Maverick Philosopher

A Design Argument From the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

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Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design. 

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (and thus entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational for you to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer. Their intentionality is derivative, not intrinsic. 

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by an unguided or 'blind' process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a twisted tree root appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is:

How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its materialistic (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes? It cannot be rational. I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:

. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, non-purposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall 1983, p. 104)

The foregoing may be summed up in the following design argument:

1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

Therefore

3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

To resist this argument, the materialist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.  

The above is an impressive argument, wouldn't you say? Of course  it needs beefing up in various ways. For example, how can we be sure that there is exactly one intelligent designer and not several working in concert? If these worries can be allayed, the argument seems to establish the existence of an intelligent designer of such cognitively gifted animals as ourselves, not to mention the world in which the gifted animals are embedded. Many will be quick to identify this intelligent designer with the God of classical theism. Essential to classical theism as I am using the term is the idea that God is a personal being (tri-personal on normatively Christian accounts) who is transcendent of the physical universe which he creates and sustains in being, and is thus transcendent in the sense that he could just as well exist in his full perfection without having created anything.  

But I don't believe the above argument amounts to a proof of classical theism. It does not render the latter rationally inescapable; at best, it renders it rationally acceptable.  On classical theism, the intelligibility of nature has a transcendent source: it accrues to nature ab extra, which is to say: it is not immanent in nature. But why couldn't the intelligibility of nature, and with it, the cognitive reliability of the natural faculties with which we investigate nature, be inherent in the natural world?  The idea is not that 'Mother Nature' is a person with conscious purposes in the way that God is a person with conscious purposes, but that nature, below the level of conscious mind, is yet mind-like in that it aims at certain outcomes, and thus has 'purposes' in an analogous sense of the term. Dispositionality provides an analogy in the small for the immanent intentionality and teleology of nature in the large.

To say that a wine glass is fragile, for example, is to say that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck or dropped onto a hard surface from a sufficient height. Several philosophers have noted the analogy with conscious intentionality.   A consciously  intentional state exhibits

a. directedness to an object;
b. an object that may or may nor exist;
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.

For example, right now I am gazing out my study window at Superstition Mountain. The gazing is an intentional state: it is of or about something, a definite something.  It takes an accusative, and does so necessarily. The accusative or intentional object in question presumably exists. But the intentional object is what it is whether or not it exists. The phenomenological description of object and act remains the same whether or not the object exists.  Moreover, the object as presented in the act of gazing is incomplete: there are properties such that the intentional object neither has them nor their complements. Thus, to a quick glance, what is given in the intentional experience is 'a purplish mountain.' Just that. Now anything purple or purplish is colored, and anything colored is extended; but being colored and being extended are not properties of the intentional object as such. No doubt they are properties of the mountain itself in reality; but they are not properties of the precise intentional object of my gazing, which has all and only the properties it is seen to have. Furthermore, in reality, yonder mountain is either such that someone is climbing on it or not; but the intentional object of my momentary gazing is indeterminate with respect to the property of being climbed on by someone.

The same or similar points can be made about dispositions. If a piece of glass is fragile, then it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. There cannot be a disposition that is not a disposition to do something, to shatter, or explode, or melt.

Second, the reality of a disposition is independent of its manifestation: a fragile piece of glass is actually fragile whether or not it ever breaks. From the fact that x is disposed to F, one cannot infer that x ever Fs. This parallels a feature of intentionality: from the fact that x is thinking about Fs one cannot infer that there exist Fs that x is thinking about. (If I am thinking about unicorns it does not follow that there exist unicorns I am thinking about; if I want a sloop it doesn't follow that there is a sloop I want; if Ernest is hunting lions it doesn't follow that there are any lions he is hunting.)

Third, although a manifested disposition is a fully determinate state of affairs, this complete determinateness is not present in the disposition qua disposition. The disposition to shatter if suitably struck is not the disposition to shatter into ten pieces if suitably struck, although it is of course the disposition to shatter into some number or other of pieces, the exact number being left indeterminate.

Conclusion and Metaphilosophical Upshot

And so it might be like this: nature in itself is animated by an intrinsic immanent teleology or intentionality below the level of conscious mind, an intrinsic (as opposed to derivative) purposiveness which is present in nature all along, but which becomes conscious only in us. This intrinsic and ubiquitous pre-conscious teleology or purposiveness suffices to ground the cognitive reliability of our faculties, and in such a way as to make it rational for us to trust their deliverances.  For on this scheme, there is nothing fluky or accidental about mind. Mind is king and it is there all along. And this without any  assistance ab extra from God, and of course without any constructive 'worldmaking' nonsense of the Goodmanian sort. (Allusion to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). We also  avoid the eliminativist Unsinn of Daniel Dennett the scientistic sophist.

I am limning the metaphysical scheme presented by Thomas Nagel in his Mind and Cosmos, an overview of which you will find at my Substack site.

Nagel's panpsychist immanentism no doubt has it own flaws, as any decent aporetician ought to suspect.  But Nagel's proposal does challenge any quick acquiescence in the design argument for God sketched above.

And so I come around once again to my oft-made meta-philosophical claim that in these metaphysical and theological precincts (and not just here) there are no 'knock-down' arguments, no arguments that are rationally compelling (rationally coercive, rationally inescapable, philosophically dispositive, pick your favorite phrase).  

Let the dogmatists howl.

The dogs bark, the caravan passes: it ürür, kervan yürür.

Along the Silk Road, headed East.

a. directedness to an object;
b. an object that may or may nor exist;
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.

For example, right now I am gazing out my study window at Superstition Mountain. The gazing is an intentional state: it is of or about something, a definite something.  It takes an accusative, and does so necessarily. The accusative or intentional object in question presumably exists. But the intentional object is what it is whether or not it exists. The phenomenological description of object and act remains the same whether or not the object exists.  Moreover, the object as presented in the act of gazing is incomplete: there are properties such that the intentional object neither has them nor their complements. Thus, to a quick glance, what is given in the intentional experience is 'a purplish mountain.' Just that. Now anything purple or purplish is colored, and anything colored is extended; but being colored and being extended are not properties of the intentional object as such. No doubt they are properties of the mountain itself in reality; but they are not properties of the precise intentional object of my gazing, which has all and only the properties it is seen to have. Furthermore, in reality, yonder mountain is either such that someone is climbing on it or not; but the intentional object of my momentary gazing is indeterminate with respect to the property of being climbed on by someone.

The same or similar points can be made about dispositions. If a piece of glass is fragile, then it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. There cannot be a disposition that is not a disposition to do something, to shatter, or explode, or melt.

Second, the reality of a disposition is independent of its manifestation: a fragile piece of glass is actually fragile whether or not it ever breaks. From the fact that x is disposed to F, one cannot infer that x ever Fs. This parallels a feature of intentionality: from the fact that x is thinking about Fs one cannot infer that there exist Fs that x is thinking about. (If I am thinking about unicorns it does not follow that there exist unicorns I am thinking about; if I want a sloop it doesn't follow that there is a sloop I want; if Ernest is hunting lions it doesn't follow that there are any lions he is hunting.)

Third, although a manifested disposition is a fully determinate state of affairs, this complete determinateness is not present in the disposition qua disposition. The disposition to shatter if suitably struck is not the disposition to shatter into ten pieces if suitably struck, although it is of course the disposition to shatter into some number or other of pieces, the exact number being left indeterminate.

Conclusion and Metaphilosophical Upshot

And so it might be like this: nature in itself is animated by an intrinsic immanent teleology or intentionality below the level of conscious mind, an intrinsic (as opposed to derivative) purposiveness which is present in nature all along, but which becomes conscious only in us. This intrinsic and ubiquitous pre-conscious teleology or purposiveness suffices to ground the cognitive reliability of our faculties, and in such a way as to make it rational for us to trust their deliverances.  For on this scheme, there is nothing fluky or accidental about mind. Mind is king and it is there all along. And this without any  assistance ab extra from God, and of course without any constructive 'worldmaking' nonsense of the Goodmanian sort. (Allusion to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). We also  avoid the eliminativist Unsinn of Daniel Dennett the scientistic sophist.

I am limning the metaphysical scheme presented by Thomas Nagel in his Mind and Cosmos, an overview of which you will find at my Substack site.

Nagel's panpsychist immanentism no doubt has it own flaws, as any decent aporetician ought to suspect.  But Nagel's proposal does challenge any quick acquiescence in the design argument for God sketched above.

And so I come around once again to my oft-made meta-philosophical claim that in these metaphysical and theological precincts (and not just here) there are no 'knock-down' arguments, no arguments that are rationally compelling (rationally coercive, rationally inescapable, philosophically dispositive, pick your favorite phrase).  

Let the dogmatists howl.

The dogs bark, the caravan passes: it ürür, kervan yürür.

Along the Silk Road, headed East.

Notes on Van Inwagen on Modal Epistemology

We have some modal knowledge.  How?

Substack latest.

Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood

Anthony Flood writes,

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.

BV: Not so, and for two reasons.  Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines.  Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them.  That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression. 

A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative.  Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question.   For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?"  Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation.  He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.

Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey).  The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical.  Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.

And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation.  By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours.  The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks.  (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)

After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could  hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well.  And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a  unitarian Christian.

So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity?  That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis. 

Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated.  The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved  when a person knows -- if he does know --- that Christianity is true.

Is Empiricism Self-Refuting?

Russell says it is; I examine his claim. Substack latest.

Addenda (11/19)

Tony Flood writes,

Brian Kilmeade mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion to Christianity  quickly as he introduced her, one of his guests tonight, but I heard it on TV which was on in the background; I thought I had misheard Kilmeade. I've always admired her courage and considered her professed atheism in the context of her experience of Islamic terror. 

But her Wiki entry says she "converted to Christianity" (by which I hope she means that she received Christ as her savior), citing this and this. 

 

She blogged about Russell last week (as you did today): 

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian.” It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

In high school in 1970 along the road to my Communism, I had read Russell's essay and decided I would study philosophy. I remember catching his obit in the papers, marveling at the longevity of this stellar Victorian intellectual who had been my contemporary for over a decade-and-a-half and therefore could have met. 

 

Anyway, Ali's now firmly in my Hall of Hero(in)es. Feel free to share this, which may come as news to others as it did to me.

 

Thanks, Tony. I share your high opinion of Ali. The Unherd article which I excerpted earlier is important.  I too read Russell's Why I am not a Christian in high school.  Russell was a logical and philosophical technician of high rank, but unlike his pal Wittgenstein, he wrote popular works as well. Wittgenstein, as you know, took a dim view of Russell's popular writings. Russell was secular to the core; Wittgenstein, I could easily show, had the heart of the homo religiosus despite his bladed intellect.

 

Edward writes,

Interesting, and overlaps with a central theme of the book, as follows. Assume

1 Knowledge is propositional. That is, whatever counts as knowledge has to be expressible in language as a proposition.

2 Propositions have two terms and can be affirmative or negative, universal or particular. Thus to any two terms there correspond exactly four propositions.

3 There are a finite number of term types, as set out in Locke’s classification of ‘ideas’ in Book II of the Essay.

4 The meaning of any term is derived from experience. Locke assumes that every word either signifies a simple ‘sensible idea’, or signifies a complex idea that can be analysed into simple parts.

These assumptions define what Bennett calls meaning-empiricism, and Hanna calls semantic psychologism. It follows from them that every object of human understanding is defined by a proposition whose meaning depends on experience.

In this way we can set a limit to human understanding.

Note that the empiricist project differs from the scholastic-Aristotelian one. The scholastics generally did not believe in meaning-empiricism, because they thought that the proper signification of a term is an object, not an idea. So I think to settle your question we must look at whether words signify ‘ideas’, i.e. affections of the soul, or not.

Ad (1). Is all knowledge propositional? You are making a very strong claim here: necessarily, nothing counts as knowledge that is not expressible in declarative sentences.  But knowing what something is like counts as knowledge. I know what it is like to be punched in the stomach, but not what it is like to undergo a menstrual period.  I know some people by description only, others by acquaintance only, and still others by description and by acquaintance. Isn't knowledge by acquaintance a counterexample to your thesis?  And then there is 'carnal knowledge.' Does it not count as knowledge? There is also 'know how.' My cats know how to open doors, but they would be hard-pressed to verbalize that knowledge.

Ad (2). "Thus to any two terms there correspond exactly four propositions." Since copulae are typically tensed, there have to be more. There have to be at least twelve. 'Every animal in the house was/is/will be a cat.'  4 categorical forms X 3 simple tenses = 12 different propositions.  And then there are the tenseless uses of copulae, e,g, 'The cat is an animal.'   'The triangle is a three-sided plane figure that encloses a space.' Yogi Berra joke: "You mean now?"  'God is' is either eternally true/false or omnitemporally true/false, and tenseless either way.

Ad (3). OK.

Ad (4). "The meaning of any term is derived from experience." My question is: how could we know that this proposition is true if it is indeed true? To know that it is true, we have to know what it means. But it cannot mean anything if it is true. Do the terms of this proposition signify a sensible idea? No. 'The meaning of any terms' does not signify a sensible idea.  The same goes for 'a meaning derived from experience.'  Meaning-empiricism is meaningless on its own theory of meaning.

David Benatar on Epistemic Injustice

An excerpt from The Uphill Battle of Unpopular Ideas:

Regarding epistemic matters, many of those who identify themselves as progressives speak about “epistemic injustice” – the injustice that occurs when certain people, typically women and darker skinned people, are accorded less standing or authority as knowers or transmitters of knowledge. This is a profound and important concept.

 

The problem is that progressives have missed a key, but obvious, dimension to epistemic injustice. The more somebody is actually the victim of epistemic injustice, the less likely and less widely they are to be recognized as such. Indeed, the absence of that recognition is precisely what feeds the epistemic injustice. Not only are you not taken as seriously as you should be, but it is not widely recognized that this is the case.

 

The corollary is that the more widespread the recognition of a particular manifestation of epistemic injustice is, the less likely it is that the purported victim actually is a victim. This is not a logical point but rather a psychological one. It is logically possible for X, Y, and Z to recognize that W is the victim of epistemic injustice while continuing to take W less seriously than W should be taken. Psychologically, however, those who regard W as a victim of epistemic injustice are more likely not to inflict that injustice themselves, either because they are sensitive to the potential problem or because they compensate (and not infrequently overcompensate) for it.

 

One upshot of this is that while those espousing orthodox views are likely to be given more credence, even when the orthodox views are flawed, those expressing unpopular but well-founded views are likely to be given less credence than they should be given. That is a stark form of epistemic injustice – and one typically not recognized by those who are concerned about epistemic injustice.

 

Even mentioning this comes at a risk. This is because there are orthodox views about who the victims of epistemic injustice are – and they do not include those who hold unorthodox views (for example, about epistemic injustice). Everybody can agree that it is unseemly to claim epistemic injustice when it does not exist. However, the difference between orthodox and unorthodox views about when this applies is that the orthodox views are, by definition, dominant. The point of this observation is not to elicit sympathy, but to articulate the ironies and paradoxes.

A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson

 Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge despite its relevance to Husserl's project of founding philosophy als strenge Wissenschaft, as strict science.

Roman Ingarden, Husserl's distinguished student, has  the following to say about Nelson (a German despite his very English surname) in his On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism: 

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge. (footnote #1o:  Cf. Leonard Nelson, Ueber das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem. Die Unmoeglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie, vol. III, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule, also in the Acts of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, 1911. Husserl's ideas must have been completely crystallized in this period. Nelson was a Dozent in Goettingen from the year 1909.)

We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing the error of petitio principii. Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson's book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl's lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the "nonsense" (Widersinn) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. -- as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century -- we appeal to "physical stimuli" which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about "secondary" qualities of material objects. It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso removes the danger of petitio principii in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world. After having carried out this reduction we find ourselves, nevertheless, ipso facto in the area of pure transcendental consciousness inside which we are to carry out all epistemological investigations; but, in addition, it has to be agreed that every being (real or ideal or purely intentional) is to be deduced from the essence of the operations (acts) of pure consciousness. It seems to be that from the point of view of a valid epistemological methodology a certain kind of priority is to be demanded for pure consciousness, and that this is possible is also shown by the theory of immanent perception and the results of the analysis of primary constitutive consciousness constituting, for example, time. But, along with this, this "priority" of pure consciousness begins to assume a metaphysical character in the form even of a thesis of the absolute existence of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of an existential dependence of all other being, and, above all, of the real world, on pure consciousness. The danger of petitio principii in epistemology is removed by the phenomenological reduction but it leads to an account of the existence of the world which (in spite of all differences, from, for example, Berkeley's position, which Husserl himself constantly and emphatically stressed) comes alarmingly close to the Marburgian Neo-Kanti[ani]sm, of which Husserl was often accused on the grounds of similarities between his Ideas and [Paul] Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912. (pp. 11-13)

On Perceptual 'Taking'

Ed writes,

Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”.

This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake.

But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to be a person occupying the space behind the mirror, thinking it to be a window. In that case there is also no Y (because no such person) but is there an X? That is, does “I take a mirror image to be a person” imply that there is some X such that X is a mirror image and I take X to be a person?

It is the ‘ontological’ (=referential) questions that interest me. I have never had any interest in epistemology. Is a mirror image a τόδε τι, a hoc aliquid, a this-something?

Over to you.

BV:  I don't believe anyone who knows English would ever say, 'I take a tree root to be a snake' as opposed to 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'  If you see something that you believe to be a tree root, then you cannot at the same time take it to be a snake.  If, on the other hand, if you take something to be a snake, and further perception convinces you that it is a tree root, then you can say, 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'

Suppose we try to describe such a situation phenomenologically. I am hiking in twilight through rattlesnake country. I suddenly stop, and shout to my partner, "I see a snake!" People say things like this. What we have here is a legitimate ordinary language use of 'see.'  Sometimes, when people say 'I see a snake,' there is/exists a snake that they see.  Other times, when people say, 'I see a snake,' it is not the case that there is/exists a snake that they see.  In both cases they see something. This use of 'see' is neutral on the question whether the seen exists or does not exist. Call this use the phenomenological use. It contrasts with the 'verb of success use' which is also a legitimate ordinary language use. On the success use, if subject S sees X, it follows that X exists.  On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. On the phenomenological use, if S sees X, it does not follow that X exists. Mark the two senses as see_s  and see_p respectively.

