Roderick Chisholm

Roderick Milton Chisholm (born November 27, 1916 in North Attleborough , Massachusetts , † January 19, 1999 in Providence , Rhode Island ) was an American philosopher who dealt primarily with epistemology , metaphysics , the philosophy of perception , materialism and the Ontology .

Life

Education

Chisholm studied philosophy at Brown University from 1934 to 1938. After graduating, he moved to Harvard University , where he completed his doctorate in philosophy ( Ph. D. ) with a dissertation entitled "The Fundamental Theses of Epistemology " (Mentoren were CI Lewis and Donald C. Williams ) in 1942.

At that time, many refugees were studying and teaching at Harvard, including professors who had fled the Nazi regime. There was a lively debate between proponents of the "new realism" and those of "critical realism" in American philosophy at the time. However, the question of whether the US should interfere in the war soon came to the fore.

The philosophy of Franz Brentano , which he discovered during a course on psychology , was formative for Chisholm . As a result, Chisholm decided to also study psychology.

University career

Immediately after receiving his doctorate , Chisholm was drafted into the army. He completed infantry training in Alabama , but was quickly injured and received a post in the psychological testing department in Boston . After 2 years he was transferred to the officers school in Texas, where he devoted himself to the study of clinical psychology. He then worked in some military hospitals and returned to New England a little later .

Dr. Albert C. Barnes , a wealthy inventor, hired him as a lecturer at his Barnes Foundation , which was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania . Here Chisholm became "Barnes Foundation Professor of Philosophy" before he actually gave a real lecture. Because of the mistakes he made, Dr. Barnes in 1946. The university extended the contract with Chisholm, but he moved to Brown University as a professor .

Although he taught at Brown University in Providence for most of his life, Roderick Chisholm also has a long list of the academic institutions he has worked at, in particular the University of Massachusetts , University of London (1956), University of Graz (mostly in 1960s), Oxford University (1967), Salzburg University (1972), Heidelberg University (1978), Würzburg University , Royal Philosophy Institute in London (1979), International Academy for Philosophy in Liechtenstein , Society for Austro-German Philosophy.

The list of awards is also remarkable, including three honorary doctorates : from the University of Graz, the International Academy of Philosophy and Brown University. In 1958 Chisholm was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Chisholm doctorates include: Keith Lehrer, RC Sleigh, Ernest Sosa , Fred Feldman, Dean Zimmerman and Dale Jacquette.

Among his research projects, his participation in the processing and publication of the estate of Franz Brentano should be emphasized. This project was initiated and financially supported by John Brentano, the son of Franz Brentano. Brentano also made his father's library available for this purpose.

Positions

Roderick Chisholm defended, among other things, the possibility of empirical knowledge within empirical principles, with the result that in most situations it is more rational to trust your senses and memory than the other way around.

He was also known as a specialist in the history of philosophy and made many references to the philosophy of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. His research interests included the philosophical concepts of Aristotle , Franz Brentano , Alexius Meinong , Ludwig Wittgenstein , Thomas von Aquin and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz .

metaphysics

What we perceive as everyday objects loses and gains parts again and again. Molecules were torn away from time. The same goes for bodies. You keep winning and losing parts. But people, whatever they already are, survive the changes in the body. Thus, Chisholm came to the conclusion that human persons are not identical to their bodies, nor to any part of the body that circumvents the changes. At some point in his career, he suggested that human beings are small substances inside the brain. They have no particles and therefore cannot lose or gain any.

Epistemology

According to Chisholm, epistemology consists of 4 Socratic questions:

1.) What can I know?

2.) How can I separate the important from the unimportant?

3.) How do I know what is true?

4.) How can I construct true statements?

In order to understand the process of knowledge , it is necessary to distinguish between different stages:

D1: it is likely that something is true. It is more reasonable to believe than not to believe.

D2: Belief is acceptable. Not believing is no more reasonable than believing.

D3: It is undisputed that something is true. It is more reasonable to believe than not to believe.

D4: It is obvious that something is true. This implies, first, that it is undisputed and, second, that there is no belief in it, that it is more reasonable to believe than to believe in it.

D5: It is certain that something is true. The data is obvious and there is no evidence that trusting such evidence would be more reasonable than believing in the original data.

D2 implies D1, D3 implies D2 and D1, etc.

It is fundamentally important to understand that “being obvious” does not automatically mean “being true” - this is more like “being certain / undisputed”.

Example: We think of an employee in an office who works there 5 days a week.

• If he's here today, then it is likely for him that you will work today in all the offices that worked in yesterday.
• It would be acceptable to assume that some other offices are also working today.
• A sound of work seems to come from an office above or below his office. For our observer, this makes the fact that you work in this office undisputed.
• For him it is obvious that you work in his office today and
• he will be sure that his office is open today.

