It seems to me that some of the conversations we are having on this blog could benefit from making some distinctions. As such, I want to devote a couple of posts to simply making some distinctions that I think may prove helpful--although in some cases the distinctions are subtle and hard to make, and so I welcome advice in refining them.
The first distinction I want to make has to do with a pair of contrasting epistemic circumstances that, it seems to me, are often inadequately distinguished. I say this because, as I reflect on what I was doing in Is God a Delusion?, I worry that I was blurring together these contrasting epistemic circumstances myself.
The distinction bears on the relationship between two other contrasting concepts, namely agnosticism and what I like to call fallibilism. These are, if you will, contrasting epistemic attitudes. In roughest terms, to be an agnostic is to withhold belief on a matter, whereas to be a fallibilist is to have a belief but recognize that you could be mistaken, that those who disagree with you could have some or all of the truth, and that it is important to comport yourself accordingly.
What I want to suggest is that these contrasting epistemic attitudes may be correlated with contrasting epistemic circumstances--where agnosticism is (all else being equal) the most fitting response to one while fallibilism (again all else being equal) is the most fitting response to the other. It is the distinction between these underlying epistemic circumstances that I want to try to get at.
The contrasting epistemic circumstances I have in mind are ones that might be faced by reasonable people confronted with a body of evidence. For the sake of sketching out these circumstances, I am going to leave the concepts of “evidence” and “reasonable people” largely unanalyzed. All I will say is that I when I speak about "presumptive evidence" below, I mean to use the term in a broad sense so as to include anything that can be propositionally expressed, where that proposition strikes one as clearly ("evidently") true (in the way that propositions which express what one's senses are immediately delivering strike one as clearly true), and its truth supports the truth of some other proposition(s). But this definition is itself couched in terms that require unpacking, and which might be understood in different ways. In short, I am fully aware that these terms are not uncontroversial, but I am going to sidestep these controversies for the sake of focusing on a different issue, while remaining fully conscious of the fact that in order to adequately address the issues raised here, it is likely that we will eventually need to return to these more basic controversies.
Here, then, are the two epistemic circumstances I want to consider:
Epistemic Circumstance 1 (EC1): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that "reasonable people" (however that is to be understood) generally accept, but you recognize that there are different ways of fitting that evidence into a coherent whole—different "stories" we can tell that fit just as well with the given evidence. In other words, we have certain mutually exclusive holistic ways of seeing the evidence, each of which maps onto the evidence just as well. For simplicity, let us assume there are only two such ways of seeing that fit as well onto the evidence, which we will call Worldviews A and B.
Epistemic Circumstance 2 (EC2): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that reasonable people generally accept, as well as certain further “apparent truths,” that is, things you experience as clearly true/self-evident/obvious/hard to deny/intuitively correct. But some of the people you regard as rational don’t find these apparent truths nearly as apparent as you do, and may instead find other things evident which are hardly evident to you. So, within the total body of “evidence” with which you are confronted, some of it is “shared evidence” whereas some of it is “personal evidence.” Now suppose that, as before, Worldviews A and B both map onto the shared evidence (and are the only worldviews you have so far encountered that do this). But now let us suppose, furthermore, that Worldview A maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and your personal evidence, while B doesn’t (accepting B would force you to abandon things that seem clearly right to you). At the same time, Worldview B maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and what is apparently the personal evidence of reasonable people other than you.
These, in brief, are the two contrasting epistemic circumstances I want to consider. They are not meant to be exhaustive. There may even be a kind of continuum between EC1 and EC2--that is, a range of cases that are a bit like both in one way or another, some more like on and some more like the other. As such, they might be seen as ideal types.
Now if you find yourself in EC1, there is a clear sense according to which, from your standpoint, A and B are equally plausible on the evidence. Put another way, there is no reason, on the evidence, for you to favor A over B. If A and B are the only ways of seeing that you've so far encountered that offer a good fit with the evidence, you may have some reason to endorse the disjunctive proposition, "A or B." But the evidence as such favors neither.
This doesn't mean that you won't have pragmatic or personal reasons for operating as if Worldview A is true and not Worldview B. You might find A more hopeful. Or you might like who you are better when you live as if A is true. Or perhaps you’ve grown up with a community that embraces A, and you continue to have a sense of solidarity with that community. Or perhaps you’ve tried to see the world through the lens of B and it just doesn’t sit right with you because of what you identify as mere quirks of personality. Or perhaps it is a combination of these factor. In any event, you recognize these factors as personal and idiosyncratic ones, and you see those who choose to operate as if B is true (or who choose neither, assuming that is pragmatically possible) as being motivated by personal idiosyncratic motives that are no better and no worse than the ones that motivate you.
Put another way, whatever it is that you take to be motivating you to adopt A over B, you don't take that something to be evidence for the truth of A. It is, rather, a practical reason for you to engage in the act of behaving as if A is true, even though you don't think the evidence especially favors A over B. In a real sense, you experience A and B as equally plausible, and you see your own choice of A as nothing more than a story you like to tell yourself. As such, on a theoretic or intellectual level your stance is clearly agnostic (although, on a pragmatic level, you qualify as a kind of pragmatic believer in A).
But now suppose you find yourself in EC2. In this case, in addition to whatever pragmatic and personal reasons might move you towards Worldview A in EC1, you also have the further reason that Worldview A fits with the totality of the evidence available to you in a way that B does not. You have available to you a set of apparently compelling truths that you are striving to account for, and A accounts for them well. B, however, would force you to give up on a subset of the things that seem obviously correct to you. So, in terms of everything that strikes you as evident, A is more defensible than B.
But the very subset of apparent truths you would have to give up were you to accept B is a subset which some people—who otherwise seem like reasonable people to you—do not find intuitively obvious in the way you do. And they seem otherwise reasonable. And this gives you some reason to attach less weight to the “personal” evidence than you do to the shared evidence, and so be less confident than you might otherwise have been about A.
Put simply, looked at purely on its own merits, the personal evidence seems as compelling to you as the shared evidence. But the fact that others do not see the personal evidence in the same way that you do--in addition to being the primary reason why it ends up being put into the "personal" rather than the "shared" category--gives you reason (especially in the face of a general awareness of your own fallibility) to have doubts about the reliability of the personal evidence. But you are also aware that those who don't find the evidence compelling are also fallible--and you have no special reason to think that you are the one who is wrong in this case, rather than them. For all you know, the reason you regard as clearly true what others don't is that you are so situated so as to be able to immediately intuit truths that these others can't intuit from where they are situated.
Put in somewhat more technical terms, you have so far not encountered any "defeaters" for your personal evidence--that is, nothing that gives you clear reason to believe either that what seems right to you is false, or that the mechanism whereby it comes to seem right is sufficiently suspect to place no credence in its fruits. All you have, at this point, is the immediate intuitive sense that something is the case, along with the clear awareness that other seemingly reasonable people lack this sense.
In EC1, your reasons for favoring A over B are ones that do not appear to you as evidence for the truth of A, and in this sense are seen by you as nothing but pragmatic reasons to operate as if A is true. But in EC2, your reasons for favoring A over B have the "look and feel" of evidence, that is, they seem to be truths that speak in favor of the truth of A. And this makes your epistemic situation clearly different. It means, among other things, that when you endorse A, it is because A seems right to you in a way that B does not. You favor A over B on the basis of considerations that present themselves to you as evidence for the truth of A and against the truth of B. In this sense, you are not an agnostic on the theoretical level (although you may be a kind of pragmatic agnostic, insofar as you choose to operate as if either A or B were equally plausible for pragmatic reasons).
