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
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Arguments in natural theology rely to an important extent on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us. (p. xiii)
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…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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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?
I’m willing to treat propositions with an “as if” ontological status, much like I treat possible worlds. I don’t have possible worlds in my ontology, but sometimes it’s helpful to talk in those terms, so I do. Same with propositions.
I think that all the really important work is being done by assertions or claims, and that talking about proposition tends to foster the illusion of mystery. Likewise, I’m partial to Sellars’s deflationary treatment of “facts” as true claims.
It’s hard enough to figure out the relations between true claims and the world without populating the world with mysterious doppelgangers like “propositions” and “facts”.
No theist here, and certainly not Erik, is at all threatened by anything I say. But I do sense that he is finding our dialogue increasingly frustrating. I’m enjoying the dialogue immensely, but I doubt he would say the same. I find that quite unfortunate and I’m not sure what exactly to do about it.
petrushka,
I’d say you don’t understand philosophy.
I don’t see any distinction between “propositions”, “statements” and “truth-claims”. The way you are trying to explain it is not explaining anything.
Given our recent examples of the classical design argument and the cosmological argument, I don’t see how this is the case. The way I see it, analytic philosophers are consistently unable to wrap their minds around even the simplest of concepts in the scholastic arguments. Feser is a notable exception.
There are still several posts from last week that contain nothing but the word “guano” – worthless, meaningless comments that contribute nothing to the topic. Certainly I am not at that level. Then again, the quality of moderation is much better here than at UD. Your call is a call for the worse – to censor me while leaving pure “guano” comments intact.
Indeed, I have to give KN credit for his behaviour. He doesn’t mischaracterise any of my points intentionally, this much is certain. He also graciously adopts the view that I don’t mischaracterise either. I may exaggerate to emphasise what I take to be his self-contradiction, and that’s all there is to it.
KN judges me fairly all the way. I am not at all threatened by anyone’s views. People are free to have the views they have. I am merely annoyed at the misunderstandings when the views are supposed to be in communication. And I have a tendency to judge persistent misunderstandings as wilful.
For me it’s easy to adopt an arbitrary concept system, look around in it, then retreat from it, step into another concept system and make comparative conclusions about both of them. In my view, understanding a philosophical argument works like this.
While KN treats well a living guy like me, it seems to be very hard for him to understand the dead guys, even though it’s his job and he is sincerely trying. KN has to translate the scholastic arguments into modern terms first and then begin interpreting, while ignoring the losses that occur in translation. I happen to be a translator by profession, so I am rather sensitive to the “lost in translation” phenomenon, and I am specifically trained to detect it too.
While KN’s treatment of Kant and Spinoza is very interesting, he draws utterly uninteresting conclusions about them. For example,
No, Kant does not think that the antithetical conflict is removed by restricting all knowledge to the spatio-temporal domain. He thinks that the conflict is removed by synthesis. It’s true that he says that noumena cannot be known, yet he obviously has a lot to say on the topic, so there evidently is a way to approach noumena via antithetical reasoning and via attempts at synthesis rather than restricting knowledge to the spatio-temporal domain.
There.
They make diapers for that, don’t they?
Sorry, work’s been crazy. Hope to get back to the book soon. Thanks for the links.
Is it fair to say that few current philosophers use the scholastic concept system for their work? If so, do you have any comments on how that change came about?
Further, is there a “conceptual meta-system” by which one can say that this historical process reflects progress?
Well, my own (likely immature) take is that, it’s not worth the candle. You’re not going to have a mutually edifying conversation with somebody who says stuff like:
You don’t have anything to offer him, because the guy already knows everything, not only about the scholastics (though I note he never answers any of my questions about them), but about Kant too. He won’t even acknowledge that there are limitations to Aristotelian logic.
Also, he weirdly claims that someone is trying to “censor” him.
In sum, no matter how generous you are, how charitable to his views, how sincerely you try to engage in mutually beneficial intercourse, Erik is consistently condescending and unpleasant, perhaps because he is absolutely convinced that everything he believes is (I guess for that reason) true. If I’m not mistaken there is not a single point that he has conceded on this board–and he said some remarkably ridiculous (and often inconsiderate) things on the thread involving gay marriage. Some of them pointed out by a multitude of commentators in a multitude of ways.
So, what I’m saying is….what’s the point? (Unless maybe you’re engaged in some sort of sociological study?)
As I read the paragraph I quoted from him in my post just above, I understand him to be saying that the proper way to engage scholastic arguments is to do so from within that conceptual scheme. I hope he’ll comment further on this, but I would guess he is not saying anything about whether he accepts Aristotelian arguments, only about how to engage with them.
It’s not often we get three trained philosophers debating at TSZ; its fun to watch.
The G-man got accused of something like that early in his posting career at TSZ. It might have been this post but I have not checked the comments to confirm.
That’s not how I read it:
He seems to me to be taking himself to be doing Spockian mindmelds, and then, from his loftier standpoint, deigning to inform us all who is right about what.
I believe that entire picture is mistaken–unless the “comparative conclusions” amount to little more than listing the apparent categories utilized by the various systems. IMO, we may be able to understand other categorial systems, but we can’t leave our own to do so.
