Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Music and Spirituality, Part II: The Difference Ontology Makes

My last post, which was about music and spirituality, sparked a number of thoughtful comments. As I started to respond to some of these, my response kept growing until I realized that it should be a post of its own. So...here is Part Two, in which I want to focus more deeply on what difference, if any, our ontology makes for assessing the significance and value of our aesthetic responses to music (and other aesthetic objects, human-made and otherwise).


Let me begin by sharing my affinity for Bernard’s comment, when he expresses “great wonder in being able to create worlds through words which are then reimagined into existence in brains on the other side of the globe. I delight in this from a purely materialist point of view.” Like Bernard, I think there is something amazing about the idea that activity in my brain could produce something in the physical world—a work of fiction, say—which would then stimulate the brains of people across the world to follow patterns similar to (but not identical with) many of those that motivated the author (and many of those experienced by other readers).

But if this is right, does that mean I should be able to dispense with any non-materialist beliefs without my aesthetic experience thereby losing any of its significance? Let me put it this way. When I contemplate a world in which artists produce physical artifacts that stimulate the brains of others, producing a kind of connection and harmony among far-flung human brains—well, I find this to be a kind of meta-level artistic creation. One of the wonders of a live musical performance is that this kind of shared experience can itself become an object of experience by musicians and listeners. One gazes across the auditorium and sees feet tapping to the same rhythm as one’s own, tension building and releasing in tandem across dozens of faces, etc.

The original work of art—the musical work or the piece of creative writing—becomes an instrument for producing another work of art at a higher level, one painted on a human canvas. And this work of art is beautiful.

But the same question that we confronted with respect to the beauty of the original work arises with respect to the beauty of this meta-level creation. In what does that beauty consist? Is the beauty of this neurological interplay among different human brains just another brain response? When I call this interplay beautiful, does that simply mean that when my brain receives this interplay as input, it is stimulated to generate a certain kind of pleasure response?

More profoundly, does it matter? Does it make a difference for the significance of the statement “X is beautiful” whether my subjective response to X is produced by its beauty (and is a fitting or appropriate response to its beauty) or whether the statement just means “X produces in me (and others) a certain kind of neurological response.”

One thing we can say about the latter alternative is this: If beauty just is a neurological response (or, more precisely, if something having the property of being beautiful just amounts to it have the propensity to produce a certain kind of neurological response in human observers), then it is a contingent fact that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is a great aesthetic work whereas my dog’s farts are not (please excuse the crudeness--my dogs have been eating something recently that made this example leap to mind).

What this contingent fact is contingent upon is what our human neurological wiring happens be. Had human brains been wired differently, so as to generate the kinds of responses to canine farts that Beethoven’s 9th tends to produce and vice versa, then—by virtue of brain wiring—it would be true that canine farts are things of sublime beauty whereas Beethoven’s 9th is not.

And it would follow, furthermore, that there would be nothing deficient or defective about our brain responses in this hypothetical state of affairs. That is, we could not rightly say that brains wired in this way are less discerning than brains wired in the other way (in the way that we could, for example, say that brains which fail to distinguish between fresh milk and spoiled milk are deficient in their capacity to discern significant truths about the world).

Let me summarize my point in the following way. Consider this claim: “Beethoven’s 9th symphony is a sublime aesthetic achievement worthy of Beethoven’s labors, and if our brains were wired such that we found more of aesthetic value in sniffing dog farts, then our brains would be deficiently wired.” This statement is true only if there is more to beauty than a certain kind of neurological response. If “beautiful” just means “apt to produce X kind of neurological response,” then the claim is false (because in that case alternative neural wiring could never lead to deficiencies in aesthetic discernment, and certain kinds of alternative wiring would entail that Beethoven’s efforts become aesthetically fruitless—akin to the compositional efforts of my tone deaf friend from high school—without there being any change in the actual substance of what he produced).

Now I’m pretty sure that if reductive materialism is true, then we must accept all of these implications. But I’m also pretty sure that these implications are not trivial—that they do have an impact on the significance of what is going on between artists and their audiences. If these implications are right, and there were some drug that could mimic the neurological effects of exposure to a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th, then wouldn’t the act of administering the drug have a comparable aesthetic significance as the act of putting on a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th?

Perhaps there is a difference insofar as the performers undergo neurological events that aren’t repeated when the drug is administered on the would-be audience. But then suppose there’s another drug that could produce in the would-be musicians the relevant neurological outcomes.

One might point out that administering these drugs severs the neurological activities associated with our encounter with a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th from the actual human effort that ordinarily goes into such a performance—the hours of individual practice and collective rehearsal, not to mention the investment of energy and attention during performance. One might suppose (and I think this is true) that the aesthetic “payoff” is cheapened if cut off from that effort—that there is something valuable about these aesthetic payoffs being the result of the cultivation of human talents and the collective effort to channel those talents together into a great performance.

But when we say it is valuable that these things--artistic effort and aesthetic payoff--be linked, what do we mean? The value of connecting effort with a certain kind of outcome is not a physical property of that connection, measurable with scientific instruments, etc. And so materialism cannot treat that value as a property of the connection. It has to treat it as nothing more than a subjective response to that connection. And if subjective responses are nothing more than neurological responses, the value of this connection just is another neurological response.

And so, once again, what if there were a drug that could produce that response? Of course, there isn’t. But the point is that if there were, the reductive materialist could offer no reason to favor a world in which musicians cultivate their talents and put on a great performance over a world in which the right drug cocktail is administered instead. The materialist cannot offer any such reasons because the offering of such reasons requires that there be objective values—aesthetic and other kinds of values that aren’t just “in our heads.” (I think this line of thought has bearing on issues of free will as well, but I won’t pursue that here).

Of course, the reductive materialist can still point out that, as a matter of contingent fact, we don’t have the hypothesized drugs. And so, in the real world, the desired neurological effects will be achieved only if actual musicians take up their instruments, work hard, and put on a performance before an appreciative audience. Since the desired effects really are highly desired and appreciated by many, this means that the work of musicians and other artists has real significance in the actual world, even if materialism is true. But my point is that, given reductive materialism, there is nothing about a great performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that makes it true of that performance that it is has aesthetic merit. The aesthetic merit is purely a brain event, which can hypothetically exist even in the absence of the work of art.

Now, obviously, none of this is an argument for the existence of God. At most, it is an argument in support of looking for some coherent alternative to the reductive materialist account of aesthetic value. But whether it is even that much is open to dispute. What I have most directly aimed to do here is point out that the reductive materialist account has implications for our understanding of aesthetics that I (and others) find both counterintuitive and personally troubling. These troubling implications can be avoided only if we assume that aesthetic judgments have an objective truth value—that is, only if they are true or false apart from what is going on in our heads. And it is hard to see how they can have such a truth value if we accept a materialist ontology.

While this helps to explain why I am drawn to alternative ontologies—why I might “root for them,” so to speak—can it have any bearing on what it is reasonable for me to believe?

As has been pointed out before, one cannot conclude that an ontology is false just because one finds it to be troubling or counterintuitive. That is, true statements are often personally troubling, and our intuitions can deceive us. But, as has also been pointed out before, there is a big difference between a holistic interpretation of experience and a specific hypothesis about the world of experience for which specifiable standards of evidence are clearly applicable. Among other things, one’s holistic interpretation of experience plays a crucial role in determining which of our experiences are to be treated as having the veridicality necessary for counting as evidence. As such, when we go about deciding on a holistic interpretation of experience, any attempt to do so by first settling on specific criteria of evidence will beg the question (because we will thereby implicitly embrace a holistic interpretation of experience in advance).

So how do we approach the task of deciding among such holistic interpretations, if any standard of evidence we invoke for doing so is necessarily going to beg the question? As I have alluded to before, Hegel offers an approach that I think is quite brilliant (even if his own application of that approach was, in my judgment, fatally infected by arrogance)—an approach which proposes that we tentatively “put on” or try out a holistic framework with its standards of evidence and see where it takes us. His presumption is that an inadequate framework will encounter deep problems of various kinds (which he collectively calls “contradictions”). We should then revise the framework to overcome these problems and try out the new and improved framework to expose its problems. And so on.

I will develop these ideas more fully in a later series on Hegel. For now, I just want to note that in this methodological approach, our intuitions as well as an awareness of where we cry out in protest against a framework’s implications can and do play a role.

One last point deserves mention. An important reason why many insist that aesthetics is ultimately all in our heads is because they believe that treating aesthetic claims as objective makes no sense. And the reason why they think this is because they implicitly or explicitly accept the core thesis of logical positivism, which holds the following:

“In order for a proposition to be a meaningful statement (that is, a statement with a truth value), it must either be an empirically testable claim (a claim such that the world would be different in empirically discernible ways were the claim true than it would be were the claim false) or an analytic one (one that asserts a logical relationship among concepts).”

I will hereafter refer to this as the "Logical Positivist Thesis." If this Logical Positivist Thesis is embraced, then aesthetic judgments will be meaningful only if they are understood to be saying something about what is going on in our heads. Why? First of all, because aesthetic judgments are not analytic, and so (given the Logical Postivist Thesis) in order to be meaningful they need to be empirically testable. But, to put it loosely, no scientific instrument could measure how many turps of beauty are contained in Beethoven’s 9th. If beauty is a property of the symphony, it’s not an empirical one. Since Logical Positivism has no room for the meaningful attribution of non-empirical properties, it must either dismiss aesthetic judgments as meaningless or identify them with something that is empirical. Neurological activity is empirical, and it does correlate with judgments of beauty (that is, those who experience what they take to be beautiful have something going on in their heads that is empirically different from what is going on in the heads of those who are smelling dog farts). And so the identification is made.

The big problem with this entire line of thought—one I’ve pointed out before—is that the Logical Positivist Thesis is self-referentially incoherent: it’s neither empirically testable nor analytic. And so, if we accept it, we must reject it. It is one of those principles which absolutely cannot be true. And this means that there must exist meaningful (true and false) statements that are neither empirically testable nor analytic.

In short, it is necessarily true that there exists a class of meaningful propositions (propositions which have a truth value) which are not reducible to empirical or analytic propositions. There must be true propositions that are not just matters of how ideas are related to each other, and are not empirically testable statements about the material world.

Perhaps aesthetic propositions fall into this class.

67 comments:

  1. People take psychedelic drugs and routinely claim their experiences to be the deepest and most spiritual experiences of their entire lives. So it seems to be that your experiment has been done in a way, and the results are in. I don't regard this as disturbing in the least, since one can enjoy the capacity of our brains to have such feelings out of their plain material basis. I really don't see why you have such a problem with this viewpoint, unless perhaps there is an ulterior agenda of needing to defend some kind of cosmic divine order that speaks to us through violins and the like.

    Lastly, I think your treatment of logical positivism remains unfair. "Meaningful" and "truth value" are entirely, completely different things. A thought passing through my head may be highly meaningful without being true in the least. It would be neurologically real but signify nothing real at all, and be meaningful, artistic, inspirational, etc. You seem to be conveniently conflating different categories into a naive and simplistic proposition that makes a straw positivist. Meaning is subjective, while truth values deserve tests vs reality. Meaning can be claimed to be "true", but only in the sense that I like chocolate ice cream, not in the sense that chocolate ice cream is objectively good for all and sundry.


    "There must be true propositions that are not just matters of how ideas are related to each other, and are not empirically testable statements about the material world."

    No, the truth you are in search of here is the statement "I love Beethoven's 9th". Nothing more or less complex than that. As a statement, it works, and doesn't imply any objective lovable-ness of the piece, or objective aesthetic standard, beyond perhaps a recognition that some statistical distribution of humans with X neurological makeup will agree to that statement and call it "true" for themselves as well. It eludes me why theists need to devise some objective-ness to this concept, frankly.

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  2. Logical positivists generally concede that non-propositions can be meaningful--for example, questions, commands, exclamations. But these are not PROPOSITIONS. For a proposition to be meaningful it must say something--and to say something is to make an assertion to the effect that things are like this rather than like that. In other words, to be a meaningful proposition is to have a truth value. If it lacks a truth value, it is not a proposition.

    The logical positivist thesis concerns what must be true of an utterance in order for it to be a meaningful PROPOSITION--that is, what must be true of a proposition in order for it to have a truth value (be true or false). But as such, the logical positivist thesis is clearly a proposition itself. Hence, it must stand up to its own test--and it doesn't.

    But if that doesn't satisfy you, one can set aside talk of meaning and logical positivism and simply consider the following statement:

    "In order for a proposition to have a truth value, the proposition must be either empirically testable or analytic."

    Now this statement is self-referentially incoherent, and so necessarily false. And so it's contradictory opposite is true:

    "It is not the case that in order for a proposition to have a truth value, it must be either empirically testable or analytic."

    Let us simplify this statement as the negation of a conditional with a universal quantifier, as follows:

    "It is not the case that, for every proposition P, if P has a truth value then P is empirically testable or analytic."