But the broader features of EC2 may inspire you to adopt an attitude of fallibilism with respect to your endorsement of A. It might also inspire you to reassess the reasonableness of those you had previously taken to be reasonable, insofar as they do not accept what strikes you as clearly true. But at least in general, fallibilism seems a better "fit" with EC2. If so, then while A just seems right to you in a way that B does not, you also know that you are fallible, and you know that some of the evidence you are using in arriving at A is not regarded as veridical by other people who otherwise seem eminently reasonable. This fact alone does not make the evidence seem less veridical to you, but it does motivate an attitude of due caution, a willingness to investigate, to hear opposing arguments and be open to be moved by them if they do amount to "defeaters" of your presumptive evidence. And it also makes you resistent to condemning those who endorse B.
In effect, you are inclined to say, "This is an issue about which it seems that reasonable people can disagree; but in my judgment, based on the considerations that seem convincing to me, A seems true and B false. That others reach the opposite judgment calls for respect, but it doesn't as such require that I abandon my judgment. Rather, it only requires that I hold to the judgment fallibilistically."
A few final remarks. It seems clearly possible for one person to be in EC1 and another in EC2 with respect to the same body of shared evidence. That is, Amy may confront the shared evidence without any substantive personal evidence to add, and so may see A and B as equally plausible on the evidence--while Ben confronts the shared evidence with a supplement of personal evidence, on the basis of which Ben sees A as clearly more plausible than B. In such a case, Amy might decide for pragmatic reasons to operate in terms of A--in which case we might say that both are pragmatic believers in A but Ben is also a theoretic believer (wherease Amy is a theoretic agnostic). But there are a number of alternative permutations here that need to be kept in mind--permutations which can generate theoretic accord and practical divergence, etc.
I will confess that this is a first run at my thinking on this issue, and so it doubtless needs considerable refinement. Thoughts?
My co-author, John Kronen, sent me the following e-mail message which I want to quote not only because it is worth reflecting on in its own right but because it can be useful in clarifying some of what I say in this post. Here is John's comment:
ReplyDelete"I really think an important point is that first principles or axioms cannot be proven to be true but that does not mean we have no evidence of their truth—they are self-evincing, i.e. carry their evidence within themselves (e.g. No one is taller than himself, Blue (not 'blue') is a color, From nothing nothing comes, Do unto others what you would have them do unto you, Living beings have more intrinsic value, as such, than non-living beings, etc.) One point to make clear about this is that, even though these truths are known a priori by 'reason alone', that doesn’t mean experience isn’t necessary for acquiring the concepts they involve."
Two things to note. First, John is using "evidence" here in a different way that I stipulate in my post. In my post, "evidence" is used essentially for any proposition one might use as a premise in an argument. John, above, uses it to encompass that which might undergird or support axioms--and hence that which is NOT a proposition.
For those who have trouble with anything being self-evincing, you might reflect on the way in which certain factual beliefs are immediately supported, not by other beliefs, but by sense experience. I have a sensory experience on the basis of which I form the belief that my coffee mug is on the desk. The evidence for the claim, "The coffee mug is on the desk" is not itself a proposition, but an immediate experience that directly produces the belief in question. The idea is with respect to self-evidence is that axioms can operate in something like that way--but in their case, rather than a sensory experience generating assent to a proposition, intellectual contemplation of the proposition itself generates an immediate and irresistible sense of its "rightness."
What I want to be clear about is this: When I speak of "shared evidence," this category may include both beliefs produced through immediate experience (e.g., sense experiences), and axioms that strike everyone as self-evident (e.g., the principle of non-contradiction). Likewise, "personal evidence" may include beliefs directly resulting from experiences that are either not shared by everyone or not found to be truth-evincing by everyone, or beliefs directly emerging from intellectual contemplation leading to a judgment of self-evidence (but not for everyone).
Hi Eric
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for this post, as I've for some time now been puzzled by the way the term fallibilist has been used, it moved in and out of focus a little for me, and at times seemed very close to agnosticism.
Now, at first glance, by these definitions I am often an agnostic, and never a fallibilist. This is to say, I can not think of an example where a thing seems obviously true to me, whilst understanding that it may seem obviously untrue to another reaonable person. If it may be obviously untrue to another reasonable person, then immediately I make the leap that says my personal intuition in this case is useless, and it stops seeming apparent to me too.
I suppose what my own world view encourages in me, is a deep suspicion of personal inutition. It is a great starting point for investigation I think, and for pragmatic reasons we often have no choice but to back our intuition, but to believe it is telling me something about how the world actually is, while others are getting an opposite message, appears foolhardy. The history of science in particular pulls me strongly in this direction (time can't really apply differently to objects depending upon their speed right, that's just intuitively wrong!)
In such cases, it seems much better to adopt an attitude of, well is there some way of pushing this matter harder, to see if some further pertinent evidence or line of reasoning emerges?
I have changed my mind so many times during my life, and expect to continue to do so, that believing I have found the truth of a matter on the back of a controversial hunch fills me with a sort of embarrassment, I have a very strong social response to the idea.
Interestingly, the list provided in the previous comment on things that are self-evident, strike me as not so at all.They all appear to me to have to be accepted by dint of socially and biologically constructed rules of language, logic and so forth.
Bernard
Hi Eric,
ReplyDeleteA few quick thoughts.
This may not be what you post is about but what you say apply very well in cases where the issue in question is not so much the determination of an objective truth about reality but something more on the subjective side. Where should I buy my next house? What school to choose for my child? Or when a difficult ethical decision must be made. They are all cases in which, I'd say, it is not so much a question of “truth” than of making the right decision.
It also applies, I suppose, when, for some reason, it is highly important to take a stand on a question of fact. Can't think of many examples though (answering correctly exam questions seems a little trivial).
When the goal is to determine the truth about some aspect of reality however, I find that I am much more circumspect – it may be a personal thing, I don't know. But, generally speaking, I am satisfied to say I don't know and I prefer the clarity of ignorance to the fuzziness of guessing.
As for EC2, if another has intuitions contradicting mine, I will first try to understand where the difference comes from but, if that fails, I think my only choice is to dismiss this personal evidence – on both sides. I can't see why I would prefer mine.
I think you might accomplish a great deal more by actually investigating and scrutinizing the evidence being bandied about here, than by engaging in a lot of rhetoric about why you allow yourself to believe in things for which you don't have much evidence, (self-evincing), but also don't readily accept defeaters because perhaps you were raised in a community or live in a community or have adopted a lifestance founded on pre-conceptions, etc... that reject those defeaters out of hand, perhaps after appropriate rhetorical figure-skating.
ReplyDeleteThe question should not be foremost whether the people I am dealing with have a full deck, but whether they are making a cogent case, based on points of shared knowledge and evidence (i.e., the dialiectical process of working our way up to better evidence and knowledge). No one is perfectly cogent all the time, though I guess some are demented all the time. At any rate, hanging so much on one's "take" of a person's reasonableness is yet another instance of religious thinking where one uses qualities like charisma to evaluate what should be evaluated on its merits, were we doing actual philosophy. It is sort of a reverse argumentum ad hominem.
