Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism has attracted a great deal of serious critical discussion (e.g. Naturalism Defeated?) and has had a substantial impact on ‘popular’ appraisals of naturalism. (For example, William Lane Craig frequently uses it, and it also appears in the dismissal of naturalism in The Experience of God.) Many philosophers have pointed out various problems with the EAAN, and in my judgment the EAAN is not only flawed but fatally flawed. Nevertheless, it’s a really interesting argument and it could be worth exploring a bit. I’ll present the argument here and then we can get into it in comments if you’d like — though I won’t be offended if you’d rather spend your time doing other things!
The EAAN has gone through various iterations, but here’s the latest version, from Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (2011). Intuitively, we regard our cognitive capacities — sense-perception, introspection, memory, reasoning — as reliable, where “reliable” means “capable of giving us true beliefs most of the time” (subject to the usual caveats). Call this claim R (for ‘reliable’). But how probable is R?
Suppose that one accepts evolution (E) but also affirms naturalism, defined here as the belief that there is no God or anything like God (N). What is the probability of R, given N & E? One might think it’s quite high. But Plantinga thinks that, however high the probability of R, nevertheless the probability of R given N&E is low or inscrutable. Why’s that?
Now, here’s the key move (and in my estimation, the fatal flaw): beliefs are invisible to selection. Why? Because selection only works on behavior. If an unreliable cognitive capacity is causally linked to adaptive behavior, then the unreliable capacity will be selected for (i.e. not selected against). Even a radically unreliable capacity — that one never or almost never yields true beliefs — can be selected for. Selection only “cares” about adaptive behaviors, not about true beliefs. (More precisely, we have no reason to believe that the semantic content is not epiphenomenal.)
So, Plantinga thinks, given N&E, the probability of R is very low. But, if the probability of R is low, given N&E, then that should ‘infect’ the likelihood of all of the beliefs produced by those capacities — including N&E themselves. So, given N&E, we should it think it extremely unlikely that N&E is true. And so the initial assumption of N&E defeats itself. (Here I’m being much too quick with the argument, but we can get into the details in the comments if you’d like.)
Anyway, it’s a really cool little argument, and it’s not immediately clear what’s wrong with it — and I thought it might be worth discussing, given how influential it is.
That’s correct — the debate is about whether or not what you assert here about naturalism is correct.
I don’t think it is, for roughly the same reasons that I think that the EAAN is a flawed argument. I think that some version of teleosemantics can account for the correlation between successful cognitive representations and adaptive behavior. The correspondence between mental representations and physical objects can be explained in terms of the evolutionary and developmental history of causal transactions between organisms and their environments. Appealing to theism here amounts to (in C. I. Lewis’ lovely phrase) “substituting adoration of a mystery for explanation of a fact”.
In other words, given N&E, R is not low or inscrutable at all.
However, while this may rescue basic perceptual judgments from the EAAN, it does seem to me that some other kind of argument will be necessary to establish the objectivity of moral or mathematical judgments, under naturalism.
Yes, you’re right — I sometimes conflate sense and reference. Bad philosopher! Bad! No!
And while “sense” (“content”) is linguistic, hence social, historical, yadda yadda yadda . . . . (no Forms, please, we’re pragmatists) . . . or at least a certain kind of sense is lingustic, etc. — but, if I understand where the teleosemantic program is heading, that kind of semantic content is biological and neurological, not linguistic.
There have got to be two different kinds of semantic content. Huw Price is right. In fact, I’m not sure anything other than Price’s dualism about representationalism would defeat the EAAN.
As for reference . . . that’s a whole different story that I’m not ready to tell.
Evaluating the correspondence without any assumption of access to an absolutely true exterior standard or an exterior deliberacy that set the whole thing up to correspond in the first place is a case of measuring your ruler with the same ruler. You have no means by which to measure the success of the correspondence other than by assuming the validity of the correspondences under consideration in the first place.
You must assume you are accessing something outside of N & E in order to evaluate the success of N & E in generating those correspondences, or else you are being self-referential when you talk about the “success” of N & E generated correspondences.
There’s no escaping the fact that you must assume something outside the system in order evaluate the system that your faculties and thoughts are purportedly generated by, or else your “evaluation” of the system, by the system, is nonsensical.
William J. Murray,
There are two different questions that the pragmatic naturalist needs to answer: how do we know that there are correlations between our cognitive representations and physical objects? and how do we explain those correlations? (Also, it is of utmost importance to keep a careful eye on the difference between the semantic questions — questions about representation or content — from the epistemological questions — questions about warrant or justification. For while semantics and epistemology cannot be separated, they must be distinguished.)
I handle the first question in terms of the (weak) transcendental argument that some minimally humanly detectable regularity in physical objects, properties, and relations is necessary in order for me to ascribe any thoughts to myself at all, and that the iterative process of self-criticism and mutual criticism increases our epistemic grip on those objects, properties, and relations.
I handle the second question in terms of the functional states built up in an organisms internal mapping of its environment over the course of evolutionary and developmental history. The mind-world problem is seen to be a pseudo-problem once we realize that the relation of mind and world is no more mysterious than the relation of organisms to their environments, and in no greater need of positing a transcendent standpoint in order to make it intelligible.
If there is any serious tension within my relaxed, liberal naturalism, it lies in that I haven’t figured out how exactly to reconcile my emphasis on a plurality of discursive frameworks, each constituted by material inference rules that determine what counts as ‘objective’ relative to that framework, with my emphasis on teleosemantic or neurosemantic content for grounding the cognitive states of the organism in its environment. And figuring this out requires (at least) two different kinds of intentionality (discursive intentionality and teleological intentionality) and, correspondingly, of normativity.
There is nothing wrong in measuring a ruler with a ruler. Practically speaking, that is how it is done.
We invent our first ruler. We arbitrarily and capriciously calibrate it. We declare that to be the standard. And then we measure all other rulers with our arbitrary standard. We now have an ability to judge the truth of assertions about length. That ability to judge truth has emerged from our asserting an arbitrary and capricious standard.
When a newborn child faces the world, he has no choice but to invent his/her own internal standard, and then use that private internal standard for keeping perception consistent. There is no external standard to which perception must adhere.
I wonder about this . . . firstly, by the time she faces the extra-uterine environment, she has a pretty rich set of neuronal connections — which aren’t terribly useful at representing anything in particular because there hasn’t been much pruning. And that pruning starts almost immediately, especially for recognition of faces of caregivers and of auditory patterns in the language they speak.
Secondly, as we mature, acquire a language, learn how to modulate our bodily rhythms and gestures with those of others, how to imitation and so on, we learn how to correct our perceptual judgments by taking into account the reports of the judgments of others. We manifestly can and do “triangulate” on the properties and relations of physical objects through the mutual coordination between ourselves and others. If there’s supposed some other thing besides that which deserves to be called “objectivity,” I’m not entirely clear on what it is or why we need it.
Isn’t the “exterior standard” the real world? And natural selection is the test for the “success of the correspondence” of the belief to the real world.
EAAN claims this does not work because the contents of beliefs can’t be linked to behavior and so cannot influence evolution by natural selection, but teleosemantics is one naturalist approach to doing so and thus calling this argument from EAAN into question.
Once we have the ability to form the simplest, reliable beliefs about the real world, then we can bring the methodology of science into play to verify scientific theories like evolution. (I understand that scientific methods might not apply to completely resolving questions of morality, but this is not relevant to EAAN).
I recognize that I am using evolution twice in the above, but I don’t think I am doing so in a way that makes the argument circular.
I suspect KN is saying something similar but more sophisticated in his reply to your point, but I have to work more to understand his arguments.
BruceS,
Actually, BruceS, I think you just put the same point I was making in clearer language — I don’t think that the content of what I’m saying is any more sophisticated. So, thank you for that!
