Friday, March 12, 2010

I will fail in my thesis

To think that I could succeed in my thesis would be to have hubris beyond belief. Given my intellectual and other limitations, here's all that I can hope to do:

* Succeed in an unambitious project
* Fail in an ambitious project

I started thinking I was going to succeed in an unambitious project, yet here I am defending moral realism, grappling with Epistemic Realism!

Here's the only way that I can save myself from obvious failure: I need to hedge. I need to say something like, "This is a good way for the Moral Realist" instead of saying "I think that this is true." Expect a significant hedge, acknowledgment that I'm not up to the task of really defending all of the issues that I raise, to be an important theme in the introductory matter in my thesis.

1 comment:

Tyrone S. McQuay said...

Sorry to hear about it. Well, I think what’s good about it is that you can still try another time. You can improve the thesis that you already did. And from the sounds of your story, I bet it would be easy for you to finish it up and defend it.