Also, everything is held fallibilistically, or should be. Even our ideas of gravitation are rather sketchy and may be overturned at a moment's notice. The question is, as usual, one of consciousness (due, once again, to taking seriously the quality of evidence) ... do I know that my belief is weak, or do I believe that the Koran is the fount of all truth, including the truth that all infidels deserve to die, especially if they have the courage to point out that my beliefs are utter claptrap? This may very well be self-evincing, but none the less highly subjective if not wrong, and very destructive.
People routinely take their emotional experience as self-evincing as much as their sense experience. Your coffee mug and its position can be verified, measured, and otherwise engaged with in an objective way. So the self-evincing doesn't really do much essential work. The irresistable sense of "rightness" does a great deal more work in emotional and cognitive axioms that are so incredibly dangerous.
Interestingly, the list provided in the previous comment on things that are self-evident, strike me as not so at all.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, I look at everything on that list, and each one strikes me as self-evident. That is, I not only operate AS IF they are true (which I do), but they SEEM true to me. In this sense they are different from certain other things that strike me as consistent with the evidence, which I choose to act on, but which I don't have an immediate sense of their truth (I am going to treat this student as if she hadn't plagiarized the paper she just turned in, but the truth of this does not strike me as evident--the case for plagiarism in this case fits at least AS WELL with the available evidence as the case against).
Now is the fact that something seems true to me enough for me to regard those who disagree with me about them as thereby proving themselves to be irrational--as not members of the community of reasonable people whose views deserve respect, attention to whom might expose errors in my own belief system? No.
And so, if there is NOTHING more to be said for a proposition than "It seems right to me," and there is significant disagreement about it, I have to concede that I might be wrong. And that possibility should be reflected in HOW I cleave to it, HOW I respond to those who disagree, etc.
But in some cases, at least, the "It seems right to me" survives the disclosure of real disagreement among seemingly reasonable people (sometimes it doesn't, in which case I find myself, like you, turned into an agnostic by the disagreement itself). But when the self-evincing character survives the reality of dissent (as happens to be the case, for me, with the Principle of Sufficient Reason), I would feel disingenuous were I to pretend that I don't at some level believe it. At least sometimes, the most honest expression of where I am is that I think it's true, but I know I could be wrong and those who hold an opposing view could be right, and so I want to attend to their thinking with an openness to learning something. And I want to say, "Reasonable people can disagree about this."
Hi Eric
ReplyDeleteBriefly, why some of these don't appear at all self evident to me:
Do unto others - not only is this a cultural construction, it is at times a lousy one.Consider the perosn who, following the rule, stones an adulterer to death, in an attempt to save their soul. It is what they would have the poor unfortunate do to them in the same situation. I can't get to self evident here.
Is blue a colour? Interestingly, not to the ancient Greeks, apparently. Homer describes the sky as bronze, which some have speculated is because the perception of colour is itself culturally informed. Blue is sometimes a colour. It is not self evidently so (for me).
Can something come from nothing? This feels like a physics question to me, not a self evident one, but one that would need to be established by careful observation and testing. Were physics to show it to be untrue, I would not cling stubbornly to this self evident truth. And if it is true, then where would God come from? For many believers, this is evidently untrue.
Living beings have more intrisnsic value than non-living. I'm not sure that's how I've felt about various viruses I've contracted over the years (virus being borderline alive, I accept, substitute bacteria all you pedants).
Bernard
Hi Eric,
ReplyDeleteLiving beings have more intrinsic value, as such, than non-living beings.
This touches the question of “absolutes” we have been discussing, of course. What's an “intrinsic” value? How do we measure it? Before determining if the statement is true or false we must first explain what it means.
One idea is this: how can we define this notion of “intrinsic value” using other concepts? Once this is done we can see if, from the definition, it becomes easier to figure out how we attribute values and how to compare them.
There are similar problems with the whole list, I think. I see the whole idea of “self-evident” as very problematic. For example, mathematicians have gotten rid of this a long time ago and it has no place whatsoever in modern mathematics.
JP:
ReplyDelete(1) You are absolutely right that a concept like "intrinsic value" needs explication. It should come as no surprise that providing such conceptual explication has been an important project for philosophers interested in meta-ethics. I may have more to say about this in later posts.
(2) I am not an historian of mathematics, but I do know something about the shift away from euclidian to no-euclidian geometries--a shift that it strikes me as involving a kind of "Hegelian" turn in how mathemeticians approach their axioms. Hegel thought we cannot avoid starting points, but that we should always "wear" them provisionally but critically to see where they take us (do they lead to a "contradiction"?). But even if one accepts this Hegelian approach to axioms, one might still wonder how the selection of axioms--the decision about which axioms to "try on"--is made. That something strikes one as self-evident may be one basis for such selection.
(3) I deliberately avoided the notion of the self-evident in the post itself because I worried that the distinction I was trying to make would be lost amidst the controversy that invoking that term would generate. Then I thought it would be helpful to share John Kronen's comment for the sake of highlighting different uses of "evidence" and that as I was using the terms "shared evidence" and "personal evidence," the seemingly self-evident could fall into either category (you're just more likely to question your sense of it being self-evident if the judgment of being self evident is NOT shared). But the distinction I am trying to make here does not turn on accepting to epistemic category of self-evident truths.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteWith respect to your concerns about the list of self-evident truths--
1. The Golden Rule: Your concern turns, I think, on a well-known and much-discussed ambiguity pertaining to the how the principle is to be construed (one that is often hashed out by reference to masochists). I may have more to say about this in a later post (it seems a post devoted to the golden rule would be fitting at some point). For now, however, I just want to stress that the same SENTENCE can refer to different PROPOSITIONS, one of which is clearly false or dubious, the other of which is not. I agree with your skepticism about the Golden Rule interpreted in the sense you are using. What I find self-evident isn't that.
2. To say that blue is a color is to say that it falls into a broader category of which it is a species. I'm not sure how the variability of color experience, and the possibility that this variability is culturally shaped, speaks to the classification of blue into the "color" category. You might make the different point that this classification is simply saying something about language and not about the relation between what is referenced IN our language, and so is rather trivial--but whether that is true depends on what is shared, if anything, by all the things that we locate in that category (in other words, is color merely a "term of art" or a "family resemblance term," or does it designate a "natural kind").
3. "Nothing comes from nothing, my dear." (An aside: When I read King Lear in high school, there was a blizzard on the day we were supposed to discuss the "storm on the heath" scene--so my teacher had us put on our coats and go outside to read the scene; I still remember that fondly, and must say that King Lear remains for me one of the most vivid and resonant of Shakespeare's plays, precisely because of my teacher's inventiveness). In any event, I talk about this "nothing comes from nothing" principle in relation to the evidence from physics in Chapter 5 (pp. 130-133 and esp. pp. 137-138) of IS GOD A DELUSION? Don't know if you have the book, but I'd be curious what you think of the arguments there.
4. The inherent value of living things. Much hinges here on the meaning we attach to "inherent value." But rather than get into that HERE, let me just briefly note that I might regard a virus (or bacterium) as more inherently valuable than a fleck of iron, but regard a human as more inherently valuable than a virus--and insofar as the virus (less valuable) threatens the human (more valuable), I may be inclined to attach instrumental disvalue to it (it is bad FOR a human). But that something has instrumental disvalue relative to the order of inherently valuable things does not speak to whether it has some measure of inherent value. Making full sense of this would require devoting more attention to the relevant value concepts.
