Teacher's Guide - Class Planning Guide

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The Contract
Part 1 - [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] | Part 2 - [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] | Part 3 - [12[13] [14] [15]

The pedagogical aim of this chapter is to get students to take the rationalist project seriously, at the same time as seeing its problems. The student should leave the chapter realizing that reasoning plays a very large role in forming our beliefs, while seeing that it is doubtful that reasoning alone can give certain knowledge of very much. A more specific focus is Descartes' project in the Meditations, including Cartesian doubt, the cogito, and the ambition of using the certainty of one's own existence as a foundation for other beliefs.

Chapter 3 - Comments on Sections

3.1 This is an expositional section, to be read in advance of class. The quotation from Wollstonecraft is fairly hard though, and it would be a good idea to see that the class does understand how the little précis I give just after the quote relates to what she actually says. I included the quote because it makes an important connection between optimism about the ability of a single person to think for herself and the courage to think that one can find ways in which the customs and moral ideas of one's society may be less than perfect.

3.2 This section is meant to work through some issues raised in 3.1, especially those raised in the Wollstonecroft quote. It is intended to raise doubts about the ability of an isolated individual, however intelligent, to perform a thorough and profitable questioning of many of her culture's beliefs. It is not inevitable, though, that this is the direction the class will go. The way to get a discussion going is to do the first of the two activities of the section and to consider the scores produced. If they suggest that the class thinks that an individual by herself can think out how her culture is wrong, try asking "but Morton is clearly hinting the opposite, what reasons do you think he might have?" Also focus on the particular case of the status of women and ask why many very intelligent women in traditional cultures have not questioned their roles. If the scores suggest that the class is pessimistic about the prospects for an isolated rebel, use the list (a)-(c) in the second activity to elicit ways in which some topics may be more amenable to radical rationalism than others.

What role is the assumption that the person is very intelligent playing? Is there a trade-off between intelligence and the need to rely on the opinions of those around one?

3.3 Galileo is not on the standard list of great philosophers, but I take him as providing the background to Descartes, via considerations about physics that are more accessible than Descartes' own physics. My hope is that reflecting on Galileo's thought experiments will make a case that one can at least exclude apparent factual possibilities by sufficiently rigorous, ideally mathematical, thinking about what they would involve. For all that, the section can be skipped if there is not enough time.

3.4 This is an activity directed at the issues in 3.1. It should not be difficult to get a class to be explicit on the problems of the five theories. Then you have a chance to get a discussion going on how much help this would be in a scientific or philosophical enterprise. How near to the truth about - space-matter-energy, whether you are the only thinking being in the world, numbers - can we get by excluding theories that have no hope of being true? How much nearer to narrowing the list of possibilities down to one could we get on some of these topics than others? You might raise the radical Cartesian suggestion that if we were only good enough mathematicians we wouldn't need to do experiments in science.

(5) is of course a Russell-type paradox. You may have to explicitly derive the conclusion that the judge of the Outsiders both is and is not an Outsider. You may then have to prompt them a bit to get them to see that this means that the description of Russellia cannot be right.

3.5 The most essential thing for the student to understand here is the use of a Demon possibility to undermine the reasons for believing something, and the difference between this and the basic boring skepticism that just pokes holes in our grounds for belief one by one. It is important that the students understand that in order for Descartes' technique to work he does not have to convince you that deceiving spirits - or whatever, see 3.7 - are real, or even likely, but that you don't have evidence to show that they are not real.

3.6 This activity makes a basic important point about the limited force of the basic skeptical argument - especially when combined with 3.8, and in fact they could well be done together. It is based on a logical point that can be hard to grasp though. See the second to last paragraph of the note for 2.7.

3.7 It is important to work through this activity. (If you are working through 3.8 then you could consider skipping it.) Students should be able to produce their own fantasies of extreme delusion. Everyone has theirs. You should discuss which ones undermine which bodies of everyday belief.

3.8 This would work best if most people in the class have seen The Matrix, preferably not too long before. You might arrange a special out-of-class screening, if you have a video-equipped room handy. It is really only the first 45 minutes and, to a smaller extent, the very end, that is relevant. (But the whole film is so much fun; why break it?) Students should have no shortage of reactions to the film, and should have no difficulty seeing the connection with the idea of a Cartesian deceiver or a brain in a vat. Reflection on what the film is actually depicting may produce a shock, however: given the film's central premise, most of the action is illusory. So the fights, for example, never really take place. They must be depictions of the experience of characters in the film, though usually shown from a neutral perspective. (Are there other interpretations?) You should gently press the question of what is supposed to be real in the film until the point becomes clear. Some students' reactions may amount to an interesting "Kantian" line that sufficiently coherent experience is of something real, even if it is ultimately produced by factors quite different from the causes supposed in everyday life. (Bertrand Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, makes the point that - to paraphrase - if physics is right then the real causes of our experience are so different from what common sense supposes that it is almost as if we were brains in vats.) Some students may combine the film and this section of the course to suppose that skeptical philosophy is trying to persuade them that they are in fact victims of a global deception. You should be clear that the aim is subtler than this. (But note the Russell point: there might be scientific reasons for thinking that there is something deceptive about much experience. Thought experiments won't show this, though.)

