When you come across vague expressions, use of passive voice and adverbs that weaken a statement or seem to create a meaningful claim…when it’s doing nothing of the kind — you should look out for weasel words!

Weasel words are generally used to create an impression that there’s something meaningful, when there isn’t. Use of euphemisms (“weapons of mass destruction”) and generalisations can indicate weasel-word practices. 

For example — “many critics say…” (which critics?) or “there’s a consensus amongst experts…” (which experts?) — even vague statements of certain percentages such as ‘the majority / minority’, can make you ponder what is the concrete evidence for the claim being made.

Weasel words are popular in politics and advertising (you can imagine why!) and when you spot the use of jargon and ambiguous statements in arguments, have a closer look and see if they are in fact weasel words.

Further Resources:

Don Watson’s Weasel Words

Hedging as a Fallacy of Language

What if you’re a machine? How would you know? Let’s start by taking a look at the Turing Test.

Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence begins with the question as to whether machines can think. What can machines do? We have seen leaps and bounds in terms of technological advancement, not just security and surveillance, but games, knowledge bases and information. In fact, the idea of computers developing self-awareness and independent thought has been the plot of a great many fictional stories, horror and otherwise.

He proposed a test, where a judge has to decide which of two players — A or B — is a computer and which is a human. The judge is limited to using responses to written questions. In fact, you can even play it online.

While there’s a number of objections as to whether technology would ever be good enough to have independent intelligence, there’s still a hypothetical potential for artificial intelligence. And of course, what that might mean for our definition of consciousness, if a machine could be made concious. There’s a number of challenges to the Turing Test , including the ‘Chinese Room’ story of John Searle, which you can see in the links below.

Turing Test Resources — Ayse Pinar Saygin

The Chinese Room Argument

We’ve previously looked at dualism and the mind, and what the physicalist approach is — what about philosophical zombies?

They’ve had a bit of a popularity surge in recent years, what with TV shows, fiction books and pop culture, but there’s also an interest in these fictional creatures in the field of philosophy. For example, the proposal of property dualism — it is not the same as physicalism as it claims that experiences such as smell, sight, emotions and the like are new properties, are distinct from mental and physical properties, although there are correlations. There’s something else that makes these properties of consciousness separate from the physical world.

With the philosophical zombie — it used to be a human being, but to all intents and purposes, but it doesn’t have a working brain and yet is undead (while it might be searching for brains… it isn’t a conscious being). Therefore the physical capabilities to be conscious are absent from it, and yet it exists. Property dualists would argue that if zombies are metaphysically possible, then consciousness is not identical to any physical properties. There’s a number of great resources on the topic, including a radio interview — but if you have any arguments yourself on why zombies (including the fact that we just see them in horror movies!) aren’t a good argument for property dualism, let me know on the comments of the blog at 365daysofphilosophy.com.

Further Resources:

Radio National Philosopher’s Zone — Zombies and Consciousness

Stanford Encyclopaedia on Zombies

The Philosophical Zombies Argument

Last episode I posted a link to Thomas Nagel’s— What is it like to be a bat? — and it’s an example of one of many arguments in response the physicalist approach to the mind. 

Bats are able to capture their prey in the dark by the use of something called echolocation sonar, or bio-sonar. By using a call-and-echo response, bats are just one of many creatures who are able to who can identify food (in their case, flying creatures). This led Nagel to argue that bats have some form of conscious awareness, but but we are unable to understand what the inner experience of the bat. While we can analyse the hunting patterns of a bat, even dissect the creature and many like it, we cannot have a true insight into what it is like to be that creature. 

It’s this that leads Nagel to claim that theories of mind that consider consciousness to be merely neurological events and chemical responses to be missing the qualitative element of consciousness — the way things seem and feel, a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. 

The subjective character of experience is known as qualia — and since this is philosophy, there’s further debates on whether that is a good enough argument for what consciousness involves as well!

Physicalism is a kind of monism, the view that there’s a single substance or existence. Instead of the mind-body dualism as I’ve discussed previously, physicalism is the view that there is only the physical elements to consider when talking about the mind-body problem. For example, events in the brain are able to be explained as having real-world, non-spiritual or mental elements. 

While this sounds like a more scientific approach to the mind —such as studying the chemical and electronic responses of the brain — philosophers aren’t necessarily doing neuroscience or becoming psychiatrists who are analysing the brain as a subject. The philosophical approach to monisms like physicalism involves making arguments, and defending why dualism isn’t the correct way to explain mental processes.

There’s a number of different elements within physicalism, and I’ll be unpacking these in further shows.

t may seem a little odd to be referencing what is essentially a psychology textbook in a philosophy blog, but this was one of the earliest books I read that first introduced me to the field of consciousness, and I still recommend it when it comes to unpacking the scientific perspectives of epistemology. And you have to keep in mind (no pun intended) that it is a very scientific perspective; as Blackmore puts it herself — “ why are we so deluded into imagining our selves as something separate that controls our brain?”