Burk,
ReplyDeletePeople routinely take their emotional experience as self-evincing as much as their sense experience. Your coffee mug and its position can be verified, measured, and otherwise engaged with in an objective way. So the self-evincing doesn't really do much essential work. The irresistable sense of "rightness" does a great deal more work in emotional and cognitive axioms that are so incredibly dangerous.
What you call "engaging with my coffee mug in an objective way" amounts to testing my sense experience of the coffee mug against other sensory experiences, right? It seems that all instances of testing propositions derived from the senses involves using our senses in a range of ways, where the point of such testing is to look for any contradictions. A proposition derived from sense experience passes the test if it coheres with other propositions derived from sense experience--not just MY sense experience but that of others (what we call "corroboration").
It may surprise you that ethicists do the same sort of thing in testing intuitive moral judgments. They look for patterns in recurring moral judgments, formulate theories in terms of the patterns discovered, test the theories against a range of moral intuitions, and are prepared to revise speicific moral intuitions for the sake of the coherence of the whole system. They also seek corroboration, in the sense that they are more inclined to trust moral intuitions if they are widely shared (especially if they are widely shared across a diversity of backgrounds and cultures).
Continued-->
(Continued from above)-->
ReplyDeleteIn reflecting on this process, I think it is important to keep in mind that when it comes to something like the moral judgment that torturing children is fun, or that the holocaust was horrible, etc., those who profess to doubt these judgments are not (typically) saying they have different responses to these cases than those who don't doubt them. Rather, what they are doubting is whether these judgments are "objective" as opposed to merely "subjective." Even as JP and Bernard raise questions about these judgments, they admit to being appalled by the same things that appall me.
In this respect, we might liken the dispute to a group who shares the same sense experience, but some are idealists who claim that this sense experience does not tell us anything about any "world out there," whereas others insist that this sense experience is putting us in touch with some "objective" truth. The point is not to carry this analogy too far, but to note that there is a difference between not sharing the same experience (some have the experience of the coffee mug being on the desk, others don't) and disagreeing about the evidentiary significance of a shared experience (some think having the experience tells us something about an external world, such that it supports the truth of the claim that there is a coffee mug on the desk; others think otherwise). Lack of agreement about the latter does not count against the "corroboration" of our sense experience that is routinely invoked in the process of testing sensory judgments. And as such, it is a bit disingenuous to say, "We have reason to suppose that sense experiences are putting us in touch with objective reality, since these experiences are generally corroborated (in the sense that others have the same experiences, even when they are idealists who deny the objective validity of the experiences), but we have no reason to suppose that moral intuitions are putting us in touch with anything objective, since they cannot be corroborated by others (since, although very many moral values are widely shared even by those who think ethics is purely subjective, the fact that they take them to be purely subjective means that they aren't really sharing them)."
I'm not saying that there aren't reasons to be suspicious about the objectivity of ethics that don't extend to empirical claims, nor that there aren't reasons to support the objectivity of empirical judgments that don't apply to ethics. What I am saying is that we should be consistent in how we approach things in the two domains, and not let our theoretical presuppositions impute differences that aren't there.
Yes, axioms are selected for a variety of reasons, some of them being whether or not they seem “natural” or how well they fit or clash with the logician’s intuition (in the sense of the condensate of all his experience). Or because a set of axioms can be replaced by a smaller, more “elegant” set. Or because a logician wants to experiment with a set of strange axioms and see where they lead. And so on.
ReplyDeleteThis being said, once axioms are chosen, they are not considered any more “true” than alternatives. Of course, they must be useful or interesting in some sense, perhaps because they produce mathematics that are useful, say, in physics – otherwise nobody would work with them. But, formally speaking, axioms and the primitive terms they are concerned with, are really taken as meaningless and arbitrary. This idea, well expressed in Bertrand Russell’s famous quote, is central to mathematical logic.
The role of intuition in mathematics is also interesting. While mathematicians, by and large, must have a very developed intuition of their subject in order to come up with new ideas and questions, intuition as such is never used as substitute for formal proof. It has no evidential value whatsoever.
HI Bernard: I'd probaly put myself in the fallibist camp wrt my moral intuitions and my religious beliefs. I like the way Eric has categorized (some of) the alternatives. But I have to ask you something. You say that when you find out that a reasonable person disagrees with you about something you previously thought to be obviously true, you no longer SEE it as obviously true.
ReplyDeleteI presume you see it as obviously true that this response to the disagreement of reasonable people is the epistemically appropriate one. Well I think myself to be a reasonable person and I DISAGREE that agnosticism in the face of reasonable disagreement is epistemically required. Perhaps you don't share my self-assessment, but if you do then I ask: are you AGNOSTIC about the appropriateness of your agnostic response? :-)
Eric- Thanks for the rundown on corroboration. I am sure some ethicists take popularity as some kind of measurement of objectivity. But there seem to be fundamental differences.
ReplyDeleteWe have to consider the nature of perception, and the nature of judgement. In the case of morals, what we perceive is perhaps the suffering of a child. This makes us feel X. Then we call the suffering bad. In the case of the coffee mug, perhaps it is red. We see it is red. That makes us feel good. Then we call the coffee mug good. Neither the suffering nor the red is the issue .. it is our feelings about them that creates a moral judgement.
So there are two steps in any judgement- one a matter of perception and maybe objectivity, the other a matter of feeling and response. Even if all people feel the same way, this response remains the essence of subjectivity. It can hardly be called anything else. We might just as well call the color red objectively good. Red is, of course, not a great example, since color perception is notoriously subjective as well. But our feelings about red can hardly be anything but subjective.
Looking at this scientifically, the fact that we are wired to empathize with the suffering of others (if we indeed are, through mirror neurons and the like) hardly says anything about the facts of the universe, but rather that our evolution found it useful to maintain such social feelings, just as it found it useful to program us to enjoy the red color of fruits, and respect the existence of gravity in many physiological and behavioral ways.
Game theory might be seen as some kind of cosmic objective property (like gravitation) via its reflections in social utility and how it plays out in evolution & culture, but if one hangs one's hat on that as being objective, then one would have to phrase one's moral theory quite differently. Not that the suffering of others is objectively bad, (the immediate feeling and judgement is subjective), but that a working society requires social rules that are objectively confined to a few possible types, given that our point in living is happiness and survival, and perhaps for some people, hope- all entirely subjective motivations.
cont...
Suppose you were someone without any moral feelings. Perhaps severely autistic, or beyond ...something like that. Or a Vulcan of some extreme kind. How would that work? You might learn from others the conventions of human society, like that physical abuse of others is not allowed, perhaps explained through a golden-rule type of logic. You might then observe moral rules without any internal feelings at work. How is all this objective? It might be called objective in the sense that you recognize and obey the conventional rules of the society. And it might be objective in a second sense that you recognize and can recount the social logic that makes those rules sensible. But the ultimate origin and point of the rules remains subjective, and outside yourself.
ReplyDeleteSuppose we go to the next step, into a society where no one has the feelings that the one person didn't have above. No one even values their own lives- they have no feelings about social or personal affairs at all, but mechanically follow rules without motivation. Where would the rules come from? They wouldn't come from anywhere, and this society wouldn't work. Unless perhaps one allows a bit of evolution, where the sub-societies with some self- and social-preservation rule set (initiated arbitrarily) win in a survival race over those that don't and they also keep those rules intact into future time.