    This is logically equivalent to the following:

    "There exists a proposition P which has a truth value and is neither empirically testable nor analytic."**

    If P is false, then not-P is true. And if P is neither empirically testable nor analytic, then not-P is neither empirically testable nor analytic. Thus, it follows that there exists a true propositon which is neither empirically testable nor analytic.

    Thus, given the self-referential incoherence of our original statement, we can deduce that there exists at least one true proposition which is neither empirically testable nor analytic.

    In short, unless there is a logical error in my deduction here, I have demonstrated that there are truths beyond what science and logic can demonstrate.

    If there's a flaw in the logic of the deductive reasoning here, please point it out to me.

    **Note: the logical equivalence holds if we assume existential import for the universal quantifier. If we do not assume existential import, then the logically equivalent proposition becomes "There exists a proposition P which has a truth value and is neither empirically testable nor analytic OR there do not exist any propositions P." We'd then need to simply add the true premise, that there exist propositions, to arrive at the same conclusion.

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  3. Hi-

    "In order for a proposition to have a truth value, the proposition must be either empirically testable or analytic."

    Thanks for your distinction between propositions and meaningful statements of other kinds. But this statement doesn't seem so incoherent to me. It can be characterized as analytic, based on the definition of its component terms.

    A truth value only happens, when it is defined as a correspondence truth, if it can be shown to correspond to reality. So asserting that such a proposition needs to be empirically testable seems like a tautology ... A=A. Likewise, analytic statements would have similar properties of being self-testing by way of the definitions of the terms going into them, plus logic.

    So it doesn't seem to be equivalent to say that a proposition, to have truth value, does not need to have either empirical testability or analytic logic. I would be interested in what you conceive of as other propositional truths that could work here.

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  4. Hi Eric

    I think it is possible to believe that statements about beauty are relative without being a logical positivist. I hope so anyway, as it's my position.

    I am interested in this idea that the type of evidence we allow already speaks to our values. I would accept this, but would not want to make the step from here to one of any evidence goes. The obligation is just to lay out both one's evidence and the reasons why this type of evidence might be seen as relevant/compelling.

    So, for example, I'm unsure that the feeling something has intrinsic value/beauty should count as good evidence, this being because it seems to count as evidence in favour of either stance ( a materialist position also expects some experiences to feel particularly powerful, important etc). It is difficult for me to see how such evidence then contributes to my understanding, as it pushes me in both directions.

    I am impressed by a number of pieces of evidence in the aesthetics debate. There is the story of a neurosurgeon who, in stimulating a patient's exposed brain, has the patient report they heard a particular piece of music. There are twin studies that suggest a genetic component in our tendency to hold strong belief positions, there are differences in standards of beauty across time and culture, there are the restricted profiles of groups responding to a particular artist, there is the ego driven in-fighting in the world of the arts, there is the use of beauty judgements as markers for class, the fact that genetic markers predict responses to particular tastes, the power of drugs to produce euphoria, the brain scan patterns of people enjoying music... I won't go on.

    And there is the puzzle of how the transcendent would make itself felt on the physical brain. So, if we take what we can see when people are exposed to the arts, and what they tell us about these experiences, we get a package of evidence which needs to be fitted against either possibility.

    Considering all these things, I come down on the side of beauty being a biological and cultural phenomenon, a response to our individual lifeline. This doesn't feel at all reductionist to me, it is about people connecting with one another, their histories and their deepest yearnings. A dog farting isn't art because it lacks the ability to connect with us on this rather beautiful level.

    Bernard

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  5. Bernard,

    You said, "I think it is possible to believe that statements about beauty are relative without being a logical positivist." I agree. There are many aesthetic relativists who are not logical positivists. Hence, I need to clarify my intent a bit.

    What I wanted to say is that I suspect many or most of those who regard aesthetic objectivism as incoherent do so because they implicitly or explicitly embrace logical positivism. Thus, if logical positivism is self-referentially incoherent, one important reason for viewing aesthetic objectivism as irrational evaporates. But that is consistent with holding that one can think beauty is relative without being a positivist.

    I also agree, of course, that art can do something that dog farts simply cannot do--which is to forge certain special kinds of connections among people--and that this is true even if the standards of beauty are fixed by culture in some interplay with human biology.

    The question I pose arises when we attach a special significance to art because of its capacity to forge these distinctive connections--when we call those connections beautiful or valuable. If we relativize THIS value--the value of the distinctive sort of connection art can generate--then I'm not sure how it can ground the distinctive significance most of us think art possesses (even those of us who think that its power to forge human connections is culturally bounded in various ways).

    So, let's suppose that the chief value of art lies in its capacity to forge connections, at least among certain culturally (or more ideosyncratically) attuned individuals. If the value of something S is ultimately understood in purely subjective terms as a neurologically grounded response to S, then the value of S can be severed from S itself. S becomes connected to its value contingently in such a way that S can be taken away without any loss of value.

    And THIS is what unsettles me deeply. Given this perspective, nothing of value has been LOST from a world in which there are no ACTUAL human connections forged by art, but in which the kinds of neurological activities generated by a favorable response to the presence of such connections are still being produced in individual brains.

    The same sort of problem arises in areas outside of art--say love. Consider a world in which, instead of real people meeting each other, falling in love, and wrestling through differences to forge intimacy, we have isolated individuals hooked up to self-contained virtual reality simulators in which all of the neurological responses typically generated by love relationships are reproduced, but there are NO actual relationships of this kind between any individuals--unlike the Matrix, in which individuals SHARE a VR environment and so can interact within that environment(I wrote a short story along these lines years ago, before the Matrix came out, but abandoned it before even polishing it into publishable form).

    Has anything of value been lost? I want to say yes, because the actual relationships are valuable in themselves. But that requires a notion of intrinsic value--of things possessing value in themselves apart from whether they are subjectively valued. The question is what sort of ontology can ground intrinsic value.

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  6. Hi Eric

    My honest response, I think, is just that your virtual world scenario doesn't unsettle me. Under this scenario, if I understand you correctly, my experiences are exactly the same. I wrestle with conundrums, follow hunches, fall in love, create art, face great trials, develop empathy and so on. My life then is potentially rich and wonderful. So what is missing?


    I suppose you would say, well the other people, the challenges, the art, it's not real, it's all in your head. Okay, but as I experience reality, whatever that might mean, inside my head anyway, I'm not unsettled by the difference.

    I think too I have an instinct not to be unsettled by hypotheticals, just because one can construct many such scenarios. How about a world of intrinsic value where the creating force is deliberately misleading the human mind, so intrinsic value does exist but we're getting it all wrong and missing out on what is truly valuable. How unsettling (only it's not really is it?)

    I'm also wary of assuming that reducing to the physcial means we must reduce to the smallest level of the physical, so giving physics explanations priority over bilogocal ones for example. We should, I would contend, reduce to the level where the richest information can be mined. So, we are better to think of values as being a biological and cultural phenomenon, rather than one of neural states.

    At this level our tastes and values are anything but dishearteningly meaningless things, they are the end product of an exquisite sequence of trial, invention and discovery. That there is beauty in a piece of music, or in group of people responding as one to that music, speaks to me of one of the fundamental glories of human existence. Knowing that it has been at least three and half billion years in the crafting, for me, adds rather than subtracts significance.

    By this view value is relative but not arbitrary, it has been shaped and constrained by our personal and collective histories. I personally find that a more beautiful thought than standards of beauty being somehow floating out there in the ether.

    Bernard

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  7. People take psychedelic drugs and routinely claim their experiences to be the deepest and most spiritual experiences of their entire lives. So it seems to be that your experiment has been done in a way, and the results are in.

    Reread:

    If these implications are right, and there were some drug that could mimic the neurological effects of exposure to a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th

    ---

    You seem to be conveniently conflating different categories into a naive and simplistic proposition that makes a straw positivist.

    It takes one to... falsely accuse one?

    A truth value only happens, when it is defined as a correspondence truth, if it can be shown to correspond to reality. So asserting that such a proposition needs to be empirically testable seems like a tautology ... A=A.

    From the SEP article:

    the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to a fact

    So, no, not actually. (If you still don't believe me, note the next paragraph, where "verificationist theories of truth" are listed among the "traditional competitors" of the correspondence theory.)

    Now, of course, even so, I suppose you can (provided your theory of language allows you to do this) just define the word "true" to mean something like, "the property of being able to be empirically or analytically verified" and make your position a tautology. Of course, I can then redefine "true" as "the property of being believed by Dustin," but somehow I do not think you would take this as a decisive refutation of your positions.

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  8. Um, this post is just because I forgot to click the email follow up comments button last time. So...

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  9. Hi, Dustin-

    I don't entirely understand what you are getting at. Perhaps the best thing to do might be to say what a better definition of truth might be, which would allow other ways to know whether a proposition is true or not. I guess moral "truths" are one of the prime goals, as are artistic "truths", none of which I would set much store by other than in a subjective context.

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  10. I'm not sure what there is not to understand. The correspondence theory you invoked says a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality. It says nothing about what methods we use to show that it corresponds with reality, or even about whether it is possible to show that at all.

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  11. Also, it's worth pointing out that virtually no philosophers even view logical positivism as a live option anymore, largely for the reasons Eric just gave. That it is self-referentially incoherent is about as widely agreed upon among philosophers as anything.

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  12. Burk,

    It might help us if you would explain why you hold to a view (logical positivism) which has largely been discarded. Have you come up with a new insight within that view that others missed? Are you aware of the history of that viewpoint and why it was discarded?

    Further, do you understand the idea that a proposition like, "All truth must be based upon emperical proofs,” fails to meet its own test? In other words, what was weighed, tasted, felt, seen, or calibrated, beforehand, such that this proposition statement was the result? Obviously nothing. It is a faith statement that sets the parameters for further statements regarding what can be true or not, but it is outside those parameters.

    Finally, just a note of irony. What should we make of the fact that many of the best known Evangelical Christian philosophers also hold to the correspondence theory of truth, the very same theory you hold as well, and yet with it come to completely different conclusions?

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  13. Bernard,

    If the virtual scenario doesn't unsettle you at all, then I suspect we've arrived at a rock-bottom intuitive difference.

    But I want to push it a little further just in case we haven't hit a rock bottom difference. While I, too, think that my life would be "potentially rich and wonderful" under this scenario, it would do so only on the condition that I remained ignorant of the truth. For me, at least, knowledge that it was "all in my head," that the people I loved, including my children, were a fiction, etc., would shatter it all, stripping it of meaning.

    Of course, you can point out that this knowledge would alter my brain chemistry, such that it would no longer be identical to the brain chemistry I possess in the (presumably) actual world. But that doesn't alter the fact that in the hypothetical world, the richness and subjective meaning of my existence is fundamentally at odds with how amply I am in contact with the truth. To learn the truth is to learn that there is no otherness, no intimacy (in the sense of two independent selves sharing themselves with each other), no real benevolence (in the sense of actions that promote the good of the other), etc. When I love and value my children, it's not a set of subjective impressions I love and value. It's these other little people, separate from myself, with hopes and dreams and wills of their own. If the virtual scenario proved real, what that would prove is that what I love isn't there. I would collapse into despair, I think.

    Anyway, those little ones I love are now awake and clamoring for my attention, so I need to go.

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  14. Hi, Dustin, Darrell-

    What I was trying to do was to show that the pat dismissal of logical positivism doesn't work as well as you and Eric seem to think it does. While having no illusions about the difficulty of verifying truths in the correspondence sense, I would suggest that other sources of truth- intuition, revelation, authority, beauty, etc. - don't even come up to a basic standard of propositional meaning using normal language, which requires some mechanism for verification or at least falsification inherent in such a proposition. Some rational criterion, you might say. I love intuition, for instance, as a powerful guide from our inborn and unconscious perceptive and analytical capacities. But it isn't veridical, and its hypotheses need to be tested in a more explicit way before they can thought of as objective truths (though they can create subjective "truths" immediately- no problem there).

    And if one wants to get into whose ideas have the earlier sell-by date with respect to critical French philosophers, I'd suggest that theists should be careful about throwing stones out of their glass houses. I certainly don't subscribe to the whole logical positivist program, but this basic idea of truth and how one gets there in a valid way is pretty elementary. The main thing one learns as a scientist is not that one should be charitable to competing theories, but that one should break them down as mercilessly as possible, (given that one understands them), find their weak points, and then test them, because people are endlessly self-deluded, myself included.

    At any rate, the correspondence theory seems still to be the leading way of stating truth values, as per the SEP. Here is one snippet:

    "It is not easy to find a substantive difference between truthmaker theory and various brands of the sort of modified correspondence theory treated above under the heading “Logical Atomism” (see Section 7.1). Logical atomists, such as Russell (1918) and Wittgenstein (1921), will hold that the truth or falsehood of every truth-value bearer can be explained in terms of (derived from) logical relations between truth-value bearers, by way of the recursive clauses, together with the base clauses, i.e., the correspondence and non-correspondence of atomic truth-value bearers with facts."

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  15. Eric

    I don't think this is a fundamental difference. More I'm just having trouble imagining my way into your thought experiment.

