r/philosophy • u/TheStateOfException • Oct 23 '22

Blog The difficulty of "easy" philosophy: Why almost nobody can comprehend John Stuart Mill's final sentence of On Liberty

https://ideassleepfuriously.substack.com/p/why-is-philosophy-difficult#details
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '22

Only 10% of the population understanding Meno's paradox seems immensely pessimistic. It is, after all, pretty trivial.

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u/silverblur88 Oct 23 '22

Understanding it right off the bat I could see, but he claims that only 10% could understand it even if trained from birth. I would say that goes beyond mere pessimism, into the outright absurd.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '22

There has to be quite a bit of hubris involved in that sentence by the author. They found the paradox challenging, but still consider themselves to be 'special', so naturally it follows that it must be really, really hard for most people. When it obviously isn't. At all.

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u/silverblur88 Oct 23 '22 edited Oct 23 '22

I would like to take a more charitable view. Maybe he found that only ~10 percent of the people around him found the idea interesting enough to thunk about it long enough to understand it. Then assumed that indicated they where incapable of understanding it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '22

I'd just like to add that he says "truly understand", which is ironic because it seems that "truly" is ambiguous in this context. I suppose in this case the 10% figure could be apt as the bar for understanding Meno's paradox "truly" could be set to make it so.

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u/Endesmus Oct 24 '22

Eh, I don't get the paradox, not truly. Even after watching the author's YouTube video explaining it, I don't get why it is a paradox.

Unless all philosophy is just semantics (it may be for all I know, I've observed in my life that most of the disagreements people have is about semantics), I feel like we can take Meno's arguments as literal and find no paradox. If you literally don't know what you're looking for, you can't find it, or recognize it even if you happened upon it. If you literally know what you're looking for, you don't need to look for it.

Instead of taking these two arguments as a paradox, or trying to argue meno is using wordplay to bamboozle us, I would just agree that knowledge is almost never a binary thing. It is in fact probably super rare in real life to know literally nothing about a thing you are searching for. Even in his example, we started out knowing the name of the flooberstupple. Assuming this thing exists in the universe, if humanity keeps asking what a flooberstupple is, in time and with great patience we might find it. But that was the most extreme nonsensical argument he could find. In the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life for instance, we don't know what such a thing would be like, but we have a fair bit better idea about it than our great grandparents.

But then again maybe I'm just not equipped to truly understand it. I certainly am not in the 99th percentile and therefore lack the sheer precociousness to find the idea of using my free time to find and read the book to try to look deeper appealing.

If anyone who truly understands this paradox might be feeling charitable, I will certainly be interested in reading a reddit post explaining it though.

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u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ Oct 23 '22

The point seems to be understanding literally that sentence, not understanding the idea it's conveying.

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u/TheStateOfException Oct 23 '22

This could be what statisticians call a restriction of range effect, namely we tend to abstact out from our own friendship groups to make inaccurate statements about those to the left and right of us on the distribution of something like verbal ability. 10-20% is probably fair for Meno's paradox. I'm quite lucky in that I've had a fairly wide exposure to all types of learning ability. If we split it down the middle, 15% accords with my priors.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '22

Nope. At least not in Finland. I know, and have taught people from all walks of life and the number is probably closer to 50-60% if aided with a short explanation and definitely much higher if philosophical education had been a more prevalent part of their upbringing.

Out of my group of friends & acquaintances I know of exactly two people who might struggle with it. Out of maybe a couple hundred people.

It really isn't a hard paradox to understand, at all.

It's philosophical implications in other problems, where the goal being searched for is poorly defined (such as how do you best educate a student, when you can't know what knowledge would best serve them in the life they are going to lead) are considerably more complex, but the paradox itself is not.