PS: Who are the “three trained philosophers”?
Well, I did say trained, not professional. As I see it, you, KN, Erik.
Yes I noticed that you actually said “trained” and changed my question simultaneously with your response.
Erik tells us that he’s a professional translator. What’s the basis for thinking there’s been much philosophical training? I haven’t noticed much evidence in his posts, but I haven’t read them all. I do note that he hasn’t answered questions about scholastic philosophers or seemed to have recognized that Aristotelian logic has been superseded. That last is not exactly controversial.
ETA: FWIW, Bruce, I dunno about “training,” but YOU seem to me to be among the most widely (and perhaps THE most widely) read in recent philosophical literature around these parts. Reciprocating Bill also seems to have read a lot, and….was it Glen who made some recent references to Rawls? And Neil, keiths, and Elizabeth all seem to have hit the books. (I’ll also reluctantly add Patrick if you call that libertarian stuff philosophy… 🙂 )
Yes, logic is about the compatibility or incompatibility of assertions. Think of this example: modus ponens says that one should not believe all of p, p –> q, and ~q. (Interestingly, modus tollens says the same thing, which raises the very interesting question as to whether the inference rules are the same rule or not.) On some views, we explain validity in terms of compatibility and incompatibility; on other views, we explain incompatibility and compatibility in terms of validity. Philosophy of logic is actually a really hot topic these days because of the applications to computer science. (For example, Google uses relevance logic.)
This touches on one of the deepest differences between our respective views: since my entire approach is shaped by 19th and 20th century philosophy, I see an essential difference between formal languages (such as logics and mathematics) and natural languages. (This is most clearly brought home by comparing Frege with the late Wittgenstein, or the early Wittgenstein with the late Wittgenstein.)
As a result, “logic” ends up meaning, “symbolic logic”, which is quite different from what a medieval philosopher would have meant by “logic”. For a medieval philosopher, “logic” as one of the three branches of the trivium meant critical thinking and basic epistemology, which in turn means that epistemic concepts like justification, warrant, evidence, and truth are part of logic. For a contemporary philosopher, logic and epistemology are distinct precisely because of the essential difference between formal languages and natural languages.
Of course I have a good deal I could say about the intentionality of thought — the “aboutness” or content of propositions — as well as what I think is right (and wrong) in the traditional version of the correspondence theory of truth, how perception is related to concepts and to inference, and so forth. It’s just that I don’t consider those issues to be part of logic in the contemporary sense.
If we can at least agree to disagree on this point, we’ll be able to move along nicely.
I’m not sure about that. In the case of most simple organisms, the problematic situation is fatal. It takes a very complex organism to be able to resolve a problematic situation by learning. (Here I’m using “complex” in a loose way — I’m happy to consider octopuses to be very complex, compared to all other invertebrates. And even the simplest multicellular animal is vastly more complex than a single-celled amoeba, let alone a mere bacterium.) Yet many animals are able to learn, and in doing so, resolve problematic situations (within a limited range). As we get more evidence from cognitive ethology, we find many instances of genuine reasoning in nonhuman animals — causal reasoning in many animals (crows are looking particularly surprising these days) and of course lots of social reasoning in monkeys and apes. There’s even some evidence that chimpanzees can detect what another chimp is inferring, which is a highly sophisticated cognitive skill.
I wouldn’t insist that all of these cases count as inquiry in Peirce’s or Dewey’s sense, though with some consideration I’d be inclined to say that great apes can inquire. What great apes don’t do, and we do, is improve our ability to inquire over time — both individual life-times and over the course of history.
I’m tempted by a certain measure of pessimism in that vein as well, though mine comes by way of Adorno’s remark that “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” But then my Adornoian pessimism is always mitigated by my Deweyan (Dewey-eyed?) optimism (and conversely).
That’s not at all even implied by what I said. What I said is that if minds had the powers your view of concepts requires them to have, then our minds have powers undetectable by cognitive neuroscience. My point about “magic neurons” was a tongue-in-cheek way of making that point. No phrenology involved — I’m perfectly happy to point out all the problems with localization studies, to insist on the role of massive integration across cortical and subcortical systems, and so on. In fact, if one considers the fact that many chemicals (such as hormones) cross the blood-brain barrier, or the complexity of nerves around the stomach, it seems pretty clear that cognition involves the whole organism. It’s figuring out the specific roles played by specific parts of the brain that complicates the relation between neuroscience and cognitive science.
Logical and mathematical concepts. For example, the mathematical concept of a sphere as a two-dimensional surface in all points at equidistant from a center can be expressed as an algebraic formula. That’s not an empirical concept.
This objection looks like a conflation of two very different things: (1) the thought that knowledge has a “foundation”” and (2) that philosophy has a distinct content, method, and significance. There’s no argument here as to why denying (1) entails denying (2).
By “foundation” I meant the idea — more modern than medieval — that we can and should discover a stratum in the geology of knowledge on which everything else rests, but which does not depend on anything else. The rationalists and empiricists have different ideas about what this foundation might be — principles of pure reason or sense-impressions — but both are foundationalist projects.