In saying that, this is a book that is used in the study of consciousness and therefore the questions, further reading and exercises are very useful in helping with the topic, and it isn’t limited to just a single theoretical approach. There’s a great range of major theories, including Eastern Philosophy (which as I mentioned previously, doesn’t often get much coverage in mainstream philosophy), discussions on neuroscience and mystical experiences and so on. It covers free will, even lucid dreaming and superstitions and what they tell us about the mind.

Particularly useful are the discussions about ethical considerations of animals and their place in the world as thinking creatures, and the influence of technology on what we might consider to have a ‘brain’ or not. It’s a great introductory text that encourages you to look further into the bigger issues.

I have the first edition of the book, but it has been revised since then; you can also find a “short introduction” book on the same topic as well.

This is a part of my interview with philosophy educator and author Stephen Law - to get the full interview, subscribe for as little as $1 an episode at https://www.patreon.com/kyliesturgess.

While I have briefly touched upon video series and video resources that you can find online to help with general philosophical theories and history, there are a number of resources that help investigate philosophy through fictional and quasi-fictional means.

In saying this, I have to stress the part about “fictional”; a useful resource can be manipulated or made less effective as a learning tool due to the fact that many discussions about weighty matters in philosophy such as the mind, what is art, what does it mean to be human and so on… may not necessarily serve the plot of a film very well. 

It can also be said that many films might not serve philosophy very well either — one example that comes to mind is a movie called ‘After the Dark’ (formerly known as ‘The Philosophers’), which I was quite keen to see after catching the preview, that you can see on this blogpost… and I was unimpressed by the way it portrayed the characters and their ethical dilemmas. In short, interesting premise for a movie — terrible people in the movie!

However, one film and my dislike of it doesn’t mean that you can dismiss its potential use for discussion, or other movies that try to tackle philosophical ideas and issues within its themes. In fact, you could say that nearly every film poses ‘bigger questions’ or can be used as a resource to create open intellectual questions, as I discussed in Day 27, with the Question Quadrant.

Here’s some links that provide you with some ideas for checking out philosophical content within fictional film: 

I’ll be doing more film reviews of my own throughout the year. Stay tuned.

Here’s a few discussion questions (and these can be extended answer questions):

Philosophy News on What is Truth

Philosophy Now on the nature of reality

2. Is there a limitation to skeptical doubt? Why or why not?

The Myth of Consistent Skepticism: The Cautionary Case of Albert Einstein — Skeptical Inquirer

Hegel and Skepticism by Michael N Forster

3. Are there limitations to expertise?

The Philosophical Breakfast Club — TED Talk

The Philosophy of Expertise by Evan Selinger & Robert P. Crease.

4. We can never truly know everything, therefore we know nothing.

Socratic Paradox

Skepticism is a very early philosophical approach, with two main forms. Firstly, a denial of genuine knowledge, that we really just have beliefs about the world; the most famous of the ancient skeptics was Pyrrho of Ellis around 300CBE, who proposed this extreme or radical skepticism. His view was that we cannot have knowledge about a subject at all (which seems self-refuting, as how do you verify that you can’t have any knowledge…?) but concluded with “we can never attain certain knowledge, so our best path is to live quietly and modestly and seek peace of mind.”

In more modern terms, skepticism has become less metaphysical (‘what do we know?’) and more epistemological: can we know, how can we have genuine knowledge? Modern skepticism, particularly scientific skepticism, focuses on particular fields of knowledge and methods of justification. Some popular topics for modern skepticism include pseudoscientific and paranormal claims.

Some conditions that have historically been set out as the standard requirement in the analysis of the concept of knowing is the Justified True Belief Analysis of Knowledge.

A knows that b is true, if and only if (iff):

Historically correspondence has often been suggested as a criterion for the truth of a statement: For some philosophers this is not a mere criterion of truth, but the truth of statements consists in, or is constituted by, correspondence to the way the world is.

Ordinarily, we have no trouble understanding what someone means when they say something like “I ate all the pie for dinner”. Indeed, there is a simple answer to the question ‘what is truth’. If a certain state-of-affairs exists or occurs in the world, and we assert that it does, then our statement is true. The statement “rain is wet” is true, if and only if, (iff) rain is wet. In addition, if I did eat all the pie for dinner!

‘A statement is true if it corresponds with the facts” meaning: that is “if it corresponds with some actual state-of-affairs in the world”. If a certain state-of-affairs exists or occurs in the world, and we assert that it does, then our statement is true. True sentences are accurate representations of the world. For any proposition p: p is true if and only if p corresponds to a fact.

Further Resources:

The analysis of knowlege — Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

Knowledge from Great Issues in Philosophy

Gettier challenges to Justified True Belief

Gettier Problems