Is Religious Belief Natural?

Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously — at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos — even to a non-philosopher.

In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition.

De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.

A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion

  • Arguments in natural theology rely to an important extent on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us. (p. xiii)

  • …we have identified two puzzling features of natural theological arguments: they rest on intuitions that are untutored and, to some, appear obvious and self-evident. At the same time, there has been and continues to be disagreement about the validity of these intuitions. (p. xiv)

  • The main aim of this book is to examine the cognitive origins of these and other natural theological intuitions. We will see that many seemingly arcane natural theological intuitions are psychologically akin to more universally held, early developed, commonsense intuitions. (p. xv)

  • In recent years, cognitive scientists … have convincingly argued that religion relies on normal human cognitive functions. Religious beliefs arise early and spontaneously in development, without explicit instruction. (p. xvi)

  • The received opinion on the unnaturalness of theology does not sit well with the observation that intuitions that underlie natural theological arguments are obvious, self-evident, and compelling. (p. xvi)

  • Using evidence and theories from the cognitive science of religion and cognate disciplines … we aim to show that natural theological arguments and inferences rely to an important extent on intuitions that arise spontaneously and early in development and that are a stable part of human cognition.

See also: Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not

That religious belief comes naturally is no surprise given a theistic outlook. The findings seem to indicate that one has to be re-educated to reject religious beliefs. Could it be that it is atheism that is unnatural? Is it the denial of religious instruction to children that is the real child abuse?

330 thoughts on “Is Religious Belief Natural?


  1. : Chapter 7
    : The Argument from Beauty and the Evolutionary Basis of Aesthetic Experience

    The argument from beauty, or the aesthetic argument, denotes a family of arguments for the existence of God that take the beauty of the natural world of works of art … as evidence for the existence of God. Some authors have articulated this connection between the divine and beauty as obviously true, as something taht does not even require an explicit argument at all. (p. 131)

    All known human cultures have at least music, dance, and some form of body adornment, and many others have plastic arts, such as sculpture or painting as well. (p. 135)

    Art making and aesthetic appreciation are universal at the cutural level … (p. 135)

    Art making and aesthetic sensitivity emerge early and spontaneously in child development, as is evident in an early disposition to draw, sing, dance, and play word games. (p. 136)

    Taken together, the cross-cultural universality of art, the spontaneous development of artistic behavior in children, and its antiquity in the archeological record indicate that a sensitivity and concern for beauty, and a propensity to create beautiful things are stable parts of human cognition and behavior. (p. 137)

  2. The argument from beauty, or the aesthetic argument…

    The cosmetological proof of the existence of God?

  3. Looks like I missed this post meanwhile:

    Kantian Naturalist:
    In one sense, that’s right: the “basis” of the methodological PSR is that it is an empirical generalization from past successful inquiry. It can be changed at any time, in that we could decide to reject the PSR as a guide to inquiry.

    False. If “in one sense, that’s right” is supposed to mean that you are stating a corollary to something I said, then no, I said nothing like this, and couldn’t.

    It’s false also because you are again merely asserting, not proving or demonstrating. I really only care about proofs and demonstrations. I don’t care about assertions.

    And it’s false also because no principle worth the name is an empirical generalisation. For example the law of identity is not an empirical generalisation. Modus ponens is not an empirical generalisation. The PSR is also a logical principle, nothing to do with empirical generalisation.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    It’s not an argument from authority if the authorities whose expertise is being appealed to are relevant to the issue under discussion. Just as it’s not an argument from authority to appeal to experts in neuroscience when we’re talking about brains work, it’s not an argument from authority to appeal to logicians when we’re talking about the nature and history of logic.

    If this is so, then my appeals to the authority of Saussure overpower Wittgenstein and Frege whenever I make a point about language. Wittgenstein’s and Frege’s expertise in this area, if any, is irrelevant compared to Saussure. In my view, Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use” and Frege’s distinction of “Sinn” and “Bedeutung” are not simply irrelevant (in that no linguist ever had any use of them), but also demonstrably false.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    I think I’m making the point that we do not need any ultimate foundation in order to understand what knowledge is, how it works, or why it is valuable.

    Let’s look again at what you actually said, “But there’s a big difference between pointing out that any assertion can be justified on the basis of some other assertion, should the need for further justification be required in some particular context, and thinking that there is some ultimate justification or foundation for all assertions. Though each assertion can be justified on the basis of some other assertion, it doesn’t follow that there exists an “ultimate foundation” — an assertion that justifies all the other assertions and which does not need to be justified itself.”

    First, here you are not making the point that we do not need any ultimate foundation. You are making the point that from grounding particular assertions it doesn’t follow that all assertions are grounded or that there is an ultimate foundation to assertions. This is right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as demonstrating that there indeed is no ultimate foundation.

    Second, you are implying here that the adherents of foundationalism argue for the need for ultimate foundation the way you do here, inductively. That’s false. You should know better, given your training.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    I’d like some clarification on the implicit challenge here. Is it to justify the epistemological superiority of scientific practices over other discursive practices, including a priori metaphysics?