One interesting implication of this approach is that it allows us to distinguish between “science” and “metaphysics” in a certain way — for what scientific theories have going for them is that they are empirically testable, and the reason why that is important is because its at the level of perceptual-motor transactions with the environment that our semantic content is brought into genuine contact with reality. Everything else is just speculation and myth-making — perhaps necessary for certain kinds of social existence, but by no means telling us anything about how the world really is.*
And this is really important for Plantinga’s overall view — remember, he wants to argue that there is a deep conflict between science and naturalism. The EAAN is just the strategy he employs to get there. (Of course, he also thinks that only theological metaphysics can properly ground or account for empirical science.)
So now, what we’re doing is explaining how science itself is possible in naturalistic terms — in other words, using science (esp. cognitive ethology and neuroscience) to explain how science is possible at all. And though this is doubtlessly circular, it is not viciously so — it’s just the right move for a rigorous antifoundationalism.
* I allow that reason alone can tell us how the world might be or must be, but reason alone cannot tell us how the world is. For that, one needs experience, because it is only at the level of perceptual intake and motor output that semantic content is causally related to physical objects, properties, and relations.
I suspected you might reply in this vein, but had guessed you’d include more Kantian content!
I had a look at the link to Price’s book that you posted, but it requires too much background, technical knowledge for me. But I’d certainly welcome your summary and thoughts after your investigation of teleosemantics, if you have the time to post them and they are appropriate for this blog.
BruceS,
Oh, I’d be happy to rephrase my thought in terms intuitions and categories, if you’d like. 🙂
Yes, after I’ve looked a bit of the Millikan over the weekend, I’ll talk about Price if it still seems relevant.
Then why did you bring them up – incorrectly I might add?
Indeed. Chemisty, physiology, biology, geology, ecology, meterology, etc. And no, all those different areas do not reduce to physics. Each one references systems that emerge as new properties that have arrangements of matter unique to those systems, that then follow new laws that support higher levels of interaction. In other words, stating that thoughts are analogous to the movement of billiard balls or pachinko machine bearings is plain old wrong for the simple reason that neither billiard balls nor bearings in the pool or pachinko systems ever create any emergent properties analogous to mental interactions.
Hmm, that was one long sentence.
This is where I see epistemology as having gone badly wrong, and that is why I often sound critical of philosophy.
Imagine you are standing in a dense fog. The perceivable environment is completely homogeneous, and that is about as much regularity as you can imagine. Yet you cannot see anything. You struggle to find something other than fog, to find an irregularity.
Or imagine that you are walking in the Sahara desert. Everything looks the same in every direction. That’s a lot of regularity. You long for an oasis or a tree or even a rocky outcrop to break up the regularity and give you something of a landmark so that you can start to set your bearings.
Or suppose that you are walking down the street in a housing development. All the houses look identical. They were all built from the same plan. They are spaced apart uniformly. Unless you have a GPS system, you will have trouble telling where you are. There is lots of regularity, and that is precisely the problem.
Contrary to all of the nonsense about inductionism, it is the irregularities of the world, not the regularities, that make cognition possible.
If we cool water down enough, it turns to ice. If we heat it up enough, it boils. Freezing and boiling are irregularities in the behavior of water with temperature change. So we create an arbitrary temperature scale for measuring, but we anchor that measuring scale in the freezing point and boiling point irregularities. It is irregularities that allow us to anchor our representations to the world. In a highly regular world, you could do solipsistic philosophy. But intentionality, our ability to anchor our representations to the world, depends on irregularities.
What you are describing is a very fundamental notion in physics; namely symmetry breaking.
No, that is not correct. Language is of little or no help with perception. The child needs a highly refined perception as a prerequisite to acquiring language. The child is not aware of language until the child can perceive phonemes, which are often subtle irregularities in the sound emitted by a speaker. And we cannot expect the child to relate his hearing of the word “doggy” with that small animal, unless the child is already able to perceive that small animal.
Language can teach a child that it is useful to distinguish between say cats and dogs (rather than seeing all as small animals). But it cannot teach the child how to distinguish.
Neil Rickert,
I appreciate the correction, but I think I can accommodate it within my transcendental approach to epistemology per se by saying that there must be some minimally detectable pattern of regularities and irregularities — since neither is recognizable without the other! — in order for us to have the kinds of perceptual and discursive states that we manifestly and unproblematically ascribe to ourselves in order to regard ourselves as cognitive agents.