    If you are positing a world where a wonder drug causes the experiences to which I attach value, then to me in that world they still have value. After all I know no better. If I become aware I am in a drug world, then whether I am disturbed is entirely dependent upon the working of the drug, it either makes me disturbed or it doesn't.

    If at this point I become aware but the drug stops working, then I'm no longer in drug world so the nature of the question changes to am I disturbed by the possibility that I might be living in drug world. But that possibility is live now, and like you I suspect, I'm not disturbed by this possibility because I choose to reject it.

    It may well be we reject the possibility for quite different reasons, (or believe we do while being pushed by identical forces) but I now feel the thought experiment has brought us all the way back to the starting point, as thought experiments so often do (Chinese Room anyone?)

    Sorry if I've missed something important.

    Bernard

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  16. "In order for a proposition to have a truth value, the proposition must be either empirically testable or analytic."

    I have been puzzling a lot over this statement (called S below) and the related argument, trying to make sense of it. For what it's worth, here's my take at this.

    First, there are formulations of the same idea that don't lead to any serious problem. For example, one might say as far as we know, besides mathematical and logical propositions, the only true statements we know about reality are empirical. Or, more to the point maybe: Besides math and logic, we have a working (pragmatic) definition of truth based on empirical verification. We lack such a definition for other propositions about reality. These statements may of course be argued for or against - but they don't lead to any dramatic logical demonstration.

    While the above may (or may not, I don't know) take care of the logical positivist straw man, it does not refute Eric's argument. So, what about it?

    Suppose we have the set P of all true propositions about reality. Now, we can start to make statements about P. For example, we can say: 'Elephants have 8 legs' is not a statement in P (called S1 below). This statement however, is true. What kind of statement is it? I'd say that, like S above, it is neither empirical nor analytic. If we decide to include statements about P in P itself, then we have an infinite store of true statements about reality that are neither empirical nor analytic. (Because, once we have S1, we can build an infinite series of true statements starting with "'Elephants have 8 legs' is not a statement in P" is a statement in P", and so on. Mathematically speaking, this is not a proper procedure as it will likely lead to self-referential paradoxical statements.

    The original statement S is, like S1, a statement about P. If we consider them as meta-statements about P, but not in P, nothing dramatic follows. S may or may not be true. If we consider that these meta-statements are, in fact, statements about reality, then S is trivially false and, while Eric's argument proves that P contains more than empirical or analytic statements, this is because we just put them there by defining meta-statements about P as statements about reality.

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  17. What I was trying to do was to show that the pat dismissal of logical positivism doesn't work as well as you and Eric seem to think it does.

    Right, me and Darrell and Eric and *every other philosopher* have been deceived.

    While having no illusions about the difficulty of verifying truths in the correspondence sense,

    I am going to say this one more time, and if that doesn't work I am just going to give up. The correspondence theory of truth is *opposed* to logical positivism. According to the correspondence theory, something can be true even if we cannot verify it. Which seems completely right to me.

    I would suggest that other sources of truth- intuition,

    Well, many philosophers think that a sort of intuitive apprehension comes prior to accepting any of our sense experiences as veridical--so if intuition is worthless, so is empirical data. They seem to me to be right about this. Of course, you have no idea what their arguments are...

    don't even come up to a basic standard of propositional meaning using normal language, which requires some mechanism for verification or at least falsification inherent in such a proposition.

    So if I told the average person, "There is a subatomic particle which we cannot in any way measure," they would just think I was saying something unintelligible? If I asked the average scientist, "Where is that electron and how fast is it going," he would say that my question actually didn't make sense?

    (Incidentally, logical positivism has a great deal of trouble accounting for quantum physics as it stands, since the elements of it must be inferred, rather than directly observed.)

    I'd suggest that theists should be careful about throwing stones out of their glass houses.

    Many leading philosophers are theists. You don't know who they are, but they exist. But everyone has given up logical positivism.

    The main thing one learns as a scientist is not that one should be charitable to competing theories

    But one should be charitable in *interpreting* them.

    For example, one might say as far as we know, besides mathematical and logical propositions, the only true statements we know about reality are empirical

    What empirical test did you run to determine that empirical tests give us the truth about reality? What empirical test did you run to determine that intuition doesn't?

    the logical positivist straw man

    It's not really fair to call a fair statement of a position held by the majority of philosophers for half a decade--and, apparently, still sympathized with by some of the people on this blog--a straw man.

    the set P of all true propositions about reality

    includes propositions about propositions.

    we just put them there

    We can't cause propositions to exist.

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  18. Dustin,

    I agree that the use of the expression logical positivist straw man say seem a little cavalier. Let me try to explain what I am talking about. Logical positivism as such is a philosophical doctrine, not a scientific one. While individual scientists may have expressed views similar to logical positivist tenets, logical positivism has never been a prerequisite to science. But, too often, when a scientist says something like I believe we can obtain knowledge about the world only through empirical means, philosophers are quick to use the logical positivist label and accuse the said scientist of being hopelessly delusional (hence the straw man). Such a statement however by no means implies adhesion to logical positivism. It is a perfectly meaningful expression of a belief expressing perceived limitations on human knowledge.

    As for propositions, I don't understand what you mean. Propositions are language constructs and are, by necessity, "caused to exist". Maybe you are referring to the possible truth about the world expressed by a proposition. Of course, "truths" are not caused to exist. But propositions are human creations.

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  19. JP--You offer to propositions in the same general ballpark as the Logical Positivist Thesis (LPT) but importantly different from it. They are:

    K: "(A)s far as we know, besides mathematical and logical propositions, the only true statements we know about reality are empirical."

    P: "Besides math and logic, we have a working (pragmatic) definition of truth based on empirical verification. We lack such a definition for other propositions about reality."

    You are correct that these alternative propositions are not as problematic as LPT--because neither makes a claim about what kinds of propositions have a truth value such that the claim isn't of those kinds. Of course, that doesn't mean they are entirely without problems.

    K makes a claim about which propositions (as far as we know) can be known to be true. It leaves open, therefore, the possibility of true propositions that we cannot know to be true. As such, even though K itself is not a mathematical or logical proposition, nor an empirical one, it might still be true given K. So K does not refute itself. However, if K is true, then--given K--it seems to be one of those true propositions we cannot know to be true. Right? If we embrace it, then, doing so amounts to an act of faith of a sort. And if such acts of faith can be legitimate (perhaps because they are unavoidable), we'd need to explore the criteria for the legitimacy of acts of faith.

    Similar issues arise with respect to P, I think, but I've now run out of time and probably won't have access to a computer again until Monday.

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  20. "In order for a proposition to have a truth value, the proposition must be either empirically testable or analytic."

    (addendum)

    In my comment above I consider the set of all true propositions (P). This set is not central to my argument and it still holds without it. My point here is that P does not exist.

    Consider the statement "This statement is not a statement in P" (S). Does S belong to P? If it does, then by definition of P, it should be true and if it is it does not belong to P. Likewise, if S does not belong to P, it is true and should belong to P. The existence of P leads to a contradiction; thus, P does not exist.

    Now, if we equate true propositions and truths about reality, we are led to the conclusion that it is meaningless to talk of all truths about reality. An interesting thought, I think.

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  21. JP--Your arguments relating to the set of all true propositions are interesting. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to reflect on them before my weekend houseguests arrived and took over the room with the computer.

    I'd like to digest their significance a bit more but want to share one thought here. The conclusion you reach in your last post--that set (P) doesn't exist, may not be the only one to draw from the apparent paradox relating to statement (S). The contradiction arises if it is assumed, first, that there exists a set (P) which contains all true propostions AND, second, that (S) is a meaningful proposition--that is, a proposition with a truth value. We can avoid a contradiction by denying either of these assumptions.

    (S), of course, has a distinctive form to it: it is explicitly and exclusively self referential. It is only about itself and its own truth value. Let's call this kind of proposition an exclusively self-referential truth claim. It may be that the conclusion to draw from the paradox caused by (S) is that (S) is not a meaningful proposition (as opposed to your conclusion, that there is no set P).

    Adopting this position makes some sense to me. Since (S) is such that, in order for it to have the truth-value "true" it must have the truth value "false," and since to have a truth value is to fall on ONE side of the true/false divide, (S) has no truth value.

    And if so, then it might follow that no exclusively self-referential truth claims are meaningful. In short, we may have identified a class of utterances that have the appearance of propositions but which are not meaningful propositions after all.

    This conclusion, if sound, pairs in an interesting way with the conclusion I draw from the self-referential incoherence of LPT. The conclusion there is that there must exist meaningful propositions which are neither empirical nor analytic (and hence cannot be known to be true through empirical means or through logical analysis of the relations of concepts--whether their truth value can come to be known at all is another matter).

    Now LPT does not refer exclusively to itself the way that S does, but it DOES apply to itself, since it is a proposition that is broadly about propositions--about what kinds of statements can be meaningful and so have a truth value (or, put another way, about what kinds of truths there are). So S and LPT fall into two distinct sub-classes within a broader class: utterances about propositions. And these prove to be a particularly tricky class.

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  22. To follow up: We can avoid paradox by holding that (S)--an utterance about propositions, or what might be called a meta-level proposition--is meaningless. But we cannot say that ALL meta-level propositions are meaningless without self-referential incoherence. So it follows that some-but-not-all meta-level propositions are meaningful.

    I think JP's point in his original comment invoking the class of true propositions (P) was, in effect, that a statement like LPT--that is, a statement about which propositions are meaningful--can avoid self-referential incoherence simply by including within the range of utterances to which it extends meaning utterances that describe a class to which it belongs. What we see now is that, in order to be true, it is necessary that this class not be the entire class of meta-level propositions, but some sub-class.

    But while that is a necessary condition, it doesn't follow that it is a sufficient one. In short, for a statement about which propositions are meaningful to be itself meaningful and true, it is necessary but not sufficient that the statement identify as meaningful a sub-class of meta-level propositions that includes itself but excludes exclusively self-referential truth claims like S.

    There are potentially very many statements about which propositions are meaningful that meet this condition (although LPT is not among them). But meeting this condition is not sufficient for truth. Which one of these is true, then, remains as far as I can tell an open question.

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  23. Eric,

    Concerning the self-referential statement (S) above and the set of all propositions (P), yes, one approach may be to explicitly limit what can be properly considered a proposition. We then get another set, say P'. I don't know whether P' is free from contradiction or not, but the argument about the original set P still holds: it is self-contradictory and does not exist.

    Excluding self-referential statements is not obvious at all. The case of S is simple enough but, taking inspiration from mathematical logic, it may be possible to write a (very complex) statement that self-referentially says something about P' as a whole. There may not be any simple criterion we can apply to define precisely what we want to exclude.

    My feeling is that we need to be very careful how we define those sets in order to make them unambiguous. Requiring that sets of propositions be defined in one of the following two ways might help: specialization (using a clear criterion) of an already defined larger set (top-down) or by explicit construction (bottom-up). It seems possible to talk of the set of all sentences by providing some explicit recursive mechanism to build them (explicit construction). The fact that we cannot go down from there to true propositions by specialization (because P does not exist) appears to imply that the concept of “true proposition” is ill-defined. A possible an interesting consequence is that the idea of “absolute truth” may be, if not meaningless, very problematic.

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  24. Eric

    The more I think about it, the more perplexed I become about this idea that a materialist take on art or love somehow misses a level of meaning.

    Let's take love as an example. So I am love, what does that mean from a materialistic point of view? Well, it means that my brain is in a certain state, it is true. But what does that mean?

    Well, in part, it means my wife and I have shared a physical destiny. Every thought I have allowed, every scent I have savoured, every song I have listened to and dream I have harboured, have brought me to this unique state at this particular moment, where I am ready to react to this singular human being, grounded in time and space before me. Her own history, her family, her struggles, her talents, impulses and decisions have delivered up as just the right person at just the right time, that our lives might shine a little more brightly.

    And that moment speaks not just of our personal histories, but of our great shared evolutionary history; of every chance movement, fumble, mutation and reaction that it took to make for us a world capable of such conscious joy. It's hard not shed tears of gratitude just thinking about it.

    And that is what it means for love to be 'just a brain state'. So I can only wonder, how much more meaningful could it get? Stories of deities or greater forces or purpose would surely detract from the splendid unlikeliness of it all. Certainly they would for me, which is precisely why I choose not to construct such tales.

    Bernard

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  25. Bernard,

    "Certainly they would for me, which is precisely why I choose not to construct such tales."

    But you have just constructed one. The problem is that it doesn't fit very well with the journey (of two people) you just described. Eric described the problem very well. You talk of shedding tears of "gratitude," but to whom? To silence? To the void? To chance? It doesn't make sense for you to be grateful, given your world-view. We are grateful for gifts. Gifts are given. Chance just happens. I believe everything you said, everything you described as to how it made you feel, I just don't think such reactions would follow if your world-view was true. If you had never met that person, if the opposite had happened, how is that any different given there is no "destiny" in such a world? You have constructed a tale where there is no ultimate purpose or meaning to anything, and yet, because you don't want that to be true, you borrow words like "destiny" and “gratitude” to personalize the universe even though you don’t believe in any such thing. In my view, such is another pointer or sign that there is more to this universe than just the physical.