    Yes. And please prove, not assert. Enough of mere assertions.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    Perhaps to show how scientific practices involve a stronger notion of objectivity than other discursive practices do? (This is perhaps not you would want to set up the problem.)

    More precisely, demonstrate that the scientific notion of objectivity is indeed “stronger” in the relevant sense.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    My point rather was that nothing we currently know about how brains process information is compatible with the beliefs that either the intellect is immaterial or that the brain has any causal interaction with any immaterial entities.

    Ah, I get it. In summary (given everything you have said earlier too), you are saying that any view that posits the immateriality of mind cannot hold water, because cognitive science currently doesn’t know this to be the case, therefore physicalist theories of mind are more plausible. This is tragicomical.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    At this point in the conversation I’m only pointing out the incompatibility on that specific point. If the incompatibility doesn’t bother you,…

    I challenged you to specifically pinpoint the alleged incompatibility. Make your allegation specific, tie it to a quote of mine along with a citation from the relevant science, then I may acknowledge that there indeed is an incompatibility, and we may begin to address it. Until then, you are just insinuating.

  4. Mung: … denotes a family of arguments for the existence of God that take the beauty of the natural world of works of art … as evidence for the existence of God. Some authors have articulated this connection between the divine and beauty as obviously true, as something [that] does not even require an explicit argument at all. (p. 131)

    And those authors are simply idiots.

    Not only does the existence of human sense of beauty, or our idea that “beauty exists in the natural world”, not serve as an argument for the existence of god, it’s the other way round.

    Our attention towards and appreciation of beautiful people and things are one of the main reasons why we invented god(s) in the first place. It’s pareidolia writ large: the human tendency to identify meaning in visual images which don’t really contain that meaning. The truth is not god causes beauty, rather beauty causes god beliefs. Not god causes beautiful rainbows, rainbows cause people to imbue them with some special significance (eg saying that a rainbow is a bridge from one world to the next or it’s a bridge from Earth to the realm of the gods).

  5. Reciprocating Bill: The cosmetological proof of the existence of God?

    It does sound like something cooked up by a licensed beautician. Along with blue hair. Peacock feathers: therefore God.

  6. Erik:
    And it’s false also because no principle worth the name is an empirical generalisation. For example the law of identity is not an empirical generalisation. Modus ponens is not an empirical generalisation. The PSR is also a logical principle, nothing to do with empirical generalisation.

    I don’t think the PSR is itself an empirical generalization — I said it is based on empirical generalizations. The PSR itself is, I think, a prescriptive or imperative claim. It says, in effect, “look for the explanation of an observation!” And if one were to ask, “why should I do that?” the answer is, “because doing so has led to successful inquiry in the past!” And if a skeptic were to say, “Ok, but why should I think that it will do so in the future?” the pragmatist answer is going to be, “you won’t know unless you try!”

    For that matter, I think that modus ponens is also a prescriptive claim — it says, “don’t commit yourself to p, p –> q, and ~q!”

    The difference between modus ponens and the PSR is that modus ponens is about the incompatibility of assertions, and so it is a semantic prescriptive, whereas the PSR is an epistemic prescriptive, about how to go about with successful inquiry.

    If this is so, then my appeals to the authority of Saussure overpower Wittgenstein and Frege whenever I make a point about language.

    And if I knew Saussure as well as you do, or if you knew Wittgenstein and Frege as well as I do (which I am not yet sure of), we could recognize each others authority and have a reasonable discussion about their respective strengths and weaknesses.

    First, here you are not making the point that we do not need any ultimate foundation. You are making the point that from grounding particular assertions it doesn’t follow that all assertions are grounded or that there is an ultimate foundation to assertions. This is right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as demonstrating that there indeed is no ultimate foundation.

    Though it does weaken the case for one rather drastically, because it shows that we don’t need to posit an ultimate foundation in order to understand what we are doing when we are engaging in the game of giving and asking for reasons: committing ourselves to claims, acknowledging what we ourselves have committed ourselves to, endorsing or withdrawing entitlements to implications, and so on. The very activity in which you and I are engaged here — testing each others claims and assumptions — is fully intelligible as it is, without there being any ultimate foundation at all.

    Second, you are implying here that the adherents of foundationalism argue for the need for ultimate foundation the way you do here, inductively. That’s false. You should know better, given your training.

    That is, to put it mildly, an uncharitable reading of what I said. I’m quite ware of the arguments for foundationalism, both in classical philosophy and in modern philosophy.

    In the Cartesian tradition, with which I am most familiar, the need for ultimate foundations is driven by a quest for certainty. (This is not the case in Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, in which the foundations are quite different from in the Cartesian project.) The quest drives Descartes to establish some assertion which is epistemic efficacious (it confers warrant on other claims) and epistemically independent (it doesn’t get its warrant from any other claims).

    But as I sketched above when discussing the game of giving and asking for reasons, any claim is epistemically dependent on some other claim in order to be epistemically efficacious, so no claim can be both epistemically efficacious and epistemically independent. The idea that some special claim can be both epistemically efficacious and epistemically independent is a myth — what Sellars called “the Myth of the Given”.