I see_p a snake. But as I look more closely the initial episode of seeing is not corroborated by further such episodes. The snake appearance of the first episode is cancelled. By 'appearance' I mean the intentional object of the mental act of seeing_p. This appearance (apparent item)  is shown to be a merely intentional object. How? By the ongoing process of visual experiencing. The initial snake appearance (apparent item) is cancelled because of its non-coherence with the intentional objects of the subsequent perceptual acts. The subsequent mental acts present  intentional objects  that have some of the properties of a tree root. As the perceptual process continues through a series of  visual acts the intentional objects of which cohere, the perceiver comes to believe that he is veridically perceiving a tree root. He then says, "It wasn't a snake I saw after all; I took a tree root to be a snake!"

Clearly, I saw something, something that caused me to halt. If I had seen nothing, then I would not have halted. But the something I saw turned out not to exist.

So my answer to your concluding question is in the affirmative.

Finally, if you have no interest in epistemology, then you have no interest in the above question since it is an epistemological question concerning veridical and non-veridical knowledge of the external world via outer perception.

You are some kind of radical externalist.  But how justify such an extreme position? 

I Know My Limits

I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. 

(Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)

Epistemic Bluster

Man, who boasts of his knowledge, does not even know what knowledge is.

.........................

The thought is from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Apology for Raymond Sebond, trs. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Hackett Publishing, 2003, p. 12. The Apology first saw the light of day in 1580.

To Know for Sure; To Be Forever

Objective certainty is to knowledge what absolute immutability is to being. We want to know for sure; we want to be forever. The spiritually awake cannot be content to stumble along in the twilight and then just fall off a cliff.  

This message will not get through to the sleepwalkers of the sublunary.

Perhaps a better man than I can reach them?

Our Knowledge of Sameness (2021 Version)

How ubiquitous, yet how strange, is sameness!  The strangeness of the ordinary. Sameness is a structure of reality so pervasive and fundamental that a world that did not exhibit it would be inconceivable. There is synchronic and diachronic sameness. I will be discussing the latter.

How do I know that the tree I now see in my backyard is numerically the same as the one I saw there yesterday? Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford 1993, p. 124) says in a Reidian vein that one knows this "by induction." I take him to mean that the tree I now see resembles very closely the one I saw yesterday in the same place and that I therefore inductively infer that they are numerically the same. Thus the resemblance in respect of a very large number of properties provides overwhelming evidence of their identity.

But this answer is open to objection. First of all, there is something instantaneous and immediate about my judgment of identity in a case like this: I don't compare the tree-perceived-yesterday, or rather my memory of the tree-perceived-yesterday, with the tree-perceived-today, property for property, to see how close they resemble in order to hazard the inference that they are identical. There is no 'hazarding' at all.  Phenomenologically, there is no comparison and no inference. I just see that they are the same. But this 'seeing' is of course not with the eyes. For sameness is not an empirically detectable property or relation. I am just immediately aware -- not mediately via inference -- that they are the same.  Greenness is empirically detectable, but sameness is not.

What is the nature of this immediate awareness given that we do not come to it by inductive inference or by literally seeing (with the eyes) the numerical sameness of yesterday's tree and today's tree?   And what exactly is the object of the awareness, identity itself?

A problem with Plantinga's answer is that it allows the possibility that the two objects are not strictly and numerically the same, but are merely exact duplicates or indiscernible twins. But I want to discuss this in terms of the problem of how we perceive or know or become aware of change.  Change  is linked to identity since for a thing to change is for one and the same thing to change. 

Let's consider alterational (as opposed to existential) change. A thing alters if and only if it has incompatible properties at different times.  Do we perceive alteration with the outer senses? A banana on my kitchen counter on Monday is yellow with a little green. On Wednesday the green is gone and the banana is wholly yellow. On Friday, a little brown is included in the color mix. We want to say that the banana, one and the same banana,  has objectively changed in respect of color.

But what justifies our saying this? Do we literally see, see with the eyes, that the banana has changed in color? That literal seeing would seem to require that I literally see that it is the same thing that has altered property-wise over the time period. But how do I know that it is numerically the same banana present on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? How do I know that someone hasn't arranged things so that there are three different bananas, indiscernible except for color, that I perceive on the three different days? On that extraordinary arrangement I could not be said to be perceiving alterational change. To perceive alterational change one must perceive identity over time. For there is change only if one and the same thing has different properties at different times. But I do not perceive the identity over time of the banana.

I perceive a banana on Monday and a banana on Wednesday; but I do not visually perceive that these are numerically the same banana. For it is consistent with what I perceive that there be two very similar bananas, call them the Monday banana and the Wednesday banana.   I cannot tell from sense perception alone whether I am confronting numerically the same banana on two different occasions or two numerically different bananas on the two occasions. If you disagree with this, tell me what sameness looks like. Tell me how to empirically detect the property or relation of numerical sameness. Tell me what I have to look for.  Sameness is like existence: neither are empirically detectable features of things. 

Suppose I get wired up on methamphetamines and stare at the banana the whole week long. That still would not amount to the perception of alterational change. For it is consistent with what I sense-perceive that there be a series of momentary bananas coming in and out of existence so fast that I cannot tell that this is happening. (Think of what goes on when you go to the movies.) To perceive change, I must perceive diachronic identity, identity over time. I do not perceive the latter; so I do not perceive change. I don't know sameness by sense perception, and pace Plantinga I don't know it by induction. For no matter how close the resemblance between two objects, that is consistent with their being numerically distinct. And note that my judgment that the X I now perceive is the same as the X I perceived in the past has nothing tentative or shaky about it. I judge immediately and with assurance that it is the same tree, the same banana, the same car, the same woman. What then is the basis of this judgment? How do I know that this tree is the same as the one I saw in this spot yesterday? Or in the case of a moving object, how do I know that this girl who I now see on the street is the same as the one I saw a moment ago in the coffee house? Surely I don't know this by induction.

How then do I know it?  I don't for a second doubt that it is the same tree, the same banana, the same girl. I am strongly inclined to say that I know that it is the same tree, etc.  The question, however, is how I know it. How is it possible that I know such a thing given that transtemporal identity is not empirically detectable?  My inability to explain how it is possible would seem to some to cast doubt on my claim that I do know that it is the same tree, etc.  Others will demur and say that what is actual is possible whether or not one can explain how it is possible.  One simply waxes dogmatic in the face of critical raisonnement.

If I cannot know diachronic identity empirically, do I impose the concept of such identity on what I literally see so as to enforce the numerical identity of the two trees, the two bananas, the two girls?  Do I really want to say that identity is a transcendental concept to which nothing in the sensory manifold corresponds, a concept that I impose on the manifold?

Knowledge and Belief

If there are truths that we cannot know but only believe, should we deny ourselves those truths because they cannot be known but only believed?

Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?

1) I see a tree, a palo verde.  Conditions are optimal for veridical perception.  I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze. The tree is given to my perceptual acts as having these and other properties.  Now while I do not doubt for a second the existence of the tree, let alone deny its existence, the tree is not given as existing.  It is given as green, as blooming, etc., but not as existing. I see the green of the tree, but I don't see the existence of the tree.  If existence is a property of the tree, it is not an observable property thereof.  Whatever existence is, it is not phenomenologically accessible or empirically detectable. And yet the tree exists. We might be tempted to reason as follows:

a) The tree is not exhausted by its quiddity: it is not a mere what, but an existing what.
b) The existing/existence does not appear: only quidditative properties appear.

Therefore

c) The existing/existence of the tree is hidden.

2) Should we conclude that the existing of things is mysterious or hidden, an occult depth dimension beyond our phenomenological ken? P. Butchvarov and others would answer in the negative. And presumably anyone phenomenologically inclined would have to agree. Now there is a class of views according to which the existence of a concrete particular such as a tree is a sort of coherence of the facets, aspects, guises, noemata, intentional objects -- pick your term -- that are presented to us directly and in their turn present the thing itself.  Following Butchvarov I will use 'object' and distinguish objects from entities. The tree itself is an entity; the various facets, aspects, guises, noemata, are objects.

For example, I am seated on my porch looking at the tree.  I cannot see the whole of it, and I don't see all of the properties of the portions I do see. Seated, I enjoy a visual perception the accusative of which is (incomplete) object O1.  When I stand up, still looking at the tree, I am presented with a slightly different (incomplete) object, O2.  Advancing toward the tree, a series of objects come into view one after another.  (This makes it sound as if  the series is discrete when it is actually continuous.) Arriving at the tree, I put my hands around the trunk. The resulting object is richer than the others by the addition of tactile data, but still incomplete and therefore not identical to the completely determinate entity. But these objects all cohere and 'consubstantiate' (Castaneda) and are of one and the same entity. In their mutual cohesion, they manifest one and the same entity. They present the same infinitely-propertied entity in a manner suitable to a finite mind.

Butchvarov speaks of the material (not formal) identity of the objects.  On such a scheme the existence of an entity is naturally assayed as the indefinite identifiability of its objects.  Existence is indefinite identifiability. By whom? By the subject in question. We could call this a transcendentally-subjective theory of existence, although that is not what Butch calls it.  We find something very similar in Husserl and Hector-Neri Castaneda. In Husserl, existence is 'constituted in consciousness.' Sein reduces to Seinsinn.

On a scheme like this, existence would not be hidden but would itself be accessible, not as a separate monadic property, but as the ongoing relational coherence of objects, noemata, guises, aspects or whatever you want to call them. It would seem that the phenomenologically inclined, those who agree with Heidegger that ontology is possible only as phenomenology, would have to subscribe to some such theory of existence. 

3) On the above approach one could 'bracket' the existence in itself of the tree entity and still have available existence as indefinite identifiability.  But does this 'bracketing' (Husserl's Einklammerung) merely put existence in itself out of play or does it cancel it?I suspect it is the latter.

Let's be clear about the two senses of 'exists.' 

In the phenomenological sense, existence is the mutual cohesion of Butchvarov's objects, Castaneda's guises, Husserl's noemata.  Existence is thus accessible from the first-person point of view. It is in the open and not hidden. The question, How do I know that the tree exists? has a ready answer. I know that the tree exists from the manifest coherence of its objects, their indefinite identifiability in Butchvarov's sense.  

In the second sense, existence is such that what exists exists independently of (finite) consciousness and its synthetic activities. In this second  'realist' sense of 'exists,' things could exist even in the absence of conscious beings. Existence in this second sense is that which makes existents exist outside of their causes and outside the mind and outside of language. In the former 'idealist' sense of 'exist,' nothing could exist in the absence of consciousness. 

4) One conclusion:  if you deny that existence is hidden, then it looks like you will have to embrace some type of idealism, with its attendant problems.

5) How might existence be hidden? Suppose that everything  apart from God is kept in existence by ongoing divine creative activity. If so, each thing apart from God is an effect of the divine cause.  Its being the effect of a hidden Causa Prima is itself hidden.  My tree's being maintained in existence outside of its (secondary) causes and outside the mind  is not manifest to us. Perceiving the tree, I cannot 'read off' its createdness.  Its createdness is its existence and both are hidden.

6) My final conclusion is that no classical theist can adopt a phenomenological theory of existence.

Secure Epistemic Foundations, Language, and Reality

This from Grigory Aleksin:

I have been doing some reading and thinking, and there are a few things that I cannot quite get my head around. I was wondering whether you could help me, or point me in the direction of some work on the issue. My somewhat naive task has been to try and find the most foundational and basic pieces of knowledge that are required by any worldview. 

It seems to me there are at least two things that are in some sense foundational:

(1) Something exists

(2) There are correct and incorrect inferences

(1) seems to follow from what is meant by a 'thing' and what is meant by 'exists'. However this is only the case, if there are correct and incorrect inferences. Therefore, (2) is in some sense prior to (1). Hopefully that makes sense.

BV: It does indeed make sense. But I would approach the quest for secure foundations more radically.  How do I know (with objective certainty) that something exists? I know this because I know that I exist.   'Something exists' follows immediately from 'I exist.'  To say that one proposition follows from another is to say that the inference from the other to the one is correct.  The correctness of the inference preserves not only the truth of the premise but also its objective certainty.  I agree that your (2) is in some sense prior to (1); it is a presupposition of the inferential move from 

(0) I exist

to

(1) Something exists.

My problem arises when I consider that both (1) and (2) are not actually part of reality: both are sentences or linguistic expressions.

BV: Here you have to be careful. Surely a sentence token is a part of reality, even if you restrict reality to the spatio-temporal. The truth that something exists is not the same as its linguistic expression via the visible string, 'Something exists.' That same truth (true proposition, true thought) can also be expressed by a tokening of the German sentence 'Etwas existiert' and in numerous other ways. This suffices to show that the proposition expressed is not the same as the material vehicle of its expression. And already in Plato there is the insight that, while one can see or hear a sentence token, the eyes and the ears are not the organs whereby one grasps the thought expressed by marks on paper or sounds in the air.

So we need to make some distinctions: sentence type, sentence token, proposition/thought (what Frege calls der Gedanke). And this is just for starters.

And should we restrict reality to the spatio-temporal-causal? Are not ideal/abstract objects also real?  The sign '7' is not the same as the number 7. A numeral is not a number. I can see the numeral, but not the number. I can see seven cats, but not the (mathematical) set having precisely those cats as members. I can see the inscription '7 is prime' but not the proposition expressed on an occasion of use by a person who produces a token of that linguistic type.  The ideal/abstract objects just mentioned arguably belong to reality just as much as cats and rocks. 

Thus I have come to consider the role of language. The issue is that language is just a way of mapping reality, and as such is disconnected from it. This raises the question of what 'truth' is, since on one hand we know that there are objective truths, yet truths are only expressed [only by] using language. My question is, then: how can the analysis of language be used to answer philosophical questions? I know that linguistic analysis plays a central role in analytic philosophy, but I cannot help by having [but have] doubts or suspicions that something is wrong. As you see, I cannot fully express what it is that causes me such a headache, but it stems from a suspicion with respect to the use and limits of language, and thus philosophical inquiry. 

BV: We do distinguish between WORDS and WORLD, between language and reality. But this facile distinction, reflected upon, sires a number of puzzles.  My cat Max is black. So I write, 'Max is black.'  The proper name 'Max' maps onto Max. These are obviously distinct:  'Max' is monosyllabic, but no animal is monosyllabic.  So far, so good. But what about the predicate 'black'?  Does it have a referent in reality in the way that 'Max' has a referent in reality?  It is not obvious that it does.  And if it does, what is the nature of this referent?  If it doesn't, what work does the predicate do? And then there is the little word 'is,' the copula in the sentence.  Does it have a referent? Does it map onto something in reality the way 'Max' does? And what might that be?  The transcendental unity of apperception?  Being?  If you say 'nothing,' then what work does the copula do?

One can see from this how questionable is the claim "that language is just a way of mapping reality . . . ."  We don't want to say that for each discrete term there is a one-to-one mapping to an extralinguistic item.  That would be a mad-dog realism.  (What do 'and' and 'or' and 'not' refer to?) Nominalism is also problematic if you hold that only names refer extralinguistically.  And you have really gone off the deep end if you hold that all reference is intralinguistic.

Here is another ancient puzzle.  A sentence is not a list. 'Max is black' is not a mere list of its terms. There is such a list, but it cannot 'attract a truth-value.' That is a philosopher's way of saying that a list cannot be either true or false. But a sentence in the indicative mood is either true or false. Therefore, a sentence in the indicative mood is not a list.  Such a sentence has a peculiar unity that makes it apt to be either true or false. But how are we to understand that unity without igniting Bradley's regress?

And then there is the question of the truth-bearer or truth-vehicle. You write above as if sentences qua linguistic expressions are truth-bearers.  But that can't be right. How could physical marks on paper be either true or false? 

My question is, then: how can the analysis of language be used to answer philosophical questions?

It is not clear what you are asking. You say that there are objective truths. That's right. Your problem seems to be that you do not see how this comports with the fact that truths are expressed only by using language.  The source of your puzzlement may be your false assumption that sentence qua linguistic expressions are the primary vehicles of the truth-values.

Combox open.

Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.

[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]

But now to work.

There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.

Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.

If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.)  Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.

Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:

Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough -- it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.

[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]

But now to work.

There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.

Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.

If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.)  Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.

Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:

Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough -- it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)

Indexicality and Omniscience

Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument for the impossibility of divine omniscience. What I know when I know that

1. I am making a mess

is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that

2. BV is making a mess

or perhaps, pointing to BV, that

3. He is making a mess.

Just as no one except BV can refer to BV by tokening the first-person singular pronoun, no one except BV has access to the indexical fact that, as BV would put it to himself, I am BV. Only BV is privy to this fact; only BV knows himself in the first-person way. Now an omniscient being knows everything that can be known. Although I am not omniscient, there is at least one proposition that I know -- namely (1) -- that is not known by any other knower, including an omniscient knower. So an omnisicent being is impossible: by its very definition it must know every fact that can be known, but there are indexical facts that it cannot know. God can know that BV is making a mess but he cannot know what I know when I know that I am making a mess. For any subject S distinct from God, the first-person facts appertinent to S are inaccessible to every mind distinct from S, including God's mind. That is what I take to be Grim's argument.

I suppose one could counter the argument by denying that there are indexical facts.  But since I hold that there are both indexical propositions and indexical facts, that response route is not available to me.  Let me see if I can respond by making a distinction between two senses of 'omniscience.'

