I have been following Vincent’s spat with Edward Feser (A Catholic philosopher with some reactionary views – his blog) over whether Feser’s own “cosmological argument” has the merit Feser seems to think. Here’s Vincent’s latest post on the matter.
Not being able to post at Uncommon Descent, I thought I might catch up with Vincent at Feser’s blog but I seem to have worn out my welcome. In case anyone decides to pop in from Feser’s blog, I thought I’d offer this thread for discussion. And please regard it as an open thread. Nothing will be considered off-topic. Usual rules apply!
How many potentialities can dance on the head of an actuality?
The medieval world breathlessly waits to see which Scholastic wins…
Glen Davidson
Here’s my deliberately naive response to arguments of the general sort that Feser offers.
Generating a “demonstration” or “proof” of the existence of God is trivially easy, because all one needs to do is build all the information into the premises. The conclusion follows necessarily from the premises because all deductively valid arguments are tautologies. It’s trivially easy to construct a proof of the sort:
(1) By “God,” one means anything that has the following characteristics: {x, y, z . . }
(2) necessarily, if there is a P such that {a, b, c . . . }, then there is a y such that {x, y, z . . . };
(3) there is a P such that {a, b, c . . . }
———–
Therefore, God necessarily exists.
Proving that God exists isn’t hard — in fact, it’s not just easy but trivially easy, as long as all the hard work has gone into formulating the required premises in the first place.
It’s the argument which leads up to and establishes those premises that’s the hard part!
I know one thing that they don’t. The meaning of the word “succinct””.
Torley with quoted Feser is an excellent article to read.
That is, if you want to understand the phrase “incommensurate worldview”.
As in, Aristotle’s worldview and its middle ages update.
Here is an essay in the popular press by a theoretical physicist on scientific progress, scientific realism, and the relationship between philosophy and science that may be of interest:
Why Science is not about Certainty
BruceS,
Interesting. But I disagree with him — not about certainty, but about science. He questions the standard picture, and rightly so. But I don’t agree with his alternative.
SeverskyP35,
I give these guys a lot of credit for their industry. It’s just page after page of errant nonsense. And they argue with each other about this stuff with such vehemence. Awesome. Lewis Carroll would have a field day.
I love Freudian typos. Someone at Feser’s blog commented about the “immoral soul”!
Kantian Naturalist,
Hope you don’t mind that I linked to your comment, KN.
Alan Fox,
Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt there, Alan! I’ve actually been spelling it wrong for many years.
So not so much Freudian as foolish, I’m afraid.
One of those words that would have disappeared from the lexicon but for that one phrase. As there’s a perfectly good synonym in “utter” one wonders why it hangs on.
Just posted a couple of comments at Feser’s blog mentioning how slow and clunky it is and managed to post in triplicate. Now I’m getting 502 errors on trying to delete the extraneous comments or comment further. Maybe it’s time to return to reality.
Neil Rickert,
Glad you enjoyed it.
I read him as favoring scientific progress and a form of scientific realism. Based on our exchanges on these topics, I am not surprised that you don’t agree.
Plus, he likes philosophy!
C programmers spell it trs.
Alan Fox,
Not at all, Alan — on the contrary, I’m flattered!
Since Torley and Feser are both catholic, last I heard, it’s pointless to look at their “first cause” arguments, because whether either, both, or neither have succeeded in proving the necessity of some character we might agree to call god, they “have all their work still ahead of them ” [as Hitchens said in a slightly different context] to justify the filth of their current cult.
Makes me want to vomit that men who actively support the woman-murdering Church can be admired as “deep thinkers” even by themselves, much less by anyone not already a member of their sick cult. You’d think that anyone with power of self-reflection would think it through and – in shame – abandon that wretched hive forever.
You’ll hurt yourself if you continue to bottle up your feelings.
🙂
A commenter at Feser’s blog responds to Kantian Naturalist’s “deliberately naïve” comment
Well, he did say it was deliberately naïve!