    More precisely, demonstrate that the scientific notion of objectivity is indeed “stronger” in the relevant sense.

    In my view, all discursive practices are bodily, perceptual-practical interactions with others and/or with objects. What makes discursive practices distinct from other bodily, perceptual-practical interactions is that there are shared norms to which we are committed and by which we hold each other responsible for what we say, as well as what we do.

    What makes scientific practices distinct, I think, is the concept of measurement. A measurement produces a “cut” between the aspects of a system we are currently interested in manipulating and the aspects of a system that we are not currently interested in manipulating.

    In doing so, we implement — through the technologies and techniques at our disposal — an invariant system that is not dependent on the perceptual or conceptual abilities of the individuals using it, the local cultural practices, respective natural languages, and — in theory — even their species-specific biological endowments. The goal of a measurement system is to disentangle the modally real structure of reality from how we ordinarily take it to be as a result of our biological and cultural interpretations by systematically manipulating different aspects of the phenomena under investigation. In other discursive practices, such as sports or cooking, systematically disentangling the modally real structure of the world from our biological and cultural interpretations is not the goal. That is why the assertions embedded within successful scientific theories are more objective than assertions embedded within other discursive practices.

    (There are also, of course, cultural/social practices that are less about assertion and more about disclosing the world from a certain point of view. For me, and for quite a few others, Barber’s Adagio for Strings discloses a peculiar mode of sublime sadness, but that mood, however existentially significant, is not an assertion.)

    Ah, I get it. In summary (given everything you have said earlier too), you are saying that any view that posits the immateriality of mind cannot hold water, because cognitive science currently doesn’t know this to be the case, therefore physicalist theories of mind are more plausible. This is tragicomical.

    I am saying that if one accepts that scientific practices characterize the structure of reality with a greater degree of objectivity than other discursive practices, then one has good reasons to confer on cognitive science more epistemic authority than on one’s pre-scientific intuitions, including one’s intuitions about what minds are, what concepts are, and how reasoning works, regardless of how well those intuitions can be rationalized by a priori arguments.

    (However, the epistemic authority conferred onto the results of any specific result in cognitive science can be contested by inquiring into the methodology, the assumptions at work in generating the hypothesis being tested, and so on. Bad science is much easier than good science!)

    In other words, cognitive scientific explanations can act as an epistemological constraint on phenomenological descriptions — and, if the explanations are produced by good scientific practices, according to the constitutive norms of empirical inquiry (including, of course, the PSR itself), then those explanations should act as an epistemological constraint on phenomenological descriptions.

  7. hotshoe_: Our attention towards and appreciation of beautiful people and things are one of the main reasons why we invented god(s) in the first place.

    Then why did we invent gods like us rather than beautiful and aesthetically pleasing gods?

    Do you have any evidence that children start inventing gods early in development that can be traced to their aesthetic sensitivity?

    That would be right in the wheelhouse for this book, if you did.

    Here what the authors say:

    What is the link between aesthetic experience and religious belief? CSR is remarkably silent on this. (p. 132)

    I find that pretty amazing, if what you say is true.

  8. Beauty and Sexual Selection

    Sexual selection theory thus does not provide an adequate naturalistic explanation of our appreciation of nature. (p. 140)

  9. Kantian Naturalist:
    I don’t think the PSR is itself an empirical generalization — I said it is based on empirical generalizations. The PSR itself is, I think, a prescriptive or imperative claim. It says, in effect, “look for the explanation of an observation!” And if one were to ask, “why should I do that?” the answer is, “because doing so has led to successful inquiry in the past!” And if a skeptic were to say, “Ok, but why should I think that it will do so in the future?” the pragmatist answer is going to be, “you won’t know unless you try!”

    As a thorough rationalist, I’m committed to a much stronger version of the PSR. There’s an explanation to everything because without explanation we wouldn’t know how things work. Moreover, without a reason there’s no reason why things should work at all. But things work the way they do, therefore there’s a reason – always.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    And if I knew Saussure as well as you do, or if you knew Wittgenstein and Frege as well as I do (which I am not yet sure of), we could recognize each others authority and have a reasonable discussion about their respective strengths and weaknesses.

    I know Wittgenstein and Frege far better than my expertise requires. Namely, my expertise (general linguistics) requires not an iota of them (and it’s been easy for me to figure out why), but I have read both the Tractatus and Über Sinn und Bedeutung and debated their proponents before.

    Non-linguists operate under the delusion that Wittgenstein and Frege are terribly important to linguistics. Reality is drastically different – they are not even mentioned, because they have no relevant theory on offer.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    Though it does weaken the case for one rather drastically, because it shows that we don’t need to posit an ultimate foundation in order to understand what we are doing when we are engaging in the game of giving and asking for reasons:…

    No, it doesn’t weaken the case. It simply doesn’t touch the case. You may very well point out particular reasons for every particular move in the game, but it does nothing to say anything about why there is a game in the first place! Why be rational with regard to each move, but irrational with regard to the game as a whole? How is this even pragmatic?