A. X is omniscient₁=_df X knows every fact knowable by some subject or other.

B. X is omniscient₂ =df X knows every fact knowable by some one subject.

What indexical facts show is that no being is or can be omniscient in the first sense. No being knows every indexical and non-indexical fact. But a failure to know what cannot be known does not count against a being's being omniscient in a defensible sense of this term any more than a failure to do what cannot be done counts against a being's being omnipotent. A defensible sense of 'omniscience' is supplied by (B). In this second sense, God is omniscient: he knows every fact that one subject can know, namely, every non-indexical fact, plus all facts pertaining to the divine subjectivity. What more could one want?

Since no being could possibly satisfy (A), (A) is not the appropriate sense of 'omniscience.' Compare omnipotence. An omnipotent being cannot be one who can do just anything, since there are both logical and non-logical limits on what any agent can do.  Logical: God cannot actualize (create) an internally contradictory state of affairs. Non-logical: God cannot restore a virgin.  So from the fact that it is impossible for God to know what is impossible for any one being to know, it does not follow that God is not omniscient.

To sum up. There are irreducible first-personal facts that show that no being can be omniscient in the (A)-sense: Patrick Grim's argument is sound. But the existence of irreducible first-personal facts is consistent  with the truth of standard theism since the latter is committed only to a being omniscient in the (B)-sense of 'omniscience.'

Does Omniscience Require Incarnation? Pursuing Some Consequences

Dr. Vito Caiati  occasioned in  me a new thought the other day: that divine omniscience might require divine incarnation.  The gist of the thought is as follows. If God is all-knowing, then he possesses not only all knowledge by description, but also all knowledge by acquaintance. But it is not easy to see how God in his disincarnate state  could have all or any  knowledge by acquaintance of beings whose subjectivity is realized in matter.  And this for the simple reason that if God is a pure spirit then his subjectivity is real without being realized in matter.

One could know everything there is to know objectively  about bats but still not know subjectively, 'from the inside,' what it is like to be a bat in Thomas Nagel's sense.  Objective omniscience is compatible with subjective nescience.  To know what it is like to be a bat I would have to be one: I would have to have the physiological constitution of a bat.  And so for God to know what it is like to be a man dying on a cross God would have to be a man dying on a cross.  To have objective knowledge of every aspect of dying on a cross is not to experience dying on a cross. That's the rough idea.  It has interesting and troubling consequences which I didn't pursue on Saturday night. So I am pleased to hear from Jacques.

Jacques writes,

I agree that God has to become a human being in order to know everything. But, as you say, this seems to lead to further problems. Here are two things that come to mind. 

First, there would be the same problem with respect to every sentient being. God has to be one of us in order to know certain perspectival or subjective facts about us. But God also has to be a bat or a beetle, for the same reason, if God is to be truly omniscient.

It seems so.

But in addition, it's not enough for omniscience that God has been incarnated once as a certain type of being. After all, that would mean only that God knows what it's like to have been that human being--a male one, living in the Roman empire, etc. Surely God also needs to know what it's like to be a woman, or a Mayan, or whatever. And also needs to know what it's like to be me as opposed to you, and you as opposed to me. Does this mean that believing in an omniscient God rationally supports some kind of Hindu-ish or pantheistic theory over Christianity? (Or does it mean that Christianity properly understood implies that God is every single one of us, and every bat and beetle?)

This is much less clear.  You and I are two numerically different human beings, but I don't need to be you  in order to know what it is like to be you.  Despite the privacy of experience, most if not all of our sensory qualia are similar if not qualitatively identical.  Lacking the special powers of Bill Clinton, I can't feel your pain: I cannot live through numerically the same pain experiences you live though when you are in some definite kind of pain, such as non-migraine headache. Your experiencings are in your psyche; mine are in mine. But I know what it is like when you have a headache since the subjective qualitative features of the experiencings are the same or very similar.  What makes this possible is that we are animals of very similar physiological constitution.  I suspect that sensory qualia are universals of a sort.

I am not a woman and I so I don't quite know what it is like to experience menstrual cramps. But I know what muscle cramps are like, and so I have some basis for empathy with the distaff contingent of child-bearing years.

And so I would not go so far as to say that for God to know what it is like to be a human, he must be or become every human.  It suffices for him to become a human. Nor is it necessary that he become a woman for him to know what it is like to be a woman.

But then there is this consideration:

Is there something it is like to be me, this particular person, numerically different from every other person?  Sometimes I have the strong sense that there is.  Call it one's irreducible haecceity (thisness) or ipseity (selfness).  It is irreducible in that it cannot be reduced to anything repeatable or multiply exemplifiable or anything constructed out of repeatable  or multiply exemplifiable elements. This is a sort of quale that I alone have and experience and that no one distinct from me could have or experience. We are all unique, but each of us has his own uniqueness 'incommunicable to any other' as a scholastic might say. I sometimes have the sense that each of us is uniquely unique as a person, as a subject in the innermost core of his subjectivity. And sometimes it seems that I know what it is like to be this uniquely unique person, absolutely irreplaceable and (therefore?) infinitely precious  and of absolute worth.

If God exists, he is super-eminently uniquely unique and we, who are made in his image and likeness, are derivatively uniquely unique.

Trouble is, this notion of a uniquely unique haecceity tapers off into the mystical. For my thisness or your's or anything's is ineffable. It cannot be conceptually articulated or put into language. Individuum ineffabile est as a medieval Aristotelian might say.  Is the ineffable nonexistent because ineffable?   That was Hegel's view. Or is the ineffable existent despite being ineffable? That was the Tractarian Wittgenstein's view: Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche.   One cannot eff the ineffable. Does this mean that it is not there to be effed? Or does it mean that effing is not the proper mode of access to the existent ineffable? I incline in the latter direction. 

Now suppose that each person at the base of his subjectivity is uniquely unique and is acquainted with his own irreducible haecceity and ipseity. How could God know anyone's haecceity?  He can't know it objectively, and to know my haecceity subjectively, as I know it, God would have to be me.  This leads on to the heretical thought that for God to be all-knowing, he would have to be every sentient being, as Jacques appreciates.

Second, it seems that having all objective knowledge precludes subjectivity and vice versa. While incarnated as a particular man, with a perspective and personality, God was not simultaneously aware of all objective facts. That kind of awareness would seem to make it impossible to have a perspective and a personality. So is true omniscience impossible? Either you know everything objective, or you know only something objective and only something subjective. I don't mind this result too much. I have no strong intuition that omniscience is possible. But then what should a Christian or other theist believe about God's knowledge? 

A God's eye view is a View from Nowhere (to allude to a title of one of T. Nagel's books.) An incarnate God would have to have a definite perspective and personality.  But then he could not be objectively omniscient. If, on the other hand, he were objectively omniscient, then he could not be incarnate.  That seems to be what Jacques is saying.

It might be replied that that Jesus qua God is objectively omnisicent but subjectively nescient, but qua man is objectively limited in knowledge but has knowledge of qualia. If that makes sense, then we could say that an incarnate God knows more than the same God aloof from matter. For then the incarnate God knows everything the disincarnate God knows plus what it is like to be a man, and by analogy what it is like to be a cat or a dog or any sentient being sufficiently similar in physiological make-up to a man.

Is true omniscience possible? If true omniscience requires knowing everything there is to know, both objectively  (by description) and subjectively (by acquaintance), then true or full omniscience is impossible, i.e., no one person could be fully omniscient.  What then should a Christian theologian say?

He could perhaps say this: God is omniscient in that he knows everything that it is possible for any one person to know.  Now it is not possible that any one person know everything both objectively and subjectively. Therefore, it is no restriction of God's omniscience that he does not know everything.

Could an eternal God know what time it is? Presumably not. Could God be both omniscient and ignorant with respect to future contingents?  Why not?  God knows whatever it it possible to know; future contingents, however, are impossible for anyone to know.

It is like the situation with respect to omnipotence. It is no restriction of God's omnipotence that he can do only what it is logically possible to do.  God is powerless to restore a virgin. But that's nothing against the divine omnipotence.

God, the Cosmos, Other Minds: In the Same Epistemological Boat?

Tony Flood has gone though many changes in his long search for truth. He seems to have finally settled down in Van Til's presuppositionalism.  Tony  writes,

God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat. [. . .] To be skeptical about one but not the other two is arbitrary. Our innate predisposition to be realistic about all three is divinely written “software” that informs our cerebral “wetware.”

I wish I could accept this, but I don't, and I believe I have good reasons for my non-acceptance.

By "in the same epistemological boat," Flood means that God, the physical universe, and other minds are all on a par in respect of dubitability. No one of them is more open to reasonable doubt than the other two, and none of them is open to reasonable doubt. Therefore, one can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than one can doubt the existence of other minds.  Atheism is on a par with solipsism in point of plausibility.

And bear in mind that by 'God' here is meant something very specific, the triune God of Christian theism, the God of the Bible as understood by Van Til and Co.  It is one thing to argue -- and it can be done with some plausibility -- that the validity of all reasoning about any subject presupposes the existence of an omniscient necessary being. It is quite another to argue that the presuppositum must be the God of Christian theism as the latter is expounded by a Calvinist!

Now I concede that doubts about the external world and the the reality of other minds are hyperbolic, and if taken as genuine doubts, as opposed to thought experiments deployed in an epistemology seminar, unreasonable. No one really doubts the existence of rocks or other minds.  Not even Bishop Berkeley doubts, let alone denies, the existence of rocks, the tree in the quad, and suchlike.  This is why it is perfectly lame to think that Berkeley's idealism can be refuted by kicking a stone. (See Of Berkeley's Stones and the Eliminativist's Beliefs and Argumentum ad Lapidem?)

The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes' dream argument and its latter-day brain-in-the-vat incarnations are methodological tools of the epistemologist who seeks to understand how we know what we know, and what it is to know what we know.   A philosopher who wonders how knowledge is possible may, but need not, and typically does not, deny or have any real doubt THAT knowledge is possible. For example, I may be firmly convinced of the existence of so-called abstract objects (numbers, sets, propositions, uninstantiated properties, etc.) but be puzzled about how knowledge of such entities is possible given that there is no causal interaction with them.  That puzzlement does not get  the length of doubt or denial. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for knowledge of the past, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world.

My point, then, is that (i) practically no one has real doubts about the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, and that (ii) it would not be reasonable to have such doubts.  But (iii) people do have real doubts about the existence of the God of Christian theism, and (iv) it is not unreasonable to have such doubts.  The various arguments from evil, and not just these, cast reasonable doubt on Christian theism.

One type of real doubt is an 'existential' doubt, one that grips a person who succumbs to it, and induces fear and perhaps horror.  There are those who lose their faith in God and suffer in consequence.  They experience a terrible sense of loss, or perhaps they fear that they have been duped by crafty priests who exploited their youthful innocence and gullibility to infect them with superstitious nonsense in order to keep the priestly hustle going.  One can lose one's faith in God, and many do.  No one loses his faith in the external world or in other minds. And this for the simple reason that there was no need for faith in the first place.

I believe I have said enough to cast serious doubt on, if not refute, the idea that God, the the cosmos, and other minds are are in the same epistemological boat. That's a boat that won't float.

If God Cannot Cause Himself, How Can He Know Himself?

This from a reader:

If we say God cannot create himself since this implies a contradiction (God existing prior to himself to act on himself), how can we say God does anything with regard to himself?

For instance, we say God knows himself. But how is this possible, seeing as God would need to first exist, in order to know himself? Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it. If I "know" a thing, I have the thing, the thing that is not me, in my mind. But if there is only simply God, how does he "have" himself in his mind?

An interesting question worth thinking about.

I grant that God cannot create himself. For if he creates himself then he causes himself to exist, and nothing can cause itself to exist. For a thing cannot enter into a causal relation unless it exists. So if God causes himself to exist, then his existence is logically, if not temporally, prior to his existence. And that, we agree, is impossible.

The main point is that the existence of a thing cannot be logically prior to its existence. (And if it cannot be logically prior, then it cannot be temporally prior either.) But the existence of a knower not only can but must be logically prior to its self-knowledge.  I cannot know myself unless I exist, but I can exist without knowing myself. In the finite case, then, it is clear that existence is logically prior to self-knowledge, and indeed other-knowledge as well.

Now God is omniscient and exists in all possible worlds.  So there is no possible situation in which he does not know himself or fails to know everything there is to know about himself. If we think of God as omnitemporal as opposed to eternal, then at every moment he enjoys full self-knowledge. At every moment, his existence and self-knowledge are simultaneous. But this is not a problem since there is no problem with God's existence being logically prior to his self-knowledge even if the former is not temporally prior to the latter.  We get the same result if God is eternal.

In sum, God's existence cannot be logically prior to God's existence as it would have to be if God creates himself. But God's existence can be logically prior to God's self-knowledge.

There is a second problem that the reader conflates with one I just discussed.   If God alone exists, how can God know himself if "Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it"?  This problem is solved by denying the assumption. Self-knowledge is NOT a relation to what is outside the mind.  I feel good right now, and I know it. The object of my knowledge is an internal state. God's self-knowledge can be said to be analogous to finite self-knowledge. 

How Can a Simple God Know Contingent Truths?

Chris M writes, 

If God simply is his act of existence, and if his existence is necessary, how can God have knowledge of contingent truths? What I mean is that it is possible for God to do other than he does (say not create, or create different things.) If he did differently - say, if the world didn't exist - his knowledge would be different in content. Yet God is supposed to be a single act of being, purely simple and identical across all possible worlds. God's essence just is his act of necessary existence, knowing and willing. It seems God's knowledge of contingents thus is an accident in him. But God can have no accidents. How then can he, as actus purus and necessary existence, have properties (such as knowing x or willing x) which he may not have had ?

That  is a clear statement of the difficulty.  As I see it, the problem is essentially one of solving the following aporetic tetrad:

1) God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2) God knows some contingent truths.

3) Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4) God exists necessarily.

The classical theist, Aquinas for example, is surely committed to (1), (2), and (4). The third limb of the tetrad, however, is extremely plausible. And yet the four propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

 

For example, it is contingently true that Socrates published nothing and contingently true that God knows this truth.  He presumably knows it in virtue of being in some internal mental state such as a belief state or some state analogous to it. But this state, while contingent, is intrinsic to God.  The divine simplicity, however, requires that there be nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.  Since God exists necessarily, as per (4), the belief state exists necessarily, which contradicts the fact that it must exist contingently.

 

I discuss this problem here, and in nearby posts in the Divine Simplicity category. 

Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs

That philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge.  

The contemporary Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs begins his book Illusions of Sceptics (2016) by considering this question.  He grants that the "cognitive potential of philosophy" is called into question by the "embarrassing fact that there is not a single thing that philosophers would agree on." (13) Nevertheless, Fuchs insists that we have no good reason to be skeptical about the possibility of philosophical knowledge. His view is that "Discord among philosophers can . . . be sufficiently explained by the frequent prejudices of philosophers . . . Consequently, the existence of discord among philosophers does not imply that their work is of fundamentally unscientific character." (16)

Besides the prejudices of philosophers, the lack of consensus among philosophers may also be attributed to philosophy's difficulty: "the discord may just be a consequence of the specific challenging character of philosophy."(19)

Fuchs maintains that "consensus has no relation to the core of scientific quality. . . ." (24). The core of scientific quality is constituted by "proof or demonstration." (24)  His claim is that interminable and widespread disagreement or lack of consensus has no tendency to show that philosophy is incapable of achieving genuine knowledge, where such knowledge involves apodictic insight into the truth of some philosophical propositions. 

There are two main issues we need to discuss. One concerns the relation of consensus and truth; the other the relation of consensus and knowledge. My impression is that Fuchs conflates the two issues. I will argue, contra Fuchs, that while it is obvious that consensus and truth are logically independent, logical independence is not obvious, and is arguably absent, in the case of consensus and knowledge.  My view, tentatively held, is that the lack of consensus in philosophy does tend to undermine philosophy's claim to be knowledge.

Consensus and Truth

I maintain, and Fuchs will agree, that the following propositions are true if not platitudinous.

1) Truth does not entail consensus. If a proposition is true, it is true whether or not there is consensus with respect to its truth.

2) Consensus does not entail truth. If most or all experts agree that p, it does not follow that p is true.

3) Consensus and truth are logically independent. This follows from (1) in conjunction with (2). One can have truth without consensus and consensus without truth. 

Lack of consensus, therefore, does not demonstrate lack of truth. Even if no philosophical proposition wins the agreement of a majority of competent practitioners, it is possible that some such propositions are true.  But it doesn't follow that some philosophical propositions have 'scientific quality.'  To have this quality they have to be true, but they also have to be knowable by us.  But what is knowability and how does it relate to consensus? To answer this question we must first clarify some other notions.

Truth, Knowledge, Knowability, Cognitivity, Justification, and Certainty

I add to our growing list the following  propositions, perhaps not all platitudinous and not all agreeable to Fuchs:

4) Knowledge entails truth. If S knows that p, it follows that p is true. There is no false knowledge. There are false beliefs, and indeed false justified beliefs; but there is no false knowledge. You could think of this as an analytic/conceptual truth, or as a truth about the essence of knowledge.

5) Truth does not entail knowledge. If p is true, it does not follow that someone (some finite mind or ectypal intellect) knows that p.

6) Truth does not entail knowability by us. If, for any proposition p,  p is true, it does not follow that there is any finite subject S such that S has the power to know p. There may be truths which, though knowable 'in principle,' or knowable by the archetypal intellect, are not knowable by us.

7) Cognitivity does not entail knowability. Let us say that a proposition is cognitive just in case it has a truth value. Assuming bivalence, a proposition is cognitive if and only if it is either true, or if not true, then false.  Clearly, cognitivity is insufficient for knowability. For if a proposition is false, then it is cognitive but cannot be known because it is false. And if a proposition is true, then it is cognitive but may not be knowable because beyond our ken.