This is the essence of our emotional subjective matrix. Our feelings may have sensible origins, based on the logic of survival, etc., but if anything is subjective, they are. Even if, under the pressure of unnatural conditions, (e.g. very large societies), we make up moral rules that serve us better than our inborn rules/feelings, that doesn't make them objective either, since they serve the ultimately subjective point of self-preservation and happiness.
Hi Eric
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I think I may be misunderstanding the notion of self evincing. I am pretty sure the earth is round, but don't think this is a self evincing instance. We need evidence, be it form photos, predictions or whatever, to support it. Now, if we take something like blue is a colour, a certain amount of information gathering is also required before we can come to accept this as true. If it is about the word blue, then the only way to know this is through the empirical checking of word usage within your language. If it is about the way we perceive certain wavelengths, then the Homer example becomes relevant. You hint at it being about something else, but I'm not sure what. The point then becomes we have to do an awful to of philosophical work regarding categories, qualia or whatever may be relevant, before we can judge the truthfulness of the statement. Do you mean this by self evincing, that it becomes apparent only after long and detailed philosophical examinations? I'm not sure if it is or not, but your responses to my suggestions all seemed to involve this sort of clarification or reformulation, which leads me to think I have self evincing wrong.
The crucial thing for me though, is we seem to agree that often one's convictions about self evident truths are wrong. This being the case, from whence comes our warrant to assume our truth is better than anybody else's in matter of pure intuition, which the fallibilist does but the agnostic does not?
Bernard
Hi Keith
ReplyDeleteOf course reasonable people may disagree about the appropriateness of agnosticism. I don't for one moment claim to be right here, on this too I am agnostic. I am simply interested in better understanding my own stance, and that of others, in order to modify my understanding useful and satisfying ways. Were I to assume I was right and others wrong, I would close myself off from this learning. And so my desire to learn, part of my own personal narrative, leads me towards agnosticism. I have no great desire that others follow. Indeed if they did the conversations would be far less rich, wouldn't they?
Bernard
Eric
ReplyDeleteThinking on this some more, it strikes me that at issue might actaully be the fundamental belief about where beliefs themselves come from. When my beliefs clash with those of others, my prior belief that beliefs themselves are a product of evolutionary/cultural/environmentalhistories is probably the thing that leads me away from fallibilism. Here, where evidence can not decide the issue (so there is room for reasonable people to disagree) the difference itself stems form stories. And there is no good reason to believe that one story should have primacy over enough if they are neutral with respect to evidence.
If I carried a different metanarrative, say that our intuitions have a different source, then it may be possible to jumpt to fallibilism. I might have a metastory supporting my belief that my own stories are worthy of special consideration. I'm not sure how I could construct a sufficiently compelling version of this however, that wasn't itself subject to the same doubts. I suspect this is where you amke use of pragmatism, and possibly Hegel, to underpin this starting point.
Bernard
Eric,
ReplyDeleteThis is an important issue, for if knowledge is justified by epistemology, so is epistemology justified by the human condition. Thus we should be clear how the human condition is, its facts, structure, and order. Perhaps a "philosophy for the human condition" is needed and missing.
You write: “For all you know, the reason you regard as clearly true what others don't is that you are so situated so as to be able to immediately intuit truths that these others can't intuit from where they are situated.”
Actually we know that this is the case, for in our own life we experience this change of place we are situated on, and how the place we are situated affects our cognition and indeed our senses and the very way we experience life. This happens very conspicuously when we move on the epistemic axis, i.e. when we understand something we didn’t before. For example, when we learn a new language we experience the sounds of it entirely different than we did before, namely as more meaningful. When we study an art form we experience its works quite differently, namely as more emotionally charged. In general, when we understand something we didn’t before, be it a mathematical theorem, or a poem, or a person, we tend to experience it as more lovely. But it is not only a movement on the epistemic axis which changes how we experience life and thus the bits of evidence we have. So, for example, when we love somebody we experience her quite differently, namely as more beautiful (so there is an intimate connection between truth, love, and beauty). The state of our moral character as evolved through our past life choices has a big effect also. The same goes for our hopes and where we have put our faith in life.
Existentially speaking, the world we live in (and which we try to make sense of in philosophy) is like a landscape on which we move around. Now it is obvious that the same dynamic property of the human condition we experience individually, is a universal fact. Therefore, others, from where they are situated on that existential landscape, may observe the world differently than we do and thus have and announce different experiences (whether “observations” or “perceptions” or “sense impressions” or “intuitions” or “a priori knowledge” or “personal data” or “seeming like”, or “feelings”, or “gut feelings”). Thus I think it is fair to say that we live in a common but also sprawling, complex, and structured existential landscape. That is the human condition, on which ultimately all knowledge is based.
[continues bellow]
[continues from above]
ReplyDeleteGiven the above, I think there is no question whatsoever about the reliability of all personal experiences, for the fact that others announce different experiences is exactly what one would expect. Actually, all experiences are by nature veridical and incorrigible. Where we may be in error is in how we interpret such experiences or on what kind of understanding or beliefs we build on them.
I think that at this juncture first a confusion and then a myth become apparent. The confusion I am referring to concerns the issue of illusions. For example an “optical illusion”, such as seeing that two line segments are of different lengths when they are not, is not really “optical” for the visual experience itself is veridical: it is absolutely true that we see two line segments of different lengths. The illusion refers to an error in our interpretation of what we see, namely to think that should we measure the lengths of the two line segments we’ll get different results. We call illusory those cases where we easily misinterpret what we experience. Illusions only evidence that our cognitive faculties are not only fallible but sometimes easily and systematically so. The myth I am referring to is the belief that some classes of experiences (e.g. intuitions, feelings, etc) are more prone to lead us into cognitive error than others (e.g. publicly verifiable data, physical measurements, etc). I say it is a myth because many people unquestioningly believe in it, but when I actually look I see nothing that would make me think there is much of a difference, certainly not a significant one. For example, as is well known, physical scientists who only use physical measurements are often led into error, despite using appropriate methods for detecting errors (see bellow). In conclusion, I say, all experiences are veridical, and all experiences can lead us to error.
Given our fallibility we have developed methods which allow one to detect and correct errors. One such method is “peer review”: When your experiences are shared with other people then compare your understanding/interpretation of them with theirs in a critical fashion. (This method is used in the physical sciences where the shared experiences at hand are the universally shared experiences of our physical senses. But the same method can be used in the case of, say, a shared religious experience, even though few people may share it.) Moreover there are methods which apply even in the case where apparently nobody else shares one’s experiences, or, perhaps, nobody else is there to compare one’s interpretation of them with. One such lonesome method is to test one’s understanding for coherence. Another method is to check for consistently predictive success.
[continues bellow]
[continues from above]
ReplyDeleteIn this same context I think that the idea of “defeater for personal evidence” makes no sense. Perhaps by “personal evidence” you mean some kind of immediate interpretation of some experience, e.g. “the earth is flat”. If by “evidence” we understand experiences then evidence cannot be defeated; only interpretations of evidence or arguments or beliefs based on some evidence can be defeated by new evidence or by new interpretations or by new arguments. Incidentally, “evidence” (or “what is evident”) is an extremely ambiguous concept which can be used to mean anything from “personal data” or “personal experiences” (as I here use it) to “physical data” or “physical measurements” as physicists and naturalists use it, to “arguments which justify a belief” or “reasons for holding a belief” or “beliefs one uses as premises in arguments” as philosophers often use it. Given this ambiguity perhaps it would be best to avoid the use of that word.