If we knew what exactly our person really knows about his business building, then this data would be practically significant for us.

There are three different stages in this Socratic process:

1.) "methodological doubt" (we should brace our judgments)

2.) "Searching for a basis" ("appearances" - objects that we perceive with our senses)

3.) "the way back" (we choose what we want to believe)

As rational living beings, we know that some assertions imply others, and also that some of them negate others. Furthermore, some can confirm some others or vice versa. So if we come across two mutually negative statements, we will consequently say goodbye to at least one of them. With this process of filtering, we select the data that is acceptable. So gradually we get the data that is undoubtedly correct.

If we can ever know what we know, then we can have knowledge of what we are entitled to believe. Such knowledge is objective. The statements can be either right or wrong. But under what conditions can we even think that we know what is true?

We can at least say that: if a statement is justified by the fact that it is definitely true, then if you reflect on how this belief is formed and if you ask yourself about the correctness of the statement, then you will know whether it is really true.

Privileged access

We have privileged access to some of the processes of our mind.

This doctrine has two sides:

• Access: towards the content of our thinking - either intellectual (e.g. belief) or emotional (love, hate) or sensual (sensory perception).
• Privilege: the parts of our thinking present themselves directly to us, the owners.

Example: You think about going for a walk. If you think about it, you immediately know that you are thinking about it. There is no need to look for further evidence to be certain. Using "thinking" as usual, we might think that "thinking about walking" implies adequate evidence of believing that someone is thinking about walking.

We also have privileged access to certain data about our feelings. I don't immediately know that a leaf I see is green - but I know right away that something appears green.

"If someone wants to find out if I'm depressed, then he / she has to know a lot more about me than I need to know in order to conclude that I'm depressed."

The unconscious is also needed to be able to understand thoughts; therefore we need a lot of detailed knowledge about the person. By researching all the data about a person, conscious thoughts and desires are discovered, as well as the potential conscious states.

If a unit can think and feel, then it cannot be anything but a substance. It can e.g. B. not be a number. Namely, a number cannot think or feel. So what is this thing that feels unconscious yearnings if it is not the subject of conscious yearnings?

Two possible answers:

• a first possibility would be to say that there is still a second substance in each of us and it is unconscious; this second substance can hate things that the first substance loves and vice versa.
• but one could also say that for each of us there is still a quasi-substance which is similar to the substance (it can feel), but which does not fit into any known category.

No matter how important psychoanalysis is, it is simply inadequate epistemologically and ontologically.

Within the categorizations we take some conscious action for our example; judge, wonder, want or hope. We can know what these terms mean. As rational beings, we can grasp the nature of these things. We can know what it's like to own these things. We can see that these are things that only individual examples can have. And they cannot belong to abstract objects (such as numbers or relationships). One can hope that the rain will fall, but no process or number or relationship can hope for it. So there is an individual substance that has these properties. We can exclude three phases from this:

• i can know i hope for rain
• as a rational living being I can understand what it means to hope for rain
• I find that the only entity that can have the quality of hoping for rain is something individual or a substance

Appearances and Reality

How should one identify appearances? If we know under which conditions an external physical being can be perceived, then one can foresee which appearances it will assume.

Aristotle already criticized the fact that natural scientists before him believed that there can be no black or white without a view. In this sense, a question could also be called: "Does a falling tree make a sound even if nobody is in the forest?"

If we say that the objects of visual sense perception are surfaces in the body of the subject, then we draw the conclusion that the subject needs a body if it wants to perceive something. What you perceive is so naturally a part of the body.

The objects of visual sense perception are definite. It is either that all objects of sensory perception are individual or that some of them are individual and others have completely different properties.

Our qualitative experience is subjective because its existence depends on the existence of the understanding subject of the experience.

swell

• Hahn, Lewis Edwin (Ed.): The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm , Open court, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois (1997). ISBN 0-8126-9356-6

Publications (selection)

• "Perception: A Philosophical Study" / "Perceiving" (Cornell University Press, 1957)
• "Epistemology" (DTV, 1979; Buchner, 2004) / "Theory of Knowledge" (Prentice Hall, 1966, 1977, 1988)
• "The Person and the Object" / "Person and Object" (George Allen and Unwin, 1976)
• "The first person" (Minnesota University Press, 1981)
• "A Realistic Theory of Categories" (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Web links

• Literature by and about Roderick Chisholm in the catalog of the German National Library
• Richard Feldman and Fred Feldman:  Roderick Chisholm. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .