Hey, this is the partially examined life episode 294 Part 2.

We've been discussing Willard Van Overenquines SA Epistemology Naturalized from 1969.

Where were we?

So we had just been talking about the idea that there was some hope with some conceptual

advancements in terms of contextual definitions and the use of set theory to translate

thing, talk, and to sense state of talk, but ultimately because of the problem of induction

and other skeptical concerns, there turns out to be no real doctrinal advantage to those

conceptual advancements.

We can't prove the external world as client puts it from sense data and logic and set theory

or a generalization school always cover more than we can observe.

So we can't really demonstrate natural science from immediate experience.

Cartesian certainty is not impossible.

We can't endow the truths of nature with the full authority of immediate experience.

He mentions an essay by Bertrand Russell called The Existence of the External World that

I looked at briefly.

It might be a good thing for us to look at.

I felt like we should read whether it's that or problems with philosophy.

We should read some Russell this year.

We're in the neighborhood of it and finished what was another like quine, a very

plain spoken, often writer who had a hugely influential take on empiricism for the time.

Have we ever read any Russell?

I think you were not on the one about mathematics and then I think we read his theory of definite

...