The first set of questions is meant simply to make sure that the students do see how the assumptions of the film work. You can begin them and break off when it becomes clear that they are clear on the issue. The second set of questions is more important. There are various ways of answering them; it is not to be assumed that when you probe hard enough the film doesn't work. Of course, you should let the discussion go in any philosophically relevant direction it wants, having started with any of these questions. The third set of questions is less focused; you can't count on starting a discussion with them. They are there partly to stimulate students who read them, and also so that if the discussion takes a course that seems to connect with these thoughts you can ask the students if this is a statement of what they had in mind. (And the answer may be: no, what I wanted to say is different in these ways . . .)

Other films that could serve the same purpose in the course are The Truman Show and, though it is less to the point, Pleasantville.

3.9 This nonessential section should be thought-provoking and sustain a discussion. The suggestion it invites the reader to consider is that to get a demon possibility that undermines a large body of beliefs without also making some other beliefs more certain we have to use very artificial - weird, crazy, metaphysical - demon possibilities in the direction of brains in vats and deceiving spirits (even further in those directions, perhaps). And the intelligibility of these possibilities is not obvious: they may just not make sense. What demon possibilities can you come up with that get around the worry expressed here, and how much sense do they make?

3.10 This section is not only not essential to the main thread of the chapter or the book, it is longer and harder than average. But it will be of interest to students who have come to philosophy through religion, or for whom the course so far has touched a vein of religious doubt. It encourages the students to see that there are different ways of combining a skeptical attitude with religious belief or disbelief. If you assign this section as reading, you should allow class time to discuss it. Then you should, by using the graph the text suggests filling in or otherwise, get the class to compare the appeal of the different positions described. Make sure they grasp fideism, which suggests that while skepticism is not a friend of dogmatism it is a friend of faith. What is the faith that this suggests. Is it an optional business, in that equally rational people could follow it or not follow it? Could a skeptic suggest that it was an illusion? What should the attitude of someone who has faith be to someone who does not (on each of these positions)?

Early in the section Protagoras' relativism is mentioned. I have cut from the second edition Plato's objection that the position is self-refuting: if Protagoras is right then his own view is true only for him. Intelligent students are likely to make this point themselves, and then you might guide them to ways later skeptics and relativists have got around this reply, for example, instead of saying "no belief is true absolutely" saying "all beliefs can be challenged" or "there are good reasons for and against believing anything."

3.11 This is a section the class must read, in advance. It is rehearsed in 3.12.

3.12 It is essential to work through this section in class. It looks hard, in that the positions of Russell and Sartre used here come from sophisticated theories. But in fact the ideas, taken out of context, are not so difficult to grasp. STAGE ONE: you are not always sure that you exist because (Russell) what you take to be "me" in your thinking might not be you, or because (Sartre) you might have no awareness of a self at all. I'd strongly recommend doing the (a) to (d) exercise quite literally to get this point home. (a) and (b) are the naturally Russellian stories and (c) and (d) are the naturally Sartrean stories, but it is worth lingering on suggestions that link things differently, as they would suggest links between Russell's position and Sartre's. STAGE TWO: even when you/Descartes explicitly think "at any rate this me that I'm thinking about now exists" you may wrong, because (Russell) the "me" may not be a single thing that can reasonably be labeled "me" at all, or (Sartre) it may be a process rather than an entity. The second stage is harder to understand than the first; I'd suggest letting it emerge from a free discussion of the first part. So you might do the (a) to (d) exercise and then raise the issue of whether any of this should bother Descartes. Then do the (1) to (3) exercise. Cartesian reply (1) invites problem (iii), (2) invites (ii), and (3) invites (i). In a way (3)/(i) is the metaphysically most interesting, since it suggests that there need be no thing that does the thinking. You might try out responses to fantasies like this: there are two computers, and one thinks "I think" and the second then thinks "I am" plus a false memory (produced by its program) of having thought "I think." Is there a self in this story? Or suppose that all thoughts by all people are events in the mind of God. What kind of thread is necessary in order that the stream of my thinking forms a "self" distinct from the stream of your thinking?

3.13 This section rounds off the chapter and links it to the larger sequence of ideas. Still, it is not essential to cover it. The (1) to (6) activity at the end of the section could combine well with 3.6 or 3.8. The aim is to show that there are more and less certain beliefs, and that even when beliefs are intuitively certain one may be more certain than another. A discussion could go in the direction of a classification of certain beliefs (of dimensions along which there is a more or less certain contrast.) The class could find themselves discovering the differences between - for example - analytic truths, introspectively given facts, beliefs basic to the way we think, and beliefs which we cannot easily imagine alternatives to. The content of Box 7 could well be covered at the same time. The link is the very unlikely possibilities one has to consider in sorting out degrees of certainty. The point about implicit premises made in the box is important: that often a belief will seem completely certain until you begin to look carefully at it, and then sometimes it begins to seem not just not certain but doubtful.

Chapter 3 - Test
(See comments for chapter 1 test.)

Mark each of the following assertions as True or False:

A rationalist aims to prove that all of the beliefs of her culture are true.
A rationalist aims to prove that all of the beliefs of her culture are false.
Rationalism builds on the discovery that we don't have to do experiments to know that some theories are wrong.
To clear the ground for building an error-free system of belief we have to decide that everything we previously believed is false.
To clear the ground for building an error-free system of belief a rationalist will consider all of his beliefs to see whether any of them might be false.
You can know just by thinking that Descartes existed.
According to Descartes, "I exist" follows from "I think."
If you were a brain in a vat you would not exist.
If you were a brain in a vat you would be wrong in thinking that you are sitting at a desk.
Once he has proved that he exists Descartes has no problem proving that he is not deceived by an evil spirit.
If you are walking along thinking about music you are certain that you exist.
If you are walking along thinking about music you temporarily don't exist.