 Hello, I'm J.J. Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Assignment Blackburn is one of the leading philosophers of this generation. It's penetrating ideas about the nature of truth and the ultimate goal of morality are perhaps his lasting philosophical legacy. Professional philosophers know Professor Blackburn as the leading proponent of quasi-realism, a variant of moral expressivism which provides a non-realist account of our moral discourses and practices. Non-professionals know him for his popular philosophy books such as Think, A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, a very short introduction, and Being Good, an Introduction to Ethics. His most recent book, Truth, focuses on ideas like post-truth and fake news. Now to discuss his ideas on the truth and the good and why they matter, let's welcome Simon Blackburn, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University, research professor at UNC Chapel Hill, and professor at the New College of the Humanities. Hello, Professor Blackburn, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hello, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Okay, so before getting into our main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. So for you, what is philosophy and how did you get started studying it? Well, I think a lot of children quite naturally have sort of embryonic philosophical ideas. They puzzle themselves, and I know that I did, about things like what happens where space ends, or does it go on forever? What happens when time begins? What happened before time begins? Or is that a contradiction? And questions, of course, about the existence and nature of the gods, which in any religious society are going to naturally occur to thinking people. And so I guess at my childhood and next milestone, if you call it that, on my philosophical journey was a master at my school, asked us to read a book by a man called G. E. Moore, who's quite a well-known British philosopher of the beginning of the 20th century, a friend of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, and Moore wrote a book called Principia Ethica, in which there was this argument that beauty cannot lie in the eye of the beholder, because you can perfectly well imagine a, say, a lovely landscape, but with no one seeing it, no one to behold it. And he thought that refuted the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. And I protested to the master, I said, no, this is a very poor argument, because after all, you asked me to imagine this beautiful landscape. And of course I've got my own aesthetic, my view about what a beautiful landscape would contain. So I imagined that. So why not say that its beauty lies in my eye, and then I am in effect the beholder, this imagined scenario. The master was a bit stumped by this. So he said you better go and read philosophy at university. And I read Moore and then I went up to Cambridge, and I had a wonderful teacher, and that set me on my journey. So that was how it came about. Okay, so who influenced you to pursue a career in academic philosophy? Well, my direct teacher in Cambridge, Cambridge has a sort of collegiate system in the college, you're directly under the tutelage of one person, supervisor or tutor. And my supervisor was a man called Kazimiel Louis, who wasn't a very well known philosopher, he did write a few quite sort of specialist papers. But he wasn't well known. But he was a magnificent teacher, he had this gift of knowing when to be a bit tough on you because you've been lazy. And knowing when to be a bit kind to you because you tried your best. That always put an edge on meetings with him, you never knew whether you were going to be praised or blamed. And I think that stimulated a lot of us in my college to become thrilled by philosophy and engaged with it and we discussed it all the time. Whereas other students go and discuss football, we went and discuss philosophical arguments. So that's how my career started. Yeah, so you started reading G. Moore's Pinky Pia Ethical, which I think your work actually hinted or well influenced by because your work focuses on two main things, the nature of two and the grounds of morality. So let's start first with your work on you. What is the philosophy about the notion and what are the suggested aspects? Yeah. Well, I was motivated to write about truth partly because of the prevailing atmosphere of postmodernism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It's slightly declined now, but at the time there was quite a kind of skepticism about the notion of truth. And there were relativistic noises that different people had their own different truths that somehow truth had lost some of its luster. And I felt that these were very dangerous. And of course in the decade since, since 2015 say, we've learned to think in terms of a post-truth world and that's I think even more dangerous. So I wrote this little book on truth with that as the target. I wanted to show that truth survives these postmodernist skepticisms. The way I thought, I mean, the way it's tended to work in my mind was that a lot of people, I mean the first thought you have when you think about the notion of truth is that it's correspondence with the facts. I remember a remark like I'm sitting in my office is true because it corresponds to the fact that I'm sitting in my office. So that's the first thought. Now, a lot of philosophers said, well, that's a perfectly good thing to say. It's not that there's anything wrong with it. But it's not very insightful. It doesn't give us as it were a theory of truth. If you look carefully at the notion of a fact, you'd see that we've got no real access to the idea of a fact, except as something which is, as it were built to correspond with the truth. So it's as if