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Summary PSS Final Exam Study Guide
- Instelling
- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
- Boek
- What is truth?
study guide for the final exam of the course Philosophy of Social Sciences
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Lecture 1● Contingency with regards to how a particular discipline is categorized
● A plurality of rationalisites
○ Not a narrow definition of social sciences
○ There is plurality, different ways of doing science
● Models/Styles of rationality
○ Proof; Hypothesis; Experiment; Systematics; Statistics; History
● The philosophical implications
○ Science doesn’t operate on a single model of rationality
○ No domain in science has priority over another
○ Each mode defines truth/non-truth in its own way
○ Historically each science enlarged the practice of science
● What is the truth? Each mode has its own way of defining
○ 1. Historical (first definition: truth is proven knowledge, that is absolutely certain, true for all
cases)
■ This kind of science isn’t found in many sciences
○ 2. Truth is a correct representation/picture of nature or society
■ Hypothesis-driven science
■ Presents a certain view of the world
■ Representation: concept that is very close to the idea of picture
■ Lack the absolute certainty
■ Hypothesis: propose knowledge (certain knowledge): logic, geometry
■ Truth is a correct representation, picture of the world: hypothetical science
● Theory: two kinds
○ Aristotle/Plato: proof-oriented, based on axioms
■ No empirical verification necessary
■ Ex. geometry, early relativity/string theory, “theory of action”
○ Hypothesis-oriented:
■ Empirical verification necessary
● The endurance of Plato and Aristotle
○ All Western philosophy is a conversation with Plato and Aristotle
○ But Greek Culture was different
○ Plato: aristocrat, opposed to Athenian democracy
■ Wanted truth to be independent of political bargaining
○ Everything originates in “a one”
○ All human-world comes out of a single something: a one, origin of everything
■ Plato: the forms
■ Aristotle: first principles: ideal and abstract forms existing in heavens coming from one
● First premises: conclusions (logic)
● Axioms: theorems (geometry)
● Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s First Principles: demiurge: the world (causal chains)
● Aristotle: everything in the world is a causal consequence of something preceded… until you reason
yourself back to the first principle out of which everything is caused
○ What is in geometry that is so persuasive?
■ Euclid’s Elements (300 BCE): most famous book in the world after
● Deductively structured: mathematical proof
● Axioms: equivalent to first principles
● Absolute certainty of axioms: how do you accept without really proving?
, ○ Pythagorean’s theorem can be proven on the basis of five axioms, so theorems are necessarily true
○ Axioms can’t be proven: you feel compelled to accept them
● Plato: teacher, knowing math was a requirement to enter the Academy as a student
○ “Every soul has an instrument of knowledge that is purified and kindled by the study of
mathematics” (Republic)
○ We all have this faculty of mind, but we must train it
■ You do so by studying the book Elements
● What ability do we acquire by training this muscle of mind?
○ Intuition
○ Training your intuition so that it becomes a reliable tool to find truth
○ The fact that you are able to accept the truth of the axiom is due to that intuition
■ On the basis of this, you accept the truth
● How do we acquire first principles? (the possibility of knowing these first principles?)
○ Plato’s explanation: a myth: a story of the origin/creation of the world
■ Plato’s Meno: recollection of first principles
■ Timaeus: creation of the world by the Demiurge, you were listening to the creation of the
world by the Demiurge, so you knew. Then you forgot, and recollection of this memory is
why you accept the truth of axioms.
○ Aristotle: no recollection of Demiurge’s story but there is a correspondence between nous in the
world (Plato’s instrument of knowledge: soul, intuition) and nous in the psyche
■ Two forms of certain knowledge:
● Science: derived from first principles, not sense perception
● First principles: not deductively derived, instead directly intuited.
○ Aristotle vs. Plato: Aristotle’s is not a Demiurge story, but we are being helped and retain what is
most essential, which helps intuition to allow establishing first principles (analogy of army)
Tutorial 1
● Plato: no higher science than geometry
○ Mathematics: ultimate thing that gets us to truth, it can’t be proven otherwise
● Plato’s Republic: cave allegory
○ One prisoner leaves the cave, sees the real world, forces others to do the same
■ Freed person represents the philosopher: should enlighten his fellow citizens (Socrates:
killed because of the questions he asked)
○ Cave: the world we find ourselves, we are prisoners
○ Philosophical ideal of how the world should look like: state led by philosopher king (against
democracy)
○ Shadows: imperfect representations of the actual idea of them
○ Cave is the real, of empirics, outside is the realm of forms (more truthful than empirical world)
■ Gives illusion that we understand the world
■ Observing physical world is insufficient to explore the world
● Plato’s Meno: socratic dialogue (starts with question on virtue)
○ Being perplexed and paralyzed: first step of enlightenment
○ What does this tell us about learning?
○ “Finding knowledge within oneself: recollection” (28)
● Summarizing Socrates’ ideas into a paradox
○ It is impossible to look for something he knows (already knows)/ doesn’t know (doesn’t know
what to look for)
● Solution: learning is actually through recollection
○ truth/knowledge are already in us
, ○ Soul is immaterial, exists before incarnation
○ Soul possess knowledge
○ Source of knowledge is independent from our worldly experience
● Link to cave: our body/empirical/earthly/material environment is cave
○ Our soul will return to another realm, and come back in a different bodily form
○ Plato: immortality, continuity: no beginning, all circular
○ Recollection is through intellectual meditation
Lecture 2: The Erosion of the Classical Deductive Style
● Aristotle: two kinds of knowledge
○ Scientific knowledge deductively derived from first principles
○ First principles: grasped by observations leading to abstraction through intuition (nous/soul)
○ nous/soul and cosmos
● Intuition gives us a direct access to reality outside the world we observe
○ For very few of us (elites)
○ In principle, we all have it but most of us haven’t activated it
● Discontinuity between Greek and Roman culture and our culture
○ The “West” started anew in the 12th century
○ Rebirth of Western civilization
○ Spain: place of exchange, translation from Greek to Arabic
■ Muslim translations of Aristotle and Plato, given to universities
○ Clash between Greek legacy and Christian thought
■ Universities (schools of the church) and bishop
■ Outcome of science: abandonment of Plato/Aristotle was beneficial
● What wasn’t taught of Aristotle at the university?
○ World is eternal (both Plato and Aristotle)
■ Plato’s Demiurge wasn’t a specific moment at time, so doesn’t count as the creation of
the world in religious terms
○ God can’t have created other worlds
■ Our world is the necessary outcome coming from the first beginning in logical time.
Opposed by the bishop because God is almighty and if he wished, he could have created
other worlds
● Christian principle: God almighty, God’s will
○ What pleases the sovereign has force of law
○ Necessity replaced by law
■ No necessity unless Aristotle/Platonic philosophy
○ The world is contingent: it could have been otherwise (Islam, Jews, Christians)
■ For Aristotle, this was because we didn’t understand it enough if we did, contingency
wouldn’t exist
● Al-Ghazali (11th c.): declining causal necessity, it is God’s wish
● Maimonides (12th c.): emphasis on the will of God regarding the design of universe
● Ockham’s Razor: problems
○ Pick the simplest explanation that you can possibly pick
○ Created because: no guarantee that world is made simple, incredibly complex mechanisms aren’t
for us, as human we should take simple explanations
○ God’s terms: inexplicable, we can’t really understand nature
○ We have finite minds, and we can’t find Aristotle’s or Plato’s intuition in our minds. We don’t
have a direct line between our own intellect and ohw the world is structured
■ Knowing God’s will isn’t by inspecting our own minds
, ■ We should study Bible, book of nature
● Greek mathematics: geometry (proceeds by proofs)
● But algebra comes from arithmetic: “counting,” description, no proof (Arabs, Christians)
○ Algebra as a tool to describe nature (for Greek: it is for marketplace, not very high)
● Because the world is inaccessible to us, we can’t explain it by God-like principles so we should explain the
unknown by the known
○ Beginning of mechanism: understanding the world as a machine
○ Understanding the world mechanically is saying that world is a machine: known to us, something
that we made, so we can understand
○ We don’t know if God created the world as a machine, so applying the idea of a machine to nature
is our machine, not God’s
■ Product of our own minds, understanding the world in our own terms
● Scientific lessons taken from the voluntaristic view of nature:
○ No access to real first principles, so we should research nature through experience, observation,
and we should apply our own making to the world
○ We can do this because there is room for speculation
■ Applying speculations regarding other worlds to our own world
■ God could have created multiple worlds
● Aristotle vs. Scholasticism (voluntarism)
○ God as point in space, in our world vs. transcendent, beyond our limits
○ God is the first principle (unmoved mover) vs. world created voluntarily
○ World is necessarily what it is (emanate from unmoved mover) vs. contingent laws of nature
● Consequences of voluntarism:
○ God isn’t under the obligation to create a world we can understand or create a world that fits
humans perfectly
■ This gives us freedom to adapt the world to what we think is perfect for us
Tutorial 2
● Plato: optimistic view of acquiring knowledge
○ Empirical world is perfect. Thus, we need logic to explain phenomena
○ Forms: basis for explanation of reality
■ The world around us vs. the world of forms
● Plato- Timaeus:
○ Plato starts modest at the start of the dialogue because we are citizens of the material world with
imperfect faculties, so we can’t fully understand the perfect world
■ More political reason: killing of Socrates
○ Reality exists on two levels: constant changing/senses and underlying set of concepts
○ All particles of four elements are in cosmos and they move, but cosmos itself is unchangeable
■ Four elements are assigned to a particular geometrical form by Plato
■ All elements in the sensible world are made up of these four elements
○ Task of creating human beings:
■ Material objects are imperfect versions of perfect forms
■ Leftover ingredients are mixed (not pure as before), assign each soul a star
● Leftover soul of the universe is divided to small pieces of soul assigned to each
star, these souls are our souls
■ The imperfection of such soul explains why we don’t know everything about the universe
● But the fact that we have a soul is why we know some
○ Earth is perfectly created by divine powers
■ It is receptacle: not a thing but a place, shapeless, with pure potential
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