we know further that we must have had evidence for them, and yet we do not know how we know them, i.e., we do not know what the evidence was. If there is any ‘we’, and if we know that there is, this must be so: for that there is a ‘we’, is one of the things in question. And that I do know that there is a ‘we’, that is to say, that many other human beings, with human bodies, have lived upon the earth, it seems to me that I do know, for certain.
If this first point in my philosophical position, namely my belief in (2), is to be given any name, which has actually been used by philosophers in classifying the positions of other philosophers, it would have, I think, to be expressed by saying that I am one of those philosophers who have held that the ‘Common Sense view of the world’ is, in certain fundamental features, wholly true. But it must be remembered that, according to me, all philosophers, without exception, have agreed with me in holding this: and that the real difference, which is commonly expressed in this way, is only a difference between those philosophers, who have also held views inconsistent with these features in ‘the Common Sense view of the world’, and those who have not.
The features in question (namely, propositions of any of the classes defined in defining (2)) are all of them features, which have this peculiar property – namely, that if we know that they are features in the ‘Common Sense view of the world’, it follows that they are true: it is self-contradictory to maintain that we know them to be features in the Common Sense view, and that yet they are not true; since to say that we know this, is to say that they are true. And many of them also have the further peculiar property that, if they are features in the Common Sense view of the world (whether we know this or not), it follows that they are true, since to say that there is a ‘Common Sense view of the world’ is to say that they are true. The phrases ‘Common Sense view of the world’ or ‘Common Sense beliefs’ (as used by philosophers) are, of course, extraordinarily vague; and, for all I know, there may be many propositions which may be properly called features in ‘the Common Sense view of the world’ or ‘Common Sense beliefs’, which are not true, and which deserve to be mentioned with the contempt with which some philosophers speak of ‘Common Sense beliefs’. But to speak with contempt of those ‘Common Sense beliefs’ which I have mentioned is quite certainly the height of absurdity. And there are, of course, enormous numbers of other features in the Common Sense view of the world which, if these are true, are quite certainly true too: e.g., that there have lived upon the surface of the earth not only human beings, but also many different species of plants and animals, etc., etc.
Specimen Questions
1 Why did G. E. Moore maintain there are a large number of basic truisms which we simply know, and which it is absurd to doubt? Was he correct?
2 What is the ‘Common Sense’ view of the world, according to Moore?
3 Moore argues that there is a difference between knowing what an expression commonly means in its ordinary use, and being able to give a correct analysis of its meaning. What is the point he is making here?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 G. E. Moore, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ [1925], in G. H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy, 2nd series (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925). Reprinted with other important essays in G. E. Moore, Selected Writings, ed. T. Baldwin (London: Routledge, 1993).
2 A valuable critical study of Moore is T. Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990).
3 See also B. Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969); A. Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
4 For a clear overview of Moore’s central ideas see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/ (by T. Baldwin), and also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/moore/ (by A. Preston).
5 For a short podcast on Moore’s proposal on how to combat external world scepticism see P. Millican’s Oxford lecture at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/42-possible-answers-external-world-scepticism (2010).
6 You can also listen to T. Baldwin’s podcast lecture on ‘G. E. Moore and Cambridge Philosophy’ by going to https://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/16321.
Notes
* G. E. Moore, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ [1925], extracts from Part I. First published in Contemporary British Philosophy, 2nd series, ed. G. H. Muirhead (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925); repr. In G. E. Moore, Selected Writings, ed. T. Baldwin (London: Routledge, 1993).
1 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty [Über Gewissheit] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), §§ 94, 105, 151.
12 Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation? Wilfrid Sellars, The Myth of the Given*
The final extract in our survey of accounts of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition takes us back to the problem of the foundations of knowledge, a problem that had figured prominently in the thought of René Descartes in the seventeenth century (see extract 4, above). In a highly influential paper the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars takes as his target the idea that all our knowledge must be derived or inferred from certain basic authoritative statements, knowledge of which is ‘non-inferential’ – that is, these statements are not themselves inferred from any other statements. As paradigms of such supposedly authoritative statements Sellars instances, on the one hand, basic analytic statements such as ‘two plus two makes four’, and, on the other hand, simple reports of immediate sensory experience, for example ‘this is red’. (This follows a long tradition concerning the two fundamental types of proposition on which all our knowledge is supposed to be based; compare for example David Hume, Part II, extract 7, below).
Knowledge, on the model Sellars is about to attack, is like a complex edifice whose whole weight rests ultimately on its foundations. In the case of empirical knowledge, what supposedly makes the foundations secure is that, at the level of basic sensory experience, I am confronted with a datum (e.g. an impression of redness) that directly validates my speech-act when I declare ‘this is red’. As Sellars puts it, ‘one is committed to a stratum of authoritative nonverbal episodes (“awareness”) the authority of which accrues to a superstructure of verbal actions, provided that the expressions occurring in these actions are properly used. These self-authenticating episodes would constitute the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edifice of empirical knowledge …’ .
It looks deceptively simple: when I see the red apple, there is an experiential datum – a ‘given’, and it is this that confers authority on my statement ‘this is red’.1 But Sellars acutely argues that under scrutiny this idea – the ‘myth of the given’ as he calls it – turns out to be highly problematic. For the correctness of my judgement about this apple’s being red depends on a whole network of complex linguistic rules about the standard conditions for the appropriate use of the predicate ‘red’ (roughly, something counts as red only if it would be called ‘red’ by a normal English-speaking observer in normal light). So the picture of what is ‘given’ somehow validating my knowledge in isolation must be wrong. It is, Sellars argues, ‘a matter of simple logic, that
