Maverick Philosopher

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Any reasons one adduces in support of the thesis of  the infirmity of reason will share in the weakness of the faculty whose weakness is being affirmed.  Is this a problem for the proponent of the thesis? Does he contradict himself? Not obviously: he might simply accept the conclusion that the reasoning in support of the thesis is inconclusive.

Suppose I argue that, with respect to all substantive philosophical theses, there there are good arguments  pro and good arguments contra, and that these arguments 'cancel out.'  Now my thesis is substantive, and so my thesis applies to itself, whence it follows that my meta-thesis has both good arguments for it and good arguments against it, and that they cancel out.

Where is the problem? I am simply applying my meta-philosophical skepticism to itself, as I must if I am to be logically consistent.  Now I could make an exception for my meta-thesis, but that, I think, would be intolerably ad hoc.

I am not dogmatically affirming the infirmity of reason; I am merely stating that there are reasons to accept it, reasons that are not conclusive.

Deeper into this topic:

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

Words and Distinctions

A wise man does not quibble over words, but he insists on distinctions.

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Reader C. P. inquires,

Do you think that the arguments for and against every substantive philosophical thesis are equipollent [equal in force], or do you think only that we can never be certain about the truth of the theses? In some of your posts, you suggest that you think the former (e.g. here); but in others, you suggest that you think we can determine some theses as more likely true than others.  I'm fairly sure that you hold the former, but I thought I should make sure.

The question, as I would formulate it,  is whether every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out,'  or whether some substantive philosophical theses are rationally preferable to their negations.  I begin by explaining my terminology.

D1. An argument for a thesis T cancels out an argument for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible, or not far from equally plausible, to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'

Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any.  With respect to propositions, plausibility is not the same as truth.  A plausible proposition needn't be true, and a true proposition needn't be plausible. With respect to arguments, plausibility is neither validity nor soundness as these are standardly defined.  Validity and soundness are absolute, like truth herself. Plausibility is relative.   There cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is logical fallout from the standard definition of 'sound' according to which a sound argument is one that is deductive, valid, and has only true premises.  If there are sound arguments for both a thesis T and its negation ~T, then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.  Therefore, there cannot be sound arguments for a thesis and its negation.

So I am envisaging situations in which argument and counter-argument are equally plausible or nearly so but only one is sound.  Equally plausible to whom? It could be one and the same philosopher. Preston, for example, finds the arguments for and against a regularity theory of causation equally plausible. For him the arguments cancel out and he ends up in a state of doxastic equipoise with respect to the issue. From there he might go on to suspend judgment on the question, or he might investigate further.  A third option for one who ends up in doxastic equipoise is to leap to one side or the other.  Suppose, after canvassing the arguments for and against the existence of God, or those for and against the immortality of the soul, you find that the cumulative case for and the cumulative case against are equally plausible.  You might leap to one side for prudential or pragmatic reasons.  You would have no theoretical reason for the leap, but also no theoretical reason against the leap. But the leap might nonetheless be prudentially rational and the refusal to leap prudentially irrational. 

Or the plausibility could be to a group of philosophers.  Suppose the group has ten members, with five finding the arguments for more plausible than the arguments against, and five taking the opposite stance.  I will then say that argument and counter-argument are equally plausible to the group.  As I set up the example, none of the members of this group are in a state of doxastic equipoise. But I will make bold to claim that each of them ought to be, assuming that each of them is a competent practitioner. This claim is controversial, and needs defending, but I must move on. 

A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer.  A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if one is a competent practitioner,  then he is a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; he embodies the relevant intellectual virtues, and so on.

The answer to the reader's question will depend on what counts as a substantive or seriously philosophical thesis (SPT).  Such theses cannot be denials or affirmations of Moorean facts. Such a fact is roughly a deliverance of common sense. STPs are not at the level of data, but at the level of theory. The distinction between data and theory is not sharply drawn. Border disputes are possible. The theoretical bleeds into the datanic and vice versa. Theories are data-driven, but some data are theory-laden. But I don't believe one can get on without the data-theory distinction.

For example, it is a Moorean fact that some things no longer exist.  This cannot be reasonably disputed. Affirm the datum or deny it, you are not (yet) doing philosophy.  That Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists is not a philosophical claim, but a proto-philosophical or pre-analytic datum. But if you maintain that what no longer exists does not exist at all, then you go beyond the given to affirm a controversial philosophical thesis known as presentism.  Roughly, this is the thesis that, with respect to  items in time, only what exists at present exists, period.  (It implies that the Wholly No Longer and the Wholly Not Yet are realms of nonexistence.) This is hardly common sense despite what some presentists claim.  If Scollay Square is now nothing at all, then how could it be the object of veridical memories and the subject of true predications? A predicate cannot be true of an item unless the item exists.

If, on the other hand, you maintain that what no longer exists does exist, albeit tenselessly, then you are affirming a controversial philosophical thesis known in the trade as eternalism.  Eternalism will enable you  to explain how a wholly past item can be the object of veridical thoughts and the subject of true predications. But if you try to explain what 'tenseless' means in this context, you will soon entangle yourself in difficulties.  Both presentism and eternalism are examples of what I am calling seriously philosophical theses, they cannot both be true, and neither records a Moorean fact.

For a second example, consider the claim that consciousness is an illusion. This is not an SPT, despite its having been urged by philosophers of high repute.  It is either beneath refutation or is quickly refuted by a simple argument: illusions presuppose consciousness; ergo, consciousness is not an illusion.  There are any number of eliminativist claims that are not SPTs.   The claim that there are no claims, for example, 'sounds philosophical' but cannot be taken seriously: it is not an SPT.    On the other hand, there are eliminativist claims that are SPTs, for example, the claim that there is no such person as God, or that continuants such as tables and trees do not have temporal parts. 

In sum, if you affirm what is obvious or deny what is obvious you are not making a seriously philosophical claim even if what you affirm or deny is highly general and is apt to ignite philosophical controversy when brought into contact with other propositions. For example, if you affirm that some events are earlier than others, you simply a record a datum that no sane person can deny.  If, on the other hand, you affirm that everything that people believe is true then you affirm what is datanically false and no object of rational controversy. 

I consider all of the following examples of SPTs:

• There are no nonexistent objects.
• There are uninstantiated properties.
• There are no modes of existence.
• The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
• God exists.
• The soul is immortal.
• The human will is libertarianly free.
• Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
• I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
• Anima forma corporis.
• Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
• Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
• Truths need truth-makers.
• Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
• There are no facts.
• Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
• There are no properties, only predicates.
• The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
• Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.

There are many more examples, of course. Now what do the above  examples have in common? None of them records a Moorean fact. That is, none of them, if true,  is obviously true or datanically true.  Example.  There are two tomatoes on my counter, both ripe, and both (the same shade of) red.  That is a given, a datum, not subject to philosophical dispute, certain hyperbolic forms of skepticism aside.  But it is not a datum, phenomenological or otherwise, that the redness of the tomatoes is a universal, a repeatable entity, whether a transcendent universal (a one-over-many) or an immanent universal (a one-in-many).   For there is an alternative theory according to which the properties of particulars are themselves particulars (unrepeatables). On this theory each tomato has its own redness. Accordingly, there are two rednesses in the example, not one.  Both theories explain the data, but they cannot both be true. Phenomenology does not suffice to decide between them; dialectic must be brought in.  Once you get the dialectical ball rolling, you will have a hard time stopping it. It will roll down a rabbit hole that opens out into a labyrinth . . . .

Having clarified what I mean by a substantive or serious philosophical thesis, I now state two  meta-philosophical theses that I am considering. 

The strong thesis is that every SPT is such that the arguments for it and against it cancel out in the sense defined in (D1) above. This implies that no SPT is rationally preferable to its negation. I have my doubts about the strong thesis.

The weak thesis is that a proper subset of SPTs are such that the arguments for and against cancel out. I strongly suspect that the theses that most concern us belong to the proper subset, the hard core of insolubilia.

On the weak thesis, some SPTs will be theoretically-rationally preferable to others.

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices. Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government . . . .

Joseph de Maistre, Against Rousseau: On the State of Nature and the Sovereignty of the People

De Maistre's statement above is extreme but it contains a kernel of insight. Let me see if I can isolate the kernel.

Thinking beyond the empirical is endless and leads to no fixed result. The conclusions of the philosophers are inconclusive. The strife of systems rages unabated across the centuries. Nothing is ever settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  In a Kierkegaardian figure, philosophizing without dogma is like sewing without a knot at the end of one's thread. Thoughts are never stayed. Considerations and counter-considerations multiply and ramify, leading to protracted disputes. The protraction is unto infinity. Dispute impedes decision and action, including decisions and actions at the level of thought.

Not only is thinking inconclusive, it entangles itself in contradictions when left to run without sensory or dogmatic input. Think of Nagarjuna's tetralemmae, Sextus Empiricus' mutually canceling arguments, Kant's antinomies, etc. Or just plunge into the arcana discussed in the technical philosophy journals on any topic.  Forget the strife of systems; philosophers cannot come to agreement on even the most carefully and precisely defined questions.  Can anyone honestly think that real progress is being made on the narrowly defined questions over which philosophers, including this one, obsess? What goes for precisely defined technical questions whose human importance is low or non-existent, goes all the more for the broad questions of great human relevance.

"Human reason reduced to its own resources," if not perfectly worthless, is not capable of establishing any of the substantive and humanly important propositions about God, the soul, the nature of justice, and so on, that we need to know to flourish, and establish them in a manner that secures agreement among well-intentioned and intelligent truth-seekers.  We need the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, and we need agreement on it, but we can secure neither by our own efforts, whether individual or collective. Or at least that is a very good induction  from past philosophical experience.

Human reason needs input from a source outside it. (One cannot argue without premises, and not all premises can be argued for.) With respect to the Big Questions, sensory input is obviously of no use. Nor is mathematics, set theory and other formal disciplines. Foundational questions cannot be decided by the will of the people. Do you really want to put the principle of presumption of innocence up for democratic grabs?  Consensus does not constitute truth, and in any case uncoerced consensus is not to be had.

One might turn to divine revelation.  That would solve the problem if it were available. But revelation cannot be accepted at face value because there are competing revelations that cannot all be true. One is forced to distinguish putative and genuine revelation and to worry about the criteria of genuine revelation.  Even if God gave us all the answers in a book, he didn't tell us which book it is.

But then we are back to the dialectic of endless consideration and counter-consideration.  We have to think about which Scripture to credit and what any bit of it means. Sola scriptura leaves us in the lurch, and what, pray tell, is its Biblical basis? Theology must be brought in, but what is that if not applied philosophy, philosophy applied to the putative data of revelation. And so we are brought back to philosophy and the disagreement endemic thereto. To take but one example, the Christian and Muslim differ bitterly, and unto bloodshed, about the nature of God: radically One, or triune?  And in each major and minor religion there are sectarian splits, and meta-splits on how to heal the various splits and whether it is even necessary to do so.  You may be latitudinarian and inclusive,  but not unto inclusion of those who are neither.

One can always wax dogmatic, but that is no satisfactory solution for a thoughtful person. Dogmas are decisions at the level of thought. The dogmatic pronunciamento cuts off thought, which is endlessly self-perpetuating, and there is something satisfying about bringing endless talk to a halt.  Basta! Enough!   We value decisiveness in people, despite the arbitrarity and willfulness of decision. Therein lies the appeal of the dictator who puts an end to parliamentary mewling and hand-wringing. We note in passing the bivalence of these words: 'strong-willed' has a positive, 'willful' a pejorative, connotation.  Our very language reflects our predicament.

Action uninformed by thought is willful and one-sided.  It is blind. Thought without action is effete and epicene. So we are in a fine pickle indeed, one of the many 'pickles' that make up our miserable but also exhilarating predicament. (And our condition is indeed a predicament: something is deeply wrong and we need to find a way out without the assurance that there is a way out.)

The problem, or part of it, is that considerations of the intellect alone cannot determine action. Will and de-cision come into it. At some point thinking needs abruptly to be cut off by free, hence undetermined, decision.  Can the cut-off be achieved by a will that is not merely willful? Or is a free decision necessarily arbitrary in a bad sense?

Both thought and action breed disagreement, often bitter and protracted, and sometimes bloody. In the precincts of theoria there is the strife of systems. In the precincts of praxis, the strife of blood and iron. The conflicts in either sphere feed the conflicts in the other. Conflicts among minds and ideas stoke conflicts among bodies and interests, and conversely. Intra-spheric conflict drives inter-spheric conflict.

So the problem cannot be solved within either sphere. The spheres need to be bridged or mediated. Dogmas are one kind of mediating principle.

Dogmas are decisions at the level of thought. One takes action, or a group takes action, at the level of thought by enforcing a view that must be accepted with no further questions. Dogmas are attempts to stop thought and knot the thread on pain of something dire such as perdition or excommunication or the gulag. But these congealed thoughts are still thoughts and so will be questioned, doubted, and denied.  Even if it is granted that the thread must be knotted somewhere, why here?

Dogmas are delivered by indoctrination, by inculcating them.  The word is exactly right, its etymology suggesting a stamping in, as with the heel (calx, calcis). Inculcation is most effective with the young and defenseless, those still in de Maistre's cradle:  "His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct."

But whose dogmas should line the cradle and be stamped into the young?  No doubt there are good dogmas and good prejudices, but could a dogmatic method sort the good from the bad?  One needs a critical method.

Human actions are embodied thoughts, thoughts made flesh. But if the thoughts are false or pernicious, then the actions will not be good.

What then should we say about the de Maistre quotation above?  I believe I have laid bare the kernel of insight it contains: human reason is weak and needs guidance from without whether or not any such guidance is available. Reason is a very poor guide to life. Appeals to 'reason' are useless when not absurd. Whose 'reason'?  How applied? And what exactly is this vaunted faculty anyway?  And what is its reach? How reasonable was Kant's mapping of its limits in his Critique of Pure Reason? The "Come now, and let us reason together . . ." of Isaiah 1:18 has little application among men, whatever application it has between a man and God.

But what I have written above tenders no aid and comfort to the reactionary extremism of de Maistre. He sees what is wrong with the appeal to reason, but not what is wrong with its opposite, appeal to tradition and unexamined prejudices.  The predicament we are in cannot be solved, if it can be solved, by veering off to either extreme.

I am tempted to say what Heidegger said in his Spiegel interview in 1966, the years before his death: Nur ein Gott kann uns retten.

Rationalistic Fideism, Mysterianism, Misology, and Divine Simplicity

I want to thank the perspicacious Lukas Novak for helping me in my endless quest to know myself.  Professor Novak comments:

Is Bill a Gnostic?

Well, I am not sure about the precise meaning of this epithet, but to me Bill appears as a strange amalgam of a rationalist and a fideist. The rationalist comes first and sets up certain rather strict requirements on the contents of faith -- so that everything that does not fit in comes out as "incoherent" or "incomprehensible". Then, entre fideist and says that we nevertheless are still justified in believing these contents because we can justifiably assume that our intellect is so incompetent.

To me, this puts too much confidence in our reason in the first stage and too little in the last. It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction etc. in a given particular case. In this, he seems to be putting way too much confidence in his reasonings. The overall, habitual outcome of this is, however, the exact opposite: a significantly diminished confidence in the competence of our intellect as such. (This reminds me of the mechanism of how "misology" is generated, in Plato's Phaedo.)

We were discussing ecclesiology and the Incarnation, but at the moment I am revising my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  Divine Simplicity entry, so I want to shift over to this topic since similar structural patterns emerge.  What follows is a section I will add to the entry, one on a recent paper by Eleonore Stump of St. Louis University. Professor Stump is a distinguished Aquinas scholar and defender of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS).

4.4 Stump's Quantum Metaphysics

Like Dolezal, Eleonore Stump thinks of God as self-subsistent Being (esse). If God is absolutely simple, and not just simple in the uncontroversial sense of lacking material parts, then God must be self-subsistent Being. God is at once both Being and something that is. He has to be both. If he were Being (esse) but not a being (id quod est), he could not enter into causal relations. He could not do anything such as create the world, intervene in its operations, or interact with human persons. Such a God would be "religiously pernicious." (Stump 2016, 199) Indeed, if God were Being but not a being, then one could not sensibly maintain that God exists. For if Being is other than every being, then Being is not. (It is instructive to note that Martin Heidegger, the famous critic of onto-theology, who holds to the "ontological difference" of Being (Sein) from every being (Seiendes) ends up assimilating Being to Nothing (Nichts).) On the other hand, if God were a being among beings who merely has Being but is not (identically) Being, then he would not be absolutely transcendent, worthy of worship, or ineffable. Such a God would be "comfortingly familiar" but "discomfiting anthropomorphic." (Miller 1996, 3)

The problem, of course, is to explain how God can be both Being and something that is. This is unintelligible to the discursive intellect. Either Being is other than beings or it is not. If Being is other than beings, then Being cannot be. If Being just is beings taken collectively, then God is a being among beings and not the absolute reality. To the discursive intellect the notion of self-subsistent Being is contradictory. One response to the contradiction is simply to deny divine simplicity. That is a reasonable response, no doubt. But might it not also be reasonable to admit that there are things that human reason cannot understand, and that one of these things is the divine nature? "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) As I read Stump, she, like Dolezal, makes a mysterian move, and she, like Dolezal (2011, 210, fn 55), invokes wave-particle duality. We cannot understand how light can be both a wave phenomenon and also particulate in nature, and yet it is both:

What kind of thing is it which has to be understood both as a wave and as a particle? We do not know. That is, we do not know the quid est of light. [. . .] Analogously, we can ask: What kind of thing is it which can be both esse and id quod est? We do not know. The idea of simplicity is that at the ultimate metaphysical foundation of reality is something that has to be understood as esse —but also as id quo est. We do not know what this kind of thing is either. (Stump 2016, 202)

Stump, E., 2016, “Simplicity and Aquinas's Quantum Metaphysics” in Gerhard Krieger, ed. Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles im Mittelalter: Rezeption und Transformation, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 191–210.

Dolezal, J. E., 2011, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications.

Miller, B., 1996, A Most Unlikely God, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Now for my apologia.

