The stage is in darkness, with sombre mood music, then light rises . . .
Origenes, 226 in the Pregnancy thread:
<<Two desperate naturalists in a room.
A: “I feel completely desperate. There is no way we will ever be able to explain life and consciousness.”
B: “I feel the exact same way. The main issue is that we have nothing to work with. All we have is mindless particles in the void obeying mindless regularities. Starting from that, how can we possibly explain life, not to mention personhood, freedom, and rationality? There is simply no way forward.”
A: “Exactly right. Sometimes I feel like such a loser. The other day I heard that current science cannot even explain liquidity.”
B: “What did you just say?”
**POOF**>>
THE END.
Origenes: “The Emergence of Emergentism: A Play for Two Actors”
Thank you KF,
This is an honor. The first play I’ve ever written and I’m over the moon with it. It came to me out of nowhere, I must say. I simply cannot explain it. All I did was putting various parts of the discussion together, and next, unexpectedly, the play, somehow ‘emerged’, for lack of a better word.
KF added the setting and is absolutely right about it: starting with darkness, somber music, and then the dramatic rising of light …. it completes it.
– – –
p.s. IMHO the role of actor B is a real challenge for any actor. In particular the line ***What did you just say?*** must be communicated in such a way that the audience truly experiences the emergence of emergentism – Robert Downey Jr. comes to mind.
Bravo! Author! Author!
My Dinner With Alan
Andrew
And for the musical version, as sung by Dorothy and the Scarecrow (Strawman) from The Wizard Of Oz ,
“Mindless particles obeying mindless regularities”
It’s good, it’s very good. The conceptualisation is brilliant.
But “obeying” is perhaps not quite the word, as obedience suggests choice.
I can’t think of a better off the top of my head, “following” or “driven by” are no better . “Mindlessly obeying” has problems too.
“Mindless particles AND mindless regularities” damages the visual impact.
“Mindless particles randomly obeying mindless regularities.” Is superfluous.
Anyway, congratulations.
Well, never let it be said that I always take the moral high-ground and never descend to pettiness. So here we go:
Anti-naturalist: “There’s no naturalistic explanation for life and consciousness.”
Naturalist: “No definite answer, sure, but there’s been lots of progress in figuring out how life and consciousness fit into a naturalistic worldview.”
Anti-naturalist: “No, there isn’t. It can’t be done.”
Naturalist: “Sure, just look at these books and articles [provides list]”
Anti-naturalist: “Literature bluff! Literature bluff!”
Naturalist: “well, read it for yourself — or not. It’s not my job to educate you.”
PM1, you know that I took time to answer you point by point. KF
@PM1@7
“ No definite answer, sure, but there’s been lots of progress ”
Thomas Huxley, when installed President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, pronounced, “With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call “vital” [alive] may not, some day, be artificially brought together. ”
That was over 150 years ago; with very slight variations – three years, ten years, in our lifetime, soon, very soon now – is an echo-chamber regular, and only a manifestation of the triumph of forlorn hope over prolonged failure.
“How did life begin? We don’t know ….. BUT we DO know that it was the result of chemical accidents though we can’t demonstrate even the first tiny step because we still don’t know what the first step was.”
Is this the epitaph of arguments for “Intelligent Design”? Scientists can’t produce an evidenced explanation for the initial appearance of life on Earth, therefore ID must be true by default?
I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to wait for some positive scientific, testable hypothesis to emerge from the ID movement. Let’s see if I live long enough to see it.
Alan Fox asks, “Is this the epitaph of arguments for “Intelligent Design”?”,,,
Well Alan, the proper word is not “epitaph” but “prologue”. But since you, self-admittedly, are not in control of the words you are writing, well then, I can hardly fault you, (or PM1), for constantly making such nonsensical arguments.
As to a positive testable hypothesis, well AF, whereas Darwinian evolution has no rigid falsification criteria that would demarcate it as a scientific theory, and not a ‘metaphysical research program’, and/or a pseudoscience,
,,, whereas Darwinian evolution has no rigid falsification criteria that would demarcate it as a scientific theory, and not a ‘metaphysical research program’, and/or a pseudoscience, Intelligent Design does have a rigid falsification criteria so as to demarcate itself a testable scientific theory. In fact there is currently up to a 10 million dollar prize being offered for the first person that can “Show an example of Information that doesn’t come from a mind. All you need is one.”
,,, i.e. Honestly admitting that natural processes can’t create information is just the very first step, i.e. the ‘prologue’, to the technological fruits that are to come to man from advances in systems biology, biomimetics, etc..,
Quote and Verse:
@11
I’d still love to see how you reconcile Popper and Bacon, since Popper developed falsificationism precisely in order to do science without induction. If you think that science involves induction, then what do you need falsification for?
To be fair, I think there are really interesting reasons why Popper is the favorite philosopher of science among practicing scientists, even though there are glaring philosophical problems with his philosophy of science. My surmise is that most scientists like Popper because Popper shares what most scientists value: inspiration, creativity, a willingness to try out any idea, no matter how crazy, just to see if it works. And I’d bet that most scientists just don’t notice that his entire project is based upon rejecting induction in scientific reasoning — or if they do notice, they don’t care.
Lakatos showed (correctly, I think) that there’s no demarcation criterion for any scientific theory, not just evolutionary theory — but that there is no basis for ever demarcating science from pseudo-science. (This does not mean that “pseudoscience” is a useless concept, only that there is no unambiguous criterion that puts all scientific theories on one side and all pseudoscientific theories on the other.)
What I do like in Lakatos is his distinction between “progressive research programs” and “degenerating research programs”. I think this is a much more useful distinction than trying to solve the demarcation problem.
PM1, (generously assuming that you were in control of the words you just wrote, and that you are, therefore, capable of even being rational 🙂 ), the conflict between Popper and Bacon exists far more in your imagination than it does in the real world.
In fact, Popper, via his emphasis on falsifying evidence over and above just focusing on confirming evidence, used the inductive method far more precisely, in a ‘bottom-up’ inductive manner, to weed out a failed hypothesis. i.e. to ‘inductively’ weed out presuppositions that are wrong in a far more rigorous way.
i.e. Empirical evidence, and inductively falsifying wrong presuppositions in a ‘bottom-up manner, still plays a central role in Popper’s reasoning, it is just that Popper held the inductive method can be abused, and indeed has been abused, particularly by naturalists, (and/or Marxists), especially when they look only for examples that confirm their naturalistic hypothesis, and ignore all evidence that falsifies it.
In short, Popper’s supposed rejection of the general method of induction was sparked by Naturalistic dogmatism which refused to consider any falsifying evidence, and only considered evidence that might lend support. (which sounds exactly what we are currently going through with Atheistic Naturalism and Darwinism)
Moreover PM1, I can see why you yourself would try to diss falsification. There is simply no empirical evidence that is ever allowed to falsify Darwinian evolution.
And thus, since Darwinian evolution is beyond empirical reproach, then obviously “it does not speak of reality”
Quote and Verse:
Of supplemental note,
@13
Sorry, but that’s not correct. Induction has nothing at all to do with weeding out failed hypotheses. Popper thinks that a hypothesis must be rejected if even a single observation is incompatible with it. That is completely different from induction, where we generalize over multiple observations.
Popper’s falsificationism is built upon the following truth of deductive (not inductive) logic.
The following is a logically invalid argument
But Popper thinks that that’s how inductive reasoning works, in the following way. The inductivist is someone who reasons:
Popper thinks that the inductivist is making a logically invalid argument because the two argument schemas are the same.
By contrast, the following is logically valid:
Popper uses this to reconstruct scientific reasoning as:
and that is the logical basis of falsificationism. All the hard work of science goes into designing an experiment careful enough to show that H logically entails O, so that even a single failure to observe O is sufficient to reject H. No induction required.
From which it follows, as Popper makes very clear, that it is not logically possible to ever confirm a scientific hypotheses. All hypotheses fall into one of three categories: falsified, not yet falsified, and not even falsifiable.
Popper’s complaint against Marxism and psychoanalysis was not that they were false or nonsense, but they were not genuine sciences — and that was because (he thought) every objection to them was dismissed by using that theory. Criticisms of Marxism were dismissed as mere ideology that disguises class interest; criticisms of psychoanalysis were dismissed as unresolved Oedipal issues. So the problem, he thought, is that Marxists and psychoanalysts were not even able to recognize the sheer possibility that their theories could be mistaken, because they desperately needed to be right, no matter what. And that obstinate clinging to being right, no matter what, is the exact opposite of a scientific attitude.
PM1, perhaps if you were, via your free will, to exert more control of your thoughts and words, instead of just letting the random jostling of atoms in your brain dictate your thoughts and words for you, your arguments for atheistic naturalism might be more persuasive to others here on UD?? Just a suggestion! 🙂 (And also generously assuming that you have the will necessary to change your actions)
You are, of course, and as usual, wrong. Inductive reasoning is indeed included in the ‘deductive’ feedback loop you’ve indicated.
1. If hypothesis H were the case, that would entail observation O.
2. But we do not observe O.
3. Therefore, H is not the case.
i.e. As you yourself indicated in your deductive argument, “bottom up” empirical evidence and/or observation, via step 2, is given ‘inductive’, i.e. ‘bottom-up’, authority to provide feedback and falsify a deductive premise.
And again, Darwinists and/or Atheistic Naturalists are notorious for denying empirical evidence any ‘inductive feedback’ authority to falsify their premise of atheistic naturalism. And as such, that makes atheistic naturalism profoundly unscientific and irrational.