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  26. Bernard,

    The materialist love story you tell here IS beautiful. And I am not saying that it's beauty depends on the existence of God or some other cosmic forces that made its occurence likely. What I am saying is that the story's BEING beautiful loses a certain kind of significance if "X is beautiful" means nothing more than "X produces a certain kind of neurological response in brains of a certain kind."

    If this is what the beauty of the materialist narrative of love consists in, then the beauty is not a feature OF that narrative. It is not true OF the narrative that IT is beautiful; rather, it is true of my brain that it responds to the narrative in such-and-such a way.

    On this account of beauty, if we could alter my brain chemistry such that it failed to respond in such-and-such a way to the narrative of love you tell, then this narrative would no longer be beautiful even though the narrative itself hasn't been altered one bit.

    And if we altered my brain chemistry such that it started to respond to some tabloid gossip column in the way that it currently responds to your narrative of the startling emergence of attuned minds in a material universe, then the Brangelina gossip would therefore come to have the sublime beauty of your narrative--even though it hasn't changed one whit.

    What bothers me here is that whether X is in fact beautiful does not depend in any way on the actual character of X. Calling X beautiful therefore fails to tell us anything significant ABOUT X. Instead, it's all about me. There's a kind of solipsistic implication here that I rebel against.

    Now none of this is to say that we need to bring God into the story in order for the story to be beautiful. Rather, it is to say that in order for the story's beauty to have the kind of significance I THINK it has, it's beauty has to be in some way an "objective" truth about it--which it won't be if its beauty is simply a contingent neurological reaction to it.

    There are broadly naturalistic attempts to render aesthetic judgments objective in the needed way--attempts to identify beauty with a certain kind of form and structure possessed by things in the world, a form and structure that makes a certain kind of response rationally fitting or appropriate. I am not saying that these accounts don't work. In fact, I think they have considerable power. But if they do work, they make possible questions about the surprising fact that a brain evolved for survival happens to possess the capacity to recognize and appreciate beauty. And while this surprising fact needn't be understood in theistic terms, that theism offers resources for integrating this fact into a holistic world picture becomes something that needs to be considered when we are deciding among worldviews.

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  27. There have been a number of comments to the effect that a materialist world view (in some general sense) implies some form of loss, an impossibility to embrace a full life, to understand beauty and so on. You know, that kind of things. There is even at times the suggestion that materialists must be, by necessity, in some sense incomplete or delusional. So, let me try a few ideas on this topic.

    Humans are meaning generating beings. We create these meanings through some kind of narrative about reality. These narratives don't have to be true or be based on a true account of reality – although for many this is an important factor. Whatever narrative we will adopt depends on a number of factors, including certainly our view about the nature of reality, our life experience and so on.

    There is no doubt that religious narratives are extremely good at generating meaning. This is testified by the enormous success of religion throughout history. I have no doubt that a religious world view can lead to a very meaningful life.

    The scientific narrative is also extremely powerful and provides, I should say, an account of our place in the universe as meaningful as the religious one – once you adopt the world view, of course. Again, I am not talking about truth – only about meaning. These two concepts are no doubt related but nevertheless different.

    So, while a materialistic world view makes allowance for the fact that other world views may be as meaningful, it is apparently very difficult for theists to see it the same way.

    I would suggest that there is some built-in feature (if I may use the term) of theism that explains that. And, from what many have written, it has to do at least in part with strongly held beliefs about absolutes of various kinds – but belief in these absolutes is part of the world view. I would also suggest that when one says that, say, beauty loses some significance when seen in a materialistic context, this is only relative to a theistic world view. In essence, this is what is going on: one derives his meanings from a specific world view, looks at another and observes that the said meaning is not there. What else could we expect? It is natural to say that it is missing, but meanings (and this is my point) are relative to world views, not absolutes. As long as we evaluate other world views in terms of meanings belonging to our own, mutual understanding may prove difficult.

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  28. Eric and Darrell

    An interesting thing happens in these discussions I am finding. At a certain point, the response becomes 'no, it just can't be like that.' So, if I believe that there are no such thing as qualia, this is apparently insane, and if I believe a deterministic version offree will is valuable to me, this makes a mockery of something I now forget, and most remarkably now we get a claim that my gratitude doesn't make sense. Again, and perhaps I should just stop butting my head agianst this particular wall and move on, what you mean to say is that it makes no sense to you Darrell, a point I happily concede. But to insist it can make no sense to me, in the absence of any argument as to why it can't, reduces to a sort of intellectual imperialism and is sinmply ridiculous. I am deeply grateful that chance has delivered me to this point in my life. Of course I understand you may find the same world view dispiriting. So we must conclude that such notions of meaning are, as JP rightly points out, relative to ones' values, as opposed to support for those values.

    Eric, although your language is more judicious, the point remains the same. You write eloquently about why my world view feels unsatisfying to you. Fair enough. But, so long as you concede it needn't feel at all unsatisfying to me, that what we have is just a difference of instincts and values, then you are embracing a relativistic position.

    But, if you are arguing that something is missing from my set of values, that my sense of value is somehow not as rich or satisfying because I don't believe in intrinsic value, then you need to put up an argument as to why this is the case, or else the case lapses into the same sort of fundamentalism.

    And finally (sorry but being told what I can and can't believe in principle riles me) no, there is no peculiar challenge for evolution in explaining the emergence of apreciation of beauty. There is a challenge for the parodied version of evolutionary theory that creationists also enjoy promoting, but surely this discussion can raise its sights higher.

    What is it I am missing in your beauty argument Eric?

    Bernard

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  29. Let me clarify a couple of things so as to avoid possible misunderstanding (since I think JP may have misunderstood my most recent comment).

    First, my view concerning beauty judgments and other value judgments is that they lose an important kind of significance if no judgment can ever be more fitting than another--if, for example, someone's judgment that Mark Doty's memoir about the death of his lover to AIDS (HEAVEN'S COAST--buy it and read it!) is a piece of crap is no less fitting than my judgment that it is a beautiful meditation on grief and love. (Note that one can regard an aesthetic judgment as fitting even if one does not personally LIKE it--I think Wagner's operas are aesthetically great, but they are not especially to my taste).

    In order for one aesthetic judgment to be more fitting than another, there must be something about the object of that judgment which renders it reasonable/appropriate to apply the judgment to it in a way that it is not reasonable/appropriate to apply the judgment to certain other things (there is something about Bernard's materialist story about the nature of a loving relationship that makes it reasonable or appropriate to call it beautiful in a way that it is not similarly appropriate to call a Brangelina tabloid piece beautiful).

    Both of these points can be and have been accepted by naturalists--and there are naturalists who, because of these points, seek to offer a naturalist account of what makes certain kinds of aesthetic judgments fitting and others not so.

    It so happens that in my personal history, my commitment to these ideas about aesthetic (and ethical) values have done more to push me in the direction of theism than theism has pushed me towards a certain understanding of beauty, etc. But I readily grant that there are those who have the views about values that they have because they flow out of their theistic worldview, and I as readily grant that there are those who have these ideas about values who have not on the basis of them gravitated towards theism.

    I will also grant that a radical subjectivization of values doesn't imply that persons cease to have values and preferences and hence doesn't imply that people can't have lives that are more subjectively satisfying to them than others would have been, etc. But it does imply that there can be nothing about Beethoven's 9th Symphony which makes it fitting to call it great art. It just happens to be the case that many people have a certain kind of positive subjective response to it (due to some combination of biology, cultural conditioning, and personal history). But if none had this response to Beethoven but universally reserved that response for Barry Manilow singing "Mandy," there'd be nothing about that arrangement which one could reasonably judge unfitting. And so there is a certain kind of significance that the statement, "Beethoven's 9th a great aesthetic achievement," ceases to have.

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  30. Forgot to create a link the Doty's memoir, Heaven's Coast. Now I did. Get yourself a copy and read it, because it is beautiful. And if you think otherwise, there's something defective about your beauty recognition software...

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  31. One more point that I think may be important to the direction in which this discussion has turned. I think we can all agree that aesthetic judgments have a different meaning and different implications if there are objective standards of appropriateness than they have if there are no such standards. But then the question arises: Do these differences entail that under the one set of conditions, aethetic judgments are somehow LESS VALUABLE? If you subjectivize all values, then the answer will be, "Only if you find it to be less valuable." If you don't subjectivize all values, then the answer MIGHT be yes, depending on what you think the non-subjective standards for evaluation in this case happen to be.

    But to embrace the latter does not require one to embrace dogmatism. That is, one can be a non-relativist about values and yet still be a fallibilist about them. One could think that the task of ascertaining the non-relative standards of value is very difficult, and hence that reasonable people can disagree. Furthermore, one can be a non-relativist about values and see that this as itself a position about which reasonable people can disagree, and so be a fallibilist about one's non-relativism as well.

    I am not a relativist about values, but I am a fallibilist about them--except in a few cases, such as the disvalue of brutal gratuitous violence committed against children. I not only am not a relativist about the disvalue of this, but I respond to those who seem to attach positive value to these things with a great deal of confidence that they are wrong and I am right in our respective value judgments.

    But the value questions at issue on this blog are the sort about which reasonable people may disagree--and I think this is true even if the value questions admit of a non-relative answer. As such, I would advocate adopting a stance of fallibilism even as we strive to articulate, explain, and defend our respective convictions.

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  32. Thanks Eric

    That's a helpful distinction. By this standard then I am a relativist. I think there is nothing about Beethoven's 9th beyond its ability to engender certain reactions in us that fits it to the description great art. This does not mean that I might not consider it great art, or be wowed by its ability to affect people in profound ways.

    Two questions then. First, how could one judge the fit of art to greatness if not through reference to people's response to it? You say this task might be very difficult, I am interested in the methodology available that would suggest it is not impossible. One can try to look for features or categories of features I suppose, but without reference to how those features make people feel... I'm still missing something.

    And to this business of meaning. Are you a relativist with respect to meaning? Or do you argue that whether something is meaningful is independent of the perceiver? If you are a fallibist about this, does this amount to saying that reasonable people can disagree on whether something is meaningful, or does it amount to saying that reasonable people can disagree on whether meaning is dependent upon the observer? If you do not hold the latter, then you hold that I am simply wrong, and I am interested to know why you think this. If you do hold the latter, then how is this form of fallibism substantially different from relativism?

    Bernard

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  33. Thanks for the clarification, Eric.

    I think it's agreed that differences regarding the existence of absolutes of one kind or another is a core issue here.

    This said, I have been trying to make sense of this notion that, in some sense, Beethoven's 9th is objectively a great work of art – that is: this assessment is independent from the fact that many humans react to it in a particular way. Or, to put it otherwise, there is something intrinsic to it that makes it so. One consequence of this view is that, if all life disappeared from the earth, it would still be meaningful to make that assessment about the symphony. It is possible I misunderstood even this but this is what objective value seems to mean. If we needed to keep humans in the picture, then the value would be relative to humans, which would lead us to a relativist view of things.

    Now, we perceive a musical work uniquely through our sense of hearing. So, on the “objectivist” account, we must conclude that the greatness of a work can be reduced to a bunch of sound waves or, if they are recorded, to marks on plastic – that's no small reductionism. The naturalist account has no problem with that because it is assumed that the music will, so to speak, trigger something in our brain and this “something” can be as sublime as we want.

    But I don't think “objectivists” see it this way. I can only think of this: the objectivist admits that the greatness of Beethoven's 9th needs to be recognized by a human mind but, at the same time, asserts that the human mind has access to a universal, objective, evaluation procedure. If so, this is very close to the subjectivist view – it just adds the assumption (in a typical display of human hubris?) that the human way must be the “correct” one. Does that mean that if a hypothetical advanced extra-terrestrial being remains cold before Beethoven's 9th, this is because he is lacking access to this universal and objective aesthetic sense? It seems to follow.

    Well, I just can't make it work. I don't think the objectivist account is as straightforward is it may appear.

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  34. Eric-

    Thanks for the clear explanation.

    That sounds like a sort of totalitarian significance.. "This must be liked by you.. because it is objectively good!". I'm not sure you want to go there, really. I think alot of people happen to like "Mandy", and might take offense at gratiutous snobbery. Not to be adversarial or anything!

    The issue is whether such significance either exists or is something we want to exist. And I would say no on both counts. So for you to claim that it is "an important kind of significance" is the most subjective expression of all. Important to you, and likewise imagined by you.. it all works out in the end.

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  35. When it comes to aesthetic judgments, I tend to be a fallibilist BOTH about the truth of specific aesthetic judgments AND about the non-relative character of aesthetic truth. That is, I understand and appreciate the reasons for thinking that the beauty of X is nothing more than a certain kind of subjective response to X. While I do not myself accept this relativist view, I understand why a reasonable person could do so.

    That said, my own experience with music and other forms of art leans me (with a strong sense of my own fallibilism) towards the thesis that there is something ABOUT certain works of art which makes it fitting or appropriate to have a "beauty response" to it.