Here’s what I really should have said:
(emphasis mine) thanks, PZ Myers
It would apply to all fact-free deductive arguments. What that has to do with Feser and God, is that Feser likes to make such arguments about God.
Alan Fox,
Oh, that KN. He’s unbelievably this. He’s breathtakingly that!
What I enjoyed most from this critique was the definition of “probative”: sound *PLUS* free of informal fallacies! Wow, it’s like DOUBLY sound! Not ANY kind of fallaciousness snuck in there anyplace!!! Are you impressed?
Wait! Don’t answer yet! If you buy in now, we’ll add that our argument is both NORMATIVELY PERSUASIVE and…..DEMONSTRATIVE!!!!!
Whee. You can’t go wrong with this little number, I promise you. I know it seems like bullshit from stem to stern, but take it for a spin. It simply CAN’T be wrong with all of our patented built in safe-guards.
We wouldn’t tell you that God didn’t exist if HE didn’t. Now you too can be sure. How? Our arguments are not only normatively persuasive, true, valid, sound, probative, they’re also fucking demonstrative, baby! So all you doubters should really be ashamed at this point. How many demonstrative arguments AGAINST God have YOU got?
Except, of course, that we have plenty of good reasons for rejecting scholastic metaphysics.
Aristotle built his metaphysics on the basis of cutting-edge science of the 3rd century B.C. Aquinas took Aristotle’s metaphysics as a given and worked mighty hard to reconcile it with the authority of Scripture, which he also took as a given. (Thus, for example, Aquinas had to worry much more about the characteristics of prima materia or ‘prime matter’, since h was committed to creation ex nihilo. Aristotle argued for an eternal universe, so the origins of the forms wasn’t a problem for him.)
Point is, Thomism is great and all, but its authority is pretty meager. Anyone who doesn’t accept the authority of Scripture already has no reason to be a Thomist — though arguably Thomism is the best theological metaphysics there is, so if one needs a theological metaphysics, Thomism or some version of scholasticism is the best bet. And anyone who thinks that the best science of classical Athens isn’t a good basis for the metaphysics of the 21st-century has no reason to be an Aristotelian about metaphysics. (Though arguably virtue ethics is a better framework for thinking about ethics than deontology or consequentialism.)
Right. I’m no logician, but if it’s not the case that all deductive arguments are syntactically equivalent to tautologous sentences, I’d like to understand why not. That’s one of the big lessons I picked up from my casual, self-guided reading of the Tractatus, and if Wittgenstein is wrong about this, I want to understand why he’s wrong.
[I’ll be participating with a bit more frequency for the next few weeks — my book is done and I start teaching at the end of the month.]
Wonderful, and congratulations on your new book!
Yes, I notice that ploy of wrapping your thoughts in the most obscure way in order to give it that sheen of impeccability (heh). There seems to be a bit of potlatching going on.
I noticed the tendency to false dichotomy too. Right, wrong; up, down: it’s all so black-and-white. 😉 Yet there is something in human language that leads us to think and talk in dichotomies, I suggest. Anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Seconded. I enjoy and appreciate your contributions here. Don’t neglect the day job, though!
As I understand it, any valid argument to conclusion C from premises P1, …, Pn can be rephrased as the single formula (P1&P2&…Pn) implies C.
If the argument is valid (ie true for all models in predicate logic) then the formula is a tautology (and conversely).
Is that the sort of thing which you were thinking about?
That works for predicate logic, but I am not sure about modal logic.
My problem with the Feser stuff occurs right at the start, when (according to Torley’s quote) he says:
This principle is supposed to be something we see as necessarily true as soon as we understand it. I don’t understand it. And I don’t understand how it can be something necessarily true. So I am stuck there.
That’s what I was trying to get at by the incommensurate worldviews stuff.