In contrast, pragmatism criticizes both rationalism and empiricism by rejecting foundationalism. The Cartesian “quest for certainty” is to be rejected as a philosophical project. At the same time, however, pragmatism avoids becoming mere postmodernism by showing that there are still better and worse ways of thinking, doing, and being, even though there is no absolute certainty.
Since the version of foundationalism that pragmatism opposes is the modern version of foundationalism shared rationalism and empiricism, and not the medieval version of foundationalism of the scholastics (if that is indeed a version of foundationalism at all!), we are perhaps talking past each other on this point.
For me, anyone that makes that claim that “my school of thought is Saussurean structuralism (a little different from post-structuralism).” has got to have some formal training. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not much help to me in understanding what his school of thought involves.
Although I would not say it was in the analytical philosophy tradition.
Him not seeing agreeing that Aristotelian philosophy has been superseded would be consistent with my reading of his approach to the correct way of engaging with arguments made under a given conceptual scheme; this approach would ignore its historical status.
My questions put to him were meant to try to understand whether he believes conceptual schemes can be superseded. Perhaps if I had any inkling of what Saussurean structuralism entails I might know the answer from that.
I should say, in fairness to KN, that I too have found some of Eric’s comments in his replies to KN to be off-putting. The “note to self” remark comes to mind. But Erik’s tone is nowhere near the type of insulting behavior I see in some of the posters here. I don’t understand the motivations of the G-Man at all, but for others, I think a small group of posters here have been at each other for so long that familiarity has bred contempt.
Yes, it is a hobby I’ve taken up seriously over the last year. Aside from the obligatory Phil 101 bird course, I have no training in philosophy. I’m hardly well read, but I do find myself able to engage with a lot of the primary literature in phil of mind and science, where my interests lie now, which is progress for me.
Fwiw, though I’m unsure, I have a strong sense that our anti-POMO friend Gregory might frown on structuralism even of a Saussurean odor.
He’s a mystery to me. If you look at his published work at his site online, he clearly has an academic specialty and expertise in it. I don’t understand why he does not apply that to his arguments here as other posters do with their expertise.
Unless (some of) his posts ARE are a kind of ironic application of his worldview and expertise. I’m thinking of those which attack a person or his/her views because of their source in an (perhaps unacknowledged) worldview.
It would be oh so wrong though, if objective moral norms actually exist.
By understanding other categorial systems we will understand our own. And by understanding our own categorial system we will know how it compares with other categorial systems. By knowing how our own categorial system compares with other categorial systems we become motivated to either keep it or change it or drop it. This is one of the explanations for how religious conversion and ideological/philosophical shift happens.
It might be true that there’s an intuition that moral norms are “objective”, though I wonder whether it’s also true that there’s an intuition that those norms are “non-natural” . And it’s probably true that for a lot of people, there is some deeply held conviction that there’s an association between the intuition that there are objective moral norms and the intuition that there are gods and/or God.
But I’d still like to see the evidence that we have these intuitions. That we have these intuitions is not itself intuitive.
As with our taking up the teleological stance, or adopting a theory of mind,0 etc. there’s always going to be this Big Question of the relationship between the features of our cognitive architecture, how rigid or plastic it is at different stages of individual development and how much cultural variation there is, and also how well — with what degree of reliability – does the feature of our cognitive architecture track some feature of the environment.
The only way I can see getting from (1) “we have an intuition that there are objective moral norms” to (2) “there really are objective moral norms” is if (1) is well-confirmed by various lines of evidence (psychology, anthropology, etc.) and (2) is a better explanation of (1) than any other explanation. That seems dubious to me. And if the norms are non-natural, then you had better have an explanation of how we evolved the capacity to detect and track these putatively non-natural norms — divine intervention? Magic neurons?
FWIW, I’m having a lot of trouble following some of your posts, KN. This one is a good example. So many (key) words in there that convey either very little to me or so much that I don’t know what to make of the sentences that include them. In this one, I’m thinking of “non-natural,” “objective,” “intuitive,” “intuition,” and “norms.”
My confusion over what’s being claimed often makes it hard for me to tell whether I’m in (general) agreement or disagreement, whether I’m agnostic, etc., etc.
I understand the book A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion linked in the OP is about presenting that evidence.
Of course, despite how Mung’s brief comment might be taken, AFAIK the book is not claiming that our intuitions about an argument speak directly to the argument’s soundness. The last chapter of the book discusses that issue. Based on the free preview at Kindle, they seem to take the Bayesian approach: you can argue rationally either way, depending on your theistic prior.
That’s definitely a fair criticism! In response, let me note that I was intentionally using the terms that Mung introduced into this conversation with this quote:
I myself know how I want to explicate the concepts of “intuition” and “norms” in this context, but I’ve been on this rodeo enough times — at TSZ, UD, and elsewhere — to know that there’s no explication of “objective” and “non-natural” that’s going to satisfy everyone.
Those terms are, if you will, “semantically overdetermined” — they have too many different meanings. To be honest, I’d be just as happy dispensing entirely with “objective,” “subjective”, “natural” and “non-natural” from my philosophical lexicon. Debates over those terms are liable to cause more heat than light.
Well, at the outset I decided not to even attempt to post the material they cite. People can disagree with any conclusions that they make. If they find something interesting or controversial they can follow up on their own.