    More precisely, however, my tendency is to favor the view that this non-relative dimension to aesthetics actually appears only on the meta-level. That is, what is beautiful is not the work of art or object of beauty as such but rather the way in which it is synchronized with and interacts with the human mind. While this may sound like aethetic relativism, I don't think it is--because the view here is that there is something that is true of this distinctive kind of interaction/interplay which gives it a non-relative value. This perspective has bearing on JP's extraterrestrials example, as well as making room for judgments of beauty to be appropriately different in different cultures or because of distinctive personal histories, etc.

    On this meta-level, my tendency is to favor the view that the value of the interplay is grounded in the nature of reason (again displaying a Kantian influence). But an explanation of how reason can generate a non-arbitrary endorsement of the fittingness of valuing this distinctive sort of interplay is not only something that is too big to handle in a comment, but something I'm still wrestling with. So I will hold off on that for now (but may offer a separate post on it at a later date as my ideas come together).

    ==> Continued

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  36. JP and Bernard,

    “There have been a number of comments to the effect that a materialist world view (in some general sense) implies some form of loss, an impossibility to embrace a full life, to understand beauty and so on. You know, that kind of things. There is even at times the suggestion that materialists must be, by necessity, in some sense incomplete or delusional. So, let me try a few ideas on this topic.”

    I think you have this somewhat backwards. I think the point I have been trying to make is that a materialist clearly can embrace a full life, understand beauty, and so forth, but he does so in spite of a world-view that cannot adequately account for such things. Further, it is the atheist/materialist who tells us, most often, that the belief in God is delusional and incomplete. Isn’t one of Dawkin’s books the “God Delusion?” Or one only need peruse some of Burk’s comments.

    “So, while a materialistic world view makes allowance for the fact that other world views may be as meaningful, it is apparently very difficult for theists to see it the same way.”

    But a materialistic world-view does not make allowances for a Christian/transcendental world-view to be as meaningful. It basically states that theism is psychological only and has no bearing on physical reality. It equates such belief with belief in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. Please tell me of one well-known Philosophical Naturalist who believes Christianity or theism to be as meaningful, in a positive truthful sense, or as in the same way he believes Philosophical Naturalism to be meaningful and positive. Have you read the leading spokespersons right now (The New Atheists) for the materialist/philosophical naturalist view-point, people like Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchins? Maybe you disagree with their tone, but do you disagree with their conclusions?

    “The scientific narrative is also extremely powerful and provides, I should say, an account of our place in the universe as meaningful as the religious one – once you adopt the world view, of course. Again, I am not talking about truth – only about meaning. These two concepts are no doubt related but nevertheless different.”

    Again, you seem to be equating the “scientific narrative” with materialism or what is better called philosophical naturalism (From hereon PN). They are not the same thing. Further, the reductionism of PN actually works to take the meaning away from our place in the universe, because it asserts there is, ultimately, no meaning or purpose to the universe, regardless of what we subjectively wish to be so. It is a narrative of chance, no purpose and no meaning; we are the accidental result of impersonal processes and nothing more, or do you disagree with that assessment?

    Eric, I believe, has pointed out the problem when one wants to believe in ideas/qualities like love, beauty, hope, goodness, and such but whose world-view does not adequately support or allow for the existence of such things in any objective way. I can’t see where anyone has really addressed his points.(Continued)

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  37. For now, I simply want to sketch out the basic form of my view on aesthetic judgments and its relation to the human mind.

    The human mind is characterized both by rationality and by an array of contingent (and variable) sentiments and inclinations unrelated to reason. These contingent features of the mind impact what we respond to aesthetically, such that different people will respond differently to Beethoven's 9th. When looking at the range of responses, only some of the mind-art interactions will warrant the positive valuation of reason. However, to the extent that a mind might cultivate the contingent traits that render it responsive to Beethoven's 9th in the valuable way, the value of that interplay would imply that cultivation of those traits is valuable all things being equal.

    But all is not always equal. For example, if the mind in question has already cultivated contingent dispositions that entail it routinely establishes the very same kind of valuable mind-art interplay with Indian classical music, then cultivating the dispositions needed to "appreciate" Beethoven become unnecessary for realizing the relevant good. And if the different psychologies and physiologies of space aliens were such that this same interplay could not be produced by listening to Beethoven but COULD be produced by sniffing complex "smell symphonies"...well, you get the idea.

    And by the way, I actually LIKE Barry Manilow (I grew up on him and owned all his albums as a kid). And I don't think "Mandy" is lacking in aesthetic value (I hum along happily when it comes on the radio). I just don't think it's in the same league as Beethoven's 9th--by which I mean that the distinctive kind of value (endorsed by reason) that the latter is capable of producing in the properly primed human mind exceeds the value of what the former can produce. If that makes me an elitist or a music snob, so be it (but I suspect that Barry Manilow would be among those who would agree that Beethoven's 9th is a great musical achievement than Mandy).

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  38. JP and Bernard,

    Here is the issue for me. If a naturalist were to step out of his world-view for a second, and assume there is a God who is the origin of this universe and people, and who embodies the very idea of beauty, meaning, purpose, love, and who has woven the desire for those qualities into humans and the universe, then our world as we experience it seems to fit and make sense. If, however, on the other hand, I were to assume the universe and humans to be without meaning or purpose, the result of chance and, really, accidental, then I would wonder whence the desire for meaning, purpose, love, beauty, hope, and all the rest? To say, well, “but I have all those,” is not an answer. Of course one does. No one is suggesting otherwise. The question is how do they arise from a meaningless, non-personal, purposeless universe? For the theist, this is not a problem. For the naturalist, it is. Now, it may be a naturalist feels he has an adequate answer. But, can we at least agree that it’s a problem? Now, if we can, that very point actually lends support to the theist position, because if naturalism were true, we should not desire or wish for these things—the problem should actually never arise. Does that make sense?

    I have had a chance to look at some of the other responses, and I will try and address those shortly. I do want to say this: I am not saying, at all, that there is anything deficient or “crazy” about what Bernard and JP are voicing. I respect your viewpoint and assume you both are very intelligent, thoughtful, and caring people who have lives of meaning and purpose. I think you both believe what you are asserting and I think you are both rational and reasonable people. I apologize if it seems I have suggested otherwise. However, I do respectfully disagree with your conclusions in these discussions.

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  39. Let me stress again that the judgment "X is aesthetically valuable" has, under my understanding of aesthetics, a different meaning than "I like X." There are things I think are aesthetically valuable that I don't happen to like, and things I like a lot that I don't think have enormous aesthetic value. And I think that's fine. I would never say we are all required to make our likes and dislikes perfectly line up with aesthetic achievement. What I would say is that to the extent that we can come to appreciate some great aesthetic creations, we realize a good we would not otherwise realize.

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  40. Hi, Eric-

    Yes, you draw a fascinating distinction, which I think naturalists have to grapple with as well- about aesthetic value that one does not personally share. I would make sense of it as signifying that other people hold X to have aesthetic value to them, and I respect their taste for some reason (they seem intelligent, sensitive, etc.).

    Suppose I was deaf, and had a significantly different aesthetic landscape than hearing people. I would have some respect for their aural aesthetic judgements without being able to appreciate them myself. This is all consistent with an ultimately relativistic scheme.

    This informs issues of fads and fashions. Modern art is in deep danger of trading on the respect we have for the aesthetic sensibilities of refined, educated, and sensitive people, who may have been pursuing more of a social game of one-up-manship / brinksmanship / cultural transgression rather than truly expressing the aesthetic sensibilities that we thought we were respecting them for. This can all come crashing down, sort of like a financial collapse which in large part is a matter of trust, not objective values. Tastes are heavily culturally constructed, (and reflective of social hierarchy), so this tends to work out in a longer historical process, though.

    Long after the fact, we may look back and ask ourselves.. well, Dada was certainly adventurous and wild, but did anyone actually like it?

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  41. Hi Eric

    The more I consider what you are saying about the fallibility of your beliefs, the more I think the difference between our stance sis more cosmetic than I first realised.

    I am sure my point of view on this is largely culturally informed. As a high school teacher in a state funded school, the biggest daily challenge I face in my work is providing access to education for those whose cultural experiences sit outside those assumed by the national educational agenda. With depressing consistency these kids get spat out of the system because their sense of what is beautiful, meaningful and important is different from those with the power. So the implicit snobbery of a non-relativistic take on the arts becomes a mechanism of oppression.

    I know my response to this debate is sharply affected by this ongoing frustration in my professional life and I just wanted to be open about that.

    Bernard

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  42. Many interesting comments here.

    Eric says: “... what is beautiful is not the work of art or object of beauty as such but rather the way in which it is synchronized with and interacts with the human mind.

    I essentially agree. My take is that beauty is not something that belongs to an object taken in itself (that is beauty as an entirely objective notion) nor is it something that happens only in the mind of a subject (solipsism?). It arises in the interaction of the two, in which one “resonates” in the other. Maybe one could say it's similar to a conversation. We differ on whether this notion can relate or not to something bigger. I don't see how this could be made to work.

    I just don't think it's [Barry Manilow] in the same league as Beethoven's 9th--by which I mean that the distinctive kind of value (endorsed by reason) that the latter is capable of producing in the properly primed human mind exceeds the value of what the former can produce.

    I tend to agree and our arguments would certainly present many similarities - but I would not extend this value system outside of the human realm (ignoring the possibility of some ETs having similar sensibilities). However I should add that I am open to the idea that Manilow (or another “minor” figure) can have on some the same effect (or some equivalent) that Beethoven has on me – and I wouldn't mind if that were true.

    What I would say is that to the extent that we can come to appreciate some great aesthetic creations, we realize a good we would not otherwise realize.

    Agreed, at least in spirit. But I would certainly not put that in moral terms.

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  43. Hi Darrell,

    You say: “But a materialistic world-view does not make allowances for a Christian/transcendental world-view to be as meaningful.

    I think I have said the opposite (but I can only speak for myself of course). So, to be sure, let me reiterate: a religious world view can lead to an extremely meaningful life. And I don't mean that as some kind of second-rate meaningfulness. It can be as meaningful as you make it.

    Now we may have a difference as regards to how meanings are achieved. I believe that meanings are made, not given. And, although their power certainly depends on the confidence we have on our world view, meaningfulness does not depend, in my view, on the truthfulness of that word view (as long as we believe it of course). I like the idea that meanings are created by finding our place in some cosmic narrative – and I mentioned the religious and scientific narratives as important examples. (Maybe Bernard, as a writer, could comment on this). Given this view of the origin of meanings, I can certainly say that a life based on a religious world view has as much meaning as I attribute to mine.

    On the other hand I am under the impression that you link the notion of meaningful life to the truthfulness of the underlying world view. On this view, you cannot honestly accept that my life is as meaningful as yours and that was the basis of my comment to the effect that it is apparently very difficult for theists to see it the same way. Please correct me if I got this wrong.

    If a naturalist were to step out of his world-view for a second, and assume there is a God who is the origin of this universe and people, and who embodies the very idea of beauty, meaning, purpose, love, and who has woven the desire for those qualities into humans and the universe, then our world as we experience it seems to fit and make sense.

    Well, I can only say that I have been a believer in my youth. I may not have used the term “theist” at the time (as probably too abstract) but my faith was deep and sincere. And I had to let go because the more I learned about science and the world, the less my religious world view made sense to me – precisely the opposite of what you suggest. It was longer ago than I care to admit and the emotional strains of my “anti-conversion” are long gone but, as far as I can remember, there was nothing easy about this.

    I think you vastly underestimate the difficulties raised by a theistic position. I will try to elaborate on this soon but I have to go for now.

    JP

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  44. Darrell and JP

    JP has helped me see I overlooked one way in which meaning is very different for theists and non-theists. That is in the beliefs we form about our beliefs, and it may be what you mean Darrel in which case apologies for missing this.

    I believe my beliefs are constructed things, built not just by me but by my biological and cultural histories. And I believe I get to choose (in a limited sense) beliefs on pragmatic grounds. This excludes me therefore from believing my beliefs are true things, I am limited to seeing them as useful things. Now a theistic position would allow me to believe my beliefs were true things and this, I readily concede, is a layer of meaning unavailable to the non-theist.

    I can't choose to be a theist on these grounds of course, as the pragmatic nature of the choice rules out true belief, but an interesting question is still, am I missing out on something valuable?

    Let me think about that.

    Bernard

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  45. I hesitate to intrude in this interesting discussion. I am only just beginning at the age of 51 to encounter philosophy at this level but as a semi-pro musician the musical references have been most interesting.

    I wonder in the same way as the comparison between Beethoven's 9th and Manilow's Mandy, might not an Indian classical musician find the limited western scale used by Beethoven lacking in true artistry compared to the micro tonal differences of his/her own tradition? In other words people here seem to be saying that almost everyone should agree that the Beethoven is great art and the Manilow not , thereby confirming that there is something 'more' to it than mere subjectivism and by that possibly hinting at the truth of supernaturalism (pardon me if I'm wrong here).

    However, if another culture were to find the Beethoven as 'beneath' their expectation of great art as some here would find the Manilow doesn't that just show that it really is just subjectivism?

