In the last video, as you may recall, I took you on a thrilling rollercoaster ride of conceptual ups and downs. I raised your hopes by encouraging you to wonder at the miracle that is mathematics only to dash those hopes cruelly on the rocks of ordinary life. Math isn't like ethics. And then I ended by raising your hopes again, maybe? I should probably just talk about the boy and his geometry lesson. But I can't help thinking, you're probably in an emotionally delicate place after that rollercoaster ride. Let's talk about method. Methods for knowing things and proving things, ways of coming to think things. Then we'll get to the geometry lesson. A bit of review. Last lesson, I asked whether maybe Meno should've just opted out of Socrates's little word games. Why should he have to define virtue? Is it so implausible that he could just know what it is, without being able to define it verbally? Good point. Let's think about another drawback to Socrates's method. Above and beyond this reasonable concern that the demand for definitions may be unhelpfully stringent. What is Socrates's method, in all these dialogs? What is this thing called the Socratic method? In Greek, Socrates is employing elenchus, AKA, the elenchtic method. That's your word for the day, it just means refutation. Socrates is getting you to say stuff, until you've said enough stuff, that he can catch you in a contradiction. That is, some of the things you say end up inconsistent. He thereby proves something you're saying must be false. But just asking people questions in this way, as a way of figuring out what's what about the world, is a problematic method, even before we get to that point where we're asking people specifically for definitions. Problematic? How so? Well, put it like this. The Socratic method tests for inconsistency in our belief sets. What does inconsistency mean? I think the notion is intuitive enough. Let me give you some examples of fixed ideas. One, Socrates is a man. Two, all men are mortal. Three, Socrates is immortal. Something's gotta give, doesn't it? You can see that there's an oncsistency there. Or this. What the Gods love is holy, what they hate is unholy. The Gods love and hate different things. Nothing, is both holy and unholy. But this, virtue is a matter of getting your hands on the goods. Stealing is not virtuous. Virtue is sometimes a matter of not getting your hands on the goods. I hope you recognize that those last two sets represent argumentative dead ends, that Euthyphro and Meno can plausibility be read as running themselves into, in our dialog. This is how it goes, Socrates asks, his interlocutors answer, and soon enough Socrates has enough pieces but not all the pieces will fit. Obviously there's nothing inherently philosophical about this concept of inconsistency. Consider a very ordinary case. One, I put my keys in my purse, two, my keys aren't in my purse, three, if my keys aren't in my purse, I must have left them at home. Something's gotta give. We've all lost our keys some time or other. So we've been in these sorts of painful situations. There's nothing philosophical about it. Thus we see that Socratic elenchus is a perfectly ordinary tool for finding lost keys. And now when your parents ask you why you're wasting your time studying philosophy, you have a good answer. If I ever loov my, lose my keys I'll be able to find them. Of course, this isn't right at all. Insofar as the Socratic method is ordinary like this, you don't need to study philosophy to learn how to think like this. And insofar as the Socratic method is not ordinary, it's not clear how useful it is. You aren't going to find your keys by seeking the definition of my keys, after all. Finding your keys isn't a matter of turning your mind inside out to find a concept. Instead, you turn your bag inside out to make sure they're not stuck in some inside pocket. You proceed from seeing the problem to making some kind of empirical investigation. Conclusion, logic is all well and good but there's more to mental life than logic. Logic just helps a little bit around the edges. Let's get a bit more abstract. Socrates tests belief sets for consistency. What we want, obviously, is truth. We want true beliefs. So what's the relationship between consistency and truth? I am still trying to keep this a bit informal but we can say, a consistent set of beliefs, more generally, a set of propositions or maybe, sentences but let's just go on talking about beliefs. A consistent set of beliefs is a set of beliefs all of which could be true, together. Not are true together, could be true. Is that confusing? Consider this. Smith has a gun. Jones got shot. Smith shot Jones. I hope you immediately recognize the consistency of those three propositions. But I hope you don't think that the fact that they could all be true together, so it seems, proves