If we were “jelly-fish in a liquid world” (Lewis, Mind and the World Order), we wouldn’t have any concepts or categories at all, because there be nothing for them to latch on to, so to speak. Experience in such a world would be, in Kant’s lovely phrase, “less than a dream.”
Lest I seem to be entirely committed to the a priori approach to all matters, however, I would immediately wish to add that while I do think that certain kinds of epistemological issues are best framed transcendentally (hence a priori), the main function of that approach is to undermine skepticism.* But once the transcendental inquiry has done its job in that regard, room must be made for empirical inquiry into how cognitive capacities are actualized in experience.
* I have in mind here not just “Cartesian skepticism”, a faux skepticism deployed a semi-rhetorical device to undermine Thomistic realism, but also the much more interesting and powerful Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and especially the fascinating Dilemma of the Criterion.
Neil Rickert,
I didn’t say that language was necessary in order to perceive, and of course you’re right that perceptual activities are necessary in order to acquire a language.
I was talking about our ability to revise and correct perceptual judgments — assertions about what it is that one perceives. For I do think that the acquisition of a shared language is necessary for that higher-order epistemic activity. In short, my view is that non-discursive animals (including human infants) do perceive, they do not make perceptual judgments (analogously, they act, but do not perform actions — hence they are actors but not agents).
I hope that clarifies the distinctions I have in mind. Having made that (hopefully) more explicit, how much would you still disagree with?
Calling those “perceptual judgments” should be considered a misnomer. For what you describe isn’t a perceptual act at all. It is the translation of perceptual information into a shared language. Yes, we do revise and correct our ability to do that. It is part of learning a language. That is the first place that I see “truth” coming up. But it isn’t a question of having true perceptions; it is a question of translating our perceptions into true natural language statements. We are not revising and correcting our perception. We are revising and correction our system of meanings that we use to formulate linguistic statements on the basis of our perceptions.
Neil Rickert,
I don’t think we’re disagreeing much, then. We’re using different terms, that’s all.
In my line of work, “perceptual judgment” has an entrenched meaning as (what you call) “translating our perceptions into true natural language statements”. (However, there are many philosophers who don’t distinguish correctly between perceptual judgments and perceptual acts; it’s a serious problem and I strive to avoid that conflation.)
My main reservation about your phrase, “translating our perceptions into true natural language statements” is with the word “translating.” Normally we think of translation as going from one natural language to another natural language. So use of “translation” here suggests that perceptual activity is (or is like) a natural language of its own, and that seems very odd, to say the least. (It also entails linguistic idealism.)
So, while I don’t particularly relish indulging in such pedantry, I find the general idea at work agreeable but not the specific phrasing in which you’ve expressed it.
To be honest, I don’t much like that phraseology myself. It was the best I was able to come up with at the time.
Neil Rickert,
No worries! 🙂
Robin,
Under materialism, thoughts are ultimately caused by physics, whether it is the physics of emergent or non-emergent systems. You are just being evasive.
William, to Robin:
Sure. So what?
My computer operates according to the laws of physics, and it doesn’t have access to an “absolute arbiter” of mathematical truth. Yet I trust it to get the right answer when it sums up the columns in my spreadsheet.
If physics isn’t a reason to ignore the output of my computer, then it isn’t a reason to ignore the output of my brain.
P.S. “Deliberacy” is not a word.
William,
I don’t know where you got that idea. Those statements are contradictory, and so obviously there is a “qualitative difference” between them. I accept 1), but not 2).
Completely untrue. We continually evaluate our cognition from the inside in order to detect our mistakes, despite having no access to an “absolute arbiter” of objective truth. Computers run diagnostic programs on themselves to determine their reliability, despite have no access to an “absolute arbiter” of computer health. Far from being “nonsensical”, it’s the sensible thing to do.
Can a human overlook her mistakes? Sure. Can a computer miss a fault in its circuitry? Yes. As I’ve said many times, absolute certainty isn’t possible. Instead, we try to maximize the probability that our beliefs are true.