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  46. Hi Jeff,

    Welcome to the discussion.

    I think you are right when you say that many see the greatness of such works of art as Beethoven 9th as somehow related to a transcendent realm (I am certainly oversimplifying but I think this is the general idea). Others, like me, disagree and would rather see this in purely human terms.

    Where most, if not all, will agree is that it is meaningful to use words like “greatness” to describe such works. Differences are about the question of where this meaning comes from. By the way, this in no way precludes the possibility that people from different cultures or backgrounds will see as “great” different kinds of music – as in your example concerning Indian music.

    What do you think?

    JP

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  47. Thanks for the warm welcome JP.

    My head says naturalism but even after all these years my heart yearns for transcendence.

    I find I get so lost in the arguments for both sides that I have to claim the wishy-washy stance of the agnostic - not because I think the answer is unknowable but because I personally don't have the mental capacity to critically assess the complex arguments put forward by both sides.

    Common sense (a very unreliable guide) says naturalism all the way - but then.. (see what I mean ;-)

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  48. Let me continue from my last comment, asking why take seriously the (subjective) aesthetic values of others.

    If we respect another's intellect and sensitivity, we might respect their taste. And that respect would have an important point to it, not only towards toleration of differences in taste, but to accept that they might have something to teach us, if we had a bit more time to devote to some obscure style of art, or were more educated about its meanings, or had a better appreciation of the culture from which it arises, etc. So respect paid to aesthetic leaders is similar to respect paid to other authorities, who might guide us to experiences that ultimately could be subjectively valuable for us as well. The movie review is a classic of the form.

    This leads (me) straight to religion, which is a sort of art of living and community, whose authorities and connoisseurs persistently tell others that they would gain extremely valuable personal experiences were they to jump in the pool. Religion comes in a myriad of styles. Preferences are based on frankly personal tastes and traditions, more than on analytical rigor. Religions use art directly in ways that typify particular communities. Core myths are clearly more of an artistic character than historical, technical, analytical, etc.

    Why it is so hard to take the authorities of religion at their word that great personal experiences will flow once we give our hearts to Jesus and appreciate the beauties of religion from the inside? What they say is empirical fact, after all, for millions of people. Partly, it is the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. While tradition and authority are guides to great experiences, they aren't infallible, and in every aesthetic realm, free communities split into subcultures of differing tastes and temperaments, responding to the many varieties of human experience.

    And, of course if religion were honestly sold only as Bach, holding hands, and uplifting sermons, there wouldn't be any issue beyond the aesthetic (and psychotherapeutic). But the artistry extends to (and seems to require) bizarrely seductive truth claims about .. well, no need to go into all the myths again. For people who like their artistic myths without irony, permanently suspending disbelief, religion is literally heaven-sent.

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  49. Burk

    I agree, and want to add that this issue of fallibility is perhaps more important than that of relativity. What I mean by this is that at the point where Eric states that although he thinks there are intrinsic aspects to beauty, reasonable people can still disagree on them, he appears to me to be saying we have no mechanism by which we can judge beauty, beyond those already employed by relativist considerations of beauty. And at this point the two views get pretty close don't they?

    Eric, I know you have mentioned some aspect of rational consideration here, making reference to Kant, but I'm still struggling to understand how such a mechanism is in itself not, well, mechanistic. This may come down to your views on the evolutionary process, which I've just assumed are naturalistic. And here the point ecomes as relevant to God as it is to beauty. By what mechanism do you believe we receive such knowledge? I don't quite get this yet.

    Bernard

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  50. Hi Bernard,

    I have not forgotten the discussion we started some days ago about the the power of science but there are so many interesting threads on this blog that it's difficult to stay focused. So, let me follow up on this.

    Your comparison between inductive reasoning and the evolutionary process is intriguing. There are similarities although, strictly speaking, the term “inductive” does not seem to apply to evolution. Thinking of this, I have a feeling that there is an important idea here but I can't put my finger on it. I will continue to think about this.

    Induction seems to be a pretty basic process. Isn't that in a sense how memory works? Even in simple animals (for some reason I have this image of a worm in my head...), we can imagine sensory input producing a change in the nervous system (memory), this memory being retrieved at a later time as part of a decision making process. Successive instances of the same input might reinforce the memory pattern, making actions based on these reinforced patterns more effective, and so on. If we see knowledge acquisition as the progressive construction in the brain of patterns corresponding to reality then the inductive process consists simply in giving more weight to (or trusting more) the most reinforced patterns. Put in this way induction seems to lose its somewhat mysterious aspects. Making sense?

    At the more logical/rational level, something funny happens. In the context of “common sense” approach to knowledge, induction is validated by the fact that it worked in the past. So, it is validated in fact by using itself. This may look like circularity but maybe it isn't. We may see this instead as a bootstrap process feeding back on itself and progressively asserting its reliability. In any case, without induction, how could we acquire knowledge?

    The question of our tendency to prefer elegant solutions is very interesting. It has certainly something to do with the way our mind works but why? Maybe there is something about mathematics that makes it possible to derive elegant laws – maybe the flexibility of the mathematical language allows us to define concepts and tools appropriate for an elegant formulation. As to whether nature's laws are simple and few in numbers, I don't know but maybe it makes sense to think that, given our taste for elegance, we would find elegant laws first.

    It is true that most scientific models are mathematical. This is especially true physics. In fact, to really understand any advanced physics, I think that mathematics are necessary. You are absolutely right to point out the danger of metaphors when thinking about science (particularly physics). You mention quantum physics and this is the perfect example of this. The farther what we consider is from our habitual environment, the less useful is our intuition. And, in the case of quantum physics, it fails completely. Even in simpler matters like time scales or distances different from what we experience in our lives I don't believe our intuition is adequate. I don't believe we can really conceive of a billion years or a million light years.


    JP

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  51. Hi JP

    Thanks for those thoughts. I keep coming back to induction as somehow emblematic of a bigger issue but I can't get it properly into focus yet.

    It is to do with the way a pragmatic defence of science, which is the only defence that makes sense to me, appears to let in at the same time a very strong defence of theism. If we embrace science purely because of what it can do for us, provide consistent and predictively powerful models, then for consistency's sake we must surely allow other values to be judged useful, at least by the individual. And one of those values perhaps is the ability to construct meaningful stories, which for some will of course involve a theistic response. At this point theism seems as reasonable as faith in science, at least in this regard.

    And yet I don't quite buy it. So why not? I'm not sure yet, this may just be my prejudice speaking. Induction seems to sit at the middle of something important to my argument though. It feels as if we reason inductively because it's useful to do so (and difficult to imagine an alternative), but does this idea that evolution leaves us with no alternative, change the nature of that argument? Probably not, as evolutionary theory is itself arrived at via scientific reasoning.

    Talk of the Plantinga argument also got me wondering whether inductive reasoning is an example of something evolution could have trapped us into doing erroneously, in the sense that the world is not actually regular but treating it as such provides a survival shorthand. I can't make this fly though.

    You made an interesting point to Eric raising the possibility that the very notion of truth may be more slippery than we imagine. And this takes me to the possibility that the best definition of truth we can manage is a pragmatic one, it becomes that stance for which a mechanism exists to allow us to reach agreement. So it is true that more people live in Tokyo than Liverpool in this limited but common sense respect. By this definition scientific models, although always tentative, are true in a way that statements of belief are not. But this is dissatisfying to me, as it feels as if the argument relies upon its ability to slip out from under a definition.

    And that takes me back to how it is science reaches consensus, and immediately I'm thinking of Karl Popper and this business of falsification, which is I think the prime cultural mechanism by which scientific progress is cemented in.

    Sorry, this is not particularly coherent, but I write it in the hope that it may prompt a more organised response from somebody who is a step ahead of me on all of this.

    Bernard

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  52. Hi Bernard,

    I have tried to figure this out for some time this question of what really is science. And I always end up with this pragmatic common sense view. I don't think we can justify science on purely logical grounds. Because, ultimately, a logical formulation will end up asserting unproven principles and, what do you do then? The idea that there are self-evident logical principles does not seem right to me.

    Hence, the idea that science is this natural thing that humans do. And, truly, we do that all the time: looking for evidence (what channel is this show on?), making experiments (let's try this chinese restaurant), and so on. In practical matters we are all “proto” scientists and all sane persons believe in this evidential approach to knowledge. In a sense, asking to justify science may be as silly as asking to justify language. Both are just things we do. Induction, in this context, may simply be the way we use memory: we remember that something was true (no tigers come to this water hole) and we use that information later.

    Now, if we suppose a reality with less regularity or a different kind of regularity and in which intelligent life can exist, then we would expect different heuristics to be programmed into these beings. We might find something quite different from induction (but I cannot see what).

    As I have argued before this natural proto-science evolved into modern science by becoming extremely reliable through the use of rigorous methods and error-detection mechanisms. In the same way, maybe, that language evolved into poetry and literature.

    I think you are right when you say that a pragmatic definition of truth may be the best we can use. This is how I see it and I don't know what else it could be. I would add that scientific propositions (the earth is about 4.5 billion years old) are of the same kind as practical statements (more people live in Tokyo than Liverpool).

    Do all that look like a very shaky foundation for science? Maybe but, on the other hand, given how well it works, I don't mind what it looks like – appearances, as often, deceive us. I am thinking that there is something in us striving for neat, logical reasons for what we do. That would lead, for example, to a search for absolute moral truths and so on. But a need for something does not make it true. Moreover, given a need or desire strong enough, it is always possible to find a rationale for it.

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  53. Hi, JP, Bernard-

    Most scientific models are probably not mathematical. Science is nothing but normal trial, error, and thought, carried to more or less systematic levels. Any car mechanic goes through the same process of observation, hypothesis creation, testing, and verification as his or her hunches get closer to the actual cause of the malady (hopefully without replacing too many expensive parts along the way).

    Scientific models are ideas about how the world works, and it is great when they get to the precision of mathematics, but much of the world is terribly messy, chaotic, and not very amenable. Think of medicine. Lots of science, but little mathematics. The power of elegance in this context is purely its functional ability of packing a lot of insight into a brief idea. E=MC*2 is a model of such elegance. But Darwin's idea of natural selection is another, non-mathematical one. Each idea keeps paying dividends as it condenses vast swaths of phenomena into our tiny heads, which surely don't have the capacity to perform the numerical calculations it would otherwise take (if it were possible at all) to simulate the relevant phenomena in the kind of time series required.

    People often say that the universe is a huge computer, going through its (either unconscious or conscious, depending on your mystical taste) information processing as we hurtle through time. Scientific ideas are all shortcuts to create simplified models of these calculations, since doing them directly is out of the question. While scientists are biased towards deterministic, elegant, mechanistic models, they don't have a choice in the matter, and if chaos and indeterminacy reign, not to mention spooky theistic actions, so be it.

    The whole idea of simulation is incidentally interesting, since all the simulation in the world won't really supply understanding- where you are mentally able to connect new dots by virtue of a mental model and mental database to create a richer, more reality-corresponding model. Exquisite simulation may be able to predict phenomena precisely, but without a symbolic, condensed understanding of the model, it would not typically give you any purchase on related phenomena.

    The exceptions occur (rarely) when a set of phenomena can be so precisely modelled, (think quantum electrodynamics and chromodynamics), and that model is so "right" for that set, that its extra results or implicit assumptions can make new particles "pop out" of the equations, which are then later tracked down empirically (or else the equations are thrown into the trash).

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  54. JP, Bernard, and all other conversation partners,

    I'm going to try and post my responses to several of your most recent comments and your specific questions to me within Eric's most recent post and especially in relation to the article by Peter Williams

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  55. Hi Burk

    When I speak of science being mathematical I am using the term too loosely perhaps. I shall try to explain.

    A central concern of this blog is the reasonableness of religious beliefs. Almost everybody believes the earth is round(ish), many people believe in a God, some people believe Tom Waits to be the finest songwriter of the last fifty years and even the most enthusiastic Pastafarians don't really believe in The Flying Spaghetti Monster. The question becomes, are some of these beliefs more reasonable than others, and on what grounds?

    One option is to apply blind democracy, the more popular a belief, the more reasonable. I would reject this approach, as I suspect would you.

    Yet science seems to be able to produce beliefs that almost everybody agrees to hold, and so a good starting point for me is why? Is there something about the methodology of science that produces models reasonable people agree on?

    Before answering that, I want a description of scientific habits that extend beyond the common sense, it's like what my mechanic does, variety, because this seems too loose to reward closer analysis. Is the young boy employing trial and error in his search for a girl really a scientist of love?

    Although Popper's attempt at describing science has its problems and critics, I do respond to the crucial role he gives to potential falsification. It seems to me the defining characteristic of the scientific model is the ability to say, if this is right, then we should expect to see A, and if we don't we really ought to look around for alternative hypotheses. This in itself demands that the experimental criteria for success and failure can be established in advance, and this is the sense that I see science as mathematical. The model between physical relationships must be such that we can agree upon the measurements implied, and when the measurements are made, we can agree upon those too. So a degree of quantification is necessary.