That said, if there is something in particular for which you want to know their sources I will try to respond. But if there are many such requests I can’t promise a response for every one.
Exactly.
Can I hear an Amen?
Just today I was reading how the categorical systems of Aristotle and Kant are completely different. Wasn’t Neil asking for a discussion of the how (or was it the why) of categorizing?
No, there’s a deeper issue – soundness. Everybody knows that validity is easy – this way it was put to me by others here, so don’t take just my word for it. Comparing statements or assertions or whatever we call them against each other gives us an idea of validity, but comparison with facts gives us soundness.
If you think that principles like the PSR don’t have or shouldn’t have ontological bearing, then you are dealing with a principle that only gives you shallow validity which is irrelevant for real-life (ontological) purposes. You don’t have soundness and you seem very intent on avoiding it too. Our difference is that I don’t shun the ontological implications of logical principles.
No, this is not the result. This is a mere reassertion of your distinction of natural and formal languages. I see no basis to the distinction and I see no “result” to it either, because you already nicely began by clarifying that your statements have relevance strictly vis-a-vis other statements, not vis-a-vis facts or ontology. So, whatever you say the distinction of formal and natural languages to be, I frankly don’t see it as grounded in any relevant reality or truth and I don’t see it going anywhere either. Saying that ‘”logic” ends up meaning “symbolic logic”‘ is only reasserting the same thing, not arriving at a conclusion or result.
We have been disagreeing nicely all along. In my view, presuppositions and theories have to be justified, supported by some relevant facts, their has to be some relevant utility or ontological bearing to them. Without this, we are not getting started properly and we have nowhere to move on.
Remember your original claim that I opposed? It was, “…the resolution of a problematic situation requires the use of intelligence in inquiry,” but here you have receded to from “intelligence” to mere “learning” and “learning” is reduced to whatever occurs to animals when they adapt. This does not show that “a problematic situation” requires intelligence and inquiry. It only shows that some animals have it and they recognise “problematic situations”. In fact, the term “a problematic situation” itself presupposes inquiring intellect, so the causality, if any, is in the direction that you imply, but in the opposite direction.
I don’t even agree with the first sentence in your elaboration, “In the case of most simple organisms, the problematic situation is fatal.” Yet even the most simple organisms are born, reproduce, and die as per their own life cycle like all other species do, and it doesn’t seem to require any intelligence or inquiry on their part at all..
And this is a problem? Philosophy has many central concepts whose corresponding ‘entities’, if they were real (and on my view they are), are undetectable in principle to any science, such as the concepts of “existence”, “experience”, “immaterial”, “universal”, etc. Adding “mind” to it is not really making this fact any worse, but simply reaffirming this fact.
Remember, you said, “Empirical concepts are concepts applied to objects that we can experience.” Aren’t mathematical concepts, such as sphere and two-dimensional surface, center, etc. applicable to objects that we can experience? All concepts can be related to experience. In fact, we experience concepts themselves – that’s called cognition, defined on Wikipedia as “the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc.” The domain of concepts is definitely the realm of experience. Thus there are no non-empirical concepts.
The rejection of foundationalism can only reasonably take place when you have something better to replace it with. Because when you throw out a central philosophical project, then you are left with no project and with no foundation. You may assert that you still affirm the concepts of better and worse, but without an established reason and foundation the assertion is without content.
That’s all quite correct, but since logic is the study of validity, logic alone cannot give us soundness.
On the contrary — it’s that the methodological principle in the PSR is a perfectly fine principle for everyday life and empirical knowledge, including science.
Well, the distinction between formal and natural languages as I’m making it here isn’t my invention — it’s fairly well-established amongst philosophers who take Frege (on formal languages, esp. that of arithmetic) and Wittgenstein (esp. his criticism of Frege in the Philosophical Investigations) as a point of departure. The technical achievements in 20th-century logic made by Cantor, Goedel, and others would seem to speak for themselves as to whether Frege’s accomplishment was a good idea.
That much seems right — any assertion can be called into question, some further assertion can be called upon to justify it, and so forth.
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. Thinking that it does follow is just another fallacious permutation of quantifiers, as faulty as reasoning from “for each human being, there exists one biological mother” to “there exists one biological mother for all human beings”.
I’ll conclude this post with Sellars’s way of stressing what anti-foundationalism looks like:
I think that this is the really important point: any claim can be put in jeopardy, but not all at once.
I can’t disagree with that. But I’ve read through a lot of threads without discovering a reason to try.
But logic with ontological foundation/implications does.
Yes, I heard your assertion already at the first time. The problem is that it continues to be a mere assertion. Without a foundation there’s no basis for the assertion, you can change it haphazardly any time, and you can at the same time hold random contrary assertions – which in fact I think you do. It’s not the first time I am saying this, and meanwhile you have not done anything to leave a more systematic impression of your views.
A purebred argument from authority.
Similarly, it doesn’t follow that there isn’t any ultimate foundation. What point do you think you are making here?
I’m not yet convinced of that, because I’m not yet convinced of the superiority of Neo-Platonic or Aristotelian philosophies of logic over modern symbolic logic.
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. It is even possible, by my lights, that we could discover that following the PSR doesn’t always result in resolving problematic situations. I myself can’t imagine any inquiry that would do so, but it’s a possibility. I am more inclined to think that if we were to abandon the PSR, we would cease to be doing anything that we could recognizable as inquiry.
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.
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.
I want to go back and pick up on this remark:
I remarked a few posts back that I accept a version of “methodological naturalism”, according to which philosophy does not have unimpeachable authority. My conception of the relation between philosophy and science is pretty complicated, but here it is in rough form: philosophy can elucidate the basic structure of our experience in the world, and science can explain how we can the kinds of experience that we do.
Philosophy can give us what McDowell calls “constitutive explanations”: it can tell us what it is to be minded, to be an agent, to act in light of reasons, to be cognitively oriented towards objects, and so on. There are a variety of techniques that philosophers can bring to bear in constructing constitutive explanations, including reflective analysis, ordinary-language philosophy, and phenomenology. (I myself am partial to the existential phenomenologists.)
By contrast, science can give us what McDowell calls “enabling explanations”: it can tell us what is required for the causal implementation of mindedness, agency, rationality, objectivity, value, and so on. In his own work McDowell draws this distinction in order to erect a wall of separation between philosophy of mind and language and cognitive science. I myself do not think there is any such wall. It is more of a “semi-permeable membrane”.
If a cognitive scientist’s enabling explanation is covertly shaped by a Cartesian conception of mind, then an embodied phenomenologist can point out why this is mistaken. If a philosopher describes mindedness as something that cannot be causally implemented, or if cognitive science tells us that minds can’t actually function the way that some constitutive explanation tells us that they do, then the philosopher is mistaken. Constitutive explanations can be informed by enabling explanations, and conversely.
Enabling explanations can be criticized in light of constitutive explanations because some conception of what one is studying is informed by certain presuppositions, and those presuppositions may be disclosed as distorted, one-sided, or even false in light of better constitutive explanations. Specifically, and relevant to my current research, I think that much of traditional cognitive science has been informed by a Cartesian view of mind, and that a cognitive science informed by existential phenomenology is a much-needed research program just now getting underway.
However, constitutive explanations can be criticized in light of enabling explanations because enabling explanations are grounded in well-confirmed, empirically successful models of causal processes. This matters because empirical science at its best (which is, however, much less common than usually supposed) is epistemologically superior to other forms of knowing, because in science we deliberately and systematically untangle our beliefs and assumptions from the description of the phenomena under investigation. Unlike poetry, science does allow the world to get a vote in what we say about it.
The problem with doing metaphysics entirely a priori — “from the armchair” — is that without taking the sciences into account, we have no way of knowing whether we are really talking about reality or just bringing our intuitions into logical coherence. And that matters because any conceptual system can be made logically coherent if enough intelligent people work at it long enough. Even the world of Middle Earth can be made more tidy and internally consistent.
In order to know that our metaphysics is actually getting at reality, and not just a collective fiction (that we fail to recognize as such, because it has been with us for millennia), we need a way of taking reality into account — of allowing the world to get a vote in what we say about it — and empirical science is our best way of doing precisely that. Without empirical science, metaphysics can’t be distinguished from collective fiction, philosophical anthropology, astrology, mythology, or poetry.
So if one has a theory of how minds work that conflicts with cognitive science, I think that’s a real problem. It might be a problem with cognitive science — enabling explanations can be criticized in light of constitutive explanations! — if one has extremely good reasons to think that cognitive science has been informed by distorting or one-sided conceptions of mindedness. But if the enabling explanations are grounded in well-confirmed empirical science, then it’s the constitutive explanations that are the problem.
On structuralism, methodical analysis would yield a formal system. The system consists of elements called distinct units. They are units like atoms, but each unit has reality inasmuch as it is distinct from other units, as a part of the formal system. There’s never a unit by itself. There are only units as sets of characteristics or properties, discerned from a bigger whole.
The place and role of the units in the system is subtle and nuanced. On the one hand, every unit is arbitrary, i.e. the entire system is arbitrarily divisible. On the other hand, each unit must have its determined role vis-a-vis other units in the system, i.e. it must be a system, not a mess.
Classical structuralism differs from post-structuralism in just one crucial point. On classical structuralism, the system is about reality, i.e. the formal system is not the reality or final truth itself, but descriptive of it. On post-structuralism, the internal coherence (logical validity) is a sufficient sign of a good system, while ultimate reality or final truth are notions that are ignored.
Probably the best introduction to how the structuralist methodology works is Louis Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language.
If you mean analytical as opposed to continental, then that’s right, it’s a continental school of thought. But analysis (dissection) as a method is central to it.
Sound conceptual schemes cannot be superseded, because they are inescapable to philosophy. In case of choice of multiple sound conceptual schemes you can pick your preference, but there must be some justification to the preference, such as elegance or utility, greater explanatory scope or such. I don’t think KN is justifying his preference properly.
But inasmuch as we know that science only proceeds inductively, we cannot say that science is onto reality in any closer sense than armchair philosophy is. This has been the issue all along.
Agreed, as long as we are really talking about reality, not about inductive reasoning from repetitive accidentia.
