William Lane Craig on Logical Positivism

David Hume in HCJ

Suggested to be the most intelligent man on the British Isles of his time, David Hume was an empirical philosopher who became well known in a short space of time for his groundbreaking ideas which even today are still mulled over in our brains, albeit in a somewhat blinkered way, as his views and theories are enough to break anyone's sense of reality, reducing them to quivering wrecks in the corner of the room, a paranoid jerking sensation overcoming them every few seconds. 
Luckily though this is not an epidemic case and actually Hume's work is extremely interesting and enlightening for our world views. 

He held the belief that all human ideas and envisioning are synthesised from simpler atoms of understanding- complicated ideas are made up of previously experienced basic ones. 
Being an empiricist his focus was mainly on the idea of sense data and the reasoning that everything we know and feel is based on the senses we pick up from the surrounding world. 

He was one of the first in the group of revered philosophers to be referred to as a sort of 'social scientist' in the sense that he liked to focus on people, and why they are how they are, how they react to situations and so on; he quite enjoyed the study of Newtonian laws and tried to apply many of these laws to human behaviour. This makes me think back to the essay concerning human understanding, in which he is describing how there are varying schools of philosophy in the early times used for different means- one school would produce ideas to perpetuate the mass humans pleasure, and encourage them to continue in the way they were thinking, I assume leading to more consumerism and lavish living- whilst the more learned new schools of philosophical thought were more about questioning what it was mankind was missing in their thought; studying what we DON'T know as a race. It is easy to talk about things we know (or think we know as Hume may have said) but more difficult and in fact more challenging and exciting and indeed exemplar of being more learned to think and talk about everything we are yet to know. 

Do you think you know the unknowns!?

I use this illustration purely as it is an interesting visual example and brings me on quite nicely to my next discussion. Hume presented a theory called 'Logical Positivism' in which he studied how knowledge is obtained and verified and what to believe and what not to believe. This is the part which begins to send your head whizzing around, but is also the most interesting.
Essentially what is outlined is that there is no absolute truth, everything is based in probability.
I think this is reasonable to say because although science can prove things for fact, there is never a 100% certainty about all things. We took the example in the lecture of letting a pencil fall from your hand- you could do it a thousand, a million times even and could reasonably infer with a degree of certainty that the pencil would fall to the ground, and this is something which is verifiable because it has been done so often, but it is not absolute fact because there is still a minute chance that the pencil could fly to the ceiling- just because this may not have happened, it doesn't make this an impossibility. The sun will 'rise' (although this is a fakery of the mind) every day and go down every night but this does not mean it will happen the following day.


This is also related to Hume's idea of causation. 
Taking the example of the billiard balls- if you were to hit the white ball with the cue, and the ball were to hit another ball and make it move, you could infer that the white ball made the other ball move as that sounds reasonable and you can say that you saw it, but what if there were an unseen energy that made the ball move? As we can not see the causation, we can not rule out that there is another possible explanation for why the ball moved, but we can not see it so we will never know. 


I think this sort of thinking is essential for journalists because we need to learn that yes, everything is not always as it seems, but also that before making a story or reporting on something that you are entirely sure of your facts, and that you have considered every single angle on how it could also be wrong and falsified- more on this in a bit. 
This is also very well supported by Chris' YouTube video which serves to show that you create situations in your mind to fill the visual story- and that we should be wary of this because it is not always the actual case and is a dangerous way of thinking, something Hume was very aware of and very cautious with, also referred to as induction theory- the notion that we draw on inferences from past experience. What becomes apparent though of course is that just because an event has occurred no matter how many times it does not mean that it always will be the same. Just because you hang all pictures from a nail, does not mean that ALL pictures are hung from nails on the wall.



My personal belief is that whilst it can be a little distracting to run off into own thought, it is a saving grace that we have it as many can find solace in the hiding places of their minds and of course great inventions are normally a synthesising of ideas so only in this respect do I disagree with the notion that 'brain wandering' is a dangerous activity. 


Lastly of course, and probably my favourite for the endless discussion possibilities, is the idea of verificationism and falsification principles. Hume particularly enjoyed this as his work would have been based on him also making sure that it was all true or rather all verifiable in the contexts and borders of the work, because as we start to think in these ways we discover there is no 'truth' only verifiable or non verifiable statements. Everything must have independent verification if it is to be considered seriously in any way. If a statement is non-verifiable it is neither true nor false and has no scientific value. A.J Ayer describes this and likens it to the quacking of a duck- it may as well just be background noise if it is non-verifiable. 


Similarly non-contradiction shows us that if we take the notion that there are lifeforms on another planet, we could say this is provisionally true (because we don't know but can assume) but are non contradictory as we can not verify this for fact or non fact. 
I will let Dr.Craig take it from here.


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NB: Not sure this embed worked :/ uploaded it separately instead above


So having listened to this lecture it did get me thinking about a few things.
I've always been very interested in the brain and have always been the one to question as much as possible, something I think the human race is forgetting to do in contemporary times, and all this study makes me think back to Descartes and why I particularly enjoy his work. 
We talk about verifiable and non verifiable, and yet while you are certain there is a computer screen in front of you, it is only really as real as your brain allows you to think feel and see that it is. Descartes talks about the perfect image and the shadow of a chair and all of that way of thinking but I have always said to myself, how do I know the chair is even there to begin with? Yes you can see it, touch it, sit in it and know its shape, feel is bend and shape under your weight and see the material which created it, but people often forget we barely use 10% of our brain capacity in the day to day lives we lead, so who is to say the brain has not merely created a fictional visual world for their millions of electronic pulses to exist in? 