    Evolution is an interesting example because it seems to me that the verification of various evolutionary theories has been highly mathematical, at least in the sense I am using. It became quickly apparent post Darwin that the process needed more time than Kelvin's estimates of the earth's age allowed for example. A quantifiable prediction was being made. The strongest current evidence for evolutionary processes comes from the probability models of phylogenetics. And as an historical aside, this got it's kick in direct response to a challenge from Karl Popper.

    The place I think I am inching towards in this whole debate is that we use a word like truth to mean many things. One common usage is this predictive sense. If I say it is true that a particular movie is playing tonight, I am predicting that if we turn up at the theatre it will indeed be showing. If I say it is true the same movie is remarkable, I am employing a different, but also commonly accepted, usage.

    Some of the tribalism that emerges in the theist/atheist debate seems to stem from our habit of not signposting our shifts between these meanings. This is a gross oversimplification of course and I remain confused by most of the issues under discussion.

    Bernard

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  56. Hi Bernard,

    You are right, of course. Saying that science is based on common sense does not look like much and I may be on a wild-goose chase here. But, still, I am not sure. I am even under the impression that it is necessary that science be founded on nothing more than that – its power deriving precisely from this.

    So, what about other principles like Popper's falsifiability and so on? I would say that they are not fundamental but derived, the result of centuries of evolution. In this view, science has, with time, developed its own modus operandi, the whole complex set of methods and safeguards of modern science. The knowledge that such and such methods work has been achieved in the same manner than other scientific results have been.

    Well, I don't know if it makes much sense but I find there is some elegance to this. Of course, searching for elegance is dangerous and may be misleading. Oh well...

    Your ask “Is there something about the methodology of science that produces models reasonable people agree on?”. My little remarks address at most the question of how these methods originated. It does not explain why they work, and this is really what your question is about. This may be more important and interesting but also very difficult. I will try to come up with something more to the point.

    JP

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  57. Burk,

    You write: “Most scientific models are probably not mathematical. Science is nothing but normal trial, error, and thought, carried to more or less systematic levels. Any car mechanic goes through the same process of observation, hypothesis creation, testing, and verification as his or her hunches get closer to the actual cause of the malady (hopefully without replacing too many expensive parts along the way).

    I tend to agree that what the car mechanic does is science, in some less formal sense of the word of course, but I’d like to defend two propositions: 1. What the car mechanic does is to develop increasingly exact models of phenomena. 2. The car mechanic’s modeling is mathematical in nature.

    The car mechanic, from experience or from study, holds in her mind an “ideal” model of the car type she is working on. Further she observes data about the broken car she is working on, and tries to create a model about what damage in the ideal model would produce the data she is observing. She develops such a model and tries to implement the corresponding fix; if it doesn’t work then she has new data, which do not fit with the old model, and on which she can now try to develop a better model. Such a train of modeling, testing, and remodeling – is indeed pretty much what the scientific project consists of.

    My second contention is that all models, including the car mechanic’s model, is a mathematical one. Any model, even a model one only keeps in one’s mind without ever formalizing it on paper, entails several conditional (if-then-else) propositions. My own knowledge of car mechanics is next to zero, but a primitive example that applies to all conventional cars is “If the car has no gas then the engine will not start”. All such propositions can be formalized in propositional logic, and propositional logic is a mathematical field.

    Think of medicine. Lots of science, but little mathematics.

    I think you are here mixing a very low brow sense of science with a very high brow sense of mathematics. As it happens, a medical doctor’s modeling of disease has been formalized in software. There are several computer based diagnostic “expert systems” which, depending on the known symptoms and other data, produce a diagnosis about what the patient is suffering from. These systems, which mimic a medical doctor’s scientific job, have been found to be quite effective in the praxis. The “intelligence” or “knowledge base” of such systems resides in a complex structure of mathematical expressions such as: “If X and Y then A with probability 0.71 or B with probability 0.29”. So it’ true that the medical doctor need not know sophisticated math, nor must use the calculator all the time, but his modeling of disease is certainly mathematical in nature.

    Scientific models are ideas about how the world works,[snip]

    Not at all. Quantum mechanics is the most successful and influential scientific theory of all time, but its mathematical models about the physical phenomena it describes say next to nothing about how the world works in order produce such phenomena. Hence the need to find a so-called interpretation of the theory. The rest is history: The first interpretation (the Copenhagen interpretation) contradicted basic assumptions of naturalism, and when naturalists did manage to produce naturalistic interpretations of quantum mechanics these interpretations turned out to monstrously implausible and also mutually contradictory, without any clear idea about how to decide which one of them is true. So much then for naturalism being “common-sensical” and “objective”.

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  58. Hi, Bernard-

    Absolutely- real science involves standards as well, which raise it over common sense and the like. Those are demonstrability, repeatability, transparency of method and discussion, free criticism by reviewers, readers, students, listeners, and others with some knowledge of the field. I agree that Popper's falsifiability is the most succinct description of all this.

    The point goes back to one's definition of truth. Normal people have no problem with the correspondence definition of truth, even if they engage in other, less solid versions of truth in addition. So once scientists demonstrate that, say, the results of an atomic collision lose just the amount of mass that is predicted by E=MC*2, they have said something that no theist can ever say- that an idea we have in our heads corresponds precisely with empirical reality in a specific, demonstrable way.

    So, if your boy were able to show that a particular line he had developed was able to reel in any girl he liked, then he and we might be onto something akin to a science of love, which might lead to some insight into the weaknesses of the fairer sex, if any, not to mention the deviousness of the unfairer.

    For evolution, the timings involved are estimates in the loosest sense. We have post-hoc knowledge of the time needed from paleontology, but from the theory alone, many spans would be compatible, if not 6,000 years.

    I agree that our definition of truth lies at the heart of all this, not to mention psychological issues and fallibilities of all sorts. Prediction isn't science until it is reliable, based on public methods, and part of a deeper model of reality, so unless your prediction of movies playing were based on some model of the information network involved, it might resemble magic more than science (though very effective magic in this instance).

    I'd note one more thing, which is the psychological issues involved in differentiating ways of knowing. One of the great transitions of childhood is giving up magical thinking. I remember being with my father in the basement as he took out his shotguns from the previous hunting season. Before I knew it, he had blasted a hole in the wall, due to a shell that wasn't supposed to be there. Shock all around, and I realized that adults were not only fallible, but could make lethal mistakes.

    Well, this takes many forms, and is very hard to describe, but at some point, children give up the assumptions of magical comfort that eased them through childhood, and realize that the real world is a serious place that does not care about them particularly. Most people have come to this realization deep down, even if they are in heavy denial. They fear death, despite all the heavens they are offered, and so forth. In the same way, they respect how science studies the concrete, ground truth, finding both wonderful and horrifying aspects to this thing we call reality. They know deep down the difference between that and comforting myths, projections, positive thinking, vain hopes, and the like.

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  59. Hi, Dianelos-

    Your point about quantum mechanics is a good one. Essentially, scientists/mathematicians came up with a bunch of magic formulas that model the world accurately, but have not yet really told us (or me, anyway) what reality underlies it. We can quibble about the details, but I'd basically agree. The wave nature of everything is something of an underlying insight, but there has to be more going on.

    Is this science? Well, certain aspects of it are science, but its corpus is, in my mind, incomplete. Finding and documenting regularities of the real world are definitely aspects of science, proven out in further experiments, predictions, etc. If those regularities fail to illuminate deeper aspects of reality, as a field/relativity theories like gravitation did, then the science is only partly done. That could be because we have not found the Einsteinian key (or data) to unlock that further reality, or it could be that that further reality is complicated beyond our conception. The one thing that is highly unlikely is that Yahweh is going to come to the rescue at such difficult points, for a variety of reasons that we have been through. Our minds need to be a bit more open than that (and more humble).

    That is the frustration of the work- that there are always things that are not understood. As long as there are scientific frontiers, we will be in that position. On the other hand, the science of, say, chemistry, is based on known foundations of physics, and stands as a complete scientific system where new findings extend our knowledge of the complexity achievable by chemicals, and are readily explained as they arrive by deeper principles.

    So a true theory (to my mind) should have not just a black box method of prediction, but also communicate an underlying logic to phenomena: a human-accessible model. That is what the theory of evolution does, for instance. As for naturalism in this context, if we had any kind of basis to interpret quantum theory to a deeper level, whether theistically or mechanistically, naturalism/science would be open to it. But to just throw theism out there as the explanation in the clear absence of such a basis ... that is just making stuff up.

    Specifically, none of the quantum interpretations are seriously problematic to naturalism in a philosophical sense. Non-locality is certainly unprecedented, but who are we to prejudge how reality operates? With time apparently fungible, and the vacuum itself an dynamic arena of physics, the limited non-locality required to accommodate most quantum interpretations is weird, but worse things have happened. Naturalism is all about accepting what is real. Before we have a deeper approach, we don't have a basis to decide which of these views (if any) makes the most sense. But nor do we have warrant to give ourselves over to an over-board theism. We are humbly ignorant, if that is OK with you.

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  60. Burk

    The tale of your father and the gun is wonderful. Something of that nature sits at the heart of almost every coming of age story, which is the area in which I have done most of my writing. And it ties in with the comment you make at the end of your response to Dianelos. At some point we come to the realisation that not only do we not have the answers, but neither does anybody else. The interesting cultural question then becomes, what do we do with this uncertainty?

    For me the appeal of the narrative of scientific history is that it provides a way of dealing with uncertainty that feels somehow heroic (and this is of course just a personal response and one others might quite reasonably reject). So yes, ultimately we might be tilting at windmills (perhaps consciousness, perhaps quantum behaviour, perhaps the Big Bang will prove intractable) but our stubborn refusal to back down from the challenge has seen a good number of edifices crumble before our curiosity. And although this is science viewed through a highly romantic lens, lives are lengthened by medicine, enrichened by communication technology (twenty years ago this kind of easy international interaction between strangers was unthinkable) and all the rest. Quite wonderful.

    Others will quite rightly point out that the great questions of ethics, aesthetics and purpose remain unanswered, and to respond to these needs without some kind of mythology appears impossible. I think my tentative response to that is, yes, but let us all acknowledge that this is exactly what we are dealing with; important, precious, necessary mythology, but mythology nonetheless.

    Bernard

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  61. Hi Burk,

    You write: “Essentially, scientists/mathematicians came up with a bunch of magic formulas that model the world accurately, but have not yet really told us (or me, anyway) what reality underlies it.

    Right, and this I think nicely illustrates Eric’s explanation about the difference between phenomenal reality (which quantum mechanics models with phenomenal success) and noumenal reality (i.e. reality in itself: the objective reality out there that produces the phenomena we perceive when we look around).

    The wave nature of everything is something of an underlying insight, but there has to be more going on.

    Actually what quantum mechanics (QM) entails is a wave/particle duality. Waves do not enjoy some kind of primacy. Indeed, according to the many worlds interpretation, which is perhaps the most elegant (and conceptually useful) naturalistic interpretation of QM, only particles exist in the various parallel universes. The waves in the theory only describe how the parallel universes will be created.

    Is this science? Well, certain aspects of it are science, but its corpus is, in my mind, incomplete.

    Well, I’d say QM is certainly science as far as the pragmatic relevance of the scientific project goes, not to mention according to the opinion of virtually all scientists. Only in classical science (including Darwinism) it is the case that one is led to believe that scientific models not only describe phenomena but also the underlying reality. But even in the age of classical physics more careful thinkers, such as Kant, knew that this is just an impression which does not hold on deeper analysis. When QM was discovered we got an actual demonstration that Kant was right and that the impression that science describes reality is in fact illusory.

    Now, perhaps you are not saying that QM is not real science, but rather that, given that QM does not describe how reality is, it must be incomplete science. Perhaps there is a better and yet to be discovered theory about quantum phenomena which would also describe in a natural manner how noumenal reality is. If so, you are in good company; Einstein thought the same, but for a different reason, namely because he disliked the non-deterministic implications of QM: If phenomenal reality is non-deterministic as QM appears to be saying then noumenal reality must be non-deterministic also, because a deterministic noumenal reality must produce a deterministic phenomenal reality. Incidentally, this simple syllogism was proven false by the many worlds interpretation of QM, because, as it turns out, this syllogism implicitly assumes that each one of us remains one observer. But if reality is such that each one of us is copied all the time into different parallel universes then it is possible that in each local universe the respective copy of ourselves observes a non-deterministic phenomenal reality, while noumenal reality in its entirety remains deterministic. (Physics is not metaphysics, but physics does have metaphysical implications – namely noumenal reality cannot be such as not to produce phenomenal reality – and physicists have made some interesting inroads into metaphysics.)