    Kantian Naturalist:
    In my view, all discursive practices are bodily, perceptual-practical interactions with others and/or with objects.

    This is the root problem. You are an empiricist at heart, not a rationalist.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    What makes scientific practices distinct, I think, is the concept of measurement. A measurement produces a “cut” between the aspects of a system we are currently interested in manipulating and the aspects of a system that we are not currently interested in manipulating.

    Nah. Measurement is non-different from any sensory instance, subject to the same problem of induction and to the pitfalls of empiricism. Same as with any other sensory instance, it requires a rational mind to put the measurement into perspective and derive any meaningful conclusions from it.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    I am saying that if one accepts that scientific practices characterize the structure of reality with a greater degree of objectivity than other discursive practices, then one has good reasons to confer on cognitive science more epistemic authority than on one’s pre-scientific intuitions, including one’s intuitions about what minds are, what concepts are, and how reasoning works, regardless of how well those intuitions can be rationalized by a priori arguments.

    …which is an a priori rationalisation starting with a very dubious premise. Why should I accept that scientific practices characterise the structure of reality with a greater degree of objectivity than other discursive practices? Why – beyond mere assertions? What kind of objectivity are we talking about and what makes it relevant?

    Kantian Naturalist:
    In other words, cognitive scientific explanations can act as an epistemological constraint on phenomenological descriptions — and, if the explanations are produced by good scientific practices, according to the constitutive norms of empirical inquiry (including, of course, the PSR itself), then those explanations should act as an epistemological constraint on phenomenological descriptions.

    Your if here is fatal, because it evidently requires armchair-philosophical a priori reasoning to determine what kind of scientific practices are good. And, even this aspect arguendo conceded, this only gets you to the point that scientific explanations can constrain phenomenology, not must. But it must be must in order to have any relevance to me.

    And disappointingly, you have identified no claim of mine about mind that you could specifically challenge by means of whatever you call cognitive science.

  10. Late to the party:

    Mung asks in the OP:

    That religious belief comes naturally is no surprise given a theistic outlook.

    It’s no surprise to me either, as a life-long atheist. Once you consider the (evolutionary, in terms of breeding success) advantages of social living in larger than family groups, a propensity to accept tribal authority rather than just patriarchal/matriarchal authority seems a likely candidate as a heritable trait.

    The findings seem to indicate that one has to be re-educated to reject religious beliefs.

    Indeed, education plays a large part in whether religious ideas start to unravel. Exposure to other cultures and ideas, the problem with fixed and contra-factual religious claims (see recent events with Jim Stump and BioLogos) are often the starting point when people begin to question their religious belief. That is why there is a “battle” over public education in the US.

    Could it be that it is atheism that is unnatural?

    Depending what you mean by “atheism” and “unnatural” the answer could be yes or no. 🙂

    Is it the denial of religious instruction to children that is the real child abuse?

    Maybe some would claim that as a good thing but I doubt it will happen, if at all, via legislation. Anyway, it was religious instruction that turned me off the Anglicism I was immersed in as a child.

  11. Erik: There’s an explanation to everything because without explanation we wouldn’t know how things work. Moreover, without a reason there’s no reason why things should work at all. But things work the way they do, therefore there’s a reason – always.

    This, from the guy who is regularly berating KN for making assertions rather than providing PROOFS.

  12. Alan Fox: Once you consider the (evolutionary, in terms of breeding success) advantages of social living in larger than family groups, a propensity to accept tribal authority rather than just patriarchal/matriarchal authority seems a likely candidate as a heritable trait.

    I appreciate the attempt to think about religion in evolutionary terms, but this way of setting up the problem won’t work. I say this not as a criticism of the Fantastic Mr. Fox (sorry, couldn’t help myself) but to exhibit for all a different way of thinking about religion in quasi-naturalistic terms*.

    Firstly, it must be stressed that many mammals, and most primates, live in social groups larger than families. In some cases (e.g. baboons) family relations play an important role in structuring the social group; in other cases they don’t. Primate social groups are characterized by very complex relations of dominance/submission and alliance/competition, so there are pretty good reasons to think that the same would be true of early hominids.

    Though we currently lack a detailed model of the evolution of Homo, and quite likely will never have sufficient data to confirm any detailed model, we can speculate at a coarse-grained level that one key feature that drove hominid evolution is the adaptation for cooperative foraging. This seems likely on the grounds that (a) in most human societies, different contributions to food procurement for the group are made by different individuals and (b) this is not the case in any extant apes. (Even group hunting in chimps seems to be more a matter of who can get to the monkey first.) We have pretty good archeological evidence of hunting of large mammals in sites associated with Homo heidelbergensis, and since successful hunting of mammoth, auroch, and other large mammals requires cooperation, there’s extremely good evidence of cooperative foraging by about 500,000 years ago. With earlier Homo, esp. H. erectus and H. ergaster, we simply don’t know enough yet.

    Based on this, it seems at least plausible that there’s some interesting connection between the evolution of “religion”, in the form of ritual, magic, story-telling, and music — the kind of animistic religion that seems to be a human universal — and the need for maintaining a tribal identity sufficient to insure cooperative foraging. I suspect that this why we begin to see burial of the dead with H. heidelbergensis as well.

    However, this is still a far cry from organized or institutionalized religion, in which the performance of ritual requires a specialized social role (priests) and the gods play a social, moral, and political function. (The gods or spirits of hunter-gatherer tribes usually do not have a moral function.) Nourzeyan (in Big Gods) argues that organized religion plays a crucial role in getting relative strangers to trust one another. Hunter-gatherer tribes are usually maxed out at about 150 people, whereas even small cities from the ancient near east are a 100 times that or more. It seems that organized religion is required for civilization to function, which is probably the main reason why most people don’t trust atheists.

    I don’t think that the Scandinavian countries are the exception to this rule that secularists take them to be, because those societies are already characterized by a high degree of racial and cultural homogeneity. And I suspect that there’s actually a deep reason why the United States is both the most religious of the First World nations and the most culturally diverse.

    * Why “quasi-naturalistic”? Because there is no hope here of being able to reduce normativity to anything non-normative. As Brandom puts it, “you can’t bake a normative cake from non-normative ingredients”. The very most that naturalism can do here is sketch a tentative account of how non-discursive animals evolved into discursive animals. But such a genetic account is a far cry from being able to reduce the normative to the non-normative.

  13. Erik:

    You may very well point out particular reasons for every particular move in the game, but it does nothing to say anything about why there is a game in the first place! Why be rational with regard to each move, but irrational with regard to the game as a whole? How is this even pragmatic?

    The question, “why there is a game in the first place?” admits of two different kinds of response. One response is to ask, “what is the reason for having reasons?”, and then try to ground our reason-giving in something deeper or more ‘metaphysically ultimate’ than any social practice. Another response is to see that there’s something amiss with the idea that reasons needs to be grounded in reasons deeper than the reasons which need to be grounded. It’s as if one needed a sign to be told that there’s a sign up ahead. If one needed a sign that said, “Warning: Sign Ahead” in order to pay attention to the sign, one would presumably also need a meta-warning sign, “Warning: Warning Sign Ahead”, and hence a regress.

    The way to avoid the regress here is to accept that there are grounds — our ordinary practices of reason-giving are sufficient to ground our particular beliefs and judgments — but that there is no deeper ground to those grounds. In other words, the pragmatist suggestion is that “groundless grounds” are, despite the air of paradox, conceptually coherent and rationally acceptable.

    However, one can accept that there norms are not grounded in anything deeper than the norms themselves and still pose the question, what are norms for</I? What is the purpose of normative reasoning? By my lights this is a fully legitimate question because evolutionary explanations are explanations of proper functioning. So we can handle the question, "why are there norms at all?" in terms of "what is the purpose of normative reasoning?" and then handle that in terms of "how did normative reasoning evolve?" That's a fine question by my lights, and one on which a great deal has already been said and much remains to be said.

    This is the root problem. You are an empiricist at heart, not a rationalist.

    I should think it obvious that I am neither a rationalist nor an empiricist!

    If an empiricist is someone who thinks that the stimulation of sensory-receptors (“sensations”) is necessary and sufficient to constitute propositional content, then my view is opposed to empiricism. On my version of pragmatism, the stimulation of sensory-receptors is never sufficient to constitute propositional content, even if it is necessary for perceptual episodes that ground empirical propositional content.

    But more generally, my emphasis on the inseparability of perception and action — hence my use of “sensorimotor” — is quite opposed to the empiricist conception of experience as a flurry of disconnected atoms of experience (“simple ideas” in Locke, “impressions” in Hume, “sense-data” in the logical empiricists) falling upon the consciousness of a passive, spectatorial subject.

    Nah. Measurement is non-different from any sensory instance, subject to the same problem of induction and to the pitfalls of empiricism. Same as with any other sensory instance, it requires a rational mind to put the measurement into perspective and derive any meaningful conclusions from it.

    I don’t see how this is supposed to be an objection to anything I actually said. Of course measurement is a discursive practice that involves norms — my point above was that measurement allows us to disentangle the modal structure of reality from our biological and cultural perspectives on it precisely by instituting an invariant metric, the structure of which is independent of our sensorimotor abilities (even though our sensorimotor abilities are employed in using the metric by making a measurement).

    …which is an a priori rationalisation starting with a very dubious premise. Why should I accept that scientific practices characterise the structure of reality with a greater degree of objectivity than other discursive practices? Why – beyond mere assertions? What kind of objectivity are we talking about and what makes it relevant?

    Why should you accept it? I just gave the argument — because that’s what measurement does.

    Your if here is fatal, because it evidently requires armchair-philosophical a priori reasoning to determine what kind of scientific practices are good.

    But our understanding of good and bad science is not done from the armchair — it is done by close examination of scientific practices. We can and do ask questions such as, is there sample bias? Was the experiment double-blind? Did statistical analyses eliminate confounding variables? Was the sample contaminated? It is precisely by looking at successful inquiry — inquiries that have stood the test of attempted refutation — that we develop a conception of what good scientific practice is, and then use that in guiding future inquiry.

