You Need A Better Mirror

IS SOLIPSISM INEVITABLE?

“Yes, I get it, people typically choose mates of relatively equal levels of physical attractiveness and I understand you want someone on par with you in looks, but you are not nearly as pretty as you think you are. You’re not ugly, but you’re not good looking either just AVERAGE!” Your Blunt Reality Check

Whether she realizes it or not “Blunt Reality Check” is making an epistemological claim to the effect that one is precluded, in principle, from having objective knowledge about one’s own appearance. As Robbie Burns long ago maintained, “To see ourselves as others see us/ It would from many a blunder free us.” Burns maintained that the ability to see ourselves as others see us could only come from God but the source of Blunt Reality Check’s claim would appear to be that of philosophical solipsism, the view that since all knowledge, including that of our looks, is necessarily from the first-person perspective, objective knowledge of the world, including that of our looks, is impossible. But is Blunt Reality Check right? Is solipsism inevitable?

There can be no question that all knowledge requires a conceptual framework within which that knowledge is situated. This is true even of so-called objective scientific knowledge which is “paradigm dependent,” that is framed in terms of the prevailing paradigm. For example, the Copernican heliocentric astronomical paradigm replaced the Ptolemaic geocentric paradigm with the consequence that all astronomical knowledge claims about our solar system are framed in terms of the former and not the latter,

Things become more difficult when the realm of matter-in-motion is transcended and we engage, in the present context, matters of beauty. What constitutes beauty? What are the criteria of being good looking? Indeed, are there criteria is any “objective” sense or is beauty relative to the eye of the beholder? “I don’t know much about art,” the relativist refrain goes, “but I know what I like.” However, philosophical realists maintain that this is not the case, that something – a musical score, a painting, a sculpture, and so on – possesses objective qualities which mark them off as beautiful or not regardless of the view of the spectator. So the question aesthetic beauty is vexed.

But what about solipsism? The difficulty for the solipsist like Blunt Reality Check is that she is precluded from making the claim she does. She cannot, without self-contradiction, make a universal claim in respect to the possession (or not) of beauty since such a claim transcends the solipsism to which she subscribes. In other words, in claiming objective knowledge about what is or is not good looking, she has violated those principles she claims to endorse.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!