You keep repeating it, but when will you finally prove it? (Inductive reasoning won’t cut it of course, never did.)
In terms of mind, please pinpoint some statement of mine about mind that conflicts with whatever you call cognitive science and PROVE that cognitive science is right and that I cannot be right.
Very helpful, Erik. Thanks for taking the time to post.
I have enjoyed reading your exchanges with KN.
Interesting post–and about a school I never learned a single thing about in school–although there were a couple of profs who taught it and wrote about it in my undergrad institution.
Thanks.
First, this is a blog, not an academic journal or even an academic blog & TAZ is far from my highest priority. Second, I’m a ‘westerner’ who now lives east of western Europe, BruceS. That makes communication more difficult, since I’m not just using a ‘western’ approach. The ‘east’ is in many ways more ‘mysterious’ than the ‘west’, so I take your comment as a compliment.
In terms of philosophy, I’d much rather engage Comenius, Solovyev and Berdyaev, than Peirce and Dewey, or Dilthey, Husserl and Gadamer than Russell and Quine. And I’m more interested in ‘applied’ philosophy than narrow ‘technical’ philosophy today, like in Bent Flyvbjerg’s phronesis, even when it comes from not a professionally trained philosopher. And when it comes to ‘realism,’ I’d much rather discuss Bhaskar than Sellars, the latter who is KN’s scientistic hero. I’ve had more than enough of KN’s Brandom and McDowell as if they are significant, thanks very much! The playing field here, as I’ve noted several times, is tilted toward certain figures of a decidedly atheist orientation. Do you also recognise that fact, BruceS?
What passes as ‘philosophy’ here is also rather narrowly ‘anglo-Saxon’ dominant, as Erik noted, or with attempted ‘continental’ hipsterism, as KN sometimes shows. It is imo largely uninspiring. This is why I’ve called KN a ‘philosophist,’ rather than a ‘philosopher.’ That doesn’t mean, however, that KN can’t or sometimes doesn’t make helpful contributions; it just means that if one sees the emptiness behind them, it changes the overall picture of what it means to ‘contribute.’ Contributing to ‘skepticism’ isn’t much of a compliment to a person, after all!
The bottom line, in answer to BruceS, who I find to be amongst the most balanced, patient and least antagonistic here, is that it is very difficult to have a ‘philosophical’ conversation with someone not only who is not grounded in anything, but who is motivated by their worldview to actually resist (a) foundation(s) of any kind. Iow, serious conversations with hardcore skeptics & philosophists come pretty cheap! And for goodness sake, in the USA, some people think first of ‘Ayn Rand’ when they hear ‘philosopher’ and have never heard of Alasdair MacIntyre. So, it is unsuprising for someone like walto to claim I have said nothing at all, with such a flimsy bureaucratic philosophistry as his. I’m just as critical of IDists at TAZ as I am of atheists, up to a ‘reasonable’ limit, but I find glaring errors in both of these ‘positions’. 😉
Erik is carving KN up with reason and depth of thought because KN has no foundation to stand on and zero incentive, apparently, to even consider vertical thinking (which begins and ends ultimately with foundation). This makes KN among the slipperiest kinds of ‘thinker’, indeed, qualifying him as a philosophist, rather than a philosopher. Archimedes’ ancient claim “give me where to stand and I shall move the world,” is lost to such a person, who’d apparently rather be disenchanted than coherent.
KN’s approach reminds me of the phrase:
But the atheism, the lack of foundation, the intentional horizontality in some of what I call WAP – weak American philosophy – is far too much on display here. No doubt, it’s ‘pragmatic’! 😉 Likewise, evangelical Christianity is the mainstay worldview at Uncommon Descent. This kind of polarity is what makes such good arguing-dancing partners with each other and why TAZ contributors often start threads by quoting people at UD.
Maybe KN could discuss Jacques Ellul, one of the “Righteous among the Nations,” rather than Brandom and McDowell? Maybe he might just give himself up to touch on Mortimer J. Adler’s philosophical impact on USAmerican thought (or see this on Adler’s cosmological argument: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1995/PSCF3-95Cramer.html )? How about Dreyfus, Rescher or Charles Taylor? The list of ‘avoidables’ for horizontal thinkers like KN goes on and on.
Can you imagine a conversation between ‘philosophers,’ BruceS, between KN and Saul Kripke (e.g. on names); the one has told here that he is a Jewish atheist, while the other is a religiously observant Jew? Kripke says: “‘I don’t have the prejudices many [like KN?] have today, I don’t believe in a naturalist world view. I don’t base my thinking on prejudices or a world view and do not believe in materialism.’ He claims that many people think that they have a scientific world view and believe in materialism, but that this is an ideology.”
Already here at TAZ, KN has self-identified as a naturalist, emergentist, empiricist, socialist, feminist (LGBTist), environmentalist, anti-foundationalist, compatibilist, reductionist, scientism proponent, sometimes ‘Darwinist’, pragmatist, skeptic, and atheist. Yet he seems to understand absolutely nothing about ideology!?! Why not read Terry Eagleton, a fellow (neo-)Marxist, to learn something about ideology?
