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.
Or you might be a botanist considering evolutionary explanations for morphological diversity in broad-leaved trees.
William J. Murray,
What a huge pile of irrelevance. What does any of that have to do with objectivity?
What you’re essentially saying is that assuming something makes it true, absolutely true. So I don’t care if one assumes truth, morality, free will or whatever, or even if one MUST assume them to even talk about those things, which is debatable BTW, presuppositional knowledge is not based on absolutes no matter how hard you try to convince yourself.
If you do not assume the law of non-contradiction, you have nothing to argue about.
Trivially dismissable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic
If you do not assume the principles of sound reason, you have nothing to argue with. If logic is not assumed to be a causally independent, authoritative arbiter of true statements, there’s no reason to apply it
So when one works under alternative sets of postulates in different fields, one is not using sound reason? Absurd. And still doesn’t make logic postulates absolutely true. Just like you can use euclidean postulates for certain fields, and euclidean postulates act as “authoritative arbiter of true statements” for those studies, doesn’t mean one can’t dispense of the parallel postulate the very next day to work on some hyperbolic geometry model. Do you understand that?
If you do not assume libertarian free will, you have no one to argue against
And no omniscient god with foreknowledge either. Actually god’s foreknowledge negates his own free will. Besides, there’s no need to invoke a god to invoke free will and is perfectly compatible with naturalism, unlike again, the purported attributes of god.
If you do not assume morality to be an objective commodity, you have no reason to argue in the first place
Because you say so?
So yeah, tell me about how making assumptions on absolutes using our fallible minds does actually make all those assumptions absolutely true.
And plenty arguments on how those attributes are incompatible with many of the assumptions made in the arguments for the existence of a creator. Actually most Christians, when confronted with arguments like theological fatalism, prefer to cut down on god’s superpowers in order to retain their “god given” freebies. “Oh, so omniscience and free will don’t work together? well, maybe god doesn’t know exactly everything, because I totally must have my free will to tell atheists why they’re wrong in rejecting the god I just put down a notch.”
…and of course, making up more stuff about god’s omnipotence and all that is still eons departed from the myths in a book, so you still have a long long way to go to rationally justify your faith, whatever that is
The fact that we have different theories about how the mind functions and how we arrive at reliable knowledge of reality does not entail that we differ in our use of normative terms, nor does it entail my use of normative terms is in any illicit, mistaken, misguided, or meaningless.
As usual, your interpretation of my views is largely a matter of fanciful fabrication rather than informed by genuine understanding of what I do and do not think is true. Just like WJM, you prefer to win arguments by declaring yourself victor at the outset and pronouncing your opponent as beyond the pale of reasoned discourse. I don’t do that to you, so why do you do that to me?
All that the EAAN is supposed to show is that naturalism is self-refuting, hence irrational to accept.
It utterly fails to do this, for reasons that have been exhaustively dissected at TSZ and elsewhere. The whole argument is dead on arrival.
And yes, it doesn’t show anything about which conception of God would be the right one to adopt.
The EAAN is designed to show that it is irrational to be a naturalist or atheist. He has other arguments designed to show that it is rational to believe in God. He does not accept any of the arguments of classical theism; Plantinga clearly rejects the cosmological argument favored by Feser and Craig, as well as the ontological argument, the argument from design, and so forth.
Plantinga does think that it is not irrational to believe in God because a belief in God is a “properly basic belief”, just as our belief in other (finite, human) minds is a properly basic belief.
As far as I can tell, this argument utterly fails to capture what is known about both the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and the cognitive science of attributing mental states. In what we do actually know about how we understand each other as cognitive and conative agents, beings with their own perspectives on reality, there are a lot of empirical and material conditions that have to be satisfied that simply cannot be satisfied with regard to God. The analogy simply does not and cannot work.
So while I think Plantinga is correct to say that all the arguments of classical theism fail to establish that God exists, I don’t think that his proposal can fare any better.
That’s independent of whether the EAAN is a successful argument or not, though I think it is an utter disaster.
Which goes to show that even a stain like Plantinga can be relatively wise when compared to such utter shits as Feser and Craig.
KN,
It’s good that you’ve reached that conclusion. You started out with a much more favorable opinion of the EAAN:
keiths,
Yes, it can take a while to really see what has gone wrong with a philosophical argument.
Plantinga is a better philosopher than Feser or Craig. That doesn’t endear me to his ethics or politics any better.
But none of us use them. How about the Law of Identity, is it also dispensable?