Novak's characterization of me as both a rationalist and a fideist is basically accurate.  And yes, the rationalist comes first with exacting requirements. Let me try to illustrate this with DDS.  God is the absolute reality, a stupendously rich reality who transcends creatures not only in his properties, but also in his mode of property-possession, mode of existence, mode of necessity, and mode of uniqueness. God is uniquely unique. Such a being cannot be a being among beings. He is uniquely unique in that he alone is self-subsistent Being. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.

One can reason cogently to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the conclusion is apparently self-contradictory.  The verbal formula does not express a proposition that the discursive intellect can 'process' or 'compute.' It is unintelligible to said intellect.  For the proposition the formula expresses appears to be self-contradictory. Stump agrees as do the opponents of DDS.

Now there are three ways to proceed. 

1) We can conclude, as many distinguished theists do, that the apparent contradictions are real and that God is not absolutely simple, that DDS is a 'mistake.'  See Hasker, William, 2016, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 699-725.  For Hasker, DDS involves category mistakes, logical failures, and a dehumanization of God.  (One mistake Hasker himself makes is to think that a defender of DDS can only tread the via negativa and must end up embracing radical agnosticism about the nature of God. Stump has some interesting things to say in rebuttal of this notion. See Stump 2016, 195-198.)

In short: God is not reasonably believed to be simple.

2) A second way is the mysterian way.  The conjunction of God is esse and God is id quod est is an apparent contradiction.  But it is not a real contradiction. Characteristic of the mysterian of my stripe is the further claim that the structure of the discursive intellect makes it impossible for us to see that the contradiction is merely apparent.

In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple despite the ineliminable apparent contradictions that this entails because, as Stump puts it, "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) To put the point more generally, it is reasonable to confess the infirmity of human reason with respect to certain questions, and unreasonable to place an uncritical faith in its power and reach.  This is especially unreasonable for those who accept the Fall of man and the noetic consequences of sin.

Besides, if God is not a being among beings, then one might expect the discursive intellect to entangle itself in contradictions when it tries to think the Absolute Reality.  God, as Being itself, cannot be subsumed under any extant category of beings. 

3) A third way is by maintaining that the apparent contradictions can be shown to be merely apparent by the resources of the discursive intellect. In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple, and all considerations to the contrary can be shown to rest on errors and failures to make certain distinction.

What is my argument against (3)? Simply that the attempts to defuse the contradictions fail, and not just by my lights.  Almost all philosophers, theists and atheists alike, judge the notion of a simple God to be contradictory.

What is my argument against (1)? Essentially that those who take this line do not appreciate the radical transcendence of God. This point has been argued most forcefully by Barry Miller (1996).  Theists who reject divine simplicity end up with an anthropomorphic view of God.

As for Novak's charge of misology or hatred of reason and argument, I plead innocent. One who appreciates the limits of reason, and indeed the infirmity of reason as we find it in ourselves here below, cannot be fairly accused of misology. Otherwise, Kant would be a misologist.  I will turn the table on my friend by humbly suggesting that his doxastic security needs sometimes get the better of him causing him to affirm as objectively certain what is not at all objectively certain, but certain only to him.  For example he thinks it is epistemically certain that there are substances. I disagree.

But I want to confess to one charge. Lukas writes, "It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction, etc."  It may be that I am too zealous in my hunt for aporiai.  But I am deeply impressed by the deep, protracted, and indeed interminable disagreement of philosophers through the ages over every substantive question.  My working hypothesis for the metaphilosophy book I am trying to finish is that the core problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble by us.  And then I try to figure out what philosophy can and should be if that is the case, whether it should end in mystical silence -- that is where Aquinas ended up! -- or fuel a Pyrrhonian re-insertion into the quotidian and a living of life adoxastos, or give way to religious faith, or something else.

An Irrational Attitude for Human Beings?

Is the following attitude irrational for beings of our constitution?

I refuse any truth I cannot know to be true. Hence I refuse any truth that can only be believed, or can only be accepted on the basis of another's testimony. I will not allow into my doxastic network any truth that I cannot validate by my own internal criteria. To believe on insufficient evidence is worse than to lose contact with reality.  My intellectual integrity and epistemic autonomy trump all other epistemic values. What is true must pass muster by me for me to know that it is true. It is worse to be fooled than it is better to accept a truth, even a saving truth, that I cannot by my own lights prove to be true.

Better to languish in the dark than to accept light from an unproven source!

If we were mere spectators, then perhaps the above attitude would be rational.  But although we are transcendental spectators, we are also materially embodied, culturally embedded, and interested.  To be between -- inter esse-- is our station: to be between angelic spectatorship* and  animalic embodiment. Both blessed and cursed, man is a being-in-between. We are not merely observers of life's parade; we march in it as well, and our ultimate happiness may depend on the acceptance of truths that we cannot know here below.

So I say that it is not practically or prudentially rational for beings of our curious constitution to adopt the stance limned above, except when we are pursuing pure theory.

__________________

*My pretty formulation is marred slightly by the fact that angels are not mere spectators, but free agents. In that respect they are like us. Where they have it over us is in their freedom from bodies.

I don't know enough Thomistic angelology to know whether or not the doctor angelicus would say that it is better to be an angel than to be a man. But I do know enough of his anthropology to know that he would hold it to be man's nature to be a composite of form and matter.  Pace Plato, we are not accidentally embodied. A man is not complete without a body. Thus the disembodied post-mortem state before the resurrection of the body  is a state inferior to the resurrected state wherein man regains a transfigured body. (Would a theologian use 'transfigured' in this context?)

There are various questions here that will tempt the philosopher.  One is this. If the soul (anima) is forma corporis, and if forms are not substances in there own right, and thus not capable of independent existence apart from their material embodiment, how is it that a person can survive his bodily death as a mere soul? This is a bit of Platonism at odds with Aquinas' Aristotelianism.

It has been said, with justice, that Aquinas was an Aristotelian on earth but a Platonist in heaven. After all, God himself, the form of all forms, forma formarum, is yet the absolute substance. A form that is not the form of anything is, in the case of God,  a being in its own right.

Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

I argue the case over at MavPhil StrictPhil.

Remembering Henry Veatch and Rational Man

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl

Could All Paths be Dead Ends?

I wrote:

Reason in the end must confess its own infirmity.  It cannot deliver on its promises. The truth-seeker must explore other avenues.  Religion is one, mysticism is another. 

Vito Caiati responds:

My concern is as follows: While I agree that “reason in the end must confess its own infirmity,” I am troubled by the possibility that religion and mysticism terminate, for many, in their own dead ends. Regarding religious belief, too many sincere seekers, perhaps those not blessed with a religious disposition, the apparent gift of a minority of humanity, end up concluding, to quote Pascal, that  “[J]e suis fait d'une telle sorte que je ne puis croire” (“I am so made that I cannot believe”; Pensées Le livre de Poche, 1991, 464). I realize that there are a variety of theological responses to this declaration, including the debilitating effects of original sin on the human soul and mind, but these attempts merely explain away or rationalize what is for many a painful reality. As for mysticism, its truths, real or supposed, are enjoyed, as you know, by a very tiny fraction of humanity, East and West. 

Given these states of affairs, is it not possible that many (most?) of us are trapped in our ignorance of higher things? That none of the three ways—reason, religion, or mysticism—is a viable alternative? That our fate is tragic and miserable?

I hope that the answer to each of these questions is a negative one, for I continue to search for a way forward.

In The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith, I list the following options, omitting mysticism:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others that point to the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane if not all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend (D). Or are there other options?

Dr. Mark Whitten wrote to remind me that

John Bishop (University of Auckland) has a book , Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith (OUP, 2007) which is perhaps the best book that I have read on the subject.  He argues for what he calls a ‘supra-evidential fideism’ in which  one is ‘morally entitled’ to “take as true in one’s practical and theoretical deliberations” a claim that lacks  evidence sufficient for  epistemically-justified acceptance or rejection.

It is a developed Jamesian’ approach to the right to believe. He does not allow for beliefs that go contrary to the weight of evidence, thus he rejects Wittgensteinian fideism. One may believe beyond the evidence, but not against the evidence. He holds that one must always respect the canons of rational inquiry and not dismiss them, even in matters of faith. Yet, by the very nature of the faith-issue, they can be transcended with moral entitlement.

Nor does he allow for ‘induced willings-to believe.’  He holds that one who already has an inclination / disposition to believe is morally entitled to do so if the issue is important, forced, and by the nature of the issue cannot be decided upon the basis of ‘rationalist empiricist’ evidential practice.I came across  the book on a list of important books in philosophy of religion on Prosblogion.

I think that it is a type of fideism that combines your categories B and D – fideism and reasoned faith.

Here is the Introduction to Bishop's book.

What should I say to Dr. Caiati?

It might all be a big bloody joke in the end. But we don't know that it is, and there are indications that it is not.  Among the indications and intimations are the deliverances of conscience, and a wide range of paranormal, religious, and mystical experiences. Add to that the explanatory failures of naturalism and the dozens and dozens of arguments that conduct us from undeniable features of this world (its existence, order, beauty, causal structure, contingency, intelligibility, etc.) to a Source beyond it.  None of these arguments is rationally compelling. Cumulatively, they make a strong case, but still not a compelling one. No substantive thesis bearing upon our ultimate concerns can be proven, not even the thesis I have just enunciated. There is simply no rest here below. We are in statu viae.

We are on the road, and any rest is temporary. Up ahead death looms, undeniable and ineluctable. That we will die is certain. But what death is is uncertain and unknown. We don't know what death is because we don't know what we are or who we are. If you think you know, then you are fooling yourself. You are either whistling in the dark or slumbering in some dogmatism, whether scientistic or religious.  That I am is certain; what I am highly uncertain.  That I sense a difference between right and wrong is certain; what this sense reveals, if anything, is highly uncertain.

The human condition is a predicament, and this predicament can be described as a chiaroscuro, a blend of light and dark, clarity and obscurity. I am tempted to quote the great Pascal, "There is light enough for those who want to see, and darkness enough for those who are contrary-minded." But that is not quite what I want to say.  My thought is that there is light enough to justify faith and hope, and darkness enough to justify the opposite.

But we live better by faith and hope and worse by unbelief and despair.  We resolve the matter pragmatically, by deciding and doing. Life as I  see it is a venture and an adventure with no assured outcome. Life is lived well when it is lived as a quest for the Absolute along the various routes of philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality. 

All genuine religion involves a quest since God must remain largely unknown, and this by his very nature. He must remain latens Deitas in Aquinas' phrase:

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

(tr. Gerard Manley Hopkins.)

But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less  of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive becomes ossified.  All human institutions are corruptible, and are eventually corrupted.

Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing  of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. When philosophy and religion and mysticism and science are viewed as quests they complement one another. And this despite the tensions among Athens, Jerusalem, Benares, and Alexandria.

The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist -- he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil -- to mention one line of attack.  What he 'knows,' of course, is only the concept he himself has fabricated and projected.  Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature -- which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.

The (immature) religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder -- or worse. 

Ancora Una Volta: "Reasoned Mysterianism"

Dr. Vito Caiati writes (minor edits, formatting, and bolding added),

I thank you for your online response (Reasoned Mysterianism: A Defense of an Aphoristic Provocation) to my recent email.  In it you offer an impressive, rigorous defense of “reasoned mysterianism” that has impelled me to think more deeply on this subject, so much so, in fact, that I spent part of the night awake in bed ruminating over your argument.  Both it and your aphorism of July 21 (The Believing Philosopher) lead me to repeat what I wrote in my first email to you last February: “You have helped me sharpen and deepen by thinking on many questions, and you have made me more assured in turning away from easy or comforting answers.”

In this spirit, I will take up the invitation made in your email of yesterday and respond.  In doing so, I would like to draw a clearer distinction between a “reasoned belief” and a “reasoned mysterianism” by referring to your statement,

Vito mentions the leap of faith. As I see it, there is no avoiding such a leap when it comes to ultimate questions. There is no possibility of proof or demonstration hereabouts.  One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, for example. So if, on the basis of arguments for or against the existence of God, one comes to believe in God or not, there will be a leap of faith either way.

I fully agree with what you say here because while the affirmations of God’s existence or the existence and immortality of the soul cannot be proven, they can be reasonably held. In holding the former, for example, one gives assent to one or more philosophical arguments or calls on other forms of evidence, while acknowledging the powerful arguments and evidence against this belief. But here, most would agree that we are not dealing with what “to the discursive intellect must appear contradictory”; rather, while the intellectual challenges are so enormous that certainty is beyond our grasp and, as you correctly point out, that a leap of faith is required, we respect the intellectual limitations imposed on us by our “cognitive architecture.”

For me, this is the important point: that we not go beyond these limitations however much we would like to do so.  Therefore, I agree that “reasoning about God and the soul, etc. is precisely reasoning in justification of a leap of faith or else in justification of a leap of disbelief.” In such matters, the absence of “certainty” is no hurdle for me in affirming the existence of God, which I do. 

However, while I grant that “it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations. [And that] Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality,” I hold that such objects and states of affairs are best left alone.  If the objects and states of affairs of “reasoned belief,” such as God’s existence, remain as open and debated today as they were in the distant past and as cloudy to the human mind, what can we possibly know of those shrouded in absolute mystery and apparent contradiction? Here, it seems mere hubris to make a leap of faith; rather, is it not better to acknowledge the mystery and grasp what aspects of the Unknown, albeit small, that reasoned belief permits?  Why not be content with the latter and leave the rest to God, who, after all, either intended or permits our having a constrained “cognitive architecture”?  

The misery of our ignorance, perhaps the greatest evil, is not to be undone by mere conjecture and hope, however well intended. Thus, while I agree that we must choose, I think that the possible choices are quite circumscribed. 

REPLY

I will begin on a note of deep agreement: the misery of our ignorance is indeed a great, and perhaps the greatest, evil. It surprises me that this is not usually mentioned when people recount the evils of the human predicament. Surely it is awful that we are almost totally in the dark about the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore, and that bitter controversy rages on every side.  To my mind the human condition is indeed a predicament, a 'situation' deeply unsatisfactory, the solution to which is either impossible or, if possible, then such as to require a radical revision of the way we live.

Now on to the meat of our disagreement. 

For most of my philosophical life I have held the position sketched by Vito Caiati according to which only what we can see to be rationally acceptable may be accepted.   So if, by my best efforts, I cannot bring myself to see how a religious dogma satisfies the exigencies of reason, then I ought not accept it.

But lately I have been re-examining this position. Such re-examination is in the spirit of philosophy as critical reflection that spares nothing, not even itself. There is nothing unphilosophical in questioning the reach of reason.*  Note that this questioning remains within philosophy: from within philosophy one can question philosophy and raise the possibility that philosophy can be and perhaps must be supplemented ab extra. 

One type of supplementation is via divine revelation.  Now philosophy cannot prove the fact of divine revelation, nor can it validate the specific contents of a putative revelation, but it can reasonably allow for the possibility of divine revelation. Without quitting the sphere of immanence it can allow for the possibility of an irruption into this sphere of salvific truths that we need but cannot access by our own powers.

Vito will grant me that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.  If so, it is reasonable to believe that there is a transcendent Person capable of revealing himself to man.  I would argue that the possibility of revelation is built into the concept of God.  Our concept of God is a concept of a personal being who could, if he so desired, reveal himself to his creatures in specific ways, via prophets who leave written records, or even by revealing himself in person in a special man who somehow is an, or rather the, incarnation of God.  Our possession of such a concept of God is of course no guarantee that there is such a God.   But without straying from the precincts of philosophy one can articulate such a concept.

This implies that it is reasonable to be open to the possibility of receiving 'information' of the highest importance to us and our ultimate well-being from a transcendent Source lying beyond the human horizon. This possibility is one that we can validate from within our own resources and thus without appeal to divine revelation.

One who grants the existence of a personal God cannot foreclose on the possibility of the receipt of such 'information.' To foreclose on it one would have to adopt some form of naturalism or else a non-personal conception of God.  Spinoza's deus sive natura, for example, is clearly not up to the task of transmitting any saving truths to us.

Now suppose some of these bits of 'information' or revealed truths are beyond our ken not only in the sense that we cannot validate them as true from within our immanence, but also in the sense  that we cannot validate them as possibly true. That is, we can generate no insight into their logical possibility. Suppose they appear, and indeed must appear, logically impossible to us within our present (fallen) state.  The idea is not that they are logically impossible in themselves, but that they must appear logically impossible to us due to our current 'cognitive architecture.'

Supposing all this, would it be reasonable to take Vito's advice and leave these putative truths of revelation alone, on the ground that it would be hubris to make a leap of faith in their direction when, by our own best lights, and after protracted examination, they appear logically impossible?

It is not clear to me that it would.  For then the measly creature would be valuing his intellectual integrity over the possibility of an eternity of bliss.

There might well be more hubris is setting up ourselves as arbiters as to what is possible and what is not. Weak-minded as we are, who are we to judge what is possible and what is not? If God exists, then we are his creatures. We are in the inferior position and ought to listen to God's teachings and commands whether or not they pass muster by our criteria, and especially since our ultimate happiness is at stake. 

If we really understand what is meant by 'God,' and we believe that God exists -- which I admit itself requires a leap beyond what we can legitimately claim strictly to know -- then how can we insist that God, his actions, his commands, and his revelations satisfy the exigencies of our puny intellects in order to be admissible?

There is much more to be said, but I have gone on long enough for one post. 

________________

* Think of the academic and the Pyrrhonian skeptics, the empiricists, the critical philosophy of Kant, phenomenology with its anti-dialectical orientation and invocation of the given, logical positivism, and the ordinary language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein.

The Believing Philosopher

The religious belief of a believing philosopher is a reasoned belief, and even if his belief extends to the acceptance of mysteries that to the discursive intellect must appear contradictory, his is a reasoned mysterianism.

When Reasoned Faith No Longer Strikes One as Reasonable: What Then?

Thomas Doubting inquires,

I’ve met and talked to a number of people who, while originally atheists, have found faith in God and become active Christians as result of their intellectual pursuit that led them to the conclusion that God is logically necessary.

There is an ambiguity regarding 'logically necessary' that needs to be removed. Suppose there is a sound deductive argument A for the existence of God.  Necessarily, if the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion -- God exists -- is true.  That is not to be confused with: If the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion -- God exists -- is necessarily true.

