with reasons.

3. Plato and Gettier. In the excerpts we studied from Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus advance through a series of increasingly sophisticated answers to the question what knowledge is. For this assignment, you should explain their reasons for rejecting:

a. the “theory” that knowledge is (for example) geometry and other such sciences, plus crafts like cobbling,

b. the theory that knowledge is perception,

c. the theory that knowledge is true judgment,

d. and then explain Gettier’s challenge to the last theory we studied from Plato according to which knowledge is true judgment with an account.

e. Do you think that Gettier successfully undermines the theory that knowledge is true judgment with an account (or, in his vocabulary, “justified true belief”)? If so, can you (and if so, how?) refine the philosophical account of knowledge so as to make it immune to Gettier-style counterexamples? If not, why not? Justify your answers with reasons.

All papers must be in 12 point font, double-spaced, with one inch margins. Papers are to be turned in to Canvas no later than 11:59 AM EST, February 19, 2024. Late papers will be penalized one letter grade (the difference between an A and an A-) per day. Plagiarism in papers will be punished with an F for the course.

Further Instructions. 1) Avoid unexplained jargon (e.g., “objective,” “subjective,” etc.) and be sure to make clear the author's use of unusual terms. 2) Avoid merely repeating what was said in lectures and sections. 3) Support your arguments with specific evidence/details from the relevant text or phenomenon. Use (brief) quotations and give citations using page numbers. 4) Keep a copy of your essay.