#g.e. moore

[thehumanfront]

Moore’s paradox

(Pictured: We tie knots in our minds from our misunderstandings of language, according to Wittgenstein. He wanted ‘to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’: liberate us from cases like Moore’s paradox by making language less ambiguous and more truth-apt.)

Named after G.E. Moore, Moore’s paradox illustrates how it may be possible to make logically valid statements containing contradictory beliefs. To borrow Moore’s own example, ‘It is raining but I do not believe it is raining’: ‘P and I believe not-P’. Intuitively, this seems bizarre! How is that statement valid?!

Belief isn’t a simple statement of facts. The paradox rests on there being a genuine belief about the world (it’s an epistemic paradox). It arises from your believing something in contradiction to what you just said.

Moore suggested that the solution is to say P isn’t an assertion but an implication: it’s not contradictory to undermine only an implication. However, fellow analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was greatly influenced by this paradox, offered a different take.

He blamed language in the first-person point of view for the source of Moore’s paradox, which doesn’t arise in the third person (‘It is raining but she does not believe it is’) or past tense (‘It was raining but I did not believe it was’).

Wittgenstein thus called for clarification of the expression ‘I believe’, arguing that it isn’t intelligible: things are either true or they’re not. In Philosophical Investigations he writes:

‘How did we ever come to use such an expression as “I believe . . . ”? . . . Did we observe ourselves and other people and so discover belief?’

Hence ‘I believe’ is really just equivalent to ‘This is the case’. Thus ‘P’ and ‘I believe not-P’ are just two propositions of the same kind which do contradict each other, dispelling an unavoidable paradox.

Belief, true or false, is usually taken to be meaningful: it’s matched up against some kind of objectivity (e.g. through justification). This undermines Wittgenstein’s view that false beliefs aren’t possible. But, when we lift all of our pride about it, can we say such objectivity exists? Wittgenstein’s own version of truth is ‘deflationary’. For him, truth has no explicit meaning (e.g. it’s not verifiable). Rather, it is implicitly fixed to its own conditions for being true, making it superficial and expressive.

But isn’t it radical for Wittgenstein to deny the meaning of ‘I believe’? We mentally report on what we think to be true every day . . .

Either way, feel free to ignore Ludwig’s advice and commit Moore’s paradox.

Will you?

You will and I believe you won’t.

[anaxerneas]

Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

What I find is that I continually want to write to people, but hate it when I come to do it. It is so difficult to say what you mean, & one knows how different from what you meant it & from what it would be in conversation, it will all sound.

from Leonard Woolf’s April 30th 1905 letter to G.E. Moore

[thats-absurd]

[anaxerneas]

G. E. Moore's notes on "Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930-1933" from Philosophical Occasions

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

[myoldpseudonym]

omg omg i'm so excited. this is fifty pages long. the first paragraph says literally NOTHING 😍🤤😳

[principleofplenitude]

“I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.” So the 22-year-old Bertrand Russell wrote to his fiancée Alys Pearsall Smith in November 1894. The object of his “extravagant admiration” was George Edward Moore (always known as “GE Moore” because he hated both his given names), who was 18 months younger than Russell and at that time just an undergraduate.   Russell was reporting to Alys on a meeting of the Apostles, the self-selecting and self-consciously elite discussion group (founded in 1820, and still in existence today) which only the students and fellows considered to be the brightest and best were invited to join. At their meetings, a member presented a case in a short paper—usually on a philosophical, cultural or political subject, designed to display both erudition and wit—which was then put to the vote. Russell had been enlisted in his second year at Cambridge, and Moore, likewise, two years later. To be revered within the Apostles was to be a superstar of the British intellectual elite. In the 1890s it was a society with an exceptional reach into the worlds of culture and politics, as well as ideas. At the time of Russell’s letter to Alys, active members of the society included the philosophers James Ward and JME McTaggart, the political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the polymath Edward Marsh and the art critic Roger Fry. It wasn’t only in Cambridge quadrangles but soon also the squares of London in which Moore’s star shone. There was plenty of cross-over between the two sets. Several of the Bloomsbury luminaries were elected to the Apostles: John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard Woolf and EM Forster. Bloomsbury would develop a veneration of Moore as great as, if not greater than, that expressed by Russell. Beatrice Webb told Leonard Woolf that, although she had known most of the distinguished men of her time, she had never met a great man. “I suppose you don’t know GE Moore,” Woolf replied. In his autobiography, he reflected that Moore was “the only great man whom I have ever met or known in the world of ordinary, real life.”   Today, this veneration seems a little hard to understand. It is still customary (just about) to lump Moore in with Russell and Wittgenstein, as a trio exemplifying the analytic tradition of philosophy that flourished in England during the 20th century, but the reputations of Russell and Wittgenstein today are far greater. To give one small indicator, nobody has ever suggested to me that I follow my biographies of Russell and Wittgenstein with one of Moore.

“He was the most revered philosopher of his era. So why did GE Moore disappear from history?“ from Prospect Magazine