that they actually must be true. Maybe someone else shot Jones. And you know what else? I made the whole story up. None of those are actually true. They're all false. No actual person was harmed in the construction of this set of propositions. But it's a consistent set. Looks like. Conclusion: knowing your beliefs are all consistent is not sufficient for knowing they are all true. It's not even sufficient for knowing that any of them are true. But what if you find an inconsistency? Don't you then know that something's false in the set? Yes, but you don't therefor know which item, or items in the set is false. And per the previous point, merely fixing the inconsistency won't necessarily fix the falsehood problem. Confused? Let me just say it again with different examples until it sticks in your brain. The follow set is, so far as I can see, consistent. Meno is virtuous. All virtuous men own slaves. Meno owns slaves. As I mentioned in the last video, the ancient Greeks regarded it as quite normal and appropriate to own slaves, Meno owned slaves. I'll bet, Meno believes all of those statements. Of course, you don't buy two, I don't buy two, slavery's wrong. And one isn't looking so good either. But that doesn't prevent two and one from nestling in a consistent set. Sure, maybe what I need to do is just give Meno enough rope to hang himself. That is, let him keep talking, until he says something else that's inconsistent. I think you can see how that might quite easily work. And Meno is a fairly, he's a reliable dummy. As we've seen from the dialogue. But is an inconsistency guaranteed to emerge? And suppose we do draw out an inconsistency, what then? Take a Euthyphro-type case this time. 1, It's wrong for a son to prosecute his own father. 2, You should always prosecute a murdered, no matter who it is. 3, Dad murdered a guy. This is enough to make a fairly obvious inconsistency by infliction. Surely, it can't be that you both should and should not prosecute dad. Something's gotta give. At least in practice. But once you've seen that, how can the Socratic method take you any further? Presumably, one or two needs to be given up, or at least qualified. But which? Which belief are you going to vote off the island of your mind after each round in the Socratic game of epistemic survivor? Well, the false one. But, all the Socratic method tells you is that, at least one is false. Not which one is false. Oh, and by the way. You know, which one is probably going to get voted off, three. Faced one through three, mostly normal people will deny three. Dad couldn't possibly be a murderer. How logical is that? Well, not very logical. How is logic going to clear up that form of, dad favoring bias? You know who doesn't have to worry about this sort of problem? Geometers, that's who. Oh, don't get me wrong. Geometry is full of contradictions. That is, it's full of proofs by contradiction. In effect. But you always know what to give up. Namely, the one thing that's not certain. The thing that can't be traced back to some self evident axiom or postulate that you've previously accepted. Give that other thing up. Now, wouldn't it be great if we had something like Euclidean axioms. Self evident postulates where other subjects are concerned. Hey, maybe that's what Socrates is after, with all this geometry stuff in the middle of the Meno. Is Socrates looking to geometry to give him touchstones of truth, like Euclidean axioms. So the Socratic method can go from being a negative method. For making people look like idiots in front of their friends and making you unpopular, to being a positive method for churning out true and potentially surprising theorems about ethics. So people can settle all their disputes about all that stuff once and for all time. File that thought away for later reference. For now, let's close out this video, but some preliminary thoughts about why this isn't likely to work? If that is what Socrates is up to. We've already touched on this. We seem to have lots of ways of knowing things, and they don't all seem very much like geometry. But let me tell you a story to sort of focus our thinking a little bit. As you may have noticed, I tend to tell people to go off and read Wikipedia, if they want to know stuff about stuff. Now, occasionally, this has bothered some of my colleagues, in fact, sometimes they look at me like I just told my students to go out and lick the sidewalk. Wikipedia? You don't know where that stuff has been! You don't know who wrote it, experts or just some guy. We're scholars. The whole point of having scholars, a university, is to solve for that whole, some dude said it, so I believe it. That problem. True fact: my 12-year-old daughter told me she's not allowed to quote Wikipedia when she writes her report for her seventh-grade humanities class. She's supposed to go to the