So I see no reason whatsoever why we should not take at face value and equally seriously all our experiences (or personal data) whether shared or not (and incidentally “shared” comes in degrees from unique to universal). On the contrary, if we find others we trust and who speak of perceiving things we would like to perceive ourselves we may decide to move closer to where they are situated, existentially speaking. It is in this way, I suppose, that religious communities form. For in the same way that one must learn and practice Chinese before experiencing the beauty and meaning of Chinese language, one must learn and practice Buddhism before experiencing that beauty and meaning of the Buddhist religion.
What I am suggesting is that we are used to oversimplifying and/or restricting the human condition. We are used to conceptualizing the human condition as if it is taking place within a room. People may be situated at slightly different spots around the room, but when they look around (unless they suffer from some kind of serious handicap) they must see the same things, say, one door, three windows, a ceiling above, etc. But a better analogy for the human condition is that it takes place on a large landscape. Some features of the landscape are shared, as, say, that if you walk in a straight line you’ll always get to water (i.e. that it’s an island), or that a high mountain is always visible at its center. But many other features will look entirely different depending on where one stands on that landscape, the same way that photographs taken on the same inland may look quite different. Even the shape of that central mountain will look quite different, depending on whether one looks at it from the south or from the east, or from bellow, or from high on the path to its peak. If one reaches the peak the world will look remarkably different, and the mountain itself will disappear.
Eric’s reference to Lear is a valuable caution:
ReplyDeleteKING LEAR
…what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
CORDELIA
Nothing, my lord.
KING LEAR
Nothing!
CORDELIA
Nothing.
KING LEAR
Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
Lear’s application of “self-evident truth” leads to his tragic downfall.
Hi Dianelos
ReplyDeleteCertainly we change over time. Our understanding develops, and we come to realise some perspectives are indeed more revealing than others. The question though, is what to do when two people reasonably disagree, and there is no way of determining which of them holds the higher ground, so to speak?
We can say they are both equally valid, I suppose, but if they are contradictory, this seems to create a problem. Or, we can say 'the one I like is the better one', which many people do, but I personally find this disturbing. Isn't it better at this point to say 'actually, we're both just guessing here, and probably this guesswork is based upon our own personal needs?' I like this because it reminds me that my own point of view, in this particular case, has no public grounding. If this were not the case, I could show why my point of view was better, and bring the other party around.
Those things we agree upon (the roundness of the earth, the danger of stepping in front of a moving bus etc) are grounded in shared beliefs (like the consistency of physical experience). We can't be sure these shared beliefs are not somehow systematically in error, but until viable alternative is presented, going with them makes a certain pragmatic sense.
In some ways we can see science as the project by which the reach of these grounded beliefs is extended, and the extension has been achieved, I would submit, by an insistence upon testability via prediction.
But ungrounded, or private beliefs are a different matter. Here we really are free to make up any old thing that works for us, because the inability to convince others of their merit is not a show stopper. Mightn't it be useful to, in our terminology of truths, beliefs and so forth, to keep this distinction between public and private beliefs clear?
Bernard
Hi, Eric...
ReplyDelete(This question is totally off-topic, but I didn't know how else to get it to you. I'll not be offended at all if it's ignored -- you owe me nothing!)
I wandered in from Robin Parry's corner of the 'net. I've read some of your postings and the Kindle preview of your book (which I think I'll end up buying soon). Last night I listened to your "Pale Blue Dot" podcast interview. All that to say, I'm impressed both by your ninja reasoning skillz and that you actually use them in defense of religion.
I'm a Christian. I work with a lot of extremely sharp people who pride themselves in their rationality... and they're pretty much all atheists. We talk religion periodically, and I usually get overwhelmed. They're not aggressive or mean -- just pretty well convinced that being a Christian is by-and-large irrational. You do a good job (in my opinion) of presenting a rational Christianity -- at least as rational as atheism -- and I'd like to be able to absorb some of your arguments so as to present a slightly more reasonable Christianity to them than they may have encountered before. (Not really with the intent to convert anyone... just in the interests of pursuing truth.)
But what do you do with the Resurrection?
All other arguments aside, there's really nothing at all rational about believing a man came back from the dead after three days on the basis of second-hand (or third- or fourth-) accounts from 1st Century Judean peasants. No matter how rational all of the rest of it can appear, the fact that this one point is so ridiculous (and yet so central) makes me wonder if the whole enterprise of presenting a "rational Christianity" is doomed from the start. What do you believe about the Resurrection? How does it fit into your defense of Christianity?
If you address this in your book, a response of "see chapter X" is perfectly fair. I wouldn't at all expect you to spend much time responding here when you've already spent the effort elsewhere. But otherwise if you were inclined to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them.
Cheers...
Ron
Ron,
ReplyDeleteYour question deserves more than what I can give in a comment. In briefest terms, if the doctrine of the resurrection is looked at in isolation from the totality of the Christian worldview, then you are right that it qualifies as irrational.
If there is hope for the doctrine of the resurrection, it lies PRECISELY in the fact that it is a central feature of a holistic picture of the world--a central component to a narrative that Christians make use of in seeing their experience in a distinctive way. As such, it cannot be assessed apart from an assessment of the entire "way of seeing" that it makes possible. (On the task of critically approaching alternative ways of seeing, see my Religion Dispatches article on the relevance of theology, as well as various posts on this blog, especially under the tags "worldviews" and "interpretive worldviews," but probably under "Hegel" too).
And your question here is actually germane to the topic of this post--because when it comes to the sorts of total narratives we're talking about, it is typically the case that, at least given our current limits in understanding and experience, there is more than one that maps onto not only the "shared" evidence" but also the "personal evidence." As one gets more fine-grained and detailed in one's worldview, it becomes increasingly likely that one is choosing from among alternatives that fit as well with what YOU take as evidence.
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDeleteYou write: “Certainly we change over time.”
This doesn’t quite capture what I wanted to express in my previous post. It’s not just that *we* change over time; rather the world we experience changes over time *also*. Reality is such that both what we experience in the world and how we experience the world changes over time; one’s whole individual human condition is in flux.
We are part of reality; I think it’s a misleading principle and a bad move to conceptually build a boundary between us and reality. This is a bad move even on naturalism, and leads naturalists to false beliefs such as that “physical processes in our brain cause our experiences”. In fact there is no causal boundary between our brain and the rest of the physical universe. Indeed, if you think about it, the physical processes within your brain when, say, you are seeing an apple tree, are inseparably joined to the tree.
On the other hand, given the fact that we can intelligently and productively communicate with other people, it is clear that there is also such a thing as *the* human condition, a vast, complex, and ordered landscape, on which each individual’s human condition occupies some particular place, while it moves around.
You may ask, why should one give so much heed to the human condition (in its general, or individual sense)? Because the human condition is the only basis for all knowledge we have. So if you care about knowledge you should care about the foundation of knowledge too. To ignore that foundation guarantees that at some point you’ll make a seriously wrong turn in your thoughts.
[continues bellow]
[continues from above]
ReplyDelete“The question though, is what to do when two people reasonably disagree, and there is no way of determining which of them holds the higher ground, so to speak?”