these two wear each other's socks, but they don't actually get us any further. They're locked together. Sure, you can lock together truth and fact. But you can't see them as separately contributing to understanding each other. So, faced with that, traditionally philosophy went in various other directions, one of which is called the coherence theory of truth, and says that basically our only test for truth. For a new candidate, suppose somebody comes along with something we ask is that true. The only test we can introduce is whether it's as it were fits in with the rest of what we believe. And that gives rise to think all the coherence theory of truth, the idea is that something's true if it coheres well with the rest of what you believe. And there's something sort of hard headed about that because it gives it's right about one of the ways we think about truth. But it won't do as it stands because if your head is full of nonsense anyhow, suppose you're the victim of a conspiracy theory. So you think that all doctors are in a league to try to pretend that vaccines are safe when they're not or something like that. You're an anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist. Well, you'll probably find new things out there on the web, which cohere with that belief. But that's because the belief is nonsense. And those things are nonsense too. So you might read that, you know, 500 children have died in the Philippines out because of measles vaccines or something. And that might just be a lie, which somebody's put on the web. But it would cohere with your view, your anti-seedent view that the vaccinations are dangerous. And you'd regard it as true. Well, you'd regard it as true, but you'd be wrong. I mean, I think that you're just, as it were, buttressing your lie or buttressing your falsehood. So coherence won't do either. And faced with that, a lot of philosophers have started to worry. I mean, the most famous is a late 19th century, early 20th century philosopher Gottlob Freger. And in Cambridge, he was followed by a great philosopher who died very young, Frank Ramsey, and then Wittgenstein. And these all held that, well, perhaps it's a mistake to concentrate on the notion of truth. Because after all, it performs a kind of disappearing act. And by that they mean there's no difference between asking whether it's true that I'm sitting in my study and whether I'm sitting in my study. You don't have to, as it were, introduce the notion of truth. There's one question about where I am, which is whether I'm in my study, let's say. And once you've solved that, you've solved everything there is to solve about whether it's true that I'm in my study. There's no further question. Well, if the words it's true that don't introduce a further question, then perhaps the next thing we should ask ourselves is whether there's a real problem here. Is there some slippery thing, the nature of truth? Or is it best just to think of truth as some sort of device, it has a utility. But perhaps its utility isn't to introduce a new notion. It's more like terms like and or not, which are there as it was part of our bookkeeping. They don't by themselves refer to anything. They're just part of the inferential web that we build in order to think. So this is sometimes called the deflationist or minimalist theory of truth. And it's basically a notion that's an aspect of this, the story I want to tell and do tell in this, in this book which you're sharing. Which is the truth. Don't get excited by the grandeur of truth or the sort of slightly mysterious and marvelous and sort of almost divine nature of truth. Just think instead of ordinary everyday judgments that you make, perhaps without thinking, you go out onto the road you look right you look left you see whether there's traffic coming. You judge that it's true that there's traffic coming. And as a result, you don't walk in front of it. And in thousands and thousands of occasions on thousands and thousands of occasions throughout normal day, you're making that kind of judgment all the time. And those are judgments, which are can also be framed in terms of truth. You judge that it's true that the traffic's coming. You judge it's true that the whole breakfast cereal is edible. You judge it's true that if you push the door it will open and so on and so on and so on. We know an awful lot about our way about the world. We navigate the world successfully, as indeed do other animals. So, we have an ecological niche and we are in that niche and by and large we do pretty well. This means there's really no room for notions like relativism about truth. Because the relativist is apt to say well you've got your truth, I've got my truth. Who's to say which is better and things like that. Well, I don't think it's, I don't think it's, it helps to talk about your truth and my truth. It's certainly true that I can have some beliefs that you don't share and you can have some beliefs that I don't share. Maybe you have a lot of beliefs about say the Philippines that I don't share because I've never been there and I don't know. And I may have a lot of beliefs about Cambridge that you don't share because you've never been here. You've never been here. You won't know things about Cambridge, I know. So of course we have different beliefs. But there's nothing in having a belief which entitles you automatically to say that you've got a truth, your belief might be false. And it's essential to the notion of belief that it's got this polarization, a belief can be true, it can be false. The analogy I quite like and I think I use in the book. Well, I'm not sure I use it in that book. I used it anyhow in some writing. An analogy is with archery. Suppose you're a sportsman and you become interested in archery, the Olympic sport of shooting arrows