So, what are the ultimate causes of thought under a non-materialistic conception of the mind?
And how are they any less deterministic than those in the physical realm?
While the interaction between self and others is important, it’s not the whole story. We manifestly can and do triangulate on the properties and relations of physical objects with no necessary coordination with others. When a baby is playing by itself, it’s picking things up, examining them, tasting them, turning them around, tossing them into the air — it’s exploring the world of physical reality without reference to the opinions or standards of others. It’s learning about the properties of external objects by reference to themselves.
That, I think, is the beginning of where objective judgements contrast with social ones.
Physics is the substrate upon which behaviors are limited. Having a fence around your yard prevents you from climbing into the neighbor’s yard, but it doesn’t “cause” you to plant your garden.
Ultimately we have feedback steered learning. We do not have TRVTH. We have learned responses.
What ID supporters deny (and not all of them are religious fundamentalists) is that this kind of a system can invent new and complex things.
In the case of biology , evolution can invent irreducible complex structures. In the case of brains, it can invent mathematics and 747s.
But no matter how sophisticated we become, we don’t seem able to invent TRVTH.
No, physics is not just a limitation of behavior, but a description of effects that follow causes. Under physics, every effect has a physics-based cause, whether we are talking about emergent properties or not. If thought and belief is not caused in accordance with physics – by the material forces and characteristics of interacting matter involved in they material system – then what else, undirected by rules of physics, is involved that causes what one thinks and believes?
All you are doing here is using evasive terminology to avoid the logical ramifications of materialism. Under N & E, thought is necessarily caused by matter acting in accordance with rules of physics (whether in an emergent system or not). If the matter and forces of the system result in a person barking like a dog and thinking they’ve said something profound, that is what that person will do and think, because all that “person” is is the product of matter acting in accordance with the rules of physics, regardless of what that cause happens to produce.
The “person” is not “free” to change their thoughts or behavior, because they “are” the material interactions according to laws of physics that produces the very behavior and thoughts that make them who they are. The have no agency outside of that material system for overview or supervision; they think whatever the system causes them to think. Their thoughts and beliefs are ultimately caused by whatever happenstance interactions of matter produces. They – who and what they are – is a happenstance effect of matter as it interacts under the rules of physics.
Therefore, if the effect of the material system is that the system holds a belief in darwinism or radical islam or in pink elephants, that is what what will happen. If eating a pizza late at night just happens to provide the chaotic causal input that later changes the system from holding belief A to holding belief B, then that is what will happen.
And that is why N & E cannot provide a basis for the view that our beliefs are sound; because, ultimately, eating a pizza at night (or any other happenstance physical interaction) might be the actual, physical difference between believing A and believing B.
Actually, no. Quantum physics demonstrates that there are uncaused events.
WJM,
Sorry it has taken me so long to reply. I certainly believe torturing children is wrong, but no, I do not think that my belief is self-evident in M-W’s sense of “without proof or reasoning” or in the philosophical sense of being wholly independent of any other beliefs (unless “torturing children is wrong” is taken as an analytic statement in which the wrongness is contained in the definition of torture, in which case it is tautologically, but uninterestingly, self-evident).
But perhaps I’m still not making my question clear. You say, “That something is self-evidently true has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not others agree that it is true.” The very fact that something might be self-evidently true, but that people might disagree suggests that there is a need for a way to resolve the disagreement. Saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” doesn’t seem satisfactory. My question initially arose when you stated that we must have a standard (and, if I interpret you correctly, one that lies outside of our own minds). A standard is obviously useful when trying to resolve disagreements, so can you help me understand what you think the standard is, and how we can know it is the standard, and how we have access to it? That is the question I still have.
To (hopefully) further clarify, I will follow your lead using M-W dictionary: a standard is “something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example.” Since you first appealed to the need for a standard, if you were using a non-typical definition, that would be good to know. So far in your responses to my question about standards, you have suggested that we derive general truths from more basic self-evident or axiomatic ones, but that is not a standard per se, but rather an epistemological approach that relies on identifying a set of axiomatic or self-evident truths from which to start. But the latter is just the sort of thing about which people disagree, hence the need for a standard — a set of axiomatic truths established by authority, custom, or general consent that we can use as models or examples.