    And, even this aspect arguendo conceded, this only gets you to the point that scientific explanations can constrain phenomenology, not must. But it must be must in order to have any relevance to me.

    Then it has no relevance to you, because there is no “must” — only a “should”.

  14. Kantian Naturalist,

    Lots to respond to in that fascinating comment and too little time till the weekend.

    I will just mention one of my daughter’s friends when she was a kid insisted on addressing me as Mr Fox (with a twinkle in her eye) rather than by my first name as I suggested. Not being familiar with the Roald Dahl stories, it was a long time before the penny dropped.

  15. I want to briefly pick up on Erik’s suggestion that I am an empiricist. If that were do, one could easily frame the debate as one between my empiricism and his rationalism.

    The fact is that my position is much more complicated and harder to place on the space of established views. In a nutshell, what I am calling “pragmatism” here is a synthesis of two different philosophical trajectories: it is a combination of a non-rationalistic conception of rationality and a non-empiricist conception of experience.

    Though I do cite Kant as a crucially important influence (hence my screen-name), it is largely due to his recognition that empirical content generally, and science especially, necessarily involves an interplay of reason and experience. But his attempt to do so was doomed at the beginning because he was committed to both a rationalistic conception of rationality and to an empiricist conception of experience. The former can be seen in his treatment of the categories of the understanding, and the latter can be seen in his treatment of sensations as the “content” or “matter” of sensible intuition. These two commitments result in the contradictions of the Schematism chapter, which Kant himself saw was badly inadequate. (The contradictions of this chapter are brilliantly illuminated in Adorno’s lecture course on the Critique of Pure Reason.)

    It is largely by reflecting on the failures of the Kantian project that subsequent philosophers saw the need to overcome both rationalism and empiricism.

    The non-rationalistic conception of rationality begins with Wittgenstein’s reflections on the inadequacy of Frege’s theory of concepts in the Investigations, gets further developed by Sellars’s account of meanings as functional roles, and culminates in the neo-pragmatist account of reasons as essentially embedded in discursive practices (Brandom). To be a reason-giving and reason-taking being is to be able to participate in the socio-linguistic activity of attributing (to others) and acknowledging (to oneself) the commitments and entitlements by which we keep track of inferential moves.

    The non-empiricist conception of experience begins with James’s criticism of sensationalistic empiricism in his Principles of Psychology, gets much further refined and given a biological foundation in Dewey (e.g. “The Reflex Arc in Psychology”, Experience and Nature), and independently developed by Heidegger’s notion of practical involvement in Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of motor intentionality in Phenomenology of Perception. These trends are then further developed and augmented in the conception of the skillful coping of sensorimotor abilities in Samuel Todes, Hubert Dreyfus, and Alva Noe.

    To date, only three philosophers have really taken up the project of reconciling the discursive practices account of neopragmatism with the embodied coping account of existential phenomenology: Joseph Rouse (in How Scientific Practices Matter) and Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance (in their ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons). Rouse develops in detail the idea that discursive practices are a distinct kind of sensorimotor ability. Kukla and Lance develop a fine-grained account of the role of the first-personal and second-personal speech acts in our discursive activity, and they cite Rouse as an important influence.

    My approach builds on theirs by identifying all three as developing what I call “essentially embodied neopragmatism”. I pick up where they leave off, by using Tomasello and Sterelny to show how sensorimotor ability is transformed into discursive practice — it is because inference itself is a distinctive sensorimotor ability, and discursive practices transform social cognition into shared norms by “collectivizing” our individual bodily inferential abilities — such that we can share our meanings and inferences despite our having different bodies.

    I am not yet sure how this collectivizing takes place. Joint attention, a key cognitive process that makes possible imitation (“mimesis”) is surely a key part of the story, but no one yet knows what neurophysiological mechanisms causally underpin joint attention. There was a brief flurry of hype around “mirror neurons” but it has since thankfully died down.

    My best guess right now is that joint attention evolved from our primate capacity for empathy. If that’s anywhere near right, then we can say — very crudely! — that rationality is the synergy of empathy and inference.

  16. Kantian Naturalist:As Brandom puts it, “you can’t bake a normative cake from non-normative ingredients”.

    🙂

    Does he believe there are normative cakes and normative ingredients from which to bake a cake?

  17. Aesthetic Appreciation and Evolved Sensory Biases

    …sensory bias theories do not explain why many highly acclaimed works of visual art are hardly eye candy. (p. 142)

    That is very similar to my objection to hotshoe_’s argument. Why aren’t our gods beautiful and aesthetically pleasing?