8) Knowledge entails justification. If S believes that p, and p is true, it does not follow that S knows that p.  For knowledge, justification is also required. This is a bit of epistemological boilerplate that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus.

9) Knowledge entails objective certainty.  Knowledge implies the sure possession of the object of knowledge; if the subject is uncertain, then the subject does not have knowledge strictly speaking.

Consensus and Knowledge

Fuchs and I will agree that consensus is not necessary for truth: a true proposition need not be one that enjoys the consensus of experts. But consensus may well be necessary for knowledge.  Fuchs, however, seems to conflate truth and certainty, and thus truth with knowledge.  A truth can be true without being known by us; indeed, without even being knowable by us. But, necessarily, whatever is known is true.  On p. 30 we read:

By denying that the thought processes of philosophers can exhibit a scientific quality simply because of the existence of discord among philosophers, we make consensus a necessary condition for the general validity and potential certainty of scientific knowledge, which is the attribute of science. (Emphasis added.)

On the following page we find the same thought but with a replacement of 'potential certainty' by 'certainty':

. . . the necessary question of whether the consensus of experts is really such an essential and indispensable condition for the certainty and general validity of scientific knowledge. (31, emphasis added.)

When one speaks of the validity of a proposition, one means its truth. ('Valid' as a terminus technicus in formal logic is not in play here.) So it seems clear that Fuchs is maintaining that consensus is necessary neither for the truth of propositions nor for their certainty.  He seems to be maintaining that one can have certain knowledge of a proposition even if the consensus of experts goes against one. This is not obvious. Why not?

Knowledge requires justification. Now suppose I accept the proposition that God exists and that my justification takes the form of various arguments for the existence of God.   Those arguments will be faulted by an army of competent practitioners, not all of them atheists, on a variety of grounds. What's more, the members of the atheist divisions will marshal their own positive arguments, in first place arguments from evil. Now if just one of my theistic arguments is sound, then God exists. But I do not, by giving a sound argument for God, know that God exists unless I know that the argument I have given is sound.  (A sound argument is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true.) But how do I know that even one of my theistic arguments is sound? How can I legitimately claim to know that when a chorus of my epistemic peers rises up against me?  

If what I maintain is true, then it is true no matter how many epistemic peers oppose me: they are just wrong! Truth is absolute: it is not sensitive to the vagaries of agreement and disagreement. Justification, however, is sensitive to agreement and disagreement. Or so it seems to me.  My justification for considering a certain argument sound is undermined by your disagreement assuming that we are both competent in the subject matter of the argument and we are epistemic peers.  You may disagree with what I just wrote, and thus disagree with me about the implications of disagreement, but you ought to grant that I am raising a very serious question here. (If you don't grant that, then you get the boot!)

In a situation in which my justification for believing that p is undermined by the disagreement of competent peers, there is no certainty that p. If knowledge logically requires certainty, and certainty is destroyed by the disagreement of competent peers, then I can no longer legitimately claim to know that p. So, while truth has nothing to fear from lack of agreement, knowledge does. For knowledge requires justification, and justification can be augmented or diminished by agreement or disagreement, respectively.

Interim Conclusion

Fuchs makes things too easy for himself by conflating truth and knowledge. We can agree that consensus is logically irrelevant to truth.  Protracted disagreement by the best and the brightest over the truth value of p has no tendency to show either deductively or inductively that p is not either true or false. Truth is absolute and thus insulated from the vagaries of opinion. But truths (true propositions) do not do us any good unless we can know them.  It is not enough to know that some truths are known; what we need is to know of a given truth that it is true. But disagreement inserts a skeptical blade between the truth and our knowledge of it.

Disagreement in philosophy undermines her claims to knowledge.  As I see it, Fuchs has done nothing to undermine this undermining.

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Dream and Reality

Suppose I become aware of something while dreaming. Does the fact that I am dreaming invalidate the content of my awareness? Or are there cases in which I become veridically aware that p even while and despite dreaming?  

In bed I am puzzling over a chess problem. The book drops from my hands and I fall asleep. The solution occurs to me in a dream, and I later upon waking verify that it is correct. This happens. The solution I dreamt was correct despite my having dreamt it. So not everything that appears in a dream is invalidated by so appearing.

Or during a dream it occurs to me that the number of primes between 13 and 19 inclusive is itself prime. (A prime number is an integer greater than 1 the positive integer divisors of which are only 1 and the number itself.  Examples: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, and 29.) The content of my dream-thought is true, indeed necessarily true.  So again one cannot validly infer the invalidity of a dream content from the fact that it is a dream content.

Are all items of a priori knowledge that are knowable while awake also knowable while dreaming? I think so.  At least in principle. Suppose I come to know a priori by working through the proof that Zorn's Lemma is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. Could I come to this insight while dreaming? In principle, yes, but not in practice inasmuch as I would need to have visual aids, paper, pencil, books, etc.

In sum, my dreaming that p is consistent with the truth of p if p is knowable a priori.

Due to my embodiment and its limitations, what I know a priori I know in most cases only on the occasion of sense experience, but never on the basis of sense experience. (That's what makes it a priori.)  Now suppose there is a visio intellectualis, an intellectual intuition, not only of necessary truths, but also of spiritual substances. Suppose there is mystical knowledge of God or of Persons of the Triniity.  Would such mystical insight, if veridical, lose one iota of its veridicality if it were enjoyed while dreaming?  Why should it? Perhaps the quiescence of the senses and bodily functions in sleep disposes us toward such extraordinary experiences.

"You're speculating!" No doubt. But if  a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

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Again on Divine Simplicity and God's Knowledge of Contingent Truths

This entry continues yesterday's discussion.  The question was: How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths?  Here again is yesterday's aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

I briefly discussed, without endorsing, an externalist way of rejecting (3). Reader Dan M. has a different idea for rejecting (3):

. . . a kind of nominalism about mental acts or states.

To illustrate, consider this truth: (A) Bill is sitting. Because 'Bill' is a singular term denoting a man, (A)'s truth implies the existence of at least one item. But there's disagreement about whether (A) implies the existence of other items. A property realist might say: (A) implies the existence of a property, sitting-ness. An event or state realist might say: (A) implies the existence of an event or state, Bill's sitting. But a nominalist may say: no, an item (e.g. Bill) can be a certain way (e.g. sitting), without that consisting in (or otherwise committing us to) the existence of any further items (such as a property of sitting, or a state or event of Bill's sitting).

Bringing in God's knowledge, we can say: (B) God knows that Bill has two cats. Someone who accepts proposition 3 might say: (B) implies the existence of an item intrinsic to God, namely a particular state of knowledge. If I understand you on knowledge externalism, that sort of response takes issue with 'intrinsic'. On the alternative view I'm entertaining, we take issue with 'item' instead. We say: there is no item of God's knowing that Bill has two cats. Just as Bill can sit without there being a state of Bill's sitting (construed as a bona fide item), God can know that something is the case without there being a state of God's knowing it (construed as a bona fide item).

Very interesting!

The suggestion, to put it generally, is that if a subject S believes/knows/wants/desires (etc.) that p, a correct ontological assay of the situation will not turn up anything in addition to S and p.  Thus there is no need to posit any such item as the state (or state of affairs or fact or event) of S's believing/knowing/wanting/desiring that p.  So on Dan's proposal, if 'God knows that Bill has two cats' is true, this truth does not commit us ontologically to the state (state of affairs, fact, event) of God's knowing that Bill has two cats.

In Cartesian terms, there is an ego and a cogitatum, but no cogitatio. This amounts to a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction.

Well, why not?  One reason off the top of my head is that such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among believing, doubting, suspending judgment, wanting, desiring, willing, imagining, remembering, etc.

One and the same proposition, that Bill has two cats, is known by me, believed but not known by my loyal and trusting readers, doubted by a doubting Thomas or two, suspended by Seldom Seen Slim the Skeptic who takes no position on the weighty question of the extent of my feline involvement, remembered by last year's house guests, etc.  Indeed, one and the same subject can take up different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

Suppose a neighbor tells me there's a mountain lion in my backyard. I begin by doubting the proposition, suspecting my neighbor of confusing a mountain lion with a bobcat, but then, seeing the critter with my own eyes, I advance to believing and perhaps even to knowing.  So one and the same subject can take up two or more different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

These examples are phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts, particular mental occurrences or episodes such as Bill's seeing here and now that there is a mountain lion in his backyard. The differences among believing, knowing, doubting, desiring, remembering, etc. will then be act-differences, differences in the types of mental acts. 

How would a resolute denier of mental acts account for these differences?  Will he shunt all the differences onto propositional contents?  Will he theorize that there are memorial, imaginal, dubitable, desiderative, etc. propositional contents?  Good luck with that.

Suppose that S goes from doubting that p to believing that p. The denier of mental acts would have to redescribe the situation as one in which there are two propositions, call them a dub-prop and a cred-prop, with awareness of the first followed by awareness of the second.  How could one display these two propositions? Dubitably, there is a mountain lion on the backyard and Credibly, there is a mountain lion in the back yard? 

Perhaps such a theory can be worked out plausibly. But it makes little sense to me.

And so we are brought back to our problem: How can a simple God know contingent truths? 

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Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

Theophilus inquires,

I've been researching the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) recently and I've had a hard time figuring something out. On DDS, is it the case that God is identical with his thoughts? Surely on the view (as you say in your SEP article) God is identical with his omniscience. But does that also mean he is identical with the content of that attribute? 

I would appreciate your input on this question, and your SEP article has given me a lot to think about.

The good news for Theophilus is that he has stumbled onto a serious problem. The bad news is that there is no really satisfactory solution known to me.

 

On DDS, God is identical to his attributes. Omniscience is one of the divine attributes; ergo God is identical to omniscience. This seems to imply that God is identical to the mental states in which his omniscience is articulated.  But a good lot of what God knows is contingent, for example, that I am the author of the SEP entry in question. Someone else might have been the author of that encyclopedia entry, not to mention the fact that there might not have been any such entry, or any such encyclopedia.

 

If we think of knowledge as a propositional attitude, and if this holds for God as well as for us, then there are many contingently true propositions with respect to which God is in corresponding contingent mental states. For if it is contingent that p, then it is contingent that God is in the state of knowing that p. Thus God is contingently in the state -- call it S -- of knowing that there is such an on-line publication as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

 

But how can God be identical to S?  This, I take it, is the question that vexes Theophilus.  He is right to be vexed.  How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths? 

The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

The plausibility of (3) may be appreciated as follows.  Whatever else knowledge is, it is plausibly regarded as a species of true belief.  A belief is an intrinsic state of a subject.  Moreover, beliefs are individuated by their contents: beliefs or believings with different contents are different beliefs or believings.  It cannot be that one and the same act of believing has different contents at different times or in different possible worlds. 

That the tetrad is inconsistent can be seen as follows.  Suppose God, who knows everything there is to be known,  knows some contingent truth t.  He knows, for example, that I have two cats.  It follows from (3) that there is some item intrinsic to God such as a belief state whereby God knows t.  Given (1), this state, as intrinsic to God, is not distinct from God.  Given (4), the state whereby God knows t exists necessarily.  For, necessarily, if x = y, and x is a necessary being, then y is a necessary being. But then t is necessarily true.  This contradicts (2) according to which t is contingent.

Opponents of the divine simplicity will turn the tetrad into an argument against (1).  They will argue from the conjunction of (2) & (3) & (4) to the negation of (1). The classical theist, however, accepts (1), (2), and (4).  If he is to solve the tetrad, he needs to find a way to reject (3). He needs to find a way to reject the idea that when a knower knows something, there is, intrinsic to the knower, some mediating item that is individuated by the object known.

So consider an externalist conception of knowledge.  I see a cat and seeing it I know it -- that it is and what it is.  Now the cat is not in my head; but it could be in my mind on an externalist theory of mind.  My awareness of the cat somehow 'bodily' includes the cat, the whole cat, all 25 lbs of him, fur, dander, and all.  Knowledge is immediate, not mediated by sense data, representations, mental acts, occurrent believings, or any other sort of epistemic intermediary or deputy.  Seeing a cat, I see the cat itself directly, not indirectly via some other items that I see directly such as an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan ontological guise, a Meinongian incomplete object, or any other sort of merely intentional object. On this sort of scheme, the mind is not a container, hence has no contents in the strict sense of this term.  The mind is directly at the things themselves.

If this externalism is coherent, then then we can say of God's knowledge that it does not involve any intrinsic states of God that would be different were God to know different things than he does know.  For example, God knows that I have two cats.  That I have two cats is an actual, but contingent fact.  If God's knowledge of this fact were mediated by an item intrinsic to God, a mental act say, an item individuated by its accusative, then given the divine simplicity, this item could not be distinct from God with the consequence that the act and its accusative would be necessary.  This consequence is blocked if there is nothing intrinsic to God whereby he knows that I have two cats.

I don't find externalism plausible, so I am left with an impasse.  I cannot see how God can exist without being ontologically simple. So I cannot reject (1). And of course I cannot solve or rather dissolve the problem by disposing of the presupposition that God exists. As for (2), I am not about to deny that there are contingent truths or that God knows contingent truths. As for (4), if God is simple, then surely he is a necessary being.  A being that is its existence cannot not exist.

 

Few philosophers will follow me to the conclusion that our tetrad is a genuine aporia.  Most theists will cheerfully deny (1). A few will deny (4) which implies the denial of (1). Atheists will dismiss the whole discussion as an empty academic exercise  since it is plain to them that there is no God. A few brave souls will deny (2) either by denying that there are contingent truths or that God knows them. And then there are those who will deny (3).  This I should think is the best way to go if there is a way forward.

 

Could we go mysterian on this? The limbs of the tetrad are each of them true, and so collectively consistent; it is just that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

 

REFERENCE: W. Matthews Grant, "Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, July 2012, pp. 254-274.

  

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Does the Divine Transcendence Require that God not be a Being among Beings?

Atheism and Ontological Simplicity: A Retraction and a Repair

God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

Anti-Pyrrhonian Haiku

The truth we need
We cannot know.
So we must believe
That it is so.

Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?

A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question is ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God? 

My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God.  My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day.  Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore).  It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body -- can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? -- but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.  

By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did.  Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.'  (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)

So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist.  But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists.  The evidence is a lot slimmer.  This is not to say that there is no evidence.  There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling.  There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets.  But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.

When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists.  Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun."  In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things.  But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.

The difference could be put like this.  The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God.  Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know.  But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.

In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt.  But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil.  It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil.  How do you know there is evil?  No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain.  But is pain evil?  Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil.  Pain is given.  But is evil given?  Pain is undeniable.  But one can easily deny the existence of evil.  Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.

As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God.  Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value.  I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists.  As certain as I am that I have hands?  More certain.  I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way.  But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?

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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

God, Proof, and Desire

A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question is ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God? 

My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God.  My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day.  Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore).  It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body -- can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? -- but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.  

By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did.  Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.'  (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)

So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist.  But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists.  The evidence is a lot slimmer.  This is not to say that there is no evidence.  There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling.  There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets.  But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.

When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists.  Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun."  In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things.  But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.

The difference could be put like this.  The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God.  Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know.  But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.

In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt.  But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil.  It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil.  How do you know there is evil?  No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain.  But is pain evil?  Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil.  Pain is given.  But is evil given?  Pain is undeniable.  But one can easily deny the existence of evil.  Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.

As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God.  Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value.  I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists.  As certain as I am that I have hands?  More certain.  I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way.  But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?

Our Knowledge of Sameness

How ubiquitous, yet how strange, is sameness!  A structure of reality so pervasive and fundamental that a world that did not exhibit it would be inconceivable. 

How do I know that the tree I now see in my backyard is numerically the same as the one I saw there yesterday? Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford 1993, p. 124) says in a Reidian vein that one knows this "by induction." I take him to mean that the tree I now see resembles very closely the one I saw yesterday in the same place and that I therefore inductively infer that they are numerically the same. Thus the resemblance in respect of a very large number of properties provides overwhelming evidence of their identity.

But this answer seems open to objection. First of all, there is something instantaneous and immediate about my judgment of identity in a case like this: I don't compare the tree-perceived-yesterday, or my memory of the tree-perceived-yesterday, with the tree-perceived-today, property for property, to see how close they resemble in order to hazard the inference that they are identical. There is no 'hazarding' at all.  Phenomenologically, there is no comparison and no inference. I just see that they are the same. But this 'seeing' is of course not with the eyes. For sameness is not an empirically detectable property or relation. I am just immediately aware -- not mediately via inference -- that they are the same.  Greenness is empirically detectable, but sameness is not.

What is the nature of this awareness given that we do not come to it by inductive inference?   And what exactly is the object of the awareness, identity itself?

A problem with Plantinga's answer is that it allows the possibility that the two objects are not strictly and numerically the same, but are merely exact duplicates or indiscernible twins. But I want to discuss this in terms of the problem of how we perceive or know or become aware of change.  Change  is linked to identity since for a thing to change is for one and the same thing to change. 

Let's consider alterational (as opposed to existential) change. A thing alters iff it has incompatible properties at different times.  Do we perceive alteration with the outer senses? A banana on my counter on Monday is yellow with a little green. On Wednesday the green is gone and the banana is wholly yellow. On Friday, a little brown is included in the color mix. We want to say that the banana, one and the same banana,  has objectively changed in respect of color.

But what justifies our saying this? Do we literally see, see with the eyes, that the banana has changed in color? That literal seeing would seem to require that I literally see that it is the same thing that has altered property-wise over the time period. But how do I know that it is numerically the same banana present on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? How do I know that someone hasn't arranged things so that there are three different bananas, indiscernible except for color, that I perceive on the three different days? On that extraordinary arrangement I could not be said to be perceiving alterational change. To perceive alterational change one must perceive identity over time. For there is change only if one and the same thing has different properties at different times. But I do not perceive the identity over time of the banana.