The standard is whatever serves the purpose God had in creating what exists. Those behaviors that serve the purpose of God are moral, those that do not are immoral. We (those of us with free will) have sensory access to that standard because we are designed to be able to recognize, through an unhindered conscience, what behaviors serve the purpose of God, and which do not. Some moral statements are self-evidently true and require no evidence or argument. Others require more consideration.
However, our conscience can be hindered via free will; we can choose to bury or misinterpret our conscience, which can make it very difficult to tell the difference between right and wrong.
And no, the standard doesn’t lie outside of the mind, it lies within the universal mind of which our individual minds – to some degree – are part of, just as our individual physical bodies all share, and are part of, the larger physical world. As our bodies experience and are governed by laws like gravity, so too is our mind governed by certain universal mind qualities. Just as anyone can recognize certain self-evident qualities of gravity, so too can we recognize certain self-evident qualities of existence, or mathematics, or geometry, or morality.
When I presented my remarks on “triangulation” above, I was leaning heavily on Donald Davidson’s triangulation argument for the conceptual interdependence of objectivity, intersubjectivity, and subjectivity. As I was thinking about how Davidson would respond to this point here, it slowly dawned on me that Davidson is committed to some highly questionable assumptions about the relation between concepts and experience. Thanks for the provocation — very helpful!
William J. Murray,
It seems to me that you’re assuming that biology reduces to physics. More precisely put, that either (a) we can explain biological phenomena in the language of physics or (b) we can translate biological explanations into physical explanations, perhaps with the assistance of “bridges” between the two. The problem is, you’re assuming that naturalists must be reductionists. But that is merely your assumption, one to which naturalists are not committed by virtue of being naturalists. There’s a vast literature on intertheoretic reduction and there are intense, fascinating debates about the very idea of ‘the unity of science’. If you want to insist that naturalists must be committed to reductionism — hence that biological explanations must reduce to physical ones — then argue for that — don’t just assert it.
William,
As usual, you are avoiding questions and points that you cannot answer. Here are three of mine.
Regarding “self-evident” truths:
Regarding physics as the substrate of thought:
Regarding the absence of a transcendent arbiter of truth:
WJM,
Thank you for your response. That was much closer to what I was trying to get at and clears up a lot of my questions. I’m grateful. But I do have one lingering question, if you’ll indulge me. You say the following:
I presume this might apply to other types of truths (besides moral) as well, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
If it is true that we have some type of internal access to the standard through our conscience, but if it is also true that we can misinterpret that standard, or otherwise by confused or deluded about it, then if two people differ about a belief, how can i distinguish between which one has correctly interpreted the standard through his or her conscience and which one hasn’t, or whether perhaps both have misinterpreted in different ways. As you’ve said previously, “You cannot check the length of a ruler by using the same ruler,” so does that same logic not apply here; that is, if the standard is capable of misinterpretation, then that would seem to rule out the possibility that one could check the accuracy of either one’s own interpretation or that of another using one’s own interpretive abilities? Can you help me with this conundrum?
William,
I’m still awaiting a reply.
Pragmatic naturalism doesn’t show that there aren’t necessary truths, and rational theism doesn’t show that we have infallible access to necessary truths. Fallible access to both necessary and contingent truths is the human condition under both naturalism and theism.
That is not to say that the endless quarrel between naturalism and theism does not matter, but that it does not matter for epistemology. Either metaphysics can accommodate epistemological insights within its own terms.
This nicely summarizes one the key issues I have with William’s argument. Thanks KN. But more to the point, even if I were to grant that…say…biology reduced to physics, that still doesn’t mean that biology reduces to billiard ball (or pachinko machine) physics. There’s an awful lot of physical phenomena out there that William’s argument just seems to negate. William’s argument relies on the same type of thinking that those who hold Noah’s Ark to be literal rely upon; he doesn’t take into account the implications of his claims because he really doesn’t understand the science that establishes those implications.
