Maverick Philosopher

Is Empiricism Self-Refuting?

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

Addenda (11/19)

Tony Flood writes,

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Edward writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad (3). OK.

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

Of Russell's Teapot and Abbey's Angry Lunicorn

Does the angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon manage his anger by sipping herbal tea from Russell's teapot?

Substack latest.

Untangling Plato's Beard

I was asked by a commenter what motivates the thin theory of existence.  One motivation is 

. . . the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor. (Willard Van Orman Quine, "On What There Is" in From a Logical Point of View, Harper Torchbook ed., 1963, pp. 1-2)

As I see it, here is how the paradox arises.

1) 'Pegasus does not exist' is true. Therefore:

2) The sentence in question has meaning. (Only meaningful sentences have a truth value.) 

3) If a sentence has meaning, then so do its (sentential and sub-sentential) parts. (Compositionality of meaning.) Therefore:

4) 'Pegasus' has meaning. Therefore:

5) Something is such that 'Pegasus' refers to it. ('Pegasus' is a proper name, and the meaning of a proper name is its referent, that to which it refers.) Therefore:

6) 'Pegasus' refers to something that exists. (Everything exists; there are no nonexistent objects; one cannot refer to what does not exist for it is not there to be referred to.) Therefore:

7) Pegasus must exist for it to be true that Pegasus does not exist.  Paradox!

None of the first four propositions is plausibly denied. To avoid the conclusion, we must deny either (5) or (6) and the assumptions that generate them. Now Quine is no Meinongian/Wymanian. Quine advocates a Russellian solution which amounts to rejecting (5) by rejecting the assumption that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference.  For Russell, ordinary proper names are definite descriptions in disguise. This allows them to have meaning or sense without reference.   Thus 'Pegasus' is elliptical for 'the winged horse of Greek mythology.'  This allows the following contextual paraphrase of 'Pegasus does not exist':

It is not the case that there exists an x such x is the winged horse of Greek mythology

which is free of paradox. What the paraphrase says is that the definite description which gives the sense of 'Pegasus' is not satisfied. Equivalently, it says that the concept winged horse of Greek mythology is not instantiated.   Thus the original sentence, which appeared to be about something that does not exist but which, if it existed, would be an animal, is really about about a description or concept which does exist and which is assuredly not an animal.

It is a brilliant solution, prima vista. It works for negative general existentials as well. 'Unicorns do not exist,' despite its surface grammar, cannot be about unicorns -- after all, there aren't any -- it is about the concept unicorn and predicates of it the property of not being instantiated.  Extending the analysis to affirmative general existentials, we can say that 'Horses exist,' for example, is not about horses -- after all, which horses would it be about? -- it is about the concept horse and predicates of it the property of being instantiated.  

What about singular affirmative existentials such as 'Harry exists'?  Quine maintains that, in a pinch, one can turn a name into a verb and say, with truth, 'Nothing pegasizes' thereby avoiding both Plato's Beard and Meinong's Jungle so as to enjoy, clean-shaven, the desert landscape bathed in lambent light.  So what's to stop us from saying 'Something Harry-sizes'?  (Quite a bit, actually, but I won't go into that in this post, having beaten it to death in numerous other entries. Briefly, there are no haecceity-concepts: there is no such concept Harry-ness that (i) can exist uninstantiated; (ii) if instantiated is instantiated by Harry and Harry alone in the actual world; (iii) is not instantiated by anything distinct from Harry in any possible world.)

Let us now pause to appreciate what the Russellian (or rather 'Fressellian') approach accomplishes in the eyes of its advocates. It untangles Plato's Beard. It avoids Meinong's jungle. It preserves the existence-nonexistence contrast by situating it at the second level, that of descriptions, concepts, propositional functions, properties, as the contrast between satisfaction-nonsatisfaction (for descriptions), instantiation-noninstantiation (for concepts and properties), and having a value-not having a value for propositional functions, or as Russell puts it, being sometimes true or the opposite.

What's more, it diagnoses the failure of certain versions of the ontological argument. Descartes' Meditation Five version has it that God exists because God has all perfections and existence is a perfection. But if Frege and Russell are right, existence is not even a property of God let alone a perfection of him inasmuch as '. . .exist(s)' has no legitimate use as a first-level predicate and can be be properly deployed only as a second-level predicate. (God is an individual.)

Last, but not least, the Fressellian analysis consigns entire libraries of school metaphysics to he flames, the books in which drone on endlessly about Being and Existence and the distinctio realis, and the analogia entis, and ipsum esse subsistens, ad nauseam.  Swept aside are all the hoary and endlessly protracted debates about the relation of essence and existence in individuals: is it a real distinction, and what could that mean? Is it a formal distinction, and what could that mean? Etc. On the Frege-Russell approach there simply is no existence of individuals.

And now you know why the thin theory is called 'thin.' It could also be called 'shallow' in that it eliminates existence as a deep and mysterious topic.  The thin theory disposes of existence as a metaphysical topic, reducing it to a merely logical topic.  As Quine famously says in an essay other than the one cited above, "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."  Thus 'Cats exist' says no more and no less than 'For some x, x is a cat.'  You will note that the analysans makes no mention of existence. It features only the word 'cat' and some logical machinery. Existence drops out as a metaphysical topic.

Of course, I don't accept the thin theory; but as you can see, I appreciate what motivates it in the minds of its adherents.

How to Grow Old and the Question of an Immortality Worth Wanting

Sage advice from Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who grew old indeed. The best part of his short essay follows:

I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities. It is in this sphere that long experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being oppressive. It is no use telling grownup children not to make mistakes, both because they will not believe you, and because mistakes are an essential part of education. But if you are one of those who are incapable of impersonal interests, you may find that your life will be empty unless you concern yourself with your children and grandchildren. In that case you must realise that while you can still render them material services, such as making them an allowance or knitting them jumpers, you must not expect that they will enjoy your company.

Without a doubt, "strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities" is the key. 

Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -so at least it seems to me- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

[from “Portraits From Memory And Other Essays”]

The second paragraph raises deep and difficult questions.  The philosopher in me has often entertained, with considerable hospitality, the thought that an immortality worth wanting must involve a transcending of the petty and personal ego, the self that separates us from other selves and the world. An immortality worth wanting must involve a sloughing off of the petty self and a merging into an impersonal, universal, transcendental awareness of impersonal Platonica including eternal truths, changeless essences, absolute values, and noble ideals. Those philosophers of a predominantly theoretical bent will be attracted to this conception reminiscent as it is of Aristotle's bios theoretikos as exemplified in its highest instance, noesis noeseos.

"But then you would no longer exist! You would be swallowed up in death, the greatest calamity of them all." To this objection I had a ready reply: "It all depends on who I am in the innermost core of my selfhood; if I am in truth the eternal Atman, and not this indigent and limited psychophysical complex; if I am the transcendental witness self, then I will not cease to exist. In the measure that I identify with that deathless, impersonal awareness of eide and Wahrheiten an sich, I am proof against extinction by the body's death. I will merge at last with the sea of transcendental awareness which is my true self and give up my false petty individuality for a greater individuality, that of the Absolute.

That is one strand, the monistic strand, in my thinking about selfhood and immortality. It dominated my thinking in my twenties and thirties. 

But another is the personalist strand which takes very seriously the reality of persons in the plural and the possibility of deep I-Thou (as opposed to I-It)  relations between persons and between a finite person and the ultimate person, the First Person, if you will, God. 

On both conceptions there is a distinction between the true self and the false self. Controversy erupts over the nature of the true self. Is it trans-individual, or is it individuated?   Is there one true self or many? Are we to aspire to an obliteration of the individual self or to its transformation?  On neither conception is survival the schlepping on of the crass and carnal earthly  self.  Is the death of the individual a great calamity or is it  a benign release into true selfhood? The controversy is ancient. Ramanuja to Shankara: I don't want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar!

As for Lord Russell, he would not have spoken of the eternal Atman, but he was a convinced atheist and mortalist. He was sure his individual consciousness would cease at death. But this did not bother him because the objects of his ultimate concern were impersonal.  "The things I care for will continue, and others will carry on what I can no longer do."

Their Cocks Make Them Sure

There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we  know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. 

But for those who are cocksure about it, I suspect that it is their cocks that make them sure.

Crudity aside, their natural concupiscence blinds them to the spiritual reality of God and the soul, dulls their consciences, and ties them to a passing world that their lust convinces them is ultimately real.

This is why I do not trust the atheisms of Russell and Sartre. They were sensualists and worldlings who failed to satisfy the prerequisites of spiritual insight. Pride and lust dimmed their eyes.

Half-Way Fregeanism About Existence: Questions for Van Inwagen

 In section 53 of The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege famously maintains that

. . . existence is analogous to number.  Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought.  Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down. (65)

Frege is here advancing a double-barreled thesis that splits into two sub-theses.

ST1. Existence is analogous to number.

ST2. Existence is a property (Eigenschaft) of concepts and not of objects.

In the background is the sharp distinction between property (Eigenschaft) and mark (Merkmal).  Three-sided is a mark of the concept triangle, but not a property of this concept; being instantiated is a property of this concept but not a mark of it.  The Cartesian-Kantian ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus lauter Begriffen), according to Frege, runs aground because existence cannot be a mark of any concept, but only a property of some concepts.  And so one cannot validly argue from the concept of God to the existence of God.

Existence as a property of concepts is the property of being instantiated.  We can therefore call the Fregean account of existence an instantiation account.  A concept is instantiated just in case it has one or more instances.  So on a Fregean reading, 'Cats exist' says that the concept cat is instantiated.  This seems to imply, and was taken by Frege and Russell to imply that 'Cats exist' is not about cats, but about a non-cat, a concept or propositional function, and what it says about this concept or propositional function is not that it (singularly) exists, but that it is instantiated!  (Frege: "has something falling under it"; Russell: "is sometimes true.") A whiff of paradox? Or more than just a whiff?

The paradox, in brief, is that 'Cats exist' which one might naively take to be about cats, is in reality about a non-cat, a concept or propositional function. 

Accordingly, as Russell in effect states, 'Cats exist' is in the same logical boat with 'Cats are numerous.' Now Mungojerrie is a cat; but no one will infer that Mungojerrie is numerous. That would be the fallacy of division. On the Fressellian view, one who infers that Mungojerrie exists commits the same fallacy.  'Exist(s)' is not an admissible first-level predicate.

My concern in this entry is the logical relation between the above two sub-theses.  Does the first entail the second or are they logically independent?  There is a clear sense in which (ST1) is true. 

Necessarily, if horses exist, then the number of horses is not zero, and vice versa.  So 'Horses exist' is logically equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.'  This is wholly unproblematic for those of us who agree that there are no Meinongian nonexistent objects.  But note that, in general, equivalences, even logical equivalences, do not sanction reductions or identifications.  So it remains an open question whether one can take the further step of reducing existence to instantiation, or of identifying existence with instantiation, or even of eliminating existence in favor of instantiation. Equivalence, reduction, elimination: those are all different.  But I make this point only to move on.

(ST1), then, is unproblematically true if understood as expressing the following logical equivalence: 'Necessarily Fs exist iff the number of Fs is not zero.'  My question is whether (ST1) entails (ST2).  Peter van Inwagen in effect denies the entailment by denying that the 'the number of . . . is not zero' is a predicate of concepts:

I would say that, on a given occasion of its use, it predicates of certain things that they number more than zero.  Thus, if one says, 'The number of horses is not zero,' one predicates of horses that they number more than zero.  'The number of . . . is not zero' is thus what some philosophers have called a 'variably polyadic' predicate.  But so are many predicates that can hardly be regarded as predicates of concepts.  The predicates 'are ungulates' and 'have an interesting evolutionary history,' for example, are variably polyadic predicates.  When one says, 'Horses are ungulates' or 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' one is obviously making a statement about horses and not about the concept horse.  ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," pp. 483-484)

It is this passage that I am having a hard time understanding.   It is of course clear what van Inwagen is trying to show, namely, that the Fregean sub-theses are logically independent and that one can affirm the first without being committed to the second.  One can hold that existence is denial of the number zero without  holding that existence is a property of concepts.  One can go half-way with Frege without going  all the way.

But I am having trouble with the claim that the predicate 'the number of . . . is not zero' is  'variably polyadic' and the examples van Inwagen employs.  'Robbed a bank together' is an example of a variably polyadic predicate.  It is polyadic because it expresses a relation, that of robbing,  and it is variably polyadic because it expresses a family of relations having different numbers of arguments.  For example, Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank together, but so did Ma Barker and her two boys, Patti Hearst and three members of the ill-starred Symbionese Liberation Army, and so on.  (Example from Chris Swoyer and Francesco Orilia.) 

Now when I say that the number of horses is not zero, what am I talking about? It is plausible to say that I am talking about horses, not about the concept horse. (Recall the whiff of paradox, supra.)  What I don't understand are van Inwagen's examples of variably polyadic predicates.  Consider 'are ungulates.'  If an ungulate is just a mammal with hooves, then I fail to see how 'are ungulates' is polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.  I do understand that some hooved animals have one hoof per foot, some two hooves per foot, and so on, which implies variability in the number of hooves that hooved animals have. What I don't understand is the polyadicity. It seems to me that 'Are hooved mammals' is monadic.

The other example is 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.'  This sentence is clearly not about the concept horse. But it is not about any individual horse either.  Consider Harry the horse.  Harry has a history.  He was born in a certain place, grew up, was bought and sold, etc. and then died at a certain age.  He went through all sorts of changes.  But Harry didn't evolve, and so he had no evolutionary history.  No individual evolves; populations evolve:

Evolutionary change is based on changes in the genetic makeup of populations over time. Populations, not individual organisms, evolve. Changes in an individual over the course of its lifetime may be developmental(e.g., a male bird growing more colorful plumage as it reaches sexual maturity) or may be caused by how the environment affects an organism (e.g., a bird losing feathers because it is infected with many parasites); however, these shifts are not caused by changes in its genes. While it would be handy if there were a way for environmental changes to cause adaptive changes in our genes — who wouldn't want a gene for malaria resistance to come along with a vacation to Mozambique? — evolution just doesn't work that way. New gene variants (i.e., alleles) are produced by random mutation, and over the course of many generations, natural selection may favor advantageous variants, causing them to become more common in the population.

'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history,' then, is neither about the concept horse nor about any individual horse.  The predicate in this sentence appears to be non-distributive or collective.  It is like the predicate in 'Horses have been domesticated for millenia.'  That is certainly not about the concept horse.  No concept can be ridden or made to carry a load.  But it is also not about any individual horse.  Not even the Methuselah of horses, whoever he might be, has been around for millenia.

As I understand it,  predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F.  Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them.  'Blue' is an example.  If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.

If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective).  If some Occupy-X nimrods or Antifa thugs have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod or thug has the building surrounded.  If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did.  If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct.  Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries.  If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.

My problem is that I don't understand why van Inwagen gives the 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' example -- which is a collective predication -- when he is committed to saying that each horse exists.  His view , I take it, is that 'exist(s)' is a first-level distributive predicate.  'Has an interesting evolutionary history,' however, is a first-level non-distributive predicate.  Or is it PvI's view that 'exist(s)' is a first-level non-distributive predicate?

Either I don't understand van Inwagen's position due to some defect in me, or it is incoherent.  I incline toward the latter.  He is trying to show that (ST1) does not entail (ST2).  He does this by giving examples of predicates that are first-level, i.e., apply to objects, but are variably polyadic as he claims 'the number of . . . is not zero' is variably polyadic.  But the only clear example he gives is a predicate that is non-distributive, namely 'has an interesting evolutionary history.'  'Horses exist,' however, cannot be non-distributive.  If some horses exist, then each of them exists.  And if each of them exists, then 'exists' is monadic, not polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.

Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia

Reader K. G. writes,

I recently came across a passage in Russell's Mysticism and Logic which you may find interesting. In the essay "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter," Russell writes (p. 144), "… the existence of sense-data [qualia] is logically independent of the existence of mind, and is causally dependent upon the body of the percipient, rather than upon his mind.” [. . .] On the contrary, I propose that any tenable definition of qualia must construe them as mental items, i.e. items whose esse is their percipi. [. . .]

 

What are your thoughts on this argument?

 

I think you are confusing qualia with sense data.  I grant you that qualia are mental items, and that they cannot exist apart from minds.  But sense data are not qualia.  First of all, Russell does not use 'quale' (singular) or 'qualia' (plural) in the two essays you mention.  But he does tell us what he means by 'sense data':  ". . . I believe that the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects or sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical, and among the ultimate constituents of matter." (10th ed., 128)

 

Suppose I am staring at a blue coffee cup.  The particular blue that I visually sense, precisely as I sense it, is a sense datum: it is the direct or  immediate object of my visual sensing.  It is distinct from the sensing. The sensing is something I undergo or experience or live through; it is part of my mental life.  As such it is mental in nature.  The sense datum, however, is not mental.  It is not an episode of experiencing or part of an episode of experiencing; it is the direct object of  an experiencing.  For Russell, the blue sense datum is not only not mental; it is physical: it is a proper part of the coffee cup.  I read Russell in these essays as a bundle theorist: physical objects are bundles of sense data both synchronically and diachronically.

 

Note also that while a blue sense datum is blue, a sensing of a blue sense datum is not blue.  (An adverbialist who speaks of sensing-blue-ly gives up the act-object schema that Russell presupposes.) 

 

Sense data, then, are objects of sensings.  For Russell, they are extra-mental and indeed physical.  Qualia, however, are the phenomenal characters of experiencings.  For example, the felt quality, the what-it-is-like, of a twinge of pain, precisely as it is felt.  Or the smell of burnt garlic.  Or the taste of licorice. 

 

There are many tricky questions here.  Suppose I am given a piece of black, semi-soft candy and asked  what it is.  I put it in my mouth to find out.  I discover that it is a piece of licorice.  I seem to have discovered something objective about a physical object, namely, that this bit of candy is licorice.  This would suggest that the object of my gustatory sensing is extra-mental and indeed physical.  Or should we say merely that I had a gustatory experience with a certain phenomenal character and that the characteristic taste of the thing I put in my mouth is wholly mental in nature?

 

Bertrand Russell: Empiricism is Self-Refuting. Is He Right?

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), 1969 Pelican ed., pp. 156-157:

I will observe, however, that empiricism, as a theory of knowledge, is self-refuting. For, however it may be formulated, it must involve some general proposition about the dependence of knowledge upon experience; and any such proposition, if true, must have as a consequence that [it] itself cannot be known. While therefore, empiricism may be true, it cannot, if true, be known to be so. This, however, is a large problem.

It is indeed a large problem.  But, strictly speaking, is empiricism self-refuting?  A self-refuting proposition is one that entails its own falsehood.  *All generalizations are false* is self-refuting in this sense.  It is either true or not true (false).  (Assume Bivalence)  If true, then false.  If false, then false.  So, necessarily false.  Other self-refuting propositions are antinomies: if true, then false; if false, then true.

Let empiricism be the proposition, *All knowledge derives from sense experience.*  Clearly, this proposition does not refute itself.  For it does not entail its own falsehood.  It is not the case that if it is true, then it is false.  Rather, if it is true, then it cannot be known to be true.  For it is not known by experience, and therefore not knowable if true.

Empiricism, then, is not self-refuting, but self-vitiating, self-weakening.  It is in this respect like the thesis of relative relativism (RR): it is relatively true that all truths are relative.  (RR) does not refute itself, but it does weaken itself.  Presumably, what the relativist really wants to say is something stentorian and unqualified: all truths are relative!  But the demands of logical consistency force him to relativize his position.

The real problem is that if empiricism is true, then it cannot be believed with justification.  For on empiricism the only justificatory grounds are those supplied by sense experience.  It is also quite clear that empiricism is not a formal-logical truth or an analytic truth.  A logical positivist would have to say it is cognitively meaningless.  But we shouldn't go that far.  It plainly enjoys cognitive meaning.

You might say that empiricism is just a linguistic proposal, a non-binding suggestion as to how we might use words.  Equivalently, one might say it is just a stance one might adopt.  If you tell me that, then I will thank you for 'sharing,' but then politely voice my preference for either a non-empirical stance or a stance that is not a mere stance, but the blunt asseveration that empiricism is false.  After all, I know that kindness is to be preferred over cruelty, ceteris paribus, and I know this by a non-empirical value intuition.

Another wrinkle is this.  If all knowledge derives from sense experience, then presumably this cannot just happen to be the case.  I should think that if empiricism is true, then it is necessarily true.  But what could be the ground of the necessity?  I have already noted, in effect, that the necessity is neither formal-logical nor analytic.  Is the necessity grounded in the nature, essence, eidos, of knowledge?  That would be a rather unempirical thing to say.  Empiricists have no truck with essences or Forms or eide.

Here then we appear to have a further embarrassment for empiricism.  It cannot be the nature of knowledge to derive from and have its sole justificatory ground in sense experience.  So it just happens to be the case.  This cannot be ruled out as logically impossible.  But it smacks of deep incoherence and is, shall we say, profoundly unsatisfactory. 

Please note that similar reasoning can be deployed against scientism.  If all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge, then this proposition, if true, cannot be known to be true.  Is it then merely believed without justification?  Is it merely a matter of adopting the 'scientistic stance' or doing the 'scientistic shuffle'?  If so, I will thank you for 'sharing' but then politely refuse your invitation to dance.

Related: Five Grades of Self-Referential Inconsistency

Hat Tip: I thank Patrick Cronin for reminding me of the Russell passage.

Can Anyone Recommend a Good History of Philosophy?

A graduate student in philosophy asks about histories of philosophy:

Suppose I wanted, over time, to work through a text or series of texts. Which ones are worthy of consideration? I've heard good things about Copleston's 11 volumes. There's also Russell's history of western philosophy and Anthony Kenny has done a history as well. Do you recommend any of those (or perhaps another)? I should say that any history text will not supplant primary sources; it would be an addition to them.

While Bertrand Russell is entertaining, I can't recommend his history.  He wrote it for money, or rather he dictated it for money.  (When he was asked why he wrote a blurb for a certain book, he said that he had a hundred good reasons: the author paid him $100.)  For a taste, consider the following passage  from Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1945), p. 427. I found it here, but without a link and without a reference. So, exploiting the resources of my well-stocked library, I located the passage, and verified that it had been properly transcribed. Whether Russell is being entirely fair to the Arabs is a further question.  In fact, I am pretty sure that he is not being fair to Avicenna (Ibn Sina) who played a key role in the development of the metaphysics of essence and existence.

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry; in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism; the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus produced new thought better than that produced by the transmitters -- in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).

Copleston is good, and you might also consider Hegel.  He will broaden you and counteract the probably excessively analytic atmosphere which you now breathe.  But the Swabian genius is quirky and opinionated just like Lord Russell.  When he comes to the medieval period in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he puts on his “seven-league boots” the better to pass over this thousand year period without sullying his fine trousers. (Vol. III, 1)

Summing up the “General Standpoint of the Scholastics,” he has this to say: “...this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return.” “Barren,” and “rubbishy” are other terms with which he describes it. (Vol. III, 94-95) The politically correct may wish to consider whether the descendants of Hegel should pay reparations to the descendants of Thomas Aquinas, et al.

ComBox open for anyone with recommendations.

Related articles

Kierkegaard: "To Hell With the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Theism Meets Metaphysical Naturalism

Ibn Sina Hospital in Sirte, Libya Attacked; ISIS Kidnaps 20 Medical Workers - Back Page News

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

Not Enough Evidence?

 "Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!" (Bertrand Russell)

It may well be that our predicament is such as to disallow conclusive or even sufficient evidence of the truth about it. If Plato's Cave Allegory is apt, if it lays bare the truth of the human predicament, then it must be that the evidence that the cave is a cave and that there is an outer world, whether it be the evidence of someone's testimony or the evidence of one's own rare and fleeting experiences, is scant and flimsy and easily doubted and denied.  What I merely glimpse on rare occasions I can easily doubt.  One can also doubt what any church teaches for the simple reason that there are many churches and they contradict each other on many points of doctrine and practice.  And the same goes for what I believe on the testimony of others.

We don't know that the human condition is a cave-like predicament along Platonic lines, but if it is then we have an explanation of the paucity of sufficient evidence of its being what it is.  (By sufficient evidence for a proposition p I mean evidence that renders p more likely than its negation.)

It is vitally important to us whether God or some form of Transcendence exists, and whether a higher life is possible for us beyond the miserably short and indigent predicament in which we presently find ourselves.  But it may be that the truth in this matter cannot be known here below, but only believed on evidence that does not make it more likely than not. It may be that our predicament is such as to make impossible sufficient evidence of the truth about it.

Do I violate an ethics of belief if I believe on insufficient evidence?  But don't I also have a duty to myself to pursue what is best for myself?  And seek my ultimate happiness?  Why should the legitimate concern to not be wrong trump the concern to find what is salvifically right?  Is it not foolish to allow fear of error to block my path to needed truth?

Lately I've heard bandied about the idea that to have faith is to pretend to know what one does not know.  Now that takes the cake for dumbassery.  One can of course pretend to know things one does not know, and pretend to know more about a subject than one does know.  The pretence might be part of a strategy of deception in the case of a swindler or it might be a kind of acting as in the case of an actor playing a mathematician.

But in faith one does not pretend to know; one honestly faces the fact that one does not know and ventures beyond what one knows so as to gain access to a needed truth that by its very nature cannot satisfy the strictures that we moderns and post-moderns tend to build into 'know.'

Related articles

Russell's Leaky Teapot Revisited

Believing on Insufficient Evidence

The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

Peter Unger on Bertrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy

This from a reader:

In one portion of Grace Boey's interview of Peter Unger, Unger discusses what Russell had to say about the value of philosophy, and I was a bit taken aback because that particular quotation by Russell resonates with me a lot, and Unger's swift dismissal of it as garbage left me almost wounded.

What Unger appears to be saying is that claims about the value of philosophy are either quasi-mystical nonsense, or these are claims which can be empirically tested, and therefore should not be assumed a priori. We can only say philosophy has value if we take a bunch of philosophy students, measure parameters such as their dogmatism, creativity, rationality etc at the start and then at the end when they graduate, see if learning philosophy has improved these parameters, and whether this improvement is more than the graduates of other subjects like psychology and literature. Only then we can say that there is value in studying philosophy.

Your thoughts appreciated.

This is what Unger says: 

 

This quote is from a small book that Bertrand Russell wrote, from 1912, which is still used as a textbook today: a little book called The Problems of Philosophy. He talks here about the value of philosophy:

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves. Because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all that because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The second part, after the ‘above all’ seems like complete nonsense. What the heck does all that mean? It’s mystical nonsense, no? This from one of the two founders of modern logic, second only to Gottlob Frege in laying down the foundations of symbolic and mathematical logic.

Let’s go to the first part, before the ‘above all’. He says that these questions, and not questions about, say, chemistry, or ornothology, enlarge your conception of what is possible. I hardly even know what that means. But he goes on and says things which are less hard to understand, like, it enriches your intellectual imagination. And a second thing it does, which I take to be distinct, is it diminishes your dogmatic assurance.

These are things that can be tested for, as I said before! Whether it’s a treatment effect, or a selection effect. There are tests for how creative people are, or how dogmatic they are. You test them, at the end, the day after they graduate. And you see whether this is true.

Bertrand Russell never even bothers to think about whether, or what, these things might have to do with any test you can give to human people, or what’s going on. It’s so full of nonsense, the guy was always full of nonsense. He read up on relativity theory, but you would think he would think of some psychological testing that had some bearing on the smoke he was blowing. He never gave it a thought.

BV:  In dismissing mysticism as nonsense, Unger merely advertises his own ignorance and spiritual vacancy and falls to the tabloid level of an Ayn Rand who displays no more understanding of mysticism than he does.  Mysticism is a vast field of ancient yet ongoing human experience and endeavor and one that earlier American philosophers such as Josiah Royce, William James, and William Ernest Hocking, to mention just three philosophers of high distinction, took very seriously indeed.  See, respectively, The World and the Individual, First Series, 1899, lectures II, IV, and V; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, lectures XVI and XVII; Types of Philosophy, 1929, chapters 30, 31, 32, 33.  It is worth noting that all three luminaries were professors at Harvard University.

In those days Harvard was still far from the over-specialization and hyper-professionalization of philosophy that breeds people like Peter Unger, who though "terribly" clever -- to use one of his favorite adjectives --appear to view philosophy as a highly rarefied academic game without roots in, or anything to say about, one's life as an "existing individual" (phrase from Kierkegaard, but I am thinking of all the existentialists, as well as  Augustine, Pascal, the Stoics, the ancient Skeptics, and indeed all philosophers from Plato to Aquinas to Kant and beyond for whom philosophy has something to do with the search for wisdom).

The institutionalization of philosophy in the 20th century, though not without some benefits, has led to the following.  Empty gamesmanship without existential anchorage.  Hypertrophy of the critical and analytic faculty with concomitant atrophy of the intuitive faculty. Philistinic dismissal of whole realms of human experience and endeavor.  Technicality and specialization taken to absurd lengths not justified by any actual results.  (If extreme specialization and narrowing of focus led to consensus among competent practioners, then that might count as a justification for the specialization.  But it hasn't and it doesn't. See here.)

Bertrand Russell, you will recall, published a collection of essays in October 1910 that in the second edition of December 1917 were given the title Mysticism and Logic.  The lead essay, "Mysticism and Logic," which originally appeared in the Hibbert Journal of July 1914, displays a serious engagement with what Unger the philistine dismisses as "complete nonsense."  What Russell writes about mysticism is penetrating enough to suggest that he may have had some mystical experiences of his own.  In the end Russell rejects the four main tenets that he takes as definitive of mysticism, but his rejection is reasoned and respectful.  He grants that "there is an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to be attainable in any other way." (p. 11)

But of course that essay dates from the days of our grandfathers and great grandfathers.  Times have changed, and in philosophy not for the better.  The analytic philosophy that Russell did so much to promote has become sterile and ingrown and largely irrelevant to the wider culture.  There are of course exceptions, Thomas Nagel being one of them. 

There is a lot more to be said.  But for now I will simply oppose to Unger's nauseating view the following quotations:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (William James, Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

See here for a different critical response to Unger.

Related articles

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Can One Copulate One's Way to Chastity? Notes on Wittgenstein and Unger

Van Inwagen on Russell's Teapot

I thank Jannai Shields for referring me to Peter van Inwagen's Russell's China Teapot and Andrew Bailey for making van Inwagen's papers available on the Web. 

Russell's Leaky Teapot Revisited

Gary Gutting recently interviewed Alvin Plantinga in the pages of The New York Times and brought up the business about Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot.   The following response of Gutting to Plantinga comes early on in the interview:

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

Russell's comparison  has long struck me as lame, and so I want to revisit and rethink this topic.  What follows is an old post from August 2010 amended and substantially expanded:

Gutting, Dawkins, and Russell's Celestial Teapot

In his recent NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, Notre Dame's Gary Gutting writes, describing the "no arguments argument" of some atheists:

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.

I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team.  Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists.  Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God.  So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different. 

If someone asserts that there there is a celestial teapot orbiting the Sun, or an angry unicorn on the far side of the Moon, or that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' one will justifiably demand evidence.  "It's possible, but what's your evidence for so outlandish a claim?"  It is the same with God, say many atheists. The antecedent probability of  God's existence, they think, is on a par with the extremely low antecedent probability of there being  a celestial teapot or an irate lunar unicorn, a 'lunicorn,' if you will. 

 

But this is to assume something that a sophisticated theist such as Thomas Aquinas would never grant, namely, that God, if he exists, is just another being among the totality of beings.  For Aquinas, God is not an ens (a being) but esse ipsum subsistens (self-subsistent Being).  God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  Admittedly, this is not an easy notion; but if the atheist  is not willing to grapple with it, then his animadversions are just so many grapplings with a straw man.

Why can't God be just another being among beings in the way an orbiting teapot would be just another being among beings were it to exist?  I hope it is clear that my point is not that while a teapot is a material object, God is not.  That's true, of course, but my point cuts much deeper: if God exists, he exists in a way dfferent from the way contingent beings exist.

First of all, if God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the  existence of every contingent being.  Every such being on classical theism is continuously maintained in existence by the exercise of divine power.  Thus every contingent being is radically dependent for its existence on divine activity.  The same cannot be said about an orbiting teapot.  If 'ontic' means pertaining to beings, and 'ontological' means pertaining to the Being of beings (the esse of entia), then 'God exists' is both ontic and ontolological.  It says that there is a being possessing such-and-such divine attributes, but it also says something about the Being of what is other than God, namely, that its Being is createdness, a form of continuous ontological dependency.  'An orbiting teapot exists,' however is merely an ontic claim.  It says or implies nothing about the Being of anything distinct from it.  Now this difference between an ontic-ontological claim and a merely ontic one strikes me as very important.  It is a difference that throws a spanner into the works of such facile comparisons as Russell's.

Second, on some accounts necessarily existent abstracta are also dependent on God.  If (Fregean) propositions are divine thoughts then they are dependent on God despite their metaphysical necessity.  The exist necessarily, but they have their necessity not from themselves but from another.  Not so for the teapots and the unicorns.

Third, God is not only the ultimate ground of all beings, both contingent and necessary (except himself); he is also the ultimate ground of the intelligibility of all beings, of their aptness to be understood by us or anyone, their aptness to be subjects of true predications.  Propositional or sentential truth is made possible by ontic truth, the intelligibility of that which is veridically represented by true propositions.  But I don't think one would want to say that an angry unicon on the far side of the moon is the ultimate ground of intelligibility.

Fourth, God is the ultimate source of all value.

Fifth, God is the all-pervasive One, immanent in each thing yet transcendent of all things.  This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility and its value snd its unity in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being, a being who does not have existence like a teapot but is its existence

So, on a sophisticated conception, God cannot be just one more being among beings.  The Source of being is not just another thing sourced.  The ground of intelligibility is not just another intelligible item.  The Thinker behind every thought is not just another thought.  The locus and source of all value is not just another valuable thing.  The One is not just another member of the Many.

These differences between God classically conceived and outlandish specimens of space junk  is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments to God from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.  But as far as I know there are no similar arguments to teapots or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things.

 

First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something merely in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist.  Affirming and denyng the existence of God is not simply a matter of adding to or subtracting from a pre-given ontological inventory.   For God does not make a merely ontic difference, but an ontological one as well.  The existence of God changes the ontology.  For if God exists, then the Being of non-divine entities is createdness, hence different from what it would be were there no God.  Socrates is a being whose existence/nonexistence makes no difference to the system of ontological categories, and no difference to the nature of existence, property-possession, etc.  God, however, is a being  whose  existence/nonexistence does make such a difference.

 

Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the classical theist's assertions. To sum up.  (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

God is a not a being among beings, but the very Being of beings.  To deny God, then, is not like denying an orbiting teapot; it is more like denying Being itself, and with it, beings.  Or it is more like denying truth itself as opposed to denying that a particular proposition is true.

One who appreciates this ought to find discussions about the antecedent probability of theism as compared to teapotism faintly absurd.   The question of the antecedent probability of something like Russell's teapot makes sense and has an easy answer: very low!  The question of the antecedent probability of there being truths has no clear sense.  The probability of a proposition is the probability of its being true.  Hence, that there is truth, or that there are truths, is a presupposition of any meaningful talk of probability.  It is therefore senseless to ask about the antecedent probability of there being truths, and the following answer is clearly absurd:  the antecedent probabilty of there being any true propositions is extremely low.

Now my point is that the God question is like the truth question, not like the teapot question.

Unfortunately, the line I have sketched here will be rejected both by all atheists, but also by many theists, those theists who think of God as a being among beings, uniquely qualified no doubt, but no different in his Being or in the way he has properties than any other being qua being.  Or, in the quasi-Heideggerian jargon employed above, these theists will say that 'God exists' is an ontic, not an ontic-ontological claim, and as such no different than 'Socrates exists' or 'Russell's celestial teapot exists.'

 And the widely-bruited 'death of God?'  It is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that there is no celestial teapot (or Santa Claus, or . . . ) after all.  As Nietzsche observed, the death of God is the death of truth.

Related articles

A Bad Reason for Thinking that Atheism is not a Religion

Ontic Versus Alterity Theism

In his recent NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, Notre Dame's Gary Gutting writes, describing the "no arguments argument" of some atheists:

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.

I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team.  Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists.  Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God.  So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different. 

If someone asserts that there there is a celestial teapot orbiting the Sun, or an angry unicorn on the far side of the Moon, or that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' one will justifiably demand evidence.  "It's possible, but what's your evidence for so outlandish a claim?"  It is the same with God, say many atheists. The antecedent probability of  God's existence, they think, is on a par with the extremely low antecedent probability of there being  a celestial teapot or an irate lunar unicorn, a 'lunicorn,' if you will. 

 

But this is to assume something that a sophisticated theist such as Thomas Aquinas would never grant, namely, that God, if he exists, is just another being among the totality of beings.  For Aquinas, God is not an ens (a being) but esse ipsum subsistens (self-subsistent Being).  God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  Admittedly, this is not an easy notion; but if the atheist  is not willing to grapple with it, then his animadversions are just so many grapplings with a straw man.

Why can't God be just another being among beings in the way an orbiting teapot would be just another being among beings were it to exist?  I hope it is clear that my point is not that while a teapot is a material object, God is not.  That's true, of course, but my point cuts much deeper: if God exists, he exists in a way dfferent from the way contingent beings exist.

First of all, if God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the  existence of every contingent being.  Every such being on classical theism is continuously maintained in existence by the exercise of divine power.  Thus every contingent being is radically dependent for its existence on divine activity.  The same cannot be said about an orbiting teapot.  If 'ontic' means pertaining to beings, and 'ontological' means pertaining to the Being of beings (the esse of entia), then 'God exists' is both ontic and ontolological.  It says that there is a being possessing such-and-such divine attributes, but it also says something about the Being of what is other than God, namely, that its Being is createdness, a form of continuous ontological dependency.  'An orbiting teapot exists,' however is merely an ontic claim.  It says or implies nothing about the Being of anything distinct from it.  Now this difference between an ontic-ontological claim and a merely ontic one strikes me as very important.  It is a difference that throws a spanner into the works of such facile comparisons as Russell's.

Second, on some accounts necessarily existent abstracta are also dependent on God.  If (Fregean) propositions are divine thoughts then they are dependent on God despite their metaphysical necessity.  The exist necessarily, but they have their necessity not from themselves but from another.  Not so for the teapots and the unicorns.

Third, God is not only the ultimate ground of all beings, both contingent and necessary (except himself); he is also the ultimate ground of the intelligibility of all beings, of their aptness to be understood by us or anyone, their aptness to be subjects of true predications.  Propositional or sentential truth is made possible by ontic truth, the intelligibility of that which is veridically represented by true propositions.  But I don't think one would want to say that an angry unicon on the far side of the moon is the ultimate ground of intelligibility.

Fourth, God is the ultimate source of all value.

Fifth, God is the all-pervasive One, immanent in each thing yet transcendent of all things.  This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility and its value snd its unity in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being, a being who does not have existence like a teapot but is its existence

So, on a sophisticated conception, God cannot be just one more being among beings.  The Source of being is not just another thing sourced.  The ground of intelligibility is not just another intelligible item.  The Thinker behind every thought is not just another thought.  The locus and source of all value is not just another valuable thing.  The One is not just another member of the Many.

These differences between God classically conceived and outlandish specimens of space junk  is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments to God from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.  But as far as I know there are no similar arguments to teapots or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things.

 

First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something merely in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist.  Affirming and denyng the existence of God is not simply a matter of adding to or subtracting from a pre-given ontological inventory.   For God does not make a merely ontic difference, but an ontological one as well.  The existence of God changes the ontology.  For if God exists, then the Being of non-divine entities is createdness, hence different from what it would be were there no God.  Socrates is a being whose existence/nonexistence makes no difference to the system of ontological categories, and no difference to the nature of existence, property-possession, etc.  God, however, is a being  whose  existence/nonexistence does make such a difference.

 

Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the classical theist's assertions. To sum up.  (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

God is a not a being among beings, but the very Being of beings.  To deny God, then, is not like denying an orbiting teapot; it is more like denying Being itself, and with it, beings.  Or it is more like denying truth itself as opposed to denying that a particular proposition is true.

One who appreciates this ought to find discussions about the antecedent probability of theism as compared to teapotism faintly absurd.   The question of the antecedent probability of something like Russell's teapot makes sense and has an easy answer: very low!  The question of the antecedent probability of there being truths has no clear sense.  The probability of a proposition is the probability of its being true.  Hence, that there is truth, or that there are truths, is a presupposition of any meaningful talk of probability.  It is therefore senseless to ask about the antecedent probability of there being truths, and the following answer is clearly absurd:  the antecedent probabilty of there being any true propositions is extremely low.

Now my point is that the God question is like the truth question, not like the teapot question.

Unfortunately, the line I have sketched here will be rejected both by all atheists, but also by many theists, those theists who think of God as a being among beings, uniquely qualified no doubt, but no different in his Being or in the way he has properties than any other being qua being.  Or, in the quasi-Heideggerian jargon employed above, these theists will say that 'God exists' is an ontic, not an ontic-ontological claim, and as such no different than 'Socrates exists' or 'Russell's celestial teapot exists.'

 And the widely-bruited 'death of God?'  It is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that there is no celestial teapot (or Santa Claus, or . . . ) after all.  As Nietzsche observed, the death of God is the death of truth.

More on Translating 'Something Exists' and a Response to Brightly

I issued the following challenge: translate 'Something exists' into standard first-order predicate logic with identity. This is the logic whose sources are Frege and Russell. So I call it Frege-Russell logic, or, to be cute, 'Fressellian' logic.  My esteemed commenters don''t see much of a problem here.  So let me first try to explain why I see a problem.  I then  consider David Brightly's proposal.

1. First of all, 'Something exists' cannot be rendered as 'For some x, x exists.'  This is because 'exist(s)' is not an admissible first-level predicate in Frege-Russell logic.  The whole point of the Fressellian approach is to make 'exist(s)' disappear into the machinery of quantification. There is no such propositional function as 'x exists.'  'For some x, x exists' is gibberish, syntactic nonsense in Frege-Russell logic. 

2. But the following is not gibberish: 'For some x, x = x.'  So one will be tempted to say that 'Something exists' can be rendered as 'For some x, x = x,' ('Something is self-identical') and 'Everything exists' as 'For all x, x = x' ('Everything is self-identical'). 

But this won't work either.  It is true that everything that exists is self-identical, and vice versa.  But it doesn't follow, nor is it true, that existence is self-identity. Here is one consideration.  When I say of Tom that he exists, I am not saying that he is self-identical. Suppose I hear a false rumour to the effect that Tom is no more.  But then I encounter him in the flesh.  I exclaim, "You still exist!"  Clearly, "You are still self-identical" does not mean the same.  If I said that, Tom might retort, "What the hell, man, were you worried that I had become legion?"  In some circumstances, that a man should continue in existence is surprising.  But we are never surprised by a man's continuing in self-identity.

Furthermore, when Tom ceases to exist, he does not become self-diverse.  Loss of existence is not loss of self-identity.  To put the point in formal mode, after his demise 'Tom' continues to refer to one and the same individual, Tom.  The bearer of the name is gone, but not the reference. Otherwise it could not be true that Tom is gone.  There is also a modal consideration.  Tom is a contingent being: he exists but he might not have existed.  If existence is self-identity, then Tom's possible nonexistence is Tom's possible self-diversity -- which is absurd.  It makes prima facie sense to say of an individual that it might not have existed or that it no longer exists; but it make no sense at all to say of an individual that it might not have been self-identical or that it is no longer self-identical.  If Tom might not have existed, then it is Tom who might not have existed.  But if Tom might not have been self-identical, then it is not Tom who might not have been self-identical.

So, even if everything that exists is self-identical and conversely, existence is not self-identity.  When we say that something exists we are not saying that something is self-identical, and when we say that everything exists we are not saying that everything is self-identical.  I conclude that 'Something exists' is not expressible in the terms of the Frege-Russell system.  As for 'Everything exists,' it is surely a presupposition of the whole Frege-Russell approach: the approach presupposes that Meinong was wrong to speak of nonexistent objects.  But this presupposition cannot be expressed, cannot be 'said,' in Fressellian terms.

We are in the following curious predicament.  Something that must be true if if the Fresselian system is to be tenable -- that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent objects -- is not expressible within the system.

3. David Brightly accepts my challenge to give a Frege-Russell translation of 'Something exists.'  He writes:

And as a Fressellian I accept the challenge. That property is Individual aka Object, the concept at the root of the Porphyrean tree. We can say 'Something exists' with ∃x.Object(x), ie, there is at least one object. Likewise ∀x.Object(x) (which is always true, even when the box is empty) says 'Everything exists' and its negation (which is always false) says 'Some thing is not an object'. But both these last are unenlightening---because always true and always false, respectively, they convey no information, make no distinction, are powerless to change us.

I asked: which property  is it whose instantiation is the existence of something?  David's answer is that it is the property or concept Individual or Object.  And so I take David to be saying something like the following. "Just as the existence of cats is the being-instantiated of the concept cat, the existence of something is the being-instantiated of the concept Object."

David mentions the tree of Porphyry:

David speaks of the 'root' of the tree where I speak of its apex. No matter.  However we visualize it, upside down or right side up, David's suggestion is that Object or Substance (as above) is a summum genus, a supreme genus. It is a concept superordinate to every concept, a concept under which everything falls.

Operating with a scheme like this, we can, in the spirit of Frege's dialogue with the illustrious Puenjer, reduce every existential proposition (or at least every general existential proposition) to a predication by climbing Porphyry's tree.  Thus:

Cats exist --> Some mammal is a cat
Mammals exist --> Some animal is a mammal
Animals exist --> Some  living thing is an animal
Living things exist --> Some  body is a living thing
Bodies exist --> Some  substance is a body
Substances exist --> Some Objects are substances.

The point of these translations is to dispense with 'existst(s)' by showing how propositions of the form Fs exist can be replaced salva veritate with propositions of the form Some G is a F, where G is superordinate to F.  This amounts to the elimination of existence in favor of the logical quantity, someness.

We have now climbed to the tippy-top of the tree of Porphyry. We have ascended to a concept superordinate to every concept (except itself) a genus generalissimum, a most general genus.  And what concept might that be? Such a concept must have maximal extension and so will have minimal intension. It will be devoid of all content, abstracting as it does from all differences. Frege in his dialog with Puenjer suggests something identical with itself as the maximally superordinate concept. 'There are men' and 'Men exist' thus get rendered as 'Something identical with itself is a man.' (63)  Something identical with itself is equivalent to Brightly's Object.

4. Now why can't I accept the Frege-Brightly view? Well, I've already shown that 'Everything exists' cannot be translated as 'Everything is self-identical.'  But this is tantamount to having established that the concept whose instantiation is the existence of everything cannot be the concept self-identical something or the concept Object.

Another way to see this is by considering two individuals at the very bottom of the Porphyrean tree.  So consider my cats, Max and Manny.  In respect of being cats, mammals, beasts, animals, living things, material substances, and self-identical somethings, they do not differ.  They do not differ quidditatively.  But they do differ: they differ in their very existence.  Each has his own existence.  Max is not Manny, and Manny is not Max.  That is not a mere numerical difference; it is a numerical-existential difference.  Since each cat has its own existence, the existence of either cannot be the being-instantiated of any quidditative concept. All such concepts abstract from existence.  The same goes for all individuals.  Individuals exist.  But the existence of individuals is not the being-instantiated of any concept. If you want, you can think of existent (self-identical something) as a highest genus, but Existence -- that in virtue of which things  exist and are not nothing -- is not a highest genus.  And it is Existence that is the topic.  There are no instances of Existence.  Existing things are not a kind of thing.

The Frege-Russell theory fails utterly as a theory of Existence.

As sure as I am sitting here, I am sure that I will not convince the Londonistas.  That fact is more grist for the (meta)philosophical mill.

On Translating 'Some Individual Exists' Fressellianly

An astute reader comments:

You write:

2. But can this presupposition be expressed (said) in this logic? Here is a little challenge for you Fressellians: translate 'Something exists' into standard logical notion. You will discover that it cannot be done. Briefly, if existence is instantiation, which property is it whose instantiation is the existence of something? Same problem with 'Nothing exists.' If existence is instantiation, which property is it whose non-instantiation is the nonexistence of anything? Similarly with 'Everthing exists' and 'Something does not exist.'

But couldn't we translate those expressions this way (assuming  we have only two properties: a, b)?
1. "something exists" -> "there is an x that instantiates either a or b or ab"
2. "everything exists" -> "there is an x that instantiates a and there is a y that instantiates b and there is a z that instantiates ab"
3. "nothing exists" -> 1 is false
4. "something doesn't exist" -> 2 is false

I am afraid that doesn't work.   We need focus only on on 'Some individual exists.'  The reader's proposal could be put as follows.  Given the properties F-ness and G-ness,

What 'Some individual exists' says is exactly what 'Either F-ness is instantiated or G-ness is instantiated' says.

I would insist however that they do not say the same thing, i.e., do not have the same meaning.  The expression on the left says that some individual or other, nature unspecified, exists.  The expression on the right, however, makes specific reference to the 'natures' F-ness and G-ness.  Surely, 'Some individual exists' could be true even if there are are no individuals that are either Fs or Gs. 

Note that it is not a matter of logic what properties there are.  This is an extralogical question.

On the Frege-Russell treatment of existence, 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts, properties, propositional functions and cognate items.  It is never an admissible  predicate of individuals.  Thus in this logic every affirmation of existence must say of some specified concept or property that it is instantiated, and every denial of existence must say of some specified concept or property that it fails of instantiation.

This approach runs into trouble when it comes to the perfectly meaningful and true 'Something exists' and 'Some individual exists.'  For in these instances  no concept or property can be specified whose instantiation is the existence of things or the existence of individuals.  To head off an objection: self-identity won't work.

That there are individuals is a necessary presupposition of the Frege-Russell logic in that without it one cannot validly move from 'F-ness is instantiated' to 'Fs exist.'  But it is a necessary presupposition that cannot be stated in the terms of the system.  This fact, I believe, is one of the motivations for Wittgenstein's distinction between the sayable and the showable.  What cannot be said, e.g., that there are individuals, is shown by the use of such individual variables as 'x.'

The paradox, I take it, is obvious.  One cannot say  that 'There are individuals' is inexpressible without saying 'There are individuals.'  When Wittgenstein assures us that there is the Inexpressible, das Unaussprechliche,  he leaves himself open to the retort: What is inexpressible? If he replies, 'That there are individuals,' then he is hoist by his own petard.

Surely it is true that there are individuals and therefore expressible, because just now expressed.

"The suicide of a thesis," says Peter Geach (Logic Matters, p. 265), "might be called Ludwig's self-mate . . . . "  Here we may have an instance of it.

The Philosophical Foundations of Slackerdom

Ludwig Wittgenstein took a dim view of Bertrand Russell's nontechnical writings.  They would include such provocative pieces as In Praise of Idleness.

Why Wittgenstein was a Better Man than Russell

Russell worried about logic.  Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell

Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes shot his mouth off in summary judgment of men of very high caliber. He once remarked to M. O'C. Drury, "Russell's books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red -- and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue -- and no one should be allowed to read them." (Recollections of Wittgenstein,* ed. R. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 112.)

Here is a passage from Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (Liveright 1930, p. 24) whose urbanity, wit, and superficiality might well have irritated the self-tormenting Wittgenstein:

I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.

This observation ties in nicely with my remarks on short views and long views.  If middle-sized happiness is your object, then short views are probably best.  But some of us want more.

 __________

*This title is delightfully ambiguous. Read as an objective genitive, it refers to recollections about Wittgenstein, while read as a subjective genitive, it denotes Wittgenstein's recollections. The book, consisting as it does of both, is well-titled.

An Argument of Russell Against Mental Acts

Bertrand Russell's (1872-1970) The Analysis of Mind first appeared in 1921.  Lecture I contains a discussion of Brentano, Meinong, and mental acts.  He quotes the famous Brentano passage from the 1874 Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, and then confesses that until very lately he believed "that mental phenomena have essential reference to objects . . .'" but that he no longer believes this. (p. 5)  One of Russell's arguments against acts is contained in the following passage:

. . . the act seems unnecessary and fictious. [. . .] Empirically, I cannot discover anything corresponding to the supposed act; and theoretically I cannot see that that it is indispensable.  We say: "I think so-and-so," and this word "I" suggests that thinking is the act of a person.  Meinong's "act" is the ghost of the subject, or what once was the full-blooded soul.  It is supposed that thoughts cannot just come and go, but need a person to think them. (p. 6)

Russell is making three claims.  The first is phenomenological: acts are not given to introspection.  The second is dialectical:  there are no arguments or considerations that make plausible the positing of acts.  The third is genetic:  the reason some believe that there are acts is because they have been bamboozled by the surface grammar of sentences like 'I want a unicorn' or 'I see at tree' into the view that when thinking takes place there is an agent who performs an act upon an object. 

The Phenomenology of the Situation

What is involved in the awareness of the lamp on my desk?  Phenomenologically, as it seems to me, there is awareness of (i) the lamp and of (ii) being aware of the lamp.  At a bare minimum, then,  we need to distinguish between the object of awareness and the awareness of the object.  Both items are phenomenologically accessible.  There is straightforward awareness of the lamp if it is seen or imagined or remembered, whereas the awareness of the lamp is given to introspection.  Of course, the awareness does not appear alongside the lamp as a separate object.  Being aware of the awareness of a lamp is not like being aware of a lamp being next to a clock.  And yet, phenomenologically, there is awareness of the lamp and awareness of the awareness of the lamp. Notice that I didn't smuggle in any ego or subject of awareness in my description.  So far, then, we are on solid phenomenological ground: there are objects of awareness, there is awareness of objects, and there is awareness that the two are different.  This is the phenomenological bare minimum.

But of course this does not show that there are mental acts.  For the bit of phenomenology that I have just done is consistent with the subjectlessness of awareness. If awareness is subjectless, as Sartre et al. have maintained against Husserl et al., then it cannot be articulated into individual acts of awareness  unless some individuating/differentiating factor can be specified.  But there seems to be no phenomenological evidence of such a factor. 

Well, let's see.  There is awareness of the lamp; there is awareness of the clock; there is awareness of the books piled up on the desk, etc.  But awareness appears 'diaphanous,' to borrow a word from G. E. Moore's 1903 "The Refutation of Idealism."  The diaphanousness of awareness is a phenomenological feature of it.  This being so, there is no phenomenological evidence of any act-articulation on the side of awareness.  All the articulation and differentiation appear on the side of the object.  But aren't there differences among seeing a lamp, imagining a lamp, and remembering a lamp?  No doubt, but why must they be act-differences?  It is consistent with the phenomenology of the situation that these differences too fall on the side of the object.  Instead of saying that there are acts of imagination and acts of memory, one could say that there are imaginal objects and memorative objects.

The point, then, is that phenomenology alone cannot justify the positing of mental acts. So Russell does have a point with respect to his first claim.   Phenomenology needs dialectical supplementation.

The Dialectics of the Situation

Being aware of a centaur and being aware of a mermaid are of course different.  This difference is phenomenologically evident.  But what differentiates them if there are no mental acts?  Not the objects, since they don't exist, and not the awarenesses since they are one and not two on the assumption that there are no mental acts.  And if there are no mental acts, then there are no subjects of mental acts.  And yet there must be something that accounts for the difference between awareness of a centaur and awareness of a unicorn.  The denier of acts seems at this point forced to embrace a Meinongian theory of beingless items.  He could say that the centaur-awareness and the mermaid-awareness are numerically different in virtue of the fact that a centaur and a mermaid are distinct denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein.

To this I respond that there are no beingless items.  The realm of Aussersein is empty.  (The arguments cannot be trotted out here.)  Hence there is no Meinongian way out.  I conclude that we are justified in positing mental acts to account for the difference.  I gave this argument already in more detail in my recent reconstruction  of an argument from Laird Addis for mental acts.

I conclude that Russell is wrong in his second claim.  If the argument I gave is sound, then acts are theoretically indispensable. 

Russell's Genetic Claim

This is fairly weak inasmuch as Russell seems not to appreciate the distinction between a mental act and a mental action.  An action is the action of an agent  who performs the action.  But a mental act is merely an occurrent episode of intentional awareness.  As such, it needn't be anchored in a substantial self.  One could reject substance ontologies as Bergmann does while admitting mental acts.  There is nothing in the notion of a mental act that requires that the subject of the act be a substance that exists self-same over time. 

Bertrand Russell on Arabic Philosophy

The following passage is from Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1945), p. 427. I found it here, but without a link and without a reference. So, exploiting the resources of my well-stocked library, I located the passage, and verified that it had been properly transcribed. Whether Russell is being entirely fair to the Arabs is a further question.

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry; in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism; the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus produced new thought better than that produced by the transmitters -- in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).

Russell's Teapot: Does it Hold Water?

Here is a famous passage from Bertrand Russell's Is There a God?

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

One thing Russell is doing in this passage is making an unexceptionable point about burden of proof and/or the ad ignorantiam fallacy. If the existence of X has not been disproven, it does not follow that X exists, or even that it is reasonable to believe that X exists. So if anyone were to affirm the existence of something like Russell's celestial teapot or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, then the onus probandi would be on him to support his outlandish claims. The burden of proof would not rest on those who deny or dismiss such claims.

So far, so good. Russell is of course doing more than underscoring a couple of obvious points in the theory of argumentation. He is applying his points of logic to the God question. Here too I have no complaint. If the existence of God has not been disproven, it does not follow that God exists or even that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.

But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God. But perhaps we should distinguish between a strong and a weak reading of Russell's suggestion:

S. Just as we cannot have any reason to believe that an empirically undetectable celestial teapot exists, we cannot have any reason to believe that God exists.

W. Just as we do not have any reason to believe that a celestial teapot exists, we do not have any reason to believe that God exists.

Now it seems to me that both (S) and (W) are plainly false: we have all sorts of reasons for believing that God exists. Here Alvin Plantinga sketches about two dozen theistic arguments. Atheists will not find them compelling, of course, but that is irrelevant. The issue is whether a reasoned case can be made for theism, and the answer is in the affirmative. Belief in God and in Russell's teapot are therefore not on a par since there are no empirical or theoretical reasons for believing in his teapot.

Another suggestion embedded in the Russell passage is the notion that if God existed, he would be just another physical thing in the physical universe. But of course this has nothing to do with anything maintained by any sophisticated theist. God is a purely spiritual being.

Another problem with the teapot analogy is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being.

This is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve.