Name : Zain Ali

Reg No : FA18-BPY-074

Paper : Intro to Philosophy

Q1: Keeping in view classroom discussion and reading philosophical text, what/how do you
(not) know regarding Philosophy? Why does Philosophy is (not) important? What are your
strategies to (un)learn philosophical ideas? Note: Justify your way of thinking with philosophical
argumentation)?

Ans: What we know and What we don’t know and How do you know:

At a press conference in 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, then US secretary of defence, used

epistemology to explain US foreign entanglements and their unintended consequences. “There
are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known
unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also
unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know,” he said. we need more knowledge;
it is that we need to distinguish between what we know and what we don't know, through what
Firestein calls “controlled neglect”. Philosophers must selectively ignore vast quantities of facts
and data that block creative solutions, and focus on a narrow range of possibilities.

 “Knowing What We Know  And What We Don’t Know,” we tackle the foundational question
of whether we can know what we do and don’t know, since knowing what you do and don’t
know is the first step to true intellectual humility.  

Ask yourself which is worse thinking that you know MORE than you do? Or thinking that you
know LESS than you do? How can we avoid both the arrogance of dogmatism and the paralysis
of doubt? Clearly, people who are so cocksure they know everything, come across
as intellectually arrogant. Who wants to be that person? But is it better to be so lacking in
conviction that you never stand your ground?  

It’s okay, it seems to me, to be confident, but not so confident that you become dogmatic. It’s
also okay to be humble. But you shouldn’t be so humble that you become defeatist. The trick, I
think, is strike a balance, to find a middle ground between excessive humility and excessive
arrogance. That will enable you to avoid both a rigid dogmatism and a wimpy defeatism.
Knowing what you know and what you don’t know is the key to finding that middle way.

The problem is that for most of us, that is much easier said than done. People tend to do
everything they can to hold onto their beliefs. We shut ourselves off from opposing points of
view.  We dismiss sources of evidence that challenge or undermine our beliefs. We surround
ourselves with like-minded people. That’s all a recipe for groupthink. That’s why we should seek
out dissenting voices. We all need to have even our most firmly held beliefs challenged from
time to time.

On the other hand, for almost anything you believe, no matter how well grounded, you can find
somebody who not only disagrees, but who will do everything that they can to sow doubt. Think
of the climate change deniers. Now you might want to dismiss such people as mere shysters—as
paid “merchants of doubt.” And you might be tempted to say that you’ve got no reason to listen
to them. But how exactly do you reconcile that thought with the idea that it’s dangerous to cut
yourself off from opposing points of view?

I’m not saying that we should necessarily listen to every single skeptic or naysayer, no matter
how spurious their arguments. It makes sense to try and separate out genuine grounds for
skepticism from spurious grounds for skepticism. But that is, again, something easier said than
done. The problem is that almost nothing that we know is truly certain. I believe in climate
change, for example, but I am not absolutely certain of it.

The problem is that it’s precisely in the gap between well-grounded belief and absolute certainty
that doubt lives. Once you admit that you are not certain, you’ve opened the door to doubt—
whether it’s from paid merchants of doubt or from sources more to your liking. And it’s not clear
that you’re rationally allowed to shut the door on the doubters until they’ve had their full say.

But true doubters never have their “full say.” They never stop doubting. They will tangle you up
in interminable arguments, with no end in sight. At some point, you have to cut them off and get
on with it. Though that seems right to me, it’s, again, not entirely clear how it’s consistent with
not closing yourself off to opposing points of view. I’m tempted to say that you’ve just got to
 know how to strike the right balance. Too little skepticism, and you become rigid and
dogmatic. Too much skepticism, you become a wishy-washy defeatist, who won’t take a stand.   

But that raises the question of whether there’s a formula for achieving such balance. It would be
nice if there were. But I think there probably is not. The world is sometimes painted in shades of
gray, rather than in clear strokes of black and white.

Why philosophy is important and why it is not important :

This answer will probably seem quite condescending, judgmental, and harsh, but I believe it’s
just as true as Socrates’ claim that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living.”

If we says that philosophy is important so for this we can not neglect it because It belongs in
the lives of everyone. It helps us solve our problems -mundane or abstract, and it helps us make
better decisions by developing our critical thinking (very important in the age of
disinformation).

And most who deny or doubt the importance of philosophy suffer from one or both of two
delusions:

1. they don’t truly and fully understand what philosophy is - but they surely believe
they do; or,
2. they fail to realize that their own life subliminally and unconsciously manifests its
own philosophy, which means their life is controlled by powers and forces beyond
themselves - i.e., any claims to being truly free are mistaken.
Strategies about learning and unlearning philosophical ideas:

Five components for learning philosophical ideas

 Conceptualization of learning.

 Conceptualization of teaching.

 Goals for society.

 Implementation of the philosophy.