Of related note to Atheistic Naturalists denying empirical evidence any ‘inductive feedback’ authority to falsify their premise of atheistic naturalism.
Here are a few falsifications of Darwin’s theory that Darwinists simply ignore as if they do not matter,
@14
Making a single observation is not the same as inductive reasoning, which involves generalizing over multiple instances. Observations must have epistemic authority in order to count as reasons for falsifying a hypothesis, but they aren’t premises or conclusions in an inductive argument.
(By the way, there’s no such thing as a deductive premise or inductive premise: what makes an argument inductive or deductive is the form of the argument, not the content of the individual premises.)
PM1, again, your arguments might be far more persuasive to people here on UD if you were actually in control of your thoughts and you had the capacity to think rationally. Again, just a suggestion. Do with the suggestion what you will, (that is if ‘you’ can will yourself to do differently than what the random jostling of atoms of your brain tell you to do) 🙂
Again, “you’, (again assuming “you” exist as a real person and not as a neuronal illusion), are of course, and as usual, wrong.
In your example, there is indeed an inductive ‘bottom-up’ feedback loop of empirical observation, “O”, that is given the authority to falsify premise “H” in the deductive argument. “You” saying that, “Making a single observation is not the same as inductive reasoning, which involves generalizing over multiple instances”, that claim from you is just a plain, and simple, flat out lie on your part (which is becoming a recurring theme with you), and that lie from you certainly does not negate the fact that a bottom up inductive inference is certainly being made from “O” to falsify the general claim “H”.,,, Having multiple instance of empirical observations “O” that, in a ‘bottom-up’ fashion, falsify the general claim “H” only makes the inductive inference that “H” is false more secure. And indeed, in the real world of empirical science, and for the vast majority of times, it takes multiple instances of “H” being experimentally falsified by “O” to completely invalidate “H” as a claim.
And having worked in the chemical industry for years, trouble-shooting and fixing various problems in chemical plants, I can most certainly tell you that ‘bottom-up’ empirical falsification was our bread and butter for sorting through various possible causes for a problem in order to find the correct cause of the problem and fix it. i.e. We were constantly ‘reasoning up’, in a ‘bottom-up’ inductive fashion, from empirical observation in order to sort through various possible causes of a problem in order to eliminate the wrong ones and find the right cause of the problem.
PM1:
Popper wrote:
My concern with this is that Popper’s claim is itself well within the realm of science. IOW the claim itself is a scientific theory/hypothesis.
So, we can (and must) apply it to itself, thus:
1. Scientific theories can never be ‘justified’, or verified.
2. [“Scientific theories can never be ‘justified’, or verified”] is a scientific theory.
From (1) and (2)
3. [“Scientific theories can never be ‘justified’, or verified”] can never be ‘justified’, or verified.
More Popper:
So, Popper is saying: universal statements about reality have no logical justification and are not genuine statements.
However, this statement is itself a universal statement about reality. So, It can (again) be applied to itself, and commit suicide. That is, it follows that the statement itself has no logical justification and is not a genuine statement …
For me this is typically Popper, a few years back I found dozens of statements by him to be self-referentially incoherent. I’m quite sure I have posted them on this forum, but I cannot find that particular post.
Thanks for pointing out Popper’s ‘philosophical overreach’ Origenes. I had an inkling of it, but I did not know just how bad his overreach actually was.
As to this one self-refuting claim in particular, “Scientific theories can never be ‘justified’, or verified. (p.317)” [Popper ‘The logic of Scientific Discovery’]
And we can even include this following claim from Popper to falsify that preceding claim that he made,, i.e.,,, “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
And from that we get,
Moreover, the reason I take exception to Popper’s blanket claim that “Scientific theories can never be ‘justified’, or verified”” is that Special Relativity, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics have all been through nothing less than ‘experimental hell’. And yet those mathematical theories have come through ‘experimental hell’ unscathed. i.e. Although Herculean experimental efforts have been made trying to find any discrepancy between what the mathematics of those theories predict, and what we experimentally observe, there is simply no discrepancy to be found in the mathematical predictions of the theories and the observations of our experiments. (with the caveat, of course, being, as far as measurement accuracy will allow us to tell)
These are just crazy, almost incomprehensible, levels of experimental verification.
To give a glimpse of just how insanely precise the measurement of 120 standard deviations is for ‘Leggett’s Inequality’,,, (which is the main line of experiments from quantum mechanics that have falsified “realism”,,, Of note:”realism’ is the belief that an objective reality exist apart from our ‘measurement and/or observation’ of it))
Again, 120 standard deviations for Leggett’s inequality, is just a crazy, almost incomprehensible, level of experimental verification.
So thus my objection to Popper’s blanket claim, “Scientific theories can never be ‘justified’, or verified” is that, (besides being a self-refuting statement), “by golly, special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics” have all been through ‘experimental hell’, and their mathematical predictions have been experimentally verified’ to insane levels of precision, and therefore we certainly are ‘justified’ in believing that they are accurate mathematical descriptions of reality.And until someone/anyone, can find any discrepancy in the theories, the belief that we now have, (what I have termed), ‘platonically perfect’ mathematical descriptions of the universe is a well ‘justified’ belief.
Bornagain77 @
I agree with your analysis.
It seems to me that Popper’s claim can be paraphrased as: “we can never be certain about anything”, which applied to itself is, of course, a full-blown self-referentially incoherent statement.
People often wrongly assume they occupy a position independent of what they are talking about. We have both witnessed some extreme examples of this phenomenon in the past couple of days. E.g. how can someone claim that he doesn’t **think** that rationality requires control over his thoughts? How does that not lead to a ‘self-referentially incoherent experience’?
BTW I found one ‘Popper-makes-self-referentially-incoherent-statements-post‘, this one contains just 8 statements; there must be other posts on this subject.
Another engineer! One more data point for my hypothesis. 😉
AF: “One more data point for my hypothesis.”
Correction, one more data point for your “niche’s” hypothesis.
In other news, AF’s ‘niche’ also holds to the hypothesis that Alan Fox does not actually exist as a real person, but that AF is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’. (Which is, needless to say, bad news for Alan Fox).
@ Phil
I’ve just checked and I’m alive and well, comfortably ensconced in my self-designed and constructed niche.
Does Phil agree with Stephen Pinker? Startling? More like obvious, I would say.
Phil asked previously:
To which I replied:
Yes, sort of, though I don’t know…
To help Phil, let me expand. I don’t know how life got started on this planet, but I am convinced all existant and extinct life we know of share a common ancestor. The adaptation to available niches led to the diversity of life and to the appearance of humans. Of course I don’t know every detail of the process. Nor do I know how tightly we are bound by our physical make-up that makes us human. I reject strict determinance and I am convinced humans have the constrained ability to make choices. Part of that constraint stems from our physical make-up such as our cognitive capacity which are products of an evolutionary pathway. Hence “sort of”.
Alan Fox tries to have his cake and eat it to,
AF: “I’ve just checked and I’m alive and well, comfortably ensconced in my self-designed and constructed niche.”
I know that you exist as a real person, and you most definitely know that you exist as a real person. In fact, the fact that you really do exist as a real person is the most certain thing that you can possibly know about reality, (Descartes). But alas, your worldview of Atheistic Naturalism itself is what cannot possibly ground your existence as a real person. Much less, since Atheistic Naturalism denies the existence of agent causality, and/or free will, can your Atheistic worldview possibly ground you ‘self-designing’ your own “constructed niche”. i.e. Your beef is with your Atheistic worldview, not with me. I know that you exist and that you, as a causal agent, bring about ‘intelligent’ effects in the world that have no possible naturalistic explanation. Every single sentence that you write is undeniable evidence that you are a real person who, via your free will, brings about real, and intelligent, effects in the world.
You can try, and indeed you have tried, to trivially rationalize, and/or ‘hand-wave’, these fatal problems away as if they are no big deal for your worldview of Atheistic Naturalism, yet these ‘problems’, no matter how much you may try to ignore them, and/or rationalize them away, are catastrophically fatal for your worldview. And if you are to maintain a shred of intellectual honesty, even a shred of intellectual sanity, you are forced, (indeed you should be more than willing), to give up the sheer insanity inherent in your ‘chosen’ worldview of Atheistic Naturalism and adopt a worldview that can reasonably, and sanely, ground your existence as a real person who brings about real effects in the world. i.e. Ground your existence as a real person who, via their free will and/or agent causality, has the capacity to bring about about real, and intelligent, effects in the world.
Might I suggest Judeo-Christian Theism as an alternate, and sane, worldview that can ground your existence as a real person who, via your free will, brings about real, and intelligent, effects in the world?
Verse:
Bornagain @28, Alan Fox
One’s existence must necessarily be one’s most certain truth. For any person, the existence of “I” cannot be doubted in principle, precisely because, there is no position a person can occupy independent from “I”. The “I” is no object between objects.
Everything external to the “I” can be doubted, without being self-referentially incoherent. Life on earth can be thought of as an “illusion”; a dream.
One cannot draw a circle around “I” and proceed with arrogating oneself a position outside the circle and judge the existence of “I”. There is no outside of the circle, one does not have an ontological right to assume a position independent of the “I”.
Everything external to the “I” can be doubted, without being self-referentially incoherent. To think that solipsism is true is anything but self-referentially incoherent. Life on earth can be coherently thought of as an illusion, it could be part of a dream.
There is but one thing which cannot possibly be an illusion: the “I”.
@19
I don’t think there’s any danger of self-referential incoherence in Popper. He is making claims about science, not making a scientific claim. (Which is not to say that scientists themselves can’t or don’t also make claims about science.)