Like you I think, I justify my worldview by appealing to the success of science in explaining and helping us predict the world, and so insist that any metaphysics has to be consistent with science. So I would not accept Feser’s principle unless it could be defined consistently with how we do science and then checked in the light of that science.
Congratulations on completing your book. Great news for you. And it is good news for the people at TSZ that you may devote some of your newly-freed time to contributing more..
I understand the basic idea here. I mean, I’ve studied Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics and I’ve even taught it a few times. And it does take some time and practice to enter into a very different word-view from one’s own. But just because one can understand Aristotle on the nature of change doesn’t make his views necessarily true or obviously true.
Love those. They say nothing at all. In addition, the second one requires the soundness of another (silly) syllogism itself:
1. Whatever can be explained by the actualization of a potential can be explained only by something actual (i.e., “a changer”) [NB: I moved the “only” where it belongs for them, because I’m nice that way.]
2. Change is a matter of explaining the actualization of a potential.
3. Therefore, change requires a changer.
As indicated above, it may all be bullshit (I mean, like, through and through), but, by cracky, it’s a valid, sound, probative, epistemically normative DEMONSTRATION. So y’all can suck it
To understand how Aristotelians think about ‘change’, one has to enter into the whole Aristotelian vocabulary of ‘form’ (morphe), ‘material’ (hyle), ‘potency’ (dunamis), ‘actuality’ (energeia), and ‘movement’ (kinesis).
All perceptible things are a fusion of form and matter, and their change is a goal-directed process from potency to actuality, where the form of the thing is the goal (telos) of the changes it undergoes. The form of the oak tree explains the growth of the acorn (which is a potential oak) into an oak, the form of the frog explains the growth of the tadpole (potential frog) into a frog, and so on. The forms themselves are eternal and unchanging, but perceptible things change because material, or hyle, cannot be pure form.
It’s not a foolish way of looking at things, but it is a very different world-view from that of contemporary science, or the metaphysics that science needs.
Can one accept Aristotelian philosophy, eg about causes, and also accept modern science? Torley seems to think so. He disparages Feser’s table examples as scientifically illiterate but still says Feser’s metaphyics is basically right.
Or on a related topic, the same issue arises for mental causation: can mental causes be separated from the physical causes of the changes in brain states which underlie the changes in mental states without having to invoke downward causation from mental to brain states (which some argue is inconsistent with science in a certain sense)?
A supporter the holymorphic (Aristotelian) theory of mind that I’ve read says yes: as long as we explain mental causation by claiming it relies on a different type of cause than that used in science, name causation by rationalization. Mental events are rationalization causes and brain events are standard scientific causes and both can operate at the same time.
But can you really still accept all of science and accept Aristotelian metaphysics of causation? My guess would be no, you cannot, but I don’t know understand enough of Aristotle to justify that guess.
Ditto
I agree, but a somewhat better way of putting it is that if the only criterion for the metaphysics is that it unifies the sciences and makes sense of the history of science, then there is no room for Aristotelian accounts of causation in the metaphysics — nor is there room for any of the other ‘manifest image’ concepts, like rationality, subjectivity, normativity, agency, and the like.
I’m still torn between scientific naturalism and a more liberal version (e.g. Nagel, Hanna, and many others). I’ve decided that, in a sort of ‘know thy enemy’ spirit, to read Ladyman and Ross’ Every Thing Must Go. They begin by defending, in a non-pejorative sense, “scientism”: that the only metaphysics that bears on objective reality is the metaphysics that (a) tells us what fundamental physics is all about and (b) explains the relation between fundamental physics and the other sciences.
It’s actually a fairly compelling account, so far. But what to make of all those manifest image concepts that I defend, like rationality and normativity? Is it ultimately coherent to say that there are certain concepts that we must have in order to make sense of the world, but that those concepts don’t tell us anything about how the world really is?
I’ve only seen popularized version of L&R in Massimo Pigliucci’s writings, eg he refers to them in last paragraph of Possibility of p-zombies as well as articles on his old blog.