Back to the OP: if religious belief is ‘natural,’ and we already know it is ‘personal’ (cutting across the nature/culture divide), then is it not ‘unnatural’ to live irreligiously, to not acknowledge religiosity ‘naturally’ as a ‘person’? I’m not proselytising any ‘particular’ religion here, as Mung has indirectly done in the OP. The point itself still stands. And when it comes to persons, this is exactly what KN’s and several others’ ‘philosophistry’ here, badly leaves out. For an alternative from USA, check out Christian Smith’s “What is a Person?”
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? 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.)
That’s setting the bar much too high, and I rather suspect that you know it. 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.
At this point in the conversation I’m only pointing out the incompatibility on that specific point. If the incompatibility doesn’t bother you, or if your response to it is, “so much the worse for cognitive science,” well, that’s an intellectually respectable position — but not one that I share and one that I think has troubling consequences for how we think about knowledge.
I’ve heard of Ellul but haven’t read him — or Adler, for that matter. I tried reading Adler once but couldn’t get past his tone. That’s petty of me, I know.
By “Dreyfus,” did you mean Hubert Dreyfus? He’s a big influence on me; I’m re-reading the McDowell-Dreyfus debate for perhaps the fourth time right now. I’m interested in showing how discursive practices are a kind of embodied perceptuo-practical activity. I think this is important for understanding how different techniques and technologies embedded in various embodied, collaborative scientific practice practically disclose phenomena as belonging to different kinds, and that’s why the Unity of Science thesis is wrong.
Taylor has also been a big influence on me, ever since I read “Overcoming Epistemology” in grad school. I haven’t read either of his two big books but I’ve read most of Philosophical Arguments and Dilemmas and Connections. I very much like Taylor’s treatment of secularism. Additionally, I have a paper on Rorty that basically shows why Taylor’s criticism of Rorty is correct. I also find Taylor’s criticisms of Brandom deeply insightful — briefly, that the discursive activity in the space of reasons is just a part of human symbolic activity. It’s a nice way of bringing Cassirer back into the conversation, too.
I haven’t left it out; I’m forthrightly acknowledged it. I simply don’t think the point goes as far or cuts as deep as you do. Secularism is, in some sense, “unnatural” — and so are capitalism, socialism, science, democracy, fascism, feminism, patriarchy, and slavery.
Heck, if you point out that Homo sapiens has existed in hunter-gatherer societies for about 80% of our time on this planet, then civilization is “unnatural”!
The point is, saying that something is or is not “natural” or “unnatural” is not to say anything interesting or important about it — saying “X is natural” does not mean that “X is good” or that “~X is bad”. The ethical arguments (about what is good or bad for individuals or for society) and the epistemological arguments (about what is true or false, reasonable or unreasonable by way of belief, etc.) will not get any direct help from natural science.
Indeed, thinking that a result from natural science could, all by itself, play a trumping role in some ethical or epistemological debate is a version of the Myth of the Given. Science does constrain what we can say about ethics or epistemology, but at the end of the day, it’s a different language game: ethics and epistemology are normative language games (the norms of conduct and of belief, respectively), and science is a descriptive language game.
My point about the epistemological superiority of science (which is also Sellars’s point, as I read him) is that the methods of science — its techniques and technologies — confer on the descriptive claims of empirical science a higher degree of epistemic authority than other descriptive claims embedded in non-scientific forms of knowing. It does not confer on the descriptive claims of science a higher degree of epistemic authority than all other kinds of moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons, let alone non-discursive symbolic forms.
This is the kind silly adolescent nonsense that I’ve come to love in Gregory’s posts. He attributes Kripke’s causal theory of names to his orthodox Judiaism, like Superman’s powers from coming from Krypton. Lot’s of people agree with Kripke about names (which, not that it matters, I personally consider brilliant). The view had forerunners in Donnellan, Barcan Marcus, and Putnam (and even in some unpublished work by G.E. Moore), none of whom were known for their religiosity, but all of them very good philosophers, (Putnam and Moore actually both more important than Kripke). Gregory’s implications there are utter nonsense.
And I really hope that the suggestion that Mortimer Adler was a good philosopher was a joke. I mean, he was a nice writer and got a number of people who’d never taken a class in the subject interested in philosophy, so kudos for that, but he was hardly a great contributor to the field.
Anyhow, the whole notion that good philosophers must be theists is basically ridiculous and betrays an entirely adolescent (Yay team!) way of thinking. Yes KN is not Kripke, but you, Gregory, are not even close to being Adler, never mind any of the great non-theist thinkers like Hume, Mill, and Russell (or, if you must have Continental philosophers in the list, Sartre).
Thanks for this reply, Gregory.
I recognize that the philosophy here is limited in many respects, and I do visit other forums to learn more.
I do admit that analytical, Western philosophy is easier for me to understand given my background (math and IT).
So I also welcome any thoughtful input of those who with completely different ideas who choose to post here.
walto,
I didn’t think that Gregory was attributing Kripke’s theory of names to his Judaism. There’s no religion in Naming and Necessity, though there is a very sophisticated critique of mind-brain identity.