There are some good reasons for rejecting Popper’s philosophy of science (as Bornagain77 notes with his remarks about the importance of induction in scientific practice), but I don’t think that the allegation of self-referential incoherence is one of them.
What I like in Popper is his admiration for the epistemic virtues of good scientific practice: creativity, tenacity, a willingness to allow the universe to prove that you are mistaken about your most cherished beliefs. I just think he was mistaken to reject the importance of induction. He took Hume’s problem of induction too seriously.
Rather, I think that good scientific practice requires an interdependence between abduction, deduction, and induction: abduction for recognizing the explanatory role that a hypothesis needs to play, deduction for testing those hypotheses as rigorously as possible, and induction for determining the degree to which to the data confirm the hypothesis.
A bit off-topic, but some of you might be interested in this book about how we came up with the very idea of such a thing as “the scientific method”. A major figure in this history is William Whewell, a British polymath who coined, among other words, the English word “scientist”. (Prior to this, scientists were called “men of science” or “natural philosophers.”)
“I don’t think there’s any danger of self-referential incoherence in Popper.”
Boldly proclaims the person who also claims that he has no control over his own thoughts
i.e. Why in blue blazes should anyone take you seriously PM1? You are not in control of what you are saying! 🙂
@31
Of course I’m in control of what I’m saying, especially when writing, when one has the luxury of erasing and rewriting an inapposite turn of phrase.
And control of what one says is exactly what I asserted we do have, as you would know if you were follow a line of thought beyond a single quotable sentence.
Self-control consists precisely in the ability to decide whether or not to say what one thinks, and if so, how to say it — as well as in the ability to decide whether or not to act on one’s desires, and if so, how to do so.
I know it’s quite crucial to your worldview that naturalists cannot endorse agent causation, but since I am a naturalist who does endorse agent causation (see here), you might consider whether you understand naturalism as well as you think you do.
Well PM1, I don’t blame you for backtracking on your quoted statement, and now claiming you are an atheistic naturalist who endorses agent causation. (after all, It is par for the course for atheists to believe in contradictory things, indeed an atheist must believe in contradictory things if he is to live his life with any semblance of sanity),
But alas, the only way atheistic naturalism can be made compatible with agent causation, and/or free will, is if Baron Munchausen really does have the ability to pulls himself free out of a swamp by his own pigtail.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pull_oneself_up_by_one%27s_bootstraps
i.e. It just ain’t gonna happen no matter how much you may hope/imagine, it to happen. You are simply up to your neck in the swampy morass of insane atheistic metaphysics and no amount of pulling on your own pigtail is ever going to free you from catastrophic epistemological failure inherent therein.
Of supplemental note, even leading atheists have honestly admitted that it is impossible for them to live their lives as if they do not have free will,
PM1 @
Don’t just assume based on authority. Observe and draw your own conclusions.
Popper’s central thesis and it is obviously self-referentially incoherent, but if you cannot decide for yourself, don’t take it from me, here is N. Dykes:
More self-referentially incoherent stuff from Popper :
Follow-up #34
Origenes/29
If it were found to be possible for self-awareness to emerge from a sufficiently complex computer simulation then it might be possible that we are no more than avatars running on some vast cosmic computational system. In that case, how “real” can we say that “I” is? How certain is our “knowledge” of self?
Origenes/34
Does Popper specifically exclude his own proposition? If not then the claim that all knowledge is conjectural can include itself without raising a contradiction. In effect, what Popper is claiming is that, while we can have greater confidence in the truth of some propositions rather than others, in no case does that confidence rise to a justifiable level of absolute certainty.
Seversky:
So, Seversky, you are saying: “we cannot be certain about any proposition”, right? It seems to mean the same thing as Popper’s “all knowledge remains conjectural.”
Here we go again:
1. We cannot be certain about any proposition.
2. [“We cannot be certain about any proposition”] is a proposition (universal & affirmative BTW).
3. We cannot be certain about [“We cannot be certain about any proposition”].
– – – –
These attempts come awfully close to the mother of all self-contradictory statements: “true statements do not exist” or “truth does not exist.” One is well-advised to stay as far away as possible from that whopper.
Seversky, 36@
One would still be unable to doubt one’s existence. Nothing can change that.
A question for you:
Suppose your scenario, suppose that one day a computer acts on its own accord. Suppose it creates new code that cannot be traced back to a programmer. What would be the materialistic/physical explanation for that? What would be identified as the physical source of the new code?
PM1:
This is actually a strawman on Newton (and Locke etc). Here is Newton in Opticks, Query 31.
It is better to see this as an argument on empirical support, backed by observed reliability, driven by the underlying thesis of a generally orderly, in key part intelligible world. That, as you know, comes from the Judaeo-Christian worldview that God holds all things together by his word of power. Hence, laws of nature.
Obviously, Newton and others are open to correction and recognise that results are subject to such further observations.
Warrant, to be knowledge in the commonly used sense, does not have to be certain, just well founded and reliable. I have described this as weak form/sense knowledge. The kind we have from history, courts, serious news reporting, medicine, common sense, science.
Warranted, credibly true (and so, reliable) belief.
Knowledge, after all, is a term from ordinary usage, and it is a common, widespread phenomenon. The sort of tightened claims I have seen, turn it into a rare phenomenon. That difference is telling, these are distinct phenomena.
KF
PS, Dallas Willard:
Sev:
Thus, self referential and self defeating.
What is warranted is to claim that weak sense knowledge, though tested and reliable, is in principle generally defeasible. That is, it is an act of supported belief. However, there are some things that are utterly certain, especially the self evident.
It is also warranted to say, we have had many things once widely thought to be pretty certain knowledge, corrected. Newtonian dynamics is case no 1.
We walk by faith and not by sight, indeed.
KF
Seversky@ // follow-up #39
Cogito, “I do something, therefore, I exist”, cannot be doubted, but it does not provide us with a defined knowledge of “I” and/or existence.
Surely, “what is consciousness?”, “what is being?” are still questions to be answered. So, does one know what one is talking about when one concludes “I exist”? Perhaps that is your larger point here.
I would say that Descartes’ argument functions because the terms it uses are general, “wide enough” to encompass all possible coherent definitions of “I” and “existence.” Whatever “I” precisely is, whatever “do something” precisely is, whatever “existence” precisely is, the argument holds.
The terms are like icebergs and although we cannot see the (larger) parts below the water line, we still know that we must be right.
@34
The paper by Dykes is clearly argued and it suggests that Popper’s critical rationalism depends upon assumptions he inherits from Hume and from Kant. And I agree with Dykes that those assumptions are questionable — if one were to reject those starting-points, Popper’s critical rationalism is much harder to defend. But, Dykes doesn’t do much to justify his preferred starting-point, either.
I agree with Dykes that if one assumes an ontology in which there are things with essences and those things endure over time, then Hume’s riddle of induction just disappears. Hume’s riddle of induction depends upon an ontology of separate, discrete events, where all connections between them are only psychological projections. (Kant basically shares the same underlying ontology of sense-impressions: they are separate unconnected events and all connections between them are a result of the mind imposing order on sensory chaos.)
That said, I don’t share Dykes’s assurance that it’s just obvious that a thing-ontology is true and an event-ontology is false. I think that one would still need an argument for why we ought to prefer an ontology of things over an ontology of events, and then use that to motivate a critique of Hume and Kant.
I’m no expert on Popper, so I’ll leave aside whether Dykes is right to say that Popper depends on Hume and Kant. But for a counter-point to Dykes, I did find this: A Refutation of Nicholas Dykes on Karl Popper. Might be worth your time.
I suspect that Dykes misses Popper’s point when he says that Marxism and psychoanalysis were not irrefutable but were decisively refuted (pp 12-13). When Popper says that Marxism and psychoanalysis are pseudosciences, he’s talking about the attitude held by the advocates of those doctrines. As Popper sees it, the real problem with Marxists and Freudians is that they are unable to imagine ever being wrong. That is, for Popper, the opposite of the proper scientific attitude: a scientist is always inviting reality to prove them wrong, and will do everything they can do discard their own favorite hypotheses.
It’s surely no inconsistency for Popper to have held that Marxism was at one point a science because Marxists had regarded their hypotheses as tentative conjectures that could be tested against reality, and that Marxism ceased to be a science when the propositions of Marx and Engels became self-confirming dogma.
PM1, of course one can always manufacture an invitation to the grand delusion thesis and say, prove me wrong. The problem is not with the power of assertion it is one of the roots of the hard question nature of philosophy, self-referentiality. We exist, undeniably; by memory and observation, we are going concern entities (of finite lifespan). We are capable of reasoning, and anything that casts hyperskeptical doubt on that is self referential. Which is precisely where we are with this case. The argument would “prove” too much, undermining reason thus the arguer from Hume forward to Popper et al. Skepticism, especially in hyper forms, of course, is an inferior good substitute for due prudence. Which last would reply, any claim that asserts, implies or opens the door to grand delusion may be set aside as self referentially absurd thus self defeating. There is no reason to dismiss distinct identity (foundational to logic), or the stability or continuity of beings with core characteristics. In that context, it is unsurprising to see patterns that are sufficiently consistent to be taken as marks of such characteristics. For instance, in human computer arithmetic techniques, patterns of results from adding, multiplying etc are taken advantage of to greatly speed up and enhance reliability of arithmetic results. That is how my late dad, was able to add three columns of decimal digits to any length, with sufficient speed and reliability that he would habitually mentally cross check calculators. Similarly, there is no good reason to arbitrarily doubt the reliability of the day-night cycle, the seasons, that unsupported heavy objects near Earth’s surface fall at 9.8 N/kg initial acceleration, that this lets us weigh the Earth, or that Stars fall into the Hertzsprung-Russell pattern, etc. Yes, we cannot prove to arbitrarily high absoluteness, but we cannot live by such hyperskepticism. We cannot presume food and water poison unless absolutely proved otherwise, and much more. And even the concept poison implies stable characteristics. KF
@44
I would agree up to this point: Hume, whom I more than admire, is very close to what is called in Buddhism “the two truths doctrine”: there is the conventional reality, in which there are both stable and enduring objects, with synchronic and diachronic identity and definite physical properties and stable and enduring selves, with synchronic and diachronic identity and definite mental properties. But there is also ultimate reality, which has neither objects nor subjects, nothing has identity, and there are no properties. We live in conventional reality, but enlightenment consists partly in understanding that conventional reality is not absolute reality.