The necessitas consequentiae must not be confused with the necessitas consequentis. See my separate post on this topic.  The premises of a sound argument logically necessitate its conclusion, but that does not imply that the conclusion is logically necessary.  

So even if one succeeds in demonstrating the existence of God, one has not thereby demonstrated the existence of a necessary being. For one might have succeeded only in demonstrating the existence of a logically contingent being.

I will read you as saying that there are people who come to faith in God via deductive arguments that they consider to be sound, just that, without the additional idea that the God so demonstrated is a necessary being.

Other relevant sources of ambiguity: Are you thinking of persons whose faith is SOLELY based on argumentative considerations?  Are the argumentative considerations demonstrative only, or are probabilistic considerations relevant?  

I will assume an affirmative answer to both questions.

I've always wanted to know, but was a bit uncomfortable to ask, how well are they prepared to deal with a quite conceivable situation where they should accidentally discover that their investigation was logically flawed and from the rational point their conclusion is not valid and, therefore the their faith in God’s existence has no logical grounding. 

In other words, if your intellect guided you on the road to God and in the years following the finding of God you developed strong faith in and love for God would you still cling to your faith if you had suddenly discovered that the reasoning that brought you to Him was defective?

Suppose someone comes to accept the existence of God on the basis of one or more arguments, but then discovers that those arguments are flawed. It would not follow from this that the person's reasoned faith has no logical grounding. For there could easily be other arguments that establish the existence of God.

So your question is better put as follows.   "Suppose a person who became a theist solely on the basis of arguments comes to believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the existence of God. Would that person be justified in clinging to his faith in God?" 

The question is interesting and important but also very complicated. I'll just make a couple of points.

Does the person also believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the non-existence of God?  Suppose that is the case. Then the person has three beliefs: that God exists; that God's existence cannot be demonstrated; that God's non-existence cannot be demonstrated.  Is he rationally justified in holding all three?  The theoretically-rational course would be to suspend judgment on the question of God's existence by neither affirming that God exists nor denying that God exists.  

But there is also prudential rationality to consider. If the arguments pro et contra cancel out, then God might or might not exist for all we know.  Believing would then be the prudentially rational thing to do, and pragmatically useful to boot. This is because the question of the existence of God is not a merely theoretical question, but one that bears upon our ultimate happiness and well-being.

If, on the other hand, the person in question has come to believe that some argument demonstrates the non-existence of God, then to be rational he ought to reject belief in God.  Or so it will seem to most.

But it is not that clear. Suppose one believes that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, but there are good arguments for the nonexistence of God, arguments from evil, say.  Suppose the person is also skeptical about the power of reason to decide such a weighty, metaphysical question.

Would it not be prudentially rational for him to go on believing? After all, God might exist.  And what would one lose by believing? What one would lose by believing would be as nothing as compared to what one might gain by believing and coming into right relation with God.

Related: Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?  

 

No Voice for Men in Abortion Debate? Do Arguments Have Testicles?

Michael in Russia writes,

Got a question for you. I am a pro-abortion man (or even more generally a pro-death man since I support capital punishment too). You strongly oppose the former. I'm not going to repeat all familiar pros and cons. Rather, I've got one peculiar premise which I have never met in discussion of the issue and which I take to be the first step in dealing with it—namely, I hold that we, men, should have no voice at all in this business. Since no man has ever known what it is (like to be a bat) to conceive, to bear, and to give birth, and it appears that no one is going to, I maintain that this issue must be decided on strictly by women whatever the outcome. It's utterly undemocratic, but I'm not a fan of egalitarian democracy. So, what do you think of this: no voice for men in abortion debate, that's strictly women's business?

Thank you for reading, Michael, and thank you for writing.

It warms my heart to hear that you are pro-death - - when it comes to capital punishment.  You are probably aware of my arguments for the latter's moral justifiability in some cases and in some venues. (In a place where the justice system is unfair, I would be inclined to support a moratorium on the death penalty.)  I also maintain, pace the late, great Nat Hentoff, that it is logically consistent to be for capital punishment and against abortion. 

My view in one clean sentence: Abortion is morally prohibited in most cases while capital punishment is morally required in some cases.

Now on to your question: Ought men have a say in the abortion debate?  Here is my short answer:

Arguments don't have testicles!

But that bumper sticker wants unpacking. 

An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument.  And similarly  for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime.  The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers and consumers.

Here is an argument. "Infanticide is morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion; therefore, abortion is morally wrong." The soundness/unsoundness of the argument cannot pivot on the sex of the producers or consumers of the argument.

Suppose someone argues that repeat-offending rapists should be be chemically or in some other way castrated by the state. Would the fact that men and men alone would bear the burden of the punishment be any reason to maintain that women have no right to a say in the matter? No.

It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man.  Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection. 

"You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!" 

What's it like to be a pregnant woman? 

In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' made famous by Thomas Nagel is not relevant.  One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative.  I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.

What's more, we white men can have a sort of knowledge by analogy of what women and cats and blacks feel. For example, men and women both urinate and defecate, and typically a certain pleasure accompanies these activities. I know by analogy what it is like for a woman to micturate and feel relief and a modicum of pleasure even though my modus micturiendi  is somewhat different.

Defecation triggers orgasm in some women. I have never experienced that, but I can imagine it. Similarly with menstrual cramps, morning sickness, and other miseries of pregnancy.  I am a sympathetic and sensitive guy as everyone knows. To be honest, I am a bit womanish in this regard, and I don't intend 'womanish' as a term of derogation.

I don't know what it is like to be a bat, and I will grant that bat qualia are beyond our ken even analogically; but I have some sense of what it is like to be a cat inasmuch  as cats manifestly feel analogs of such human emotions as fear, surprise, annoyance, etc.

I have no idea, however, what my cat Max Black feels when he retromingently takes a leak.

Do I know what it is like to be black? Well, I know what it is like to disrespected. So I know what it is like to feel the hurt and the rage of a black motorist who is stopped by a cop merely for 'driving while black.'  

But do I know what it is like to be a slave?  About as well as contemporary blacks do in the West none of whom are or have ever been slaves.

"But you have never faced the prejudice blacks experience." Not that particular prejudice, but plenty of other kinds.

At this point tribalism enters the discussion.  The more we tribalize, the more we shrink the space of objectivity, reason, and argument.  The more we tribalize, the more we reduce ourselves to mere tokens of racial, ethnic, and other types. The more we do that, the more we miss the person, the free agent, the rational being. 

There are blacks who would say to me, "You have no idea what it is like to be black!" I say, "Bullshit! You have incarcerated yourself in your tribal identity."  Same with women who feel (that's exactly the right word) that abortion is a women's issue exclusively. Well, it is not. It is an objective issue that affects both males and females. Stop feeling and start thinking.

That should be obvious. Among those aborted are males and females. So abortion cannot be solely a concern of women.

So let us set our tribalism aside and approach the question as rational beings on the plane of reason and argument where no testicles are to be found.

The Constitution, Reason, and Abstract Principles

This entry continues the 'religious test' discussion. (Last installment here.) The Canadian writes,

I agree that there's no incoherence in a statement such as "(1) The Constitution guarantees  freedom of religion and disallows religious tests.  (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding."  But why is the most reasonable interpretation one that projects such a proviso on to the text?  What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation?  On the one hand, a reasonable interpretation might be one that results in a constitution that reasonable people could accept.  Naturally, if this is the criterion, no reasonable interpretation can produce a constitution that, in practice, would create a society where that same constitution would be destroyed.  On the other hand, it might simply be one that's adequately supported by the textual evidence (and other evidence, e.g., reasonably hypotheses about the authors' intentions).  Or maybe a reasonable interpretation is subject to both constraints.  In any case there is a tension between the two.  As you say, there's really no good textual evidence (or any other kind, as far as I know) to indicate that the Constitution really does implicitly limit the scope of religious freedom so as to preclude the freedom to practice traditional Islam, or that it limits the scope of 'No religious test' so as to allow for tests with respect to Islam.  I'd argue that a reasonable interpretation in the second sense--the most reasonable one, in that sense--is unreasonable in the first sense.  

"What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation?" I agree that there is no evading this difficult question. One answer is that a reasonable interpretation is an internally coherent one.  The First Amendment guarantees the "free exercise" of religion and "freedom of speech," inter alia. Now if "no religious test" (Article VI, section III) is interpreted in so latitudinarian a fashion as to allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to gain political power, then we are on the road to an internal contradiction.  For these Muslims, once in power,  will of course try to shut down the free exercise of religions other than Islam, and they will attempt to prohibit freedom of speech if it involves any criticism, no matter how respectful, of Muhammad or of any aspect of their religion. They will have used the Constitution to destroy the Constitution.  They will have exploited our freedom of religion to eliminate freedom of religion, and our freedom of speech to eliminate freedom of speech.

It seems to me that the Constitution cannot be interpreted so as to allow the emergence of the following logical contradiction:

a) Under no circumstances shall (i) the freedom to practice the religion of one's choice (or to refrain from the practice of any religion) be prohibited by the government, or (ii) the freedom to express one's view publicly be abridged.

b) Under some circumstances (e.g., when enough Muslim fundamentalists gain power) the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech many be prohibited and abridged.

Note that the (a)-(b) dyad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot both be true.  What we have here is a strict logical contradiction.

But to embrace a logical contradiction is the height of unreasonableness. 

I conclude that to interpret the Constitution in such a way that it allows for the emergence of the above contradiction is unreasonable. The solution is obvious to me: one cannot allow a destructive political ideology such as Islam to count as a religion for purposes of Constitutional interpretation.  I am conceding that Islam is a religion and not a mere political ideology masquerading as a religion, and I am conceding that it is a religion in its own right and not a Christian heresy; the point is that it is a religion-cum-political ideology that is incompatible with the principles and values of the American founding.

Therefore, Islam ought not count as a religion when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. It may well be a way to God for those brought up on it and who know no better way, and it deserves respect for that reason. But this is no reason to abstract from its totalitarian and theocratic political nature, a nature at war with our political principles.

The Canadian continues:

In any case, I think that for your argument you need the first notion of reasonable interpretation.  But then there's a problem:  Leftists, whose ideas about reasonable political principles are very different from ours, can now argue on a similar basis that we should just ignore the seemingly plain meaning of the Constitution in cases where it conflicts with their values.  For instance, they can argue that since it's just not reasonable to let citizens buy AR-15s, the 2nd Amendment must be interpreted in such a way that citizens don't have that right.  That seems worrisome.  If there isn't even a generally agreed meaning for the constitution, the only way to politically resolve such disagreements is by some kind of debate over ultimate aims or values; but I know you agree with me that that isn't likely to happen either.  So it seems wise to insist that the constitution's meaning is the meaning of the text, not the meaning that we think it would have or should have in order to be most reasonable.  But then we're back to the problem that the text just doesn't seem to exclude Islamic freedom of religion, or to allow for a "religious test" in that case--or even to exclude the possibility that the Constitution is just internally inconsistent in some respects...  

In many cases there is no "plain meaning."  The meaning has to be 'excavated.' Does "establishment of religion" have a plain meaning in the First Amendment? (That's a rhetorical question.) "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."  The meaning is open to interpretation.  Or take the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does 2A bear its meaning on its sleeve? Of course not. What is the Militia? Is the right individual or collective? Does the initial clause supply a reason, or the only reason, in justification of the right to keep and bear arms? I have argued elsewhere that it supplies a reason, not the only reason. I am sure many if not most would disagree.

So I deny the Canadian's assumption that the Constitution has a plain meaning that can just be 'read off' the text. There is no avoiding interpretation in the light of principles that are not themselves articulated in the Constitution. The Law of Non-Contradiction, for example, is not stated in the Constitution. We bring that principle to the text, and reasonably so.  

Or consider the Principle of Charity in interpretation. To save keystrokes I won't formulate the principle.  My astute readers know more or less what it is. Well, does "All men are created equal" in the Declaration have a plain meaning?  There are benighted souls who think it implies the empirical equality of all human beings.  But this violates the Principle of Charity since if the declaration in the Declaration were so interpreted it would come out false! The Charity principle, however, is not to be found in any of the founding documents; we bring it to the text and we do so reasonably.

There is no avoiding interpretation. The text does not have a plain meaning. The other extreme, however, is far worse. There are those who say that the Constitution means whatever SCOTUS says it means.  But then there is no text; there is a tabula rasa upon which people in black robes write whatever they want.  The most SCOTUS can do is decide upon an enforceable meaning among candidate possibilities that find support in the text.  That alone is the reasonable view.

For example, are 2A rights collective or individual? It was decided that they are individual. SCOTUS in this decision came to the 'right' decision. Yes, my use of 'right' is tendentious. More on this problem below.

What I am saying, then, is that there is a text, not a tabula rasa; the text has a meaning; the meaning is not obvious; the meaning is subject to interpretation in the light of principles brought to the text.

But whose principles are these?  Those of a reasonable person. But what constitutes reasonableness? Here is where the crunch comes, as my Canadian interlocutor fully appreciates.  SCOTUS has the power to lay down the law and enforce an interpretation of the Constitution.  But who has the power to decide what the principles of rationality are? Logically prior question: Are the principles of rationality matters of decision at all?

The Canadian concludes:

We might be back to a recurring deeper disagreement here.  I don't think that any system of abstract principles and values is enough to provide a framework for a workable society.  I think some kind of pre-rational or pre-conceptual horizon of meaning and practice and natural community is the basis; explicit principles and values have a role, but only when they're understood by everyone to operate within that specific cultural world.  The principles of "no religious test" or "freedom of religion" were just fine when they were only being applied to a fairly small range of fairly similar religions, practiced by relatively similar people.  (And, sure, there were always some who were not so similar--Africans, Amerindians--but they were small in number and had no real influence.)  Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems.  Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones.  But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles.  I suspect that the very idea of "religion" that we in the west tend to take for granted is really an artefact of our specific religious and cultural heritage.  There is probably no useful general account of "religion" across all human cultures.  So it would be unwise to propose any kind of freedom for  that kind of thing. 

I agree that abstract principles and values are not enough. They have to reflect a (temporally) prior pre-conceptual shared understanding that is taken for granted. The principles and values cannot be imposed ab extra, but must be a sort of distillate or articulation on the conceptual plane of what is already tacitly understood and accepted at the pre-conceptual level.  Otherwise we will argue about the principles.

Argument about first principles is the province of philosophy and is legitimate there. In philosophy, nothing is immune to scrutiny. I should think that 'nothing immune to scrutiny'  is a constitutive rule of the philosophical 'game' or enterprise.  But if our politics becomes a philosophical free-for-all, then we are in trouble. 

There is no place for dogmas in philosophy. But in politics and religion we seem to need them. We need propositions that are unquestionably accepted.

For example, if we don't all accept that there is a  sense in which we are all equal, equal as rights-possessors, then we are in deep trouble. And if we don't all accept that certain ideologies such as Islam are incompatible with the principles enshrined in the U. S. Constitution, then we are in deep trouble.  Examples are easily multiplied.

I think we agree on why we are in the mess we are in. As you put it, "Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems."   But benign non-Christian religions such as Buddhism are not the problem. The problem is Islam.  The solution is extreme vetting of immigrants from Muslim countries.  "Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones.  But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles."

I disagree. Which traditional American principle are you referring to?  Don't tell me "freedom of religion." Islam is not a religion in a sense that could allow it to be on a list of acceptable religions given American principles.

Can a multi-cultural society flourish?  There is reason to be skeptical. A society cannot flourish without shared principles and values. But the latter presuppose and grow out of a shared public culture.  Acquiescence in and assimilation to that shared culture -- Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian -- must be demanded of all would-be immigrants.  Otherwise we will break apart and become easy pickings for foreign aggressors.

I suspect it is already too late to turn things around peacefully. Civil war is a real possibility.

Incarnation, Resurrection, and Rational Acceptability

A while back I was talking with my young theological friend Steven about Christianity. I had remarked that its essence lies in the Incarnation. Without disagreeing with me, he offered the bodily resurrection of Christ as the essential pivot on which Christian belief and practice turns. This raises a number of questions. One is this: Can, or rather may, a scientifically-trained mind accept the literal truth of Christ's bodily resurrection?  I don't think that there is an insurmountable problem here. But there may be an insurmountable problem when it comes to accepting the literal truth of the Incarnation. This entry, then, falls into two parts. 

A. The Rational Acceptability of Christ's Resurrection

Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, writes:

We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers. For Robert Boyle (of the ideal gas law, co-founder in 1660 of the Royal Society) the resurrection was a fact. For James Clerk Maxwell (whose Maxwell equations of 1862 govern electromagnetism) a deep philosophical analysis undergirded his belief in the resurrection. And for William Phillips (Nobel prize-winner in 1997 for methods to trap atoms with laser light) the resurrection is not discredited by science.

To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine.

Maybe science has made the world seem more comprehensible – although in some respects it seems more wonderful and mysterious. Maybe superstition was more widespread in the first century than it is today – although the dreams of today’s sports fans and the widespread interest in the astrology pages sometimes make me wonder. Maybe people were more open then to the possibility of miracles than we are today. Still, the fact that the resurrection was impossible in the normal course of events was as obvious in the first century as it is for us. Indeed that is why it was seen as a great demonstration of God’s power.

To be sure, while science can’t logically rule miracles in or out of consideration, it can be a helpful tool for investigating contemporary miraculous claims. It may be able to reveal self-deception, trickery, or misperception. If someone has been seen levitating on a supposed flying carpet in their living room, then the discovery of powerful electromagnets in their basement might well render such claims implausible. But if science fails to find defeating evidence then it is unable to say one way or the other whether some reported inexplicable event happened, or to prove that it is miraculous. Science functions by reproducible experiments and observations. Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. The extraordinary character of the event, and its significance, provide a unique context, and ancient history is necessarily hard to establish. But a bare presumption that science has shown the resurrection to be impossible is an intellectual cop-out. Science shows no such thing.

I agree with Hutchinson.

B. The Rational Acceptability of the Incarnation?

Please note that if a man was raised from the dead by the power of God, it does not follow that the man so raised was God. So if Jesus was raised bodily by the power of God it does not follow that Jesus was or is God. The orthodox Christian narrative, however, requires the doctrine of the Incarnation codified at Chalcedon according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became fully human, body and soul, in Jesus of Nazareth while remaining fully divine.  Given the identity of the Second Person and the man Jesus, if a man was raised bodily from the dead by the power of God, and this man is God, then God raises himself.