I like the way you put this, but is this an argument against direct perception?
I think it’s too early to say with confidence. Paraconsistent logic programming is still in its infancy. Computer programs built on paraconsistent logics might be extremely useful in the future.
And of course Buddhist logic has been built on rejection of the law of non-contradiction for almost two thousand years, since the groundbreaking work of Nagarjuna in the first century A.D.
Perhaps. Nietzsche was probably the first major philosopher to revive Heraclitean flux, a philosophy of pure becoming, in the history of Western philosophy. I’m not saying that Nietzsche is right about this — I have my own criticisms of Nietzsche, as I’ve made evident many times here — but it’s not clear to me that it would be insane to reject the law of identity. It would involve a new way of talking and thinking. I don’t think that Aristotle (or Kant, or Hegel, or whomever) has decisively figured the necessary constraints of all possible intelligibility. There are no fences to be put around human creativity, including the creation of new vocabularies with new rules.
Now, I would like you to back up this with some example. Did I misrepresent your epistemology somehow? If yes, then sorry about it, and I would like to know in what way I did it.
As to your “normative” talk, well, it would normally be below comment, but I will take this up next. Answer the first thing first though. If you have no example, then I did not misrepresent you and everything stands. Also, I did not declare myself winner. I only demonstrated that we are not playing the same game. Thus there can be no winner here.
It’s an argument against direct realism, i.e. against the view that we perceive objects as they are. The reality is that we perceive objects through the senses, in the manner and to the extent that the senses work. Direct realism is flatly false. Some more nuanced epistemology is called for, because reality as we perceive it is undeniably intermediated, not direct.
In order to have any meaningful talk about reality, there must be some proper definition of misperception (e.g. hallucinations) as distinguished from (normal, true) perception. KN failed to give it. He equated misperception with non-perception.
Human creativity, new vocabularies, and new rules are not possible without the Law of Identity. The very argument you’re using against it presupposes it.
Interesting.
I have argued that perception is direct. But I avoid the term “direct realism”. I don’t think we perceive objects “as they are”, because I don’t believe that “as they are” has any actual meaning. The closest we can come is to say that we perceive objects as we perceive them.
The language of perception and ideation seems to have been frozen in the 19th century. This kind of discussion makes no sense to me.
I don’t see why.
KN can claim all he likes that different rules or different words will change this, but he is simply mistaken. Nor can human creativity change this.
It does not seem relevant. It does not seem to be the least bit relevant.
As a mathematician, I’m a fictionalist. So I don’t believe that mathematical entities actually exist. That doesn’t stop me from doing mathematics.
More to the point, I take KN to have been referring to possible inventions in the way that we use natural language for reasoning. Natural language is not a logic calculus. Natural language is not a formal language. Reasoning is not necessarily the application of logic.
Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Formal logic for maybe three thousand years.
Percentage of people who could pass a freshman test in formal logic, maybe one.
You don’t do mathematics with nothing, Neil. All you’re saying is that you can do mathematics without being hindered by your philosophy, from which it does not follow that your philosophy is coherent.
reasoning:
: the process of thinking about something in a logical way in order to form a conclusion or judgment
: the ability of the mind to think and understand things in a logical way
I don’t know where you found those definitions. But they are bunk.
In any case, this is beside the point. Your own argument (a few posts above) for the law of identity use a quote from Aristotle. Your argument amounts to: You cannot use Aristotle’s logic without the law of identity.
KN would probably grant that. He was arguing that there are alternatives to Aristotle’s logic.
Apparently classical logic postulates are Mung’s god… there would be no truth without them
Actually I quoted from an online article that mentioned Aristotle in the title. You just weren’t paying attention.
I found them in a dictionary. If you are going to insist on making up your own vocabulary please let us know. I for one can’t wait to see how you do it without the Law of Identity.
This doesn’t even make sense. Would you care to try again?
This looks quite badly confused to me. No direct realist — J. J. Gibson or Alva Noe, for example — denies that we perceive things by means of our senses.
Roy Wood Sellars (in many ways the founder of critical realism in philosophy of perception long before Wilfrid Sellars and Davidson independently made this view fashionable) put the point this way: the question is whether what we perceive is sense-data or objects, not how we perceive objects. Do we perceive objects by way of our senses, or do we perceive only sensations themselves? The former allows for realism; the latter leads to phenomenalism or perhaps idealism.