at a target. You can't have a sport in which you're entitled to draw the bull's eye wherever the arrow lands. That's right. If you tried doing that, it's not that you'd hit the bull's eye every time. There'd be no such thing as hitting the right place because you're simply pretending that the right place is wherever your arrow landed. I think relativism about truth is a bit like that. You have a belief. The belief might hit the right place. That is, it might be true. It might correspond with the facts, but it might not be true. And if you say, oh, but it's my truth, that corresponds to drawing the bull's eye, what your belief is supposed to be, around whatever the belief is. And that just makes, just as the parallel move in archery makes nonsense of the whole idea of hitting the right place. So in the case of belief, this will make nonsense of the whole idea of having a belief, essential to the notion of belief, that a belief can be successful, true, stand up to inquiry, tell us of the way of the world. Or it can be false. It can mislead us and it can lead us down false paths and into mistakes. So, so I think that that's, that's my analogy for saying, don't get misled into a relativism about truth. It leads nowhere. Okay, so, so far we had four hearings of truth. So you have the correspondence theory of truth where truth is correspondence of fact coherence theory where a belief is true if it is, it coherence with a set of beliefs that you have. You also have the deflation is theory of truth where or redundancy theory or minimalist theory of truth where the predicate it is true functions like a logical device in our inferences and our thinking. And of course, your view you're espousing is a kind of pragmatic view or like what Ramsay, Frank Ramsay has told us the success view of truth. So, and, and of course, we touched on relativism about truth and that does not make sense in your view. But what's your main view about truth? So what's your answer to the question about the nature of truth? Well, as I think part of my philosophical temperament, because I'm a cheerful sort of person is to look for good in as many theories as I can. So I think there's something right about the idea of correspondence. It's very often, you know, if you want to, if you believe that there's, you know, there's Coca Cola in your refrigerator. Well, you know, that either corresponds to the fact that there is Coca Cola in your refrigerator, it doesn't the way to determine that is to go and look. So, there's something right about the idea that we submit beliefs to a kind of process of observation and verification when we hold them. I think too about the deflation is that there is no difference between judging that there's Coca Cola in the fridge and judging that it's true that there's Coca Cola in the fridge. Those two just the same. The, the aspect I'd like to bring in and that Frank Ramsay brought in was success in action, the utility of truth. It was somehow to connect our faculty of judgment of judging things as true or false as making of having beliefs with our success as active animals. We have our cognitive functions in order, like any other animal in order to advance our ways of living in the world. And if all the effort that we put into getting things right had nothing to do with acting properly with acting well, then it would be a mystery why evolution selected for it. Brains are very expensive evolutionary. They take a lot of support. There's a lot of blood. They take up a lot of nutrients. They take big brains. If they do us no good. Well, put it the other way around. What good do they do us. And then the good they do us is they enable to act well in the world. Now, the first person to think, well, not the first but one of the first people to think along those lines was William James. He was a philosopher of, again, the late 19th century, who was part of a group in Cambridge, which included Charles Sanders Purse himself, William James and eventually John Dewey and others called pragmatists. And they wanted to influence this aspect of practice of success of acting in ways that think about the desired goals that you have. And it went in a bit haywire, especially in James's handling, because he thought that that gave sort of carte blanche to any belief which made you feel comfortable or made you feel, you know, happy or gave you consolation. And in particular, he turned that to a defensive religious belief, which he thought had those advantages. There's never any kind of wishful thinking. You know, suppose you're a mother and your children or child lives in a different country, and you receive information that your child is committed to crime and is there to be tried and may go to prison. This is very disturbing, very upsetting. So much better not to believe it. Your life will perhaps towards the end of your life you can't do anything about this problem. Much better to brush it aside and go on as tranquil as you were before. Well, that's not, that's not because it's true, it's because of wishful thinking. So James James's defense of wishful thinking gave the pragmatist view rather a bad press, certainly in England, for example, they're very few people who followed him. It's slightly more congenial, I think to American philosophers who share the sort of American sort of get up and go attitude, you know, that some barge along getting our own way. So pragmatism took root there more firmly. In Ramsey's handling, it's much more sophisticated, much more interesting, I think, where he says, you know, we step back from an individual case of belief like that of the mother, and look at the general, you know, our cognitive apparatus. And it seems that it's inevitable it seems that if you cross again across a huge spectrum of cases in everyday life every day. I