I could go on and on but I feel this would be slightly going off the point and maybe would be better saved for a blog in my own free time! Just remember- almost everything, if not everything, is probably falsifiable and unfalsifiable.

Early Journalism

So in this lecture we began to see and to make the more apparent links in the timeline of journalism! I'm not sure about others but it has often been difficult to make them, so having a big timeline up and explained by Chris certainly helped!

So humans are 35,000 years old and of course it is impossible to theorise what happened between then and first recorded, well, anything!- which was 6,000 years before Christ.

First writing was the Chinese pictographic writing- every character had a word- eventually led to to Chinese typewriters, obviously some time later though, which used simplified pictures to create phrases.
Following this was cuneiform writing, again a pictorial writing which was fairly abstract; lines and a few symbols to create complicated ideas. Created with a 'cune' - a type of knife used to cut clay and stone to write on tablets with- able to utilised by all of the eastern areas of Europe.

Then of course comes the Lindesfame Gospel; an old style Latin/Anglo Saxon typography. Very few books of it survive but Christianity in the western world saved this ancient type of writing after writing it all out into the faster developing forms of type and print.

It did astound me how progress happened over such a long time frame with no exact ideas of dates and brings to mind the importance, as a journalist, of dating and timing events, so that arguments and ideas can be created and relayed with surety- an imperative of journalistic accuracy.
1920's sees Caxton's printing press which is outstripped by the 20 years later Gutenberg's printing press which become jovially known as 'Bible making machines' - the Bible of course being the first book to go in to mass production! Printing press has massive benefits to the imparting of knowledge between generations- all that was lost before will be lost no more! Einstein says it gives man a kind of immortality as they now had the ability to save the ideas of the deceased.
Then comes the Renaissance and the selling of books for money and thus a new industry.

1517 and the reformation by Martin Luther promotes the Bible being mass produced and the church begin to encourage literacy so all can be joined by the word of the book.
What follows is mostly to do with the wars of the Tudors and the Spanish all today with America and its riches to be had!
Most notably, 1620- Mayflower and the American colonies and the Stuarts, 1641-51 and the English Civil War, Tudors making England wholly Protestant and defined as non Catholic, 1660 Stuart Monarchy back in power, Charles II promising an easy going monarchy, 1660 Addison publishes writing which is witty and broad minded, undogmatic and not like a puritan, 1667 of course puts the spotlight on John Locke, and his open minded and considerate writing, and finally followed some more less notable political 'confusements' as we referred to them in our lecture.

Finally in 1688 the Stuarts are deposed and William of Orange comes from Holland to take the reigns over the English, whilst the rest of the Stuarts make haste and flee to Ireland and Scotland.
1690 and the battle of the Boyne, the mopping up of the infidels and its recording in history, 1700 and Newton, made ever famous because of his word being able to be spread through writing, and then in 1702 comes the first ever Newspaper! and a form of Journalism is born! Mass money was then to be made in printing and commercialism through advertisement and insurances all offered by people through the newspaper.

Times move on again and the English dissolves elements of sovereignty to join with Scotland which prompts the war on the Jacobite's. Tribal people from the Scottish clans who had no national identities but all seemed at war together- often referred to as the 'Tartan' people. They eventually get totally destroyed by the English armies who line up with their canons and cut down the Scottish- defending themselves with simple swords and shields.
After all the bloody history this is why the Union Flag becomes known as 'The Butcher's Apron' as it contains colours from all the flags the English armies harmed in some way or other, or in the case of the Scottish, totally eradicated.

Seminar Paper

Joseph Addison in ‘The Spectator’ 1712

So having read the article it seems Addison is primarily concerned with a few major things. Mostly his ‘rant’ if you will seems to be about style of writing and most importantly, the methodical construction of a discourse. He makes clear the distinction between his creative writing, referred to as his ‘Wild compositions which go by the name of Essays’ and his Daily Papers he bestows on the public, written with regularity and method.

He generally makes the point that for his daily papers he tends to have considered his entire plan for the discourse before writing, so that when ink touches paper it has an orderly flow of ideas and argument which can be conveyed and understood easily.

He then carries on his discussion with the reader by giving an example of an associate of his who does not write or even discuss in tongue with flow or practice, and who in fact seems to be, as Addison refers to him, “one of the most Eminent Immethodical Disputants of any that has fallen under my Observation”.

This man is Tom Puzzle, who Addison explains is supposedly a learned man, but not so much so that he can explain and eradicate any doubts or holes in his lecturing about issues of the world or common concerns on the home front amongst such topics of unreasonableness of bigotry and priest-craft. Addison explains that “This makes Mr. Puzzle the Admiration of all those who have less Sense than himself, and the Contempt of those who have more.”

Addison then continues on to talk about his friend and associate Will Dry, another most learned man aligned with Addison in the sense of producing what is to be considered a ‘good discourse’, and he explains how Tom Puzzle is fearful of him because of Mr. Dry’s tendency to break his arguments with simple questions, or when Mr. Puzzle is running off a question asked of him, Mr. Dry simply responds with a “what then?” which stops Puzzle dead in his talks.

Having listened to this as a fairly narrative description of what we have read then, I invite you to discuss what you think about Addison’s work as a form of journalism, how interesting it is and the ideas it raises, and what his criticisms of Puzzle say about approach to writing at the time, and the importance of accuracy and conformity in writing.

Was there a strict social rigidity when it came to producing work? (Taking into consideration all the philosophical discussions we have already had about thinking and learning and knowing)

Was there a need to prove oneself as an established writer by having work published rather than lending talent to the art of discussion?

Can we see many similarities to Addison’s general argument today? How often do newspapers or more specifically, individuals in newspapers i.e. columnists critique writing rather than current events? (Though I guess book reviews are a prime example of this)