I perceive a banana on Monday and a banana on Wednesday; but I do not visually perceive that these are numerically the same banana. For it is consistent with what I perceive that there be two very similar bananas, call them the Monday banana and the Wednesday banana.   I cannot tell from sense perception alone whether I am confronting numerically the same banana on two different occasions or two numerically different bananas on the two occasions. If you disagree with this, tell me what sameness looks like. Tell me how to empirically detect the property or relation of numerical sameness. Tell me what I have to look for.

Suppose I get wired up on methamphetamines and stare at the banana the whole week long. That still would not amount to the perception of alterational change. For it is consistent with what I sense-perceive that there be a series of momentary bananas coming in and out of existence so fast that I cannot tell that this is happening. (Think of what goes on when you go to the movies.) To perceive change, I must perceive diachronic identity, identity over time. I do not perceive the latter; so I do not perceive change. I don't know sameness by sense perception, and pace Plantinga I don't know it by induction. For no matter how close the resemblance between two objects, that is consistent with their being numerically distinct. And note that my judgment that the X I now perceive is the same as the X I perceived in the past has nothing tentative or shaky about it. I judge immediately and with assurance that it is the same tree, the same banana, the same car, the same woman. What then is the basis of this judgment? How do I know that this tree is the same as the one I saw in this spot yesterday? Or in the case of a moving object, how do I know that this girl who I now see on the street is the same as the one I saw a moment ago in the coffee house? Surely I don't know this by induction.

How then do I know it?

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Anderson Against Modes of Being: The Case of Berkeley

Could God Prove His Own Existence?

In response to two recent posts, here and here, Jacques comments:

I'm mostly persuaded by your recent posts about theism and knowledge, but I disagree about your claim that

"Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to."

Think of your condition 5 ["It is such that all its premises are known to be true."]  if you can prove that p then you can derive p from an argument with premises all of which are known to be true.  Suppose that God has some argument A for the conclusion that God exists.  As you point out, A will either depend on premises taken to be self-evident, or an appeal to the seeming self-evidence of further premises in sub-arguments for the premises in A that are not taken to be self-evident.  But now suppose that there's some premise P such that A is a proof of theism for God only if God takes P to be self-evident and P really is self-evident -- in other words, only if P is 'objectively' self-evident and not just 'subjectively'.  Of course, P might well appear to God to be self-evident; it might even appear to him that the objective self-evidence of P is itself objectively self-evident, and so on ad infinitum.  But how could He really know, or be rationally entitled to believe, that P really is self-evident in the relevant sense rather than just seeming that way to Him?  Sure, if He already knows that God exists, and that He Himself = God, then He can infer that the fact that P seems to him self-evident entails its real objective self-evidence.  But how can He know that unless He can prove that He = God?

BV:  The question seems to come down to whether or not the distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence  applies to God as well as to us.  It does apply to us.  But I don't see that it applies to God.  God's is an archetypal intellect, which implies that divine knowledge is creative of its object, whereas our knowledge is clearly not.  If God knows that p by making it the case that p, then there is no logical gap between subjective and objective self-evidence for God.

On the other hand, it could be that God isn't even capable of proving anything.  Maybe proofs are only possible for ignorant thinkers (who don't know directly, by acquaintance all the facts).  But if He could prove or try to prove things I suspect His situation would be no better than ours with respect to His existence.  Of course that conflicts with the (definitional?) fact of His omniscience, but maybe the conclusion should just be that the traditional concept of the Omni- God is incoherent.

BV:  The divine intellect is intuitive, not discursive.  God knows directly, not mediately via inferential processes.  To know something in the latter way is an inferior way of knowing, and as such inappropriate to the divine intellect.  Does it follow that God can't prove anything?  I would hesitate to say  that given the divine omnipotence: if he wanted to construct a proof he could.  The point is that he doesn't need to.  But we do need to employ inferential process to articulate and amplify our knowledge both deductively and inductively.

The main question, however, was whether WE can prove the existence of God.  My answer to that is in the negative.  The reason is due to the nature of proof as set forth in my definition.  But perhaps you have a better definition.

Neither the Existence Nor the Nonexistence of God is Provable

A post of mine ends like this:

To theists, I say: go on being theists.  You are better off being a theist than not being one.  Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable.  But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite.  In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

About "Don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite," Owen Anderson asks:

How would we know if that claim is itself true?  Isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?

To formulate my point in the declarative rather than the exhortative mood:  

 

    P. Neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God is provable.

 

How do I know (P) to be true?  By reflection on the nature of proof.  An argument is a proof if and only if it satisfies all of the following six requirements: it is deductive; valid in point of logical form; free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii; possesses a conclusion that is relevant to the premises; has premises each of which is true; has premises each of which is known to be true.

 

I say that an argument is a proof if and only it is rationally compelling, or rationally coercive.  But an argument needn't be rationally compelling to be a more or less 'good argument,' one that renders its conclusion more or less rationally acceptable.

 

Now if my definition above gives what we ought to mean by 'proof,' then it is clear that neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God can be proven. Suppose you present a theistic or anti-theistic argument that satisfies the first five requirements.  I will then ask how you know that the premises are true.  Suppose one of your premises is that change is the conversion of potency into act. That is a plausible thing to maintain, but how do you know that it is true?  How do you know that the general-ontological framework within which the proposition acquires its very sense, namely, Aristotelian metaphysics, is tenable?  After all, there are alternative ways of understanding change.  That there is change is a datum, a Moorean fact, but it would be an obvious mistake to confuse this datum with some theory about it, even if the theory is true.  Suppose the theory is true.  This still leaves us with the question of how we know it is.   Besides, the notions of potency and act, substance and accident, form and matter,  and all the rest of the Aristotelian conceptuality are murky and open to question.  (For example, the notion of prime matter is a necessary ingredient in an Aristotelian understanding of substantial change, but the notion of materia prima is either incoherent or else not provably coherent.)

 

To take a second example, suppose I give a cosmological argument the starting point of which is the seemingly innocuous proposition that there are are contingent beings, and go on to argument that this starting point together with some auxiliary premises, entails the existence of God.  How do I know that existnece can be predicated of concrete individuals?  Great philosophers have denied it.  Frege and Russell fanmously held that existence vannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals but only of cncepts and propositional functions.  I have rather less famoulsy argued that the 'GFressellina' view' is mstaken, but this is a point of controversy.  Furtrhertmore, if existence cannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals, how can individuals be said to exist contingently?

 

The Appeal to Further Arguments 

 

If you tell me that the premises of your favorite argument can be known to be true on the basis of further arguments that take those premises as their conclusions, then I simply iterate my critical procedure: I run the first five tests above and if your arguments pass those, then I ask how you know that their premises are true.  If you appeal to still further arguments, then you embark upon a vicious infinite regress.

 

The Appeal to Self-Evidence

 

If you tell me that the premises of your argument are self-evident, then I will point out that your and my subjective self-evidence is unavailing.  It is self-evident to me that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain cases.  I'll die in the ditch for that one, and pronounce you morally obtuse to boot for not seeing it.  But there are some who are intelligent, well-meaning, and sophisticated to whom this is not self-evident.  They will charge with with moral obtuseness.  Examples are easily multiplied. What is needed is objective, discussion-stopping, self-evidence.  But then, how, in a given case, do you know that your evidence is indeed objective?  All you can go on is how things seem to you.  If it seems to you that it is is objectively the case that p, that boils down to: it seems to you that, etc., in which case your self-evidence is again merely subjective.

 

The Appeal to Authority

 

You may attempt to support the premises of your argument by an appeal to authority.  Now many such appeals  are justified. We rightly appeal to the authority of gunsmiths, orthopaedic surgeons, actuaries and other experts all the time, and quite sensibly. But such appeals are useless when it comes to PROOF.  How do you know that your putative authority really is one, and even if he is, how do you know that he is eight in the present case?  How do you know he is not lying to you well he tells you you need a new sere in your  semi-auto pistol?

 

The Appeal to Revelation

 

This is the ultimate appeal to authority.  Necessarily, if God reveals that p, then p!  Again, useless for purposes of proof.  See Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation.

 

Move in a Circle?

 

If your argument falls afoul of petitio principii, that condemns it, and the diameter of the circle doesn't matter.  A circle is a circle no matter its diameter.

 

Am I Setting the Bar Too High?

 

It seems to me I am setting it exactly where it belongs.  After all we are talking about PROOF here and surely only arguments that generate knowledge count as proofs.  But if an argument is to generate a known proposition, then its premises must be known, and not merely believed, or believed on good evidence, or assumed, etc.  

 

"But aren't you assuming that knowledge entails certainty, or (if this is different) impossibility of mistake?"  Yes I am assuming that.  Argument here.  

 

 Can I Consistently Claim to Know that (P) is true?

 

Owen Anderson asked me how I know that (P) is true.   I said I know it by reflection on the concept of proof.  But that was too quick. Obviously I cannot consistently claim to know that (P) if knowledge entails certainty.  For how do I know that my definition captures the essence of proof?  How do I know that there is an essence of proof, or any essence of anything?   What I want to say, of course, is that it is very reasonable to define 'proof' as I define it -- absent some better definition -- and that if one does so define it then it is clear that there are very few proofs, and, in particular, that there are no proofs of God or of the opposite.

 

"But then isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?"

 

Yes, if one operates with a different, less rigorous, definition of 'proof.'  But in philosophy we have and maintain high standards.  So I say proof is PROOF (a tautological form of words that expresses a non-tautological proposition) and that we shouldn't use the word to refer to arguments that merely render their conclusions rationally acceptable.  

 

Note also that if we retreat from the rationally compelling to the rationally acceptable, then both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.  I suspect that what Owen wants is a knock-down argument for the existence of God.  But if that is what he wants, then he wants a proof in my sense of the world.  If I am right, that is something very unreasonable to expect.

 

There is no getting around the need for a decision.  In the end, after all the considerations pro et contra, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live.

 

Life is a venture and an adventure.  You cannot live without risk.  This is true not only in the material sphere, but also in the realm of ideas.

 

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God, Proof, and Desire

The Problem of Dirty Hands

Quod Gratis Asseritur, Gratis Negatur and Petitio Principii

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil: The Nature and Tractability of the Problem Depends on the Type of Theism Espoused

Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation

Indexicality and an Argument against Omniscience

Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument. What I know when I know that

1. I am making a mess

is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that

2. BV is making a mess

or perhaps, pointing to BV, that

3. He is making a mess.

Just as no one except BV can refer to BV by tokening the first-person singular pronoun, no one except BV has access to the indexical fact that, as BV would put it to himself, I am BV. Only BV is privy to this fact; only BV knows himself in the first-person way. Now an omniscient being knows everything that can be known. But although I am not omniscient, there is at least one proposition that I know -- namely (1) -- that is not known by any other knower, including an omniscient knower. So an omnisicent being is impossible: by its very definition it must know every fact that can be known, but there are indexical facts that it cannot know. God can know that BV is making a mess but he cannot know what I know when I know that I am making a mess. For any subject S distinct from God, the first-person facts appertinent to S are inaccessible to every mind distinct from S, including God's mind. That is what I take to be Grim's argument.

I suppose one could counter the argument by denying that there are indexical facts.  But since I hold that there are both indexical propositions and indexical facts, that response route is not available to me.  Let me see if I can respond by making a distinction between two senses of 'omniscience.'

A. X is omniscient₁=_df X knows every fact knowable by some subject or other.

B. X is omniscient[2] =df X knows every fact knowable by some one subject.

What indexical facts show is that no being is or can be omniscient in the first sense. No being knows every indexical and non-indexical fact. But a failure to know what cannot be known does not count against a being's being omniscient in a defensible sense of this term any more than a failure to do what cannot be done counts against a being's being omnipotent. A defensible sense of 'omniscience' is supplied by (B). In this second sense, God is omniscient: he knows every fact that one subject can know, namely, every non-indexical fact, plus all facts pertaining to the divine subjectivity. What more could one want?

Since no being could possibly satisfy (A), (A) is not the appropriate sense of 'omniscience.' Compare omnipotence. An omnipotent being cannot be one who can do just anything, since there are both logical and non-logical limits on what any agent can do.  So from the fact that it is impossible for God to know what is impossible for any one being to know, it does not follow that God is not omniscient.

To sum up. There are irreducible first-personal facts that show that no being can be omniscient in the (A)-sense: Patrick Grim's argument is sound. But the existence of irreducible first-personal facts is consistent  with the truth of standard theism since the latter is committed only to a being omniscient in the (B)-sense of 'omniscience.'

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Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

There are those who love to expose and mock the astonishing political ignorance of Americans.  According to a 2006 survey, only 42% of Americans could name the three branches of government.  But here is an interesting question worth exploring: 

Is it not entirely rational to ignore events over which one has no control and withdraw into one's private life where one does exercise control and can do some good?

I can vote, but my thoughtful vote counts for next-to-nothing in most elections, especially when it is cancelled out by the vote of some thoughtless and uninformed idiot.  I can blog, but on a good day I will reach only a couple thousand readers worldwide and none of them are policy makers.  (I did have some influence once on a Delta airline pilot who made a run for a seat in the House of Representatives.)  I can attend meetings, make monetary contributions, write letters to senators and representatives, but is this a good use of precious time and resources?  It may be that Ilya Somin has it right:

. . . political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people. If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. That is because there is very little chance that your vote will actually make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a presidential race, for example). For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful.

Is it rational for me to stay informed?  Yes, because of my intellectual eros, my strong desire to understand the world and what goes on in it. The philosopher is out to understand the world; if he is smart he will have no illusions about changing it, pace Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.

Another reason for people like me to stay informed is to be able to anticipate what is coming down the pike and prepare so as to protect myself and my stoa, my citadel, and the tools of my trade.  For example, my awareness of Obama's fiscal irresponsibility is necessary if I am to make wise decisions as to how much of my money I should invest in precious metals and other hard assets.  Being able to anticipate Obaminations re: 'gun control' will allow me to buy what I need while it is still to be had.   'Lead' can prove to be useful for the protection of gold, not to mention the defense of such sentient beings as oneself and one's family.

In brief, a reason to stay apprised of current events is not so that I can influence or change them, but to be in a position so that they don't influence or change me.

A third reason to keep an eye on the passing scene, and one mentioned by Somin, is that one might follow politics the way some follow sports. Getting hot and bothered over the minutiae of baseball and the performance of your favorite team won't affect the outcome of any games, but it is a source of great pleasure to the sports enthusiast.  I myself don't give a damn about spectator sports.  Politics are my sports.  So that is a third reason for me to stay on top of what's happening.  It's intellectually stimulating and a source of conversational matter and blog fodder. 

All this having been said and properly appreciated, one must nevertheless keep things in perspective by bearing  in mind  Henry David Thoreau's beautiful admonition:

Read not The Times; read the eternities!

For this world is a vanishing quantity whose pomps, inanities, Obaminations and what-not will soon pass into the bosom of non-being.

And you with it.

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Fallibilism and Objectivism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason in us, with the question whether there is truth.  A fallibilist is not a truth-denier.  One can be -- it is logically consistent to be -- both a fallibilist and an upholder of (objective) truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some (not all) classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of (objective) truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the objectivity of truth.

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it.  One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the objectivity of truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

R. C. writes,

I hadn't heard of the Dolezal case until reading your blog post. It occurred to me that this case might serve as a counterexample to the standard epistemological position that belief is necessary for knowledge.

I don't know Dolezal's psychological/epistemic state. But suppose she knows that she isn't African-American by race, but she has convinced herself to believe she is so. Would she have knowledge without belief?

Perhaps yes. Or perhaps she doesn't really believe she is African-American by race. Or, perhaps she is double minded: one mind knows and thus believes she isn't, and the other lacks knowledge on the matter but believes she is.

Anyway, I'd be interested in your take.

As I construe his example, the loyal reader is offering a case in which a subject knows that p without believing that p.  Thus he is supposing that Dolezal knows that she is Caucasian, but does not believe that she is.  If so, we have a counterexample to the standard view that, necessarily, if S knows that p, then S believes that p.  On the standard analysis, believing that p is necessary for knowing that p.  What the example suggests is that believing that p is not necessary for knowing that p.

We should distinguish between a weaker and a stronger thesis:

1. It is not the case that knowledge entails belief. (Some cases of knowledge are not cases of belief.)

2. Knowledge entails disbelief. (No cases of knowledge are cases of belief.)

I read the following passage from Dallas Willard as supporting (1):

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

Whether or not one believes what one represents truly and has an appropriate basis for so representing, depends on factors that are irrelevant to truth, understanding and evidence. It depends, one might simply say, on how rational one is. Now I do not think that this point about belief in relation to knowledge is essential to the rest of this paper, but I mention it to indicate that the absence of any reference to belief in my general description of knowledge is not an oversight. Belief is not, I think, a necessary component of knowledge, though one would like to believe that knowledge would have some influence upon belief, and no doubt it often does.

Now we can't get into Dolezal's (crazy) head, but the following is plausibly ascribed to her.  She knows who her biological parents are; she knows that they are both Caucasian; she knows that Caucasian parents have Caucasian children; hence she knows that she is biologically Caucasian.  Could she nonetheless really believe that she is not Caucasian?

Perhaps.  Belief is tied to action.  It is tied to what one does and leaves undone and what one is disposed to do and leave undone.  Dolezal's NAACP activities and her verbal avowals among other behaviors suggest that she really believes that she is racially black.

But if Dolezal really believes that she is racially black, when she knows that she is racially white, then she is irrational.  Why not say the following by way of breaking the link between belief and knowledge:

D1. S knows that p =_df S justifiably accepts that p, and p is true.

D2. S  believes that p =_df S accepts that p and S either acts as if p is true or is prepared to act as if p is true.

These definitions allow that there are cases of knowledge that are not cases of belief without excluding cases of knowledge that are cases of belief.  What is common to knowledge and belief is not belief, but acceptance.

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Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

The following entry draws heavily upon W. Matthews Grant, "Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, July 2012, pp. 254-274.