    …sensory bias theory, by its focus on early perceptual processing, is silent on our appreciation of nature. It seems therefore that sensory bias theories do not capture the full range of our actual aesthetic experiences. (p. 142)

  18. Kantian Naturalist:
    The question, “why there is a game in the first place?” admits of two different kinds of response. One response is to ask, “what is the reason for having reasons?”, and then try to ground our reason-giving in something deeper or more ‘metaphysically ultimate’ than any social practice. Another response is to see that there’s something amiss with the idea that reasons needs to be grounded in reasons deeper than the reasons which need to be grounded. It’s as if one needed a sign to be told that there’s a sign up ahead. If one needed a sign that said, “Warning: Sign Ahead” in order to pay attention to the sign, one would presumably also need a meta-warning sign, “Warning: Warning Sign Ahead”, and hence a regress.

    Good point (by your standards), but it misses my point. When you justify a particular move or a particular sign, you are already smuggling in the presupposition that what we are dealing with is a game or a system of signs. My point is, first, to point it out to you that you are doing this (viz. smuggling in inflexible major presuppositions) and, second, to invite you to give some thought to other metaphors that might provide some perspective to your preferred presuppositions.

    Life is not a game to everybody – and rightly so. Life is not quite like traffic rules either. Such metaphors are to be questioned, as they have limited applicability.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    The way to avoid the regress here is to accept that there are grounds — our ordinary practices of reason-giving are sufficient to ground our particular beliefs and judgments — but that there is no deeper ground to those grounds.

    The regress you are referring to is not a regress on my part. You said, “It’s as if one needed a sign to be told that there’s a sign up ahead.” It’s only a question of signs inasmuch as we both agree that we are operating in a system of signs, i.e. we both accept the same presupposition. Whether we accept it or not, this (un)acceptance is not automatically “another sign” – it’s a separate issue.

    Chess pieces are one thing, chess itself (i.e how to move the pieces) quite another, and the question “to play chess or not to play” is yet another separate question. From the determination that “there are chess pieces in front of me” it doesn’t follow that henceforth all questions can uncontroversially be taken to be about chess pieces in infinite regress.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    In other words, the pragmatist suggestion is that “groundless grounds” are, despite the air of paradox, conceptually coherent and rationally acceptable.

    However, one can accept that there norms are not grounded in anything deeper than the norms themselves and still pose the question, what are norms for</I? What is the purpose of normative reasoning? By my lights this is a fully legitimate question because evolutionary explanations are explanations of proper functioning.So we can handle the question, “why are there norms at all?” in terms of “what is the purpose of normative reasoning?” and then handle that in terms of “how did normative reasoning evolve?” That’s a fine question by my lights, and one on which a great deal has already been said and much remains to be said.

    I see. You permit pondering over the legitimacy of certain questions, but you don’t permit answers.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    But more generally, my emphasis on the inseparability of perception and action — hence my use of “sensorimotor” — is quite opposed to the empiricist conception of experience as a flurry of disconnected atoms of experience (“simple ideas” in Locke, “impressions” in Hume, “sense-data” in the logical empiricists) falling upon the consciousness of a passive, spectatorial subject.

    What is “action”? (Nevermind. I already got the message that you are not in the business of answering.)

    Kantian Naturalist:
    I don’t see how this is supposed to be an objection to anything I actually said. […] measurement allows us to disentangle the modal structure of reality from our biological and cultural perspectives on it precisely by instituting an invariant metric, the structure of which is independent of our sensorimotor abilities (even though our sensorimotor abilities are employed in using the metric by making a measurement).

    I disagree with everything beginning with “measurement allows us to disentangle…” etc. If you read my quote again, you should see clearly that this is so.

    Kantian Naturalist:
    Why should you accept it? I just gave the argument — because that’s what measurement does.

    I construe it this way: Perception occurs in a channel (seeing, hearing, taste, etc.) by means of instances. Similarly, measurements separate an instance from the overall reality along a particular quantitative value – length, speed, density, etc. Thus, measurements are an extension of sense-perceptions, intended to be “more precise”.

    In contrast, your argument consists in introducing the word “sensorimotor” as if this somehow made a fundamental difference between “the modal structure of reality” and “our biological and cultural perspectives” (as if our biological and cultural perspectives were not reality, hmm). Since you are radically anti-foundationalist in the first place, I don’t see how you can even begin to claim any fundamental difference anywhere. Just a moment later you, astonishingly, feel at liberty to say,

    Kantian Naturalist:
    …there is no “must” — only a “should”.

    […]

    But our understanding of good and bad science is not done from the armchair — it is done by close examination of scientific practices. We can and do ask questions such as, is there sample bias?Was the experiment double-blind? Did statistical analyses eliminate confounding variables? Was the sample contaminated? It is precisely by looking at successful inquiry — inquiries that have stood the test of attempted refutation — that we develop a conception of what good scientific practice is, and then use that in guiding future inquiry.

    But you don’t need to leave your desk to do all this. All you need to do is read biographies of scientists and some of the papers that you deem “successful” beforehand (or, given the historico-cultural context, actually in hindsight). So this is a perfect illustration of your derided armchair philosophy.

    As to your next post, I disagree with your interpretation of Kant, I don’t see its relevance or connection to pragmatism, but I clearly see that (your version of) pragmatism is not solving anything. On your part, you admit yourself that you have a bunch of important questions unsolved. I’d say fair enough.