said, you know, earlier on that every day of your life you have thousands of beliefs which are endlessly checked and verified and by perception. You have thousands of occasions on which you behave sensibly, in which you're successful in navigating your way around the world. In avoiding getting run over by the traffic in avoiding poisoning yourself by trying to eat the chair you're sitting on or so on and so on. There's things which are second nature, of course. Why can't we forge some kind of ideas about truth by connecting it to success in action. And the simplest formula which Ramsey played with was that the content of a belief that what the belief actually means is given by the kind of action which it of which it ensures the success. I don't think that formula works for various quite technical reasons, which I put in my book. But I think it's on the right lines it's an important thing to say about truth. So my own attitude is that, well deflation ism as it were, gives us the logic of truth. It's important to connect truth with success and failure, success and failure in action, and of course with verification with the fact that true belief is one which will stand up to increasing evidence. So I like to put an amalgam of these things together and that's more or less the view that I defend in that book. Okay, so in your book, in this book, you argued that we cannot be in a post-truth world, as you mentioned, we're not in an alternative fact world as well. But what are your main reasons for this claim? I did like I was saying about relativism, and what I've in a sense been insisting on in this talk, that you could no more be in a post-truth world than you could be in a post-belief world. That is as soon as you've got beliefs, it's like taking part in archery. You're in the business of aiming at a target. If you don't care whether your beliefs are true or false, then you don't care about the point of having beliefs at all. That's like drawing the bull's eye wherever your arrow lands, it's not playing the game. We can't live without beliefs. Again, as I've been insisting, you have thousands of them every day. They come and go as you perceive your world, as you navigate around it, when we finish this talk, I'm going to go and have a coffee, I hope. I'm my way out of my study because I know it by heart, I could do it with my eyes shut, and so on. So I've got a belief about how to get out of my study, and of course it's true. And I'd fare very badly if it wasn't true, I'd pop my head onto the wall or something. I'm not going to do that. And neither is anybody who's navigating their way around the traffic, who's working their way through a menu, who's, and so on and so on, who's recognizing their friends. If you recognize your friends, you've got a true belief about who you're talking to, and so on. So you just can't do without it. What people are worried about I think when they're worried about a post-truth world shouldn't be described as a post-truth world. It's what they're worried about is that over a big swathe of things where they don't know the answer. There's no telling what is the right, what is the right answer. And what I think is that the sources of information we have are themselves unreliable and untrustworthy. And I think the malaise about post-truth is basically a malaise about the rise of untrustworthy news organs, untrustworthy bubbles and silos that people get into. They act into things like conspiracy theories. And then the Google and Facebook, because this is their advertising revenue, will direct them again and again to bubbles and silos of people who have the same views. Because it's much pleasant of finding other people agree with you than finding that they disagree with you. This lack of critical thinking, this lack of being open to criticism, which I think is the great enemy of us all these days. And then, of course, philosophy I think has a very important role in defence against that. Relocation in philosophy gives you a critical edge. You know that your own first thoughts may not be right. You know that your own first thoughts may not be the best thoughts you could have if only you could puzzle further through a problem, read a better authority, learn more about the science, whatever it may be. You can't be a decent philosopher without having thoughts about your own fallibility. And I think educating people to be aware of misinformation, of the possibility of blind delusion and error, and how often how seductive error is, because it's nice to believe some things and it's not nice to believe other things. Yeah, so from what I gather from your book, so the post-shoot phenomenon or the issue about post-shoot is actually not about truth, but about the evidence that we have, the reliability of our evidence. Exactly, I firmly believe that, exactly. Okay, so let's move on to another domain of your thinking, which is the good. So one domain that the notion of truth seems to be important is the moral domain. Most of our moral thinking seems to be influenced by the thought that there are moral truths. For example, we make conclusions from the truth that upholding human rights is good. So your view, developed in these two books, essays on cause, realism, and ruling passions, seems to run contrary to this idea. Could you give us an overall picture of your view about truth in the moral domain? Yes, well my overall view has changed slightly from the way, I mean you're absolutely right, I am known as the prime exponent of quasi-realism. And this is rather embarrassing because my own view has changed slightly from the view in that set of essays. I still think there's value in that set of essays, I don't put them behind me entirely. But I think at the time I wrote them, I wasn't really aware of the, as I now see it, the attractions