Philosophy's Job: Critique Assumptions

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Philosophy’s Job: Critique Assumptions

While studying philosophy thirty five years ago I asked my professor “what is philosophy about?” He said to me “philosophy is radically critical self-consciousness”. Today I think I now know what he meant.

First I will change his wording but not his meaning. Philosophy “is a self-conscious and radically self-critical form of enquiry”.

All forms of enquiry are based upon some assumptions. Such assumptions as the world is orderly and can be comprehended by reason, the world operates by laws and is causally connected and can be measured; theology assumes the existence of God and the veracity of the Word.

Philosophers contend that the assumptions of an enquiry make that enquiry limited and distorted by those assumptions. These assumptions lead the enquiry to abstract certain aspects of the world and ignore others; an example in the natural sciences is that natural scientists ignore quality and focus on the quantifiable.

Philosophers argue that unlike other sciences (domains of knowledge) philosophy is radically critical and is self-conscious; it constantly criticizes its own assumptions. The examination of fundamental assumptions has been traditionally a distinctive preoccupation of the philosophical form of criticism. As an example, natural scientists are unable [b]qua]/b] (in the capacity as) natural scientists to examine their own assumptions. This leads to the mistaken hubris that the natural sciences can serve as a model for other domains of knowledge.

Philosophy does not rest on unexamined assumptions; this means that while other sciences (domains of knowledge) are narrowly focused; philosophy is broadly focused and views the world as a gestalt, as a whole. Philosophy contends that its knowledge is not abstract but is concrete. Its knowledge is categorical.

While philosophers disagree on many things they seem to agree that 1) assumptions distort a domain of knowledge 2) non philosophical enquiries tend to advance claims that are universal and illegitimate. As a result the best way to counter this tendency is for philosophy to draw lines of demarcation of the general field of knowledge. Philosophy draws the boundaries between prevailing forms of inquiry.

To critique assumptions is a dirty job but someone must do it! Do you agree?

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I think that any judgment and study practiced by one man upon the other – if tainted by morality – becomes more deconstructive then constructive.

Morality has within it the “right and wrong”.
Morality always starts with deconstruction of the first, then addition of “what was meant to be”.

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I think that critiquing assumptions is a means to an end in philosophy, but not the end itself. Assumptions are unstated beliefs that we often presuppose without even being aware of them, and as such philsophy has a job to do with respect to clarifying and cleaning up our assumptions. But “cleaning up” our assumptions is done in two ways: we try to make sure that they are consistent with the rest of our beliefs, and we try to make sure that they are correct. It is the latter task that makes the job of philosophy more expansive than the critique of assmuptions. If philosophy were simply about critiquing assumptions, philosophy would be about our stated and unstated beliefs – period. But philosophy, as traditionally conceived, is not about our beliefs only, but about the world. The task of philosophy is about trying to understand the world. It differs from science in this quest because it searches for ultimate explanations (science, after all, stops asking questions at a certain point – beyond this, in all directions, is the philosopher’s domain). So the critique of assmuptions, in my view, is an important part of philosophy, but it is not the whole of philosophy.

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dejardi says–“So the critique of assmuptions, in my view, is an important part of philosophy, but it is not the whole of philosophy.”

Amen Brother --right on the mark.

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cool… so you think you will come to a point where you stop questioning assumptions and adopt a few as “truth?”

the religious do this all the time…

of course they don’t have “truth”… they have assumptions masquerading as “truth”…

the question becomes: is it wiser to assume and knowingly mislabel the assumption or is it wiser to remain ignorant?

-Imp

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Playing the role of drift, he would write.
“Do you be concern with what you eat or dress, but what comes out of your mouth is important, this may harm you for eternality” , thus said the Lord.

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I could respond to this in three ways. First, your response certainly implies that you have stopped questioning the need to question assumptions, so I think it follows that you have concluded that the need for questioning assumptions in philosophy is a “truth.” So in this sense your response is self refuting. Second, when we question assumptions, we ostensibly do so to reject some, accept others, and polish up the rest. We do this for a number of reasons, e.g. to see if they cohere with the rest of our beliefs (in total or in any specific area), or to see if they are warranted, given whatever evidence we have. In other words, we question assumptions for a reason. But if we question assumptions for a reason, it follows that even the whole notion of “questioning assumptions” is itself premised upon a number of assumptions. Therefore, if, as your post suggests, we are never to stop questioning assumptions, it follows that there are some assumptions we can not question, i.e. the assumptions that undergird the notion of “questioning assumptions.” So again your post is self refuting. The larger point is that we all arrive at conclusions that we have – for whatever reason – labeled “true,” whether they are in fact true or not. We may only hold them so for a moment, but anytime we think we hold them. They may change each time we think, but they are still there each time. One way we go about evaluating the truth of these ideas is to question their assumptions. And this brings me to my final point. If we question assumptions for a reason, it seems to me that the reason is to find out which ones are closest to the truth (whatever it is). If we want our assumptions to cohere, it’s because we don’t think that truth can be contradictory. If we want to discover which assumptions are warranted, it’s because we think that some are closer to the truth than others. So even the act (as opposed to the concept, which I discussed above in this post) of questioning assumptions presupposes some notion of general truth. Again, in this way, your post is self refuting.

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you can say it is self refuting until you are blue in the face. it is not.

welcome to the boards

-Imp

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I think philosophy is nihilism applied in small doses to dogma.

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I had to repost this to make my point. You cannot plausibly argue that the above quote doesn’t imply that questioning assumptions is necessary. You place the word truth in scare quotes, and you compare those who stop at a point they call true with the religious, whom you are evidently certain (another contradiction?) don’t possess truth. You may call yourself a radical skeptic (is this true?), and claim that you question everything (are you sure that you question everything?), and this may be true, but it certainly cannot be said that the above quote doesn’t imply that we must question assumptions (as a radical skeptic, can you be certain that the above post doesn’t imply this?). And if we must question assumptions, as the post implies, my argument follows.

I find it interesting, given your radical skepticism, that you permit yourself to use the term “error.” To say that Descartes made an error, you are necessarily saying that you know certain things to be the case, viz. whatever it is that leads you to conclude that Descartes was wrong. If you don’t know these things, you cannot reach the conclusion that Descartes was wrong. You are contradicting yourself, as a radical skeptic, as soon as you utter the word “error.”

I could respond to every other comment you made, but I don’t think it’s necessary. In each of them, it is incontrovertible that you presuppose that you know certain things (that I am wrong, that “truth is beyond language,” that trying to justify assumptions is “playing a logic game which gets you nothing outside the logic game,” that “grammar assumes truth,” etc.). In so far as this is the case, I must repeat my conclusion (though my face is not yet bule): you are refuting yourself at every turn.

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alas, I do nothing of the sort.

-Imp

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I’ll try another approach to get my point across. I’ll focus on one thing to make it as clear and as simple (I don’t mean this pejoratively) as possible.
Here’s what I’ll focus on, and I’ll try to show how the problem here is a token of the problem with your entire approach.

I’m not even going to focus on the obvious contradiction you make in asserting “there is no knowable truth…and no knowledge for that matter,” the obvious contradiction being (obviously) that you are claiming, by saying “there is no knowable truth,” that you know that there is no knowable truth. I know, you’ll respond by saying, “I never said ‘I know,’ I just said ‘there is no knowable truth’.” But again, as ineffective as this response would be, I’m not going to focus on it, but on somnething else.

You say that you are a radical skeptic, and you suggest that being a radical skeptic entails a rejection of the notion that truth is knowable, and that there even is a truth. Here’s the problem with that. First, do you know that you are a radical skeptic? If you do, then it’s both true that you are a radical skeptic, and that you know it. So radical skepticism is refuted by your recognizing that you are a skeptic, and by your knowing what skepticism is. If you do not know that you are a skeptic, or what skepticism is, then you have two problems. First, your remarks should not be taken seriously, since they invite contradiction. Once you allow contradictions to obtain, then anything follows from anything, and whatever you say must be dismissed as either nonsense or as a disconnected string of ideas. Second, you cannot say, “I am a radical
skeptic,” but something along the lines of, “I think I am a radical skeptic, and that I know what skepticism is, but I may be wrong.” But this will not get you very far. Because then I could reply, “Do you know that you think that you are a radical skeptic?” To which you would reply, “I think that I think that I am a radical skeptic,” and so on. In the end you would be reduced to repeating, for as long as I keep asking the question, “I think that I think that I think that I think that I think…” The ancients called this “the reduction to babbling.” Ultimately, the radical skeptic can only be consistent if he, like Cratylus, stops talking altogether.

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consistency is for analytics…

-Imp

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The original post fits well with my definition of philosophy, the application of critical analysis toward universal consistency and soundness.

Skeptics suffer a version of the liar’s paradox, just like nihilists and subjectivists do. Roger Scruton summarized it best, if I accurately recall.

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in this regard ignorance is also honesty. I think being honest in understanding the world will give you more chanes of surviving in it, not just physically . . . but maybe emotionally and spiritually as well.

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It seems to be the obvious answer. I agree with sirswedishmike. When we confuse our assumptions with truth we are making it that much harder for us to obtain truth. We cannot help but have assumptions of the way the world works, but we would do well to remind ourselves that they are not truths.

It seems to me that we “remain ignorant” when we label our assumptions truth. But if we are aware of our own ignorance can we not then work towards truth?

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I don’t believe philosophy’s job is limited. Maybe this is an old view that some will consider outdated, but I think philosophers should comment on everything as they have for thousands of years now. Or at least give me some Creative Views.

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The philosopher’s job is unlimited in the sense that philosophy must always question the foundations of human assumption, but also very limited because maybe that’s all we can do, question.

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I do not want to imply that critical examination is THE job of philosophy I wish only to say tha it is A job of philosophy.

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Pilosophy…Assumes ignorance in most cases, as we can never be certain of how and what we know… Other sciences fail in this regard and this may be /result in ignorance.

Einstein has been quoted as saying something along the lines of …I do not know what the third world war will be fought with, but the one after will be fought using sticks and stones (ignorance).

However,I choose to believe that ignorance in itself is not pure. Just as madness, in most cases, is seen to be an imperfection. I take this to be a “truth” and I promote and will continue to promote the advancement of the health Sciences.

Philosophy on the other hand seems to be broad based and continues to give birth to new discplines.