Five Seats Infinite Questions – 4th July 2026
An intentionally small weekly online meetup for relaxed, thoughtful philosophical conversation.
Each event is built around 1-3 questions, suggested by attendees or chosen by the host. We’ll explore the question until boredom or irritation intervenes.
The question list will be posted in the event comments on the Thursday before the meetup, so everyone has time to think it over.
The group is intentionally small: around five open attendee places, plus a small core group. The aim is to create a friendly space where everyone can take part, rather than disappear into a sea of muted rectangles.
No expertise is needed. You do not need fully formed opinions, prior reading, or a working relationship with Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger. Half-formed thoughts, tentative objections, and “I’m not sure, but…” are very welcome.
This is not a lecture, debate club, or name-dropping contest. Just bring curiosity, kindness, and a willingness to think out loud.
The goal is a good conversation, not a final answer.
Online Meetup Link:
See https://www.meetup.com/exeter-philosophy-meetup-group/events/314596136/
The topics for the week are:
When a stranger tells us something beyond our experience, should we protect ourselves through scepticism—or risk believing something extraordinary?
Imagine meeting someone from a distant place who describes something you have never seen. They tell you that water can become solid without becoming thick or muddy first. It simply changes into a transparent block when the temperature falls.
Nothing in your experience supports this. Water flows. Stones are solid. The stranger’s claim seems to confuse two entirely different kinds of thing. You know that travellers sometimes exaggerate, misunderstand what they see, or invent marvellous stories to impress their listeners.
Refusing to believe them may therefore seem sensible. Yet the stranger may be telling the truth. If you reject every claim that exceeds your own experience, your existing knowledge becomes a wall: it protects you from gullibility, but also prevents the world from becoming larger.
Baggini’s The Indian and the Ice asks how we should respond to testimony that is both unfamiliar and difficult to verify. A recent Reuters report offers a striking modern parallel. Researchers used artificial intelligence and advanced imaging to read a carbonised scroll that had remained closed for almost two thousand years. The fragile object could not speak in any ordinary sense, yet new technology allowed an unfamiliar voice from the ancient world to be heard again.
Every conversation with a stranger contains a smaller version of this possibility. They may know a place, experience, language, profession, or way of life that lies beyond our usual world. Their unfamiliarity may make them less immediately credible—but it is also what allows them to tell us something genuinely new.
How much evidence should we require before allowing an unfamiliar claim to change our view? Is trusting a stranger an intellectual risk, or is some willingness to risk error necessary for learning? And when does healthy scepticism become a refusal to discover anything we did not already expect?
“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
If technology translates a stranger’s words, does that mean we have understood what they mean?
Imagine arriving in a city where you do not speak the language. A stranger points towards an animal and says a word you have never heard before. You assume the word means “rabbit”.
But perhaps it means “Look—a rabbit”. Perhaps it refers only to the visible part of the animal. Perhaps it means “food”, “good luck”, or “an animal crossing the road”. The stranger’s gestures and circumstances help, but they do not guarantee that your translation captures the world as they understand it.
This is the problem explored in Baggini’s Rabbit, based on W. V. O. Quine’s thought experiment about radical translation. Words do not exist alone. Their meanings are connected to culture, habits, assumptions, relationships and other words. Translating a sentence may therefore be easier than translating the life within which it makes sense.
Reuters recently reported that police officers in Philadelphia are using body cameras capable of translating 50 languages in real time as the city welcomes visitors for the World Cup. The technology may allow strangers to communicate where previously they could not. But officials also acknowledged limits: legally important conversations still require certified human translators, and the system may capture speech beyond the intended exchange.
The technology creates an intriguing possibility. A barrier that once prevented a conversation can now be crossed almost instantly. Yet instant translation may also produce an illusion of complete understanding. We may receive accurate words while missing humour, fear, social convention, hesitation or cultural meaning.
When we speak to strangers, is understanding primarily a matter of translating their vocabulary—or of becoming curious about the world from which their words come? Can a machine translate a sentence without understanding either speaker? And might the small misunderstandings of conversation be part of the pleasure of discovering another person?
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
Should we believe familiar, established sources because they have earned our trust—or remain open to unknown voices that might tell us something the familiar sources have missed?
Imagine that two people give you conflicting accounts of the same event.
One is a familiar voice. You recognise their name, understand their background and have relied on them before. They belong to an established institution with procedures, editors and a reputation to protect.
The other is a stranger. They have no public record, no recognised authority and no familiar badge of credibility. Yet they claim to have seen the event directly and insist that the established account is incomplete.
Trusting the familiar source seems rational. A record of reliability matters. Institutions can correct errors, verify claims and make their methods visible. But familiarity can also become intellectual habit. Established voices may share the same blind spots, while unfamiliar people may possess knowledge unavailable to recognised authorities.
Baggini’s The Rocking Horse Winner asks whether repeatedly being correct is enough to make someone a genuine source of knowledge. His No, No raises a related problem: a person may hold a true and apparently justified belief, yet arrive at it through luck or mistaken identity.
Reuters reported that the British government is considering requiring social-media platforms to make material from recognised public-service and other “trusted” news organisations easier to find. The proposal responds to widespread online misinformation, but it also raises a philosophical question: who decides which voices deserve the advantage of being called trusted?
Without dependable sources, public knowledge becomes vulnerable to fabrication, impersonation and rumour. But a system that privileges only established voices may make it harder for new witnesses, independent investigators or people outside powerful institutions to be heard.
The same tension appears in ordinary conversation. We may dismiss a stranger because they lack credentials, or accept a familiar person because their voice feels safe. Yet neither familiarity nor novelty guarantees truth.
Should trust be earned through a history of reliability, judged anew for each claim, or extended provisionally so that unfamiliar people have a chance to be heard? When does caution protect us from misinformation—and when does it trap us inside the limits of the people and institutions we already know?
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
W. K. Clifford – “The Ethics of Belief”