Azure Ides-Grey posted a video about the hippopotamus dilemma. I commented:
A philosophy professor of mine came up with a similar dilemma. His solution, which I liked, was to demonstrate that 100% of the room’s capacity was taken up with non-hippopotamus objects: in this video’s case, it would be mostly air, with some books, shelves, chairs, people, a camera, dust. If a hippo was there, it would be readily apparent to the senses (this solution works well if the room isn’t huge and doesn’t have any unusual hiding places).
You could be a schmoe and propose the hippo really is there, but it’s actually invisible. But then it’s not a hippo. A hippo falls under the “visible” category. Plus invisible hippos have no bearing on real life. If an invisible hippo exists, there’s more pressing things to seek out after the shock of that discovery wears off.
Sometimes I think 90% of philosophy is navigating linguistic and cultural ambiguities while sometimes addressing actual philosophical issues.
4 Comments
Oh noes! Not addressing actual reality!
Funny you should mention “not addressing reality.” I posted about Russell’s Teapot before. The same professor I mentioned in this post (an atheist) HATED that argument, because he understood that religions don’t make ridiculous claims of that sort. Religions might use an invisible floating teapot as a rough analogy for something occurring in the supernatural domain, not a physical thing. He didn’t like the argument because it doesn’t apply to any religion in reality.
There is always a hippo. In fact, there are a lot of hippos. You just can’t see them because you don’t live in Sub Saharan Africa. Are you saying that something doesn’t exist because it isn’t native to America?!
I guess I would see all hippos as some thing else that my Eurocentric mind can interpret. Maybe like a broken Xbox? I owned a hippo once, if that’s the case.