Buh, Wha...Huh?
For your enlightenment and enjoyment, I present some excerpts from one of my epistemology textbooks:
"Before I proceed, I should make it clear that it is not Foley's view that a condition of its being rational for some person to adopt some plan for achieving some goal is that the person actually have the belief that that plan is sufficiently likely to be successful."And those are two of the most comprehensible sentences I have come across in said book.
"My own view, which here I can only state and not develop, is that what brings it about that a person is not entitled to some feature of his belief- or knowledge-system is that either: (i) there is some practice of discovery or retention that he failed to employ but ought to have employed with a seriousness and competence such that, had he done so, the presence of that feature would have been forestalled or eliminated; or (ii) there is some practice of discovery or retention that he employed with a certain seriousness and competence but ought not to have (thus) employed, and which is such that, had he not employed it thus, the presence of that feature would have been forestalled or eliminated."
Apparently, all the nice rules about clear and meaningful writing no longer apply when one is a well-known and highly-published philosopher. Or perhaps such rules must be disregarded if one wishes to become such a philosopher.
posted by Martinez at 7:17 PM
4 Comments:
My rough translations:
"Before moving on, I should note that Foley believes it can be rational to adopt a plan even if one does not actually believe the plan will work."
And
"Personally, I think a person should drop any given portion of his belief system if (i) he failed to conduct an investigation that would have brought that belief into doubt, or (ii) he conducted an investigation inappropriately, when conducting the investigation properly would have brought the belief into doubt."
I still don't like the second bit, but I think we're getting closer to lucidity.
Yeah, those are basically the translations I came up with. It just worries me that it took me so long to come up with them.
I take comfort in my prof's assurance that such confusion is typical of first-year philosophy students. There may be hope for me yet. ;-)
Can't speak from the grad school experience myself, but the husband had few bon mots to say about it.
Claimed they weren't interested so much in the student finding answers--acquiring an increasing body of knowledge in one's area of interest--as 'learning how to ask the right questions.'
I assume one cannot generalize that approach across every post-collegiate educational discipline.
However, in today's teaching world the extra degree is mandatory. You (both) are intelligent enough to learn in spite of any less than coherent paths you may be forced to trod.
Que Dieu vous bénisse
In this case, I believe the right question is:
"If I inserted some double negatives and about five references to ponies and unicorns into these excerpts, would anyone notice?"
To be followed up by:
"If I did so, and then used them in a paper claiming to describe a new and ultimately more comprehensive philosophy of ponies and unicorns, could I then use that in a dissertation examining the roots of pony-and-unicorn philosophies in early feminist thought and paternalistic woman-as-pony and woman-as-unicorn dichotomies? More importantly, what impact would such an academically rigorous work have on My Little Pony sales in the 48 continental states of America during the first 12 months after submission to the proper journals?"
I have more, but I suspect I've already gone much, much too far.
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