Here’s the sticking point. ID is about intentionality. Things look purpose built.
Darwin’s insight was that feedback can steer a dynamic system so that it looks purpose built. Such a system can be called intelligent (and Lizzie has agreed with this). Evolution is not conscious, but it is intelligent in the sense that populations can be steered by feedback.
ID advocates deny that purpose built stuff can be built without “conscious” intention. Consciousness is their non-negotiable assertion.
Yes, it applies to all truths. Free will can deny anything.
If you are going to reduce “the ruler” to the point that everything we perceive, we perceive through the faulty lens of our perceptions and mind, thus calling our sensory/cognitive capacity “the ruler”, then of course Plato’s Cave becomes our reality and we might as well all be solipsists. But, in order to “check our ruler”, we must assume that some standard outside of the cave of our own sensory/cognitive limitations exist that we have adequate access to in order to “check any ruler” we might have.
Without the assumed exterior standard and assumed access to it – even if we have faulty access to it as would be the case with any presumed exterior standard (assuming we are not just delusional Boltzmann Brains floating around in the cosmos) – morality must be assumed relative and subjective, which then breaks down into incoherence for everyone but sociopaths, and contradicts how we must live and behave every day.
The argument I make is not that it is a fact that an absolute standard of morality exists, or that I have a better way of interpreting it than others, but simply that – logically – we must assume it exists. The assumption (1) that it exists, and that we must try and interpret it as correctly as possible, and (2) the assumption that there is no such standard, lead towards entirely different and irreconcilable domains of thought.
I don’t use the term “reductionism” because it is irrelevant to my argument.
No. The only problem is that you are clinging to an errant view of what my argument is about. It’s not about determinism, or reductionism. It’s about cause-and-effect physicalism, whether we’re talking about billiard balls or emergent systems. Perhaps a better way to illustrate my argument is this:
Is it possible that you could eat a particular pizza and, because of the happenstance, unpredictable chaotic cascade of chemical reactions that follow, a slight change to your brain chemistry occurs that in turn causes a belief about a proposition to change, whereas without eating that pizza and ingesting that particular set of chemicals at that particular time, such a change probably wouldn’t have occurred?
William J. Murray,
I don’t see how one could think that billiard-ball picture of causation applies to complex, biological systems without assuming reductionism. The very reason why I don’t think that billiard-ball causation applies to biological systems is because emergentism (in ontology) explains why anti-reductionism (in philosophy of science). More precisely, there are serious problems with any successful inter-theoretic reduction, and emergentism explains why inter-theoretic reduction is likely to be unsuccessful.
Unless I already accepted that biology reduces to physics, and that the billiard-ball picture of causation holds of all systems described by physics, I don’t think I’d have any reasons to think that the billiard-ball picture of causation holds of biological systems.
To answer your question,
One can imagine a certain kind of physicalist who would have to “yes” to this possibility. But why? Plausibly, someone who thinks that, just as neurophysiological states supervene on the underlying molecular configurations, and those molecular configurations in turn supervene on the underlying arrangements of particles, so too propositional contents supervene on those neurophysiological states. So, if one accepts this picture, then a change in the biochemistry could, conceivably, change the propositional content.
That is definitely not the picture I accept, but I’m suddenly unsure as to how exactly to explain why I don’t accept it, or how to explain the picture I do accept.
I don’t find “cause and effect physicalism” to be an accurate representation of what most scientists, let alone most people, subscribe to. Nor do I find it to represent what most people actually understand from science. I certainly don’t subscribe to it. At best then, per your own claims, your argument is based on a strawman.
No, because the chemical composition of food has little to no direct impact on how the brain formulates thought, let alone desire. This seems to be a product of your lack of understanding of how large systems (like digestion and physiology) work rather than an illustration that defeats my point.
