THE PLAIN VIEW
15th September 2002
The next issue, Number 76, will appear on 15th October 2002.
From October 2002 the Atheist Thought Home Page will be at
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/stockton/at00.htm
Since Spring 1995 I have contributed a quarterly column 'The Plain View' to the magazine 'Humanism Scotland'. The following article is an attempted amplification of the theoretical basis of that column. Humanism is the Plain View of the world we live in.
"Humanism claims to be the distinctively lay view of the world. It is the ordinary way of taking hold of the world, straightforwardly, by contrast with the mysteries, the far-fetched, the ancestral and the immemorial. Contrary to what many may suspect or complain of, Humanism not only has no mumbo-jumbo. It has no experts. Intellectuals and the man in the street speak the same language. Humanism is the Plain View"
These are the words of a notable humanist - H J Blackham - and it is the basic text from which my writings are, I claim, derived. Whether I comply sufficiently with Blackham's penultimate sentence is a matter for the struggling reader to determine.
'Doing philosophy' is distinct from the academic study of the Lives and Works of the Great Philosophers - valuable though that is to any person claiming to be educated. To do philosophy is to unpack received opinion. Assumptions that are hidden - by habit or by intent - have to be identified and examined for acceptability; logical consequences of those assumptions have to be identified and put to use as ongoing tests of the assumptions. To use common sense is to make light of assumptions and their consequences and simply to accept what 'everybody knows'. But common sense ought to be valued positively; it is often sound sense because there is a process of 'natural selection' whereby unsound ideas tend to be eased out - but usually too little and too late and perhaps against the interest of those with 'axes to grind'. We all ought to 'do philosophy' much more than we actually do. To do so is to expose those parts of common sense that are unsound.
What are the assumptions underlying the Plain View? I suggest that the following list is full enough for most purposes but readers may wish to draw my attention to any major errors or omissions I am making.
1. That the universe - including us, and all that is around us - consists of material objects and their material interactions and that in this objectively real material world there is dependability - 'the uniformity of nature'.
2. That our senses, often aided by the instruments we make, give us sufficient knowledge of that reality - sufficient for our brains to get hold of and work on and put to practical use.
3.That our brains are thinking machines that have the capacity work up the data they receive and thence to generate many thoughts ..... notions of knowthat and knowhow, a sense of wonder and an urge to creativity, perceptions of moral values both as to rights reasonably to be claimed and duties reasonably to be accepted.
These three features of the Plain View may not be an accurate or an exhaustive list but they can be taken as a succinct statement of basic philosophical materialism. (We have to use the adjective 'philosophical' in this connection because the common usage of 'materialism' has altered its connotation to 'greed for the things in life that money can buy' as distinct from what is loosely called 'spirituality' which refers to perceived value that is not cash value).
The Plain View is thus synonymous with basic philosophical materialism (BPM).
Two things have to be said about BPM - its dubious assumptions and its practical necessity
The Dubious Assumptions of BPM
Every one of the assumptions sketched above is highly questionable and indeed has been questioned by notable philosophers. In any standard textbook of philosophy these questionings are set out and, after thousands of years of philosophising, there are very few certainties left among them. There is little consensus even as to the exact identification and relative importance of the various uncertainties.
Our senses are often deceived and we must suppose that we cannot always detect the deception. We cannot validate the evidence of our senses by using them - to do so is to invite circularity. What reaches our brains through our senses may be a distorted or grossly incomplete version of whatever reality there may be. As for our brains as thinking machines, capable of processing all the, admittedly, suspect data from our senses ....... all we can say is that they may be fallible enough to make a mess of the data they receive. It is just as much a lapse into circularity to use logic to validate logic as it is to use sense data to monitor the senses.
The assumptions underlying BPM are indeed fragile
The Practical Necessity of BPM
In order even simply to live our daily lives at the most obviously practical level we have to gamble on the truth of these various assumptions that we know, as philosophers, are very much open to doubt. How can we conduct our lives without assuming that what we take as material reality is actually real and not just a seamless illusion? How can do anything without some degree of knowhow and how can knowhow be possible if nature is not uniform, if generalisations cannot dependably be made from repeated similar instances, if cause and effect are simply constructions of our imagination? How can we manage with causation alone while discounting the practicalities of chance and choice? How can we do other than adopt (to use Blackham's words) "the ordinary way of taking hold of the world, straightforwardly" ?
The Paradox of Action vis a vis Thought
We are compelled practically to act as though various things - sense data, logical inference, the uniformity of nature, causation, induction, were all absolutely dependable while we have to admit that they are not.
What to do?
We have to act on the gamble of BPM because we have nothing else to go on. Perhaps BPM should be renamed DPM - Default Philosophical Materialism.
DPM is the Plain View; it is not the Grand View. The Grand View gives the opportunity for windbags to go on and on about Life, The Universe and the Meaning Of It All. Such windbaggery is a huge lever of power and a huge opportunity for destructive divisiveness but, to be fair, the Grand View is of diminishing power among educated people; it is too readily the basis for tiresome fanaticism and associated terrorism.
Liberal tendencies in religion represent an honest and sustained attempt to house-train piety and so make it acceptable to sensible people. But liberal religion, like Default Philosophical Materialism, has its paradoxes. The very flexibility of liberal religion makes it less able convincingly to offer the comforting certainties that many vulnerable people feel they need.
This website is founded not on disrespect for liberal religion but on an acceptance of the imperative of daily life - the Plain View - aka Default Philosophical Materialism .
E.S.
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