This doctrine violates our ordinary canons of reasoning. It is, to put it bluntly, absurd in the logical sense of the term: logically contradictory. (Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Shestov would agree.) Or so it seems to me and Dale Tuggy and many others. But others, equally sharp and serious and committed to the truth, think that if one makes the right distinctions the Incarnation doctrine can be shown not to be in violation of the ordinary canons. I think their fancy footwork avails nothing. Tuggy thinks the same.

Well, suppose Tuggy and I are right.  Then it seems there are two ways to go, the Tuggy way and the way of mystery.  Tuggy, if I undertand him, rejects the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Standing firm within what I call the Discursive Framework he argues cogently that the doctrines in question are logically impossible. 

But there is this 'possibility.' There are true propositions that appear to our intellects as either logically self-contradictory or as issuing by valid inferences in logical contradictions.  They are not contradictory in themselves, but they must appear contradictory to our fallen intellects here below.  It is not just that these propositions are true, but we cannot understand how they could be true; it is that they seem to us as evidently not true.  And yet they are true, and contradiction-free in themselves.

A similar sort of 'possibility' is invoked by materialist mysterians. If a non-eliminativist materialist tells me that a sensory quale is real but identical to a brain  state I will say that that is logically impossible since the two items differ property-wise.  (These items are in the same logical boat with the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity: they cannot be numerically identical since they differ property-wise.) The materialist might just insist: quale and brain state are identical -- it is just that we don't know enough about matter to understand how the identity could hold despite the discernibility. It's a mystery!

Are mysterian moves kosher ploys for showing rational acceptability?  

I don't know. But I do know it is Saturday Night, time for a drink, and my oldies show.

On Relative Poverty and Status

I have a little disagreement going with the Dark Ostrich. He asserts, "Relative poverty is all about status."  In an earlier entry, I quoted him as maintaining that 

We are born with a natural inequality which soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status.

I replied,

Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status.  Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train.  But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.  

It is not desire for status that [primarily] explains economic inequality  but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security they provide.

I would guess that no one who reads this weblog is absolutely poor, i.e., bereft of life's necessities, and that every one who reads it is relatively poor, and significantly so. What do I mean by 'significantly so'? Suppose A has a net worth of four billion USD and B a net worth of 3.9 billion. Then B is  poor relative to A. I will call this insignificant relative poverty.  But the Ostrich and I, though we have far more than we need, are significantly relatively poor as compared to, say, the late Fidel Castro, that man of the people and hero of the Left.

The Ostrich tells us that relative property is all about status. I take that to mean that it is the drive for social status alone that brings about economic inequality and with it relative poverty.  That is empirically false. I am the counterexample:  I live wisely and frugally and my net worth keeps going up. But I don't care  about status, which is relatively unreal, being mainly a matter of what's going on in the heads of others.  I carefully husband my resources because I want to be in a position to take care of myself and others when the inevitable disasters occur and not be a burden on others. What others think of me, though of some importance, is of less importance to me than my material well-being.

But let's be charitable. Perhaps what the Ostrich means to say is that it is the lust for status that mainly brings about economic inequality and relative poverty.  I concede that that might be so. It is an empirical question and cannot be answered from the arm chair.

But there are a couple of normative questions in the vicinity and these are what really interest me. One is whether it is morally permissible to pursue loot and lucre, property and pelf, for social standing. The other is whether it is rational to pursue these things for social standing. I will leave the moral question for some other time.

As for rationality, it can be understood in two different ways.

An agent is instrumentally rational if he chooses means conducive to the achievement of his ends.  A rational agent in Phoenix who intends to travel to Los Angeles by car in eight hours or less will head West on Interstate 10. If he were to head East he would show himself to be irrational, at least in respect of this particular goal or type of goal.  This says nothing about the rationality or irrationality of driving to Los Angeles. Indeed, there are those who will say that it makes no sense to speak of ends as either rational or irrational, that such talk is meaningful only in respect of means.

On a second way of thinking about rationality, one can coherently speak of ends themselves as rational or the opposite. Consider social status and material security. Which is a higher value? Which is more choice-worthy? Which would it be more rational for a being of our constitution to pursue? To me the answer is obvious. Material security, which includes wealth well beyond what one needs physically to survive, is a higher value that social status. Modifying slightly what I said above,

I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train.  But I cannot live well without  material wealth in excess of what is needed for necessities.

Given how benighted human beings are, it may well be instrumentally rational to pursue wealth for the sake of status. That's an empirical question. But no reasonable person prefers status to wealth, just as no reasonable person prefers transient sense pleasures to long-term physical health.

So the Ostrich and I may be at cross-purposes.  I am making normative claims while he remains at the level of the merely factual. 

Now suppose someone asserts that the good is whatever satisfies desire, and that there is no way of ranking desires as objectively higher or lower, and their objects as more or less choice-worthy.  Could I refute such a person?  I don't think so.  Contradict yes, refute no. For it all comes down to whether one has correct value intuitions. Some of us do and some of us don't. Just as some of us are color-blind, some of us are value-blind, wertblind in the terminology of Dietrich von Hildebrand. While color blindness is a defect in the eye of the head, value blindness is a defect in the 'eye' of the soul.

Related articles

Is Economic Inequality Morally Acceptable?

Faith, Reason, and Steven Pinker

John Gray's review of Pinker's latest book starts like this:

"Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Steven Pinker is fond of definitions. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.” 

Why are scientists so silly when they stray from their specialties? 

Let's think about the second quotation. The first independent clause is plainly false. Suppose my belief that Jones shot Smith is based solely on the testimony of a number of reliable witnesses all of whom agree. My belief is reasonable despite its being based on faith in the veracity of the witnesses.

Most of us have a justified true belief about our birth dates. How did we acquire these beliefs? Did we glance at a calendar as we emerged from the birth canal?  No. I reasonably believe that I was born on such and such a date because I remember my mother telling me so, a telling never contradicted by anyone, and because I have an official-looking birth certificate in my possession. My belief is reasonable despite being based on the testimony of others. 

There are reliable authorities in all fields. What I believe on the basis of their  testimony and what they have recorded in books I believe reasonably.

I could go on, but this is boring, so enough.  Pinker has done very good work, but when he tries to play the philosopher he makes a fool of himself.  Another example: Pinker on Scientism.

Gray's review here.

Democrats Undermine the Foundations of Rational Discourse

Rational discourse requires observance of a few simple procedural rules. One of the most basic is to use words and phrases in their commonly accepted senses and to refrain from distorting them for partisan purposes.  Take 'chain migration.' According to Wikipedia, a usually reliable source, 

Chain migration is a term used by demographers since the 1960s^[1] to refer to the social process by which migrants from a particular town follow others from that town to a particular destination city or neighborhood. The destination may be in another country or in a new, usually urban, location within the same country.

Chain migration can be defined as a “movement in which prospective migrants learn of opportunities, are provided with transportation, and have initial accommodation and employment arranged by means of primary social relationships with previous migrants.”^[1] Or, more simply put: "The dynamic underlying 'chain migration' is so simple that it sounds like common sense: People are more likely to move to where people they know live, and each new immigrant makes people they know more likely to move there in turn."

As you can see, 'chain migration' is a phrase that has been in use for a long time. It is no more a racist slur than 'black hole' is.  Why then does Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D NY) say it is?  You know the answer.

Jonah Goldberg:

A more recent example comes in the novel claim that the term “chain migration” is a racist shibboleth. Chain migration is — or was — an utterly neutral term for the process by which legal immigrants sponsor members of their extended family to become citizens as well.

Rep Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeted recently, “Reminder: ‘chain migration’ is a made-up term by the hard-line anti-immigration crowd. Its purpose is to dehumanize immigrants. If you're using that word, you're declaring a side.”

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., refuses to even use the phrase. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., insists the term — which he used as recently as 2010 — is offensive because African Americans came here in chains. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, insists that " 'chain migration' is an epithet. It was invented. The term is ‘family immigration,’ and it’s the way America has literally always worked.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., made a figurative clown of herself when she literally said, “Let's be very clear: When someone uses the phrase 'chain migration,' it is intentional in trying to demonize families, literally trying to demonize families and make it a racist slur.”

This is just more evidence that our political opponents are not fellow citizens with whom we can have productive discussions. They are domestic enemies and we are in a war. You may not want to accept that. I didn't for a long time. But the fact is now unblinkable.

Don't imagine that you can reason with them. They will ignore what you say and go right back to the recitation of their defamatory litany: racist, white supremacist, xenophobe, . . . . You need to disembarrass yourself of the notion that they are basically decent people. They are not. 

On Putting Words Into People's Mouths

Conor Friedersdorf takes British journalist Cathy Newman to task for her perverse refusal, or perhaps knuckleheaded inability, to attend to what Jordan Peterson actually maintains.

I suppose it makes me a 'sexist' to pass on this link.

Cigarettes, Rationality, and Hitchens

Let's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would Serling have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.

Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five or ten years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally -- in one sense of 'rational' -- if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.

The epithet 'irrational' is attached with more justice to the fascists of the Left, the loon-brained tobacco wackos, who, in the grip of their misplaced moral enthusiasm, demonize the acolytes of the noble weed. The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is tobacco. I should also point out that smoking, like keeping and bearing arms, is a liberty issue. Is liberty a value? I'd say it is. Yet another reason to oppose the liberty-bashing loons of the Left and the abomination of Obamacare with its individual mandate. [This entry is a repost from 28 December 2011. One of President Trump's many accomplishments has been to put an end to the mandate.]

Smoking and drinking can bring you to death's door betimes. Ask Humphrey Bogart who died at 56 of the synergistic effects of weed and hooch. Life's a gamble. A crap shoot no matter how you slice it. Hear the Hitch:

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that -- or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation -- is worth it to me. So I was knowingly taking a risk. I wouldn't recommend it to others.

Exactly right.

And like Bogie before him, Hitch paid the price for his boozing and smoking in the coin of an early death at age 62 on 15 December, 2011.  Had he taken care of himself he might have kept up his high-toned ranting and raving for another ten years at least.

So why don't I smoke and drink? The main reason is that smoking and drinking are inconsistent with the sorts of activities that  provide satisfactions of a much higher grade than smoking and drinking. I mean: running, hiking, backpacking and the like. When you wake up with a hangover, are you proud of the way you spent the night before? Are you a better man in any sense? Do you really feel better after a night of physical and spiritual dissipation? Would you feel a higher degree of satisfaction if the day before you had completed a 26.2 mile foot race?

Health and fitness in the moment is a short-term reason. A long-term reason is that I want to live as long as possible so as to finish the projects I have in mind. It is hard to write philosophy when you are sick or dead.

And here below is where the philosophy has to be written. Where I hope to go there will be no need for philosophy.

Were Trump Voters Irrational? Instrumental and Epistemic Rationality; Truth and Accuracy

A very good article. I agree that the answer to the title question is in the negative.  But I have a couple of questions about the following:

Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. Instrumental rationality is achieved when we act with optimal efficiency to achieve our goals. Epistemic rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world—that is, whether our beliefs are accurate, or true. A quick and memorable way to differentiate the two is to say that they concern what to do (instrumental rationality) and what is true (epistemic rationality). Of course, the two are related. In order to take actions that fulfill our goals, we need to base those actions on beliefs that are properly calibrated to the world. In order to understand the rationality (or irrationality) of the Trump voters, I will focus first on instrumental rationality and then turn to epistemic rationality.

The definition of instrumental rationality is perfect.  

The definition of epistemic rationality, however, leaves something to be desired.  And I should think truth and accuracy ought not be conflated.

Epistemic Rationality

It seems we we are being told that a belief is epistemically rational if and only if it is true.  But that cannot be right. Epistemic, or better, doxastic, rationality is a relative property while truth is absolute.   What it is rational to believe at one time might not be rational to believe at another time. But if a proposition is true it is true independently of time, place, and the vagaries of belief and desire. For example, it was doxastically rational for the ancient Greeks to think of water as an element even though we now know that to be false. The history of science is littered with beliefs that were at one time rationally accepted but are now rightly rejected as false.

So what it is rational to believe needn't be true. On the other hand, a proposition can be true but not rational to believe. It is easy to imagine situations in which a person speaks the truth but it would not be rational for his audience to believe him because of circumstances or his low credibility or the high antecedent improbability of the proposition asserted. 

Truth and Accuracy

The author conflates these two; this strikes me as a mistake.

What is the difference between truth and accuracy as properties of statements and such cognate items as declarative sentences, propositions, beliefs, judgments, etc.?  

It seems obvious that 'false' and 'inaccurate' do not have the same meaning as is indicated by their differential usage by competent speakers of English.   To say that John F. Kennedy  finished his first term in office in good health is to say something false, not inaccurate, while to say that he was assassinated on 23 November 1963 is to say something inaccurate (and also false).   He was assassinated on 22 November 1963.

Suppose someone says that there are people now living on the Moon.  No one competent in English would say, 'That's inaccurate!' 

Intuitively, an inaccurate statement is near the truth.  Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on the 22nd of November, 1963.  If I state that, then I make a statement that is both true and accurate.  If I say he was shot on the 23rd, then I say something very near the truth but inaccurate.  Similarly if I said that he was shot on the 22nd in Fort Worth rather than in Dallas.  Inaccurate but near the truth.

If I simply say that Kennedy was assassinated, then I say something true.  But is it also accurate?  If every inaccurate statement is false, then, by contraposition, every true statement is accurate.

If I say that Kennedy was not assassinated, then I say something false.  But is it also inaccurate? 

Perhaps we should say the following.  While every statement is either true or false, only some statements are either accurate or inaccurate.  Which statements?  Those that feature terms that admit of degrees or somehow imply numerical values.  'Tom is a smoker' would then be either true or false but not either accurate or inaccurate.  But 'Tom is a pack-a-day smoker' would be either true or false and either accurate or inaccurate.  Of course, if it is accurate, then it is true, and if it is inaccurate, then it is false.

It is plausible to maintain, though not self-evident, that while accuracy admits of degrees, truth does not.  A statement is either true or not true.  If bivalence holds and there are only two truth values, then, if a statement is not true, it is false.  It does not seem to make  sense to say that one statement is truer than another.  But it does make sense to say that one statement is more accurate than another.  'The value of π is 3.14159' is more accurate than 'the value of π is 3.1415.'  Neither statement is entirely accurate, and indeed no such statement is entirely accurate given the irrationality of π.   But I suggest that the following is both entirely true and entirely accurate: 'π is the mathematical constant whose value is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.'

Here is something bordering on a paradox.  Given its irrationality, π is such that every statement that can be made in a finite time about its value is inaccurate.  But if every inaccurate statement is false, then every statement that can be made in a finite time about the value of pi is false.

The blood libel is an outright lie perpetrated by many Muslims.  It would be absurd to speak of it as 'inaccurate.' 

Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed

If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

Hefner's death reminds me of a true story from around 1981.  This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girl friend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, arguments for logical analysis, etc.  She of course did not believe that I had found them.

What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true.  Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.

"But what about rational acceptablity at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?" 

Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too. 

Elizabeth Harman's Abortion Argument

A curious new abortion argument by Princeton's Elizabeth Harman is making the rounds. (A tip of the hat to Malcolm Pollack for bringing it to my attention.) It is not clear just what Harman's argument is, but it looks to be something along the following lines:

1) "Among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings . . . ."

2) One kind of early fetus has "moral status."

3) The other kind of early fetus does not have "moral status."

4) The fetuses possessing moral status have it in virtue of their futures, in virtue of the fact that they are the beginning stages of future persons.

5) The fetuses lacking moral status lack it in virtue of their not having futures, in virtue of their not being the beginning stages of future persons. 

Therefore

6) If a fetus is prevented from having a future, either by miscarriage or abortion, then the fetus does not have moral status at the time of its miscarriage or abortion. "That's something that doesn't have a future as a person and it doesn't have moral status." (From 5)

7) If a fetus lacks moral status, then aborting it is not morally impermissible.

Therefore

8) " . . . there is nothing morally bad about early abortion."

Some will say that this argument is so bad that it is 'beneath refutation.'  When a philosopher uses this phrase what he means is that an argument so tagged is so obviously defective as not to be worth refuting. There is also the concomitant suggestion that one who refutes that which is 'beneath refutation' is a foolish fellow, and perhaps even a (slightly) morally dubious character when the subject matter is moral inasmuch as he undermines the healthy conviction that certain ideas are so morally abhorrent that they shouldn't be discussed publicly at all lest the naive and uncritical be led astray.

But to quote my sparring partner London Ed, in a moment when the muse had him in her grip: "In philosophy there is a ‘quodlibet’ principle that you are absolutely free to discuss anything you like."  That's right. The Quodlibet Principle is one of the defining rules of the philosophical 'game.' There is nothing, nothing at all, that may not be hauled before the bench of reason, there to be rudely interrogated. (And that, paradoxically, includes the Quodlibet Principle!)

I hereby invoke that noble and indeed Socratic principle in justification of my attention to Harman's argument.

What's wrong with it?  She is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus  but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor. 

This issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no future. If it has no future, then it has no moral status. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified. 

Is it ever morally right and reasonable to question or impugn motives or character in a debate?

I have just demolished Harman's argument. She has given no good reasons for her thesis. Quite the contrary. She has presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public. But what really interests me is the bolded question.  And I mean it in general. It is not about Harman except per accidens.

Is it ever morally right and reasonable in a debate to question motives and character? I didn't get a straight answer from London Ed in an earlier discussion.  So I press him again. 

We agree, of course, that arguments stand and fall on their own merits in sublime independence of their producers and consumers. I have hammered on this theme dozens of times in these pages. One may not substitute motive imputation and character analysis for argument evaluation. 

But once I have refuted an argument or series of arguments, am I not perfectly morally justified in calling into the question the motives and character of the producers of those arguments?  I say yes.  

I have a theory about what really drives the innumerable bad pro-abortion/pro-choice arguments abroad in this decadent culture, but I leave that theory for later. Here I pose the bolded question quite generally and apart from the abortion question.

Do you now see my point, Ed? And what do you say? 