  19. : Chapter 7
    : Cognitive and Evolutionary Explanations of the Sense of the Sublime
    : p. 147

    The current best scientific explanation for awe does not explain why natural beauty is its most important elicitor.


    : Chapter 7
    : Linking Aesthetic Properties with God’s Existence
    : p. 147

    While, as we have seen, there are a number of naturalistic explanations for our subjective sense of beauty and the sublime, these do not provide a good explanation for why we experience nature as saturated with beauty.

    Failure to come up with an alternative hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon can provide nonempirical evidence in favor of a hypothesis.


    : Chapter 7
    : Summary
    : p. 154

    There is at present no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for why humans value natural beauty that does not conform to their evolved tastes. Hence the proponent of the aesthetic argument can hold that God is currently the best explanation for this sense of beauty.

    We have seen that it is possible for nontheists to enjoy these experiences without a realist commitment to God’s existence, although it remains an open question to what extent religious fictionalism is a coherent, live option.

  20. Mung, quoting De Cruz and De Smedt:

    There is at present no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for why humans value natural beauty that does not conform to their evolved tastes.

    What are some of the authors’ examples of natural beauty that does not conform to our evolved tastes, and how do they justify their claim?

  21. Mung: There is at present no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for why humans value natural beauty that does not conform to their evolved tastes.

    I wonder what would be a naturalistic explanation for or about beauty at all? Is it, like, “It evolved. (End of argument.)” ? For a naturalist, how is this not satisfactory, when everything else has precisely the same explanation?

    ETA: A few words on the topic too. If everything is explained by the statement “It evolved,” then religion must be natural for the naturalist – because religion has come to be by evolution just like everything else has, and evolution is natural. When I suggested, weeks ago, that a three-legged dog might be called “defective”, the majority retort was an emphatical “Nobody/nothing can ever be called defective!!!” So there, it’s all natural.

    However, in my opinion things are really a bit trickier. For atheists, theism doesn’t feel so natural. For the adherents of long-established religions, new age hodgepodge looks unnatural. Those who are endowed with vision would argue that blindness is a deprivation of a natural capacity, whereas blind people may be living with their state just fine and feel no need for improvement. Depends on the point of view and habitude.

  22. Erik:

    ETA: A few words on the topic too. If everything is explained by the statement “It evolved,”

    I don’t think it would be fair to say a naturalistic explanation is limited to “it evolved”.

    I do think a naturalistic explanation would be partly based on science, including the social sciences. For understanding one aspect of why something might be considered beautiful, different sciences could look at human perception, how a culture comes to identify something as beautiful, how those standards changed over time, how critics valuations may differ from general valuations. The development of the biological and cultural mechanisms underlying those phenomena would be be a separate part of those analyses, but only one part.

    By the above, I’m not claiming that the scientific analysis is a complete answer to the question of beauty. Whether some particular thing should be considered beautiful is not a question for science. Nor is trying to recreate the experience of beauty in, for example, a poem.

  23. I wonder why the experience of beauty would need an explanation at all, or how one would recognize an putative explanation as genuinely explanatory.

    But if there is an explanation of beauty at all, I don’t see how it could be a “naturalistic” one. I am not even sure that any of our first-personal, subjective experience can be naturalistically explained. The best that a naturalist can hope for, so far as I can tell, is a third-personal descriptive account of the origins of beings that can have first-personal, subjective experiences, and of some of the subpersonal causal processes that are strongly correlated with first-personal, subjective experiences. In other words, etiology and engineering.

    I don’t think that there’s anything beyond etiology and engineering that one can get from “naturalistic explanation”. If one feels dissatisfied with etiology and engineering, then there’s nothing else that a “naturalistic” explanation can provide. I myself find the problems of etiology and engineering fascinating enough, and difficult enough, that I don’t find the need for anything else.

  24. Kantian Naturalist:
    how one would recognize an putative explanation as genuinely explanatory.

    Why not the usual suspects: by how convincing the explanation was to the appropriate community, by how well it worked to predict and control, by consistency with other explanations, and on on.

    But if there is an explanation of beauty at all, I don’t see how it could be a “naturalistic” one. I am not even sure that any of our first-personal, subjective experience can be naturalistically explained.

    Requests for explanation are incomplete without a context for the request. What is the questioner expecting? I tried to cover these case: When is something called beautiful? When should be something be called beautiful? What is it like to experience x as beautiful?

    But what about “What is the first-person subjective experience of beauty?”. I think that one would have to be more specific about what standards such an explanation would need to meet. For example, if we had a scientific theory that allowed reliable prediction and control of the brain states that led to someone reporting an experience of beauty, and also to say whether the subject was reporting honestly, would that count?

    If one feels dissatisfied

    How about if we could also predict from the theory who would and would not “feel” satisfied with the explanation!?

  25. BruceS:
    Another riff on the theme of the OP:

    The next chapter is on the argument from miracles and they have already mentioned a study in which young children attribute psychological states to an animal that has died.

  26. Child psychology studies have identified a natural human bias toward the theory of intelligent design, and pose a solution: teach evolution earlier…

    The Guardian

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