I think I just completed Moore’s work.
I will say in advance that I am not well-read in philosophy, the different views and timelines, and all of the shared or commonly used phrases or classes of thinking.
Here is all the content I consumed before writing this:
(Soames on Moore chapter 1) : COMMON SENSE AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. (Soames on Moore chapter 2) : MOORE ON SKEPTICISM, PERCEPTION, AND KNOWLEDGE. My professor’s lectures which match those same chapters. An AI-generated podcast based on those same chapters.
If you feel that I misinterpreted the overall argument or reasoning from those same chapters or that those chapters completely fail in the grand scheme of this Moore vs. skeptic debate, please let me know. Better yet, let me know why your interjection is right, and if your interjection is proper enough, why it can find no way to be inserted into Moore’s work and complement it, or rearranged in a way that attacks skeptics with the same points I write below.
Let’s move forward with the idea that Moore saw, and critics saw, his work as incomplete. Let’s put the incompleteness into words beforehand. Label it how you choose. I must think you will find one of these fair, or at least fair from having derived this from the two (Soame) chapters alone.
— The philosophical difficulty is explaining the relationship between the subjective experience and the external object.
— If two people have different sensory experiences of the same object, what exactly are they perceiving, and how do those experiences give them knowledge of the physical object itself?
— Moore believed he had established that we know the external world exists, but he could not satisfactorily explain how that knowledge is possible.
Taking what he has already established, you can then extend his anti-skeptical goal by bringing up how individuals interact with the same object, and sufficiently close the gap between individual perceptions and objective objects we come across. Let’s play around.
A person can drive a passenger across town. Stopping at the stop signs they both see and recognize, following the speed limit they can either sense, see on the odometer, and refer to from known written laws, they avoid running over people and animals; they both can share a simultaneous prediction of a car wrongly pulling out and their expected and shared fear of a negative outcome, a crash. Okay, let them swap; the passenger drives across town this time.
(Not a natural transition from the previous paragraph, but let me insert this quickly) While there is no inherent or defined good vs. bad, and it is impossible to define which actions are right or wrong or good or bad, the crossover between his two interests, common sense and ethics, should come to this:
He was on the right track with the impossibility of measuring consequences, but the conversation should be reframed and reentered with:
Whether a person acts in their authentic way. And yes, still, the goodness or badness is impossible to count practically; the proper way to determine what Moore calls consequence should be a metaphorical tally of the opinions from others throughout time (so people yet to be born as well) on the individual’s action, and, most importantly, weighing each individual’s perspective (I do not see the need to nor wish to define equal tallies or perspectives) with their greater or lesser information on all of the factors and small steps and events which led to their action. Someone who grew up with those in question or witnessed the behavior in person should have a greater tally. Let me remind you, it is impossible to attain this tally, leaving the philosophical question still up for debate, of course.
(Okay, I will now continue)
Moore and skeptics use someone hallucinating a dagger on the wall, and how that fits into reality. What is that hallucination? Does it really serve as a major flaw in Moore’s work and cannot be worked into his philosophy? I do not think so. You can go for that drive, high-five, play soccer, chit-chat about dreams, share a common and continuous dialogue on a new invention with your co-inventor, meeting them in the middle with a physical or agreed-upon non-physical invention which is no different than an agreed-upon hallucinated dagger, further demonstrating two interacting with a shared reality, a reality which everyone in the world but them does not know of yet, but it still exists, whether a novel (patented) software or the newest mode of travel tucked away in a bunker in Siberia. We go for enough drives, we both solve the same question number 7 in the same math class with the same teacher in the same class at the same grade and school, we run enough football routes, we laugh at the same jokes on TV, we chit-chat about songs, we like the same artists who are indeed playing live music, we went from stick and stone to observing drones delivering that shampoo product or candy you dislike, or I dislike through shared language, conversation, and all of Moore’s common sense realities offered, truisms. So, we go for enough drives where we believe someone says they saw a tree fall in the woods. You go check the woods; oh yes, that tree did fall. A person exists, and further, many exist, who believe you saw Bigfoot in the woods. So, let’s stop there, Bigfoot? Would that not be direct proof of Moore’s flaw? Or is it the perfect buildup to show why it is not some final flaw that keeps Moore’s reasoning incomplete forever?
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Have someone else come into the room, ask if they see the dagger. If they don’t, invite a third into the room and ask if they see the dagger. Do they, do they not, sort of? Follow that to infinity and the logic, prefaced with Moore’s common sense work and truisms, prevails forever. Whether you agree with Moore’s common sense and truisms or still see him lacking that linkage- the linkage you chose from those four bullet points at the start of this essay- I feel you must admit that this essay is continuing his momentum, allowing me to indeed reference Moore fairly as a preface to this writing. So, whether you already settled alongside Moore or not, I must think that you can agree with this shared momentum and my hope to supplement and even complete Moore’s work. If you cannot, perhaps you’ll reconsider after reading the remainder of my essay.
If Moore offers the idea of being either observed in space or met in space, can we not just allow Moore to combine those and complete his theory? Allow us to grasp the moon, to meet and interact with that far and elusive observation. Allow us to hallucinate a black moon, allow the astronaut to touch the moon and tell us through a third and all of the ever-incoming tallies to reassure us that the moon is the moon as we know it outside of our hallucination, or even allow us to teach you, to teach you the moon is white, as you also were taught the earth is round and not flat.
Oh, touch the moon, the skeptic says? Let me throw what the skeptic sees as unverifiable instead of unfalsifiable synonyms that they saw Moore cannot prove the astronaut met the moon in or by. Skeptic, please do not point far into space and simply say, “no”.
Well, they won’t arrive at a contradiction. Take this as further reasoning of Moore’s truisms and common sense philosophy and as an attempt to link that linkage you think of and defined from the four bullets above or unstated 5th bullet point of your choosing, yet allow these paragraphs to be inserted into your skeptic train of thought in a fair and unabsurd way. Let’s continue.
They show that you and I can get punched in the leg and both say it hurts, yet there is no way to prove that my hurt is equal to your hurt. They rely on the limits of human language. They rely on the limits of human language and flip it into Moore and those punched into being unable to prove an agreed-upon hurt. I don’t wish to refer back to the tallies, all the forms of tallies and PHQ-9s and the skeptics’ historical hypocrisy already exposed by Moore. I do not wish either to reframe the skeptics calling our hurt from being punched in the leg unagreeable, even as it is obviously unagreeable, as no two punches contain the same force on the same form and weight of leg at the same angle, which in itself points to the fact that time exists, the time skeptics commonly label as unreal, time shown through movements of objects, objects shown as truisms by Moore, call it time or cause it causal or butterfly effects leading to someone punching you in the leg, moving to me and punching me in the leg. I do not suggest they make some sort of intervention at this point, which could just be reframed as them suggesting two identical punches can be thrown, identical with two separate parties, identical, but then ask we make the hurt of our legs the same? Define same, skeptic. Same, are we two? Does the word same itself not require something you admit is there; it makes it the same, the same, or different? How can you ask me, or rather firmly stand with the perspective that you and I got punched in the leg and we are not allowed to both say hurt and move on, move on to the upcoming bar fight and drive home and dreams and shared memories we will chat about tomorrow?
I just do not get how, relying on Moore’s established truisms and your historical hypocrisies, that you can suggest some flaw in unidentical senses and perceptions or reality of the tree that fell in the woods. It would require one unified being. A being you say we must prove is real, asking us to prove the being real by aligning that being with another being; you ask two to prove there are two through the lens only possible of one, a one who must prove his twoness to you, a second.
We would have to be the same, and same does not allow for another sameness without acknowledgement of a second and different same.
And let’s say that dagger we’re trying to figure out has another layer. It’s pink. How can we match our senses well enough with all the premises we have established already and with all of the words in the human language? You must allow that someone can describe their hallucinated dagger on that wall. You ask for perfect description, really. Why not allow the caveman to say dagger-yes and hearback, dagger-yes, no, or maybe? It is only possible if there is one caveman, no, same yet unsame caveman lingering outside of the cave and eager to be proven unreal yet hear your lectures and read your hypocrisies?
So, I have already said a third person can determine if there is a dagger. The two can discuss the dagger within the limits of human language; the third can side with the first or second and weigh in with a level only an absurd critic could call unsatisfactory.
But your philosophy makes us prove (and, consequently, how) we arrived at this sentence using human language, where each additional word besides dagger, large, sharp, adds to the corner you push us into and shows what you see as further and further proof that your dagger is different than my dagger. Allow that third person. Let them all touch that same white envelope. Have them push or pull, throw and bite, feel and crumble, however they prefer, however that justly different yet real other person wishes. They can come to the same thing, a white envelope. They both can come to the truth of that snowflake, but you require an impossibility: two snowflakes being the same.
Skeptic,
We have come all of this way using language; we ask language to explain why language can’t explain why two people can’t have the same perception of a white envelope, where language itself is made up of words, words that share no exact match. I say goodness and the white envelope are not too different. It only takes a few people to conclude that goodness is like the color yellow. You push us to explain an explanation that cannot be offered, which I show support for by the hypocrisy or impossibility in how the language you expect an explanation from works itself. Let the word majority (of people’s tallies) sufficiently prove the realness of an objective envelope.
Please admit that I have crappy vision compared to others and we must look at the same envelope; please admit my vocabulary needs to be improved or completely reset and created by a second person to have equal footing with the second who also is perplexed by some white envelope. That person to be born breaks any tie.
Skeptic, create a word that is completely original. A word that cannot be explained in any combination of human language and coordination. A word that cannot be described through our senses or how we interact in our 3-D world. Once you create that word, please attempt to give that word a definition and run into a contradiction. Reliance on other words, where each word in that definition also explains it in a manner, in a more and more way, to make it difficult for two to agree upon how much their leg hurts after something (which you claim to be unreal) punches them.
Yes, I say contradiction. I do. This word, a word for an object, recurrence, hallucination, God, time, please, choose any word. Who will you tell this word, tell this word to and not point to some other object to help explain that word. Point to that similar object; see the fault in whoever you tell the word’s interpretation. The agreed-upon word drifts further and further apart. Watch your dagger, your envelope, your word; watch it and watch all of the others interact and explain and refer and see or feel and completely misunderstand it. But it is your word; is that word not real?
