conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Introducing Empiricism about Introducing, Philosophy, Devon with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is the author of numerous Introducing bestsellers including Philosophy. He has taught the subject for many years and lives in Devon.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'Introducing Empiricism
  Most people assume that the world is pretty much as it appears to them'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Introducing Empiricism
  Most people assume that the world is pretty much as it appears to them. They believe a cat exists when they see it cross the road. But philosophers are, notoriously, more demanding. They say that beliefs are plentiful, cheap and easy, but true knowledge is more limited, and much harder to justify. This is why philosophers normally begin by separating knowledge from belief.
  That's enough to convert my beliefs into knowledge. But there is always a slight possibility that I am wrong. The world might not be as I believe it to be. Problems like these worry philosophers called "empiricists", because they think that private sensory experiences are virtually all we've got, and that they're the primary source of all human knowledge.
  But I don't. What I see is a wonderful illusion created by my mind. Of course, I am totally unaware of that fact because my perceptions seem so natural, automatic and rapid. Psychologists tell me that what I actually see is a kind of internal picture, and they devise all sorts of tests and puzzles to prove it.
  They say that the trees provide me with a "tree sensation" in my mind, and it's that which I see, not the trees themselves. If that is true, then all I ever see are "copies" of those trees, which I assume are very similar in appearance to the originals.
  But, if I think about this even harder, then I realize I have no way of telling how accurate these copies are, because I cannot bypass my mind to take another "closer look" at the originals.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The truth of a proposition like " **Smith is male** " depends on a fact being claimed about the world and is only verifiable by observation.
  This is a very important distinction which helped to clear up all kinds of philosophical muddles, notably the problem of "causation". (Hume insisted causation was a matter of fact, not a logical necessity.)
  Ever since Plato, philosophers have always admired "relations of ideas" because there is a reassuring "necessity" or guaranteed certainty about them.
  MATTERS OF FACT NEVER HAVE THAT KIND OF CERTAINTY BECAUSE THE WORLD ISN'T ALWAYS RELIABLE. SMITH MAY BE FEMALE.
  What Hume's distinction means is that all claims to existence, all problems of causation, and all science can never be like the truths of maths and logic beyond all possible doubt. There can be no "demonstrative science" and no way that God's existence can be definitively proved. Furthermore, if statements seem to be neither relations of ideas nor matters of fact (like a lot of theology), then they are probably nonsense masquerading as sense.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Wittgenstein teased out many of the absurdities that seem to be inevitable if we think of the mind as being like some kind of private room. Minds are necessarily more public, primarily because they think with a collective language. Nevertheless, materialist philosophers of mind are still puzzled and irritated by the fact that human minds and their experiences persist in remaining private and largely unknowable.
  No matter how much we know about wave-lengths of light and human sensory perception, science seems unable to describe or explain the total uniqueness of our perceptual experiences or "qualia".
  Recent philosophers like **Richard Rorty** (b. 1931) may be right to argue that the inescapable autonomy of language means that it can never be anything like a "mirror" of reality and that meaning cannot possibly be derived from the world. Nevertheless, when the postmodernist sociologist **Jean Baudrillard** (b. 1929) claims that modern wars are media events, and so "do not happen", the desire to verify the meaning of his remarks against concrete experience becomes rather tempting.
  Rorty's claim agrees with British Empiricism which has always been a moderate enterprise of limited aspirations, suspicious of great philosophical systems or "grand narratives", and pessimistic about the extent of human knowledge.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Wittgenstein teased out many of the absurdities that seem to be inevitable if we think of the mind as being like some kind of private room. Minds are necessarily more public, primarily because they think with a collective language. Nevertheless, materialist philosophers of mind are still puzzled and irritated by the fact that human minds and their experiences persist in remaining private and largely unknowable.
  No matter how much we know about wave-lengths of light and human sensory perception, science seems unable to describe or explain the total uniqueness of our perceptual experiences or "qualia".
  Recent philosophers like **Richard Rorty** (b. 1931) may be right to argue that the inescapable autonomy of language means that it can never be anything like a "mirror" of reality and that meaning cannot possibly be derived from the world. Nevertheless, when the postmodernist sociologist **Jean Baudrillard** (b. 1929) claims that modern wars are media events, and so "do not happen", the desire to verify the meaning of his remarks against concrete experience becomes rather tempting.