Harmon's argument is here. 

Related articles

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Faith, Reason, and Edith Stein

Today, August 9th, is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as the Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction between subjective (psychological) and objective (epistemic) certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

[. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God.  As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace. Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is after all, a contestable and contested claim.  How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is his revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

Rational Argument and the Questioning of Motives

London Ed writes,

. . . my main concern is how rational argument is deflected by questions of motive. Douglas Murray makes the point very well. Consider the proposition ‘Sharia law discriminates against women’. A rational response to this claim would be to investigate the nature of Sharia law, then to settle on a definition of ‘discriminate’, and then finally decide whether Sharia law does or does not fit that definition. This process is aimed at establishing the truth or falsity of the proposition in question. That by definition is rational debate.

Well of course. Who could disagree? The problem, however, is that rational debate does not resolve the main issues that divide us. Argument, even when conducted civilly and in accordance with all the proper canons, is of very limited value. Or can you think of a hot-button issue that has been resolved by rational debate?

But there is another form of response which sidesteps this completely, by questioning the motive of the person making the claim. Since it involves criticism of Sharia and hence of Muslims, the reason for making it must be racism or Islamophobia or whatnot. Note this does not involve any question of truth or falsity. Perhaps the opponent believes it too. No matter. The mere fact of making it [criticism of Sharia] means you are an Islamophobe, and must be shouted down, banned from the country, not allowed a platform etc.

Ed and I of course agree that it is in general wrong in a debate to divert attention from the content of a claim to the motives of the one making it.  The content of a claim is either true or false, either supported or unsupported by evidence, etc.  These properties of the propositional content of the claim are logically independent of anyone's psychology, in particular, the one who makes the claim. For example, here we read that in the U. S. most people with sickle cell disease are of African ancestry.  Clearly, the truth value of that proposition is logically independent of whether or not the person making the claim loves blacks, hates them, wants them all sent back to Africa, etc.  And of course there is nothing 'racist' about pointing out a racial fact like this.

But what I have just said in agreement with Ed is little more than the sort of philosophical boilerplate acceptable to all of us 'competent practioners.'  But it doesn't get us very far.

Here is a much more interesting question: 

Is it ever right to question or impugn motives in a debate?

I say it is sometimes right and sometimes rational. There are those here in the United States who oppose a photo ID requirement at polling places. They claim it 'disenfrachises' certain classes of voters, that it amounts to 'voter suppression.' But of course it does no such thing, and there is not one good argument against photo ID requirements.

The willful and widespread misuse of 'disenfranchise' is by itself a clear indication that the motives of those who misuse the word are unsavory. 

I won't go through these anti-photo ID arguments one more time. But if they are all bad, as I argue that they are, then I have every right to 'psychologize' my ideological enemy and impugn his motives. And that is exactly what I do. More than once I have claimed that leftists oppose photo ID requirements because they want to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Plain and simple, their motive is to encourage voter fraud. They are out to win any way they can, and in their minds the glorious end justifies the dishonest means. Radicals needn't be inconvenienced by the demands of bourgeois morality. They've read their Alinsky.

I could cite many more examples but one suffices to nail down the general point, which is: it is sometimes right and rational to question motives and indeed, to impute evil motives in explanation of the transparently flimsy arguments our enemies sometimes give, arguments which are mere smokescreens that make a mockery of rational discussion.

So it appears that Ed and I disagree. Surprise!  His claim, if I understand it, is that it is never morally right and rational to question motives in a debate.  My claim is that it sometimes is. 

UPDATE 8/6: Malcolm Pollack responds,

Just read your post on motives. You wrapped it up with:

His claim, if I understand it, is that it is never morally right and rational to question motives in a debate.  My claim is that it sometimes is. 

It seems to me that the thing hinges on that phrase "in a debate". What's a "debate"? In principle it is a joint, rational inquiry, the purpose of which is to arrive at the truth. In that situation, then I'd agree with Ed.

But what we find ourselves dealing with in the social, political, and academic arena these days is rarely "debate", even though it pretends to be ("we need to have a national conversation about [insert left-wing hobby-horse here]"); it's a zero-sum war of conquest. (This is why accusations of inconsistency or hypocrisy, such as pointing out the Left's own widespread racism, so completely miss the point; their consistent principle is always simply that the other side is the enemy, and will be attacked.)

So when we aren't actually having a "debate" at all, then of course I'd agree with you. The key, then, is to be able to tell the difference.

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

Thanks, Malcolm. And in that situation I would agree with Ed too. But if we use 'debate' for what actually passes for debate, then I agree with me -- and you.

I sense that your parenthetical remark is directed against me, given certain things I have said in the past, which is fine: you and I share enough common ground to make rational discussion possible and perhaps even fruitful.  But your remark may need some refinement. Suppose we distinguish two classes of leftist opponents.

Class 1. These are the ones you are referring to. They operate from the commie/Alinksyite playbook. They have one guiding principle which they apply consistently: do whatever it takes to win; the other side is the enemy; attack them and give no quarter.  Thus they will invoke our principles and values against us when it is convenient and conducive to their ends, even though they have no respect for these 'bourgeois' principles and values. For example, they will invoke free speech rights to get themselves heard, but shout down their opponents.

A naive guy like me comes along, who hasn't fully fathomed the depravity of the leftist mind, and protests their hypocrisy, their deployment of a double standard, the inconsistency of their application of the principle of free speech. And then you point out to me that I am "completely missing the point."  My mistake, I suppose, is to assume that leftists share our values, including aversion to hypocrisy and inconsistency in application of standards.

Have I understood your point, Malcolm?  

But it may be a bit more complicated since not all leftists are of the same stripe.  There are also those who belong to:

Class 2. These are the ones that really are hypocrites and deployers of double standards.  They are the ones that fall into inconsistency in the application of a principle such as that of free speech even while accepting the principle. So I can't have "completely missed the point" if there really are people in Class 2 and I point out their hypocrisy and deployment of double standards.

In sum, your parenthetical remark needs the nuancing that I have just provided. 

Let me know if you would like me to open the Combox to allow a reply.

Belief Skepticism, Justification Skepticism, and the Big Questions

1) The characteristic attitude of the skeptic is not denial, but doubt. There are three main mental attitudes toward a proposition: affirm, deny, suspend. To doubt is neither to affirm nor to deny. It can therefore be assimilated to suspension. Thus a skeptic neither affirms nor denies; he suspends judgment, withholds assent, takes no stand. This obvious distinction between doubting and denying is regularly ignored in political polemics. Thus  global warming skeptics are often unfairly tagged by leftists as global warming denialists as if they are willfully rejecting some well-known fact.

2) The skeptic is not a cynic. A cynic is a disillusioned idealist. The cynic affirms an ideal, notes that people fail to live up to it, allows himself to become inordinately upset over this failure, exaggerates the extent of the failure, and then either harshly judges his fellows or wrongly impugns their integrity. His attitude is predicated on the dogmatic affirmation of an ideal. Skeptics, by contrast are free, or try to be free, of dogmatic commitments, and of consequent moral umbrage.

Cynic: "All politicians are liars!" Skeptic: "What makes you think that scrupulous truth-telling is the best policy in all circumstances? And what makes you think that truth is a high value?"

3) One can be skeptical about a belief or a class of beliefs, but also about the rational justification for a belief or a class of beliefs. Thus skeptics divide into belief skeptics and justification skeptics. (See R. Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Oxford UP, 2003, 98) You can be one without the other. There are various combinatorially possible positions. Here are three of several interesting ones:

a) S doubts whether p is justified, but S does not doubt that p: he affirms that p.

b) S doubts whether p is justified, and in consequence doubts that p.

c) S doubts whether p is justified, and concludes that one ought to suspend judgment on p.

Ad (a). Suppose Tom canvasses the arguments for and against the existence of God and concludes that it's a wash: the arguments and considerations he is aware of balance and cancel out.  Tom finds himself in a state of evidential equipoise. As a result he doubts whether belief in God is justified.  But he decides to believe anyway.  In this example Tom does not doubt or deny that God exists; he affirms that God exists despite doubting whether the belief is rationally justified.  With respect to the existence of God, Tom is a justification skeptic but not a belief skeptic.

Ad (b). Like Tom, Tim doubts whether belief that God exists is justified. Unlike Tom, Tim transfers his doubt about the justification to the belief itself. Tim is both a justification skeptic and a belief skeptic.

Ad (c). And then there is Cliff. He thinks it is wrong always and everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Like Tim and Tom, he doubts whether the existence of God is justified and for the same reason: the arguments pro et contra balance and cancel.  He reasonably takes evidential equipoise as entailing that there is  insufficient evidence for either limb of a contradictory pair of theses. But, unlike Tom and Tim, Cliff infers a normative conclusion from his evidential equipoise: it is morally wrong, a violation of the ethics of belief, to believe that God exists given that the evidence is insufficient. 

For now I am concerned only with the rationality of doing as Tom does.  

Tom examines both sides of the question. He does his level best to be fair and balanced.  But he finds no argument or consideration to incline him one way or the other. Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that our man is free to believe anyway, that is, in our example either to affirm the existence of God or to reject the existence of God.  He is not psychologically compelled by his state of evidential equipoise to suspend belief.

But while Tom is free to affirm, would it be rational for him to affirm the existence of God? Yes, because for beings of our constitution it is prudentially (as opposed to theoretically) rational to believe beyond the evidence. Consider the case of

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jeffrey Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that (in consequence) it is not more probable than not that I have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

What if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives his last moments better than he would have by giving up. He lives courageously and actively. He lives like a man.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big bloody joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what? 

What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Addendum

Dave Bagwill hits me with a powerful objection, which I will put in my own way.

It may be that mere intellectual assent to propositions about God and the soul "incurs no costs." But how could that be true for those who live their faith?  There are plenty of examples of those whose lived faith has cost them their liberty, their livelihoods, and their lives.  As we speak, Christians are being driven from their homes and slaughtered in the Middle East by adherents of the 'religion of peace.'  

This is a good objection and at the very least forces me to qualify what I wrote, perhaps along the following lines: religious belief and practice incur no real costs for those of us fortunate to live in societies in which there is freedom of religion.

How long freedom of religion can last in the USA is a good question given the leftist assault on religious liberty. Yet another reason to battle the leftist scum.  Luckily, we now have a chance with Trump as president.  

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Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

I should think so.

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

As a young man observing my professors, I said to myself, "I can do this and I can do it better!"  (It can be advantageous to have mediocre teachers!) My belief in myself was not without evidence but surely was not grounded in sufficient evidence. (Suppose we agree that sufficient evidence for proposition p renders p more likely than not.)  My believing in myself was a believing well beyond the evidence. But my belief in self, even unto cockiness, was sine qua non for my success.  Effort follows belief.  In cases like these, belief is a matter of the will: one chooses to believe that a certain good is attainable despite the insufficiency of the evidence the intellect can gather at the time.

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

Let's consider another example.

The New Neighbors

What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are morally decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity and whose help he may need. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

It can also be shown that there are cases in which believing, not beyond, but against the evidence is sometimes rational.

Later.

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Neven Sesardić  is a Croatian philosopher, born in 1949. He has taught philosophy at universities in Croatia, the United States, Japan, England, and Hong Kong. An earlier book of his  is Making Sense of Heritability (Cambridge U. P., 2005).

“Gripping, thoroughly researched and documented, judiciously argued, and alternately depressing and infuriating, Sesardić’s courageous book offers the astounding spectacle of some of the greatest minds of the past century―including Carnap, Einstein, Gödel, and Wittgenstein―adopting odious political views, supporting Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, for simplistic and plainly fallacious reasons. More shocking still is the story of how prominent journals, encyclopedias, and the American Philosophical Association itself have sacrificed academic integrity on the altar of political activism. Great philosophers repeatedly reveal themselves as terrible thinkers when it comes to morality and politics, plunging headlong into complex controversies without drawing elementary distinctions or differentiating degrees of good or evil.” ―Daniel Bonevac, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin

The book arrived yesterday. Flipping though it, I was surprised and pleased to find a quotation from one William Vallicella on p. 168. This is from a letter that protests a proposed group resolution on the death penalty:

What then could justify the APA in taking sides on the sort of broadly philosophical issues that tend to become bones of contention in the political arena? . . . Furthermore, by what principle was the death penalty chosen as the topic of an APA resolution rather than, say, partial-birth abortions? Should the APA endorse a package of positions, issuing pronunciamentos on the Balanced Budget Amendment, handgun control and ebonics? If not, why not? (William Vallicella).

Here is a second, later letter of protest (November 2003) that  I sent to the A. P. A. before cancelling my membership:

 
 

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Reason is weak in discernment but strong in rationalization.

Is Everything an Object Among Objects?

My opponent says Yes; I return a negative answer.  This entry continues the discussion in earlier theological posts, but leaves the simple God out of it, the better to dig down to the bare logical bones of the matter.  Theologians do not have proprietary rights in the Inexpressible and the Ineffable.

Argument For

The opponent offers a reductio ad absurdum:

a. It is not the case that everything is an object. (Assumption for reductio)
Therefore
b. Something is not an object. (From (a) by Quantifier Negation.)
c. 'Something' means some thing, some object.
Therefore
d. Some object is not an object.  Contradiction!
Therefore
e. Everything is an object.  (By reductio ad absurdum)

The argument could also be put as follows.  An object is anything that comes within the range of a logical quantifier.  So someone who denies that everything is an object must be affirming that something is not an object, which is tantamount to saying that some item that comes within the range of a quantifier -- 'some' in this instance -- does not come with the range of a quantifier. Contradiction. Therefore, everything is an object!

Argument Against

First, two subarguments for premises in my main argument against.

Subargument I

Every declarative sentence contains at least one predicate.
No predicate functioning as a predicate is a name.
Therefore
No declarative sentence consists of names only.

For example, 'Hillary is crooked' cannot be parsed as a concatenation of three names.  A sentence is not a list of names.  And the unity of a proposition expressed by a sentence is not the unity of a collection of objects.   A proposition attracts a truth-value, but no collection of objects attracts a truth-value.  The mereological sum Hillary + instantiation + crookedness is neither true nor false. But Hillary is crooked is true.  

Adding a further object will not transform the sum into a proposition for well-known Bradleyan reasons.

So what makes the difference between a mereological sum of sub-propositional (but proposition-appropriate) items and a proposition?  A noncompound proposition is clearly more than its sub-propositional constituents.  The proposition a is F is more than the sum a + F-ness.  The former is either true or false; the latter is neither.  (Bivalence is assumed.) What does this 'more' consist in? The 'more' is not nothing since it grounds the difference between sum and proposition.  The 'more' is evidently not objectifiable or reifiable.  

The ancient problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition was already sighted by the 'divine' Plato near the beginning of our tradition.  The problem points us beyond the realm of objects.

The paradox, of course, is that I cannot say what I mean, or am 'pointing to.'  For if I say: 'Something lies beyond the realm of objects,' then I say in effect: 'Some object is not an object.'  But I am getting ahead of myself.

Subargument II

Names refer to objects and predicate expressions refer to concepts.
Anything that can be quantified over can in principle be named.
Concepts cannot be named.
Therefore
Concepts cannot be quantified over.

In support of the second premise:   'Some horse is hungry' cannot be true unless there is a particular horse in the domain over which the existential/particular quantifier ranges, and this horse must in principle be nameable as, say, 'Harry' or 'Secretariat.'  There needn't be a name for the critter in question; but it must be possible that there be a name.

Now for the main argument contra:

A. There are declarative sentences.
B. No declarative sentence consists of names only; predicative expressions are also required.  (Conclusion of subargument I)
C. Predicates refer to concepts, not objects.
D. Concepts cannot be quantified over. (Conclusion of Subargment II)
Therefore
E. Concepts are real ingredients of propositions but they are not objects.
Therefore
F. Not everything real is an object among objects.

Summary

The unity of the sentence/proposition is one of several problems that point us beyond what I have been calling the Discursive Framework (DF).  These problems, properly understood, show the inadequacy of this framework and refute its claim to unrestricted applicability.  The unity of the sentence/proposition  needs accounting.  (There is also the unity of concrete truth-making facts or states of affairs that cries out for explanation.)  

Now we should try to account for sentential/propositional unity as parsimoniously as possible.  We shouldn't bring in any queer posits if we can avoid them, a point on which my opponent will insist, and in those very terms.  Unfortunately, we cannot eke by with objects alone.  To repeat:  a sentence is not a list; a proposition is not a collection of objects.  So we need to bring in some queer entities,whether Fregean unsaturated concepts, or Strawsonian nonrelational ties, or relational tropes, or some odd-ball Bergmannian nexus, even my very own Unifier. (See A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer, 2002.)

The problem, of course, is that these queer items entangle us in contradictions when we try to state the theories in which they figure.  The contradictions give aid and comfort to the Opponent who takes them as justifying his claim that the DF is unrestricted in its applicability.

Frege's paradox of the horse illustrates this very well.  Frege notoriously asserted, "The concept horse is not a concept."  Why not? Because 'the concept horse' names an object, and no object is a concept.  An application of existential/particular generalizattion to Frege's paradoxical sentence yields:  Some concepts are not concepts.  But that's a contradiction, as is the original sentence.

But Frege was no 'stoner' to use an expression of the Opponent.  His contradiction is, shall we say, motivated.  Indeed, it is rationally motivated by the noble attempt to understand the nature of the proposition and the nature of logic itself.

Why can't concepts be named?  Suppose we try to name the concept involved in 'Hillary is crooked.'  The name would have to be something like 'crookedness.'  The transformation of the predicate into an abstract substantive loses the verbal chararacter, the characterizing character of the predicate '___ is crooked' functioning as a predicate.  If 'crookedness' has a referent, then that referent is an object.  But as I said, the proposition Hillary is crooked is not the mereological sum Hillary + crookedness.  The former attracts a truth-value; the latter doesn't.

The unity of a proposition, without which it cannot be either true or false, is not the unity of an object or a collection of objects, which is just a higher-order object.  This peculiar truth-value attractive unity cannot be accounted for in terms of any object or collection of objects.  And yet it is real.  So not everything real is an object.  

Impasse?

