SKEP CARDS

1. Objective lines of reasoning are infinitely regressive, Alasdair Macintyre1:

An agent can only justify a particular judgment by referring to some universal rule
from which it may be logically derived, and can only justify that rule in turn by
deriving it from some more general rule or principle; but on this view since every
chain of reasoning must be finite, such a process of justificatory reasoning must
always terminate with the assertion of some rule or principle for which no further
reason can be given.

2. All arguments only functioning it impossible to rationally debate between frameworks. Joyce2:
This distinction between what is accepted from within an institution, and stepping out of that institution and appraising it from an exterior perspective, is close to Carnaps

linguistic frameworks (as Carnap calls them) bring with them new terms
distinction between internal and external questions. 15 Certain

and ways of talking: accepting the language of things licenses making assertions like

The shirt is in the cupboard; accepting mathematics allows one to say There is a prime number

greater than one hundred; accepting the language of propositions permits saying Chicago is large is a true proposition, etc. Internal to the
framework in question, confirming or disconfirming the truth of these propositions is a trivial matter. But traditionally philosophers have interest ed

themselves in the external question the issue of the adequacy of the framework itself: Do objects exist?, Does the

world exist?, Are there numbers?, Are the propositions?, etc. Carnaps argument is that the external question, as it has been typically

construed, does not make sense. From a perspective that accepts mathematics, the answer

to the question Do numbers exist? is just trivially Yes. From a perspective which has not accepted mathematics,
Carnap thinks, the only sensible way of construing the question is not as a theoretical question, but as a practical one: Shall I accept the framework of mathematics?, and this

pragmatic question is to be answered by consideration of the efficiency, the fruitfulness, the usefulness, etc., of the adoption. But the (traditional) philosophers
questions But is mathematics true?, Are there really numbers? are pseudo-questions. By turning traditional philosophical questions into
practical questions of the form Shall I adopt...?, Carnap is offering a noncognitive analysis of metaphysics. Since I am claiming that we can critically inspect morality from an
external perspective that we can ask whether there are any non-institutional reasons accompanying moral injunctions and that such questioning would not amount to a Shall
we adopt...? query, Carnaps position represents a threat. What arguments does Carnap offer to his conclusion? He starts with the example of the thing language, which involves

To step out of the thing language and ask But does the world exist? is a
reference to objects that exist in time and space.

mistake, Carnap thinks, because the very notion of existence is a term which belongs to the
thing language, and can be understood only within that framework, hence this
concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself. 16 Moving on to the external question Do
numbers exist? Carnap cannot use the same argument he cannot say that existence is internal to the number language and thus cannot be applied to the system as a whole.
Instead he says that philosophers who ask the question do not mean material existence, but have no clear understanding of what other kind of existence might be involved, thus

persons who
such questions have no cognitive content. It appears that this is the form of argument which he is willing to generalize to all further cases:

dispute whether propositions exist, whether properties exist, etc., do not know what they are arguing over, thus they are not
arguing over the truth of a proposition, but over the practical value of their respective positions. Carnap adds that this is so because
there is nothing that both parties would possibly count as evidence that would sway the debate one way or the other.

3. We dont directly perceive objects in the world, so any claim to objective knowledge is
completely unjustifiable. John Searle3 1 writes:
[P]erceptual realism is false. The simplest version of this argument that I know of is to be found in Hume. He thought that naive
perceptual realism was so easily refutable that he dismissed it in a few sentences. If you are ever tempted to think that
you perceived the real world [directly], just push one eyeball. If [I] assume [I am]
seeing the real world, you would have to say that it doubles. That is, if the naive realists were right and I were seeing the real world,
then when I see double I should be seeing two worlds. But I am obviously not seeing
1 Macintyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981.

2 Joyce, Richard. Myth of Morality. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p 45-47.

3 Searle, John R. Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. New York: Basic Books; 2000. (27).
 two worlds. There are not two tables in front of me, even though when I push my
eyeball so that the two eyes are no longer focused, I have two visual experiences.

Moreover, no amount of subjective evidence can ever prove objective knowledge. Searle4 2
writes:
[Y]ou could have the best possible evidence about some domain and still be radically mistaken. You could have the best possible evidence about other
peoples behavior and still be mistaken about their mental states. You could have the best possible evidence about the past and still be mistaken about the
You could have the best possible evidence about your own perceptual
future.
experiences and still be mistaken about the external world. This is so because you
could be dreaming, having hallucinations, be a brain in a vat, or be deceieved
systematically by an evil demon. Strange situations, yes, but it is impossible to
disprove the potentiality for any of these scenarios.

4. Factual accounts of the world only illustrate what is, not what ought to be and thus never
contain ethical judgments. Ludwig Wittgenstein5 writes:
Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can

ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value. Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an
omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive
and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose
this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole
description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain
nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment . It would
of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true
propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the
same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are
no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.

5. Objective moral facts dont exist, John Mackie6 explains the argument from queerness:
Platos Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to be.
The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a
direction and an overriding motive; somethings being good both tells the person
who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be
sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so
constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it.

Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible)
course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it.

Mackie 2 continues:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of
a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.
Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, then it would have to be by some special
4 Searle, John R. Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. New York: Basic Books; 2000. (27).

5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lecture on Ethics" Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches pg, 67

6 Mackie, John L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. (pp. 38-40). [The Argument From Queerness].
 faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of
knowing everything else.

6. Any normative judgment is inherently flawed, Friedrich Nietzsche7 writes:

The falsity of human judgment derives firstly from the condition of the material to be
judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on
the basis of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this
material is in turn the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity.
Our experience of another person, for example, no matter how close he stand to us, can
never be complete, so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all
evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the standard by which we
measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations,
and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the
relation between ourself and anything else whatever. (Aphorism #32)

7 Human, All Too Human. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Translated by R. J Hollingdale.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.