library and check out a more reliable source. That's funny. My daughter is too smart for Wikipedia, and here I am, full-fledged professor, saying things like, eh, go read Wikipedia if you want to know who Alcibiades was. So what gives? Am I just an epistemic slop? Am I a traitor to philosophy? Okay, Wikipedia is a complicated topic and I don't wan't all of my videos to run long. So let me be a bit brief about it. Of course, it's important to teach kids to be critical about their sources. They have to learn it's not true just because Wikipedia says so. These articles can contain errors. Of course, so may that book from the library. But being forced not to take the first thing you can reach, Wikipedia, so easy. Being forced not to take that first thing is educational, and having been forced to go get a book, it will be easier for my daughter to think, maybe this book isn't right. I'll go get another book. Wikipedia is kind of like having your very own Gorgious. It makes it easy to have a plausible answer to everything. So easy in fact, you kind of have to force yourself to find anything better. But what am I saying, wikipedia is awesome. Even if it's just 95% right. Hell, having 95% true beliefs about alsebities in two minutes flat, it's a great deal And it sure saves trudging to the library, to check out this book, which is absolutely 100% reliable. Why the hell do you need beliefs about Alcibiades that are more than 95% right anyway? Wikipedia. It's quick and dirty. But we're only human. We're a quick and dirty species. Which gets me back to that point where some of my colleagues look at me like I just told my students to go out and lick the sidewalk. They've got a pedagogical point like I just said. But their viscerally negative reactions to Wikipedia go a bit beyond that, at least sometimes. What disturbs some people is how Wikipedia works, not that it doesn't work, because it does work pretty well. I mean, seriously, it does. And yet, and yet knowledge should be based on a foundation of certainty. In a human sense, it should be based on expertise. How can you let any joker wander in and edit any page? Okay. Here are the problems that the critique is just verging on sheer wrongness. Wikipedia is a complex social system with a highly developed, highly evolved set of social norms and an elaborate hierarchy of contributors. It's not just some graffiti wall anyone can spray paint any way they like. This isn't a class about Wikipedia. This is a class about life, about the life of the mind and you know what the mind is like? It's like Wikipedia. That's what. My colleagues, who distrust Wikipedia. To them, I say, you distrust the life of the mind. Mental life isn't like Euclid's elements. It's not built on an foundation. What's it built on? Well, first you were a baby. You don't remember that, but take my word for it, you were. And stuff happened, and you took it in. And ever since, it's been more of the same. People tell you stuff, your parents, your friends, your teachers, some guy on the street. A lot of those people aren't experts. I'm sorry to speak ill of your family, but it's true. Some of them are idiots probably, and far from having a Euclid style proof for much of any of this. You don't even have a talk page for your brain like every Wikipedia entry has. Stuff ends up in your head, Zeus knows where most of it came from, you can't check it. For damn sure a lot of it is wrong. Thus, if you are not going to trust Wikipedia about Alcibiades, why should you trust yourself about your friends? Much less trust your friends about what they said about that other guy that one time. But you are going to trust your friends, so you might as well trust Wikipedia. Just go with the flow, man. Just hope people aren't filling your head with too much garbage. And you know what, it seems to work out okay. We humans are pretty smart, in our dumb way. Just believing what they say all the time. Our not reason about much strategy has kept us alive this long, hasn't it? Maybe we're trapped in a cave. But then if we are, maybe we should stay here. We seem to have evolved social strategies from making our way from such an environment. Of course, tomorrow's a new days. It could all come crashing down. But, what's the alternative to taking that chance, I mean, realistically? It's all by way of asking. Just how useful is this Socratic method stuff? And for what? Quiz time. Just how useful is the Socratic method stuff? A, not useful at all. B, sort of useful around the edges, but it's not really going to change my life. C, it is the most useful method in the world, it makes me see everything differently. It reveals new and strange truths about the most basic concepts. What's the answer? Well, I just hope you answered honestly, because what would be the point of lying to yourself, or me, about what you really think.