I’ll be interested to hear what you think of the real thing!
On norms and naturalism: I personally still get stuck on the following issue (well, among many, actually): Suppose something like Millikan is true for intentionality. Suppose Kitcher’s approach or Flanagan’s moral ecology approach are true. Is that enough to completely naturalize norms? Or do we still need something extra to justify why we should use a pragmatic, naturalistic approach to moral norms and to epistemological norms.
BTW, Didn’t you have to make up your mind about your position on naturalism for the book? Or do you have a followup in mind already!
In the book itself I took the view that intentionality can certainly be naturalized if we accept liberal naturalism, but probably not if we insist on scientific naturalism of the Alex Rosenberg variety. The account of intentionality I defend in the book is that there are two kinds of intentional content — discursive intentionality and somatic intentionality — and that neither can be accommodated by the kind of hyper-reductive scientific naturalism that Rosenberg insists upon. So they can be naturalized only if our criterion for naturalization is less demanding than “being explained in terms of fermions and bosons”.
I spent the entire book explaining what I meant by those two kinds of intentionality and why we need the concepts of both, and I developed that view by way of close reading and criticism of C. I. Lewis, Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, and Merleau-Ponty. So even though I used the question, “can intentionality be naturalized?” as the frame for the book, in the end I wasn’t able to get much further than, “here’s the right view about intentionality, but whether that view is naturalizable depends on what you mean by ‘naturalism’!”
On the other hand, now that I do have a view about intentionality that I think is pretty good, I can devote myself to figuring out what “naturalism” means — and that will give me the second piece of the puzzle, and hopefully my second book.
I would say it is no longer a useful or productive way of looking at things. Isn’t it essentialism?
My deepest criticism of ID and of theism in general is that they don’t generate useful hypotheses.
I agree but would go a bit farther. It’s my view that no sensible philosophical position can conflict with any empirical truth. If Aristotelian philosophy is not consistent with what physicists now now about the world, it must be discarded.
Reading up on Aristotle, he seems widely credited as the first documented empirical scientist, making wide-ranging observations, including dissection of specimens. It was cutting-edge for the third century BC. Time moves on. Ideas change and accumulate.
Certainly we need to re-examine the concepts of “causation” and “nothing” in light of modern physics.
I do not know what they mean, and I’m not convinced that anyone does.
So I think anyone using them in a premise is just blowing smoke.
I’ve read that you don’t understand quantum physics unless you can do the math, and that if you can do the math, you understand that there is nothing understood except the math.
So I don’t know what being a materialist means, except that it means that empiricism has become deeper than scholasticism. It has always been more useful.
I keep telling the commenters at Feser’s blog, any argument is only as good as it’s premises. I’ve accepted the logic in the argument as internally sound, for the sake of argument (I wouldn’t really know if it is or not, anyway 😉 ) and I will concentrate on the validity of the original
assumptionspremises.ETA according to this post by Feser, talking of “first causes” is a straw man misunderstanding of his argument.
This refutation by one Norris Clarke (a Catholic Jesuit priest) takes a while to say that Bertrand Russell’s critique of “First Causes” is a straw man. It’s endorsed by Feser. Maybe someone with better reading skills can see what the premises for the correct argument for God (or is it the absolute ground of being) are.
ETA
The key phrase according to Clarke appears to be:
Every being which does not have its sufficient reason in itself requires a cause.
Sounds very like “Every being which isn’t God requires a cause”; (argument here), conclusion: therefore God.
And we’ve been fruitlessly beating those straw men!
Strictly speaking, it is ARGUMENTS that are valid or invalid–not premises. If an argument is (i) valid (which means that IF its premises are true, its conclusion has GOT to be true as well–valid arguments are truth-preserving) and (ii) its premises are true, then the argument is also said to be sound. A sound argument is a valid argument with true premises.
walto,
Thanks for that. I will concentrate on the truth of the original premises. But how does one establish the truth of an initial premise other than by the scientific method which will, with luck, only establish provisional correctness?
It depends on the premises, of course, but, if they’re empirical, I think that’s the best way, too.
The premises could be the results of conceptual analysis, e.g. “every effect has a cause” or “every event is located in time”. That yields an a priori truth, though arguably not a very interesting one.
The more interesting case (to me) are judgments that are “synthetic a priori“, meaning that they are neither empirically verifiable (or unverifiable) and not based on sheer conceptual explication, i.e. not true ‘by meaning alone’.
Kant correctly saw that rationalistic and scholastic metaphysics was concerned with judgments of this class; he also correctly saw that the power of Hume’s skepticism was that it ruled out judgments of this kind entirely. Kant also believed, more problematically, that the foundations of mathematics and physics were synthetic a priori. (Whether he was right about that remains contested — most 20th-century philosophers have assumed Kant was wrong about this, but Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason (2001) defends Kant on this point.)
And in general the ‘Continental’ tradition beginning with Husserl and Heidegger has been more receptive to synthetic a priori judgments than the ‘analytic’ tradition has been (until recently).
So it’s not the case that the only premises for the argument are empirical.
However, one could still say the following: if the semantical and epistemic form of the judgment is such that the judgment is both non-analytic and not a priori, then observation statements should be part of the evidentiary basis for the judgment.
Ladyman and Ross make the very interesting point that the reason why we should give more epistemic weight to successful scientific theories than to other kinds of inquiry is because the institutionalized norms of scientific practice consist of iterated filter mechanisms. There’s less chance of unsubstantiated bullshit getting through the cracks. (I think that this is basically Peirce’s point in “The Fixation of Belief”.) That’s what justifies our belief that successful scientific theories are models of objective reality, and metaphysics in turn will only successfully aim at truth to the extent that it takes the sciences as its point of departure.
They make a really strong claim that I find fascinating for its sheer audaciousness (though I’m also looking forward to seeing the argument): that the only legitimate kind of metaphysical hypothesis is one that relates a result of the fundamental physics to a result of one of the special sciences (chemistry, biology, economics, etc.). In other words, scientific metaphysics becomes meta-science.
Will keep you informed as I read more!
I agree with you that those premises are not intended to be empirical. They are intended to sound like Spinozistic axioms that have been received from on high. And the authors have been successful in that endeavor, IMO. They have written deep-sounding premises. But they are no more true a priori, than testable empirical propositions: they are bullshit. For one thing, like Spinoza, they confuse causes and explanations, so they get off on the wrong foot immediately, and, once sunk into the mire, never get a single nostril out of it.
Man, are their clothes smelly at this point.
Aha — now you see the advantage of a world view which can prove the existence of entities merely by contemplating the correct meanings of “actuality”, “potentiality”, and “perfection” from an armchair!
Of course, that world view may not work as well when one has to build an armchair.
walto,
In (somewhat) fairness to Spinoza, the distinction between causes and explanations was something that philosophers had to get really clear about in order to avoid Spinozism. Aristotle, for example, doesn’t distinguish between causes and explanations as we do. The so-called “four kinds of cause” — efficient, formal, material, and final — are better thought of as four different ways of characterizing the form-matter relationship that constitutes all changeable and perceptible things. So the conflation between what we would call “cause” (efficient cause) and what we would call “explanation” (formal cause, or final cause) is built right into the picture. Spinoza just adopts it and tweaks it in light of a mathematical conception of justification and a mechanistic conception of causation.
The Myth of the Given!
I’ve got no particular beef with Spinoza (on whom I wrote my thesis), but contemporary “rationalists” don’t have the excuse of living in the 17th Century for their silliness. These days it’s just a matter of being full of shit, and thinking it’s impressive to be flaunt their religious biases in an apparently sophisticated manner.