 Professional growth plan.

Q2: What is your perception regarding Dogma and sense of Inquiry (Logic, Questions,
Meanings)? Explain the process of development of your perception regarding dialogue between
dogma and sense of inquiry. (Note: explain with the help of philosophical argumentation).

Ans : Perception about Dogma:

Dogmatic goes back to the Greek words dogma, which means basically “what one thinks is true”
and dogmatikos, “pertaining to doctrine.” To be dogmatic is to follow a doctrine relating to
morals and faith, a set of beliefs that is passed down and never questioned. Dogmatic people are
usually not very popular. Individuals with open mind in acceptance of new ideas are without
dogmatism and individuals with close mind present as dogmatism .An important theory about
dogmatism was that dogmatism pointed to a cognitive network . Based on that, dogmatism can
be attended in two levels.

“The first level, the isolation between and within belief and disbelief systems, is characterized by
little differentiation within the disbelief system, isolation of parts within and between belief and
disbelief systems, and high rejection of disbelief system. The second level that of the
subordination of the peripheral beliefs to the central region of beliefs is characterized by the
dependence-submission in an authoritarian way of the peripheral parts of beliefs to what
constitutes the central beliefs.

Perception about sense of inquiry:

It is relatively easy to discern some order in the above embarrassment of explanations. Some of
the characterizations are in fact closely related to each other. When logic is said, for instance, to
be the study of the laws of thought, these laws cannot be the empirical (or observable)
regularities of actual human thinking as studied in philosophy; they must be laws of
correct reasoning, which are independent of the psychological idiosyncrasies of the thinker.
Moreover, there is a parallelism between correct thinking and valid argumentation: valid
argumentation may be thought of as an expression of correct thinking, and the latter as an
internalization of the former. In the sense of this parallelism, laws of correct thought will match
those of correct argumentation. The characteristic mark of the latter is, in turn, that they do not
depend on any particular matters of fact. Whenever an argument that takes a reasoner
from a to b is valid, it must hold independently of what he happens to know or believe about the
subject matter of a and b. The only other source of the certainty of the connection
between a and b, however, is presumably constituted by the meanings of the terms that the
propositions a and b contain. These very same meanings will then also make the sentence “If a,
then b” true irrespective of all contingent matters of fact. More generally, one can validly argue
from a to b if and only if the implication “If a, then b” is logically true—i.e., true in virtue of
the meanings of words occurring in a and b, independently of any matter of fact.

Process of development of our perception:

Dogma in the broad sense is any belief held unquestioningly and with undefended certainty. It
may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Roman
Catholicism, Judaism, or Protestantism, as well as the positions of a philosopher or of
a philosophical school such as Stoicism. It may also be found in political belief systems, such
as communism, progressivism, liberalism and conservatism.

In the pejorative sense, dogma refers to enforced decisions, such as those of aggressive political

interests or authorities. More generally, it is applied to some strong belief which its adherents are
not willing to discuss rationally. This attitude is named as a dogmatic one, or as dogmatism; and
is often used to refer to matters related to religion, but is not limited to theistic attitudes alone
and is often used with respect to political or philosophical dogmas.

The history of western philosophy what is called logic has included, in addition to the formal
logic discussed above, the Transcendental Logic of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and the
dialectical logic of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
(1775-1854), and especially G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). There has also been the materialist
dialectic logic of Karl Marx (1818-1883), and psychologistic logic of such figures as Wilhelm
Wundt (1832-1920) and others. There has also been the phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) and his followers, including Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905-1980), the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and others, and other
outgrowths of Continental philosophy.

Another major topic of enormous discussion and disagreement in Western philosophy, at least
since the time of David Hume (1711-1776) and his devastating critiques of it, is the existence
and status of supposed "inductive logic." The problem of induction arises because all inductive
inferences are, technically speaking, invalid because the premises of an inductive argument can
all be true and the conclusion nevertheless be false. Yet the sciences seem to require or rely on
inductive logic and methods. There has been a great deal of work on supposed methods of
inductive logic, including John Stuart Mill's Mill's Methods, Charles Sanders Peirce's account of
inductive logic, and the work of Rudolf Carnap and many others, especially the proponents of
logical positivism, who seemed to need an inductive procedure in order to work out their
program. Karl Popper, however, claimed that he had solved the problem of induction by
discarding it in favor of his method of falsification. This controversy about whether there is any
inductive logic, and if so how it is to be understood and accounted for, continues.

In addition to those, there is today what is often known as fuzzy logic, or deviant logic, advocated
by Susan Haack and others. This movement prizes vagueness, among other things, and is based,
at least partly, on quantum mechanics, which seems to defy classical logic. This movement also
owes a great deal to Quine and his famous paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in which he
suggested, by implication if not directly, that even the supposed laws of logic are subject to
pragmatic considerations, and change if necessary.