of a minimalist or deflationist attitude to truth. So I would no longer prefer to express myself by saying I don't believe in them, they're being a moral truth, I don't believe in moral facts. I'm going to say yes, I do believe in them, but I don't think there's much there to believe in except, as I've been saying all along, if you have a moral commitment, if you really believe something, then you'll say that it's true, of course you will, that just goes with the territory as it were. But the interesting question will be the nature of that commitment, it's what the judgment actually means or amounts to. Now, expressivism in moral theory is the view that what it amounts to is the possession of an attitude. So if I say eating meat is wrong, that means I'm advancing the attitude, the strategy or policy or general approval of not eating meat. That attitude can take various different flavors, it can be very, very rigorous, so I won't be friends with you if you eat meat and that would be rather extreme. It could be much more permissive. I don't want to eat meat, but I don't mind if other people do. It could be legalistic, I think there ought to be a law against it. It doesn't have to have any of those particular flavors, but it can take them on, it can take them on, it can come out in various different ways. I think one of the important gains of thinking this way is that you see that there's a difference between having the attitude of disapproval of something and for example thinking there ought to be a law against it. I may disapprove of something, but for other reasons perhaps be very against there being a matter of law, the law should not get involved in some things. So, if I hear that somebody's promised to meet you for a cup of coffee, and then without any apology or excuse just decided not to turn up. I disapprove of them, I think they owe you an excuse of some sort, an apology. But I wouldn't say it's a matter for the police. Whereas if somebody breaks other kinds of contract it might start becoming and saying it's a matter of the police means that it's a matter that society needs to take a stand on society must come in and attach sanctions and penalties to some behavior. And of course that's that's correct for some behaviors. But not not so for others. So, there are debates to be had about what's the attitudes. We're going to defend and going to find appropriate and going to encourage an argument argue for. The debates we talked about was right and wrong and we talked about was true that as inflationism shows us that you don't increase the temperature by introducing notion of truth. And again, I think you can't really have a moral opinion. It's your, I mean, go back to my favorite metaphor you, you can't put the bull's eye wherever your Arab lies arrives. So, so moral opinion has to be defended has to be argued for you have to encounter people who don't necessarily agree with it and try to persuade them otherwise. So, so all the, all the activities associated with morality go on pretty much as before. It's just you don't trouble yourself about a metaphysics about an ultimate sanction or a kind of, you know, God's script God's script for the world, which gives the last word the final answers in morality. What you do is you have your attitudes, you need to defend them. You need to voice them. If you think they need to be shared and sent health hence we get moral debate. And I'm the last person to deny that it's important. I think it is important. And it's important that it's conducted with civility with decency with as little hostility as you can manage. But there are things we need to stand up for and we do stand up for them. And I think that's inevitable. You cannot have human society without reasonable socialization of people. And that includes reasonable respect for property reasonable respect for personal space reasonable respect for people's rights. It includes not being like the world trust. Okay, so how does this connect this new idea of yours connect with your anti model anti realism in these two. I think the realism that I was against was a realism which made a mystery of reality. It said, Oh, morality. You know, it's very important. It's almost mystically important because it might stand against your desires it might get in your way might prevent you from doing things which would be rather pleasant to do. It's just a kind of mysterious authority. And of course people often then assign its authorship to God is God's law God's word God's, it's not the other. I think that's all a mistake. I don't think God's got anything to do with it. If there is a God which I rather that then he's very silent. It's not God that tells you whatever you happen to think like homosexuality is a bad thing or trans people should be cured or whatever it is. It's not God that tells you that those are your attitudes. And I would think they're debatable and in that debate, you're not going to find what the philosopher Daniel Dennett nice this prison the sky hook sort of authority I would lift you above the mundane concerns of people in society stuck in with other people in society. And your discussions are about trying to come to one mind about some particular issue. You've just got to realize that there's no, no sky hook there's no voice in the sky. That's right there's no voice in the sky. And of course as a results. Nobody who believes that there is a voice in the sky and that they've heard it is trustworthy. There is no special authority in these debates. Here's another question about your view about the good. So, are there more facts still in your current picture. You can say so. I mean remember that I'm a minimalist about facts. So, sure. I think it's a fact that homosexuality should be tolerated. And that's my attitude I have a tolerant attitude