    [continued in the next comment]

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  62. [continued from the previous comment]

    Anyway, let me come back to the proposition “Science which only describes phenomena but not the underlying reality is incomplete science”. I think this proposition is false for two reasons: how physicists' thinking has evolved, and also how physics has evolved:

    During the first decades after the discovery of QM the issue about what kind of reality would produce the relevant phenomena was hotly disputed among physicists, but not anymore. Why not? One reason is that the problem appears to be intractable. In ways that mimic the case of the hard problem of consciousness, physicists recognize that if the various interpretations are compatible with all known phenomena, then science, which is based on the study of phenomena, cannot possibly discriminate between the various alternatives. A second reason is that finding the correct interpretation of QM appears to have no practical or theoretical value, for it is not clear in what sense finding our which naturalistic interpretation is the correct one, would benefit the scientific project of modeling phenomena. Indeed, perhaps the realization is slowly sinking in that science is not in the business of describing reality in the first place, and that if naturalists have problems they should solve them themselves.

    So far, a naturalist could suggest that many physicists are mistaken about science. One problem there is that the whole of science is reductionist in nature, with chemistry being largely based on physics, biology being largely based on chemistry, and so on. Further there are the facts about the evolution of science itself, for it’s not like after the discovery of QM the evolution of scientific knowledge is inching back into a state where it describes reality. Quite on the contrary, foundational knowledge about the physical universe is, for the last hundred years, moving steadily away from any appearance of describing reality. String theory appears to be close to a completely mathematical one, and to be, as you say, only a bunch of magical formulas.

    The one thing that is highly unlikely is that Yahweh is going to come to the rescue at such difficult points, for a variety of reasons that we have been through.

    Let’s do a reality check here. The problems we have been discussing are not science’s problems. It is overwhelmingly clear that modern science is doing extremely well, and discovering new knowledge at a furious rate. The problems we have been discussing here are naturalism’s problems, and specifically the growing problems of a naturalistic interpretation of science. I agree with you that nobody should expect God to come and help solve naturalism’s problems. Why not? First because it’s hard to see what God’s motive would be, and secondly because these problems appear to be unsolvable. After all, if they were solvable one would expect the Devil to have come by now to the help naturalists. (I am joking.)

    So a true theory (to my mind) should have not just a black box method of prediction, but also communicate an underlying logic to phenomena: a human-accessible model.

    I agree. I only wish to point out that the human-accessible model (I’d have said the intellectually satisfying model) can be of two kinds: The description of a mechanistic non-purposeful underlying reality, and the description of a non-mechanistic purposeful underlying reality.

    That is what the theory of evolution does, for instance.

    Right, the theory of evolution does describe a mechanistic non-purposeful reality which would produce the functional complexity of the various species, including, not implausibly, ours.

    [continued in the next comment]

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  63. [continued from the previous comment]

    As for naturalism in this context, if we had any kind of basis to interpret quantum theory to a deeper level, whether theistically or mechanistically, naturalism/science would be open to it

    First of all there is no such thing as “naturalism/science”, no matter the belief many naturalists hold that naturalism is very scientific, and that science supports and can only support naturalism. Further, even though naturalists are famously in disagreement about what naturalism actually claims, one thing everybody agrees with is that it’s not compatible with theism. So naturalism is certainly not open to a theistic interpretation of quantum theory.

    So how does theism interpret quantum theory? Simply as a part of the God-created physical universe (or rather phenomenal physical universe) which is itself part of our experience of life. Theologians have argued that in order for virtue and moral reasoning to be possible one needs a stable and sufficiently predictable environment, and the physical universe, just as we experience it, seems to fit that requirement very well. That physical phenomena, in their most foundational aspects, seem to contradict naturalistic assumptions and resist naturalistic modeling, may well be God’s way of telling us that the fact that what we experience around us is of mechanical nature should not lead us to the belief that the underlying reality is of a mechanical nature too.

    But to just throw theism out there as the explanation in the clear absence of such a basis ... that is just making stuff up.

    All hypotheses are “making stuff up”. The question is which hypotheses fit the data and which don’t. But there is an important difference about the nature of such epistemic “fit” in the context of the two ontologies we’ve been discussing:

    The naturalistic hypothesis of a mechanistic underlying reality is such that the fit must make mechanistic sense. Hence a naturalistic hypothesis is successful when it successfully responds to “how” questions; in the context of naturalism “why” questions are either meaningless or else reduce to “how” questions. In the context of naturalism, an explanation which does not describe a mechanism, is not valid.

    The theistic hypothesis of a purposefully underlying reality is such that the fit must make purposeful or goal-oriented sense. Hence a theistic hypothesis is successful when it successfully responds to “why” questions; in the context of theism “how” questions are either meaningless or else reduce to “why” questions. In the context of theism, an explanation which does not describe a motive, is not valid.

    I surmise that a major problem is that many naturalists fail to see that different ontologies entail different epistemologies. Hence they expect theism to supply explanations which conform to naturalism’s (or indeed science’s) epistemological standards, and, say, describe the mechanisms by which God achieves this or that. Perhaps that’s also the reason why so many naturalists conflate naturalism with science: Science too is about describing a mechanistic reality, albeit the phenomenal one, and hence successful scientific theories respond to “how” questions (up to a point; to ask how mass bends spacetime is not answered by general relativity). So there is indeed an epistemological similarity between science and naturalism. Both assume the same kind of order, namely a mechanical one, and thus require explanations of the same type. Actually, it’s kind of plausible to assume that the epistemology which helps one model phenomena will also help one model the reality which produces said phenomena – but, as the recent history of science has shown, this assumption does not work very well.

    [continued in the next comment]

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  64. [continued from the previous comment]

    Specifically, none of the quantum interpretations are seriously problematic to naturalism in a philosophical sense.

    If you are saying that the naturalistic interpretations of quantum mechanics are logically possible, then I agree. If you are saying that it is reasonable to believe that they may describe reality then I can’t agree, for the implications of these interpretations are just too absurd. I suspect that if the average naturalist were aware about what these naturalistic interpretations actually imply they would find the whole thing seriously problematic too.

    Naturalism is all about accepting what is real.

    Theists claim the same about theism.

    Before we have a deeper approach, we don't have a basis to decide which of these views (if any) makes the most sense.

    I am not sure what you mean by “deeper approach”. I’d say that the pieces are well set: Naturalism must give a well-fitting and plausible description of a mechanistic reality, and theism a well-fitting and plausible description of a purposeful reality. The only remaining question is whether we have the cognitive capacity of producing hypotheses and checking their fit in both cases (which is an issue you raise bellow). In other words the only remaining question is whether we have grounds to escape agnosticism.

    Well, I believe that we do have this cognitive capacity, and I personally find that theism makes more sense of science (both of the whole project of science, and of specific scientific discoveries such as QM, non-locality, start of time, fine-tuning, etc), and much more sense of the human condition. There are many theists, from Eric Reitan to John Hick who think that the world is religiously ambiguous, but I can’t honestly agree, because I find that theism works better than naturalism when compared one to one under any plausible criterion.

    But nor do we have warrant to give ourselves over to an over-board theism.

    I think that I have this warrant, and, moreover, that this warrant is based on the common human condition we all share.

    Incidentally, I don’t understand why you chose the particular wording above. Theism, or at least sophisticated theism, is really a very positive, beautiful, morally empowering, and intellectually satisfying worldview.

    That is the frustration of the work- that there are always things that are not understood. [big snip] We are humbly ignorant, if that is OK with you.

    There is the idea of “mysterianism”, namely the view that we simply lack the cognitive capacity to understand how reality ultimately is. Some theists use this hypothesis in the context of the problem from evil, and William Craig even argues that if we knew the purpose of all evil then that purpose would be defeated. I suppose it’s all about the old saying that “God works in mysterious ways”. Naturalists can do the same and claim “Nature works in mysterious ways”.

    I personally think that naturalists can more plausibly than theists claim mysterianism. After all they can turn the table on Plantinga and argue that there is no evolutionary advantage whatsoever for a brain that has the capacity to track metaphysical truths about how reality is. The only thing that’s useful is to understand our immediate physical environment during the short time spans we are alive, and that therefore our inability to find out how reality is, is exactly how things would be if naturalism is true.

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  65. Hi, Dianelos

    Thanks for a very interesting discussion.

    On the question of naturalism/science, my point is that naturalism goes only as far as science does, and exactly that far. Up to this point in time, that leaves us with a mechanistic reality. Thus the naturalist position is that that is all we have to work with as far as is reliably known. Naturalists may also observe the psychological aspects of theism and summarily discard them as overly convenient, human-centered explanations-of-everything. But naturalists don't assume knowledge about what is patently unknown. Just like theists, (hopefully), they are at most making idle bets in the absence of evidence, and have some hope that more data will come in in the form of science rather than revelation.

    Your point about an inverse Plantinga argument is very true- it is just these exotic questions of physics and metaphysics that are well beyond our evolutionary situation and might be beyond our cognitive equipment. But... I also think that once we have mastered general computation, logic, and mathematics, (as we have), we have the tools to understand (if not simulate) just about anything, if we can gather data about it. The problems of string theory, quantum theory, and the like clearly revolve around a lack of data more than anything else. We just are not able to reproduce the big bang, or energies anywhere near it. So we are left having to tease our knowledge out of this frozen relic of a universe we find ourselves trapped in, which is amazing, but not amenable to experiments on universe production & deep reality.

    "I suppose it’s all about the old saying that “God works in mysterious ways”. Naturalists can do the same and claim “Nature works in mysterious ways”.

    But there is a crucial difference- you have claimed numerous times to know how god works.. so it seems a bit schizophrenic. The epistemological difference is crucial- do we respect unknowns as being unknown, or do we drive through them with the Mac truck of theism, claiming that god, despite its mysterious ways, causes things to happen for "reasons" and neatly explains quantum mechanics and answers prayers and makes us moral and saves us from being Left Behind, and the like? It is these (false) claims of knowledge that drive atheists up wall.

    .. cont ..

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  66. On the issue of whether science can consist of just describing things, or whether it needs also to engage in describing and underlying reality... Well, science certainly starts with describing things, and the hair-pulling efforts to attain a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics attest to the extremely strong desire scientists have to not just describe, but come to better models of the underlying reality. This is not something to be hived off as "noumenal" at all, but is the bread and butter of what we aim for in science. But the fact of the matter is that it is not always achievable. No shame in that. Again, naturalists don't have any further problem than recognizing when these limits have been reached, and not imputing our unknowns to an unknown but psychologically complex totem.

    "I surmise that a major problem is that many naturalists fail to see that different ontologies entail different epistemologies. Hence they expect theism to supply explanations which conform to naturalism’s (or indeed science’s) epistemological standards, and, say, describe the mechanisms by which God achieves this or that. ..... Actually, it’s kind of plausible to assume that the epistemology which helps one model phenomena will also help one model the reality which produces said phenomena – but, as the recent history of science has shown, this assumption does not work very well. "

    My jaw has dropped. Do we have a reliable epistemology at hand for "reality" separate from phenomena? Or a perceptual mechanism? That is the question, and I can sense that it is tempting to jump in and say: "Yes- intuition, mystical 'knowing', and revelation are what you are asking about- getting in touch with reality directly rather than through the messy intermediation of phenomena". All I can say is that the evidence on these functions is that they never have told anyone what was not knocking around in their heads already, if unconsciously. They are, like dreams, a field of self-knowledge and self expression.

    Can we, without dealing with perceptual issues at all, deduce from the accurate models we have the reality behind? But that is what the quantum interpreters have been laboring so long to do! If you give their interpretations no credence, what is your intuition (or alternate epistemology) of god going to help? The problem here is not that these interpreters demand a mechanistic answer in advance, but that they have not found an underlying logic of any kind underpinning the phenomenal world at this level. Perhaps the answer is that god is not logical, thus all the math & logic in the world won't help. But whatever it is, we know so little about it that calling it names is pointless in any case, or saying that theism "fits", and so forth.

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  67. Hi Dianelos

    You clearly enjoy reading about quantum physics and set a lot of store in its intriguing weirdness. I've just been reading an article on the IQOQI in Vienna, where testing on new variants of Bell's inequality is underway.

    I have absolutely no expertise in the field, but I think the whole history of the locality versus realism puzzle does show that we must be careful not to prejudge a problem as intractable. Again and again problems that appear insoluble have yielded to ingenious experiments.

    The various interpretations of QP seem to me to serve best as intuition pumps, providing the conceptual framework that in turn will drive the next round of speculation, experiment and discovery. That we can not yet decide between them I think just tells us where we are on the discovery curve. To claim that no more progress can be made, that we just run out of juice here, or to take a punt on one over another on the grounds that it is less absurd, seems odd to me. Most of my favourite ideas from the history of science were once deemed too absurd to contemplate.

    Again it seems to come down to a matter of personal taste. What should one do in the face of mystery? My instinct is to investigate more, and until the evidence comes in, accept we know nothing. Yours appears to be to turn to your intuition to feel your way to a solution.

    I don't think there's anything wrong with doing the latter, although I wonder how fair it is to describe this process as one of reasoning. Rather it appears to be one of imagination. The fiction writer in me rails against this relegation of imagination, as if we should in some way be embarrassed that we use it.

    Human beings makes things up because they make us feel good. And if we are smart, we are open to the things other people make up too, on the grounds that they might make us feel even better. Why, on the occasions that we enter the realm of fantasy, do we insist upon pretending we are doing something else? This is a great puzzle to me.


    Bernard

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