As my nom de plume suggests, I find skepticism quite fascinating, especially in the demanding version that has become known as the Dilemma of the Criterion. Overcoming it is one of the most — if not the most — intellectually demanding problems of Western philosophy. It’s been argued that Hegel succeeded, and that Hegel’s solution was given a less metaphysically extravagant reformulation by Peirce. I think that’s basically right.
I don’t know how we got off on this tangent. Anyway, back to making sense of emergentism!
PM1, I have been busy elsewhere. I suggest, distinct identity is the pivot of rationality, without which we cannot even have language much less argument. At logic of being level, it is tied to what it is to be an X, i.e. any particular possible world W is marked out from its typical quite near neighbour W’ by some A such that W – A = W’ and thus we have that there are in common characteristics and distinguishing ones for specific worlds. These being of course sufficiently complete clusters of coherent propositions describing how this or another world is, might be etc. From this, elsewhere I drew out 0, 1, 2 then by von Neumann N, thence Z,Q,R,C,R* etc, leading to universal power of core math, answering Wigner. Distinct identity then has ontological significance for worlds, thoughts and beings. The attempt to sideline it is headed in the self referentially self defeating direction, where yes non contradiction and excluded middle are close corollaries. In particular, a vast infinity of distinct abstract entities and relationships tied to structure and quantity are therefore necessarily present and woven into the fabric of any possible world. Further, the general denial of objective knowledge is itself an objective knowledge claim, is self referential and is self defeating. Instead, that in any world, error is possible, is actual, is itself an undeniable proposition. It is known to incorrigible certainty. So the path is to acknowledge subjective vs objective vs absolute, and to reckon that knowledge is a property of the people and comes in similar degrees. So, weak sense knowledge is warranted [that’s about Gettier etc], credibly true — so, reliable — belief. Reliable is key, and so are warrant and credibility. This defeasible weak sense is true about common sense, perception of ourselves and our orientation as well as the world we inhabit, serious thought, good newspaper reporting, education, courts, history, policy making, medicine, science etc. With Godel and co, even math. For some few items, knowledge becomes certain beyond correction, e.g. self evident first truths. But a worldview cannot be built up from such, they serve as sound plumb line tests. KF
PM1 @45
Skepticism as a philosophy always looked like a self-contradictory project to me, only expressable in self-contradictory statements like “it is not possible to arrive at knowledge” or even worse “true statements do not exist.”
Not sure why it is still a thing, especially after Descartes undeniably showed that there is at least one thing immune to skeptical undermining — see also my post here.
@47
The point of Skepticism is to liberate us from the need to know the ultimate truth of things — to accept that being guided by “the appearances” is sufficient for human happiness. On the Skeptical view, the need to be right about things is a major cause of suffering, conflict, and violence. Overcoming that need, by recognizing that it’s not possible for anyone to know the truth about the world, would make us more contented, tolerant, and peaceable.
Or so that the Skeptics would us believe. I’m certainly not persuaded — I just think that the Skepticism has gotten a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve.
Descartes’s cogito argument — which he borrowed from Augustine, by the way — at most shows the impossibility of doubting that one is conscious. Some philosophers have argued that he was misled by grammar when he reasoned from “thinking is observed” to “therefore something must exist which is doing that thinking, a thinking thing”.
But the real question is whether Descartes could reason without circularity from the sheer awareness of having thoughts to any claims about the nature of mind-independent reality.
PM1 @ 48
The claim, as you formulated it, “it’s not possible for anyone to know the truth about the world” is itself a truth about the world, so what we have here is once again a case of self-contradiction. As I said, skepticism is only expressible in self-contradictory statements.
My challenge to you: formulate the claim of skepticism without raising self-contradiction. Formulate that truth does not exist, without making a truth statement. Give it your best.
Suppose you are right, that spells the end of any ‘ambitious’ skepticism, right?
Stanford article on “Pyrrhonian Skepticism”:
Allow me to answer this question:
(1.) Suspension of judgment is the only justified attitude with respect to ANY proposition p.
(2.) (1.) is itself a proposition.
From (1.) and (2.)
(3.) Suspension of judgment is the only justified attitude with respect to (1.)
What does conclusion (3.) mean? It means that we do not know whether or not “Suspension of judgment is the only justified attitude with respect to any proposition p” is true. So, applied to itself, proposition (1.) undercuts itself. It is clearly a self-contradictory statement.
The Stanford article goes on to argue that the proposition “the only justified attitude with respect to the proposition that p is suspension of judgment” is not self-contradictory. I agree with this, of course. Surely, it might be the case that suspension of judgment is the justified attitude towards some particular proposition. However, the claim becomes self-contradictory when it is about ANY proposition (which includes itself).
So, what is the Stanford article doing here? I really don’t know. Perhaps someone can explain.
– – – –
More Stanford:
At first glance (8.) is clearly a self-contradictory statement. But perhaps there is a reason that it cannot be applied to itself? Unwittingly the Stanford article assures us that it can be applied to itself:
OK! It applies to everything! Well, let’s apply it to itself then:
(1.) There are no justified beliefs.
(2.) (1.) is itself a belief.
From (1.) and (2.)
(3.) (1.) is not a justified belief.
What does (3.) mean? It means that it is not justified to hold the belief that there are no justified beliefs. It follows that there are justified beliefs.
Conclusion: ‘Agrippa’s trilemma’ is perfectly self-refuting nonsense … The Stanford article somehow fails to notice this obvious fact.
@49 and @50
I’m no expert in Skepticism (or anything else, really), but based upon my limited reading in the area, here’s a response. Bear in mind please that I’m not trying to defend Skepticism, only explain why I think it’s really fascinating.
The Dilemma of the Criterion goes something like this: consider any doctrine that purports to contain true claims about the ultimate nature of reality. What justifies this doctrine, such that it would be rational to accept it? Suppose that we need some criterion or standard by which to evaluate this doctrine. If the criterion is itself part of the doctrine, then we’re begging the question. If the criterion is not part of the doctrine, then either it is merely arbitrary or we can ask the question as to what justifies that criterion. Then it would be some other doctrine that justifies the criterion, and we can raise the question of what other criterion justifies that other doctrine that justifies the first criterion, etc.
One philosopher who puts this dilemma to great effect is Michel de Montaigne in his Apology for Raymond Sebond. Montaigne argues that any claim from a great philosopher of antiquity can be opposed with another claim from an equally great philosopher. We have (he claims) no criteria that would allow us to decide between Platonic idealism, Epicurean atomism, or Stoic pantheism, nor are we entitled to the claims about our own rational powers that would ground Scholastic rational theology.
Montaigne concludes with fideism: the Christian should accept the teachings of the Church based on faith alone, since reason cannot help us. A century later, Hume would use very similar arguments to come to an anti-fideist conclusion.
So, in response to this:
The Skeptic claims that it is not possible to justify any doctrine about the ultimate nature of reality. Since that claim is not itself about the ultimate nature of reality, it is not self-contradictory.
PM1@51
There is a problem with your claim: how do you know that ‘The Dilemma of the Criterion’ is not about the ultimate nature of reality? In order to make that claim coherently, in order to know what you are talking about, you must hold some belief/doctrine about the ultimate nature of reality, which informs you that ‘The Dilemma of the Criterion’ has no bearing on it. However, according to skepticism, no doctrine about the ultimate nature of reality is justified. According to skepticism, there is no way of knowing what the ultimate nature of reality is, so, there is no way to ascertain which proposition is about it and which is not.
Your claim “‘The Dilemma of the Criterion’ is not about the ultimate nature of reality” tells us something about the ultimate nature of reality and is therefore a claim about the ultimate nature of reality. A claim that, according to Skepticism, cannot be justified.
You draw a closed circle around ‘doctrines about the ultimate nature of reality’, and next you arrogate to yourself a position outside of this circle by which you can judge those doctrines. But how do you justify the presumed epistemic right to be outside of this circle? You cannot.
– – – – –
Edit:
It just occurred to me that an even more direct response is available:
The claim “it is not possible to justify any doctrine about the ultimate nature of reality” tells us something about the ultimate nature of reality. It tells us that the ultimate nature of reality is such that no justified doctrine about is possible.
Therefore it is incoherent to state that the skeptic’s claim is not about the ultimate nature of reality.
@52
As I understand it, the dilemma of the criterion is about what we say about the ultimate nature of reality, not about the ultimate nature of reality itself. It is a second-order claim, not a first-order claim.
It’s comparable to the difference between “the cat is on the mat” and “the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ is true”: the first sentence is about a state of affairs in the world, and the second sentence is about the first sentence.
Likewise, the dilemma of the criterion takes metaphysical doctrines as its object and is making a claim about them — that none of them can be justified — which is different from making a claim of metaphysics.