And in fact I, along with Nagel (in “The Psychophysical Nexus”) and Robert Hanna and Teed Rockwell, think that Kripke was definitely right about this much: even if it is a necessary truth that every mental property is correlated with some physical property (including relational physical properties that range across brains, bodies, and environments), it is not a conceptual truth. It is a necessary truth — if it is a necessary truth! — that had to be empirically discovered.
And the idea that there are empirically discovered necessary truths — that not all necessary truths are conceptual truths — is itself one of Kripke’s greatest accomplishments. (Put otherwise, conceptual truth is a guide to logical necessity and logical possibility, but not to other kinds of necessity and possibility.)
In any event, Gregory was only alluding to Kripke’s work on names as an aside, in order to draw out the contrast between me and someone who is a much better philosopher than I’ll ever hope to be and who doesn’t have a naturalistic metaphysics.
That said, there are of course brilliant philosophers who are theists and brilliant philosophers who aren’t. And then there are mediocre philosophers who are theists and mediocre philosophers who aren’t.
The real contrast between a scientific metaphysician and a non-scientific metaphysician turns on, “what constrains the scope of metaphysical theorizing?” The scientific metaphysician alleges that, if one rejects verificationism as a constraint on metaphysical theorizing, then metaphysics is in the same boat as logic and mathematics: constrained only by our collective human ingenuity. The worry then is that this constraint is simply far too loose to guide us in selecting the right metaphysical system. Anything goes.
Speaking of other forums:
Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum
Since Gregory mentioned Taylor, I went back to look at Taylor’s criticism of Brandom and Brandom’s response. (Both are in the Reading Brandom volume edited by Weiss and Wanderer.)
Taylor worries that Brandom’s rationalism prevents him from appreciating the role of other kinds of world-disclosing symbolic activities, such as religion, poetry, music, ritual, myth, story-telling, literature. (For some reason he does not mention dance, or the symbolic dimension of cooking and eating, but I do not consider those major over-sights — only indications that no matter how much Merleau-Ponty one reads, it’s never enough!)
As Taylor motivates the dialectic, we need to go past Frege’s contextualization principle (“only in the context of a sentence do words have any meaning”) and also past Wittgenstein’s radicalization of that principle (this could be paraphrased as: ‘only in the context of a language-game do sentences have any meaning’) all the way to Cassirer (‘only in the context of symbolic forms do language-games have any meaning’).
And that’s entirely correct. The only point at which I would take issue with Taylor is that he concedes too much to Brandom: he allows Brandom his claim that assertions are the ‘downtown’ of the space of reasons. I think that this is badly mistaken, for the reasons that Kukla and Lance give in ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons: the discursive space of reason-giving must include not only declaratives (assertions) but also observatives, prescriptives, vocatives, acknowledgments — all of which are essentially indexed to the first-personal and second-personal voices. A language-game conducted purely the third-personal voice of assertions is a philosopher’s fiction — in this case, Brandom’s.
So I would replace Taylor’s continuum from the assertional to the disclosive with a continuum from the discursive (including the first-personal, second-personal, and third-personal voices) to the disclosive.
In his response to Taylor, I was struck to see this in Brandom: “It might well be that issues of absolutely vital importance to human life can be addressed only by helping ourselves to considerations that go well beyond the rational side of our nature. Rational animals are, after all, not only rational, but animals”.
Though this was intended as a concession to Taylor, it is actually quite badly inadequate: the world-disclosing symbolic forms that Taylor underscores are not “merely” animal but species-unique forms of world-making. The world-disclosive dimension of symbolic activity is just as unique as our capacity to play the game of giving and asking for reasons. We are not just rational animals but symbolic animals.
In short, we need a conception of human being-in-the-world as essentially and necessarily mediated by wide range of historically evolving symbolic forms, running along a range from the purely discursive (e.g. philosophical dialogue) to the purely disclosive (e.g. music), and in the vast majority of cases, containing elements of both.
If I focus on the discursive to the exclusion of the disclosive, it is not because the disclosive is unimportant or uninteresting to me, but because there are only so many problems I can work on at any given time.
IMHO, that’s the weakest part of the work.
Really? It’s the only part that really grabbed my attention, because I work in philosophy of mind with only an ancillary interest in philosophy of language.
(Actually, I work in Continental social thought with an ancillary interest in philosophy of mind, but somehow I keep on reading something new and interesting that prevents me from getting back to the Frankfurt School. I actually had a paper set and ready to go on Theodor Adorno and Alasdair MacIntyre, for a conference on “traditions of ideology critique”, but I had to cancel due to a health crisis which has since been resolved.)
Besides which, Kripke’s argument seemed to me to be quite right:
(1) If X is identical to Y, then X is logically necessarily identical to Y;
(2) If it is conceivable that X & ~Y, then it is logically possible that X & ~Y;
(3) If it logically possible that X & ~Y, then it is not logically necessarily that X & Y.
(4) If it is not logically necessary that X & Y, then X and Y cannot be identical.
Plug in “some mental state” and “some physical state” for X and Y, and you have the conceivability argument against mind-brain identity. Put otherwise, the very conceivability of zombies shows that mental states cannot be identical with brain states.
Of potential interest to the philosophically inclined:
Skepticism and the Veil of Perception
Intuition
Kantian Naturalist,
Premise (2) doesn’t do a thing for me.