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Could We be Brains in a Vat?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Smith
Peter Smith*
Affiliation:
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
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Extract

The course of my experience is quite consistent with the hypothesis that it is being produced by a mad scientist who is feeding into my sensory receptors entirely delusive stimuli. Indeed, I could at this very moment be nothing more than a brain floating in a vat of nutrients, my nerve ends linked up to some infernal apparatus by means of which my unknown deceiver induces in me utterly erroneous beliefs about the world.

So begins a familiar line of thought which dramatizes an equally familiar sceptical problem about the relation between our experiences and the world. However, Hilary Putnam has recently offered a marvellously ambitious argument which is intended to kill stone-dead the philosophical fantasy that we might be deluded brains in a vat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 115 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1984

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References

1 See the opening chapter of Putnam, Hilary Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar All quotations are from this chapter.

2 Cf. Dennett's, Daniel fantasy in his superb entertainment ‘Where am I?’ in his Brainstorms (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books 1978).Google Scholar

3 To keep things simple, I will adopt Putnam's phrasing here: if you think (correctly in my view) that there are further problems lurking here, then so much the worse for Putnam's original argument.

4 Those with whom I have discussed Putnam's argument seem equally divided into two camps — one holding that Putnam is obviously right, the other that he is obviously wrong. I can't agree that the matter is obvious either way, for (as I have suggested above) it is not clear how Putnam's argument is properly to be understood. But I can now offer a diagnosis of the dissent: Those who side with Putnam have seen that he points to reasons for thinking that the speculation that we are radically deluded brains in this-worldly vats is self-defeating. Those who side against Putnam have seen that the role of fantasies about brains-in-vats is to provide a model of an epistemic predicament, and it cannot be ruled out that we are in such a predicament merely by showing that we are not actually brains-invats of a this-worldly sort.

5 See e.g. Putnam, Hilary ‘Realism and Reason’ in his Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978).Google Scholar