I don’t know if this is sufficient to refute the charge of self-referential incoherence, but it seems like an important distinction to make.
PM1 @53
In the Stanford article, in particular concerning Pyrrhonian Skepticism, it is not stated anywhere that Skepticism restricts its focus to ‘doctrines about the ultimate nature of reality.’ On the contrary, it is stated that Pyrrhonian Skepticism is absolute and applies to any claim/proposition:
If true, it follows that Agrippa’s trilemma can rightly be applied to itself.
– – – –
Back to your statement:
If your statement is true, then the claim tells us exactly nothing about the ultimate nature of reality. However, the claim tells us, that the ultimate nature of reality is such that we cannot justify any doctrine about it. A first-order claim. Certainly, it can be argued that this does not tell us much about the ultimate nature of reality, but it undeniably tells us something.
Moreover, your statement presupposes a held justified doctrine about the ultimate nature of reality to ascertain that it is such that one cannot hold justified propositions about it. However, this contradicts the skeptic claim, as you defined it, that one cannot have justified doctrines about it.
@54
This would right if the Trilemma were itself a philosophical statement in the required sense. I don’t think that it is, because I think there’s a difference here.
The difference between “ordinary statements” and “philosophical statements” (as per the SEP) could be construed as a difference of scope. Ordinary statements about everyday objects and events as we practically perceive and manipulate them; philosophical statements are about everything. They are comprehensive.
If that’s right, then that’s compatible with my claim that the Skeptic is demonstrating the absence of justification for any metaphysical doctrines. Again, and this is crucial: the Skeptic is not saying, about ultimate reality, that no claim about it is justifiable. She is saying, about claims about ultimate reality, that none of those claims are justifiable.
In other words, here’s the issue. Are the following claims equivalent?
and
I can agree with you up to this point: Skepticism would be self-referentially incoherent if the two claims were equivalent or if the first entailed the second.
PM1@55
Again, SEP: “… it applies to philosophical positions as well as to ordinary propositions”
The Trilemma is a philosophical position, is it not? So, it follows that we can apply it to itself, right?
Again, according to SEP, the Trilemma applies to both kinds of statements.
I take it that, unlike SEP, you want skepticism to limit its scope to metaphysical doctrines.
To me, the statements are equivalent. At this point, the difference between a Skeptic and a Taoist is unclear to me.
– – – – –
edit: The claim “it is not possible to justify any claim about women” would tell us, that women are such that no claim about them is justified. IOW it is (also) a claim about women — and therefore self-contradictory.
The skeptic wants to criticize, but he doesn’t want to be criticized himself. We all make statements of belief, skeptics included. But the skeptic posits a closed circle in which no beliefs are justified. Yet at the same time, he arrogates to himself a position outside of this circle by which he can judge the beliefs of others, a move he denies to his opponents. Since the raison d’être of his thesis is that there is no outside of the circle, he does not have the epistemic right to assume a position independent of it, and so his belief about the unjustifiability of beliefs or reasoning is just as unjustifiable as those he criticizes. If the circle encloses all beliefs, if all beliefs are unjustifiable, he cannot judge between truth and falsity, since any such judgment would be just as unjustifiable as what it seeks to adjudicate. At no point can he step out of the circle to a transcendent standpoint that would allow him to reject some beliefs as tainted while remaining untainted himself.
Origenes, sobering point, worth headlining, so here goes. KF
@57
I really don’t think that’s at all true. You are erecting a massive castle out of our one line from the SEP entry. SEP entries are fine (I use them and recommend them all the time) for getting basic understanding of the issues. But they are really limited.
While I’m no expert, I have read Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne, and from those sources, I can say with some confidence that the Skeptic does not take the Dilemma of the Criterion to apply to all beliefs: it applies only to beliefs about “reality”, as distinct from “appearance”.
That is, the skeptic accepts the metaphysician’s distinction between “how things appear” and “how they really are” (a distinction that in Western phil goes back to Parmenides). The Skeptic’s project is to show that no account of reality, as distinct from appearance, is rationally defensible.
I think that your allegation that Skepticism is self-referentially incoherent rests on a pretty serious misunderstanding of what the Skeptic is really saying.
re 59: Yes. My contribution to the discussion. I’ve been on the receiving end of this misunderstanding of skepticism, so I appreciate what PM has to say.
“The Skeptic’s project is to show that no account of reality, as distinct from appearance, is rationally defensible.”
That sounds like an attempted account of reality.
Andrew
@61
Yes, that was Origenes’s mistake as well. The mistake rests on a conflation between claims about reality and claims about claims about reality.
The former is about how the world really is; the second is about what people say about how the world really is.
It seems like some people here are just really committed to not understanding a fairly basic distinction.
Understanding skepticism correctly is not the end of the world. As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not a skeptic myself. I just think it’s a really interesting concept to wrestle with.
PM1,
So the skeptic’s position is that you can’t rationally make a claim about reality.
So then why should or would I ever give skepticism a second of my time, since the rule breaks itself?
Andrew
@63
It doesn’t. Origenes is mistaken. I’ve tried explaining why but to no avail.
“It doesn’t.”
It does.
Andrew
@65
I’ve given an argument for why Origenes is wrong. My argument is based upon my having read Sextus Empiricus (Outline of Pyrrhonism), Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond) and Hume. Can you show where I’ve made a mistake? What’s your evidence? Have I misunderstood those texts?
PM1, if discussion of reality is reduced to discussion of appearances in general, that includes the skeptic’s claim. It is self referential and self defeating, as say Bradley pointed out for the Kantians. KF
PS, I clip:
PM1
A claim about an apple is not an apple itself. This is true because an apple is a thing among other things. However ‘reality’ is not a thing among other things. Reality encompasses all things, including “claims about reality” and “claims about claims about reality.”
IOW you cannot draw an enclosed circle around reality and next find “claims about reality” (or whatever) to be outside of that circle. Unlike with a drawn circle around an apple, here, in the case of ‘reality’, there is no outside of the circle.
@67
Once again: no. The skeptic begins by accepting the metaphysician’s distinction between “appearance” and “reality”. This distinction was accepted by all of the post-Parmenidean philosophers of antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, Epicurus, Epictetus, etc. They are disagreeing about what reality is, but they all accept the appearance/reality distinction.
The Skeptical point is that once we accept the appearance/reality distinction, then no account of reality can be rationally defended, because they all run into the Dilemma of the Criterion.
I’m not sure Bradley understands Kant, or Hegel’s critique of Kant.
It is no part of Kant’s view that we can know that noumena are unknowable. That’s clearly absurd and not at all what Kant actually says. Kant’s position is far more subtle than that, and much harder to refute (though I believe Hegel succeeds).
Kant’s claim is that we must restrict objectively valid judgments to what we can possibly experience. An objectively valid judgment is an assertion with a truth value (either true or false) that can be determined independently of what we hope, believe, desire, assume, etc. (The propositions of math and science are Kant’s exemplars of objectively valid judgments.)
The reason we need to do this, Kant says, is to salvage morality and faith from the onslaught of materialism (or what we today would call naturalism or scientism). If reality in itself conforms to the requirements of Newtonian physics, then free will is impossible and so is personal immortality.
So Kant restricts the whole domain of scientific investigation to how we experience the world, leaving open the conceivability of things in themselves being not determined by mechanistic physics, and thus allowing us the right to believe that we are free, that God exists, and that some aspect of ourselves survives our death.
As Kant sees it, if we had scientific knowledge of noumena, then we would be obligated to be Spinozists: deny a transcendent personal God, deny free will, and deny personal immortality.
Hegel’s brilliance is multi-faceted, and has nothing to do with accusing Kant of such a basic error as Bradley does.
Hegel first points out that assuming a total separation of being and thought (as Kant does) is just as dogmatic as assuming a total unity of being and thought. The unity of being and thought must itself be demonstrated, and that demonstration must proceed without any presuppositions at all. Hegel undertakes this in the Science of Logic, which is probably the most difficult text of the entire Western canon.
Hegel also points out that while Kant was right to argue for the distinction between intrinsic purposiveness and extrinsic purposiveness, Kant erred in assuming that the former can be no more than a subjective heuristic owing to our own limitations. Instead Hegel, who knew biology much better than Kant did (though Kant had a far better grasp of physics), argued for the reality of teleology and that nothing could be a rational being without being a rational animal. (One can see lots of Aristotle being deployed here.)
As Hegel sees it, Kant was right to claim that traditional metaphysics dogmatically assumed the unity of being and thought, he himself dogmatically neglected the possibility and necessity of demonstrating the unity of being and thought — beginning with a completely presuppositionless starting point.
And one of the consequences of that demonstration, Hegel thinks, is the reality of biological purposiveness and that purposiveness is required for rational cognition.
I also think that Hegel’s transformation of dialectics into the method for doing philosophy is also what’s necessary for overcoming the Dilemma of the Criterion, but that’s a separate issue.
@68
The problem here is that you’re not seeing how the skeptics are working within the conceptual space of ancient Greek and Roman thought. It is crucial to that whole way of thinking that there’s a distinction between “appearance” and “reality”: how things seem to be (opinion, doxa) and how things really are (truth, episteme).
All of the debates between the rival schools of antiquity were about different conceptions of how things are. Is reality atoms and void, as the Epicureans taught? Is realty transcendent ideas, as the Platonists taught? Do we perceive forms through our senses (Aristotle) or by turning away from the senses (Plato)? Is the world a result of chance and necessity (Epicureanism) or is there an intelligence at work in the world which constantly strives to bring about what is best for all (Stoicism)?