The landscape paradigm helps answer this question, I think.
Let us first concentrate on truths. We immediately see that there is a continuum of truths depending on where persons are situated: A person may express a truth about her immediate surrounding. Those close to her will express similar truths, but those far from her may express quite different truths. For example the former may say “reality is quite flat” and the latter say “reality is quite hilly”. Most (but not all) may express the truth “there is a big mountain in reality”, but some may say “the peak of the mountain is sharp” and others may say “the peak of mountain is round”. The ones who are situated on top of the mountain will say “there is no mountain”. But there are also universal truths which anyone may express. Interestingly enough, universal truths will tend to be dynamic truths of the form “do this and you’ll experience that”, for example “if you walk in a straight line you’ll get to water”, or “if you see a mountain and walk towards its peak the mountain will disappear”. Another such universal truth is this: “move close enough to where another person is and you’ll see what she does”. Of course there is a large number of more or less trivial universal truths such as: I live on the landscape of the human condition, I move around but cannot fly, and such.
Now consider how well the above paradigm fits with real life: In many different contexts, (such as the physical sciences, ethics, religion, mathematics, etc) universally accepted truths tend to be of the dynamic kind (e.g.: if you let this stone free in the air you’ll see it fall and hit the ground after two seconds; if you help others in need you’ll feel better about yourself, if you purify your heart you’ll see God; if you try to find the greatest prime number then you’ll fail, or, to mention another mathematical example, if you use this method of addition you’ll find the same result you would if you actually counted one by one). But when two people actually try to describe the static reality which is the truth-giver to such dynamic/experiential propositions (i.e. when they try to do metaphysics) they may disagree with each other even though they are both right. I am saying, in other words, that metaphysical truths will tend to be local (i.e. make sense from the proximity of a particular existential situation) and will tend to be variable. Which does not mean that there aren’t universal metaphysical truths, only that these will be more difficult to come by for they depend on one knowing a lot about the entire extension of the human condition, an evidentiary foundation which specialists (great physical scientists, but also specialized philosophers) will probably lack.
[continues bellow]
Hi Dianelos
ReplyDeleteHere's something with regard to your landscape metaphor that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on.
Two people, inhabiting the same space, but viewing it from different perspectives, examine the same distant object. It is a tree says one. No, it is a giraffe, says the other.
This is, as you say, an essential part of the human condition, that they way we view reality is informed by our own place within that same reality. Now, given neither can inhabit the other's space, the interesting question for me is how should the two speak to one another about the object they can both see?
Is it in some way fruitful for them to open a discussion upon both the things they can agree upon (it is taller than it is wide, it isn't moving)? This is the sort of thing I have in mind when I speak of objective information, that which is publicly grounded. Another strategy to increase our understanding might be to perform experiments upon it, wherein the predictive implications of each interpretation can be agreed upon in advance (throw a stone at it and see if it moves off. If it moves away, it's not a tree).
Furthermore, one can interrogate the other's perspective. We may discover in time that one of the people has never seen a giraffe, which may be most important.
After all of this though, there still may be no agreement. At this point, although one, if not both of them is wrong, there seems to me to be no way of resolving this difference of perspective, and the best thing seems to be to live with it. Here, I am attracted to a moderating language, where both stop insisting it is a tree or giraffe, and retreat to 'well it looks like a tree to me.' This is essentially the move from fallibilism to agnosticism.
What do you think?
Bernard
(repost)
ReplyDelete[2nd part; continues from above]
“The question though, is what to do when two people reasonably disagree, and there is no way of determining which of them holds the higher ground, so to speak?”
The landscape paradigm helps answer this question, I think.
Let us first concentrate on truths. We immediately see that there is a continuum of truths depending on where persons are situated: A person may express a truth about her immediate surrounding. Those close to her will express similar truths, but those far from her may express quite different truths. For example the former may say “reality is quite flat” and the latter say “reality is quite hilly”. Most (but not all) may express the truth “there is a big mountain in reality”, but some may say “the peak of the mountain is sharp” and others may say “the peak of mountain is round”. The ones who are situated on top of the mountain will say “there is no mountain”. But there are also universal truths which anyone may express. Interestingly enough, universal truths will tend to be dynamic truths of the form “do this and you’ll experience that”, for example “if you walk in a straight line you’ll get to water”, or “if you see a mountain and walk towards its peak the mountain will disappear”. Another such universal truth is this: “move close enough to where another person is and you’ll see what she does”. Of course there is a large number of more or less trivial universal truths such as: I live on the landscape of the human condition, I move around but cannot fly, and such.
[continues bellow]
[3rd part; continues from above]
ReplyDeleteNow consider how well the above paradigm fits with real life: In many different contexts, (such as the physical sciences, ethics, religion, mathematics, etc) universally accepted truths tend to be of the dynamic kind (e.g.: if you let this stone free in the air you’ll see it fall and hit the ground after two seconds; if you help others in need you’ll feel better about yourself, if you purify your heart you’ll see God; if you try to find the greatest prime number then you’ll fail, or, to mention another mathematical example, if you use this method of addition you’ll find the same result you would if you actually counted one by one). But when two people actually try to describe the static reality which is the truth-giver to such dynamic/experiential propositions (i.e. when they try to do metaphysics) they may disagree with each other even though they are both right. I am saying, in other words, that metaphysical truths will tend to be local (i.e. make sense from the proximity of a particular existential situation) and will tend to be variable. Which does not mean that there aren’t universal metaphysical truths, only that these will be more difficult to come by for they depend on one knowing a lot about the entire extension of the human condition, an evidentiary foundation which specialists (great physical scientists, but also specialized philosophers) will probably lack.
Up to now I concentrated on truths, because what appears to bother you is your observation that different people disagree about intuitions, evidence, etc. Let us now consider the matter of falsehoods, for, obviously, there are many false beliefs around. When two people disagree then there are two possibilities: Either, in respect to that disagreement, they are close to each other existentially speaking (i.e. are situated close to each other on the landscape of the human condition) or else they are not (which would for example obtain if one is in the EC1 and the other in EC2):
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[4rd part; continues from above]
ReplyDeleteFirst, if they are close together then the method of peer review works: given that they experience life in a similar way and that their evidence/intuitions/feelings are close, they can check each other’s reasoning to find out where the error is. That’s, for example, how it works in the case in the physical sciences. One would expect the same to be the case in theology too, but it is an observational fact that theists greatly differ in their evidence/intuition/feelings, so they are often not closely situated existentially speaking.
Secondly, they may be situated close together, existentially speaking. Here we exclude the case of them both be right, for that case, as we saw above, is unproblematic. Indeed, even if syntactically their beliefs appear to be direct contradictions, they may be expressing truths that apply to their different existential conditions. Furthermore, it is often the case that people on different existential situations use common concepts meaning something entirely different. In this latter case it is sometimes very difficult for one to understand what the other means even if they try to clarify their meaning.
So let’s concentrate on the case that at least one of them is wrong. In this case I don’t see how checking each other’s reasoning can be of much help. Here is an example: For me the intuition that I have free will (i.e. that I could have chosen differently than how I in fact did) is so powerful as to be incorrigible. It’s not only that I need no evidence to believe in that intuition; I can’t even imagine any potential defeater for that intuition (and I have quite an imagination). I would rather doubt that 2+2=4 (where I can at least imagine a defeater). And since naturalism is incompatible with free will, it is more probable that I would come believe that 2+2=4 is false than to believe that naturalism is true. Now suppose I met a naturalist who not only fails to share my intuition in the reality of free will, but even claims to have the opposite intuition, i.e. that she couldn’t possibly have chosen differently than how she in fact did. Under such circumstances, i.e. when our existential realities are so far apart from each other, I don’t think that there is much profit in evaluating each other’s reasoning. [continues bellow]
[5th and final part; continues from above] Or, to mention a different example, suppose two friends meet and the one announces that no matter how hard she tries she has never experienced the presence of God or anything like God in her life. And the other friend announces that for her the presence of God in her life feels more concrete and real than her experience of physical objects such as tables or the rain. I don’t see how these two friends can possibly evaluate each other’s metaphysical reasoning. For all practical purposes, in relation to that difference of belief, they are living in two different worlds. (Except of course if one of them is boasting, which I suppose does happen sometimes.)
ReplyDelete“Those things we agree upon (the roundness of the earth, the danger of stepping in front of a moving bus etc) are grounded in shared beliefs (like the consistency of physical experience).”
More precisely I assume you mean this: Those things we all agree upon (the roundness of the earth, the danger of stepping in front of a moving bus etc) are grounded in shared experiences (like the consistency of physical experience).
If so, I agree. There are some experiences that are stable (and thus agreed upon) all over the landscape of the human condition. I suppose that even the most spiritual mystic must go to the bathroom here and then. So I am not denying that much of the human condition is universally shared, a species-wide constant. What I am trying to call attention to though is how variable the human condition nonetheless is, and how, if one ignores or discounts that variation, one misses a central fact about the nature of the human condition, and thus about the nature of knowledge and what we can know about reality, and thus ultimately about the nature of reality in relation to us.
Hi Ron,
ReplyDeleteYou write: “But what do you do with the Resurrection? All other arguments aside, there's really nothing at all rational about believing a man came back from the dead after three days on the basis of second-hand (or third- or fourth-) accounts from 1st Century Judean peasants.”
This belief does look irrational (and indeed false) from the point of view of a naturalist. But why should it look irrational from the point of view of a Christian? If one believes that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnation of God, and if many of those closest to him (and peasants make as good a witness as anyone in this context) testified of seeing Him present with them in a physical sense after the crucifixion, why exactly is it irrational to believe that they were telling the truth? I fully agree with Eric that one’s intuitions about irrationality depend one one’s view of the world, i.e. on one’s existential position.
I used to doubt (and actually disbelieve) the reality of the resurrection, thinking that its meaning in the Gospels was probably metaphorical or spiritual (it represented the resurrection of faith in the hearts of the disciples, or something like that). But in order to reach better understanding I often try to put myself in peoples' shoes. So I actually try to imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus of Nazareth, and to die by the terrible way of crucifixion while seeing the disappointment and terror that ending caused to His friends. Now I don’t wish to start a big issue here, but I happen to think that while alive in our condition Jesus did not know He was God incarnate, i.e. had undergone kenosis in that sense too. I think that because the more widespread belief makes little existential and theological sense for me, appears to contradict several key passages of the Gospels account, and seriously trivializes Jesus’ sacrifice. But after dieing Jesus certainly realized that He was God’s incarnation, you know, with all the perks that come with that state of being. And having fully experienced life as a human, Christ now felt the kind of empathy towards friends a non-incarnate God cannot possibly experience. It seems to me extremely plausible that in that state of being Christ, out of pure human friendship, would decide to appear to His followers to give them heart and tell them about the Real good news. So, from my point of view, it would be kind of cold-hearted and hence irrational to think that Christ did *not* appear to His followers after the crucifixion.
Hi Dianelos
ReplyDeleteThat's a most thorough and thoughtful treatment of my question, and I thank you for that.
What's more, I do agree with the case you are putting here, which is a good feeling I must say. Often I find myself talking past you, which may well say something about the way I frame these responses. In many ways our conversations here are an exercise in discovering something about each other's vantage point.
I still have an instinct to pull back from professing belief in those truths that are not universal. I want to give them a different name and indeed a different treatment somehow. It seems important to me to distinguish between those that are landscape dependent, if you like, and those that are universal, or publicly grounded.
If you have time, can you clarify this one thing:
You say sometimes intuitions clash at a level where there is no hope of progressing through examining and sharing one another's reasons. You use the metaphor of two different worlds, and give the example of one person deeply feeling the presence of God, and another deeply feeling a corresponding non-presence. I'm not sure how far you would push this metaphor. Are you suggesting that God is simultaneously real and not real, depending upon the world one inhabits? Or in this case do you think one of the participant's perspectives is simply stopping them from seeing the truth? In which case there is still that original question of how one could decide which of the two is deprived of the crucial view.
Bernard
Eric,
ReplyDeleteYour postings on alternative ways of seeing are quite good -- I envy your students.
Of course if one assumes the existence of the Christian God in the first place, the Resurrection is a rational thing to believe. But to someone who has not made that assumption, the fact that doing so would lead to accepting the rationality of the Resurrection is itself used as justification for not making the assumption in the first place (i.e. "if I accepted the reality of the Christian God, then I'd have to believe that a man came back from the dead -- and that's just nonsense, so I won't accept the reality of the Christian God."). In my experience, non-theists are quite willing to tolerate my "alternative way of seeing"... so long as I don't arrive at any conclusions that conflict with their way of seeing. They're perfectly willing to allow me to say "duck" when they say "rabbit". But once I suggest that a disembodied head is not the entire picture, the duck/rabbit superposition begins to collapse. Since the non-theist cannot by his own rules assert the rest of the rabbit (because it cannot be seen), we are left only with my claims of "duck!" -- which is not at all acceptable to the non-theist. Even your non-theist commenters here (who are both intelligent and polite -- a refreshing difference in 'net discussions these days) seem unwilling to grant legitimacy to your "way of seeing" because it sees more than theirs does.
It is entirely possible to hold to a variety of "Christianity" which makes no substantive duck claims at all (rejection of miracles, especially the Resurrection, etc.). However, I have difficulty understanding why one would value such a Christianity in the first place: life as a non-theist would be simpler, and I think pretty much any moral principle one derived could be arrived at using naturalist assumptions as well. As St. Paul said, if Christ be not raised we are of all men most to be pitied.
I wonder why Dawkins bothered engaging (sloppily) with Christian philosophical arguments at all. He could just as easily have said "Philosophy? Hah! You think a man came back from the dead! Idiots!", which is a perfectly sufficient refutation for his target audience. Even St. Paul had the Athenians on board until he mentioned the Resurrection. This refutation is the one I encounter more frequently than misunderstandings of Aquinas, and I find myself being unable to do anything but cede the point.
(Regardless, I am drawn to these sorts of discussions like a moth to flame. Your book is en route -- through the ridiculous economics of modern publishing, I was able to obtain a dead-tree version for less of a cash outlay than the electronic version (though with no doubt a vastly higher carbon footprint).)
Dianelos,
ReplyDeleteI like N. T. Wright on Jesus' self-awareness. In print, he develops his position in his book Jesus and the Victory of God. I haven't read that one yet, but I have heard him explain his views several times in other contexts such as this one:
I do not think Jesus "knew he was God" in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself "Well I never! I'm the second person of the Trinity!" Rather, "as part of his human vocation grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be."