Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:00:11.544Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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