The Skeptic is accepting what the metaphysicians insist upon: the intelligibility of a distinction between appearance and reality. Their point is that no account of reality, as distinct from appearance, according to the metaphysicians’s own insistence, can be rationally defended.
This is why the Skeptic is not self-referentially incoherent: because all he’s doing to accepting what the metaphysician is demanding, and showing that metaphysical truth as the metaphysician understands it is impossible.
PM1 @
If they, as you say, disagree on what reality is, and they do, based on their different doctrines of reality, then they also hold different appearance/reality distinctions. How does that work for the skeptic? He does not hold any doctrine about reality, so on what basis does he make his particular appearance/reality distinction?
Kairosfocus @
I could not agree more.
Let’s hear it from the master himself …
Here, Kant does not say “we may very well be mistaken about how things are in themselves”, no, he is telling us, that we are definitely mistaken. That we cannot be right. Ever.
How can he possibly know this for sure? In order to know this for sure, he must have some transcendent position from which he can clearly see ‘how things appear’ and ‘how things really are.’ However, according to his own theory, whatever he believes reality to be he must be mistaken about it.
Again Bradley, quoted by Kairosfocus in #67:
A little trip down memory lane,
More Kant, more questions …
Kant speaks with absolute certainty about all of us and I am wondering why it is that Kant thinks that he knows other people so well. Somehow he knows for certain that we all have the same way of perceiving. He knows for certain that the same limits ”pertain to every human being”, but do “not necessarily pertain to every being”.
How does Kant know all that for a fact? Why is Kant so certain that no one can possibly perceive how things are in themselves? Did he check? Is he a mind reader of some sort? And if someone would be able to see things how they are in themselves, would Kant be able to confirm such? Why is how the other is ‘in himself’ not just as unknowable to Kant as the way objects in themselves are?
As to differentiating which beliefs we may have are true and which beliefs are false, it is interesting to note that Darwin’s theory itself undercuts our ability to differentiate between true beliefs and false beliefs. In short, as Nancy Pearcey explains “Evolutionary epistemology commits suicide.,” and “if Darwin’s theory is true, then it is not true.”
Or more succinctly
Of note: Postmodern philosophy, which is the bastard child of Darwin’s theory, denies the existence of objective truth altogether.
In the following article Nancy Pearcey explains the link between Darwinism and postmodern pragmatism
As Nancy Pearcey also touched upon, Darwin’s theory denies “the idea that there is a transcendent element in human nature, typically defined in terms of mind or soul or spirit, capable of knowing a transcendent truth or moral order.”,,,
Thus to sum up thus far, Darwin’s theory denies that we can know objective truth, whilst Darwinism’s bastard philosophical child of postmodernism ends up denying the existence of objective truth altogether.
And putting all that together, the primary reason why Darwinism, in the end, ends up denying the existence of objective truth altogether, and driving itself into catastrophic epistemological failure, is simply because objective truth is profoundly immaterial in its foundational essence.
For instance, mathematics itself, such as 2+2=4, which is obviously objectively true for all people, and not just relatively true to only individual people, is profoundly immaterial in its foundational nature. How much does 2+2+4 weigh? How fast does 2+2=4 go? Is 2+2+4 closer to Miami or Seattle? etc..
Such questions are nonsense because, obviously, the objective truth of 2+2+4 is profoundly immaterial, and we grasp its truthfulness via our immaterial minds. It simply could not be otherwise.
Alfred Wallace himself, co-discover of Natural Selection, considered our ability to do math to be proof, in and of itself, that we have souls.
Moreover, since our own immaterial minds came into being and are therefore contingent, and are not eternally existent, and yet we can discover eternal, and objective, mathematical truths with our immaterial minds, such as 2+2=4, then it necessarily follows that “there must exist an eternal mind in which these eternal (mathematical) truths reside.”
And please note that this argument for our immaterial minds, and for God, from the existence of mathematics is perfectly consistent with what we now know to be true about mathematics from Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Namely, that mathematics itself has a contingent existence and does not, in and of itself, have a necessary existence, i.e. “Math (can) not play the role of God as infinite and autonomous.”
Verse and Quote
Ba77,
Two concepts are at work here. The suppression and distortion of the truth, and the promotion of evolution to manipulate the public mind.
1) There are things that are true and will always be true. This includes human behavior as it applies to individuals and societies. There are healthy behaviors and unhealthy behaviors. The healthy behaviors include human cooperation in small groups and the larger society. Certain groups I call Total Strangers want to distort the perception of how humans should behave in the present. And they want to suppress good and healthy examples of human behavior on TV, in movies and the internet.
They also promote addiction. To drugs, to alcohol and other addictive behaviors. Of course, this is bad for individuals and society at large. We should resist addictive behaviors.
2) Evolution is not just pseudo-science, it is a force for promoting atheism. For promoting the idea that random events led to human beings. That is wrong and harmful to authentic human identity. To knowing who we really are. We were created by God. Our bodies were designed in all their complexity. We are far too complex to be explained by the discredited theory of evolution. The interactions within cells are far too complex, along with the instructions that regulate their function. We must realize this. You are not an accident. God who made all things, all life, made you.
@73
This is a really good question, and one that’s been much debated over the centuries. I know Kant fairly well, and I can say something about this. But I wouldn’t say that I’m entirely convinced by the Kantian view, myself.
You’re right that Kant’s distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” (his terms for the world as we experience it and how it really is in itself) must rest on some privileged position from which that distinction can be conceptualized.
So now we can ask: what is that position, and what justifies it?
Kant insists that his method is transcendental philosophy. This consists of (1) taking the most high-altitude, most fully general description of the world as we experience it and (2) inquiring into what kinds of cognitive capacities and incapacities that the mind must have in order for us to experience the world and ourselves as we manifestly do.
From this extremely high-altitude position, Kant observes two things:
1. Some concepts can be subsumed under more general concepts, the way that “spaniel” is subsumed under “dog,” and “dog” under “mammal”, etc. But some concepts aren’t subsumed under any others. These concepts are categories and include concepts as such “substance”, “cause”, “necessity”, “relation” etc. We cannot think without using at least one of the categories, and usually more than one. (There are twelve in all. More on this later!!)
2. Everything that we can perceive, remember, or imagine involves space (for physical things) and time (for physical and for mental things). We see something as having specific qualities and properties, but also as over there, seeing it now or as remembering it (now) as having been behind that other thing in the past.
That is, we experience the world (and ourselves) in terms of spatial relations and temporal successions. Even the mind’s own experience of itself is necessarily temporal, though non-spatial — we experience a temporal order to our thoughts, memories, feelings, desires, and hopes. (“I was thinking of nice it would be to go for a walk, then realized how cold it would be.”)
So, here’s the question: what justifies Kant’s position that we cannot know whether noumena (things in themselves) are spatial and/or temporal?
Now, I’m going to say something kind of wild and maybe bizarre, but I think it’s the most sympathetic way of reading Kant’s project: Kant introduces this claim as a hypothesis. He’s not saying “here’s how it is, folks”. He’s saying, “what if this were the case?”
OK, fine (one might say): but what justifies that hypothesis?
Here we need to take a step back and think about Kant’s entire project. He wants (he tells us in the introduction to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) to turn metaphysics into a science. This means (he thinks) making an experiment in metaphysics and seeing how well it works. His “metaphysical hypothesis” is: all that we know a priori of things is what we ourselves contribute to our experience of them.
Now, how we are we to determine if this work? What are the success conditions? Again, he tells us: the hypothesis is a success if it ends the conflict of reason against itself.
What is this conflict?
It is the fact that we are confronted with many different metaphysical systems, all of which are a priori (and so we cannot appeal to experience in order to decide between them) and all of which are internally consistent (and so we cannot appeal to logic to decide between them) and yet they are incompatible — they cannot all be true.
Kant claims that if all we can a priori of objects is what we contribute to our experience of them, and therefore can know nothing a priori of things in themselves, then we can put an end to the conflict of reason against itself.
And we can do that by showing that while mechanistic physics is exhaustively true of the world as we experience it, we are nevertheless permitted to believe that God exists, that the soul is immortal, and that the will is free. Hence we are permitted to deny atheism, determinism, and fatalism.
This ends the conflict of reason against itself, because it concedes that naturalism (as we would call it today) is true, but only for the world as we experience it, while also establishing that we are rationally entitled to affirm the core beliefs of Christian doctrine.
(Elsewhere Kant gives a different argument for why we are obligated to believe in God, personal immortality, and free will.)
This is a really good question! Kant certainly does not want to be doing anything like empirical psychology or anthropology, so it might seem that he’s making claims about what is universally and necessarily true about all human minds based on his own case.
But I don’t think it’s quite that bad: he is taking on board, and taking for granted, not just his own experiences but also what people generally tend to experience, as evident from everyday interactions with them but also (and especially) the sciences and mathematics.
I think that if someone were to claim that he knows what things in themselves are, he would say, “demonstrate this knowledge, and convince me.” That’s the attitude he took towards the mystic Swedenborg in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.
PM1 @78
Before we proceed, I would like to have clarity about the following:
To be clear, is it Kant’s position that we must be wrong about how things are in themselves? I am asking because that is how I understand him when he writes:
Is Kant saying here that how things appear to be in themselves to us, cannot possibly coincide with how things are in themselves in reality? That there must necessarily be a difference between ‘how things appear to us’ and ‘how things really are’?
@79
Briefly: no. Here’s why.
Kant thinks that any claim to definitive knowledge about things in themselves will necessarily take reason beyond its own proper limits.