It also bears upon my discussion with Professor Dale Tuggy.  He holds that God is a being among beings.  I deny that God is a being among beings, holding instead that God is Being itself.  This is not to deny that God is; but it does entail affirming that God is in a radically unique way distinct from the way creatures are.  We can call this radically unique way or mode of Being, simplicity.  So my denial, and Dale's affirmation, that God is a being among beings is logically equivalent to my affirming, and Dale's denying, the doctrine of divine simplicity.

A particularly vexing problem for defenders of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is to explain how an ontologically simple God could know contingent truths.

The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

The plausibility of (3) may be appreciated as follows.  Whatever else knowledge is, it is plausibly regarded as a species of true belief.  A belief is an intrinsic state of a subject.  Moreover, beliefs are individuated by their contents: beliefs or believings with different contents are different beliefs or believings.  It cannot be that one and the same act of believing has different contents at different times or in different possible worlds. 

That the tetrad is inconsistent can be seen as follows.  Suppose God, who knows everything there is to be known,  knows some contingent truth t.  He knows, for example, that I have two cats.  It follows from (3) that there is some item intrinsic to God such as a belief state whereby God knows t.  Given (1), this state, as intrinsic to God, is not distinct from God.  Given (4), the state whereby God knows t exists necessarily.  But then t is necessarily true.  This contradicts (2) according to which t is contingent.

Opponents of the divine simplicity will turn the tetrad into an argument against (1).  They will argue from the conjunction of (2) & (3) & (4) to the negation of (1). The classical theist, however, accepts (1), (2), and (4).  If he is to solve the tetrad, he needs to find a way to reject (3). He needs to find a way to reject the idea that when a knower knows something, there is, intrinsic to the knower, some mediating item that is individuated by the object known.

So consider an externalist conception of knowledge.  I see a cat and seeing it I know it -- that it is and what it is.  Now the cat is not in my head; but it could be in my mind on an externalist theory of mind.  My awareness of the cat somehow 'bodily' includes the cat, the whole cat, all 25 lbs of him, fur, dander, and all.  Knowledge is immediate, not mediated by sense data, representations, mental acts, occurrent believings, or any other sort of epistemic intermediary or deputy.  Seeing a cat, I see the cat itself directly, not indirectly via some other items that I see directly such as an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan ontological guise, a Meinongian incomplete object, or any other sort of merely intentional object. On this sort of scheme, the mind is not a container, hence has no contents in the strict sense of this term.  The mind is directly at the things themselves.

If this externalism is coherent, then then we can say of God's knowledge that it does not involve any intrinsic states of God that would be different were God to know different things than he does know.  For example, God knows that I have two cats.  That I have two cats is an actual, but contingent fact.  If God's knowledge of this fact were mediated by an item intrinsic to God, a mental act say, an item individuated by its accusative, then given the divine simplicity, this item could not be distinct from God with the consequence that the act and its accusative would be necessary.  This consequence is blocked if there is nothing intrinsic to God whereby he knows that I have two cats.

We will have to take a closer look at externalism.  But if it is coherent, then the aporetic tetrad can be solved by rejecting (3).

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If the Senses Could Speak

If the senses could speak, they would claim that they alone provide access to truth.  Why then should we take seriously intellect's claim that there is nothing beyond it?

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Cognitive Dissonance or Doxastic Dissonance?

From what appears to be a reputable source:

Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), is concerned with the relationships among cognitions. A cognition, for the purpose of this theory, may be thought of as a ³piece of knowledge.² The knowledge may be about an attitude, an emotion, a behavior, a value, and so on. For example, the knowledge that you like the color red is a cognition; the knowledge that you caught a touchdown pass is a cognition; the knowledge that the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation is a cognition. People hold a multitude of cognitions simultaneously, and these cognitions form irrelevant, consonant or dissonant relationships with one another.

[. . .]

Two cognitions are said to be dissonant if one cognition follows from the opposite of another. What happens to people when they discover dissonant cognitions? The answer to this question forms the basic postulate of Festinger¹s theory. A person who has dissonant or discrepant cognitions is said to be in a state of psychological dissonance, which is experienced as unpleasant psychological tension. This tension state has drivelike properties that are much like those of hunger and thirst. When a person has been deprived of food for several hours, he/she experiences unpleasant tension and is driven to reduce the unpleasant tension state that results. Reducing the psychological sate of dissonance is not as simple as eating or drinking however.

The above, taken strictly and literally, is incoherent.  We are first told that a cognition  is a bit of knowledge, and then in the second quoted paragraph that (in effect) some cognitions are dissonant, and that if one cognition follows from the opposite of another, then the two are dissonant.  But surely it is logically impossible that any two bits of knowledge, K1 and K2,  be such that K1 entails the negation of K2, or vice versa.  Why? Because every cognition is true -- there cannot be false knowledge -- and no two truths are such that one follows from the opposite of the other.   

The author is embracing an inconsistent pentad:

1. Every cognition is a bit of knowledge.

2. Every bit of knowledge is true.

3. Some, at least two, cognitions are dissonant.

4. If one cognition follows from the opposite (the negation) of another, then the two are dissonant.

5. It is logically impossible that two truths be such that one follows from the negation of the other:  if a cognition is true, then its negation is false, and no falsehood follows from a truth.

The point, obviously, is that while beliefs can be dissonant, cognitions cannot be.  There simply is no such thing as cognitive dissonance.  What there is is doxastic dissonance.

"What a pedant you are!  Surely what the psychologists mean is what you call doxastic dissonance."

Then they should say what they mean.  Language matters.  Confusing belief and knowledge and truth and related notions can lead to serious and indeed pernicious errors.  A good deal of contemporary relativism is sired by a failure to make such distinctions.

A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for years after penning that line into his diary, and presumably without certainty.

I would say that the ability to tolerate uncertainty without abandoning the quest for certainty is a mark of intellectual and spiritual maturity. A truth seeker who can tolerate uncertainty is one who will not seek false refuge in dogmas that provide pseudo-certainty. I cannot help but think of Islamo-terrorism in this connection. Had Muhammad Atta and the boys entertained some doubts about the bevy of black-eyed virgins awaiting them at the portals of paradise, they and three thousand others might still be alive.

The trick is to tolerate uncertainty without becoming either a skeptic or a dogmatist.

There is a difference between subjective and objective certainty. If subject S is subjectively certain that  p, it does not follow that p is true. That would follow only if S were objectively certain that p. But objective certainty appears attainable only with respect to one's own mental states. I am both subjectively and objectively certain that I have a headache now. This is because the esse of the headache = its percipi. Its being is its being perceived. It therefore cannot be intelligibly supposed that I merely seem to have a headache now, while in reality I do not. With respect to a physical object or state, however, appearance and reality can come apart, and what is subjectively certain can turn out to be false: my seeming to see a mountain is no guarantee that there is a mountain. My seeming to feel elated, however, just is my being elated.

What about states of affairs that involve neither mental data nor physical objects? If S is subjectively certain that torture is always morally impermissible, and T is subjectively certain that torture is sometimes morally permissible, then one of the two must be wrong, which shows that subjective certainty is no proof of objective certainty.

What about this last proposition however, namely, the proposition that apart from mental states, subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty? Is its truth merely subjectively certain, or is it also objectively certain? It is objectively certain. One sees that subjective certainty can exist without objective certainty from the fact that two subjects, S and T, can be subjectively certain of contradictory propositions. Here the mind grasps a truth about a state of affairs transcendent of one's mental state and does so with objective certainty.

I conclude that there are some propositions the truth of which can be grasped with objective certainty even though these propositions are not about such mental data as pleasures and pains. The mind has the power to transcend its own states and not only to know, but to know with objective certainty, truths whose truth is independent of mind. That is amazing.

One some days, existence strikes me as the deepest and most fascinating of philosophical topics. On other days, I give the palm to time: "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know." (Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 11, Ch. 14) But today, the honor goes to knowledge.

 

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Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for years after penning that line into his diary, and presumably without certainty.

I would say that the ability to tolerate uncertainty without abandoning the quest for certainty is a mark of intellectual and spiritual maturity. A truth seeker who can tolerate uncertainty is one who will not seek false refuge in dogmas that provide pseudo-certainty. I cannot help but think of Islamo-terrorism in this connection. Had Muhammad Atta and the boys entertained some doubts about the bevy of black-eyed virgins awaiting them at the portals of paradise, they and three thousand others might still be alive.

The trick is to tolerate uncertainty without becoming either a skeptic or a dogmatist.

There is a difference between subjective and objective certainty. If subject S is subjectively certain that  p, it does not follow that p is true. That would follow only if S were objectively certain that p. But objective certainty appears attainable only with respect to one's own mental states. I am both subjectively and objectively certain that I have a headache now. This is because the esse of the headache = its percipi. Its being is its being perceived. It therefore cannot be intelligibly supposed that I merely seem to have a headache now, while in reality I do not. With respect to a physical object or state, however, appearance and reality can come apart, and what is subjectively certain can turn out to be false: my seeming to see a mountain is no guarantee that there is a mountain. My seeming to feel elated, however, just is my being elated.

What about states of affairs that involve neither mental data nor physical objects? If S is subjectively certain that torture is always morally impermissible, and T is subjectively certain that torture is sometimes morally permissible, then one of the two must be wrong, which shows that subjective certainty is no proof of objective certainty.

What about this last proposition however, namely, the proposition that apart from mental states, subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty? Is its truth merely subjectively certain, or is it also objectively certain? It is objectively certain. One sees that subjective certainty can exist without objective certainty from the fact that two subjects, S and T, can be subjectively certain of contradictory propositions. Here the mind grasps a truth about a state of affairs transcendent of one's mental state and does so with objective certainty.

I conclude that there are some propositions the truth of which can be grasped with objective certainty even though these propositions are not about such mental data as pleasures and pains. The mind has the power to transcend its own states and not only to know, but to know with objective certainty, truths whose truth is independent of mind. That is amazing.

One some days, existence strikes me as the deepest and most fascinating of philosophical topics. On other days, I give the palm to time: "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know." (Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 11, Ch. 14) But today, the honor goes to knowledge.

 

Knowledge, Belief, Action: Three Maxims

1. Don't claim to know what you merely believe even on good evidence.

2. Don't claim to believe what you are not prepared to act upon.

3. Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing in the long run than not believing in the long run.

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A Design Argument From Cognitive Reliability

 A theist friend requests a design argument.  Here is one.

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use the philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than original. It is not part of your presupposition that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the original or intrinsic intentionality of a trail blazer or trail maintainer. Thus the presupposition that you make when you take the rock piles as providing information about the direction of the trail  is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks  with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. And their placement might be exactly right.  Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.  A stack of rocks may appear to be a cairn without being one.  A cairn, by definition, is a marker or memorial, and thus an embodiment of meaning, meaning it cannot possess intrinsically in virtue of its mere physicality, e.g., its being a collocation of bits of rhyolite. 

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) your belief that they were put there by someone to mark the trail.  It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction  while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you later found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the rock piles as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both  undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer whose original intentionality is embodied in them.

In short: the rock stacks have no meaning in themselves.  They have meaning only as embodying the original intentionality of someone who put them there for a purpose: to show the trail's direction.  The hiker who interprets the stacks as meaningful presupposes that they are embodiments or physical expressions of original intentionality and not accidental collocations of matter.

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs and brain. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. As we say colloquially, eyes are for seeing.  But the appearance of design is no  proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory  apparatus are supposed to have evolved by an unguided  process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.  The same goes for the rest of our cognitive apparatus: memory, introspection, reason, etc.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then  we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world seems  justified. Our senses  thus seem reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology under its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) interpretation  provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes? That would be like affirming both that the cairns are reliable trail indicators AND that they came about by unguided natural processes.  I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:

     . . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory
     and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and
     also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other
     than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them.
     (Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)

   This train of thought suggests the following aporetic triad or antilogism:

1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

2. It would not be  rational to rely on our cognitive faculties if they had come about by an unguided  process of natural selection operating upon random genetic mutations.
  
3. Our cognitive faculties did come about by an unguided process of natural selection operating upon random genetic mutations.

The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  From any two limbs one can validly argue to the negation of the remaining one.  So, corresponding to our antilogism there are three valid syllogisms. One of them is a design argument that argues to the negation of (3) and the affirmative conclusion that behind the evolutionary process is intelligent, providential guidance.  "And this all men call God."

To resist this design argument, the naturalist must reject either (1) or (2).  To reject (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It  is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.  To reject (1) is not very palatable either.  But I suppose one could bite the bullet and say, "Look, we are not justified in relying on our cognitive faculties, we just rely on them and so far so good."

A mysterian naturalist could say this:  Our cognitive faculties came about through an unguided evolutionary process; it is rational to rely upon them; but our cognitive architecture is such that we simply cannot understand how it could be rational to rely on processes having this origin.  For us, the problem is insoluble, a mystery, due to our irremediable  limitations.  Just because it is unintelligible to us how something could be the case, it does not follow that it is not the case. 

The best objection to this little design argument I have sketched comes from  the camp of Thomas Nagel.  Nagel could say, "You have given good reason to reject unguided evolution, but why can't the guidance be immanent?  Why must there be a transcendent intelligent being who supervises the proceedings?  Nature herself is immanently intelligible and unfolds according to her own immanent teleology.  You cannot infer theism since you haven't excluded the pansychist option."

Of course, one could beef up the design argument presented by working to exclude the panpsychist option.

Related articles

What is Reason? How Did it Arise? Nagel and Non-Intentional Teleology

Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

Thinking Meat?

A Being-Knowledge Antilogism

An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true.  The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible.  If they are not merely plausible but self-evident or undeniable, then we are in the presence of an aporia in the strict sense.  (From the Greek a-poros, no way.) Aporiai are intellectual impasses, or, to change the metaphor, intellectual knots that we cannot  untie.  Here is a candidate:

1. Being is independent of knowledge: what is or is the case is not made so by anyone's knowledge of it.

2. Knowledge is knowledge of being: we cannot know what is not or what is not the case.

3. Knowledge requires  an internally available criterion or justification.

Each of the limbs of this aporetic triad is exceedingly plausible if not self-evident. 

Ad (1). If a thing exists, its existence is not dependent on someone's knowledge of it.  It is rather the other around: knowledge of  thing presupposes the logically antecedent existence of the thing.  And if a proposition is true, it not true because someone knows it.  It is the other way around:  the proposition's being true is a logically antecedent condition of anyone's knowing it. 

Ad (2). 'Knows' is a verb of success: what one knows cannot be nonexistent or false.  There is no false knowledge.  What one 'knows' that ain't so, as the saying goes, one does not know.  Necessarily, if S knows x, then x exists; necessarily, if S knows that p, then p is true.  The necessity is broadly logical.

Ad (3).  If I believe that p, p a proposition, and p happens to be true, it does not follow that I know that p.  There is more to knowledge than true belief.  If I believe that Jack is at home, and he is, it does not follow that I know that he is.  Justification is needed, and this must be internalist rather than externalist.  If I see a cat, it does not follow that I know a cat exists or that the cat I see exists.  For I might be dreaming or I might be a brain in a vat.  There are dreams so vivid that one literally sees (not imagines, or anything else) what does not exist.  If I know a cat just in virtue of seeing one, then I need justification, and this justification must be available to me internally, in a way that does not beg the question by presupposing that there exist things external to my consciousness.  Note that 'I see a cat' and 'No cat exists' express logically consistent propositions.  They both can (logically) be true.  For in the epistemologically primary sense of 'see,' seeing is not existence-entailing.  In its epistemologically primary sense, 'see' is not a verb of success in the way 'know' is.  'False knowledge' is a contradictio in adiecto; 'nonexistent visual object' is not.

The limbs of our antilogism, then, are highly plausible and for some of us undeniable.  Speaking autobiographically, I find each of the propositions irresistable.  But I think most philosophers today would reject (3) by rejecting internalist as opposed to externalist justification.

The propositions cannot all be true.  Any two, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  Thus, corresponding to this one antilogism, there are three valid syllogisms.  That is true in general: every antilogism* sires three valid syllogisms.

The first takes us from (1) & (2) to ~(3). If what exists is independent of knowledge, and knowledge is of what exists, then it is not the case that knowledge requires an internally available criterion.

The second syllogism takes us from (1) & (3) to ~(2).  If being is independent of knowledge, and knowledge requires a purely internal criterion, then being is inaccessible to knowledge: what we know are not things themselves, but things as they appear to us.  To solve the antilogism by rejecting (2) would put us in the vicinity of Kant's epistemology according to which there are things in themselves but we know only phenomena.

The third syllogism takes us from (2) & (3) to ~(1).  If knowledge is of what exists, and knowledge is knowledge only if justified internally, then being is not independent of knowledge, and we arrive at a form of idealism.

Is our antilogism insoluble?  In one sense, no aporetic polyad is insoluble: just deny one of the limbs.  In the above case, one could  deny (3).  To justify that denial one would have to work out an externalist theory of epistemic justification.  An aporetically inclined philosopher, however, will expect that the resulting theory will give rise to aporetic polyads of its own.

And so we descend into a labyrinth from which there is no exit except perhaps by a confession of the infirmity of reason,  a humble admission of the incapacity of the discursive intellect to solve problems that it inevitably and naturally poses to itself.

______________

*The term and the theory was introduced by Christine Ladd-Franklin.

Related articles

The Aporetics of Existential Meaning

Knowledge and Belief: An Aporetic Triad

Are All Genuine Problems Soluble? A Metaphilosophical Antilogism

The Aporetics of Existence and Self-Identity

From the Laws of Logic to the Existence of God

Seeing versus Imagining a Ghost: Another Round with Hennessey

It is plain that 'sees' has many senses in English.  Of these many senses, some are philosophically salient.  Of the philosophical salient senses, two are paramount.  Call the one 'existence-entailing.'  (EE) Call the other 'existence-neutral.' (EN)  On the one, 'sees' is a so-called verb of success.  On the other, it isn't, which not to say that it is a 'verb of failure.'  Now there is difference between seeing a tree (e.g.) and seeing that a tree is in bloom (e.g.), but this is a difference I will ignore in this entry, at some philosophical peril perhaps.