towards it. And I pretty much disapprove of places where either through Islamic or Catholic influences. People don't think the same. And I would like to change them. I might not. I mean whether I get into a debate would then be a political matter. And there may be reasons for not. I don't have to worry about it. So, maybe I just let let it go. But if I needed to worry about it then I know which side to come down on. So yes, I can say they're moral facts. There's no harm in saying it. The only harm comes if you think that along with the idea of a moral fact becomes the idea of a special wisdom which eyeballs those facts and gives us gives you the sky hook gives you the the authority to impose your view on other people. I think that's that's a human temptation but want to be resisted. I like I like the continuing project from your view about the truth. So it looks like that your picture now is that let's demystify our notion of truth and let's demystify our notion of the good. And let's try to live our lives in the more mutual mutually tolerant way. Is that yes, yes, yes, it's it's a it's a very modest message but I hold it quite firmly. Okay, so but what ultimately grounds are moral discourses and practices, according to this sorry. We need to live together. Human human beings are unusually dependent amongst animals, in the sense that we can't by ourselves do everything we need. So we have to evolve ways of living together. And these will include our moral discourses and practices. It will include various kinds of cooperation. It will include the arrival of conventions of behavior. It will include the apparatus of law, which is designed to as a constrained people's behavior so that extreme antisocial behavior becomes much more difficult. And it's going to include eventually communication, we've got to be able to communicate our plans. We get institutions like the giving of promises and contracts, which bind us into certain behaviors, because other people can then expect things of us, because they know there's a cost. If I say I promise something and then I don't do it, I incur a cost. And it's the way promising works is that it's the prospect of that cost, which motivates my care to keep the promise. Because David Hume put it by saying you risk the penalty of never being trusted again. And that's a terrible penalty in a human society. And so you get the arrival of normativity out of I think our social natures and our social needs. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, because I'm thinking about the parallelism between truth relativism and moral relativism. So you have the same story for against the moral relativism this respect. Yes, I would. I mean, I think that there are issues. There are perhaps more issues. Well, I'm not sure. There are issues in the science, let's say, where people don't know where the truth lies. They don't know. For example, take a simple simple but very complicated. Simple question, you know, will will sustainable forms of energy stop global warming. That's a scientific question. I don't know the answer. I don't know that anybody knows the answer. Everybody hopes there's an answer, but that's a different thing. So there are scientific questions where, you know, we understand their difficulties with both answers. We don't know what to think. Another way of putting it is it's, it's okay to be in two minds about that. And I would say that. Now in morality, I think it's, we also come across things where the truth seems lacking. We may have an attitude but we know that it would be not entirely senseless, not entirely unforgivable to things to have a different attitude to have a more nuanced attitude or something. So, so again, you get questions where the right thing is to be in two minds where you're not sure. But I think in morality, there's much more of a tendency to people to become dogmatic quite quickly. So morality encourages a kind of thumbs the table sort of dogmatism. I think that's because there's more at stake or often there's more at stake. I mean, if, I don't know, if you, if somebody say hates the middle classes, and I'm middle class, they may have the moral view that the middle classes steal from all that they unfairly take the benefits of cooperation and industry for themselves. So there's quite a lot of people with those attitudes. Then of course it matters to me because I'm under attack and being attacked by such people verbally, if not actually physically. And so it's important to me to shout, you know, that they're wrong. So, even although economically might be very difficult to know whether a particular class of people are unjustly manipulating industry and its rewards to their benefit and to the detriment of other people. That's, that's, you know, that's something for dust capital and many other, many other works to investigate. Nevertheless, people will find it, you know, important to take a stance on that. It might be important to my, my kind of state of mind that I don't accept that criticism, because the middle class, it would be rather guilt inducing to accept it. So you get much more motivation to take dogmatic stands in reality and I think that's a danger. And of course in turn that encourages the kind of, oh well that's what you think but I think the other thing and you get the sort of just people not talking to each other. Yeah, but do facts matter in our moral judgments. So what do you think about what David Humes is thought fossil. So, what do you think of that. Well, I think the right way to think about humans insight is to think in terms of moral attitudes and not moral beliefs. What I saw was that it's, he didn't so much use the word attitude you call them passions, but it's your passions that are driving your moral sayings, your moral commitments. So you