The ‘traditional’ objections to a wholly naturalistic metaphysics, within the modern Western philosophical tradition, involve the vexed notions of freedom and consciousness. But there is, I think, a much deeper and more interesting line of criticism to naturalism, and that involves the notion of intentionality and its closely correlated notion of normativity.
What is involved in my belief that I’m drinking a beer as I type this? Well, my belief is about something — namely, the beer that I’m drinking. But what does this “aboutness” consist of? It requires, among other things, a commitment that I have undertaken — that I am prepared to respond to the appropriate sorts of challenges and criticisms of my belief. I’m willing to play the game of giving and asking for reasons, and my willingness to be so treated is central to how others regard me as their epistemic peer. But there doesn’t seem to be any way that the reason-giving game can be explained entirely in terms of the neurophysiological story of what’s going on inside my cranium. That neurophysiological story is a story of is the case, and the reason-giving story is essentially a normative story — of what ought to be the case.
And if Hume is right — as he certainly seems to be! — in saying that one cannot derive an ought-statement from an is-statement,and if naturalism is an entirely descriptive/explanatory story that has no room for norms, then in light of the central role that norms play in human life (including their role in belief, desire, perception, and action), it is reasonable to conclude that naturalism cannot be right.
(Of course, it does not follow from this that any version of theism or ‘supernaturalism’ must be right, either.)
Pure speculation on my part, but I doubt if I would have recognized your formal naturalistic self as anything like what I experience or believe.
I tend not to pay much attention to isms. This discussion is all angels on pinheads to me.
That may be true, but it is not the argument I made.
Intersubjectivity is the way I would go. Others have already been down this road with you. I understand your position but it is not one I share nor do I see any value in going down the road that others have already explored with you.
So I’ll sign off this exchange ….
Really? You think there is only “one guy” making a claim about a life transformed by the supernatural?
No, that’s just your incorrect inference. Lots of people are naturalists or command-morality theists and live happy, successful lives. I don’t claim such a path would work for everyone, or for even most people.
Walto, here’s my view – not everything in the B category works for everyone who tries it. Nor does it work every time a person tries it. Nor does it work like A category stuff works. And, there’s nothing wrong with being an A-Category ONLY person. There is no hell awaiting you. You won’t necessarily have a worse life or less satisfaction.
I’m saying that if A category doesn’t cut it for you, or if one feels like honestly exploring B category just to see what happens, you can’t demand it work like A category stuff, and you can’t treat it like A category stuff. If it was like that, it would be in the A category.
The problem as I have pointed out is that if B category stuff is fundamentally different than A category stuff, you can’t demand A-specific evidence to demonstrate that B is real. Which is the catch-22 naturalists employ. Show me “B” but show me in a way where I see it as “A”.
keiths:
Alan:
I addressed that when I introduced the example:
Alan:
Who said anything about delaying treatment? There are 7 billion people in the world — you think maybe we could deliver treatment and look for an explanation at the same time?
Also, looking for an explanation would hardly be “pratting about”. The more we learned about the phenomenon, the more likely that we could apply it to other important problems. What you call ‘pratting about’ would actually be a moral imperative.
William,
I addressed that in the comment immediately above yours:
Bruce,
I would say yes. The norms KN was referring to are social, shared by those speaking the language in question. If only one person uses the language, there is no longer a linguistic community, and therefore no basis for social norms.
In any case, even if we were to decide that a private language is based on norms, that doesn’t pose a problem for naturalism. The ought in question would still be an “ought-if”: “I ought to use this language if I want to formulate complex beliefs.”
Ought-ifs are not a problem for naturalism since they can be expressed in declarative language.
walto,
There are always competing hypotheses available, including supernatural ones. If one of the supernatural hypotheses is superior to all of the other hypotheses based on the criteria I gave above (comprehensiveness, predictive accuracy, and a minimum of arbitrary assumptions), then it’s reasonable to provisionally accept that hypothesis, which in turn means provisionally accepting the falsehood of naturalism.
keiths:
walto:
Okay, if that’s what he’s arguing, then it appears he has simply defined miracles out of existence.
In effect, he’s saying that a law by definition is never violated, whether by natural events or supernatural ones. If a supernatural event happens that is inconsistent with a purported law, then the law wasn’t really a law at all.
Putting it more concisely, physical laws are never violated because if they were, they wouldn’t be laws — by definition.