I would put the point slightly differently from Roy Wood Sellars (in large part because I am motivated to avoid the problems that I find in Wilfrid Sellars’s late philosophy of perception). I would say that living, sentient animals directly perceive affordances and solicitations in their relevant environments, and they perceive those affordances and solicitations by way of how they act in those environments.
(“Affordances” are features of an environment that are detectable by an animal’s sensory receptors and can make a difference to how the motor schema is modified in order to “latch onto” the affordances. “Solicitations” are affordances that an animal is occurrently aware of experiencing.)
There’s some interesting discussion about whether affordances are normative. I think that they must be, but there are competing views I need to get clear on here. When I say that affordances are normative, what I mean is that animals can grasp those affordances correctly or incorrectly — they can engage with the features of their environments successfully or unsuccessfully.
Now, it is certainly true that perceiving affordances involves a continual feedback between “bottom-up” and “top-down” information in the animal’s central nervous system. That is, information flows both from “higher” levels of cortical organization towards both “sensory” and “motor” areas and also from the bottom-up as the play of energies across an animal’s sensory receptors modifies the information that propagates across neuronal populations.
This distinction between top-down and bottom-up information processing is a neurocomputationally-informed descendant of Erik’s distinction between “the senses” and “the intellect” . But whereas Erik has only those two “levels”, so to speak, my model has two different directions in a multi-level hierarchy. This hierarchy allows the organism to extract information about the distal causal structures of the world from the proximal energetic flux active at its sensory receptors. By continually engaging with the affordances, and modifying its own sensory uptake by actively engaging with those affordances, the animal manages to skilfully cope with its environment.
Hence, on the naturalistic theory of cognition I’m lightly sketching here, cognition is reliable if it allows the animal to successfully cope with the affordances and solicitations that it perceives in its environment. This is strikingly at odds with Plantinga’s characterization of reliable cognition. But my conception of reliable cognition is one that naturalists themselves would find congenial, and Plantinga’s is not.
I grant that I was too hasty in assimilating hallucinations and dreams into the same category, but neither looks like a promising candidate for “misperception”. “Misperception” would be, for example, something looking orange (when it is in fact red) because the light is not quite right (and one doesn’t realize it), or seeing a car as coming faster (or slower) than it really is, or not seeing a baseball’s trajectory correctly (and failing to hit it, catch it, or avoid being hit by it).
I would imagine that Erik would say that “the intellect” is at work in all these cases. To some extent I would agree with him, in that I do think that perception always involves some “top-down” processing. Perception and action are intimately involved because both are different aspects of the movement of information across a bi-directional multi-level hierarchy of neuron populations, all of which behave in complex dynamical ways.
But I would avoid the term “intellect” here, just as I avoid “the senses”. I think it is a mistake to confuse the top-down information processing that one finds in animal cognitive systems generally, which allows those systems to cope successfully (more or less) with the affordances in their environments, with the very distinct kinds of discursively articulated understanding that seem to be unique to Homo sapiens (though with evident similarities in how great apes think and reason).
Here I would focus on how discursive practices are a distinct kind of embodied coping, and one that transforms neurocomputational processing in quite striking ways, because language makes possible a “top-to-top” information transfer without which collective intentionality and cooperation would be impossible.
(For the details I’m drawing on here, see Action In Perception by Alva Noe, Being There by Andy Clark, Reconstructing the Cognitive World by Michael Wheeler, Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark, and Articulating the World by Joe Rouse.)
There are many dictionaries. And most of them provide multiple definitions.
You did not provide a link or a citation. I’m left guessing that you may have cherry-picked the particular definitions that fit your own opinion.
One wonders what possible use there could be in mathematics for the Turned E.
Why don’t you try setting a good example for everyone by applying the good faith rule?
Mung,
One does? Which “one” is that?
Maybe it’s the same guy WJM talks about re: FSCI etc?
The one who doesn’t believe that mathematical entities actually exist. The one who manages to “do mathematics” with entities that don’t exist.
entity: a thing with distinct and independent existence.
Well crap, i probably cherry-picked that one too.
Mung,
I’m pretty sure that Neil believes that mathematical symbols exist, and that he sees a use for them, Mung. Including the Turned E.
Yes, quite right.
I’m wondering why mung asks what that symbol is used for, while providing a link that answers his question.
I’m not sure Neil uses symbols or would know what they are for. I’ll let you and Neil explain what you mean by symbol, and why they would be of use in mathematics, since I get accused of cherry-picking when I go to the dictionary.
