Platoboy and the Solipsist Both Try to Nourish Their Minds Using Hume’s Fork
Dramatis Personae
Platoboy: an enthusiastic believer in Enlightenment values.
Solipsist: a sardonic, captious, humorous nihilist.
Solipsist: Hey Platoboy! Who do you play for, the empiricists or the rationalists?
Platoboy: I don’t know, Solly. Don’t you think that’s a little personal?
Solipsist: No. You sound like Jorge Bell, the first Dominican national to win MLB’s MVP. He was a one-man wrecking crew for the Bluejays in the 80’s. But he was a little nuts. In a post-game interview, after hitting a big home run against the Yankees, the interviewer asked him what kind of pitch it was that he had hit. He got really mad and started yelling at the poor guy. He said it was like asking him about his wife; it wasn’t anybody’s business, and he stomped off.
Platoboy: Are you having a stroke, Solly? What in the contumacious hell have Jorge Bell’s hitting idiosyncrasies got to do with my epistemological allegiances?
Solipsist: Well, most regular people wouldn’t consider either one’s epistemology, or one’s batting preferences to be sensitive areas.
Platoboy: Oh contraire, Solly. Though nothing is significant, everything is sensitive.
Solipsist: Okay, Mr. Sensitive. Do we know things a priori or a posteriori?
Platoboy: Yeah; you could say that.
Solipsist: What? Are you saying that we have both kinds of knowledge?
Platoboy: Yeah; you could say that. Yeah; you could say that.
Solipsist: Now who’s having a stroke? Did you swallow a parrot?
Platoboy: Yeah; you could say that.
Solipsist: Say what? Are you trying in your aviary way to say that we have two objects of cognition? You know, Hume’s spork?
Platoboy: You mean Hume’s foon?
Solipsist: As a matter of fact, I’m trying to fathom the relation of your ideas and mine.
Platoboy: Be careful, Solly. I’d hate to see you turn a shade of blue over an absence of impressions.
Solipsist: Okay, P.B. I give up; you are simply too Hume-or-us for me. But I want to get back to the two objects of knowledge. Can you refresh me on what they are, and how they are acquired?
Platoboy: Happy to, Solly. But isn’t asking me to explain Hume a little like asking Napoleon to explicate the theory of direct democracy?
Solipsist: Are you hinting that you might not be able to keep your Platonism “Doubly portcullis’d with [your] teeth and lips?”
Platoboy: Something like that, but a scientific application of the principles of charity and faithfulness should help me here.
Hume writes that we know two distinct kinds of things, and he calls them relations of ideas and matters of fact. The relations of ideas, he tells us, are expressed in propositions whose truth value we can know by the use of thought alone. To discover if the proposition “All black dogs are black” is true, all we need do, according to Hume, is ensure that we know the correct meanings of all of the terms involved as well as the relationships those terms are put into by the grammar of the sentence. An accurate understanding of these characteristics of the proposition will uncover the truth value of the proposition; we need nothing outside of the proposition itself, and our own consciousness to accomplish this. Kant would describe this proposition as analytic, and its truth value is known a priori.
Hume goes on to point out that negations of propositions claiming relations of ideas yield absurdities. Thus “All black dogs are black” can be negated as “All black dogs are not black.” One can see immediately that the information subsequent to the verb contradicts that prior to the verb, producing an absurdity. The end of the tale forgets the beginning, as a certain British dramatist would have it.
Solipsist: Or, you could just ask somebody; “Hey, guy! Tell me, is that black dog of yours black?”
Platoboy: Yeah, Solly. I recommend you try that out, but do me a favor and wait till you see a guy with a black pit bull whose ears and tail have been cut and is wearing one of those spiked collars.
Solipsist: Okay, P.B., but why those particular details?
Platoboy: Because it will be an opportunity to experience the effects of applying the empirical method to a distinctly non-empirical problem.
Solipsist: Okay, P.B., so that’s relations of ideas. Now, what about matters of fact?
Platoboy: I’m thrilled that you asked, Solly. Now, matters of fact are expressed by propositions whose negations are as logically possible as their positive forms. Thus “All black dogs are friendly” can be negated as “All black dogs are not friendly.” Both propositions are logically possible.
Solipsist: Splendid, P.B.! And I can use that same empirical method to ascertain the truth value of either the original proposition or its negation.
Platoboy: You could at that, P.B., but I feel obliged to caution you that some cynics refer to the empirical method as “learning the hard way,” and it seems quite possible that such an application here might prove the cynics to be prophetic.
Solipsist: Oh, Platoboy! This is exquisite! I’ve crossed oceans of time trying to see, to really see what it is to know a thing.
Platoboy: Well, Solly, now you’ll be able to see it feelingly. [Aside] I wonder if this is what the Stagirite had in mind when he named one of his books Posterior Analytics? Because the Solipsist’s posterior may get properly analyzed by somebody’s pit bull. I’m very confident that you will answer the age-old questions that have been swirling around black dogs for eons.
Solipsist: But P.B.; are there really only two kinds of things to know? Only two ways to know?
Platoboy: No.
Solipsist: Well, would you like to expatiate on that?
Platoboy: No.
Solipsist: So, who do you want to quarterback your team: Hume, Plato, Descartes, or Kant?
Platoboy: Tom Terrific.
Solipsist: Good choice! Seven and counting.