We seem to be in an aporetic bind.  We need to bring in some queer elements to solve various problems that are plainly genuine and not pseudo.  But the queer items generate paradoxes which, from within the DF, are indistinguishable from bare-faced contradictions.  The paradoxes/contradictions arise when we attempt to state the theories in which the queer entities figure.  They arise when we attempt to talk about and theorize about the pre-objective or non-objectifiable.  I cannot state that no concept is an object, for example, without treating concepts as objects.  But doing so drains the concept of its predicative nature.  I cannot say what I mean.  I can't eff the ineffable.

One move the Opponent can make is to flatly deny that there is the Inexpressible, thereby defying the author of Tractatus 6.522. Das Mystische does not exist, and, not existing, it cannot show itself (sich zeigen).

If the Opponent is a theist, then his god must be a being among beings, a highest being, a most distinguished denizen of the Discursive Framework, but not ipsum esse subsistens.

How might the Opponent deal with the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition?  Perhaps he will say that a noncompound proposition is a partially but not wholly analyzable unity of sense, but that the 'more' that makes the proposition more than the sum of its constituents has no Deep Meaning, it does not 'point' us anywhere, and certainly not into Cloud Cuckoo Land but is  merely a curious factum brutum for which there is no accounting, no philosophical explanation.

I don't think this would be a good answer, but this entry is already too long.

At the moment I would happy if I could get the Opponent to make a minimal concession, namely, that I have mounted  a strong, though not compelling, rational case for the thesis that reality is not exhausted by objects, and that I have not "destroyed all of logic" in so doing.

But I am undermining the claim of the DF to have universal applicability.  This undermining takes place within the DF by reflection of something essential to the DF, namely, propositions.  As long as I refrain from making positive assertions about the Transdiscursive, I avoid contradiction. 

Related articles

Is it Coherently Conceivable that One Person Have Two Natures?

Does the Potentiality Argument Prove Too Much?

Thinker, Thought, Sentence

The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

More on One Person-Two Natures: Response to Timothy Pawl

Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

In his Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford UP, 2000), Alvin Plantinga mounts a critique of John Hick's Kantianism in the philosophy of religion.  In this entry I will begin an evaluation of Plantinga's critique.  I will focus on just two and a half pages, pp. 43-45, and examine only one preliminary argument.

The question, very simply, is whether our concepts apply to the ultimately real.  If God is the ultimately real, as he is, then the question is whether or not our concepts apply to God.  If they don't, then we cannot refer to or think about God or make true and literal predications of him such as 'God is infinite.'  If so, we cannot have any beliefs about God.  Now Plantinga's project is to show that Christian belief (which of course includes beliefs about God) is warranted.  But a belief about X cannot be warranted unless there is that belief.  So there had better be beliefs about God, in which case there had better be true and literal predications about God.  This implies that God must have properties and that some of these properties must be such that we can conceive them, i.e., have concepts of them.  In brief, it must be possible for some of our concepts to apply to God.

For Hick, God is the ultimately real, or simply 'the Real' but our concepts do not apply to God/the Real. (43)  For present purposes, we needn't consider why Hick holds this except to say that it is for broadly Kantian reasons.  And we needn't consider all the nuances of Hick's position.  At present I am concerned only with Plantinga's refutation of the bald thesis that none of our concepts apply to God. Plantinga writes,

If Hick really means that none of our terms applies literally to the Real, then it isn't possible to make sense of what he says.  I take it the term 'tricycle' does not apply to the Real; the Real is not a tricycle.  But if the Real is not a tricycle, then 'is not a tricycle' applies literally to it; it is a nontricycle.  It could hardly be neither a tricycle nor a nontricycle, nor do I think that Hick would want to suggest that it could. (45)

Here again is what I am calling the Bald Thesis:  None of our terms/concepts apply literally and truly to the Real/God.  Has Plantinga refuted the Bald Thesis?  I am sure London Ed, who got me going on this, will answer affirmatively.  Plantinga has given us a simple, clear, and knock-down (i.e. dispositive or decisive) argument that blows the Bald Thesis clean out of the water.

Or Does It?

Here is a response that Ed won't like.

Plantinga assumes that everything that exists is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM), and the principle that everything instantiates properties, where if x instantiates property P, then x is distinct from P.  Reasonable assumptions!   These assumptions articulate (some of) what I will call the Discursive Framework, the framework within which all our discursive thinking takes place. On these assumptions the following tetrad is no tetralemma:

a. My wife is a tricycle
b. My wife  is not a tricycle.
c. My wife  is both.
d. My wife is neither.

This is no tetralemma since all limbs are false except (b).  My wife, delightful as she is, is not so wonderful as to be  'beyond all our concepts.'  She does not lie, or stand, beyond the Discursive Framework.  She is not a tricycle and therefore she falls under the concept nontricycle.  Now the same goes for the Real (or the Absolute, or the Plotinian One, etc.)  if the Real (the Absolute, etc.) is relevantly like my wife.

Now that is what Plantinga is assuming.  He is assuming that tricycles, and wives, and the Real  are all on a par in that each such item is a being among beings that necessarily has properties and has them by instantiating them, where property-instantiation is governed by LNC and LEM.  What's more, he assumes that everything that exists exists in the same way, which implies that there are not two or more different ways of existing, say, the way appropriate to a finite item such as my wife and the way appropriate to God.  For Aquinas, God is Being itself:  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  Everything else is really distinct from its being. But Plantinga will have none of that, implying as it does the doctrine of divine simplicity.  Everything exists in the same way and has properties in the same way.  The differences between wife and God are in the properties had, not in they way they are had, or in the way their subjects exist.

Plantinga also assumes that to talk sense one must remain with the confines of the Discursive Framework.  This is why he says, of Hick, that "it isn't possible to make sense of what he says."  We ought to concede the point in this form:  It makes no discursive sense. For discursive sense is governed by the above principles.  

If you say that no property can be predicated of the Real, then you predicate of the Real the property of being such that no property can be predicated of it, and you land in incoherence.  These quick little arguments come thick and fast to the mentally agile and have been around for ages.  But note that they presuppose the absolute and unrestricted validity of the Discursive Framework.

It is not that the Discursive Framework is irrational;  you could say it is constitutive of discursive rationality and meaningful speech. But how could someone within the Framework prove in a noncircular way its absolute and unrestricted validity?  How prove that it is not restricted to what our finite minds can think?  How prove that nothing lies beyond it?  Of course, anything that lies beyond it is Unsayable and cannot be thought in terms of the Framework.  And if all thought is subject to the strictures of the Framework, then what lies beyond cannot be thought. 

How then gain access to what is beyond thought?  Nondual awareness is one answer, one that Buddhists will like.  The visio beata of Thomas may be another.  But I don't need to give an answer for present purposes.  I merely have to POINT TO, even if I cannot SAY, the possibility that the Discursive Framework is not absolutely and unrestrictedly valid.  This is equivalent to the possibility that the Discursive Framework  is but a transcendental presupposition of our thinking without which we cannot think but is not legislative for all of Being. I am using 'transcendental' in the Kantian way.

The Framework cannot rationally ground its hegemony over all Being; it can only presuppose it.  We can conclude that Plantinga with his quick little argument has not refuted the Bald Thesis according to which there is a noumenal Reality that lies beyond our concepts and cannot be accessed as it is in itself by conceptual means.  He has rationally opposed the thesis, but in a way that begs the question. For he just assumes the absolute and unrestricted validity of the Discursive Framework when the question is precisely whether it is absolutely and unrestrictedly valid.

So I pronounce round one of Plantinga-Hick a draw. 

Related articles

Jesus 'n' Mo 'n' Plantinga

The Use and Mention of Cartoons and Other Images

Can Kant Refer to God?

Passion and Cogency

Passionate presentation does not add to the cogency of one's arguments.  But neither does it detract.  One's audience, however, will likely mistake the presence of passion for the absence of reason.  So the best policy in most circumstances is to present one's arguments in an emotionally neutral way.  Or at least that used to be the best policy.  In this age of the short attention span things may be different.

God and Proof

This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago.

My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism.  Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration.  A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6).  The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument.  Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling.  One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2).  A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5). 

Can one prove the existence of God?  That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God?   I don't think so.  For how will you satisfy condition (5)?  Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God.  How do you know that the premises of A are true?  By argument?  Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3.  Will you give arguments for these premises?  Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises.  A vicious infinite regress is in the offing.  Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence.   You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause.  And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident.  But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident?  You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness. 

Paging Baron von Muenchhausen.

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that God exists.  The same holds for the nonexistence of God.  No one can prove the nonexistence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

Of course, when I say that no one can prove the existence of God I mean no one of us.  Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to.  And when I said above that a probative argument  is such that all its premises are known to be true, I meant, as any charitable reader would have assumed, "known by us."

The same goes for naturalism.  I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents.  But I can reasonably believe it.  For I have a battery of powerful arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy  (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.   Surely it would be foolish to say that atheists, the lot of them, are irrational people.

Either God exists or he does not.  But both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.  

To end with a psychological speculation:  those who hanker after proofs of God and the soul or the opposite are insufficiently mature to live with doxastic insecurity.

Our life here below is insecure physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and in every way, including doxastically.  We need, and sometimes crave, security.  Our pursuit of it can be ordinate.  For example, the wise make provision for the future by saving and investing, taking care of their health, buying insurance, planning how they will react to certain emergencies, etc.  Fools, by contrast, live as if there is no tomorrow.  When tomorrow comes, they either perish of their folly or suffer unnecessarily.

But there is also an inordinate pursuit of security.  It is impossible in this life totally to secure oneself in any of the ways mentioned, including with respect to belief.  One  must accept that life is a venture and an adventure across the board.

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.

 

Related articles

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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

Political Argumentation: The Cogency of the 'Hillary is Worse' Defense

The Trump phenomenon provides excellent fodder for the study of political reasoning. Herewith, some thoughts on the cogency of the 'Hillary is Worse' defense for voting for Trump. I'll start with some assumptions.

A1. We are conservatives.

A2. It is Trump versus Hillary in the general: Sanders will not get the Democrat Party nod, nor will there be a conservative third-party candidate. (To be be blunt, Bill Kristol's ruminations on the latter possibility strike me as delusional.)

A3. Donald Trump is a deeply-flawed candidate who in more normal circumstances could not be considered fit for the presidency.

A4. Hillary Clinton is at least as deeply-flawed, character-wise, as Trump but also a disaster policy-wise: she will continue and augment the destructive leftist tendencies of Barack Hussein Obama. Hillary, then, is worse than Trump.  For while Trump is in some ways not conservative, it is likely he will actually get some conservative things done, unlike the typical Republican who will talk endlessly about illegal immigration, etc., but never actually accomplish anything conservative.

With ordinary Republicans it is always only talk, followed by concession after concession.  They lack courage, they love their power and perquisites, and they do not understand that we are in the age of post-consensus politics, an age in which politics is more like war than like gentlemanly debate on the common ground of shared principles.

My Challenge to the NeverTrump Crowd

To quote from an earlier entry:

In this age of post-consensus politics we need fighters not gentlemen.  We need people who will use the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them.  Civility is for the civil, not for destructive leftists who will employ any means to their end of a "fundamental transformation of America."  For 'fundamental transformation' read: destruction. 

It's a war, and no war is civil, especially not a civil war.  To prosecute a war you need warriors.  Trump is all we have. Time to face  reality, you so-called conservatives.  Time to man up, come clean, and get behind the 'presumptive nominee.'

Don't write another article telling us what a sorry specimen he is.  We already know that.  We are a nation in decline and our choices are lousy ones.  Hillary is worse, far worse.

Consider just three issues: The Supreme Court, gun rights, and the southern border.  We know where Hillary stands.  We also know where Trump stands.  Suppose he accomplishes only one thing: he nominates conservatives for SCOTUS.  (You are aware, of course, that he has gone to the trouble of compiling a list of conservative candidates.  That is a good indication that he is serious.)  The appointment of even one conservative would retroactively justify your support for him over the destructive and crooked Hillary.

[. . .]

The alternative [to voting for Trump] is to aid and abet Hillary. 

Are you a conservative or a quisling?

Charles Murray's Challenge to People Like Me

The False Priests are the columnists, media pundits, public intellectuals, and politicians who have presented themselves as principled conservatives or libertarians but now have announced they will vote for a man who, by multiple measures, represents the opposite of the beliefs they have been espousing throughout their careers. We’ve already heard you say “Hillary is even worse.” Tell us, please, without using the words “Hillary Clinton” even once, your assessment of Donald Trump, using as a template your published or broadcast positions about right policy and requisite character for a president of the United States. Put yourself on the record: Are you voting for a man whom your principles require you to despise, or have you modified your principles? In what ways were you wrong before? We require explanation beyond “Hillary is even worse.”

Now one thing that is unclear is whether Murray would accept (A4), in particular, the bit about Hillary being worse.  He doesn't clearly state that they are equally bad.  He says, "I am saying that Clinton may be unfit to be president, but she’s unfit within normal parameters. Donald Trump is unfit outside normal parameters."  Unfortunately, it is not clear what this comes to; Murray promises a book on the topic.

Well, if you think Trump and Hillary are equally bad, then you reject (A4) and we have a different discussion.  So let me now evaluate the above Murray quotation on the assumption that (A4) is true.

The Underlying Issue: Principles Versus Pragmatism

It is good to be principled, but not good to be doctrinaire.  At what point do the principled become doctrinaire?  It's not clear!  Some say that principles are like farts: one holds on to them as long as possible, but 'in the end' one lets them go.  The kernel of truth in this crude saying is that in the collision of principles with the data of experience sometimes principles need to be modified or set aside for a time.  One must consider changing circumstances and the particularities of the precise situation one is in.  In fact, attention to empirical details and conceptually recalcitrant facts is a deeply conservative attitude.  

For example, would I support Trump if he were running against Joe Lieberman?  No, I would support Lieberman.  There are any number of moderate or 'conservative' Democrats that I would support over Trump.  But the vile and destructive Hillary is the candidate to beat! And only Trump can do the dirty job.  This is the exact situation we are in.  If you are a doctrinaire conservative, say a neocon like Bill Kristol, then, holding fast to all of your principles -- and being held fast by them in turn -- you will deduce therefrom the refusal to support either Trump or Hillary.  Like Kristol you may sally forth on a quixotic quest for a third conservative candidate.  Just as one can be muscle-bound to the detriment of flexible and free movement, one can be principle-bound to the detriment of dealing correctly and flexibly with reality as it presents itself here and now in all its recalcitrant and gnarly details.

Conclusion:  The 'Hillary is Worse' Defense is Cogent

Part of being a conservative is being skeptical about high-flying principles.  Our system is the best the world has seen and it works for us. It has made us the greatest nation on the face of the earth -- which is why almost everyone wants to come here, and why we need walls to keep them out while commie shit holes like East Germany needed walls to keep them in.  (The intelligent, industrious Germans were kept in poverty and misery by a political system when their countrymen to the west prospered and enjoyed the fabled Wirtschaftswunder. Think about that!)  But from the fact that our system works for us, it does not follow that it will work for backward Muslims riven by ancient tribal hatreds and infected with a violent, inferior religion.  The neocon principle of nation-building collides with gnarly reality and needs adjustment.

Murray's point seems to be that no principled conservative could possibly vote for Trump, and this regardless of how bad Hillary is. His reasoning is based on a false assumption, namely, that blind adherence to principles is to be preferred to the truly conservative attitude of adjusting principles to reality.  Murray's view is a foolish one: he is prepared to see the country further led down the path to "fundamental transformation," i.e., destruction, as long as his precious principles remain unsullied.

Our behavior ought to be guided by principles; but that is not to say that it ought to be dictated by them.

Rather than say that principles are like farts as my old colleague Xavier Monasterio used to say, I will try this comparison:  principles are like your lunch; keep it down if you can, but if it makes you sick, heave it up.

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An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason

Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every explanation-seeking why question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no propositions that are just true, i.e., true, contingently true, but without explanation of their being true. Are there some contingent truths that lack explanation? Consider the conjunction of all contingent truths. The conjunction of all contingent truths is itself a contingent truth.    Could this contingent conjunctive truth have an explanation? Jonathan Bennett thinks not:

Let P be the great proposition stating the whole contingent truth about the actual world, down to its finest detail, in respect of all times. Then the question 'Why is it the case that P?' cannot be answered in a satisfying way. Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'; but if Q is only contingently the case then it is a conjunct in P, and the offered explanation doesn't explain; and if Q is necessarily the case then the explanation, if it is cogent, implies that P is necessary also. But if P is necessary then the universe had to be exactly as it is, down to the tiniest detail -- i.e., this is the only possible world. (Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, Hackett 1984, p. 115)

Bennett's point is that explanatory rationalism entails the collapse of modal distinctions.  To put it another way, the principle of sufficient reason, call it PSR, according to which every truth has a sufficient reason for its being true, entails the extensional equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary.  These modal words would then differ at most in their sense but not in their reference.  If we assume, as most of us will, the non-equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary, then, by modus tollens, we will infer the falsity of explanatory rationalism/PSR.  

This is relevant to the God question.  If PSR is false, then cosmological arguments for the existence of God which rest on PSR will be all of them unsound.

Now let's look at Bennett's argument in detail.

The world-proposition P is a conjunction of truths all of which are contingent. So P is contingent. Now if explanatory rationalism is true, then P has an explanation of its being true.  Bennett assumes that this explanation must be in terms of a proposition Q distinct from P such that Q entails P, and is thus a sufficient reason for P. Now  Q is either necessary or contingent. If Q is necessary, and a proposition is explained by citing a distinct proposition that entails it, and Q explains P, then P is necessary, contrary to what we have assumed. On the other hand, if Q is contingent, then Q is a conjunct of P, and again no successful explanation has been arrived at. Therefore, either explanatory rationalism is false, or it is true only on pain of a collapse of modal distinctions.  We take it for granted that said collapse would be a Bad Thing.  

Preliminary Skirmishing

Bennett's is a cute little argument, a variant of which  impresses the illustrious Peter van Inwagen as well,  but I must report that I do not find the argument in either version  compelling. Why is P true? We can say that P is true because each conjunct of P is true. We are not forced to say that P is true because of a distinct proposition Q which entails P.

I am not saying that P is true because P is true; I am saying that P is true because each conjunct of P is true, and that this adequately and non-circularly explains why P is true. Some wholes are adequately and noncircularly explained when their parts are explained.  In a broad sense of 'whole' and 'part,' a conjunction of propositions is a whole the parts of which are its conjuncts. Suppose I want to explain why the conjunction Tom is broke & Tom is fat is true.  It suffices to say that Tom is broke is true and that Tom is fat is true. Their being conjoined does not require a separate explanation since for any propositions their  conjunction automatically exists.

Suppose three bums are hanging around the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Why is this threesome there? The explanations of why each is there add up (automatically) to an explanation of why the three of them are there. Someone who understands why A is there, why B is there, and why C is there, does not need to understand some further fact in order to understand why the three of them are there. Similarly, it suffices to explain the truth of a conjunction to adduce the truth of its conjuncts. The conjunction is true because each conjunct is true. There is no need for an explanation of why a conjunctive proposition is true which is above and beyond the explanations of why its conjuncts are true.

Bennett falsely assumes that "Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'. . ." This ignores my suggestion that P is the case because each of its conjuncts is the case. So P does have an explanation; it is just that the explanation is not in terms of a proposition Q distinct from P which entails P.

Going Deeper 

But we can and should go deeper.  P is true because each of its conjuncts is true.  But why are they true?  Each is true because its truth-maker makes it true.  A strong case can be made that there are truth-makers and that truth-makers are concrete facts or states of affairs.  (See D. M. Armstrong, et al.)  A fact is not a proposition, but that which makes a contingently true proposition true.  My being seated, for example, makes-true 'BV is seated.'  The sentence (as well as the proposition it is used to express) cannot just be true: there must be something external to the sentence that makes it true, and this something cannot be another sentence or anyone's say-so.  As for Bennett's "great proposition P," we can say that its truth-maker is the concrete universe. Why is P true?  Because the concrete universe makes it true.  'Makes true' as used in truth-maker theory does not mean entails even though there is a loose sense of 'makes true' according to which a true proposition makes true any proposition it entails.  Entailment is a relation defined over propositions: it connects propositions to propositions.  It thus remains within the sphere of propositions. Truth-making, however, connects non-propositions to propositions.  Therefore, truth-making is not entailment.  

We are now outside the sphere of propositions and can easily evade Bennett's clever argument.  It is simply not the case that any purported answer to the question why P is the case must invoke a proposition that entails it. A genuine explanation of why a contingent proposition is true cannot ultimately remain within the sphere of propositions.  In the case of P it is the existence and character of the concrete universe that explains why P is true.

Going Deeper Still

But we can and should go deeper still.  Proposition P is true because the actual concrete universe U -- which is not a proposition -- makes it true.  But what makes U exist and have the truth-making power?  If propositional truth is grounded in ontic truth, the truth of things, what grounds ontic truth?  Onto-theological truth?

Theists have a ready answer: the contingent concrete universe U exists because God freely created it ex nihilo.  It exists because God created it; it exists contingently because God might not have created it or any concrete universe.  The ultimate explanation of why P is true is that God created its truth-maker, U.

Now consider the proposition, God creates U.  Call it G.  Does a re-run of Bennett's argument cause trouble?  G entails P.  G is either necessary or contingent.  If G is necessary, then so is P, and modal distinctions collapse.  If G is contingent, however, it is included as a conjunct within P.  Does the explanation in terms of divine free creation therefore fail?

Not at all.  For it is not a proposition that explains P's being true but God's extra-propositional activity, which is not a proposition. God's extra-propositional activity makes true P including G and including the proposition, God's extra-propositional activity makes true P.

Conclusions 

I conclude that Professor Bennett has given us an insufficient reason to reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

I apply a similar critique to Peter van Inwagen's version of the argument in my "On An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason," Ratio, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1997), pp. 76-81.

Arguments to God a contingentia mundi that rely on PSR are not refuted by the Bennett argument. 

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Husserl, Knight of Reason

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel. (Edmund Husserl, "Persoenliche Aufzeichnungen" )  "I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil." (tr. MavPhil)  Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion.

My Husserl category.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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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Kripke, Belief, Irrationality, and Contradiction

London Ed comments:

I also note a confusion that has been running through this discussion, about the meaning of ‘contradiction’. I do not mean to appeal to etymology or authority, but it’s important we agree on what we mean by it. On my understanding, a contradiction is not ‘the tallest girl in the class is 18’ and ‘the cleverest girl in the class is not 18’, even when the tallest girl is also the cleverest. Someone could easily believe both, without being irrational. The point of the Kripke puzzle is that Pierre seems to end up with an irrational belief. So it’s essential, as Kripke specifies, that he must correctly understand all the terms in both utterances, and that both utterances are logically contradictory, as in ‘Susan is 18’ and ‘Susan is not 18’.

Do we agree?

Well, let's see.  The Maverick method enjoins the exposure of any inconsistent polyads that may be lurking in the vicinity.  Sure enough, there is one:

An Inconsistent Triad

a. The tallest girl in the class is the cleverest girl in the class.
b. The tallest girl in the class is 18.
c. The cleverest girl in the class is not 18.

This trio is logically inconsistent in the sense that it is not logically possible that all three propositions be true.  But if we consider only the second two limbs, there is no logical inconsistency:  it is possible that (b) and (c) both be true.  And so someone, Tom for example, who believes that (b) and also believes that (c) cannot be convicted of irrationality, at least not on this score.  For all Tom knows  -- assuming that he does not know that (a) -- they could both be true:  it is epistemically possible that both be true.  This is the case even if in fact (a) is true.  But we can say more: it is metaphysically possible that both be true.  For (a), if true, is contingently true, which implies that it is is possible that it be false.

By contrast, if Tom entertains together, in the synthetic unity of one consciousness, the propositions expressed by 'Susan is 18 years old' and 'Susan is not 18 years old,' and if Tom is rational, then he will see that the two propositions are logical contradictories of each other, and it will not be epistemically possible for him that both be true.  If he nonetheless accepts both, then we have a good reason to convict him of being irrational, in this instance at least.

Given the truth of (a), (b) and (c) cannot both be true and cannot both be false.  This suggests  that the pair consisting of (b) and (c) is a pair of logical contradictories.  But then we would have to say that the contradictoriness of the pair rests on a contingent presupposition, namely, the truth of (a).  London Ed will presumably reject this.  I expect he would say that the logical contradictoriness of a pair of propositions cannot rest on any contingent presupposition, or on any presupposition at all.  Thus

d. Susan is 18

and

e. Susan is not 18

form a contradictory pair the contradictoriness of which rests on their internal logical form -- Fa, ~Fa -- and not on anything external to the propositions in question.

 So what should we say?  If Tom believes both (b) and (c), does he have contradictory beliefs?  Or not? 

The London answer is No!  The belief-contents are not formally contradictory even though, given the truth of (a), the contents are such that they cannot both be true and cannot both be false.  And because the belief-contents are not formally contradictory, the beliefs themselves -- where a belief involves both an occurrent or dispositional state of a person and a belief-content towards which the person takes up a propositional attitude -- are in no theoretically useful sense logically contradictory.

The Phoenix answer suggestion is that, because we are dealing with the beliefs of a concrete believer embedded in the actual world, there is sense to the notion that Tom's beliefs are contradictory in the sense that their contents are logically contradictory given the actual-world truth of (a).  After all, if Susan is the tallest and cleverest girl, and the beliefs in question are irreducibly  de re, then Tom believes, of Susan, that she is both 18 and not 18, even if Tom can gain epistemic access to her only via definition descriptions.   That belief is de re, irreducibly, is entailed  by (SUB), to which  Kripke apparently subscribes:

SUB:  Proper names are everywhere intersubstitutable salva veritate.

A Second  Question

If, at the same time,  Peter believes that Paderewski is musical and Peter believes that Paderewski is not musical, does it follow that Peter believes that (Paderewski is musical and Paderewski is not musical)?  Could this conceivably be a non sequitur? Compare the following modal principle:

MP:  If possibly p and possibly ~p, it does not follow that possibly (p & ~p).

For example, I am now seated, so it is possible that I now be seated; but it is also possible that I now  not be seated, where all three occurrences/tokens of 'now' rigidly designate the same time.  But surely it doesn't follow that it is possible that (I am now seated and I am now not seated).  Is it perhaps conceivable that

BP:  If it is believed by S that p and it is believed by S that ~p, it does not follow that it is believed by S that (p & ~p)?

Has anybody ever discussed this suggestion, even if only to dismiss it?

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What Exactly is Kripke's Puzzle About Belief?

I will try to explain it as clearly and succinctly as I can.  I will explain the simplest version of the puzzle, the 'monoglot' version.  We shall cleave to English as to our dear mother.

The puzzle is generated by the collision of two principles, one concerning reference, the other concerning disquotation.  Call them MILL and DISQ.

MILL:  The reference of a proper name is direct: not routed through sense as in Frege.  The meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference.  The semantic value of a name is just the object to which it refers.  (Gareth Evans plausibly recommends 'semantic value' as the best translation of Frege's Bedeutung.)

DISQ:  If a normal English speaker S sincerely assents, upon reflection, to 'p,' and 'p' is a sentence in English free of indexical elements, pronominal devices, and ambiguities, then S believes that p.

The puzzle is interesting, and not easily solved, because there are good reasons for accepting both principles.  The puzzle is puzzling because the collision of the two principles takes the form of a flat-out logical contradiction.

And as we all know, philosophers, while they love paradoxes, hate contradictions.

(DISQ) strikes this philosopher as a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived.  How could one who is competent in English and familiar with current events sincerely and reflectively assent to 'Hillary is a liar' and not believe that Hillary is a liar?  The intellectual luminosity of (MILL), however, leaves something to be desired.  And yet it is plausible, and to many experts, extremely plausible.  Brevity being the soul of blog, I cannot  now trot out the arguments in support of (MILL).

The collision of (MILL) and (DISQ) occurs at the intersection of Mind and World.  It comes about like this.  S may assent to

a. Cicero was a Roman

while failing to assent to

b. Tully was a Roman

even though

c.  Cicero = Tully.

Given (DISQ), S believes that Cicero was a Roman, but may or may not believe that Tully was a Roman.  But how is this possible given the truth of (c)?  Given (c), there is no semantic difference between (a) and (b):  the predicates are the same, and the names are semantically the same under (MILL).  For on the latter principle, the meaning of a name is its referent.  So sameness of referent entails sameness of meaning, which is to say: the semantic content of (a) and (b) is the same given the truth of (c).

How can S believe that Cicero was a Roman while neither believing nor disbelieving that Tully was a Roman when the sentences express the very same proposition?  This is (an instance of) the puzzle.  Here is another form of it.  Suppose S assents to (a) but also assents to

d. Tully was not a Roman.

On (DISQ), S believes that Tully is not a Roman.  So S believes both that Cicero was a Roman and that Tully was not a Roman.  But Cicero = Tully.  Therefore, S believes that Cicero was a Roman and S believes that Cicero was not a Roman.  This certainly looks like a contradiction. 

It seems that our governing principles, (MILL) and (DISQ), when applied to an ordinary example, generate a contradiction, the worst sort of intellectual collision one can have.

The Paderewski case is similar.  On different occasions, Peter assents to 'Paderewski is musical' and 'Paderewski is not musical.'  He has no qualms about assenting to both since he supposes that this is a case of two men with the same name.  But in reality he is referring to one and the same man.  By (DISQ), Peter believes both that Paderewski is musical and that Paderewski is not musical.  Given (MILL), Peter believes contradictory propositions.  How is this possible given that Peter is rational?

Given the luminosity of (DISQ), one might think the solution to Kripke's puzzle about belief is simply to jettison (MILL).

Not so fast.  There are powerful arguments for (MILL).

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Evidence and Actuality: A Modal Punch at W. K. Clifford

W. K. Clifford is often quoted for his asseveration that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  Now one of my firmest beliefs is that I am an actual individual, not a merely possible individual. A second is my belief that while there is an infinity of possible worlds, there is exactly one actual world and that this world of me and my world mates is the world that happens to be actual.  (Think of the actual world as the total way things are, and of a merely possible world as a total way things might have been.  For a quick and dirty primer, see Some Theses on Possible Worlds.)

But not only do I have insufficient evidence for these two beliefs, it looks as if I have no evidence at all.  And yet I feel wholly entitled to my acceptance of them and in breach of no plausible ethics of belief, assuming there is such a subject as the ethics of belief.

Consider the following argument that I adapt from D. M. Armstrong, who borrowed it from Donald C. Williams:

1. Exactly one of the infinity of possible worlds is actual.

2. This world of me and my mates is a possible world.

Therefore, very probably,

3. This world of me and my mates is merely possible.

This is an inductive argument, but a very strong one.  While it does not necessitate its conclusion, it renders the conclusion exceedingly likely.  For if there is an infinity of worlds, how likely is it that mine is the lucky one?

And yet the conclusion is absurd, or to be precise: manifestly false.  Is it not perfectly obvious that this world of ours and everything in it is actual?  I am convinced that I am actual, and that all this stuff I am interacting with is actual.  I am sitting in an actual chair in an actual room which is lit by an actual sun, etc. 

But how do I know this?  What is my evidence?  There are no facts known to me that are better known than the fact that I am actual (that I actually exist).  So my evidence cannot consist of other facts.  Is it self-evident that I am actual?  You could say this, but how do I know, given the above argument, that my actuality is objectively self-evident as opposed to merely subjectively self-evident?  Subjective self-evidence is epistemically worthless, while objective self-evidence is not to be had in the teeth of the above argument.  No doubt I seem to myself to be actual.  But that subjective seeming does not get the length of objective self-evidence.  I now argue as follows:

4. If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe anything on no evidence.

5. I have no evidence that me and my world are actual.

6. It is not wrong to believe what is obviously true.

7. It is obviously true that I am actual.

Therefore, contra Clifford,

8.  There are some things it is not wrong to believe on insufficient evidence.

This is not a compelling argument, but it is a very powerful one.  Not compelling because the Cliffordian extremist could bite the bullet by denying (7).  He might say that the ethics of belief enjoins us to suspend belief on the question whether one is actual.  

Now this is psychologically impossible, for me anyway.  But apart from this impossibility, it is surely better known that I am actual than that Clifford's extreme thesis is true.

There are other obvious problems with the thesis.  Any tyro in philosophy should see right away that it is self-vitiating.  If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe Clifford's thesis on insufficient evidence.  But what conceivable evidence could one have for it?  None that I can see.  It is not only a normative claim, but one stuffed with universal quantifiers.  Good luck!  If you say that the thesis needn't be taken as applying to itself, then other problems will arise that you can work out for yourself.  Why do I have to do all the thinking?

Note also that if you take Clifford's thesis to heart you will have to suspend belief on all sorts of questions outside of religion, questions in ethics, politics, economics, climatology, etc., questions you have extremely firm opinions about.  The practical upshot, if one were consistent, would probably be a full retreat into Skeptic ataraxia.  At least until the political authorities came to put you in prison.  Then you would begin believing that some things are just and some are not, etc., and damn the insufficiency or nonexistence of the evidence for the contentious beliefs.

Our doxastic predicament is a bitch, ain't she?  Well, what do you want for a Cave?

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.

Objective Truth as a Condition of Intelligibility

John D. Caputo has recently made the fashionably outlandish claim that "what modern philosophers call 'pure' reason . . . is a white male Euro-Christian construction."  Making this claim, Caputo purports to be saying  something that is true.  Moreover, his making of the claim in public is presumably for the purpose of convincing us that it is true.  If so, he presupposes truth, in which case truth cannot be a social construct, as I said in my critique.  A commenter responded:

To say that Caputo "presupposes truth" is not to say that he presupposes some sort of absolutist notion of truth. Why is the latter a necessary condition for the activity of "trying to convince"?

The short answer is that there is no notion of truth other than the absolutist notion.  Truth is absolute by its very nature. The phrase 'relative truth' names a confusion.  I won't go over this ground again, having trod it before.  But there is a wrinkle, and that is what I want to explore in this entry.  Is absolute truth the same as objective truth?  Perhaps not.  It might be like this.  If there is truth, then it is the same for all cognizers: it is intersubjectively binding on all.   It is in this sense objective.  It does not vary from person to person, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, race to race, etc.   But how can we be sure that truth in this objective sense is not a mere transcendental presupposition of intelligible discourse and rational debate?  If truth is a mere transcendental presupposition, then it is not absolute.  For what 'absolute' means is: not relative to or dependent on anything at all.  Of course, if truth is absolute, it follows that it is objective in the sense of intersubjectively binding on all.  But there is a logical gap in the converse.  If truth is objective, it does not straightaway follow that it is absolute.  For it might be transcendentally relative: relative to beings like us who cannot think or judge or speak intelligibly without presupposing truth.  It might be transcendentally realtive while remaining the same for all in such a way as to exclude as meaningless such phrases as 'proletarian truth,' bourgeois truth,' 'Protestant truth,' 'Catholic truth,' 'White man's truth,' 'black female's truth,' and other similalry nonsensical constructions.

I will return to the objective-absolute distinction near the end of this entry. 

While there may be a problem in showing that truth is more than a transcendental presupposition, and thus absolute, it is fairly easy to show that truth is objective.  And so it is easy to show that Caputo presupposes objective truth when he makes his fashionably outlandish PoMo claims.

But what do I mean when I say that truth is objective?  I mean that there is a total way things are, and that this total way things are does not depend on the beliefs, desires, wishes, hopes, etc. of finite rational beings like ourselves, whether human or extraterrestrial or angelic.   So what I mean by 'Truth is objective' is close to what John Searle means by external realism.

According to John Searle, "external realism [ER] is the thesis that there is a way that things are that is independent of all representations of how things are." (The Construction of Social Reality, p. 182) Is it possible to prove this attractive thesis?  And how would the proof go?

We will recall G. E. Moore's attempt to prove the external world by waving his hands. His idea was that it is a plain fact, as anyone can see, that his hands exist, and so it straightaway follows that external objects in space exist. This sounds more like a joke than a philosophical argument. Or if not a joke, then clear proof, not of the external world, but that Moore did not understand the issue.  But let's leave Moore to one side for the space of this post. See my aptly entitled  Moore category for more on Moore.

The realism issue really has nothing to do with spatially external objects. There unproblematically are such objects whatever their ultimate ontological status. Note also that ER can be true even if there are no spatially external objects.  ER is simply the claim that there is a way things are independent of us: it says nothing specifically about spatial individuals.

As Searle interprets it, ER sets forth a condition on the intelligibility of discourse and thought rather than a truth condition of discourse and thought:

     There are conditions on the intelligibility of discourse . . . that
     are not like paradigmatic cases of truth conditions. In the normal
     understanding of discourse we take these conditions for granted;
     and unless we took them for granted, we could not understand
     utterances the way we do . . . . (181)

Among these conditions on intelligibility is ER. It is a necessary presupposition of a large chunk of thought and discourse. What Searle is doing is giving a transcendental argument for ER. He takes it as given that a sentence like 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit' is intelligible. He then inquires into what must be presupposed for it to be intelligible. For the sentence to be true, Mt. Everest must exist, and it must have ice and snow near the summit. But for the sentence to be intelligible, it is not necessary that Mt. Everest exist, or if it does exist that it have ice and snow near the summit. What is necessary is that ER be true: that there be a way things are independent of human representations. If the mountain exists, then that is (part of) the way things are, and if it does not exist, that too is (part of) the way things are. The way things are, then, is not a truth condition of any such statement as 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit.' It is a condition of the intelligibility of such statements and their negations. So even if every statement asserting or implying the existence of a physical object is false, and there is no spatially external world, it is still the case that ER is true. For it is still the case that there is a way things are independent of human representations.  The way things are would include the nonexistence of a spatially external world.

For Searle, then, external realism (ER) is a transcendental condition of the intelligibility of large portions of public discourse. He is aware that to have shown this is not to have shown that ER is true.   (194) Speaking as we do, we are committed to its being true, but that is not to say that it is true. That there is a way things are independent of human representations is presupposed by the intelligibility of much of what we think or say, but it doesn't follow that it is true.

Why not? Because its truth is conditional upon the fact that our thought and speech is intelligible. If ER is true, then it is true whether or not human representations and their intelligibility exist. But if ER is argued to transcendentally as a condition of intelligibility, then ER's truth is conditional upon the existence of  human beings and their representations. So we cannot say that ER is true, but only that we must presuppose it to be true. This is not to  say that without us it would be false, but what without us it would be neither true nor false.

Is Searle's position satisfactory? I'm not sure. I want to be able to say that ER is true simpliciter, or true unconditionally (i.e., not conditional upon the fact of the intelligibility of our discourse.)

But does my desire to be able to say that ER is true unconditionally make sense? Maybe not. We cannot not presuppose that there is a way things are assuming that we continue to think and talk as before. But is there a way things are? Yes, it might be said, in the only sense in which it would make sense to assert it, namely, as a presupposition of our thought and talk. That is, what we as rational beings must  presuppose as being the case IS the case. The 'possibility' that it  not be the case is unmeaning. No sort of wedge can be driven between the presupposing and the being. But this seems to land us in a form of transcendental idealism.

A fascinating labyrinth, this. Collateral reading: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, section 44 (c), Die Seinsart der Wahrheit und die Wahrheitsvoraussetzung.

The main thing, however, is that Caputo  presupposes objective truth when he makes his ridiculous PeeCee assertions.

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Malcolm Pollack laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or perhaps jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  (Ernst Cassirer is worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt, as I like to say, is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is a driver, a motor.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and whatnot that had been handed down, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its motor, is therefore good.

Skepsis need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a faith in Reason and in the power of Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot.*

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the self-evidence or objective certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it is one-sided.  The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically.  It is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypthesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does it function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving it by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is is also diabolical.  Lucifer the light-bearer becomes drunk on his own power and blinded by his own light. He will not obey.  He will not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind is not for minding any antecedent reality.  He will not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."   I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Perhaps Kant's "Copernican revolution" 'paved the way for' conceptual relativism despite Kant's  not being a conceptual relativist.  That's one example.

_____________________________

*The greatest figure in the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).  He famously remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787, first ed. 1781), "I have found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith."  Now how does that jive with what I wrote in the preceding paragraph?  I can't explain this now; it is just too complicated!  This is  what i call the invocation of blogospheric privilege. Brevity is the soul of blog.  This being so, I am justified in this venue of just stopping.

 

Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars."  Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which  he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654.  Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):

These words represent Pascal's change of heart.  He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham.  Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought.  The God of Abraham . . . is not susceptible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature.  What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)

Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard.  We encountered it before when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea.  But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread.  As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- the God of religion -- to the God of philosophy.  In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction.  Let's try to sort this out.

It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and  cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc.  But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or to the judgments I make about it.  I am sitting on a chair, not a concept of a chair.  The chair, like God, is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments.  The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object.  And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence, so much so that it is plausibly argued that 'person' in application to God can only be used analogically.

Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him.  But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God.  In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur.  He moves from the unproblematically true

1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation

to the breathtakingly false

2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica)  is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.

As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error.  When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.  When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing.  A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind.  She remains in her interiority as a person delightfully transcendent of my acts of thinking.

It is interesting to observe that it is built into the very concept God that God cannot be a concept.  This concept is the concept of something that cannot by its very nature be a concept.  This is the case whether or not God exists.  The concept God is the concept of something that cannot be a concept even if nothing falls under the concept.

It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al.  Or at least it is bogus to make this oppositin for the reason Buber supplies.  There is and can be only one God.  But there are different approaches to this one God.  By my count, there are four ways of approaching God:  by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense.  To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes.  Suppose Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary each summit by a different route.  Mary cannot denigrate the accomplishments of the males by asserting that they didn't really summit on the ground that their respective termini were merely immanent to their routes.  She cannot say, "You guys didn't really reach the summit; you merely reached a point on your map."

I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality.  It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu.  But that's not to say that the menu is about itself:  it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating.  The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it.  Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Child, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"

I believe I have established my point against Buber conclusively.  But to appreciate this, you must not confuse the question I am discussing with another question in the vicinity.

Suppose one philosopher argues to an unmoved mover, another to an ultimate ground of moral obligation, and a third to an absolute source of truth.  How do we know that thesee three notionally distinct philosophical Gods are the same as each other in reality and the same as the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob, in reality?  This is an important question, but not the one I am addressing in this entry.  The present question is whether a philosophical treatment of God transforms God into a mere concept or mere idea.  The answer is resoundingly in the negative.  Such a treatment purports to treat of the very same real God that is addressed in prayer, seen in mystical vision, and  sensed in the deliverances of conscience.

Related articles

Martin Buber and "Bogus Grandeur" - A Note on Saul Bellow's Literary Treatment of Buber in "Herzog"

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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Go For Broke and Die With Your Boots On!

On the Use and Mention of Cartoons and Other Images

I had a new thought this morning, new for me anyway.  It occurred to me that the familiar use-mention distinction can and should be applied to images, including cartoons.  I recently posted a pornographic Charlie Hebdo cartoon that mocks in the most vile manner imaginable the Christian Trinity.  A reader suggested that I merely link to it.  But I wanted people to see how vile these nihilistic Charlie Hebdo porno-punks are and why it is a mistake to stand up for free speech by lying down with them, and with other perpetual adolescents of their ilk.  Those who march under the banner Je Suis Charlie (I am Charlie) are not so much defending free speech as advertising their sad lack of understanding as to why it is accorded the status of a right.

So it occurred to me that the use-mention distinction familiar to philosophers could be applied to a situation like this.  To illustrate the distinction, consider the sentences

'Nigger' is disyllabic.
The use of 'nigger,' like the use of 'kike' is highly offensive.
Niggers and kikes are often at one another's throats.

In the first two sentences, 'nigger' and 'kike' are mentioned, not used; in the third sentence, 'nigger' and 'kike' are used, not mentioned. 

Please note that nowhere in this post do I use 'nigger' or 'kike.' 

I chose these examples to explain the use-mention distinction in order to maintain the parallel between offensive words and offensive pictures. 

Suppose someone asserts the first two sentences but not the third.  No reasonable person could take offense at what the person says.  For what he would be saying is true.  But someone who asserts the third sentence could be reasonably taken to have said something offensive.

Jerry Coyne concludes a know-nothing response to a review by Alvin Plantinga of a book by Philip Kitcher with this graphic:

 Coyne added a caption: AL-vinnn!  Those of a certain age will understand the caption from the old Christmas song by the fictitious group, Alvin and the Chipmunks, from 1958. ( A real period piece complete with a reference to a hula hoop.)

Here's my point.  Coyne uses the image to the left to mock Plantinga whereas I merely display it, or if you will, mention it (in an extended sense of 'mention') in order to say something about the image itself, namely, that it is used by the benighted Coyne to mock Plantinga and his views.

No one could reasonably take offense at my reproduction of the image in the context of the serious points I am making.

 

 

Likewise, no one could reasonably take offense at my reproduction of the following graphic which I display here, not to mock the man Muslims consider to be a messenger of the god they call Allah, but simply to display the sort of image they find offensive, and that I  too find offensive, inasmuch as it mocks religion, a thing not to be mocked, even if the religion in question is what Schopenhauer calls "the  saddest and poorest form of theism." 

By the way,  journalists should know better than to refer to Muhammad as 'The Prophet.' Or do they also refer to Jesus as 'The Savior' or 'Our Lord' or 'Son of God'?

Ready now?  This is what CNN wouldn't show you.  Hardly one of the more offensive of the cartoons.  They wouldn't show it lest Muslims take offense. 

My point, again, is that merely showing what some benighted people take offense at is not to engage in mockery or derision or any other objectively offensive behavior.

 

Related articles

Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism

The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy

Alvin Plantinga savages Philip Kitcher's new book, but makes dumb philosophical errors

Gun Control and Liberal-Left Irrationality

The quality of 'elite' publications such as The New Yorker leaves a lot to be desired these days.  Adam Gopnik's recent outburst on Newtown is one more example of a downward trend: it is so breathtakingly bad that I am tempted to snark: "I can't breathe!" Could Gopnik really be as willfully stupid as the author of this piece? Or perhaps he was drunk when he posted his screed one minute after midnight on January 1st.

Luckily, I needn't waste any time disembarrassing this leftist goofball of his fallacies and fatuosities since a professional job of it as been done by John Hinderaker and Charles Cooke.

Again I ask myself: why is the quality of conservative commentary so vastly superior to the stuff on the Left?

A tip of the hat and a Happy New Year! to Malcolm Pollack from whom I snagged the above hyperlinks.  Malcolm is a very good writer as you can see from this paragraph:

The New Yorker‘s essayist Adam Gopnik — whom I have always considered to be quite lavishly talented, despite his dainty and epicene style — beclowned himself one minute into this New Year with a stupendously mawkish item on gun control. It is so bad, in fact — so completely barren of fact, rational argument, or indeed any serious intellectual effort whatsoever — that I was startled, and frankly saddened, to see it in print. It is the cognitive equivalent, if one can imagine such a thing hoisted into Mr. Gopnik’s rarefied belletrist milieu, of yelling “BOSTON SUCKS” at a Yankees-Red Sox game, at a time when Boston leads the division by eleven games.

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Reason's Limits

It is quite unreasonable to suppose that the appeal to sweet reason is the best way forward in all of life's situations.  The reasonable appreciate that the hard fist of unreason applied to the visage of evil intransigence is sometimes the most cogent of 'arguments.'

It is unreasonable to be reasonable in all things.

Burden of Proof, Appeal to Ignorance, Safety Considerations, and God

Presumption and Burden of Proof

Firearms instructors sometimes say that every gun is loaded.  That is plainly false as it stands, but a wise saying nonetheless if interpreted to mean: every gun is to be presumed loaded until proven unloaded. Presumptions are procedural rules.  To presume every gun to be loaded is to adopt a procedural rule to treat every gun as if it is loaded regardless of how antecedently likely it is that it is loaded.  Suppose the likelihood is near zero: I examined the gun carefully an hour ago and I found it to be unloaded.  Nevertheless, the presumption that it is loaded remains in force.  I continue to behave as if it is loaded.  For example, I don't point the gun at anything unless I want to destroy it.

I conclude that to presume that p is not to assert that p is true, nor to assert that p is probably true, nor to assume that p is true, but to decide to act as if p is true.  A presumption, then, is not a proposition, although it embeds one.  A presumption is something like a decision.  More precisely, a presumption is the accusative of an act of presuming, an accusative that is not itself a proposition, but embeds one. 

A presumption is not like a belief in the following important respect.  To presume that a gun is loaded or that a man is innocent is not to believe that it is or that he is.  To believe that p is to believe that p is true.  But to presume that p is not to presume that p is true; it is to act as if p is true without either accepting or rejecting p.  To presume that Jones is innocent until proven guilty  is not to believe that he is innocent until proven guilty; it is to suspend judgment as to guilt or innocence until sufficient evidence is presented by the prosecution to warrant a verdict one way or the other.  When I presume that p, I take no stand as to the truth-value of p -- I neither accept nor reject p -- what I do is decide to act as if p is true.

Presumptions must be defeasible.  (I suspect that an indefeasible presumption is no presumption at all.) The presumption of being loaded is defeated in a particular case by carefully examining the gun and showing that it is unloaded.  So while a presumption is not a proposition, it embeds a proposition that can be shown to be false.  Defeasible presumption and burden-of-proof are correlative notions.  (They are like rights and duties in this respect but also in that both are normative notions.)  In a court of law, for example, if the accused enjoys a presumption of innocence, as he does in the Anglosphere, then the accuser bears a burden of proof, a burden which, if properly discharged, defeats the presumption. 

Appeal to Ignorance?

So if  person A claims to person B that a certain gun is unloaded, the burden of proof is on A to show that it is unloaded; person B does not bear the burden of proving that it is loaded.  It is not just that he bears a lesser burden'; he bears no burden. Indeed it seems that B would be within his epistemic rights were he to claim that his ignorance of whether or not the gun is loaded is good evidence of its being loaded.  But this is an appeal to ignorance.  It has not been shown that the gun is unloaded; ergo, the gun is loaded.

It has not been shown that ~p; therefore p gives us the form of the ad ignorantiam 'fallacy.'  Construed as a deductive argument, it is clearly invalid.  Construed as an inductive argument, it will be in many cases weak.  For example, suppose the gun is straight from the manufacturer and right out of the box.  Then the probability of its being loaded is very low, and the argument: This gun out of the box has not been shown to be unloaded; ergo, this gun is loaded is very weak.

Nevertheless, safety considerations dictate a defeasible presumption in favor of every gun's being loaded, whether out of the box or not, a presumption that places the onus probandi on the one who maintains the opposite.  So one might  conclude that the appeal to ignorance in this case is reasonable even though the argument is deductively invalid and inductively weak.

The situation is similar to that in a court of law.  The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, so the burden of proof rests on either the state in a criminal proceeding, or on the plaintiff in a civil trial.  In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.

We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.

Safety Considerations

There are 'safety' considerations in both the gun example and the law example.  It is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not get shot -- that we presume every gun to be loaded. "Better that a hundred guns be unnecessarily examined than that one sentient being be accidentally shot."

And it is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not sentence an innocent person -- that we presume the accused to be innocent until proven guilty.  "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted."

But now what about God?  Don't safety considerations apply here as well? If God exists, then our ultimate happiness depends on getting into right relation with him.  So why can't one make a legitimate appeal to ignorance here?  Now of course from the fact that no one has proven that God does not exist, it does not follow that God exists.  That is an invalid deductive argument.  That would be a truly fallacious instance of ad ignorantiam.  But it is also invalid to infer than a gun is loaded because it hasn't been proven to be unloaded, or that a man is innocent because he hasn't been proven to be guilty.  It just doesn't follow in any of these cases.  And yet we reasonably consider the gun loaded and we reasonably find the accused to be innocent.  And so why can't we reasonably presume God to exist on the basis of the fact that he hasn't been shown not to exist?  If the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that gun is unloaded, why doesn't the burden of proof rest on the one who claims that God is nonexistent?  We don't want to get shot, but we also don't want to lose our ultimate beatitude -- if ultimate beatitude there be. 

You can't say that that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making a positive claim; for there are positive claims that need no proof.  And you can't say that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making an existential claim; for there are existential claims that need no proof. If you claim that extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist, then the burden is on you.  But if you claim that there are Saguaro cacti in Arizona, then the burden of proof is not on you but on the one who denies it. Nor can you say that the burden rests on the theist because he is controverting the widely-accepted; the consensus gentium is that God exists.

Earlier I argued that we shouldn't bring BOP considerations into the God discussion at all.  But if we do, why doesn't the BOP rest on the atheist?

Pigliucci's Confusion

Massimo Pigliucci thinks that if one understands who bears the burden of proof in a trial, then one ought to see right away that the burden of proof rests on the theist.  For, "the burden of proof is always on the party making a positive claim, not on the one making a negative one."  This strikes me as confused.  It is true that the party making a complaint or bringing a charge is making a positive claim, but this is not the reason why the BOP rests on the accuser.  It rests on the accuser because of the presumption of innocence that the accused enjoys.  The BOP rests on the accuser not because his claim is positive but because of the procedural rule enshrined in our system of law according to which one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

It is not true that the BOP is always on the one who makes a positive claim.   'That hillside is studded with Saguaro cacti' said to my hiking companion needs no proof.  I shoulder no probative burden when I make a commonplace observation such as that. Therefore, the following is an unsound argument:

Everyone who make a positive claim bears a BOP.
The theist makes a positive claim.
ergo
The theist bears the BOP in his debate with the atheist.

I argued above that if BOP considerations are relevant to the God debate, then the BOP is on the atheist.  To appreciate the argument I gave, you have to realize that the God question is not merely theoretical.  It is a practical question.  In that respect it is like the gun safety and court room cases.  My interest in whether or not a particular firearm is loaded or unloaded is not merely theoretical, or I should say, not at all theoretical.  It is a practical interest in maintaining the health and physical integrity of myself and the people around me.  Similarly with the law.  If you are accused of homicide you are in deep trouble and face the loss of your liberty or your life.  Arguably, the God question is in the same boat.

So I invite you to accept one or the other of the following conclusions.  The BOP is borne by the atheist.  BOP considerations should be kept out of the theist-atheist debate altogether. 

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Are Burden-of-Proof Considerations Relevant in Philosophy?