When would Neil ever use the symbol “Turned E”? Does it help keep his coffee hot?
For all I know Neil denies that there are two prime numbers between 15 and 20. For all i know you agree with him. Doesn’t mean I have to buy into such nonsense.
It was a test, Neil. You flunked, even though you were given the answer.
Do you completely avoid using that symbol, you know, because of what it represents? Or do you pretend that it doesn’t carry the meaning that it carries.
For those who are following along, because you probably weren’t going to hear it from Neil, who doesn’t believe that mathematical entities exist, ∃ (check out the html for that, lol), is itself a mathematical symbol used to indicate existence (there exists; there is; there are).
What Mung is asserting as obvious truth can in fact be taken up and turned into a very interesting problem: what exactly is the relationship between existential quantification and ontological commitment? Does the former imply (or strictly imply) the latter?
Some philosophers have thought that the solution to interminable metaphysical quarrels is rather to say that existential quantification is all there is to ontology. Quine, for example, makes that one of his central doctrines! It is also central to the resurgence of analytic metaphysics post-Quine with Kripke, Lewis, Armstrong, and others.
Notice, however, the result of this approach. Now everything that can appear as existentially quantified variable in a regimented sentence is then part of the ontology: numbers, planets, God, Spider-Man, universals, hallucinations, you name it. It’s a maximally liberal criterion of ontological commitment — if you want to know what’s real, just take whatever people talk about, regiment their sentences into first-order predicate logic, and there you go. Ontology: done.
It is not entirely clear whether this move should be resisted, or if so, how.
Is that’s a round-a-bout way of saying Quine would also think that “doing mathematics” with objects that had no real existence was nonsensical?
First, let me straighten out Mung’s confusion.
I take “exist” to have a special meaning in mathematics. I have no difficulty saying that there exist solutions to
. Roughly speaking, that means that mathematicians are willing to contemplate and refer to the fictional entities involved. Fictionalism doesn’t rule out talk of existence as fictions.
I’m inclined to say that there isn’t any relationship of importance. But then, I’m also inclined to think that ontology is a mistake.
Mung,
You’re being overliteral again.
The ‘∃’ symbol no more implies true ontological existence than the statement “Harry Potter attends Hogwarts” does.
Let me clear up Neil’s confusion. When he says that he doesn’t believe that mathematical entities actually exist he means to say that they do exist as mathematical entities but they do not exist in the same sense as other things that exist. He can’t say why not, though.
The central claims of mathematics are unassailable by all pertinent mathematical, scientific and commonsensical standards. Any philosophical challenge to these claims is thus a sceptical challenge of a certain special sort, one that depends on bringing distinctively philosophical principles to bear on questions that are not themselves purely philosophical. Sceptical challenges of this sort are notoriously weak. When speculative philosophy contradicts settled science or common sense, the normal response – and, I believe, the reasonable response – is to suspect that it is the philosopher who is mistaken.
– Gideon Rosen. The reality of mathematical objects. In Meaning in Mathematics.
No; I think that rather Quine would say that there’s no sense of “real existence” other than existential quantification.
I don’t see what the point is of posting that long quote from Rosen. I can post long quotes from fictionalists about mathematics (Hartry Field, Hilary Putnam) but why bother?
KN,
If Mung weren’t quoting someone else, he’d have to make his own argument, and where (I rhetorically ask) would that leave him?
Mung:
Let me clear up Mung’s confusion.
Mung:
No, he stated his view quite clearly:
Mung:
That part you sort of got right. Specifically, he said:
They are fictional entities with a fictional existence. They aren’t real.
Mung,
We can talk about the number 17 and about Harry Potter without committing ourselves to the existence of either.
We can say that 17 is prime and that Harry Potter attends Hogwarts. We can say that 17 is not even and that Harry is not Hermione’s father. We can even say that Bung is wrong if he asserts that Harry wears square glasses and that 17 is 4 squared, even if Bung, Harry, Hermione, Hogwarts, 17, and 4 are all fictional entities.
Think about it.
dazz said:
You know next to nothing about my beliefs, yet you presume to tell me how far I have to justify them logically? ROFL!! You’re arguing with a template you carry around in your own mind. It has nothing to do with me or my beliefs.
It doesn’t matter what myths you believe in and I couldn’t care less. Of course since none of them can be rationally explained every theist can pick and choose whatever myths they want, so there’s essentially a god for every theist. I can and I am dismissing them all on the same grounds, but of course the point flew way over your head for the emptieth time