EE:  Necessarily, if subject S sees x, then x exists.

EN:  Possibly, subject S sees x, but it is not the case that x exists.

Now one question is whether both senses of 'see' can be found in ordinary English.  The answer is yes.  "I know that feral cat still exists; I just now saw him" illustrates the first.  "You look like you've just seen a ghost"  illustrates the second.

So far, I don't think I've said anything controversial.

We advance to a philosophical question, and embroil ourselves in controversy, when we ask whether, corresponding to the existence-neutral sense of 'sees,' there is a type of seeing, a type of seeing that does not entail the existence of the object seen.  One might grant that there is a legitimate use of 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) in English according to which what is seen does not exist without granting that in reality there is a type of seeing that is the seeing of the nonexistent.

One might insist that all seeing is the seeing of what exists, and that one cannot literally see what does not exist.  So, assuming that there are no ghosts, one cannot see a ghost.

But suppose a sincere, frightened person reports that she has seen a ghost of such-and-such a ghastly description.  Because of the behavioral evidence, you cannot reasonably deny that the person has had an  experience, and indeed an object-directed (intentional) experience.  You cannot reasonably say, "Because there are no ghosts, your experience had no object."  For it did have an object, indeed a material (albeit nonexistent) object having various ghastly properties. (Side question: Is 'ghastly' etymologically connected to 'ghostly'?)

This example suggests that we sometimes see what does not exist, and that seeing therefore does not entail the existence of that which is seen.  If this is right, then the epistemologically primary sense of 'see' is given by (EN) supra.

Henessey's response:  "I grant the reality of her experience, with the reservation that it was not an experience based in vision, but one with a basis in imagination, imagination as distinguished from vision."  The point, I take it, is that what we have in my example of a person claiming to see a ghost is not a genuine case of seeing, of visual perception, but a case of imagining.  The terrified person imagined a ghost; she did not see one.

I think Hennessey's response gets the phenomenology wrong.  Imagination and perception are phenomenologically different.  For one thing, what we imagine is up to us: we are free to imagine almost anything we want; what we perceive, however, is not up to us.  When Ebeneezer Scrooge saw the ghost of Marley, he tried to dismiss the apparition as "a bit of bad beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of an underdone potato," but he found he could not.  Marley: "Do you believe in me or not?"  Scrooge: "I do, I must!"  This exchange brings out nicely what Peirce called the compulsive character of perception.  Imagination is not like this at all.  Whether or not Scrooge saw Marley, he did not imagine him for the reason that the object of his experience was not under the control of his will.

The fact that what one imagines does not exist is not a good reason to to assimilate perception of what may or may not exist to imagination.

Second, if a subject imagines x, then it follows that x does not exist.  Everything imagined is nonexistent.  But it is not the case that if a subject perceives x, then x does not exist.  Perception either entails the existence of the object perceived, or is consistent with both the existence and the nonexistence of the object perceived.

Third,  one knows the identity of an object of imagination simply by willing the object in question.  The subject creates the identity so that there can be no question of re-identifying or re-cognizing an object of imagination.  But perception is not like this at all.  In perception there is re-identification and recognition. Scrooge did not imagine Marley's ghost for the reason that he was able to identify and re-identify the ghost as it changed positions in Scrooge's chamber.  So even if you balk at admitting that Scrooge saw Marley's ghost, you ought to admit that he wasn't imaging him.

I conclude that Hennessey has not refuted my example. To see a ghost is not to imagine a ghost, even if there aren't any.  Besides, one can imagine a ghost without having the experience that one reports when one sincerely states that one has seen a ghost.  Whether or not this experience is perception, it surely is not imagination.

But I admit that this is a very murky topic!

Related articles

Seeing: Internalist and Externalist Perspectives

The Epistemologically Primary Sense of 'See'

Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization

Incompleteness, Completeness, and the External World

A Tension in My Thinking: Hume Meets Parmenides

Incompleteness, Completeness, and the External World

David Brightly comments:

I appreciate that in discussing these epistemological issues we must use the non-question-begging, existence-neutral sense of 'see'. My point is that for the distinction between 'complete' and 'incomplete' to make any sense, the epistemological question as to whether seeing is existence-entailing has to have already been settled favourably, though with the caveat that mistakes occur sometimes. In the context of your latest aporetic tetrad,

1. If S sees x, then x exists
2. Seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state is such that its intentional object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete,

this would rule out the escape of denying (1). Indeed, can we not replace 'see' with 'veridically see' in (1) and (2) and obtain a rather more vexing aporia?

If I understand David's point, it is that the very sense of the distinction between an incomplete and a complete object requires that in at least some (if not the vast majority) of cases, the intentional objects of (outer) perceptual experience really exist.  Equivalently, if there were no really existent (finite-mind-independent)  material meso-particulars (e.g., trees and rocks and stars), then not only would the predicate 'complete' not apply to anything, but also would be bereft of sense or meaning, and with it the distinction between incomplete and complete.

I am afraid I don't agree. 

Suppose one were to argue that the very sense of the distinction between God and creatures logically requires that God exist.  Surely that person would be wrong.  At most, the concept creature logically requires the concept God.  But while the concept God is a concept, God is not a concept, and the God concept may or may not be instantiated without prejudice to its being the very concept it is.  (Don't confuse this with the very different thesis that the essence of God may or may not be exemplified without prejudice to its being the very essence it is.)

I say, contra David, that it is is the same with incomplete and complete objects.  The sense of the distinction does not logically require that there be any complete objects of outer perception; it requires only the concept complete object.  This is a concept we form quite easily by extrapolation from the concept incomplete object.

As I always say, the more vexatious an aporetic polyad, the better.  I am ever on the hunt for insolubilia.  So I thank David for suggesting the following beefed-up tetrad:

1. If S veridically sees x, then x exists
2. Veridical seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state is such that its intentional object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.

This is more vexing than the original tetrad, but I think it falls short of a genuine aporia (a polyad in which the limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent).  For why can't I deny (1) by claiming that veridical seeing does not logically require the real (extramental) existence of the thing seen but only that the incomplete intentional objects cohere?  Coherence versus correspondence as the nature of truth.

Related articles

On Seeing: Intentionality without Aspectuality?

Seeing: Internalist and Externalist Perspectives

The Epistemologically Primary Sense of 'See'

Seeing: Internalist and Externalist Perspectives

This is a second entry in response to Hennessey.  The first is here.

Consider again this aporetic tetrad:

1. If S sees x, then x exists

2. Seeing is an intentional state

3. Every intentional state is such that  its intentional object is incomplete

4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent.  Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.

But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands.  At least one of the limbs is false, but which one?   I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection.  That leaves (1) or (2).

I incline toward the rejection of (1).  Seeing is an intentional state but it is not  existence-entailing.  My seeing of x does not entail the existence of x.  What one sees (logically) may or may not exist.  There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature.  The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.

The meat of Hennessey's response consists in rejecting (3) and runs as follows:

. . . it does not seem to me to be right that the object of an intentional state “is incomplete.” If he and I were both looking at the cat of which he makes mention, I of course from the left and he of course from the right, [of course!] neither of us would see the side of the cat which the other would see. The cat, however, would be complete, lacking neither side. And we would each be seeing the same complete cat, though I would be seeing it as or qua visible from the left and he would be seeing it as or qua visible from the right.

There is a scholastic distinction that should be brought to bear here, the distinction between the “material object” of an intentional act such as seeing and its “formal object.” My vision of the cat and Bill’s vision of the cat has the same material object, the cat. But they have distinct formal objects, the cat as or qua visible from the left and the cat as or qua visible from the right.

5. I conclude, then, that rather than adopting limbs (2), (3), and (4) as premises in an argument the conclusion of which is the negation of (1), we should adopt limbs (1), (2), and (4) as premises in an argument the conclusion of which is the negation of (3). Seeing is an existence-entailing intentional state. But I stand ready to be corrected.

Richard's response is a reasonable one, and of course I accept the distinction he couches in scholastic terminology, that between the material and the formal object of an act.  That is a distinction that needs to be made in any adequate account. If I rightly remember my Husserl, he speaks of the object as intended and the object intended. Both could be called the intentional object.

What I meant by 'intentional object' in (3) above is the object precisely as intended in the act, the cogitatum qua cogitatum, or intentum qua intentum, precisely as correlate of the intentio, the Husserlian noema precisely as correlate of the Husserlian noesis, having all and only the properties it appears to have.  It seems obvious that the formal object, the object-as-intended, must be incomplete.  Suppose I am looking at a wall.  I can see it only from one side at a time, not from all sides at once.  What's more, the side I see as material object is not identical to the formal object of my seeing.  For the side I am seeing (and that is presumably a part-cause of my seeing it) has properties that I don't see or are otherwise aware of.  For example, I might describe the formal object as 'beige wall'  even though the wall in reality (if there is one)  is a beige stucco wall: I am too far away to see if it has a stucco surface or not.  The wall in reality, if there is one, must of course be one or the other.  But the formal object is indeterminate with respect to the property of having a stucco surface.

Here is a further wrinkle.  Necessarily, if x is beige, then x is colored.  But if I see x as beige, it does not follow that I see it as colored.  So it would seem that formal objects are not closed under property entailment.

This is why I consider (3) to be unassailably true. Richard and I both accept (2) and (4).  But he rejects (3), while I reject (1).

So far, then, a stand-off.  But there is a lot more to say.

Related articles

More With Novak on the Real Distinction

On Seeing: Intentionality without Aspectuality?

The Epistemologically Primary Sense of 'See'

On Multiplying Modes of Existence

Merely Intentional Objects and the 'Existential Fallacy'

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

Phenomenon and Existence

The Epistemologically Primary Sense of 'See'

Richard Hennessey questions the distinction between existentially loaded and existentially neutral senses of 'sees' and cognates.  He quotes me as saying:

'Sees’ is often taken to be a so-called verb of success:  if S sees x, then it follows that x exists.  On this understanding of ‘sees’ one cannot see what doesn’t exist. Call this the existentially loaded sense of ‘sees’ and contrast it with the existentially neutral sense according to which ‘S sees x’ does not entail ‘X exists.’

I should add that I consider the existentially neutral sense of 'see' primary for the purposes of epistemology.  For if visual perception is a  source (along with tactile, auditory, etc. perception) of our knowledge of the existence of material things, then it seems obvious that the perception verbs must be taken in their existentially neutral senses.  For existentially loaded uses of these verbs presuppose the mind-independent existence of material things.

So here is a bone of contention between me and Hennessey.  I maintain  that seeing in the epistemologically primary sense does not entail the existence, outside the mind, of that which is seen.  Hennessey, I take it, disagrees.

We agree, however, that a parallel distinction ought not be made with respect to 'knows': there is no legitimate sense of 'knows' according to which 'S knows x' does not entail 'x exists.'  Now consider this argument that Hennessey's discussion suggests:

1. Every instance of seeing is an instance of knowing

2. Every instance of knowing is existence-entailing

Therefore

3. Every instance of seeing is existence-entailing.

I reject the initial premise, and with it the argument.  So I persist in my view that seeing an object does not entail the existence of the object seen.  Hennessey and I agree that seeing is an intentional or object-directed state of the subject:  one cannot see without seeing something.  Where we disagree is on the question whether there are, or could be, cases in which the object seen does not exist.

I would say that there are actual cases of this.  Suppose a person claims to have seen a ghost and behaves in a manner that makes it very unlikely that the person is lying or joking.  (The person may be your young daughter with whom you have just watched an episode of "Celebrity Ghost Stories.") The person is trembling with fear as she recounts her experience and describes its object in some detail, an object that is of course distinct from the experiencing.  (Describing an ugly man with a wart on his nose, she is describing an object  of experiencing, not the experiencing as mental act.)  Now suppose you are convinced that there are no ghosts.  What will you say to the person?  Two options:

A. You didn't see anything: ghosts do not exist and you can't see what does not exist!

B.  You saw something, but what you saw does not exist, so have no fear!

Clearly, the first answer won't do.  The subject had a terrifying visual experience in which something visually appeared.  If you give the first answer, you are denying the existence of the subject's visual experience.  But that denial involves unbearable chutzpah: the subject, from her behavior, clearly did have a disturbing object-directed experience.   You are  presumably also confusing not seeing something with seeing something that does not exist.  That would be a sort of operator shift fallacy.  One cannot validly move from

S sees something that does not exist

to

It is not the case that S sees something.

The correct answer is (B).  The person saw something, but what she saw does not exist.

In dreams, too, we sometimes see what does not exist.  I once had a dream about my cat, Maya.  It was an incredibly vivid dream, but also a lucid one: I knew I am was dreaming, and I knew that the cat that I saw, felt, and heard was dead and gone, and therefore nonexistent (assuming presentism).  And so I philosophized within the dream: this cat does not exist and yet I see and hear and feel this cat.  Examples like this, which of course hark back to Descartes' famous dream argument, are phenomenological evidence that we sometimes perceive objects that do not exist.

(There are those who will 'go adverbial' here, but the adverbial theory gets the phenomenology wrong, among other things.)

Hallucinations and dreams provide actual (nonmodal) examples of cases in which we perceive what does not exist.  But even if we never dreamt or hallucinated, we would still have (modal) reason to deny the validity of the inference from 'S sees x' to 'X exists.'  For suppose I see a tree, one that exists apart from my seeing it.  My perception would in that case be veridical.  But it is an undeniable phenomonological fact that there is no intrinsic difference, no difference internal to the experience, between veridical and nonveridical perception.  That is: there is no feature of the intentional object that certifies its existence outside the mind, that certifies that it is more than a merely intentional object.  It is therefore logically possible that I have the experience of seeing a tree without it being the case that the object of the experience exists. Since the object seen is what it is whether or not it exists, I cannot validily infer the existence of the object from my seeing it.  It is possible that theobject not exist even if in actuality the tree perceived exists extramentally.

What I am saying is consistent with perception being caused in the normal cases.   For me to see an existing green tree it is causally necessary that light of the right wavelengths enter my retina, that my brain be supplied with oxygenated blood, etc.  What I am saying is inconsistent, however, with a philosophical  (not scientific) theory according to which causation is logically necessary for perception.  So consider a third senses of 'sees' according to which there are two logically necessary conditions on seeing, first, that the object seen exists, and second, that the object seen stand in the right causal relation to S.  This is a gesture in the direction of a causal theory of perception according to which causation is a logical ingredient in perception.

What I am maintaining is clearly inconsistent with such a philosophical theory.   For if the proverbial drunk literally (not figuratively) sees the proverbial pink rat when in the grip of delirium tremens, a rat that does not extramentally exist, then his seeing cannot involve causation from the side of the rat.  For presumably an existent effect cannot have a nonexistent cause.

Related articles

On Seeing: Intentionality without Aspectuality?

Is Natural Causation Existence-Conferring?

Causation, Existence, and the Modified Leibniz Question

Merely Intentional Objects and the 'Existential Fallacy'

Phenomenon and Existence

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

 

In the Absence of Knowledge, May One Believe? Remarks on Magee

According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that Magee is right on both counts, what follows?

One inference one might draw from our state of irremediable ignorance about ultimates is that it provides us with 'doxastic wiggle-room' (my expression): if one cannot know one way or the other, then one is  permitted either to believe or not believe that we survive and that God exists. After all, if it cannot be proven that ~p, then it is epistemically possible that p, and this epistemic possibility might be taken to allow as reasonable our believing that p. Invoking the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing (Critique of Pure Reason, B 146 et passim) one could maintain that although we have and can have no knowledge of God and the soul, we can think them without contradiction, and without contradicting anything we know. Does not the denial of knowledge make room for faith, as Kant himself famously remarks? CPR B xxx: Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen... "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith...."  (And given that contact with reality is a great good, would it not be better to venture contact with the unknowable portion of it via faith rather than have no contact with it at all by insisting that only knowable truth is admissible truth?)

This inference, however, the inference from our irremediable ignorance to the rational allowability of belief in the epistemically possible,  is one that Magee resolutely refuses to draw, seeing it as a shabby evasion and an "illegitimate slide."(408) Thus he holds it to be illegitimate to move from the epistemic possibility of post-mortem  survival to belief in it. As he puts it, "What I find myself wanting to drive home is not merely that we do not know but that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgment of that fact and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith of some kind, and without evasion or self-indulgence of any other sort."  (417) Near the beginning of his essay, Magee cites  Freud to the effect that no right to believe anything can be derived from ignorance. (408)

The relevance of the Freudian point, however, is unclear. First of all, no one would maintain that ignorance about a matter such as post-mortem survival justifies, in the sense of provides evidence for, the belief that one survives. And a person who thinks it rationally allowable to believe where we cannot know will presumably not take a deontological approach to belief in terms of epistemic rights and duties. In any case, the issue is this: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe where knowledge is unavailable? Magee answers this question in the negative. But I cannot see that he makes anything close to a convincing case for this answer. I will simply run through some questions/objections the cumulative force of which will be to neutralize, though perhaps not refute, Magee's view. Thus I play for a  draw, not a win. I doubt that one can expect more from philosophy.  This post presents just one of my questions/objections.

Probative  Overkill?

One problem with Magee's argument is that it seems to prove too much. If we have no knowledge about such metaphysical/religious matters as God and the soul, and so must suspend belief in them lest we violate  the putative epistemic duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, then we must also suspend belief on a host of other issues in respect of which we certainly cannot claim knowledge. Surely, the very same reasons that lead Magee to say that no one knows anything about God and the soul must also lead us to say that no one knows whether or not there are cases in which justice demands capital punishment, or whether or not a just society is one which provides for redistribution of wealth, or whether or not animals have rights, etc. Indeed, we must say that no one knows what justice is or what rights are. And of course it is not merely about normative issues that we are ignorant.