That strikes me as a weak argument, because it is really an argument against particular definitions of “law” and “miracle” and not against what most people mean by those words.
If you define “physical law” as something that is never violated, and you define “miracle” as a violation of physical law, then of course miracles can’t happen — but that’s a logical point, not an empirical one, and it is the empirical question that we really care about.
The problem can be circumvented by defining “physical law” as something that can never be violated except by supernatural means. Then miracles, as violations of physical law, are necessarily supernatural.
With this approach, you still have the problem I outlined in my earlier comment: when a violation of a purported law is observed and confirmed, you still have to decide whether it is a miracle or whether the law really wasn’t a law.
But as I explained in that comment, there is a principled basis for doing so.
William,
A couple of points regarding your recent comments:
1. Naturalism is not a “tautological system”, contrary to your claim. First, not all naturalists are methodological naturalists. Those who aren’t, including me, are open to scientific tests of supernatural hypotheses, as in the case of my regrown amputee limbs.
Even those naturalists who are methodological naturalists are generally open to the possibility that naturalism might be false — it’s just that they don’t think that this is a scientific question, so they look outside of science for an answer.
For a particular person’s naturalism to be a “tautological system”, that person would need to be a methodological and would also have to believe that scientific knowledge is the only valid kind of knowledge. There may be some naturalists who fit the bill, but certainly not all of us.
2. You point out that science may reject genuine phenomena if they aren’t sufficiently reproducible or otherwise fall short of scientific standards. That’s true, but no system is perfect. We have no foolproof method of accessing the truth.
If scientific standards are so lax that no true hypothesis is ever rejected, then they are lax enough to admit lots of false (and even contradictory) hypotheses. On the other hand, if they are so strict that no false hypothesis ever gets (provisionally) affirmed, then they are probably too strict. A compromise is required.
Dismissing the occasional non-reproducible but true phenomenon is better than accepting a whole bunch of non-reproducible and false phenomena. For you, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using the best scientific methodology, because you don’t care whether your beliefs are true — you just care if they “work”. For those of us who see the pursuit of truth as important, your approach falls well short of our intellectual standards. It is far too lax.
For example, your approach would require us to treat homeopathy as viable, despite the fact that it is a complete bust in rigorous studies. Think of all the money and effort that has been wasted on homeopathy alone over the years, and you’ll understand why scientists prefer standards that are far stricter than your own.
What McKinnon is missing (judging simply from what I’ve read here, that is) seems to be a typical tacit assumption about miracles, which is that they would either benefit or harm a targeted person, human group, or humanity in general.
I can understand that we can’t differentiate between laws being nearly, but not quite, absolute, and miracles that are indifferent to humans. But if the laws “break” entirely, or even mostly, to affect human outcomes, that at least comes within range of what we consider to be magic or miracle. Moving on to say that these “miracles” are Yahweh’s doing, or what some magical healer claims to be causing, would seem to be problematic if we only have human amputees being made whole and no other knowledge, but that human welfare apparently is the goal very much fits what we might expect from the supernatural–if the miracle writings happen to be based in fact.
Glen Davidson
I could add that if any other species seemed to get preferential treatment “from the universe,” so to speak, that could be magic as well. Maybe birds of paradise are the magic species, not humans, and only feed on nectars pouring from pink clouds over their nests, or whatever.
Perhaps the main point of magic or miracles is that they would seem to be purposeful in some way. ID, except that that the purpose is carefully never spelled out, because counters to any such purpose are usually quite apparent. Humans (who are quite obviously the important species to almost all IDists), sadly, have not been spared diseases, nor have they escaped the morphological effects of the blind wanderings of the fitness landscape that occur in non-purposive evolution.
Glen Davidson
Yes, I think that’s what McKinnon does.He says physical laws are either absolute or probabilistic. The absolute ones can’t be violated and still true and the probabilistic ones don’t need to be absolutely without exceptions to be true. Either way, no miracles. Again–he allows there could be miracles in the sense of amazing coincidences (like a bee stinging a trolley operator at just the right time to save six pedestrians). But he says that miracles of that kind don’t provide evidence for anything supernatural (since no physical law need be violated).
You’re right, it’s a purely logical point, depending on what is meant by “physical law.” And I think William is making the same sort of argument when he says that naturalism is tautological.
Your approach is more generous and fairer to the believers than McKinnon’s, I think, since you’ve already got what might be called a category for events that can violate physical laws because of their….intrinsic weirdness, and still leave the laws intact. McKinnon leaves no room for anything like that. That too is logical rather than empirical, I think, as are the principles you want to rely on (simplicity, comprehensiveness, etc.) to judge competing hypotheses.
Turning back to your ought claims. I’d say that “You ought to turn left on Elm if you want to go to the grocery store” is not a value statement at all which is why it can be expressed as something like “You’re likely to get to the grocery store from here fastest if you turn left on Elm. You claim that statements like “You ought not to torture innocent babies because it’s wrong” when taken not to be suppressing anything like “…if you want them not to be obnoxious teenagers” (what you call “free-floating oughts”) cannot be “established.” To non-logical positivists like me, that’s no big problem for them being true. We can’t “prove” that there are physical objects either. In fact, there’s a sense in which all the empirical tests for evil demons or whether we’re dreaming don’t make any sense at all. But I believe in my chair anyways, and my common-sense realism extends to values.
Note, that this is not a “counter-argument”: it’s a statement of a disagreement. (I’m not sure yet whether you get that difference.)
That seems to be a “free-floating” ought.
You can make it instrumental by something like: “if we want to find out what is true, …” or “if we want to find out what works,…” but then I suspect William will disagree with you and me on what it means for something to be true or for something to work.
For me, the agreement with others in some sense is needed. I understand it is not for William.
The problem with this, for me, is that it is arbitrary. You have no way of knowing if the faith healing actually did anything because of course there can be no controls of such an action. Worse though, it raises the question of validity when compared against those people who were cured of cancer who did not receive faith healing. Alas, there are many more people who have been cured of cancer without faith healing than the opposite. And then there’s the question of why faith healing has never regrown an organ…
In other words, while you may insist that faith healing “worked” for your wife when there’s very little actual evidence it did, medicine still has a more reliable and successful track record with treating illness.
Which may well be true William, but then it’s still arbitrary and unreliable as a practical solution. Seems to me it can’t be shown to statistically outperform “do nothing”.
Hernias, Dental cavities, cataracts, liver and kidney failure, fungus infections, retardation,.
Faith healing only seems to work on those ailments for which there is no definitive medical treatment and for which there is some percentage of spontaneous remission.
keiths:
Bruce:
No, because as you point out, there is an implicit “if”, though a different one for us than for William:
Which is fine, as long as his idiosyncratic definitions are explicit.
I think there’s an implicit “if” there as well: “If I want my beliefs to be true, I ought to take what others believe into account.”
As to whether “I should only believe true things” is a free-floating ought, I would say no. Clifford’s Principle seems overwrought to me:
Here’s the problem William – “cancer remission” is Category A phenomenon. You don’t seem to have a way to get from this Category A evidence (“medicinal prayer”), the Category A phenomenon (“cancer remission”), and your claim of a Category B phenomenon (“supernatural intervention”). The key would some type of Category B evidence, but you don’t seem to have any.
There is in this context. You’ve already repeatedly noted that supernaturalism is not consensual; it has to be experienced by the individual and may (according to you) only work in certain situations for certain people. So yes, that makes this “one guy” giving anecdotes about his experience with the supernatural and thus far all that can be said by all parties that that such events appear to correlate. Nothing in your stories demonstrates any sort of causal relationship.
walto,
Yes, and like McKinnon’s, William’s argument misses the mark because it applies only to the subset of naturalists who accept a particular set of premises and definitions.
I agree. It’s an ought statement, but not a value statement.
As a moral subjectivist, I take “because it’s wrong” to mean “because my conscience tells me not to do it”. It’s a value statement, because it expresses a value of mine, but it’s not a free-floating ought, because it can be explained in terms of my physical brain. It’s not objectively wrong; it’s wrongness depends on my physically instantiated conscience.
I accept the existence of values. I just don’t think they exist independently of the valuers. They’re instantiated only in brains; that is, they’re not free-floating.
Robin said:
Not for me.
You don’t seem to understand what “non-consensual” means in this context.
No, the problem is that you obviously don’t understand what I’m talking about in terms of “category A” and “category B”. Just because something now exists in the world as such (like, no cancer) may put that result in category A, but the faith-healing process is not category A. It is faith healing producing such results that is category B. Not the resulting lack of cancer in such patients. If the faith healing doesn’t appear to make cancer go into remission any more often than non-faith-healing, that is the category B I’m talking about. Non-consensual, non-category A results.
Which means, if it doesn’t work for you in particular, and doesn’t provide a statistical advantage when studied view category A techniques, you haven’t made any significant point wrt what I have already stated. You’re applying category A evidence and interpretation on something I’ve already stated is not a category A process – faith healing.
That some naturalists deny those premises and definitions doesn’t mean I’ve missed the mark; it could as well mean that many naturalists live in denial.
William,
You argument misses all of us who don’t accept methodological naturalism, and it also misses those methodological naturalists who don’t hold that science is the only valid source of knowledge.
Of course it is – by definition. It’s only worked once by your own admission. You have no way of knowing what would have happened if you’d done nothing, because as you readily demonstrate, there’s no way to track any “Category B evidence”. Further, you state that as a “Category B” phenomenon, it might only work for some people at certain times – the very definition of arbitrary.
Oh I do, but if there’s no indirect evidence at all, then as Alan notes, it’s just an arbitrary imagination talking.
Here’s the thing William, if your “supernaturalism” doesn’t manifest at all in any physical sense, then there’s no such thing as “faith” causing healing. You can’t have a cause/effect without some kind of “effect”.
This makes no sense sense William. “Prayer” is not a supernatural event. It is a physical one; it can be observed, measured, recorded, reported, double-blind compared, etc. There’s nothing magical about praying. There may be something magical or supernatural about the effect of prayer, but the effect is pretty measurable too. What can’t be measured (at least not in any meaningful way) is only the act of doing nothing. Everything else can be measured.
For instance, it’s trivial simple to compare the success rate of supposed faith healing to doing nothing. How? Because the results of supposed “faith healing” are “Category A” evidence – they are healed and not-healed people. How you can claim that healing is a “Category B” phenomenon regardless of how it occurred is beyond me; healing is healing, whether it comes from placebos, prayer, a knife, a drug, or doing nothing.
And as I note above, healing is healing. It’s a category A phenomenon and in this case it is category A evidence (as well) that your prayer-based approach is less effective for most people than simply doing nothing. If that were not the case, then more faith healing would lead to more cures more often in a repeatable pattern. As it stands, it’s merely arbitrary.
In thinking about this further, I think I should confirm two things: did the prayer happen in the physical world? And did the healing happen in the physical world? If the answer is yes to both of those, then how can faith healing be said to be “non-consensual”?
keiths,
That’s really the nub of our disagreement. I don’t think any claim about someone’s conscience is a good translation of an ought statement. And, as I’ve said before, one can tell this because they’re not substitutable–it’s not contradictory for somebody to say something like “I understand that this is wrong, but my conscience is indifferent to the matter.” or Jones has feelings of disapproval toward stealing, but he doesn’t really believe it’s wrong.” I think the only way to make these contradictory is to sneak a [free floating] ought into the description of the biddings of conscience, and that would be circular. Again, however, the anti-value naturalists can simply claim that while these propositions are not synonymous, the real ought statements are actually false because there are no such things as values.
My approach to these matters is akin to the approach taken by common-sense realists to phenomenalists who believe that statements about chairs are translatable into statements about appearances or to scientific realists who think statements about chairs are translatable into statements about microscopic particles. I think that both sets of translations fail. Now, of course, the phenomenalist or scientific realist could simply hold that the statements about chairs–just like those about values–are false, that if they don’t translate into either the language of appearance or the language of physics: “they are free-floating non-natural falsehoods.” Now, I readily concede that I can’t prove the truth of my common sense ontology–it’s a categorial choice–and that my appeals to commonsense and ordinary language will cut no ice with either the Carnapian phenomenalist or the Carnapian scientific realist. But I disagree with them, and I guess, with you.
Not that this is the end of such of debate or belief, but it is interesting to me what such research demonstrates on “faith healing”:
http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/faith-healing-parents-arrested-over-death-of-second-child-130424.htm
No, you’re missing my point. Glen Davison must get it as he mentions it too. Your throwaway line “caused amputated limbs to regrow” is the important issue. First off, what do you mean by limb regrowth? Humans manage to grow four in nine months, though they take a lot longer to get to full size. It’s not beyond the bounds of science in the future to develop techniques of tissue culture using pluripotent stem cells to achieve some kind of organ replacement program. So in your envisaged limb regrowth, what is happening and how quickly? “Poof” or steady growth consistent with the laws of the universe? That makes a huge difference to whether we need to worry about a causal link to this prayer.If you are postulating some breaking of the physical laws, then we have something to study but still have no way to establish a causal link to something else. All you would be able to demonstrate is coincidence.
Of course, as I said, if this prayer were consistently and unfailingly able to cause the regrowth of all amputees limbs than that would be a wonderful thing. But you still would not be able to draw a causal link to any imaginary god, ghost or ghoulie
But is’s all pie-in-the -sky, so far! 🙂
Exactly!
But it is the status quo We don’t appear to have anything that we can examine empirically that does not exhibit the properties shared by all real phenomena. Nobody is saying we can’t look. I at least am asking what are we supposed to look at?
Exactly (again)! Where’s the link?
I would like someone, sometime to actually try and come up with an an example of knowledge acquired without any reference to the external world.
Forgoing proven medical care for serious treatable conditions is never a good idea
That’s where I draw the line. And that’s where the law draws the line with regard to sick children.
I have no problem with faith healing in conjunction with medicine, or with faith healing for conditions for which there is no medical treatment.
I would like to see someone come up with an example of mathematics that is independent of the concept of number, and a concept of number that is independent of counting.
If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets. 🙂
Prayer doesn’t work for squibs.
petrushka,
A joke explained is not funny, I know, so I tried Urban Dictionary but I still have to ask for a translation.
Sorry;.
On May 19, 2014 at 6:33 pm Alan Fox and petrushka said:
Alan Fox: I would like someone, sometime to actually try and come up with an an example of knowledge acquired without any reference to the external world.
petrushka: I would like to see someone come up with an example of mathematics that is independent of the concept of number, and a concept of number that is independent of counting.
Walto: I would like someone to pay my daughter’s college tuition bills.
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Squib
Alan Fox,
A couple of things regarding the efficacy of prayer.
One: if it doesn’t work, it is because you don’t really believe. I’ve had this one flung at me.
This is similar to the notion that skepticism defeats psychic powers. Bad vibes and such.
My wife and my daughter have both been known to reproach me in such a manner.
Ah! My daughter was never very interested in the Harry Potter books so I’m pretty ignorant on that subject.
Muggles have been known occasionally to lead otherwise satisfactory lives. It is just a bit like being unaware of Star Wars or James Bond. If it’s any consolation, you can now major in English Lit without reading Shakespeare.
Not in Shakespeare’s own country I hope. And, no, it isn’t!
Who are the Beatles?
Robin said:
If reality is not comprised strictly of category A phenomena (phenomena explicable/describable via naturalism), and if category B phenomena exist, then obviously the way the naturalist conceptualizes “the physical world” is in error.
All of your arguments stem from assuming we live in a category A “physical world”. You are still asking to be shown B, but demanding it have the characteristics of A. If the supernatural exists, what you are and what reality is and what “the physical world” is, is not what you think it is, nor operates the way you believe it does.
That’s a category A (naturalist) interpretation of events. One category B way to see it is that skeptics don’t inhabit the same experiential reality as those who observe the psychic powers succeeding.
Alan said:
I tested this out and, even though I didn’t really believe, not only did it work, but I could faith heal others on occasion. I think this mystery is better conceptualized by letting go of the idea that we all live in the same experiential reality.
Alan,
I still remember the first time I ever felt old. I was eighteen, talking to a couple of thirteen-year-olds, and one of them turned to the other and said “Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”
Topology.
Okay, but not independent of space and of objects in space.
I guess what I’m after is an example of some body of concepts not tied to material reality.
Find some other way of demonstrating that your magic rises above the level of confirmation bias, coincidence, and possibly minor mystery, then.
“Category A” has the means of getting past bias. “Category B” typically requires us to sink into the indeterminacy of bias and error in order for us to “believe it,” hence I’m not interested. If you actually have something, show us how it gets beyond mistake and bias. Otherwise, forget it, I’m not interested in something indistinguishable from wishful thinking and happenstance.
We know that confirmation bias and fallacious modes of thought like post hoc ergo propter hoc exist, and that science exists partly to provide ways of knowing that typically manage to skirt those issues. We don’t know that magic occurs, and we don’t know of anyone who can show that it does. Until someone can demonstrate that magic shows up without bias and fallacious reasoning, the more parsimonious conclusion is that that purported claims of magic result from bias and fallacious reasoning.
Glen Davidson