don't, you don't really start off by thinking about facts. You start off by recognizing that moral commitments are a bit different from ordinary beliefs. They have more to do with your orientation towards the world, other than you're accepting data from the world. I think the notion of a fact is most at home it's as a word. When we think of facts we like nice concrete things like the fact that there's a bookcase over there. That's a fact and I've received that data from the world. It's certainly it's my interpretation that it's a bookcase. I mean I could be the victim of some terrible illusion or something it's a fake bookcase and it's really a drinks cabinet or something. But, but I know it's a bookcase because I've, I trust my memory and I know that I've been there many times and taken books out of it and that's what I put there and so on and so on. So there we have the idea, the very firm idea of being in an environment which provides us with information. Now with morality that idea is not so entrenched. It's quite easy to feel skeptical about moral facts. That's, that's why I say Zincways I Realism got the title that did. You've got to be very firm minimalist to say well I'm cool about moral facts I don't mind moral facts it just don't go out looking for them. So on a more personal note, you've been a professional philosopher for the longest time you're one of the top philosophers that we have in the world right now. So what is your advice for those who want to get into the academic professional philosophy. I knew you were going to ask this and I'm rather worried about it. There's a story about Mozart I think it's told Mozart was asked by some anxious parent. What he should say to his child his son I suppose, who wanted to be a professional musician. Mozart said you've got to discourage them. You've got to tell them not to do it. And this was very surprising so the parents said well, you know, why. Mozart said, because if he has to do it, he'll take no notice. And if it's not true that he has to do it, then he shouldn't do it. So I think the tip for a parent of a child who's thinking of becoming an academic philosopher is rather like that. He's got to do it. If he's got the itch, if he's not going to be happy unless he's doing it, let it go ahead. But if he doesn't, if it's just a whim or a playtime, then you stand in their way. Now, once you got past that obstacle, you decided you don't care what your parents say and you've gone to university and you're studying academic philosophy. I think my main tip is, you know, it's really. You can't dare to think. You've got to have an independent mind. And you've got to develop the habit of being careful about everything. Philosophers themselves fall into bubbles into silos where they only listen to and read philosophers that they agree with. And I think that's very, very dangerous and it's, it's, it's that to make philosophy worthless. You've got to be independent. I don't think of myself as at all clever, but I do think I've got a very stubborn streak. If somebody tells me something, at least half of my mind is going to be saying, Hang on, does this stand up? Is this, is this, is this the best way to think about this? Is this the, can't we find better words or better avenues of exploration? So I think constantly being open minded and constantly being willing to question almost anything is, that's my favorite tip. The other tip is learn to write. If you can't write well, then that's, and you probably can't think well. So where do you see hademic work in philosophy heading in the next few years? I think it's always very difficult to predict that I'm not really a futurologist and I, I think academic philosophy is always. It always lives in an environment, always lives in a social matrix. And as society changes. So the puzzles that's obsessed philosophers change may change slowly. I said famously that the owl of Minerva only takes wing with the coming of the night. Lovely image, but I think one of the things you could use it to suggest is that. And this is also something that Mark's thought is that philosophers in a sense follow the parade. They follow the way society is moving. They don't lead it. And that's partly not true. I think philosophers do often lead the parade. If you think of a movement like feminism. It may have started in the 1960s, perhaps because of social conditions, increasing women in the workforce, increasing realization that there are obstacles to them, obtaining equal pay and obtaining top positions. And that's a social change. But the first thing that feminist movement needed was writers. People like Jermaine Greer and Amy Klein and so on who could articulate what they felt was wrong with the relations between men and women at that time in various societies. And those were philosophers. Those are people thinking about the way relations between men and women should be conducted and the way they weren't being conducted. So as well as being activists, they were people who think. Mark's famously said that the, you know, until this time philosophers have tried to understand the world, but the point was to change it. It's wrong. It's a terrible contrast. The point is to change it in ways that you understand. That's right. So it's a career in philosophy worth it. I look back on mine and think yes, it was worth it. It's not a life of wealth, obviously. It's not a life of even of glory in the sense that a Nobel Prize winner can be, you know, is a glorious asset to the university and so on. But it's, it's a life of, I think, quite good and passing on good habits of mind. And I'm, I'm content with having done that if I have. So that note, thanks again, Professor Blackburn for sharing your time with us and for you guys. Join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Cheers.