Well, my point KN is that this is exactly the problem – there are people that use a lot of terms and phrases (emergent properties, reductionism, etc.) that obfuscate more than they reveal. If one holds that it is possible that such a pizza-to-belief change could occur, that capacity is what holds their entire worldview and all other beliefs suspect. If they do not believe this is possible, then the question becomes – why not? What’s the argument against it? What causes particular beliefs to be held or discarded? Are beliefs immune to chaotic effects from pizzas and butterfly wings? If so, why?
That what has significant effect on how the brain formulates thought and desire?
It depends on the thought and desire. In many cases, however, thoughts and desires develop as the brain begins to develop throughout childhood development. As such, diet alone plays only a small part. Rather, it is the combination of diet, genetic makeup, exercise, environment (including social orientation, culture, ritual, play, broad exposure vs narrow exposure, weather, pets, parental professions, etc) that establish thoughts and desires. It is because thoughts and desires are products of multiple elaborate and interacting systems that no single chemical or exposure can change them significantly, if at all.
I’m a bit late to the discussion, and I haven’t read all of the thread, but from skimming it, I think there is one aspect that hasn’t been developed here.
I would like to step back from the probability thesis, which has been the focus here, and look at the more fundamental question of defeaters. To recall, Plantinga maintains that if P(R|N&E) is low or inscrutable, then the naturalist has an undercutting defeater for all of her beliefs, including the beliefs in naturalism (N) and evolution (E). And what’s worth, this defeater itself cannot be defeated (no defeater-defeater).
Plantinga gets the concept of defeaters from John Pollack, who distinguishes rebutting defeaters (evidence that directly counts against some belief) and undercutting defeaters (evidence that counts against the reasons for holding a belief). An example of the latter would be a belief that a wall is red (is painted red), which is undercut by the observation that the wall is illuminated by a red light source. The latter does not directly falsify the impression that the wall is red, but it undercuts our reasons for believing so: anything illuminated by red light would appear red, whether it is actually red or not. Another example would be evidence that a document is a forgery. While this discovery does not directly falsify any beliefs that we gained by taking the document at face value, it undermines our reasons for holding those beliefs.
Next Plantinga says that since the naturalist believes that he, together with his cognitive faculties, is a product of natural evolution, then he had better be sure that N&E produce reliable* cognitive faculties – otherwise our confidence in our rationality is undercut, with all the nasty consequences that that entails. And, he says, the naturalist cannot just help himself to the belief in R: it has to come out of N&E and nothing else.
* reliable in the appropriate sense – I realize that there is debate about that, but I’ll leave it aside here.
This is where I take issue with the argument. I do not owe my reasons for believing that I am rational (enough) to my belief in naturalism and/or evolution. Having an account of how natural evolution produces reliable cognitive faculties would be interesting, but whether or not such an account is available to me makes no difference to my assumption of rationality. Even if Plantinga succeeded in showing that P(R|N&E) was low or inscrutable (it is, in fact, inscrutable to anyone who hasn’t put much thought and research into the matter, which would be most people), this would not undercut my belief in my rationality. To do that, he would need to get at the reasons for me holding that belief, and the reasons, if any, have nothing to do with my belief in N&E.
So it seems that plain-vanilla defeaters would not do the job here. The reason Plantinga nevertheless comes to the conclusion that low P(R|N&E) is an undercutting defeater has to do with his epistemology of proper function:
– Plantinga, Alvin (2000). Warranted Christian Belief.
Now, I haven’t read much into his justifications for this epistemology, but on the surface of it, it’s too much to swallow.
SophistiCat,
Thank you very much for a very illuminating comment — this definitely bears thinking about! On your view, the low or inscrutable value of the probability of P(R|N&E) is a defeater for R only if one accepts Plantinga’s ‘proper function’ view of warrant to begin with — otherwise, the value of that probability, though perhaps alarming, wouldn’t work as an undercutting defeater (indeed, an undefeatable defeater) in the first place.
But of course that is precisely what all the machinery of the scientific establishment is attempting to do.
I’m biased, but as far as I can tell, philosophy and theology cannot do anything except evaluate their own verbal emissions for internal consistency. There’s nothing wrong with analyzing statements for self-consistency, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.