Do we know what motion, or causation, or time are? Do we know what properties are, or what is is for a thing to have a property, or to exist, or to change, or to be the same thing over time? Note that these questions, unlike the God and soul questions, do not pertain to what is transcendent of experience. I see the tomato; I see that it is red; I see or think I see that it is the same tomato that I bought from the grocer an hour ago; applying a knife to it, I see or think I see that slicing it causes it to split apart.

For that matter, Does Magee know that his preferred ethics of belief is correct?  How does he know that?  How could he know it?  Does he have sufficient evidence? If he knows it, why do philosophers better than him take a different view?  Does he merely believe it?  Does he believe it because his fear of being wrong trumps his desire for the truth?  Does he want truth, but only on his terms?  Does he want only that truth that can satisfy the criteria that he imposes?  Would it not be more self-consistent for Magee to suspend belief as to his preferred ethics of belief?  Why is it better to have no contact with reality than such contact via faith?  Isn't it better to have a true belief that I cannot justify about a life and death matter than no belief about that matter?  Does the man of faith self-indulgently evade reality, or does the philosopher of Magee's stripe self-indulgently and pridefully refuse such reality as he cannot certify by his methods?

No one knows how economies really work; if we had knowledge in this area we would not have wildly divergent paradigms of economic explanation. But this pervasive ignorance does not prevent people from holding very firm beliefs about these non-religious issues, beliefsthat translate into action in a variety of ways, both peaceful and violent. It is furthermore clear that people feel quite justified in holding, and acting upon, these beliefs that go beyond what they can claim to know. What is more, I suspect Magee would agree that people are often justified in holding such beliefs.

So if Magee is right that we ought to suspend belief about religious matters, then he must also maintain that we ought to suspend belief about the social and political matters that scarcely anyone ever suspends belief about. That is, unless he can point to a relevant difference between the religious questions and the social-political ones. But it is difficult to discern any relevant difference. In both cases we are dealing with knowledge-transcendent beliefs for which elaborate rational defenses can be constructed, and elaborate rational refutations of competing positions.

In both cases we are dealing with very abstruse and 'metaphysical' issues such as the belief in equal rights, a belief which manifestly has no empirical justification. And in both cases we are dealing with
issues of great importance to our welfare and happiness. On the other hand, if Magee thinks that we are justified in holding beliefs about social and political matters, something he does of course hold, then he should also maintain that we are justified in holding beliefs about religious matters. There is no justification for a double standard. In this connection, one should read Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta, in God and the Philosophers, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford University Press, 1994), 31-60. See especially 41-46 for a penetrating discussion  of the double standard. 

Related articles

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What is Scientism?

A Non-Coercive Attempt to Dissuade Me From Religious Belief

Memory and the Operations of Reason

"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651) 

This seems right.  Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge:

1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and the commutative properties and that these properties are distinct.

2. If scientism is true, then  it is not the case that (1).

Therefore

3. Scientism is not true.

I grasp (understand) this argument and its validity by reason.  To grasp any such argument, it is not sufficient that a succession of conscious states transpire in my mental life.  For if the state represented by (1) falls into oblivion by the time I get to (2), and (2) by the time I get to (3), then all I would undergo would be  a succession of consciousnesses but not  the consciousness of succession.  But the consciousness of succession is necessary to 'take in' the argument.  And this consciousness of succession itself presupposes a kind of memory.  To grasp the conclusion as a conclusion -- and thus as following from the premises -- I have to have retained the premises. There has to be a diachronic unity of consciousness in which there is a sort of synopsis of the premises together with the conclusion with the former entailing the latter.

But of course something similar holds for each proposition in the argument.  The meaning of a compound proposition is built up out of the meanings of its propositional parts, and the meaning of a simple proposition is built up out of the meanings of its sub-propositional parts, and these meanings have to be retained as the discursive intellect runs through the propositions.  ('Discursive' from the L. currere, to run.)  This retention -- a term Husserl uses -- is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding.

And so while I do not grasp an argument by memory (let alone by sense perception or introspection), memory is involved in rational knowledge.

The Pascalian aphorism bears up well under scrutiny.

Example of associativity of addition: (7 + 5) + 3 = 7 + (5 + 3).  Example of commutativity:  (7 + 5) + 3 = (5 + 7) + 3.  The difference between the two properties springs to the eye (of the mind).  Now what must mind be like if it is to be capable of a priori knowledge?  Presumably it can't just be a hunk of meat.

But if the below companion post is right, not even sense knowledge is such that its subject could be a hunk of meat.  We are of course meatheads.  But squeezing meaning out of mere meat -- there's the trick!

Companion post: Pascal on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience  

Related articles

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Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

Jerry Fodor's Idiosyncratic Understanding of 'Scientism'

More on Knowledge and Belief

Here is yesterday's aporetic triad:

1. Knowledge entails belief.

2. Belief is essentially tied to action.

3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action.

Daniel K comments and I respond in blue:

First, as to your aporetic triad: I would like to reject (3) in one sense that I describe below,  and reject (1) absolutely. Not sure where that leaves the triad. But I'd be interested in whether you think I've clarified or merely muddied the waters.

In one sense I think all knowledge is action guiding. In another sense I think it is not essentially action guiding. All pure water is drinkable (at the right temperature etc.), but drinkability is not an essential feature of water (I wonder if this works).

BV:  I don't think it works.  I should think that in every possible world in which there is water, it is potable by humans.  Therefore, drinkability is an essential feature of water.  (An essential property of x is a property x has in every possible world in which x exists.)  Of course, there are worlds in which there is water but no human beings.  In those worlds, none of the water is drunk by humans.  But in those worlds too water is drinkable.  Compare the temporal case.  Before humans evolved, there was water on earth.  That water, some of it anyway, was potable by humans even though there were no humans.  Water did not become potable when the first humans arose.

Rejecting (3): The having of knowledge always contributes to how one acts. You give examples of a priori knowledge as counterexamples. My response: it seems to me a priori knowledge is "hinge" knowledge that opens the door for action and cannot possibly not inform action. In other words we won't find circumstances where such knowledge is not action guiding in the presuppositional sense. So, I disagree that we will find knowledge that doesn't inform action. A priori knowledge is presuppositionally necessary and occasionally practically useful (math for engineering). Empirical knowledge will be used when it is available. So, I don't think defending (3) is necessary to defend (2).

BV:  Willard maintains that one can have propositional knowledge without belief, and that belief is essentially tied to action.  The conjunction of these two claims  suggests to me that there can be knowledge that is not essentially tied to action.  And so I looked for examples of items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action, either by not being tied to action at all, or by not being essentially tied to action.   If there are such items, then we can say that the difference between belief and knowledge is that every belief, by its very nature, can be acted upon, while it is not the case that every item of knowledge can be acted upon.

Much depends on what exactly is meant by 'acting upon a proposition,' and I confess to not having a really clear notion of this.

While I grant that much a priori knowledge is 'hinge' knowledge in your sense, consider the proposition that there is no transfinite cardinal lying between aleph-nought and 2 raised to the power, alepth-nought.  Does that have any engineering application?  (This is not a rhetorical question.)

Now consider philosophical knowledge (assuming there is some).  If I know that there are no bare particulars (in Gustav Bergmann's sense), this is a piece of knowledge that would seem to have no behavioral consequences.  The overt, nonlinguistic, behavior of a man who maintains a bundle-theoretic position with respect to ordinary partiulars will be no different from that of a man who maintains that ordinary particulars have bare particulars at their ontological cores.  They could grow, handle, slice, and eat tomatoes in the very same way.

(Anecdote that I am pretty sure is not apocryphal:  when Rudolf Carnap heard that fellow Vienna Circle member Gustav Bergmann had published a book under the title, The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, he refused to speak to Bergmann ever again.)

It seems we should say that some, though not all, philosophical knowledge (assuming there is philosophical knowledge) consists of propositions upon which we cannot act.  Here is another example.  Suppose I know that the properties of ordinary particulars are tropes.  Thus I know that the redness of a tomato is not a universal but a particular.  Is that knowledge action-guiding?  How would it guide action differently than the knowledge that properties are universals?  Is the difference in ontological views a difference that could show up at the level of overt, nonlinguistic, behavior?

Admittedly, some philosophical knowledge is action-guiding.  If I know that the soul is immortal, then I will behave differently than one who lacks this knowledge.

Now consider the knowledge of insignificant contingent facts.  I know from my journal that on 27 April 1977 I ate hummus. Is that item of knowledge action-guiding?  I think not.  Suppose you learn the boring fact and infer that I like hummus.  You might then make me a present of some.  But if I am the only one privy to the information, it is difficult to see how that item of knowledge could be action-guiding for me.  Recall that by action I mean overt, nonlinguistic behavior.

There is also modal knowledge to consider.  I might have been sleeping now.  I might not have been alive now.  I might never have existed at all.  These are modal truths that, arguably, I know. Suppose I know them.  How could I act upon them?  I am not sleeping now, and nothing I do could bring it about that I am sleeping now.  Some modal knowledge would seem to without behavioral consequences.  Of course, some modal knowledge does have such consequences, e.g. the knowledge that it is possible to grow tomatoes in Arizona.

It seemed to me in your post that you took the truth of (2) as giving support to (3). If belief is essentially action guiding and knowledge is not essentially believing, then there should be knowledge that is not action guiding.

But again, I would like to affirm that in the sense you mean it in the post all knowledge is action guiding: either presuppositionally or consciously/empirically. For instance, the law of noncontradiction is action guiding in the sense that I cannot act if essential to that action is that the object has characteristic X, but I affirm that the object is both X and not-X. [. . .]

BV:  Consider an example.  I cannot eat a bananna unless it is peeled. My affirming that it is both peeled and unpeeled (at the same time, all over, and in the same sense of 'peeled') would not, however, seem to stand in the way of my performing the action.  Clearly, I know that nothing is both peeled and unpeeled.  It is not clear to me how one could act upon that proposition.  If I want to eat the bananna, I can act upon the proposition that it is unpeeled by peeling the bananna.  But how do I act upon the proposition that the bananna is either peeled or unpeeled?  What do I do? 

Rejecting (1): So, what if both knowledge and belief are in one sense "action guiding" (rejecting 3)? Does it imply that we have no reason to think that belief is not an essential component of knowledge (accepting 2 and rejecting 1)? I think we still do have a good reason for thinking belief is not essentially a component of knowledge. When Willard says that belief is not essential to knowledge I take him to be distinguishing between the irrelevance of being concerned with action in the act of knowing and the universal appeal of knowledge for action.

Forget the terms "knowledge" and "belief" for a moment. Distinguish between the
following states:

One is in a state (intentional?) (Y) to object (X) iff one has a true representation of X that was achieved in an appropriate way (Willard's account of knowledge). Notice that there is nothing in the description that essentially involves a readiness to act. That is not a part of its intentional character or directedness of state (Y). It is directed purely at unity, period.

Alternatively, one is in an intentional state (Z) to object (X) iff one has a representation of reality that is essentially identified by its being a ground for action. Here, essential to (Z) is its providing a ground for action.

(Y) is not a state that essentially involves action guidance but (Z) is. So, the achievement of (Y) does not involve essentially the achievement of (Z). That is, the achievement of (Y) is the achievement of a kind of theoretical unity with (X) while the achievement of (Z) is the achievement of a motivator for acting in certain ways regarding (X). Response: but Daniel, you've already said that all knowledge is action guiding! Yes, but it is not an essential feature of the state of knowing. Analogy: all water is drinkable. But drinkability is not an essential feature of water.

I'm going to stop there. I'd appreciate any comments you have. That is my effort, thus far, to make sense of both Willard's suggestion and your aporetic triad.

BV:  I do appreciate the comments and discussion.  Let's see if I understand you.  You reject (1), the orthodox view that knowledge entails belief.  Your reason seems to be that, while belief is essentially action-guiding, knowledge is not essentially action-guiding, but only accidentally action-guiding.  You deny what I maintain, namely, that some items of knowledge (some known propositions qua known) are not action-guiding.  You maintain that all such items are action-guiding, but only accidentally so. Perhaps your argument is this:

4. Every believing-that-p is essentially action-guiding.

5. No knowing-that-p is essentially action-guiding.

Ergo

6. It is not the case that, necessarily, every knowing-that-p is a believing-that-p.

But (6) -- the negation of (1) -- doesn't follow from (4) and (5).  (6) is equivalent to

6*. Possibly, some knowings-that-p are not believings-that-p.

What follows from (4) and (5) is

7. No knowing-that-p is a believing-that-p.

(7) is the thesis I am tentatively proposing.

This is a very difficult topic and we may be falling into de dicto/de re confusion.

Well, at least I am in the state that Plato says is characteristic of the philosopher: perplexity!

Knowledge and Belief: An Aporetic Triad

Here is a trio of propositions that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible:

1. Knowledge entails belief.

2. Belief is essentially tied to action.

3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action.

Clearly, any two of these propositions is logically inconsistent with the remaining one.  Thus the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).

And yet each limb of the triad is very plausible, though perhaps not equally plausible. 

(1) is part of the classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, an analysis traceable to Plato's Theaetetus.  (1) says that, necessarily, if a person S knows that p, then S believes that p.  Knowledge logically includes belief.  What one knows one believes, though not conversely.  For example, if I know that my wife is sitting across from me, then I believe that she is sitting across from me.  (At issue here is propositional knowledge, not know-how, or carnal knowledge, or knowledge by acquaintance.)

(2) is perhaps the least plausible of the three, but it is still plausible and accepted by (a minority of) distinguished thinkers.  According to Dallas Willard,

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

[. . .] belief has an essential tie to action . . . .

Although I am not exactly sure what Willard's thesis is, he seems to be maintaining that the propositions one believes are precisely those one is prepared to act upon.  S believes that p iff S is prepared to act upon p.  Beliefs are manifested in actions, and actions are evidence of beliefs.  To determine what a person really believes, we look to his actions, not to his words, although the words provide context for understanding the actions.  If I want to get to the roof, and tell you that the ladder is stable, but refuse to ascend it, then that is very good evidence that I don't really believe that the ladder is stable.  I don't believe it because I am not prepared to act upon it.  So far, so good.

But if belief is essentially tied to action, as Willard maintains, then it is not possible that one believe a proposition one cannot act upon.  Is this right?  Consider the proposition *Everything is self-identical.*  This is an item of knowledge.  But is it also an item of belief?  We can show that this item of knowledge is not an item of belief if we can show that one cannot act upon it.  But what is it to act upon a proposition?  I don't know precisely, but here's an idea:

A proposition p is such that it can be acted upon iff there is some subject S and some circumstances C such that S's acceptance of p  in C makes a difference to S's overt, nonlinguistic behavior. 

For example, *It is raining* can be acted upon because there are circumstances in which my acceptance of it versus my nonacceptance of it (either by rejecting it or just entertaining it) makes a difference to what I do such as going for a run.  Accepting the proposition, and not wanting to get wet, I postpone the run.  Rjecting the proposition, I go for the run as planned.

In the case of *Everything is self-identical,* is there any behavior that could count as a manifestation of an agent's acceptance/nonacceptance of the proposition in question?  Suppose I come to know (occurrently) for the first time that everything is self-identical.  Suppose I had never thought of this before, never 'realized it.'  Would the realization or 'epiphany' make a difference to my overt, nonlingusitic behavior?  It seems not.  Would I do anything differently?   

Consider characteristic truths of transfinite set theory.  They are items of knowledge that have no bearing on any actual or possible action.  For example, I know that, while the natural numbers and the reals are both infinite sets, the cardinality of the latter is strictly greater than that of the former.  Can I take that to the streets?

(3) therefore seems true:  there are items of knowledge that are not items of belief because not essentially tied to action.

I have shown that each limb of our inconsistent triad has some plausibility.  So it is an interesting problem.  How solve it?  Reject one of the limbs!  But which one?  And how do you show that the rejection of one is more reasonable than the rejection of one of the other two?  And why is it more reasonable to hold that the problem has a solution than to hold that it is insoluble and thus a genuine aporia?

I'm just asking.

On the Obvious

As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." Or as I like to say, "One man's datum is another man's theory."

But is it obvious that it ain't obvious what's obvious? 

It looks as if we have a little self-referential puzzle going here.  Does the Hilarian dictum apply to itself?  An absence of the particular quantifier may be read as a tacit endorsement of the universal quantifier.  Now if it is never obvious what is obvious, then we have self-reference and the Hilarian dictum by its own say-so is not obvious.

Is there a logical problem here?  I don't think so.  With no breach of logical consistency one can maintain that it is never obvious what is obvious, as long as one does not exempt one's very thesis.   In this case the self-referentiality issues not in self-refutation but in self-vitiation.  The Hilarian dictum is a self-weakening thesis.  Over the years I have given many examples of this.  (But I am now too lazy to dig them out of my vast archives.)

There is no logical problem, but there is a factual problem.  Surely some propositions are obviously true. Having toked on a good cigar in its end game, when a cigar is at its most nasty and rasty, I am am feeling mighty fine long about now.  My feeling of elation, just as such, taken in its phenomenological quiddity, under epoche of all transcendent positings -- this quale is obvious if anything is.

So let us modify the Hilarian dictum to bring it in line with the truth.

In philosophy, appeals to what is obvious, or self-evident, or plain to gesundes Menschenverstand, et cetera und so weiter are usually unavailing for purposes of convincing one's interlocutor. 

And yet we must take some things as given and non-negotiable.  Welcome to the human epistemic  predicament. 

Ignorabimus

We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant  in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here.  But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which -- we will remain ignorant in this life.

It is admittedly strange to suppose that death is the portal to knowledge.  But is it stranger than supposing that a being capable of knowledge simply vanishes with the breakdown of his body?

The incapacity of materialists to appreciate the second strangeness I attribute to their invincible body-identification.

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