His argument for this position turns on the following idea: for any claim about what things in themselves are, we can always entertain the negation of that claim. But we cannot decide which of the two — the assertion or its negation — is true.
A Christian may say, in full candor and sincerity, that a transcendent personal God exists, that we have libertarian freedom, and that an aspect of our personal identity survives the death of the body. And theologians and philosophers have lots of sophisticated arguments for those doctrines.
At the same time, consider the ideas of Benedict Spinoza. (Spinoza was certainly the most sophisticated naturalism of Kant’s time, and it has only slightly been improved upon since.) Spinoza reasons that God cannot be distinct from Nature, that everything we do must conform to the same laws of physics that govern everything else in the physical world, and that nothing that makes us unique from one another can survive the death of the body. (All this Spinoza logically deduces from the very concept of “substance” and what it must mean to say that God is absolutely, infinitely powerful.)
So here we have two logically coherent, wholly a priori metaphysical systems, that make utterly opposed claims about what things in themselves are like.
Since they are both logically coherent, reason cannot choose between them. Since they are a priori, experience cannot choose between them. What we should do, Kant thinks, is simply avoid making all claims about what things are like in themselves: we should say nothing about their properties, qualities, whether they are physical, mental, both, neither.
(This does result in a very serious problem, though, since Kant also suggests that things in themselves are the causes of our sensations — in which case the category of causation must apply to things in themselves. Many philosophers over the centuries have taken this as the thin end of the wedge that they use to destroy the entire Kantian system.)
But, given Kant’s official agnosticism about things in themselves, he couldn’t say “yes, we can know for sure that appearances and things in themselves cannot be the same” (which is what you were asking, I think). The most he could say is, “it is possible that appearances and things in themselves coincide, but we can never know for sure that they do.”
In other words, Kant’s official agnosticism about things in themselves means that he can’t say that things in themselves lack spatial and temporal structures. But he doesn’t need to go that far: all he needs to say is that since we cannot know that they do have spatial and temporal structure, we are rationally permitted to believe that they don’t. And that’s enough for Kant to then say that we are rationally permitted to believe that things in themselves are not causally determined.
And it matters that things in themselves are not causally determined because we are also things in themselves. That is, there is a self as we appear to ourselves, or how we experience ourselves — and that could be fully determined. But we are also permitted to think of ourselves as undetermined, or as having free will.
In other words, we cannot know that we have free will, but we also cannot know that we don’t have free will, so we are rationally permitted to believe that we do. (Elsewhere Kant argues that morality requires that are rationally obligated to believe that we have free will. It also requires that we believe in God and believe in personal immortality.)
Does that address your concern?
PM1
So, according to Kant, we can never know for sure how things really are. Correct?
A conversation with Immanuel Kant:
John: “Good afternoon. I exist.”
Kant: “You are permitted to hold that belief mister, but, I have to point out that, in principle, we can never be really sure that ….”
Charles: **I do not exist. Sorry, to interrupt. I am just a figment of the imagination of Mr.Kant here.**
Kant: “You are both permitted to hold your beliefs, but, and please let me finish my point here guys because this is incredibly deep and important, we can never ever be really sure that …”
John: “I agree with your point. Indeed we can never be absolutely certain about my existence. However I, on my own, can. I, and only I, am absolutely certain of my existence. You cannot, but I can know how I am in myself, so to speak.”
Kant: “Ok, bring it.”
John: “Here goes: cogito ergo sum.”
@81
If by “how things really are” we mean “how things are in themselves, completely separate from everything that the mind contributes to experience”, then yes.
Because that’s the key: what we experience as the world depends on what the mind contributes to that experience. If we had very different sensory organs, we would experience the world in really different ways. And if we had really different concepts, again, we would experience the world in really different ways.
Kant’s point is that if all we can know is what we can experience, and if all of our experience depends in part on what the mind contributes to that experience, then we cannot know what the world is like “in itself,” independent of the mind’s contribution.
Kant wouldn’t deny that we are immediately and indubitably aware of our own self-consciousness. He just doesn’t think that it follows that therefore we can know that we exist as souls, really distinct from our bodies, and capable of persisting after the death of the body.
PM1 @
So, Kant posits the hypothesis that each one of us contributes to one’s experience in such a radical way, that we are all permanently disconnected from the outer world, assuming that there is an outer world at all.
And perhaps that’s not exactly what he is saying. Kant is unclear about his position—a bad sign. To be frank, his dark mission does not interest me. I am a searcher for truth, in fact, I demand it, and I have neither the patience nor the interest for any witling skeptical self-referential effort to have me convinced that I can never get there. So, I am out.
– – –
p.s. I do not agree with your interpretation of cogito, perhaps for another day.
@84 /Clarification/
I was referring to the effort by E. Kant when I wrote “… witling skeptical self-referential effort …”.
🙂 Kant kan’t . Self-refuting is the middle name of Kant.
I am going to self-contradict here by writing another post about Kant …
The broader point that’s been made in this thread is that hyper-skepticism is self-refuting. In order to ground his hyper-skepticism, the hyper-skeptic must hold some belief that he is not permitted to hold by his own ‘philosophy.’
Now, is Kant a hyper-skeptic?
According to PM1, Kant says: If one’s mind distorts one’s experience of a thing, and if one can know a thing only by one’s experience, then we can never attain certain knowledge about a thing.
I agree. The conclusion follows logically from the premises.
However, if Kant claims that this horror scenario is actually the case and that his premises are true, then he claims to have certain knowledge that he cannot have. Then he makes a self-refuting hyper-skeptical claim.
If the mind distorts one’s experience of all things and experience is the only source of knowledge about things, then one cannot know for certain that the mind is distorting things. To know for certain that the mind is distorting all experience requires a transcendent standpoint that offers an undistorted view of the mind and its experiences.
Suppose my mind distorts my experience by having colors mixed up. Objects that are in reality green, I see as red, and objects that are in reality red I see as being green. It might actually be the case that my experience of green coincides with how other people experience red and vice versa. The point I am trying to make is that I have no way of knowing. To know this requires a transcendent standpoint, which I (and Immanuel Kant) have no access to.
Summing up: Sandy is right, Kant kan’t make a truth claim or he be self-refuting. 🙂
There is only one truth and everyone knows part of this truth.
We are somehow able to make it through this world, sometimes quite easily. How does this happen if one does not have access to a lot of this truth?
What we understand is based not only on our experiences but on the experiences of millions like us and on logic. It is also based on instruments that detect aspects of the truth which are consistent from person to person. These instruments are getting better and better.
Now as we all know, there is always more truth to learn. But to obsess over personal experiences as the only access to this truth and it may be significantly different from person to person is nonsense. We live in a world where experiences are constantly verified or sometimes contradicted by things outside of us. We adjust and get better and move on.
That is how a baby learns and we continue to learn. We read, we see, we hear, we feel, we compare everything to what others read, feel, see and hear. All get us somewhat closer to the truth.
We are beings that are constantly assessing this world to learn more truths. That is what science and logic are about. That we will never know all the truth is so obvious that it must be by design. But yet we probe and observe.
To somehow believe our experiences are significantly different from others is absurd. We adjust our beliefs on many things based on what others believe but these are constantly tested against reality. Reality will always keep us in line.
We are here and we have survived. But always learning. Science and our daily experiences will tell us much but it can never tell us everything. For that we have to search elsewhere.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mind/
@ PM1, a reasonable précis of Kant on consciousness?
There are many levels of truth. It’s called Maths what is learnt on 5 grade and also on postdoctoral studies. Different levels of the same Maths. Same thing with the Truth. If you stay 30 years on a cave eating once per week praying continuously will have access to a much different truth than if you watch Netflix ,eat from McDonald and stay all day long on tiktok, twitter,UD,etc.
@84
Kant’s starting-point is not the Cartesian skeptical question “how can know that the external world exists?” Kant accepts that the external world exists — that’s what physics is all about! But he wants to build a barrier between science and metaphysics. And the problems with his position lie in whether he’s entitled to the assumptions he needs to make in order to do that.
More specifically, Kant takes it for granted that the best science is Newtonian mechanics, which is fully deterministic. So if Newtonian mechanics were absolutely true — true about how the world in itself really is — there’s no free will, and probably no personal immortality and probably no God in a transcendent personal sense, the sort of Being who reveals Himself.
Kant wants to construct a barrier between science and metaphysics in order to prevent physics (the best science of his day) from leading to naturalism (no God, no free will, no soul).
That’s not what he’s saying. He doesn’t think that your mind constructs your experiences and my mind constructs my experiences.
Rather, he thinks that he can describe the mind as such, what it is for something to be a mind at all, which is the same in all of us and which therefore constructs all our experiences.
That’s why all of us can understand that there are physical objects that obey laws of physics, that exist in space and in time, and that are governed by cause and effect. (That’s also why all of us know ourselves and each other to be self-conscious rational agents with infinite moral worth and deserving of respect and dignity. )
Kant does not doubt that we can know “the outer world,” if by that you mean the physical world — the world of spatial objects with physical properties, things that don’t disappear when no one is looking at them. Kant accepts the reality of space and of time and the sciences of the spatio-temporal world.
What he denies is that anyone can know the absolute truth of the world. He thinks that for every doctrine of what is absolutely true, there is another doctrine that is incompatible with it, and with us having no way to decide between them.
So, is Kant a skeptic? He would certainly deny it. He would say that his entire project is to show us to how to avoid Hume’s skepticism. But one might think that in doing so, Kant nevertheless concedes too much to Hume.
I agree. And that’s often how Kant is interpreted. But I don’t think it’s the right reading.
