The Last Word by Thomas Nagel

Author:Thomas Nagel [Nagel, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

1. Of course I may be unsure of the truth of the same proposition expressed in binary notation; but that is because I am not familiar enough with that notation to be able to think in it directly, without translating: I have to figure out what “10 + 10 = 100” expresses.

2. In fact, failure to employ it is involved in some of the most common forms of faulty reasoning studied by psychologists. See Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (MIT Press, 1990), chapter 1, for some references.

3. For discussion, see Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason, and Gilbert Harman, CHange in View (Mil Press, 1986). Stich, however, offers the unhelpful proposal that we should give up truth as the aim of reasoning.

4. This technique is used by Saul Kripke to defend the necessity of certain identity statements despite an initial appearance of contingency. See Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1980), lecture 3.

5. Sometimes external factors may prompt us to search for such an understanding (as apparently happened with Einstein and absolute time). But they cannot provide it by themselves.

6. A qualification is necessary here. “2 + 3 = 4” is not gibberish. It has enough sense to be necessarily false, and it can enter into reasoning as the premise or conclusion of a reductio ad absurdum. Nevertheless, though one can suppose for the purpose of argument that 2 + 3 = 4, or observe that it follows from certain assumptions that 2 + 3 = 4, it is not possible to think that (perhaps) 2 + 3 = 4.

7. Objections and Replies VI, ser. 8. 1 he Philosophical Writings of Desctirtes (Cambridge University Press, 1984). vol. 2, p. 1294 (vol. 7, p. 436, in the Adam and Tannery edition).

8. Derek Parfit has remarked to me that similar objections could be made to the idea that God is the source of moral truth. The argument against it has to come from within morality.

9. A perennially interesting issue is whether he was right to think we could intelligibly suspend belief in all empirical propositions about the external world. Cf. Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Ernest LePore, ed., Truth and Interpretation (Blackwell, 1986).

10. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), in his From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 41.

11. It is true that Descartes’s first step on the road to an objective, impersonal reality is the cogito, a first-person thought which he takes to have objective implications. But the philosophical point of the cogito is not first personal: It is that you cannot stay with the first person. I think he is right even here, but see Bernard Williams’s criticisms of him on this point: Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Penguin, 1978), p. 100.

12. Cf. David Wiggins’s invocation of the idea that “there is really nothing else to think but that p” (that 7 + 5 = 12, for example); “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990–91), pp.

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