Assignment:
1.7 EXERCISES (4, 5, 7, 10, 16)
Consider each of the following arguments and restate them, in the simplest terms you can, giving the premises and conclusion of each. The goal, in each case, is to try to get at the argument the author is making by restating the premises and conclusion as clearly as possible. This is a common practice in philosophical investigation, but it is also a common practice whenever one is trying to be clear about another's efforts to present and support a conclusion. The following arguments are diverse in their points and approaches, but each is an effort to bring a reader to believe a particular conclusion.
4. "A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise-and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree, lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and the old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections." (Ralph Waldo Emerson [in Harris et al., 2002, 49], from the essay Nature, published in 1836.)
5. "So the human brain has grown, by normal use and exercise, in the male; and been stunted, denied normal use and exercise in the female; and the more normal brain has been injured by the unavoidable contact with the less normal, and the race-brain-the common inheritance of us all-has been steadily robbed and weakened by the injury to the mother-half.... The one bald fact that women have been kept shut up, confined to the house, in varying degrees of imprisonment, while men have been free to move, both locally and abroad, is enough to explain most of that ‘subtle, baffling, wonderful' difference.
If men had been arbitrarily divided into two classes; if half had been given the range of all trades, crafts, arts and sciences, all education, all experience, and achievement, and the other half shut up at home, never allowed out alone, and taken under escort to only a small part of life's attractions;confined exclusively to a few primitive industries; denied education as well as experience, we would find mysterious, subtle and baffling differences between the two classes." (Charlotte Perkins Gilman [Harris et al., 2002, 131], from Our Brains and What Ails Them, published in 1912.)
7. "The reason the white man and Indian see two different orders of reality while gazing out over the same piece of land stems from a theory of knowledge about land which, in turn, rests on certain metaphysical presuppositions as to what land is and in what way it is. These different orders of perceived reality, in turn, give rise to two different experiences. The white man would say ‘There is nothing here.' The Indian would say ‘Everything is here.
It seems there is absolutely no agreement on what is ‘here' even though both see the same phenomena. To the white man untilled land, an absence of towns or houses, is ‘empty.' As nature abhors a vacuum, the white man abhors what he perceives as an empty void and hastens to ‘fill it up' with fields, houses, barns, towns, and people.
The vast emptiness of what was called the ‘great American Desert' was strangely unsettling to the white pioneers. It was unbroken, rolling grassland stretching to the Rockies, and over this endless expanse blew a constant wind, at times softly but more often a shrieking wind, howling about the solitary cabins and farmhouses on the prairie. Stories are legion about settlers' wives going insane from a combination of space-drunkenness and howling winds.... The Indian, on the other hand, perceives the land as a bountiful mother who provides everything he needs.
The prairie is not an empty void between the Mississippi and the Rockies but is ‘full' with every variety of living being, plants, animals, and people. Everything is there for the taking, it does not have to be tilled or worked or coaxed to provide for its children." (Robert Bunge, 1984, from his book, An American Urphilosophie: An American Philosophy, BP (Before Pragmatism).)
10. "Truth [from a relativist position] is something like ‘truth for me.' Call this simple relativism. Here's why simple relativism is so simple to refute. Suppose I am such a relativist and announce that there is no such thing as truth per se, there is only truth-for-me or truth-for-you. A fair question to ask would be whether the statement I just made is true or just true-for-me.
If I say that relativism is simply true, then I have apparently contradicted myself. For if relativism is true (for everyone, as it were) then it is false-it is not true that all truth is relative. On the other hand, if I go the other way and say that relativism is only true relative to me, I am consistent but unable to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with me. You need only remark that relativism, then, is either contradictory or terminally unconvincing." (Michael P. Lynch, 2004, in True to Life: Why Truth Matters.)
16. "In sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true. It follows that in making manifest the large features of our language, we make manifest the large features of reality. One way of pursuing metaphysics is therefore to study the general structure of our language.
This is not, of course, the sole true method of metaphysics; there is no such. But it is one method, and it has been practiced by philosophers as widely separated in time or doctrine as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, and Strawson. These philosophers have not, it goes without saying, agreed on what the large features of language are or on how they may best be studied and described: the metaphysical conclusions have in consequence been various." (Donald Davidson, 2001, 199, in his essay, "The Method of Truth in Metaphysics.")