I read Kant as saying (as I said above) if we adopt the hypothesis that the mind always contributes to the world as we experience it, then we can construct a barrier between science and metaphysics, and that would allow us to end the conflict of reason against itself, and especially the conflict between naturalism and theism.
He’s a terribly bad writer, for sure.
It’s certainly true that Kant would not endorse a search for ultimate, absolute truth. He thinks that’s impossible for beings like us, because we cannot step outside of our own minds.
While I have tried to make his views seem plausible and unpack some of the reasoning behind them, I’m quite happy to admit that I’m not a Kantian. I think that there are cracks and fissures deep in the edifice, far below the surface we haven’t begun to scratch.
(Also, not that anyone asked, but my favorite philosophers are John Dewey and Richard Rorty — so if you know anything about them, you’ll be able to guess that I read Kant as one of my favorite enemies!)
@89
Yes, I accept Brooks’s reading of Kant as a philosopher of cognitive science, and that his contributions to cognitive science are largely detachable from larger project to which they belong (reconciling Newtonian physics with Lutheran piety).
More emerging emergence? Goal oriented. Nothing emerges from anything without information. Nothing emerges and survives without perfect functionality.
PM1, 80:
In steps:
>>Kant thinks that any claim to definitive knowledge about things in themselves will necessarily take reason beyond its own proper limits.>>
1: Things in themselves, i.e. reality, is readily recognised as the actual state of affairs that obtains, aka what is the case; truth accurately describes such, and knowledge is a state of warranted, credible access to truth.
2: This assertion by Kant is intended to be accurate to the state of affairs, and is meant to be objective, warranted, credibly and reliably true. Further, as is ever so common of worldview level assertions, it is self referential as a statement and again as an utterance of a man.
3: As implied objective knowledge, this sets out to delimit rational inquiry and as a case of rational inquiry it delimits itself, on its face. That is, this too is precisely a case of what it asserts ” will necessarily take reason beyond its own proper limits.”
4: Thus, it is self referentially self defeating and unreliable. We can set it aside and what depends on it in chains of reasoning.
5: Of course, those who assert things like this will be seen to point the finger at others, oh you are trying to talk beyond the bounds, about things in themselves, you cannot do that to try to defeat this you must confine yourself to the world of appearances. To which reach for power over freedom to think, the right answer is, sez who.
6: The kantian programme is self defeating. Instead we acknowledge the possibility of and struggle against error, but that is already a point of certain, undeniable truth and knowledge beyond the bound. Error exists. Josiah Royce and Elton Trueblood et al have put their finger on an archimedean point.
7: We must existentially struggle with it but its known presence shatters the shackles of all schemes that would separate us from knowledge of and reasoning regarding what is the actual case, reality.
>>His argument for this position turns on the following idea: for any claim about what things in themselves are, we can always entertain the negation of that claim.>>
8: Indeed, let E = error exists. Then, ~ E means, it is error to assert E. But the attempted denial implies E and we see that E is not only a fact of experience but an undeniable, self evident and certain truth. Which, is a category that is non empty as we find an instance. So, the reduced square of opposition does not apply. (And I like the revised understanding of the classic square at SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/square/ .)
>> But we cannot decide which of the two — the assertion or its negation — is true. >>
9: On the contrary, we have on the table a case of undeniable truth that is self evident and known to certainty. The claim you report fails.
KF
Sandy: It’s called Maths what is learnt on 5 grade and also on postdoctoral studies. Different levels of the same Maths.
Clearly you’ve never taken graduate level mathematics!!!
PM1 @91
It is clear as day that determinism does not allow for a person who is in control of his actions and thoughts and is, therefore, utterly incompatible with any rational inquiry, including science. The fully deterministic materialism of Kant’s days should have received nothing but ridicule as a metaphysical hypothesis.
Determinism is utterly absurd and unacceptable. It cannot be taken seriously. Did Kant not know this?
1.) If determinism is true, then all our actions and thoughts are consequences of events and laws of nature in the remote past before we were born.
2.) We have no control over circumstances that existed in the remote past before we were born, nor do we have any control over the laws of nature.
3.) If A causes B, and we have no control over A, and A is sufficient for B, then we have no control over B.
Therefore
4.) If determinism is true, then we have no control over our own actions and thoughts.
– – – –
Kant needed 50 books to erect some half-baked barrier against determinism, while it took me just 4 lines to completely demolish it ….
Origenes, I also reply here. A missing factor is the hold of Newton’s laws of mechanics, extended to a whole view of the world at that time. Some were convinced of global mechanical necessity to the point of, the first moment of the cosmos determines all else since to mathematical precision.This made belief in freedom difficult to sustain. That is what Kant faced. This of course cries out for the self moved rational soul as a first requisite of even doing philosophy, but to those locked into a system, that seems little more than a clever verbal trick. To those caught up in the evolutionary materialist web, the same seems so today. The rot runs deep, and it is hard for many to take courage of logic and recognise that determinisms destroy any basis for even the reasoning that gets to determinism.
KF @ 97
It is very difficult for me to accept that Kant and his contemporaries did not reject determinism out of hand. Very difficult. I am very serious when I say that I truly do not get it.
A collective blindness of some sort?
Determinism absolutely destroys rationality. Once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it, and it becomes a totally uncomplicated evident thing. Perhaps, that is my problem here.
Determinism and understanding.
For me, to clearly see that determinism is incompatible with rationality I had to realize that, under determinism, my understanding of things was no longer mine. At first, determinism didn’t seem completely absurd to me, because I labored under the false idea that determinism only applied to my reasoning, but that my understanding of things was (somehow) still under my control. I subconsciously made an illogical distinction between ‘reasoning’ and ‘understanding’.
It was only at the moment that I realized that determinism entails that something beyond my control, causes me to ‘understand’ things …. it became completely clear to me how utterly incompatible determinism and rationality are.
Because, if I understand things, not because I understand them, but because I’m “told” that I “understand” them, then I understand nothing and no rationality in me is to be found.
Origenes,
here is a sampler of the attitude, from de Laplace:
That is the mindset, here presented by a leading and enduringly famous Mathematician-Physicist.
Of course, my reply is, the absurd result implies major things are left out of the reckoning.
KF
Kairosfocus/100
Exactly so, An omniscient being who demonstrated foreknowledge of the future would mean that the future is already determined and exists to be known. We might, like Peter, try to deny it but we cannot avoid it.
We are all, whether we like it or not, determined to some degree. For example,
We are each just the latest link in a chain of procreation stretching back through the histories of our families to be lost in the mists of times past. We had no choice over when and where we were born or who our parents were. We had no choice over our genetic inheritance. We had no choice over what influenced our parents or more distant ancestors. We had no choice over what influenced us before we were aware of being influenced.
For all the talk of free will, we are inescapably contingent beings and any account of free will must embrace that understanding.
And, given how little we understand about the origins of life and the nature of consciousness, how do we know that rational, self-aware life-forms such as ourselves are not determined? How do we know that we are not just a necessary consequence of the outworking of natural laws and processes? And, if so, how is that a problem?
Sev, nope. The particular context of Laplace’s demons is the time direction insensitivity and utter determinism of a Newtonian, material world of atoms and bodies ruled by F = 0 => a = 0, F = dP/dt and F12 + F21 = 0. In that context of a material metaphysics with a deterministic equation set, once a single time point’s parameters and position momentum values are precisely fixed, the structure of the model dynamics set its prior and successive trajectory to all time. But, a world that is not like that, one in which we are not merely pre programmed computing substrates with associated sensors and actuators, a world in which we can actually reason . . . as is a subtext for your own argument to have any cogency . . . is a world of self moved agency not deterministic utter irrationality. And, you were in the general neighbourhood when it was pointed out that God being at the north pole of spacetime so that he is aware of the span of actual events is not equivalent to predetermination like Laplace’s demon. Indeed, I suspect part of the context that lends plausibility for some, is the same Newtonian clockwork cosmos vision. Which was never viable and has been shattered by the rise of statistical thermodynamics, quantum theory and relativity. our contingency is of course just a recognition that we are not utterly autonomous, we cannot leap off a high cliff, flap our arms and fly away at will. But we can freely and responsibly argue and type up objections, even fallacy riddled ones. KF
A Compatibilistic Response to the Consequence Argument.
Compatibilism is the enigmatic view that determinism and free will can both be true. Slagle notes that compatibilism is “a common position among philosophers.” According to the compatibilist, it does not follow that we do not control our actions and thoughts. Nozik puts it thus:
IOW according to the compatibilist, it is coherent to say that we do control our actions and thoughts, just like it is coherent to say that a thermostat controls the temperature.
So, according to compatibilism, from …
Compatibilism does not make any sense to me but it is widely held. Perhaps someone can explain.
– – – –
Merry Christmas everyone.
Seversky @102
The problem is this: if physical determinism is true, then all of our conclusions are, at best, only accidentally true because they are produced by forces that leave rationality to the side. Some beliefs we hold might accidentally be true, but we could never know it. Even if we were allowed the freedom to check them we could not do so because our conclusions would not be brought about by reasoned investigation; it would be “merely fortuitous” or a “happy circumstance” if some turned out to be true. Under physical determinism, the necessary and sufficient causes of someone drawing a conclusion have nothing to do with rationality or reasons, and therefore whatever reasons I think I have for a conclusion are unnecessary, given that I would have drawn the same conclusion without them. And even my reasons (or my awareness of reasons) are unnecessary since they do not explain my conclusion or belief.
Summing up, the problem is ***the total destruction of rationality***. A far more serious problem than the one that is wittingly described in the Stanford entry on causal determinism: