Saturday, March 25, 2023

Putnam on reason, reductionism, and relativism

Naturalism holds that what is real is what can be accounted for in terms acceptable to science.  More or less the orthodoxy in contemporary intellectual life, naturalism is a purportedly less crude descendent of what was traditionally known as materialism.  For the materialist, matter alone is real, so that anything that is both real and seems to be different from matter (mind, for example) must somehow really be material after all.  In modern times, matter is often conceived of on the model of particles in motion, so that “materialism” connotes the idea that everything real is really nothing but particles in motion. 

Not all naturalists would put things that way, because the “special sciences” (i.e. everything other than fundamental physics) make reference to entities that, it is widely acknowledged, cannot be smoothly reduced to collections of particles.  Hence for many naturalists, something is real if it can be fitted into the ontology of at least some special science or other, even if not strictly reducible to the particles recognized by fundamental physics.  Hence, when philosophers speak of the project of “naturalizing” this or that phenomenon (mind, moral value, or whatever), what they mean is showing that it can be accounted for in terms of the concepts recognized by some science. 

The late, great Hilary Putnam made an influential contribution to the project of naturalizing the mind with his version of functionalism.  But in his later work he grew highly critical of this project.  One example among many would be his essay “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” which is available in his Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3.  To be more precise, what he criticizes in this essay is the view that our capacity for knowledge, specifically, can be naturalized.  (In other work, he developed important criticisms of naturalistic theories of other aspects of the mind, such as his own earlier functionalist theory and naturalistic theories of intentionality.)

Putnam’s specific targets in this essay are evolutionary epistemology, Alvin Goldman’s reliabilism, W. V. Quine’s naturalized epistemology – and, most interestingly, cultural relativism, which he perceptively characterizes as a kind of naturalism. 

Against evolutionary epistemology, Putnam objects that natural selection favors survival value rather than truth or even rational acceptability, and that there is no essential connection between the former and the latter.  A belief could be true or rational and yet be the opposite of conducive to survival, and it could facilitate survival while being false and contrary to canons of rationality.  Hence appeal to natural selection cannot suffice to explain our capacity for knowledge.  Variations on this sort of objection have been developed by Alvin Plantinga and others, and I have discussed it elsewhere (for example, here and here).

The basic idea of reliabilism is that a belief is rational if it was produced by a reliable method for arriving at beliefs.  Against this, Putnam deploys the following example.  Suppose, he says, that the Dalai Lama is infallible on matters of faith and morals, so that any beliefs accepted on the basis of his authority would be produced by a method that is 100% reliable.  Suppose further that one of the beliefs a person adopted this way was the belief that the Dalai Lama is infallible on matters of faith and morals.  Obviously, this person’s belief would in that case have been adopted on the basis of circular reasoning.  But reliabilism would have to conclude that it is nevertheless rational, because it would have been produced by a reliable method.

Quine’s naturalized epistemology, Putnam says, entails the elimination of all normative notions from the theory of knowledge (even if Quine later resisted this characterization).  It abandons considerations about what we are justified in believing, warranted in asserting, have a good reason to think, etc. and simply focuses on how we do in fact happen to come to believe whatever we do.  But consistently to eschew normative notions would require also abandoning the notion of truth itself.  Hence a consistent naturalized epistemology would have to deny that any position is true, including naturalized epistemology itself.

Naturally, Putnam says much more than this about these views, but most interesting, again, is what he says about cultural relativism.  Cultural relativism holds that there are no criteria of truth, justification, rationality, etc. that transcend one’s culture (or one’s language, or one’s historical epoch, or what have you).  What is true, justified, rational, etc. relative to one culture’s standards will not be true, justified, rational, etc. relative to another’s.  And that is all that can be said.  To ask “But which culture’s standards are the right ones?” would presuppose that there is some neutral or objective higher-level standard by reference to which the standards of different cultures could be judged, and that is precisely what the cultural relativist denies.  We cannot get outside our cultures and adjudicate between them from some culture-independent point of view.  If it seems that we can, that is itself merely because we are looking at things from the point of view of a culture that believes in culture-transcendent standards.

Putnam suggests that this is essentially just another variation on naturalism, even if it is not often recognized as such.  He writes:

Cultural relativists are not, in their own eyes, scientistic or ‘physicalistic’.  They are likely to view materialism and scientism as just the hang-ups of one particular cultural epoch.  If I count them as ‘naturalized epistemologists’ it is because their doctrine is, none the less, a product of the same deference to the claims of nature, the same desire for harmony with the world version of some science, as physicalism.  The difference in style and tone is thus explained: the physicalist’s paradigm of science is a hard science, physics (as the term ‘physicalism’ suggests); the cultural relativist’s paradigm is a soft science: anthropology, or linguistics, or psychology, or history, as the case may be.  That reason is whatever the norms of the local culture determine it to be is a naturalist view inspired by the social sciences, including history. (p. 235)

Putnam notes that the most important cultural relativists often deny that they are cultural relativists.  He cites Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as examples of thinkers whose views he thinks in fact entail cultural relativism even if they do not characterize them that way. 

As Putnam emphasizes, cultural relativism simply cannot be rescued from the charge of incoherence.  Even to formulate their thesis, cultural relativists need, as it were, to stand outside the perspective of all cultures and claim to observe that there is no culture-transcendent perspective outside of them – which is, needless to say, a self-contradictory exercise.  Or if they consistently eschew such a culture-independent perspective, they will have to conclude that cultural relativism itself is nothing more than the expression of the cultural relativist’s own parochial perspective, which no one else has any reason to take seriously. 

Putnam takes relativism to be “a far more dangerous cultural tendency than materialism” (p. 235).  Neither view can account for knowledge and rationality, but materialism at least tends to pay lip service to them.  Cultural relativism, by contrast, reflects a “deep irrationalism,” and also encourages a frivolous intellectual mindset according to which “the deep questions of philosophy are not deep at all… that philosophy, as traditionally understood, is a silly enterprise” (pp. 235-36).  This is inevitable given that philosophy is ultimately concerned precisely with the objective standards of truth and rationality that relativism rejects.

Developing the point that relativism is incoherent, Putnam notes an interesting parallel with methodological solipsism.  This approach (associated, for example, with Rudolf Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt) analyzes all reality into constructions out of one’s own experiences.  For example, tables, chairs, rocks, and trees are on this view nothing more than collections of the experiences I have of these things.  This might sound like solipsism full stop – the view that I and my experiences are all that really exist – but the difference is that the methodological solipsist holds that each of us can carry out the same analysis for ourselves, which implies that there are subjects of experience other than oneself.

The trouble, Putnam notes, is that this is incoherent.  If I regard everything as a construction out of my experiences, then it follows that all other people and their experiences are merely constructions out of my experiences.  For example, you are nothing more than a construction out of my perceptual experiences of your body, and your experiences are nothing more than a construction out of my perceptual experiences of you talking about your experiences, behaving in certain ways, and so on.  Hence there really are no other subjects of experience, when the view is worked out consistently.  Methodological solipsism collapses into solipsism full stop.

Now something analogous is true of cultural relativism, as Putnam argues.  At first it seems as if the cultural relativist recognizes a plurality of cultural perspectives and regards them all as equally valid.  But this is an illusion.  For if there are no criteria of truth, justification, rationality, etc. over and above cultural perspectives, then to be consistent, the cultural relativist must regard the criteria of truth, justification, rationality, etc. that characterize his own cultural perspective as the only genuine criteria there are.  For if he is consistent, he will have to hold that he can no more transcend his own perspective than anyone else can.  To be sure, he will note that others have different perspectives, but he will have to regard them as simply mistaken perspectives, because they conflict with his own perspective and, again, he can have no criteria for truth, justification, rationality, etc. other than his own. 

In this way, Putnam concludes, just as methodological solipsism collapses into solipsism without qualification, cultural relativism collapses into cultural imperialism.  The cultural relativist must regard his own perspective as the only correct perspective.  Hence he is not really a relativist at all.

Putnam notes that there are two opposite extreme errors to be avoided vis-à-vis the relationship between reason and culture, and both neglect the fact that reason is immanent to culture in one respect while transcending it in another.  On the one hand, there are those who have too simplistic and exaggerated a view of the independence of reason from contingent cultural and historical circumstances.  Putnam cites logical positivism as an example.  But the cultural relativist goes to the opposite extreme of entirely submerging reason in culture and historical circumstance.  The boring but sober middle ground position is that while our rationality is always exercised in ways that reflect concrete cultural and historical circumstances, it can nevertheless stand back from them and evaluate them critically by reference to criteria that transcend those circumstances.  We cannot coherently deny this.

Though Putnam does not note it, there is a parallel here to the Aristotelian conception of the human intellect and its relationship to our bodily nature.  On the one hand, the Aristotelian rejects the Platonic-Cartesian view that the mind is radically independent of the body, and its concepts built into it independently of experience of the concrete natural world.  Rather, there is nothing in the intellect without prior sensory experience, and even after the intellect is furnished by experience it continually needs the assistance of sensation and mental imagery even when entertaining the most abstract notions.  On the other hand, the Aristotelian rejects the materialist view that human beings are entirely corporeal.  The formation of concepts involves a kind of dematerialization of the mind’s objects, stripping form entirely out of its concrete material embodiment and considering it in isolation.  And the intellect can do this precisely because it is itself an immaterial power.

Though Putnam has himself emphasized the way that the abandonment of the Aristotelian-Scholastic conception of the mind’s relationship to the world poses problems for modern theories of mind, he has also stopped short of advocating a return to it.  But one of its advantages is precisely that it accounts for how reason can be both immanent to and transcendent of culture and history in the ways Putnam has noted.

Related posts:

Putnam on causation, intentionality, and Aristotle

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part I

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part II

The absolute truth about relativism

118 comments:

  1. F. A. Hayek's position that all knowledge is based on traditional knowledge does logically imply cultural relativism. If tradition is something holy, then it is untouchable, and if it is untouchable then it can't be analyzed by its nature, and if it can't be analyzed by its nature then it follows that a human's reason can never break through his inherited tradition, which is the definition of cultural relativism.

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    1. Hayek would probably be okay with that, he saw the human mind as pretty limited.

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  2. While related to only a minor point in the OP, I've been musing on evolutionary theories of mind and their implications for a robust naturalism. In particular, it seems that natural teleology of some kind must enter into the equation (which I realize Ed has been harping on forever). Consider a stripped down Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism:

    1. If naturalism and evolutionary theory are true, we have little reason to trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties.
    2. But we can trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties.
    3. Therefore, it is not the case that naturalism and evolutionary theory are both true.

    You clearly cannot deny 2 without falling right into universal skepticism, so those who wish to avoid the conclusion must deny 1. The problem is, to say that our cognitive faculties are reliable on a naturalistic evolutionary account seems to require that evolution is naturally directed toward the development of reliable cognition. This itself would be an instance of natural teleology.

    While one of Ed's consistent points over the years is that you cannot have science without teleology, this is a conclusion many resist, since natural teleology is indicative of an overall metaphysical worldview which tends to be unfriendly toward robust naturalism.

    So in short, naturalism leads either to skepticism or to natural teleology. Either way, there seems to be trouble for naturalistic (and specifically evolutionary) theories of mind.

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    1. The answer to your dilemma is that an organism that is evolved or designed for survival will with 100% certainty develop a model of the truth. This is a theorem in cybernetics, called the Good Regulator Theorem.

      Wikipedia - Good Regulator

      So no, the dilemma of an evolved organism learning "useful lies" in order to survive, as Putnam puts forward as a hypothetical, when viewed through cybernetics, has been formally proven not to happen. Lies have short legs.

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    2. ccmnxc,
      "Consider a stripped down Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism:"
      "1. If naturalism and evolutionary theory are true, we have little reason to trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties."
      False. The absurdity of this assertion is perhaps most clear in mammals. To reproduce a mammal must be able to use its cognitive faculties to differentiate, for example, a mate of its own species as opposed to any other similar species or even non-living object. If you as a mammal mate with trees and rocks and sheep and dogs, well, you will not successfully reproduce.

      If you cannot tell the difference between food and non-food, and you spend all day eating sand and dirt, again, you will not reproduce because you will die.

      If you reach for some berries but you keep missing them because your vision has the accuracy of a fun house mirror room you will not survive to reproduce. Even if you are able to pick the berries, if you cannot tell the difference between poison and eatable plants you will not survive to reproduce. Your senses and judgements must be highly representative of reality to survive and reproduce in the harsh complexities of the pre-civilization real world.

      In the real world environment of harsh complexity a complex organism such as a mammal can only survive and reproduce if its cognitive faculties are able to provide sensory stimulations and decision making that very closely tracks with reality.

      "2. But we can trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties."
      Trust of cognitive faculties is provisional and in degrees. To survive and reproduce as a species our cognitive faculties must map to reality to a sufficient, but not perfect, degree on average.

      For example vision. Many inaccuracies have been identified in our visual system, yet we can see to fine detail and view a representation of the real world external to ourselves with generally sufficient acuity for survival and reproduction.

      "3. Therefore, it is not the case that naturalism and evolutionary theory are both true."
      Since both premises are so badly formed the conclusion not supported, dare I say preposterous.

      "You clearly cannot deny 2 without falling right into universal skepticism, so those who wish to avoid the conclusion must deny 1."
      Have you heard of Rene Descartes and cogito ergo sum?

      Trust in our senses is provisional and in degrees, subject to corrections.

      "to say that our cognitive faculties are reliable on a naturalistic evolutionary account seems to require that evolution is naturally directed toward the development of reliable cognition. This itself would be an instance of natural teleology."
      No, merely the illusion or superficial appearance of purpose or design or direction.

      Biological evolution by natural selection merely has the appearance of direction. That appearance of direction is a human projection, a post hoc abstraction.

      If you look at a snowflake you might be tempted to think water has the goal of forming a beautiful crystal. Actually, what happened is a lot of water molecules were bouncing around in the atmosphere chaotically and as they bounced into each other they started sticking together and eventually a trillion trillion of them got stuck together with none of them having any idea of the overall shape of how all trillion trillion were stuck together, and then you came along later and imposed your abstraction of design post hoc on this assemblage of water molecules.

      Evolution through natural selection is like that.

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    3. Grognak,

      That's fine. It's just that the "way out" of the dilemma that you propose is simply to take the other horn, namely that natural teleology is operative in the emergence of reliable cognition for animals. Such a position intimates a metaphysical picture that naturalism doesn't easily sit with, since Aristotelianism (or something like it) is often contrasted with a naturalized view of the world.

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    4. Grognak offers: The answer to your dilemma is that an organism that is evolved or designed for survival will with 100% certainty develop a model of the truth.

      And as support, he points to the Good Regulator Theorem, of cybernetics. While I suspect that the "theorem" is rife with some serious ambiguities and unrigorous premises, I'll let that slide. Let me instead cite what the theorem actually claims:

      That is, any regulator that is maximally simple among optimal regulators must behave as an image of that system under a homomorphism;

      In order to apply that to us and our real-world situation, one would have to claim (1) that the evolutionary forces that produced us satisfy the criteria of "maximally simple among optimal regulators"; and that (2) our brains and minds are sufficiently close to an "end product" of that system to declare that we are also maximally simple among optimal regulators. Which, I suspect, is unprovable. Or, at least, that it has not been proven, and nobody has the least idea how it could be proven.

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    5. You may be interested in Donald Hoffmans paper on this -> https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/PerceptualEvolution.pdf

      A bit of background here -> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/

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    6. @Grognak

      For the same reason that AI alignment problems exist, I don't think you can generalize the Good Regulator Theorem to say that evolutionary processes necessarily develop models of truth.

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    7. “ False. The absurdity of this assertion is perhaps most clear in mammals. To reproduce a mammal must be able to use its cognitive faculties to differentiate, for example, a mate of its own species as opposed to any other similar species or even non-living object. If you as a mammal mate with trees and rocks and sheep and dogs, well, you will not successfully reproduce.”

      @StarsustPsyche, the fact that you make this statement only proves your own lack of creativity. Your justification is ultimately circular as your statements about the relationship between cognitive faculties in mammals and the outside reality come from your own cognitive faculties.

      Dream a little grander, darling. We actually already have an entire genre of fiction that explores one possible way in which our cognitive faculties might be optimized *against* giving us an accurate model of objective reality: lovecraftian horror. People that go insane after coming into contact with something in the vicinity of a Great Old One don’t reproduce very well. You can’t make the a priori assertion that there can’t be any aspect of reality that is fundamentally at odds with a rational creature. If there were, it would be a very important evolutionary strategy to not allow that part of reality to be made aware to rational creatures’ conscious minds.

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    8. @ccmnxc

      Play Devil Advocate here: can't a naturalist defend that the human mind needs a certain level of coherence with reality in order to function even if it can't be that realiable outside of most pratical matters?

      For instance, perhaps we have a lot of false but useful tendencies like tendencies to develop morality and religion, realms of more abstract dimension, but if these tendencies were so bad at the level of wrecking our perception of the world around us or our bodies them we would just not live at all.

      The average scientificist and moralistic naturalist would be screwed by even this, but a more modest thinker like a Hayek would probably be okay.

      Like, Plantinga point is a good one but his examples are just bad. The argument seems less skepticism generator than it is said.

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    9. Simon,
      Your cited papers can be summed up
      1.Much woo.
      2.More woo.

      For example, this from your second link:
      "The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality"
      Really? You have, if you are typical, stereoscopic vision of high accuracy. You can see and judge shapes and distances. Or do you suppose your view of the inside of your house is all just a distorted baseless dream?

      A typical auto mechanic can pick the correct size wrench just by looking at the head of the bolt. How does that happen if perceptions are "nothing like realty"?

      OP (linked to Schliesser on the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism)
      Alvin Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism” (EAAN)

      This sort of pseudo scientific religiously motivated scientific evolution denialism has largely faded from notoriety in current events, but that period, say 1993 (EAAN) to Feser's 2013 linked piece saw the likes of Alvin Plantinga, Kent Hovind, William Dembski, and Ken Ham pumping out massive volumes of junk science, absurd arguments, religious propaganda, outright lies, and most especially scientific evolution denialism.

      The necessity of the senses and our beliefs corresponding with reality is obvious and simple, especially for mammals and other actively mobile animals.

      To navigate in 3 dimensions in a complex and ever changing environment requires accurately sensing the spatial relationships in that environment.

      Avoidance of hazards such as predators requires senses and reactions that map very closely and accurately to reality.

      Obtaining food, shelter, mates and all the necessities to survive and reproduce requires sensing reality to select from a vastly complex environment only that which is beneficial and to avoid that which is not.

      Truth is that which comports with reality.

      The reality of living in the wild is harsh and unforgiving. If you cannot differentiate the truth between food, predators, mates, shelter, danger, and safety versus all the rest in your environment you do not stand much chance of successfully reproducing.

      EAAN belongs on the trash heap along with nonsense about irreducible complexity, the impossibility of information gain, a six thousand year old Earth, the Biblical flood carving out the Grand Canyon, the rhetorical question as to if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys, and all the rest of such junk assertions.

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    10. @Anonymous I don't think the alignment problem is unsolvable, and the Good Regulator Theorem states that a system with survival as a core value will develop a successful model of the truth, not a correct model of the truth (homomorphism = successful, isomorphism = correct; the paper proved that the map is a homomorphism, not an isomorphism).

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    11. Stardusty. I’m not sure you are thinking this through. Let’s imagine the reality is 11 dimensions as M Theory proposes. Our senses only seem to be aware of the three spatial dimensions, and we recognise a one way movement through time. Now some creatures have evolved not to hear sound, some don’t see light. Instead they only sense what they need to sense for their role within nature.

      We know that physical matter is mostly empty space. We know that the smallest components of it don’t have physical properties unless entangled/observed. We know that from the perspective of the photons through which we get this “stereoscopic vision of high accuracy”, there is no time and no space (as is the case for all massless particles). We know from relativity that all objects actually change their properties (size, mass etc) depending on where you view them from.

      What you are doing is taking the information you get from the senses we happen to have developed in this corner of the universe where we originated, with low gravitational effects, slow velocities etc, and decided that this is a full picture. In fact it could be the equivalent of a pac-man game, where you are just so used to munching pills and running from ghosts that you assume you’re seeing the full picture…

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    12. It sure is curious that StardustPsyche sees fit to assign his or her position the theoretical virtues of being "obvious and simple" after the way they were arguing on the platonism thread a few posts down.

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    13. Talmid,

      The EAAN as I'd advance it would call into question cognition moreso than perception. So I'm fine granting perception is more-or-less accurate.

      But I don't think the naturalist would be able to consistently take that approach. Any origins theory which casts skepticism on high-level thinking and abstraction (even while trying to maintain basically reliable perception and practical action) is always going to be self-defeating, since any such account is necessarily going to be both fairly theoretical and quite abstract.

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    14. @ccmncx

      Good point that the most necessary faculty to pratical life is perception, but would not cognition need to be capable of be good at finding reliable patterns of the environment and of other beings?

      A naturalist would need to grant that cognition produced by blind evolutionary history would suck at most theoretical work, pretty much created to believe lies, but it would need to be capable of predict and adapt well if the human will survive.

      It seems that the naturalist would even be capable of defending his scientific theory on human cognition origins in a instrumentalist way. Perhaps it does not reflect reality, but it is useful enough that it is "true".

      The average naturalist would not like this, if he could understand the view, but a clever, like Hayek, Nietzsche or Santayana, would see the appeal.

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    15. SP's (and Grognak's?) responses to EAANs seem to presuppose that, under evolutionistic reductionism, we have any reason for thinking that these optimising factors actually obtain in reality qua such.

      However, on such an account, it seems, all one is warranted in affirming is that thinking that one needs to access reality to evade predators is possibly conducive to surviving long enough to reproduce, not that it's actually true. The same goes for there being predators etc.

      Dr. Feser discusses this in his Philosophy of Mind book.

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    16. Simon
      "I’m not sure you are thinking this through"
      Fair enough, let's consider EAAN a bit more thoroughly then.

      Recall, EAAN holds that our actual capacity to sense and determine truth cannot be accounted for absent the intervention of god, that is, EAAN holds that biological evolution as it is scientifically described today cannot be the case.

      EAAN is science denial, merely creationism wrapped up in faux sophisticated terminology.

      But, Simon, you suspect I am not thinking this through, so fine, let's take a closer look then.

      "...matter is mostly empty space...entangled...objects actually change their properties (size, mass etc) ..."
      Indeed, the truth of structures below the resolution of our unaided senses was unknown for the whole of human existence until very recently, and remains largely unknown.

      Exactly what one would expect from animals evolved without the aid of god.

      "What you are doing is taking the information you get from the senses we happen to have developed in this corner of the universe where we originated,"
      Indeed, exactly what one would expect from biological evolution absent god.

      "(you) decided that this is a full picture."
      Who decided that? Certainly not any scientifically minded people I know of and I never asserted any such thing. Where did you get that false assumption from?

      "you assume you’re seeing the full picture"
      How did you ever get such an idea about my supposed assumptions? No, of course not.

      You have only served to undermine EAAN. Not surprising given the fact that EAAN is such utter nonsense.

      Truth is that which comports with reality.

      If you fall off a cliff onto rocks you will really die.
      If you eat poison you will really die.
      If you fail to avoid predators that are much stronger you will really die.
      If you mate with objects not fertile opposite sex members of your own species you will really not reproduce.

      Those are realities of evolved biological life forms such as you and me. EAAN makes the absurd proposal that somehow determination of those truths has no greater reproductive advantage compared to randomized untrue fantasies.

      EAAN makes the preposterous claim that creatures bumbling about utterly deluded about the harsh realities of their environment somehow have just as much likelihood of reproduction as creatures with an acute ability to sense and act in accordance with the true realities all around them.

      The truth is that the wild environment is very unforgiving, complex, and dynamic. The only viable mechanism for survival and reproduction is to sense the environment in a manner that comports with reality, and to act upon those sensed realities at the scales needed for reproduction, which is just what humans have done for nearly all history.

      But there is no evolutionary pressure to know, say, the structure of an atom, or a galaxy, or the very fast, or very dense...and humans didn't for most of history, just as one would expect from biological evolution absent a god.

      I was actually somewhat shocked that Dr. Feser would link old arguments for EAAN. Well, we still have the likes of Ken Ham and Kent Hovind peddling the same old pseudo science creationist nonsense, I suppose it was just wishful thinking that we were done with Alvin Plantinga and his junk science.

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    17. And the caetera include the sense of -plausibility- evoked by such explanations re: selection, the evidential purchase of which would turn out to be nil, as all one could say is that finding such hypotheses plausible is possibly (though indiscernably so) conducive to survival to the point of reproduction.

      P.S.

      (Perhaps) needless to say, this is an argument against naturalism, not evolution.

      The account on which natural selection impacts which substantial forms come to be educed from prime matter/affecting accidents, say, - as on the plausibly Aristotelian account of evolution - would not generate issues of this sort.

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    18. @Stardusty. Anyone who knows me will know that I think Evolution theory is a good scientific theory, so I don’t know why you think I’m pushing ridiculous young earth creationism. I happen to be confident that elements we get hints at, such as the ‘fitness landscape’, epigenetic inheritance etc point to something far deeper and more dynamic than “randomness”, but that’s another story.

      The point however, which you seem to miss, is the crucial difference under a purely naturalistic and materialistic ontology between evolution selecting for survival and evolution selecting for truth.

      There are two levels at which this applies, and you’re clearly more focussed on the first. Lets for arguments sake say that on another planet with a very difficult environment, it was beneficial for creatures to be able to see whether other creatures were alive or not. So early on in that planet’s history, creatures developed an organ that sensed life. Creatures on that planet who are ‘life-energy blind’ see things much like we do, but the rest see a glow of various colours around other creatures that are alive. The scientists of the most intelligent species on that planet have developed technology that replicates these organs to some extent, and so they can ‘scan for life’ at some distance. They also have units for the life force, which they routinely use in medicine. “Your life force is below 72 Omicrons, I suggest you take a holiday and get some decent sleep”. “Sure doctor, I knew I was run down but had no idea it was that bad”.

      Now on Earth there was no need for us to be able to do this, and we still don’t really have any definition of life, let alone any direct way of measuring it (only it’s secondary effects). If we met this species and we learnt this whole new science from them, presumably you would agree that evolution had not given us a full picture of the reality all around us?

      The second and more important level is about intellectual truth. If you go by the most reductionist account of evolution theory, something like Dawkins “selfish gene”, then something like love is purely something our individual genes trick us into in order to successfully replicate. By this materialist philosophy itself, love is pure delusion. It has no substantial existence or reality, it is purely a kind of ‘emotional virus’ encoded into our genes by evolution. So without even needing to explain to you why this view is wrong, I think you must agree that evolution has given us a lie rather than a truth, even under your own ontology?

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    19. @G. Mancz 滿償喬治

      However, on such an account, it seems, all one is warranted in affirming is that thinking that one needs to access reality to evade predators is possibly conducive to surviving long enough to reproduce, not that it's actually true. The same goes for there being predators etc. Dr. Feser discusses this in his Philosophy of Mind book.

      I think that's a very finitistic interpretation of evolution. As if evolution is only capable of producing sphexes of varying degrees of sphexishness and nothing infinite in design can be produced by physical processes. It's the worst possible interpretation one can give about evolution and I'm not sure if Darwin would have believed that.

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    20. Simon,
      "I don’t know why you think I’m pushing ridiculous young earth creationism."
      I never said you were pushing YEC.

      "The point however, which you seem to miss, is the crucial difference under a purely naturalistic and materialistic ontology between evolution selecting for survival and evolution selecting for truth"
      I have not missed that at all.

      Evolution selects for reproduction, for which survival is a primary necessary condition.

      Our capacities for determinizing truth, as well as our shortcomings in determining truth, are exactly what one would expect on selection for reproduction in the harsh environment of the natural world.

      The link between truth and reproduction is obvious, yet EAAN misses the obvious fact that an organism must be able to determine some fairly true representation of its immediate environment to navigate and act successfully in it.

      The more removed from an organism's immediate environment the truth is, the less selective pressure there is to determine truth, and the more likely it is that an organism believes untruth, all of which is exactly what we do in fact observe.

      "presumably you would agree that evolution had not given us a full picture of the reality all around us?"
      We are in possession of sensory acuity and conceptual accuracy in exactly the ways one would expect for natural selection absent the intervention of god.

      One can believe that rain is caused by the gods, or not, it doesn't really matter for selection, and that is what we find, a wide range of beliefs about the origins of rain. It is critical to believe the truth that rain water is good to drink, whereas poisoned or salt water will make you sick or die, and that is what we find, that we can accurately sense and believe the truth about potable versus bad water.

      "By this materialist philosophy itself, love is pure delusion. It has no substantial existence or reality, it is purely a kind of ‘emotional virus’ encoded into our genes by evolution."
      Love is an emotion, like hate, our sense of ought, fear, and all the rest. They are evolved brain processes that were selected for in the aggregate, in populations of social animals, which is just what one would expect on natural selection absent the intervention of god.

      "I think you must agree that evolution has given us a lie rather than a truth, even under your own ontology?"
      I suppose you are using the word "lie" in a somewhat dramatic or metaphoric sense. Emotions are brain processes that have been selected for over hundreds of millions of years. Emotions are clearly evident in many species, and are a major driver of behavior in our species, which makes perfect sense on natural selection absent the intervention of god.

      Recall what the claim of EAAN is, that the degree to which we do and do not determine truth in various circumstances cannot be justified by natural selection absent a god. That is a preposterous claim that gets virtually zero attention outside a few fringe religious publications.

      People have all sorts of strange and false and contradictory beliefs about subjects that are not important to reproduction, which is just what one would expect on natural selection.

      People also have some amazing capabilities to determine truth about their environment in ways for which determining truth is a reproductive advantage, again, just what one would expect on natural selection.

      We are very good at sensing the truth of the overall shapes of our natural surroundings, the truth of how to successfully hunt, the truth of how to successfully forage, the truth of how to successfully make tools, communicate, socialize, and reproduce.

      The profile of our capacities for determining truth and for our propensities to believe silly fantasies is just what one would expect on natural selection, whereas EAAN cites a few inane contrived unrealistic scenarios and extrapolates them to preposterous junk science conclusions.

      Delete
    21. Stardusty. I think you miss the point completely. If you believe in God, then love is a reflection of something primordial, which brought the universe itself into existence. If you believe in a purely naturalistic sense of evolution, then there is never anything real about love. It’s a mechanism to secure replication of genes. Yet even most (if not all) atheists continue to act as if love is real, dedicating huge parts of their lives to it, even giving their lives for it. You give some irrelevant commentary about emotions being expected by the process and then ignore the fact that people treat these emotions as being true in some meaningful sense.

      This is just one example. In a purely naturalistic sense where there is only the ontological horizontal, everything much be deterministic. So free will must be pure delusion. In other words, there is no you that can decide what is true and what is not. There are only chemical and electrical reactions in your brain following evolutionary programming. So UNDER YOUR OWN ONTOLOGY, your experience that you can choose the true answer from the false answer a delusion actually given to you by evolution.

      Delete
    22. @ sd,

      "there is no evolutionary pressure to know, say, the structure of an atom, or a galaxy, or the very fast, or very dense...and humans didn't for most of history, just as one would expect from biological evolution absent a god"

      Your emotional tirade against your own "nothing" god just doesn't hit God at all. It certainly does not explain what "knowing" is and likely completely misrepresents Plantinga. Again, hitting at Hovind, Dembski, and Ham says nothing against Plantinga.

      The awareness that is "knowing" is not explained by your disgust.

      A better model of measurable reality than science is a random, unbiased, binary infinite sequence - as I have explained. Your scorn at the thought of randomness is just another emotional circular argument, which you refuse to will yourself to break away from.

      As you operate as if you have no free will, your ability to examine what is outside of your circle is nil and your arguments lead only to nothing, the god of your mind.

      "EAAN belongs on the trash heap along with …"

      And then you list some mistaken ideas (as you represent them in your mad scramble) as if an error made by a few individuals brings down God, an extremely bad argument of a type you are given to (e.g., if Aristotle can be shown to have made a single error, then nothing he said is worth anything.)

      "Obtaining food, shelter, mates and all the necessities to survive and reproduce requires sensing reality to select from a vastly complex environment only that which is beneficial and to avoid that which is not"

      It does not require rejecting metaphysical understanding in a hatred motivated war on God that inspires the violence against the Church every day, justified by circular existential mumbo jumbo.

      "The only viable mechanism for survival and reproduction is to sense the environment in a manner that comports with reality, and to act upon those sensed realities …"

      Pfft! It requires making free will choices about the environment with understanding that is above the instinctive reactions of non human animals. It requires the ability to have ideas which are not circularity based deductions and avoidances and mad attacks on institutions based on the freely chosen associations of its members, a bigotry that is hard to believe without seeing it.

      "Truth is that which comports with reality."

      Your repetition of this phrase does not mean that you know "reality". You can never know the structure of the measurable universe because complete comprehension requires more than the sampling of experimental science.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    23. @ sd,

      "I never said you were pushing YEC."

      You certainly implied it with your emotional jabber, "a six thousand year old Earth, the Biblical flood carving out the Grand Canyon, the rhetorical question as to if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys, and all the rest of such junk assertions"

      But when you scramble from a limited circularity based on "nothing", you have to do things like make implications and then deny them because you are not exactly quoted (as I have exactly quoted you here). The next "nothing" step would have to be that you were quoted "out of context". You, yourself, allow the false implication and the false non contextual assertions, but that is OK because the false "nothing" god that you entertain preoccupies you and leaves you no time to avoid double standards and double, double standards.

      Anyone who wishes to think can see that you are not "teaching" at all but are misleading from a pretence of deep understanding which cannot be that at all because you require yourself to avoid things that you cannot deal with, like randomness, which in tight circularity you can only scorn because it contradicts your predetermined, deterministic stance.

      All, avoid the pretended "teaching" of this nut who is trying only to lead you to hate what he himself refuses to understand. He is a whirling dervish of exemplary circularity, a typical "new atheist".

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    24. Simon,
      "If you believe in a purely naturalistic sense of evolution, then there is never anything real about love."
      I really experience love. That experience must be a real experience because I am experiencing myself experiencing it.

      My experiences are absolutely real, they must be, because I am experiencing them.

      "Yet even most (if not all) atheists continue to act as if love is real"
      Perhaps some atheists have the mistaken notion that abstract objects have a mind independent ontological realization.

      "people treat these emotions as being true in some meaningful sense."
      Meaning is relative and personal. One thing has meaning in relation to something else. What has meaning to me might not have meaning to you.

      It is absolutely true that when I experience love I also experience a sense that the experience of love is meaningful, that sense of being meaningful is itself a sort of emotion, a sort of experience, which absolutely must be a real experience for me because I am experiencing it.

      "(on determinism) So free will must be pure delusion. In other words, there is no you that can decide what is true and what is not."
      Non-sequitur. "Me" or "I" can be a dynamic network of processes, not a single pointlike and static locus.

      Deterministic systems make decisions. It it a fallacy to suggest that only a free will system can make decisions.

      "There are only chemical and electrical reactions in your brain following evolutionary programming. So UNDER YOUR OWN ONTOLOGY, your experience that you can choose the true answer from the false answer a delusion actually given to you by evolution."
      You contradicted yourself in this paragraph.

      First you defined me pretty well, as chemical and electrical reactions. But previously you said there was no me. Which is it then? Is there a me or not?

      Let's just suppose your definition of me is good to a first approximation.

      Can chemical and electrical reactions make decisions? Clearly, yes. Ordinary computers make lots of decisions. AI makes even more complex decisions. Many species of animals make decisions.

      Can those decisions yield true results at a rate far greater than statistically likely by mere chance? Clearly yes, much better than by mere chance, especially decisions about one's immediate environment. You can buy a toy motorized car robot that will drive around making true decisions about which way to turn to prevent running into objects, just based on a few simple sensors and ordinary deterministic decision making implemented with chemical and electrical reactions.

      My "OWN ONTOLOGY" fits the observed natural world like a hand in glove. That's because my "OWN ONTOLOGY" was derived from observations of the natural world.

      I didn't just dream up an ontology because it somehow seemed nice to me, and then get lucky that it fits reality as we observe it. Just the opposite. Human beings have been working hard for thousands of years to observe reality as accurately as humanly possible, and it is from that massive human endeavor that my "OWN ONTOLOGY" is derived.

      So of course my ontology matches our observations of the natural world and yours does not. My ontology is based on observations of the natural world whereas your ontology is based on mythological texts, ancient philosophical speculations, with a thin veneer of faux rationality as exemplified by EAAN.

      Delete
    25. Stardusty. I’m not sure whether or not you are joking, but you have now moved so far beyond making any rational sense that I assume you must be? It’s a little bit like some discussions I’ve had with Chat-GPT where it appears to make sense on one level, but hasn’t really understood what it’s saying.

      You say “meaning is relative and personal”, and that love “absolutely must be a real experience for me because I am experiencing it”. So your whole case that evolution by itself can give you the truth collapses right there. What you are saying is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true, anything you experience is true. If you experience that there are monsters under your bed, there really are monsters there. So much for truth. In fact once you go down this ‘truth is relative’ road, your whole argument becomes meaningless. You could be a schizophrenic who experiences pigs flying past your window all the time, and for you that is true. I don’t like the use of exceptions in arguments like this as they can often hide the bigger picture, but for you there really is no bigger picture. What you mean by ‘truth’ is so flexible that whatever an apparently blind and random process leads you to believe is true, is true. So why should we take anything you say about what is true seriously? It’s entirely meaningless!

      You then double down on this by arguing that just because you are a deterministic bundle of chemical and electrical reactions (in your own view), the fact that you can select the truth is proven by the fact that “ordinary computers make decisions”. But computers don’t make true decisions, they make the decisions they are programmed to make. I can very easily program a computer to give you any answer I like. There is no reason you have given as to why the programming of evolution should give you an ability to determine the truth, only a set of habits that allow you to survive. However as you don’t really have any consistent conception of truth, and have admitted that you have no choice in what your own opinion is, I don’t see any point debating something with an automaton that has no ability to change it’s programming?

      I actually think it’s quite sad as your scientistic view has successfully been peddled by the empiricists, the positivists and their ilk for a long time now, and has been absorbed by most of the population as if it’s “observation of the natural world” versus “disproven mythical texts”. The reality of course is that what you call “observation of the natural world” is a process that started in a very Christian context. Many of the biggest discoveries on that process have been from people who explicitly believed in God, or at least in a platonic or spiritual foundation to the universe. The debate is not between “observation of the natural world” and something else, as belief in God actually encourages you to observe the natural world with an expectation that it can tell you something true and meaningful. The actual debate is about how anything can be real or true if it’s all just matter following chemical and electrical processes deterministically. This last point you seem complete unable to understand.

      Delete
    26. @ sd,

      "It is absolutely true that when I experience love I also experience a sense that the experience of love is meaningful, that sense of being meaningful is itself a sort of emotion, a sort of experience, which absolutely must be a real experience for me because I am experiencing it."

      Yes, emotion is what you go on, not reason, because you deny yourself access to what is reasonable, tightly leashed to your little circle of "proving" what you have preconceived.

      Love, in its greatest human manifestation is sacrifice of self interest for the good of the beloved. It is act, but it is not the attack and violence that you inspire, which is hatred. You manifest hatred, not love.

      "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

      Then Jesus showed us by his willing death on the cross, not to satisfy some evolutionary imperative, but to redeem our sins. His friends are anyone who chooses to be his friend. He wants to redeem you for your acts of hatred against the Church, for your inspiration of violent, murderous attacks against the people of God, going on every day around the world, public acts of terror, which by falsely citing the hopeless nothing god of your silly mental circulations against God, you give cover and willing encouragement to.

      Your cult _is_ dying, as have all such cults historically, because they are hopeless and always inspire death by violence. A cult of death, such as yours, will always be seen through by the masses of people because there is nothing in it but your nothing god and death.

      Typical of your false thought: "there is no such thing as cause so I must cause the Catholic losers here to abandon hope". Your circularity adds a "moral" imperative where your nothing "truth" allows no such thing to exist. You are so deeply mixed up that your arrogance is hard to believe. You seem to think that offending people is a smart plan of action.

      "Can chemical and electrical reactions make decisions? Clearly, yes. Ordinary computers make lots of decisions. AI makes even more complex decisions. Many species of animals make decisions.

      Can those decisions yield true results at a rate far greater than statistically likely by mere chance? Clearly yes, much better than by mere chance, especially decisions about one's immediate environment. You can buy a toy motorized car robot that will drive around making true decisions about which way to turn to prevent running into objects, just based on a few simple sensors and ordinary deterministic decision making implemented with chemical and electrical reactions."

      Your definition of "decision" is deliberately limited to avoid supernatural knowing and understanding. I note that you way of dealing with this is to ignore it. Your circularity proclaims "I have already disproven that so I can and will ignore that," (and of course your ONTOLOGY allows you no choice anyway but to remain ignorant - after all, evolution - your configuration of hopeless nothing is going to be selected into non-existence, thriving temporarily only on a false intellectualism).

      "ONTOLOGY"

      Ontology bontology. Your ontology is based on contradictions and emotional clinging to ignorance. After the likes of you have caused the deaths and suppression of enough Christians, your "New" atheist cult will die.

      You can take a first tiny step towards saving your intellectual legacy from utter oblivion by seeing the leash you are willingly bound by.

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    27. Simon,
      "you have now moved so far beyond making any rational sense that I assume you must be (joking)?"
      I enjoy a good joke, but I am not attempting them in this thread. Still, it is gratifying to at least put a smile on your face.

      "If you experience that there are monsters under your bed, there really are monsters there."
      That would be the fallacy of reification, do you know what that fallacy means?

      If I experience monsters then the experience of monsters absolutely must be a real experience. It is a fallacy to reify, to make real, the thought of monsters only because I think it.

      "You could be a schizophrenic who experiences pigs flying past your window all the time, and for you that is true."
      There can always be such speculations. Perhaps I am god and you are just a figment of my divine imagination. Descartes famously considered such things and arrived at the one core absolute truth, cogito ergo sum.

      To reason further, clearly and consistently, we need simply to make the provisional postulate that the human senses are basically reliable, that is, that our senses provide some fair indication of an actual external existence.

      Despite the shallow analysis typical of theistic philosophers my method of formulating determination of truth is entirely free of self contradiction and is entirely coherent.

      "But computers don’t make true decisions, they make the decisions they are programmed to make."
      False dichotomy. Programmers do not pre-program, in general, the sensory data stream the robot will encounter in its travels. What is programmed is decision making based on various sorts of incoming data. The computer makes the decisions of how to move based on whatever sensory data it is presented with, while using its algorithm.

      "There is no reason you have given as to why the programming of evolution should give you an ability to determine the truth,"
      Because determination of truth in our environment is a strong reproductive advantage for mobile animals. It is extremely useful to determine where the water really is, what the shape of the terrain really is, what really is good to eat and what really is bad to eat, what really is good to mate with and what really is not good to mate with (good meaning actually beneficial to reproduction).

      This is so obvious as to make EAAN laughably preposterous.

      Delete
    28. Simon,
      "I don’t see any point debating something with an automaton that has no ability to change it’s programming?"
      Automatons can in fact change their own programming, which is an aspect of AI, to be self re-programming.

      "what you call “observation of the natural world” is a process that started in a very Christian context"
      So the ancient Greeks did not observe the natural world?

      "Many of the biggest discoveries on that process have been from people who explicitly believed in God"
      Indeed a testament to the bifurcation of human reason.

      "The actual debate is about how anything can be real or true if it’s all just matter following chemical and electrical processes deterministically. This last point you seem complete unable to understand."
      It seems that way to you because you lack the very understanding you then project outside of yourself.

      There is a single fundamental truth, the actual ontology of all that exists.

      For human beings to discover that truth is an issue of epistemology. How can we learn what that actual truth really is?

      That problem was solved long ago, yet you have not grasped the solution. In general, we can't, with absolute certainty.

      Our available absolute certainties are derived from first person experience only. Cogito ergo sum. And therefore there is an existence as opposed to absolutely nothing at all, and my experiences must be real experiences, but the subject of my experiences cannot be known with absolute certainty to be real except for myself.

      The materialist then makes a few provisional postulates while keeping the facts of uncertainty ever in mind. The basic reliability of the human senses, as well as the truth of the fundamental laws of logic are provisionally postulated.

      Thus formulated, the materialistic epistemology is entirely coherent, that is, entirely free of self contradiction or any sort of self defeaters.

      Delete
    29. @stardusty: When you say “truth”, what you seem to mean is “has utility”. I became an atheist long ago because I valued truth above everything. However for various reasons what seemed solid and unshakable in this atheism fell apart. I sometimes wonder why that happened to me when so many others have gone in the other direction. I guess there are various reasons, and not all are to do with me. However one thing I have noticed is that my old view was all surface. I intuitively knew that there was depth to the ideas and the corporeality of things - beyond their names and their aggregate parts - but this was not integrated with my reasoning or my world view. So I was in many ways splintered, I would act as if different types of things were real in different contexts; in personal relationships, in music, in science, in history etc. The depth to things would be real in relationships, a bit less in music, less in history, then gone completely by the time I got to science.

      Once I realised my atheism was completely wrong, at first I learnt a load of physics. I thought there must be extra dimensions that this realness of things lives. Interestingly there is indirect evidence for this in many areas of physics, from the hierarchy problem and Kaluza-Klein right to more speculative ‘Theories of Everything” like M Theory. However I’ve since realised that the real answers will never come from a quantitive abstraction, at most that can hint at it, just as you can never know a person by a mathematical description of them.

      Instead I have found the errors that lead to my mistake far back in time, after a great debate in the universities, after which what we now call nominalism won. After this the rest was fairly inevitable, as there could only be surface, no real content of being. This was the new tower of babel, the loss of hierarchy of being would lead to the ‘flat’ religion of the reformation, which would of course be fissile with no root. Inevitably it would also lead to a kind of pantheism in philosophy, which would also be fissile as the remaining surface could either be mind or matter, but not both. The split that answered ‘matter’ was very successful as it was amenable to abstraction to quantity. And once all was abstraction and quantity, meaning could only be description, and truth could only be accuracy and utility.

      So I don’t think you can ever get past this programming of history without some major event in your life, rational argument alone cannot allow you open up all your conclusions and definitions at the same time. We perhaps have evolution to thank for that. When a lion appears at the cave entrance, you can’t start reconsidering whether lions are really dangerous, whether you may be able to fly to safety etc, you must be optimised to focus on a single thing at a time, be that escaping the lion, finding food, then maybe wonder about flying when you have nothing else to worry about.

      So there really is no point going around in these circles. You think a materialist utilitarian account of reality is reasonable. I think it’s a nominalist disintegration of being, an unhealthy splintering of being into shards of surface.

      So lets just agree to disagree.

      Delete
    30. Simon,
      "When you say “truth”, what you seem to mean is “has utility”."
      I never said any such thing.

      "The depth to things would be real in relationships, a bit less in music, less in history, then gone completely by the time I got to science."
      Ok, sounds like you never got a sound basis for your world view. So much so that even when I give one to you it just doesn't register, and you attribute to me views I never expressed and do not hold.

      "However I’ve since realised that the real answers will never come from a quantitive abstraction"
      Right, the real answers come from reductionism.

      "rational argument alone cannot allow you open up all your conclusions and definitions at the same time."
      That can be solved with writing and sequential reasoning.

      "So there really is no point going around in these circles."
      You are going in circles because you are fundamentally confused in the foundations of your world view and when somebody provides a sound world view for you it doesn't help you because you are so busy projecting your own confusions onto others you don't absorb the sound reasoning provided to you.

      "materialist utilitarian account of reality is reasonable."
      I never said anything of the sort, but your confused propensity to categorize what you read and thus miscategorize what you don't understand has led you to miscategorize the sound world view I have provided.

      "I think it’s a nominalist disintegration of being, an unhealthy splintering of being into shards of surface."
      What is this babble?

      Real simple...
      Truth is that which comports with reality, the actual ontology of our actual universe.

      Discovering that truth with certainty is impossible except for very limited absolute truth derived from first person experience, cogito ergo sum, there must be an existence as opposed to absolutely nothing at all, my experiences must be real experiences but the subjects of my experiences are not absolutely certain to be true.

      Provisionally postulate the basic reliability of the human senses and the truth of the fundamental laws of logic.

      Fundamental beables, or if you prefer, mereological simples are what actually exist, that is, have ontological realization, spatio temporal physical actuality.

      Mind is a process of material, so far the only known examples of such material are brains.


      More generally, I feel none of the despair you seem to be expressing. I revel in every moment of my life. I would live to be a thousand million years old if I could. I find it deeply engaging and wonderous to live in this exciting age where the universe has at long last a portion of itself that is realistically aware of itself.

      The 20th century will no doubt be long remembered as a tipping point in human rational cultural development with so many firsts that will certainly carry forward for eons to come. I foresee an exciting future of enlightenment for my children and all of humanity, I just wish I could stick around to experience it for myself, but that is now how the human organism works, so all I can do is revel in this cornucopia of reality revelations for as long as I can stretch my life out.

      Delete
    31. @ bmiller,

      sd says, "you attribute to me views I never expressed and do not hold"

      Since his premise is that world is deterministic he finds that anything in disagreement with this is an incoherent contradiction and does not have to be answered. He cannot escape his circularity because he cannot imagine that his premise is wrong. If you attribute any view to him that would require the ability to imagine that his premise is not true, he therefore says something like "you attribute to me views I never expressed and do not hold". But anyone who forces his thinking into such a bizarre straitjacket can reliably be counted on to maintain contradictions in his mind, so claiming that he has never held a view that is shown to contradict some other view of his is his way out. Of course he maintains contradictory views because choices cannot be made if there is no real choice, and human beings, if they are to live as human beings and not as animals operating on instinct, must make choices.

      He does not answer to the charge that inspiring hatred and murderous violence against Christians places a moral imperative upon him to cease inspiring such hatred. He just goes on with it anyway, using his ignoring technique which his mental straitjacket keeps him from answering. The hate based attacks are growing in number around the world and in the USA.

      sd says, "what you don't understand has led you to miscategorize the sound world view I have provided"

      Pfft🤣!

      He has not provided a sound world view. He has provided a world view in which nothing can be properly investigated because he cannot allow himself to choose to imagine anything that contradicts his premise, and he is zany enough to think that this proves it. So he goes on with encouraging violent hatred against Christians and ignoring what he dares not investigate since it requires entertaining the idea that he could be wrong, something that anyone not a part of his single idea death cult can easily see is the case.

      Beware!

      sd says, "Fundamental beables, or if you prefer, mereological simples are what actually exist, that is, have ontological realization, spatio temporal physical actuality."

      This is fundamental lunatic babble of the sort that dogs bark at😀.

      sd says, "I foresee an exciting future of enlightenment for my children"

      With his encouragement of murderous hate based attacks on Christians, the future sd imagines must be one in which Christians have all been killed off. His monomania somehow authorises him to ignore and carry on increasing the hatred that any actually free person can see is just bad, bad, bad.

      Beware the dangerous whack job!

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
  3. Great post to read as I am half way through a cultural anthropology class that includes a strong insistence on cultural relativism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Is that the kind of text book that says truth is a construct of Western societies?

      Delete
  4. OP
    "Naturalism holds that what is real is what can be accounted for in terms acceptable to science."
    No. Naturalism holds that what is real is what in fact does exist, as opposed to abstractions that are merely processes of material in the brain with no actual mind independent existential realization.

    Naturalism takes the first ordinary definition of "nature" to its logical full extent.
    "the external world in its entirety" - Webster
    "External" meaning external to human thoughts.
    "World" meaning cosmos.

    Thus, the word "supernatural" is incoherent.
    "Super" meaning beyond or in addition to.
    So "supernatural" means beyond all that exists, which is incoherent.

    Science is a human endeavor that might ultimately be unable to examine certain aspects of nature, even in principle (for example potentially the very smallest scales might be inaccessible for observation even in principle, and events beyond our big bang likewise might be inaccessible even in principle). That which exists naturally does not depend upon human examination for its natural existence.


    " “materialism” connotes the idea that everything real is really nothing but particles in motion."
    No. Material is everything that does in fact exist. If it exists it is material. If it is not material it does not exist. Mind then is a complex process of material, particles or otherwise.

    Abstract objects do not exist. Abstractions are actual processes of material.

    "Reason Can’t Be Naturalized" - Hilary Putnam
    No. Skynet became self aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997 :-)

    "natural selection favors survival value rather than truth or even rational acceptability, and that there is no essential connection between the former and the latter."
    Putnam and Plantinga are wrong. The real functioning of the real world is the essential connection between truth and reproduction advantage (not survival, that is also a mistake, because survival is necessary but not sufficient to reproduction, and it is reproduction that is key to natural selection).

    Determination of physical truth to a functional degree is required to attain reproductive advantage through survival and successful completion of the reproductive process.

    "But consistently to eschew normative notions would require also abandoning the notion of truth itself."
    Truth is that which comports with reality. Truth does not require normative judgements to comport with reality.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Mind then is a complex process of material, particles or otherwise."
      Would you please provide a detailed description of this material 'process'.

      Delete
    2. @ SDP: you wrote "Abstract objects do not exist. "
      I've brought this up before. If sentences like "This is a faulty sentence form" can be true, then when we standardize them, we use the existential quantifier. In such cases, the bound variable stands for an abstract object. It seems that we would either have to invent other senses of "exists" in order to cover cases where the bound variable is bound by a predicated abstract object (e.g. "There exists an X such that X is a sentence form and X is faulty and...") or we admit that abstract objects exist. I attended a talk by Peter van Inwagen and thought him persuasive when he argued on these Quinian lines for the existence of abstract objects -- which to be sure lack spatio-temporal location and causal powers.

      Delete
    3. Stardusty,

      You've posted a lot of sentences that make it appear you did not understand the post.

      But let me ask you to clarify this statement:

      Abstract objects do not exist. Abstractions are actual processes of material.

      The first sentence declares that "Abstract objects do not exist" and the very next sentence declares "Abstractions are actual processes " and so they actually do exist. So it appears to be a contradiction. Do you intend to contradict yourself?

      Delete
    4. " “materialism” connotes the idea that everything real is really nothing but particles in motion."
      No. Material is everything that does in fact exist. If it exists it is material. If it is not material it does not exist.


      Stardusty, I've gone over this with Don Jindra. Simply slapping the label 'material' on everything illuminates nothing.

      Delete
    5. @Dr Yogami. If I decide to build a shed in my garden, what is the cause of the shed, what caused it to be? Do you honestly believe that the shed exists purely because of electrical and chemical reactions in my brain, that this shed was an inevitable result of the initial conditions of the big bang?

      People are so deeply drenched in nominalism and the cartesian divide that you’re willing to give up the undeniable everyday realities of existence. You tell stories of magical emergence where consciousness is just matter talking to itself, as if it’s a self evidently true fact because in your assumed nominalist, cartesian abstraction of quantity, that’s all it can be! Even though it sucks the meaning not just out of life, but out of the very science process you base it on. You think it’s fine to live your life as if that person who punched you hard in the face really did have a choice in the matter, but then want us to accept that day to day pretence as a necessary delusion when it comes to the important things. You are like snake oil salesman, selling “cures”, the “true light of truth that will save people from their superstitions”. Hail the new protestants, the new puritans! “Our gospel is the particle, it’s abstraction into number, everything else is emergent false god. Worship my truth because it’s the full truth”. But of course truth is meaningless and pointless if only particles really exist. You have no choice in what you will write in response to this post. After all it’s just deterministic evolutionary programming acting at an emergent chemical and electrical layer. So there is no reason from your perspective for your reply to be true or meaningful. If that’s what you really think about the nature of reality, why should I take you and your inevitable replies seriously? Aren’t we just biological automatons following the laws of physics?

      On the other hand, if you think that you as a biological entity have agency, a level of freedom and sentient understanding beyond that of your individual deterministic parts, why does that element not fit in your confident view of the world? How can you call something ‘not real’ that can apparently defy the “laws of physics”?

      Delete
    6. Apologies DrYogami, it seems I was replying to Stardusty’s comments that you quoted (via italics rather than quotes..)

      Delete
    7. @ StardustyPsyche,

      "Thus, the word "supernatural" is incoherent."

      You should know by now that you can't use a definition to correctly argue that something does not exist - which is what you are trying to do - so that a word describing it could be said to be incoherent, unless you in some sense assume the nonexistence in the first place.

      Perhaps an example can help you:

      I define "swfm" as the "nonexistence of strdst". Then, following your method:

      Swfm! Therefore strdst does not exist and "strdst" is an incoherent word because it describes as if it is something - nothing.

      Furthermore, if swfm then swfm->swfm->swfm … etcetera is a logic following example of avoidance by circular deduction, but it is not rational argument, it is not reason.

      Now knowing your "nothing" kind of argument, you could say "but I can bring in the fact that I know that strdst does exist, therefore the example argument from definition is wrong."

      And I would say, exactly! You can, and that is the counterexample to your silly argument from definitions. Your silly argument does not prove that something that we choose to call "supernatural" does not exist. In fact, we who worship God, worship something far more worthy of worship than "Saint" Russell, or yourself, or various other of your inadequate ideas. And what we worship we call God.

      You can define until the hills are gone, it does nothing but demonstrate smug idiocy.

      The word "Supernatural" remains coherent and means what we mean it to mean.

      Your method, OTOH, is incoherent - just a joke.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    8. Stardusty Psyche,

      I'm wondering if you can help me with something. You write:

      "No. Naturalism holds that what is real is what in fact does exist, as opposed to abstractions that are merely processes of material in the brain with no actual mind independent existential realization."

      I'm trying to evaluate the proposition in your claim, "abstractions...are merely processes in the brain with no actual mind independent existential realization." Can you tell me which processes of material in my brain are that proposition that I'm trying to evaluate, which also apparently have "no actual mind independent existential realization"? But I'm entertaining that abstract proposition of yours in my mind, which are just "material processes of my brain," which according to you, doesn't have any existence independent existential realization of the mind, and thus don't exist...

      ...Oh, no, Stardusty, do I exist? It seems by following your thinking I've abandoned reason for madness.

      Delete
    9. Anonymous March 26, 2023 at 2:55 AM
      "Would you please provide a detailed description of this material 'process'."
      Please refer to the literature for neuroscience, clearly a vast collection beyond posting here.

      Evidences for the scientific fact that what we call the mind is actually processes of the brain abound. Very briefly, injury studies, neurosurgery, psychoactive drug mechanisms, and that fact that all scientifically observed mental interactions occur with animals in possession of a functioning brain.


      ficino,
      ""This is a faulty sentence form" can be true, then when we standardize them, we use the existential quantifier."
      Limitations of common language structures provide no evidence for the ontological reality of abstract objects.

      A logical truth does not necessitate an ontological realization. A logical truth remains an abstraction, which is a brain process.

      To imagine that a logical truth entails the realization of that which is being logically asserted is to commit the fallacy of reification.

      "It seems that we would either have to invent other senses of "exists""
      Does running exist? Or is running an identifiable sort of process of material?


      DrYogami March 26, 2023 at 12:14 PM
      "Simply slapping the label 'material' on everything illuminates nothing."
      It illuminates the incoherence of terms such as "exists immaterially".

      Delete
    10. "Simon Adams March 26, 2023 at 5:17 PM
      "Apologies DrYogami, it seems I was replying to Stardusty’s comments that you quoted"
      Ok, fair enough, I kind of got that sense as I read your words!

      "that this shed was an inevitable result of the initial conditions of the big bang?"
      Either the universe is fully deterministic or at least some element of intrinsic randomness is the case.

      Do you consider it rational to assert effects happen for no reason at all? That is what intrinsic randomness entails, an effect without a cause, no mechanism, no reason at all (much less a sufficient reason), just poof, any old which way, any old time.

      The alternative to poof is determinism, that material progresses mechanistically, effects occur for sufficient reasons.

      On determinism free will is an illusion and to answer your question, yes, the shed was inevitable since the big bang. Seems incredible, I agree, but then I am dumbfounded by the incredible complexity and inexplicable puzzles of our universe every time I ride in a rain storm or look up at a clear night sky.

      "Even though it sucks the meaning not just out of life,"
      Not for me it does not, I revel in every moment of my life, even more so when I engage with others on such subjects, which evokes a sense wonder, so I appreciate your long and thoughtful reply.

      "You think it’s fine to live your life as if that person who punched you hard in the face really did have a choice in the matter, but then want us to accept that day to day pretence as a necessary delusion when it comes to the important things. "
      Deterministic mechanisms nevertheless make choices based on chaos that is so complex as to be effectively random relative to our capacity to precisely analyze complex systems.

      "So there is no reason from your perspective for your reply to be true or meaningful."
      Truth is that which comports with reality.
      Meaning a description of relationships.
      There can be no ultimate meaning to all that exists because there can be nothing outside of all that exists for all that exists to have a relationship to.
      For each of us the meaning of our own lives is a matter of personal sensibilities.

      "why should I take you and your inevitable replies seriously?"
      Up to you. There can be no objective "should" or "ought" from nature, god, or anything else, because questions of the form of the Euthyphro dilemma logically rule out any objective "should".


      Modus Pownens
      "Oh, no, Stardusty, do I exist? It seems by following your thinking I've abandoned reason for madness."
      You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

      Yes, you might be one to go mad thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking ad infinitum, or at least until you black out from lack of nutrition having abandoned all other activities in your life to dedicate yourself to repeating the thinking about statement recursively.

      However, in real systems recursion is limited by resources, so let's hope you get to your personal base case before we lose you altogether.

      Delete
    11. @ Simon Adams: No worries! : )

      @ StardustyPsyche:

      It illuminates the incoherence of terms such as "exists immaterially".

      This would only be true if "everything that exists is material" were some kind of axiom, so that to talk of "immaterial existence" were like speaking of triangles with four sides. Obviously most people here aren't going to accept a premise like this.

      You've quoted Webster. Here's the American Heritage Dictionary definition of 'nature':

      The material world and its phenomena

      Here's how that same dictionary defines 'naturalism':

      Philosophy The system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws.

      Hmmm. Interesting. I think these definitions are a lot more acceptable to people here than Webster's sparse and weird six word version, which seems to have been tossed off without any thought. This is probably because dictionary definitions are often pathetic when it comes to capturing nuance in issues under debate. Like this one.

      Delete
    12. @Stardusty: “ Deterministic mechanisms nevertheless make choices based on chaos that is so complex as to be effectively random relative to our capacity to precisely analyze complex systems.”

      You see them invisible clothes that emperor is wearing there? You are basically inventing magic beans and describing how the magic works as “complexity” and “chaos”, just like it’s some cult where only the initiated really understand it, but they can’t tell us mere mortals because it may cause a glitch in the spacetime continuum…

      Have you ever honestly tried to understand what people mean by substance from a top down perspective? That what you call emergence is not actually a product of complexity but of the way the universe actually works? When physicists say that the superposition of the wave function “decoheres’ into the environment”, what aspect of “the environment” holds these potentials into an actual macro reality? What gives the macro world it’s actual form that persists beyond these excitations of the quantum field(s)?

      Delete
    13. @SDP: As I remember, Quine argued that if someone's theory - a scientist, or whoever - entails particular affirmative statements, and if that person accepts classical Fregean-Russellian predicative logic, then that person's commitments require him/her to admit the referents of those affirmatives into his/her ontology. If you're making affirmatives about some electrons, you are implicitly admitting electrons into your ontology.

      Why? It's not that the rules of logic cause electrons or whatever to exist. It's that, if you accept a logic that employs the existential quantifier, AND if you accept that "exist" is univocal, then you commit yourself to the existence of whatever you're quantifying over.
      You can't consistently say "there exists an X such that X is F" AND deny that this bounded "X" exists, unless you invent multiple senses of "exist/s."

      Some people do that, e.g. Wm. Lane Craig, who wants to deny that abstract objects exist because he thinks they threaten the aseity of God. So far I think the theoretical costs of admitting multiple senses of "exist" outweigh the gain that comes from denying that abstract objects exist. I think the theoretical costs, on the other hand, of admitting abstract objects into my ontology are low. Why? Because they don't have spatio-temporal location or causal powers. We can even admit that some abstract objects are human artifacts: "the infield fly rule," for example.

      Delete
    14. Stardusty,

      You've posted a lot of sentences that make it appear you did not understand the post.

      But let me ask you to clarify this statement:

      Abstract objects do not exist. Abstractions are actual processes of material.

      The first sentence declares that "Abstract objects do not exist" and the very next sentence declares "Abstractions are actual processes " and so they actually do exist. So it appears to be a contradiction. Do you intend to contradict yourself?

      Does running exist? Or is running an identifiable sort of process of material?

      Are you claiming that the act of running is some sort of abstraction and so does not actually exist as part of reality?

      As far as I can tell you are claiming that "running" both does not exist and does exist.

      Delete
    15. ficino4ml,

      the existence of abstract objects -- which to be sure lack spatio-temporal location and causal powers.

      What do you consider abstract objects? It seems to me they could be fictional or imaginary things like unicorns or things like "justice" or "love". Certainly a motivation for "justice" has causal power. So then what is "justice"?

      Delete
    16. @bmiller: As you know, I am not a professional metaphysician, but I like metaphysics! Abstract objects obviously form a highly controversial topic. The items you give as examples would be abstract objects AFAIK. But I think moderns would limit causal power in their talk about abstract objects to efficient causation (not sure about material cause). The notion of justice motivates people, but I'd say it's a final cause not an efficient cause. So the example of justice doesn't run afoul of the usual modern claim that abstract objects lack causal powers. In ancient/medieval/traditional Platonism, of course, Forms are causes par excellence, since the form of F is what makes something in the phenomenal world to be F. That's not what van Inwagen or Quine talked about in what I have read of them.

      Delete
    17. ficino4ml,

      OK, so they only consider efficient causation as having causal power.

      But regarding justice:

      The notion of justice motivates people, but I'd say it's a final cause not an efficient cause.

      I doubt they would accept final causation in their philosophy either. But consider this situation:

      Someone thinks another person is being unjust and kills him with a lead pipe, then is the lead pipe the cause of the murder and the killer's motive is not? Don't we normally consider motivations when we evaluate peoples' actions?

      Delete
    18. @ sd,

      "Evidences for the scientific fact that what we call the mind is actually processes of the brain abound."

      If the mind has a Supernatural element, brain science cannot measure it.

      "itations of common language structures provide no evidence for the ontological reality of abstract objects.

      A logical truth does not necessitate an ontological realization. A logical truth remains an abstraction, which is a brain process.

      To imagine that a logical truth entails the realization of that which is being logically asserted is to commit the fallacy of reification."

      You, sd, commit the fallacy here, because if an assertion of the existence of something can be cast by a know-it-all as a reification, it does not follow that the something does not exist. I didn't see that ficino said "I imagine that x exists therefore x exists". Meanwhile your whole system of belief is one vast reification of what you imagine, because you certainly offer no scientific evidence that what science cannot measure cannot exist.

      Funny, funny, funny 🤣!

      "intrinsic randomness entails, an effect without a cause, no mechanism, no reason at all (much less a sufficient reason), just poof, any old which way, any old time"

      "Random" can simply mean "beyond the ability of a finite algorithm to predict". Any biased random sequence can be used to generate an unbiased random sequence. A sequence of events that is unpredictable does not imply that it is without cause and it does not imply that it is without purpose. You'd have to be willing to have something shown to you, but when you "know it all" you are in a tight bind. Also, I guess "Saint Russell's" assertion that there are no causes is now inoperative since you now assert that things happening without cause is "pouf"!

      Ha ha ha 🤣! This is truly funny stuff.

      " revel in every moment of my life … evokes a sense wonder, …"

      The standard BS where your total lack of wonder at meaning and causation, and lack of desire to escape your "nothing" belief is portrayed as some kind of super sensitivity beyond anything the "religious cretins" can imagine and "reify". In other words, you are letting us know how much better at reifying a belief that your senses enable you to imagine.

      "There can be no ultimate meaning to all that exists because there can be nothing outside of all that exists for all that exists to have a relationship to"

      This dumb idea that you can rule things out through definition again?

      Beware all! This guy is a nut!

      "There can be no objective 'should' or 'ought' from nature, god, or anything else"

      Pffft! This is the sermon on a dimple in a pit

      "However, in real systems recursion is limited by resources"

      Your repetition as you recurse around a circle doesn't seem to be limited 🤣.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    19. DrYogami,
      "This would only be true if "everything that exists is material" were some kind of axiom"
      Fair enough, then what else could anything possibly be but material?

      For example, dark energy, dark matter, quantum entanglement. Nobody knows what that stuff is, what its properties are, or what equations describe such material, but that is my point. What else could such stuff be other than some sort of material not yet understood very well at all?

      Just suppose it is the case that god exists, some kind of god, somehow. What is this god made of, absolutely nothing at all? Then in what sense does one claim that absolutely nothing at all exists at all?

      Suppose this god does have infinite knowledge, ok, but where? Nowhere? Stored in what, nothing? How does something that is nothing differentiate between all things yet not have any parts and be nothing nowhere at no time?

      The assertion of immaterial entails incoherent assertions necessarily.

      "This is probably because dictionary definitions are often pathetic when it comes to capturing nuance in issues under debate."
      That certainly can be the case. Also, words like nature and natural have many uses and meanings in various contexts.

      "(naturalism) Philosophy The system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws."
      Fine, but circular. This does not get to the root of what nature means.

      Just supposing god does exist and is the primordial necessary being. What could be more natural than that? In the sense that one might say something manufactured is artificial that would mean god is what is natural and our cosmos manufactured by god is thus artificial.

      So, even in the case of a real existent god the word "supernatural" reduces to greater than the greatest thing, or beyond that for which nothing is beyond, hence, the word "supernatural" remains incoherent even on a real existent god.

      Simon Adams,
      "You are basically inventing magic beans and describing how the magic works as “complexity” and “chaos”"
      Chaos is not magic, it is deterministic, but so complex as to be humanly impossible to represent in closed form equations, or even with comprehensive numerical methods, so we resort to statistical approaches or finite element analysis to get useful analytical work done.

      "what you call emergence is not actually a product of complexity but of the way the universe actually works?"
      Just the opposite is the case in evidence. To understand the very largest scales we must first understand the very smallest. That is why particle physics is so closely linked with cosmology. It is the aggregate of the very small that explains the very large.

      Delete
    20. ficino,
      "You can't consistently say "there exists an X such that X is F" AND deny that this bounded "X" exists, unless you invent multiple senses of "exist/s."
      True, strictly speaking, but human beings commonly do not speak or write strictly structured sentences and strictly employ words univocally.

      A logical assertion would likely contain an "if", "" if there exists an X such that X is F then..."".

      If the statement one makes is "there exists an X" then that is a clear statement of existence, in some sense. But a mathematician might state "there exists an X" within the context of a mathematical proof, for example, with no intention of claiming an actual ontologically real existence for such an X, merely a logical sort of existence.

      Now, you might say that sort of existence is not really existence because only real material with actual ontological realization can properly be said to exist, and by such a definition, then you could fairly say the mathematician is speaking improperly.

      "So far I think the theoretical costs of admitting multiple senses of "exist" outweigh the gain that comes from denying that abstract objects exist."
      People commonly use "exist" in a variety of ways, like it or not. Bill Clinton famously posited that he did not lie because one must consider what the definition of "is" is.

      "We can even admit that some abstract objects are human artifacts: "the infield fly rule," for example."
      The infield fly rule does not exist in the sense of an ontologically realized object, nor does any particular number, or a triangle, or any abstract object. I think that is fairly well understood as the sense of the word "exist" when one makes the philosophical point that abstract objects do not exist.

      Delete
    21. @ sd,

      "What else could such stuff be other than some sort of material not yet understood very well at all?"

      This is again your circular obsession, because you have not faced that our understanding is limited to what can be expressed and communicated with words. You just stick with what affirms your initial premise and does not contradict it, but that is irrational. God is beyond human understanding and cannot be limited by words or concepts that we can express or communicate and your "there cannot be such a thing" is just an arbitrary statement that cannot prove itself, although it can be deduced from itself because such circularity does not involve contradiction. You still do not seem to grasp the difference between logic and reason.

      By "god" you mean "nothing". Catholics do not worship "god", but "God", which is a name. When you talk about "nothing" in your insistent circular blather, you are not talking about "God". Nothing does not imply anything but can be part of a premise that can go in circles that does not prove anything. You can add as many definitions as you want. It will not make your sentences anything more than nutty and arbitrary😀.

      "The assertion of immaterial entails incoherent assertions necessarily."

      You sure are a powerful thinker in your own mind, especially when nothing is your subject😀.

      "Fine, but circular. [It] does not get to the root of what nature means."

      But it is still an example of your method.

      "that would mean god is what is natural and our cosmos manufactured by god is thus artificial"

      It does, although incoherently, when you are talking about your "nothing" god, but what we name God is neither limited by nor comprehended by the human concept of artificer.

      "reduces to greater than the greatest thing, or beyond that for which nothing is beyond"

      More definition abusing circular gibberish.

      "Chaos is not magic, it is deterministic, but so complex as to be humanly impossible to represent in closed form equations"

      Are you claiming that quantum uncertainty is "chaotic" and therefore deterministic? That would just abandon quantum mechanics, which has bedeviled any attempt to replace it with a predictive science of measurement for a hundred years. "Chaos" itself is a word that defies useful definition.

      "That is why particle physics is so closely linked with cosmology. It is the aggregate of the very small that explains the very large"

      You cannot prove that an infinite random sequence does not model the measurable evolution of the sensible universe in a simpler way than scientific laws. I have given you one definition of "random" for this purpose. Your scoffing denial that there could be such a thing as "random" is just another dive into your usual circularity, i.e., there is no such thing as "random" because you say so. Certainly the infinite sequence contains descriptions of the evolution of every communicably describable sensible universe, and furthermore, no finite algorithm could prove that a missing description is actually missing, because every longer sequence that does not contain the missing description must be itself contained in the infinite sequence.

      But I am pretty sure this goes above your head because you so will it with your clinging to circularity.

      Well prove that you have no free choice to understand this or to see it as anything but "incoherent".

      You cannot.

      Take note that God is not limited or defined by this model. Your "nothing" god, of course, is so limited. Infinite circularity is not random.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    22. @Stardusty:

      Just suppose it is the case that god exists, some kind of god, somehow. What is this god made of, absolutely nothing at all? Then in what sense does one claim that absolutely nothing at all exists at all?

      I don't see why the assertion that X is not made up of more fundamental substances means 'X does not exist'.

      The assertion of immaterial entails incoherent assertions necessarily.

      Seems like an Argument From Personal Incredulity.

      Just supposing god does exist and is the primordial necessary being. What could be more natural than that? In the sense that one might say something manufactured is artificial that would mean god is what is natural and our cosmos manufactured by god is thus artificial.

      It...kinda sounds like you haven't been reading Feser carefully on the nature/artifact distinction. At any rate, the primordial Source of the natural world itself not being bound by the laws of nature doesn't sound 'natural' to me. In fact it sounds...supernatural!

      Delete
    23. @ sd,

      "What else could such stuff be other than some sort of material not yet understood very well at all?"

      This is again your circular obsession, because you have not faced that our understanding is limited to what can be expressed and communicated with words. You just stick with what affirms your initial premise and does not contradict it, but that is irrational. God is beyond human understanding and cannot be limited by words or concepts that we can express or communicate and your "there cannot be such a thing" is just an arbitrary statement that cannot prove itself, although it can be deduced from itself because such circularity does not involve contradiction. You still do not seem to grasp the difference between logic and reason.

      By "god" you mean "nothing". Catholics do not worship "god", but "God", which is a name. When you talk about "nothing" in your insistent circular blather, you are not talking about "God". Nothing does not imply anything but can be part of a premise that can go in circles that does not prove anything. You can add as many definitions as you want. It will not make your sentences anything more than nutty and arbitrary😀.

      "The assertion of immaterial entails incoherent assertions necessarily."

      You sure are a powerful thinker in your own mind, especially when nothing is your subject😀.

      "Fine, but circular. [It] does not get to the root of what nature means."

      But it is still an example of your method.

      "that would mean god is what is natural and our cosmos manufactured by god is thus artificial"

      It does, although incoherently, when you are talking about your "nothing" god, but what we name God is neither limited by nor comprehended by the human concept of artificer.

      "reduces to greater than the greatest thing, or beyond that for which nothing is beyond"

      More definition abusing circular gibberish.

      "Chaos is not magic, it is deterministic, but so complex as to be humanly impossible to represent in closed form equations"

      Are you claiming that quantum uncertainty is "chaotic" and therefore deterministic? That would just abandon quantum mechanics, which has bedeviled any attempt to replace it with a predictive science of measurement for a hundred years. "Chaos" itself is a word that defies useful definition.

      "That is why particle physics is so closely linked with cosmology. It is the aggregate of the very small that explains the very large"

      You cannot prove that an infinite random sequence does not model the measurable evolution of the sensible universe in a simpler way than scientific laws. I have given you one definition of "random" for this purpose. Your scoffing denial that there could be such a thing as "random" is just another dive into your usual circularity, i.e., there is no such thing as "random" because you say so. Certainly the infinite sequence contains descriptions of the evolution of every communicably describable sensible universe, and furthermore, no finite algorithm could prove that a missing description is actually missing, because every longer sequence that does not contain the missing description must be itself contained in the infinite sequence.

      But I am pretty sure this goes above your head because you so will it with your clinging to circularity.

      Well prove that you have no free choice to understand this or to see it as anything but "incoherent".

      You cannot.

      Take note that God is not limited or defined by this model. Your "nothing" god, of course, is so limited. Infinite circularity is not random.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    24. @ All,

      Oops, sorry. I went for lunch and when I got back, a signal I use to myself made me think I had not posted my comment, so I posted it again. Sorry for double posting.

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    25. @ sd,

      "But a mathematician might state "there exists an X" within the context of a mathematical proof, for example, with no intention of claiming an actual ontologically real existence for such an X, merely a logical sort of existence"

      All of mathematics, true in some human logical system and mistaken in the same logical system is contained in the unbiased infinite random sequence which models God. All contradictions are there. Mathematicians have many contradictory ideas about what mathematics is, how it originated, and what can be done with it. Yet the infinite random number is only an _imperfect_ model of God because God is neither bound by the words which define it, nor limited by any entailment of the imperfect model.

      Your "nothing" god has nothing to say about this. Your hopeless (by deliberate choice) circularity is the exact opposite of God and you cannot define him away with your foolish personal "rules" of logic. And If you talk about things that make no sense to yourself, like square triangles, that's your personal problem, not something that limits God.

      You have not told us why neurons can act like random machines in themselves, balancing between the order of a finite program and the complete disorder of nuclear decay sequences - a virtuous mean between two vicious extremes.

      Your scramble always to find a way to not understand, except in the "nothing" way, does not make for rational argument.

      "I think that is fairly well understood as the sense of the word 'exist' when one makes the philosophical point that abstract objects do not exist"

      Well by you anyway in your "nothing" way of avoiding understanding by free will choice. But "fairly well understood" by whom? That "abstract objects do not exist" is certainly not uncontested in the way that a rock that hurts when it hits you is the rock that you see.

      You have kissed the blarney rock🤣.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

      Delete
    26. DrYogami,
      "I don't see why the assertion that X is not made up of more fundamental substances means 'X does not exist'."
      Indeed, in which case the answer to the question of what substance X is made of is that X is itself the fundamental substance.

      On the assertion that all observed particles are actually localized oscillations of a particular sort of field, then the fundamental substance is the field.

      On the assertion of god, then the fundamental substance is godstuff, whatever that turns out to be.

      Thus god is necessarily material, being godstuff, which is more fundamental than fields, else god is absolutely nothing at all. The assertion of a real existent immaterial being is incoherent.

      "Seems like an Argument From Personal Incredulity."
      It is an argument from logic applied to ontology.

      Can absolutely nothing at all be coherently said to exist? No, because that would assert an existent non-existence.

      Therefore all things that exist are something, some thing. A thing is at a minimum a substance, else what else could it be, even in principle?

      Perhaps you say a thought could be immaterial, even a mind with many thoughts. Can absolutely nothing at all have thoughts?

      Does that make sense to you, that absolutely nothing at all has thoughts?

      "At any rate, the primordial Source of the natural world itself not being bound by the laws of nature doesn't sound 'natural' to me. In fact it sounds...supernatural!"
      So, you say, god is not bound by the laws of nature?

      Can god create a rock too heavy for himself to lift?

      Or is god constrained to act within the confines of non-contradiction, as is a fundamental law of nature, which in that case is prior to god?

      Delete
    27. StardustyPsyche:

      Indeed, in which case the answer to the question of what substance X is made of is that X is itself the fundamental substance.

      No, it just means that X isn't made out of anything.

      Thus god is necessarily material, being godstuff, which is more fundamental than fields, else god is absolutely nothing at all. The assertion of a real existent immaterial being is incoherent.

      So you say. But you haven't actually demonstrated this.

      Can absolutely nothing at all be coherently said to exist? No, because that would assert an existent non-existence.

      Indeed. Tell Lawrence Krauss this.

      Therefore all things that exist are something, some thing.

      Congratulations, Stardusty! You've hit upon the concept of the transcendentals. There's hope for you yet!

      Or is god constrained to act within the confines of non-contradiction, as is a fundamental law of nature, which in that case is prior to god?

      Well it can't be 'prior to God', given that God is Being Itself 😉

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  5. “ On the one hand, the Aristotelian rejects the Platonic-Cartesian view that the mind is radically independent of the body, and its concepts built into it independently of experience of the concrete natural world.”

    I don’t understand why Platonic is relevant here? The generalised platonic ontology is on the nature of reality, that the human mind recognises and creates ideas/things in a participation/reflection of the ‘One’ from whom all thing’s ultimately come. In this the body is the shadow (of the soul) on the cave wall, and so cannot be radically independent. Surely only “cartesian” is relevant to the point being made?

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    1. On the quote what is said to be independent to the platonists is the soul, for it is not made to be joined to a body(who is a diferent substance) and who does not need a body to have his more precious knowledge(from higher realms).

      It was Plotinus, i think, who compared the soul to a gardener of the body, a image that does reveal the idea that the body is external to the soul, more of a tool than a part. That is not aristotelian.

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    2. Simon,

      It seems to me the criticism of Platonism here is specifically the notion that mind which is in the soul is a separate entity from the body. It is exists prior to the body in which it dwells and returns to the realm of the Forms upon death. The Aristotelian view is instead that body-soul (mind by extension) together make a true substance. Hence it can be lumped in with the res cogitans even though there are very significant background metaphysical notions that sharply distinguish the two conceptions

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    3. Thank you Talmid and Gregorius. I think I must wilfully ignore that aspect of Aristotle and the elements that make it into the later scholastics, admittedly, partly for reasons of faith (communion of saints, the intercession of saints etc). However I don’t see such a clear distinction between Plato and Aristotle when you move away from the purely ‘bottom-up’ perspective. Yes the ‘breath’ and the flesh form a single whole, but from a wider perspective the source of both was the original divine idea (or ‘Form from the One’), and what is ultimately real is the relationship to ‘the One’ through which all things are sustained. This relationship must primarily be one of spirit, and it is in spirit that our freedom exists.

      Anyway I’m rambling on with my poor philosophy and incoherent inability to express anything of these things, so I will stop now :)

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    4. @StardustyPsyche: as I understand you, you are pushing for multiple senses of "exist." Many do that. So far I am not convinced that such a move rises above the theory costs of making that move. Can you enumerate the various senses of "exist" that your position requires? How does "exist" differ in sense between
      A. "if there exists an X such that X is a sentence form..."
      and
      B. "if there exists an X such that X is a lump of 24 K gold..."
      I submit that the difference lies in the properties that we will assign to the sentence form and to the lump of 24K gold, not in senses of "exists."

      You and those nominalists who reject abstract objects need to show how the existential quantifier in classical predicate logic does its work on your assumption that "exists" need not mean "exists."

      BTW I hope it's obvious that I'm not arguing for the existence of the God of classical theism here.

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    5. ficino,
      It is not so much that I insist on various meanings for the word "exist", rather, it is a fact of human communication that people use the word "exist" in various senses.

      If you choose to define "exist" in a particular way for a particular argument, so much the better, as that can only serve to clarify your meaning.

      Consider (in no particular order):
      have objective reality or being.
      live, especially under adverse conditions.
      the ontological property of being.
      abstract existence.
      actual.
      real.
      is.
      ontological realization.
      a thing in itself.
      beable.
      independent spatio temporal realization.
      having its own existential inertia.
      mereological simple.

      "A. "if there exists an X such that X is a sentence form..."
      and
      B. "if there exists an X such that X is a lump of 24 K gold...""

      A sentence form is an abstraction.
      A lump of gold is a material object.

      Those are intrinsically 2 very different sorts of existence, not merely a matter of how we assign properties.

      An abstraction is not a thing in itself, it has no independent ontological being, is not a beable, and has no independent spatio temporal realization.

      A lump of gold is all those things that an abstraction is not. However, on reductionism, a more accurate description of the gold would be a particular arrangement of fundamental beables or mereological simples.

      On reductionism the lump of gold is a particular arrangement of particular mereological simples, not merely particular sorts of simples, rather, differentiated and enumerable separate individual beables.

      An abstraction has no such specific individual simples or beables at the root, and is thus lacks the ontological being of the lump of gold.

      "how the existential quantifier in classical predicate logic does its work on your assumption that "exists" need not mean "exists.""
      By convention.

      Language is a human convention. Mathematics is a language of logic, with written and oral symbols adopted by convention, a convention of a manner of representation of abstractions.

      A mathematical set is an abstract collection of abstract members. If we say "there exists and X such that..." then by convention that expression is taken to mean that X is an abstract member of an abstract set of abstract members.

      The existential quantifier does its work by logically positing a particular logical sort of X abstractly.

      "BTW I hope it's obvious that I'm not arguing for the existence of the God of classical theism here."
      Yes, that is obvious here, no worries.

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  6. I am in agreement with SP. There are, as a practical matter, many things real and true that do not require scientific proof. Suppose we had never resorted to what we call science and empiricism? Would that mean there were no truths; no reality? In conjunction with that, would those concepts simply not exist, a priori?

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    1. An objective reality is probably there in all cases but, even with science or empiricism, are there any absolute truths regarding the things which we discern within it? I don't see how to establish that without presupposing it in some way.

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  7. It seems obvious to me that truth is not relative ("I have my truth and you have your truth") but is instead relational ("we have our truth"). Humans are social creatures, so it stands to reason that we have no utility for truth apart from what we can integrate. Does this mean there is no absolute truth? I don't think so, it just requires that relations are primary to truth-claims.

    Can anyone see why this might be incoherent?

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    1. All physical properties are relational (known for a century now). If you have a flat reality, pure ontological horizontal, nothing but matter in time, then there is no absolute truth. However reality just isn’t like this, we could not even get to that conclusion without relying in the reality of axioms and a hierarchy of concepts that themselves derive from a platonic conception of the things in the ‘world’. If reality really is all ‘bottom up’ emergence, then there really is no point discussing who is right or wrong about anything at all, as there just is no such thing. There are just particles. But deep down the people arguing for this position can’t really believe it, because they keep arguing the case. Like a particular application installed on a computer arguing that it’s own code is the truth, and at the sane time admitting that if you just uninstall that application, it will no longer be the truth…

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    2. Would a person who is the last surviving human after a catastrophe cease to know truths because he has no relation to other humans? "Humans are social creatures" is true, but it is only a partial truth. Humans are biological creatures: we are organized with cells, tissues, and organs in mutually supportive operations. Humans are chemical creatures: our cellular operations depend on complex interactions of thousands of distinct chemicals, regulated by a complex system of other chemicals. Humans are physical creatures: all of the above also follow well-understood physical laws governing atoms forming molecules, undergoing changes according to electrical charge states, etc.

      My putative human who is the sole survivor may make a machine after writing out equations or drawing a geometrical diagram to prove the correct relationships he needs. The truth of the proof does not depend on his relation to other humans. "What we integrate" does not consist solely of how we interact with other humans.

      Who?

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    3. Anonymous:

      I suppose the last man on earth still knows truth at least in his memory, from previous interactions in society.

      But suppose he never was introduced to society -- isolated from other humans from birth -- does he still know truth? I believe he has the capacity for it. But it's not actualized until someone from the outside begins caring for him.

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    4. @bmiller: I can't speak for Quine, obviously, or for van Inwagen. I would guess that a proponent of abstract objects might say that the cause of the murder was the person who wielded the lead pipe. That person's "resentment" is a property of the agent but is not the agent; the human wielding the pipe is the agent. I'm not seeing a problem for the van Inwagen position on abstract objects.

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    5. ficino4ml,

      I'm not seeing a problem for the van Inwagen position on abstract objects.

      I can't contest that since I don't know the position. It seems to me the entire topic of the existence of abstract objects is the result of poor philosophical assumptions and a strange waste of time.

      That person's "resentment" is a property of the agent but is not the agent; the human wielding the pipe is the agent.

      Does that mean that a property of an agent has no relation to the agent's action? If that is considered the case, then why would a prosecutor seek to convince the jury of a motive? Why would a jury convict without trying to understand the motive. Was it self-defence? Greed? In either case the agent with the lead pipe was the efficient cause but the verdict will be different.

      Motive comes from the root word meaning "to move". How is something responsible for making something else "to move" without being a cause?

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    6. @bmiller: I have read philosophers who caution against relying on etymology in philosophical arguments.

      Among the philosophical assumptions that you consider "poor" do you include:
      the foundations of modern predicate logic;
      the dictum that abstract objects lack spatio-temporal location and causal powers?

      I am not sure what position lies behind your questions. Do you affirm or deny that abstract objects as characterized above exist? Are you rejecting classical modern predicate logic? Do you hold that "exist" has multiple senses? Or ... ?

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    7. ficino4ml,

      I have read philosophers who caution against relying on etymology in philosophical arguments.

      I wonder why. Do these philosophers intend to change the meanings of words? Why would they want to do that?

      Among the philosophical assumptions that you consider "poor"

      I mentioned that "It seems to me the entire topic of the existence of abstract objects is the result of poor philosophical assumptions and a strange waste of time."

      Non-existence is nothing isn't it? To even argure with someone that these things don't exist means you understand the concept and therefore it does exist at least as a concept. The only argument is what kind of thing it is, not whether that thing does or doesn't exist. Nothing is no kind of thing. So it seems to me an incoherent discussion to begin with and so a waste of time.

      Now regarding causal powers. Are we wrong to consider a person's motive when he commits a crime?

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    8. @bmiller: I take it you are supposing that at least some abstract objects have causal powers--or maybe that all of them have causal powers?

      You are heading toward ancient Platonism? If so, does that pose a problem for the aseity of God? After all, true statements about, say, triangles, would seem to be true without temporal limitation; the properties of triangles wouldn't seem to be "willed" by any mind.
      (:

      I already said that as far as I know, philosophers' talk about objects as having or not having causal powers refers to efficient causality. One might refer to abstract objects in explaining an event, but the platonist (with a small p) doesn't hold that the abstract object was the efficient cause. We can incorporate "212 degrees F" into an explanation of water's boiling, but we're not saying that the number 212 is the efficient cause of the event. The Pythagorean Theorem is not the efficient cause of Joe's designing a shelf and bracket assembly that has shelves parallel to the floor.

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    9. ficino4ml,

      I can agree that abstract objects exist and lack spatio-temporal location. I think they exist for the reason I gave. Additionally it seems they exist as a kind of thing since we are talking about particular cases that fall under the category of "abstract object".

      Do you disagree?

      I don't see how "triangles therefore no God" works so I won't spend time scratching my head on that aside.

      I already said that as far as I know, philosophers' talk about objects as having or not having causal powers refers to efficient causality.

      OK, but I asked what you think about casual powers. We consider the motive of the defendant in a criminal case as being the cause of his actions don't we? If "philosophers' talk" of causality excludes what everyone considers the cause of peoples' actions (including those very philosophers when they aren't philosophizing, I presume) then it seems they have a deficient definition of causal powers. It seems to me they don't live their lives as if they believed their own stuff.

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    10. @bmiller: you wrote: "I don't see how "triangles therefore no God" works so I won't spend time scratching my head on that aside."

      I never argued triangles therefore no God. Peter van Inwagen holds that the triangle is an abstract and uncreated object, but van Inwagen is also a Christian and recites the Nicene Creed.

      Problems about the ontological status of abstract objects and about the import of the existential quantifier in predicate logic are serious and thorny philosophical problems. "[W]hat everyone considers" on a topic may well be influenced by confusions that some philosophers try to disambiguate. Many people may consider such efforts as a waste of time. Callicles takes that attitude in Plato's Gorgias.

      I've been using "cause" to mean "efficient cause," that which acts so as to bring about change in things. In giving explanations, we appeal to reasons in addition to efficient causes, as of course you know. Aristotle will talk about "the builder's art" as the cause of the house and so forth. I would say that the builder, and whatever instruments he uses, is the efficient cause of the house, but I wouldn't say that his art is the efficient cause.

      In Schopenhauer's anecdote about his "sehr kluger Pudel," the human (S.) pulling on the cord is the efficient cause of the curtains' being pulled back. Schopenhauer's desire to let light into the room provides a motive for the action that he decided to perform, but that desire is not the efficient cause that moved the curtains. Schopenhauer is that.

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    11. ficino4ml,

      Sorry, but I don't know van Inwagen's triangle reasoning so unless you present it I have nothing to offer.

      Likewise, I've explained why I think using an existential quantifier when referring to nothing makes no sense to me. What am I missing? I don't know.

      I've been using "cause" to mean "efficient cause," that which acts so as to bring about change in things. In giving explanations, we appeal to reasons in addition to efficient causes, as of course you know. Aristotle will talk about "the builder's art" as the cause of the house and so forth. I would say that the builder, and whatever instruments he uses, is the efficient cause of the house, but I wouldn't say that his art is the efficient cause.

      This doesn't seem to be an answer to my question of whether you think a defendant's motive could be considered a cause of another person's death. If it's not, then there seems to be no explanation for the fact that people carrying around lead pipes sometimes kill other people and sometimes don't.

      we appeal to reasons in addition to efficient causes

      Isn't an efficient cause just a reason? The reason B is dead is because A whacked him with a lead pipe. Another reason is that lead pipes have a potential for causing death. Another reason is that A wanted B dead because ????

      Schopenhauer's desire to let light into the room provides a motive for the action that he decided to perform, but that desire is not the efficient cause that moved the curtains. Schopenhauer is that.

      No desire, no efficient cause. In other words, the final cause is the cause of the efficient cause. But "final cause" is the cause of which moderns dare not speak so they are left to scratching their heads. But you ficino4ml, are cheating. You've looked in the back of the book and know about formal and final causes and even use the phrase "efficient cause". You're not allowed to use those concepts while defending modernistic/materialistic/naturalistic philosophy you know.

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    12. @bmiller: you wrote "Likewise, I've explained why I think using an existential quantifier when referring to nothing makes no sense to me." And you said earlier that you accept that abstract objects exist and lack spatio-temporal location. So we disagree about their lacking causal powers. Do you want SOME or ALL abstract objects to have causal powers?

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    13. @bmiller: if blogspot allowed editing of posts, I'd do ETA here. Since it doesn't, I add that Peter van Inwagen wrote, "I do not deny that abstract objects may figure in causal explanations: I do not deny that when we say things of the form ‘so-and-so because such-and such’, the explanans will often be a proposition that demonstrably entails the
      existence of certain abstract objects. But to say that is not to say that abstract objects can enter into causal relations." ~ "God and Other Uncreated Things," in Metaphysics and God 2009, 20 n. 7.

      This is in line with what I have written.

      This business about abstract objects began when Stardusty Psyche denied that abstract objects exist. I gave reasons, channeling van Inwagen, for holding that they do exist.

      Then you and I got onto the question, do abstract objects have causal powers? I said that in classical Platonism with capital P, yes, but for modern platonists with small p, AFAIK, no.

      Eventually you reached the A-T thesis that the final cause is the "causa causarum" and is prior to the efficient cause. I'd rather try to restrict our discussion to abstract objects at this point.

      Since I inferred that you hold that some abstract objects have causal powers, since we can appeal to them in explanations, I went on to ask whether you want ZERO abstract objects to be causally inert or only some. Would you say that the number 4 has causal powers? Or the property of being a spider?

      Van Inwagen includes certain mathematical objects plus properties of objects among "abstract objects". Concrete objects, on the other hand, like "this spider," are not properties but possess properties. Concrete objects can effect change in other concrete objects and thus possess causal powers; the spider spun the web. Properties do not effect change in concrete objects; the bumblebee, not the PROPERTY of "having wings and strong legs" broke the web.

      There may be fuzzy cases that demand a lot of attention. E.g. van Inwagen gives as an example of a concrete object, "this copy of War and Peace on the table," and of an abstract object, the text of War and Peace as admitting reproduction infinite times in concrete copies. We might say, the reader is moved to grief by Andrei's death in War and Peace. Here we might need special subtlety in hashing out whether the abstract object, "the text," is a cause of an emotional change in a concrete object, a person reading.

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    14. ficino4ml,

      Here we might need special subtlety in hashing out whether the abstract object, "the text," is a cause of an emotional change in a concrete object, a person reading.

      What is so vexing to you about this example as well as the other examples of motive? The story made you cry (as opposed to the squiggles on paper). You thought the man was doing you an injustice so you whacked him (as opposed to a strange confluence of purely mechanical events). Are those not part of the cause/explanation? I think most humans think they are. Are philosophers not humans?

      Properties do not effect change in concrete objects; the bumblebee, not the PROPERTY of "having wings and strong legs" broke the web.

      I think this is confused. If the bumblebee did not have the PROPERTY of "having wings and strong legs" it could not break a web using those "properties". Is he confusing the word "property" with the essential fact that bees have those features as part of the things they are? In that case, the concept of "properties" would classify as an abstract object but not necessarily the type that could physically break a web. It has caused us to talk about it's meaning though, hasn't it?

      One other thing I'd like to point out. "Properties" are a type of abstract object. "Justice" is another. So they are particular instances of the universal type "abstract object", meaning that not only do "abstract objects" exist so do "Universals".

      Eventually you reached the A-T thesis that the final cause is the "causa causarum" and is prior to the efficient cause. I'd rather try to restrict our discussion to abstract objects at this point.

      In this discussion you brought up "final cause" as opposed to "efficient cause" (as well as mentioning the material and formal causes) to explain a motive. I agree that is a satisfactory explanation and I think it applies to Schopenhauer's too (unless his desire a concrete object?).

      I went on to ask whether you want ZERO abstract objects to be causally inert or only some. Would you say that the number 4 has causal powers? Or the property of being a spider?

      I don't necessarily want any or all abstract objects to be causally inert. I want to know what is meant for them to be causally inert. If all you mean is can the non-physical number 4 slice your finger by itself? then I would agree. But a number can be the explanans of certain questions like what is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter?...Pi. One is the loneliest number, ya know ;-)

      BTW, I think this is improper usage: "property of being a spider".

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    16. @bmiller: "property of being a spider" is improper usage perhaps in A-T but not in all metaphysical approaches.

      If you maintain that motive force is applied to the strands of the web, not by the particular, embodied bumblebee, but by one or more of the bumblebee's properties, then there is nothing more I can say to you.

      You might want to hold that the particular bumblebee (not the universal, "the Bumblebee") just IS the bundle of its properties, but a bundle theory of substance isn't an option for someone who adheres to Thomism.

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    17. ficino4ml,

      "property of being a spider" is improper usage perhaps in A-T but not in all metaphysical approaches.

      Then wouldn't it be helpful to explain your usage since you understand mine?

      If you maintain that motive force is applied to the strands of the web, not by the particular, embodied bumblebee, but by one or more of the bumblebee's properties, then there is nothing more I can say to you.

      This seems to be pretty much the opposite of what I meant.

      Is he confusing the word "property" with the essential fact that bees have those features as part of the things they are?

      I doubt unattached "wings and legs" could apply force nor could a deformed bee without "wings and legs" (at least using the things it does not have). So a normal bee with wings and legs can break the web using its wings and legs. It can be said to move through its nature as opposed to an electron which is moved by its charged nature. But what causes the bee to move through its nature at all in this instance?

      Should I give up expecting an answer from you as to why you think all abstract objects lack causal power in the face of the examples we've discussed? I'm assuming silence is affirmation.

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    18. @bmiller: As to what is meant by saying that abstract objects lack causal powers/are causally inert, as I've said before, AFAIK, it means that they do not impart motion or change to concrete objects.

      I have come across a lot of discussions of abstract objects that assume rather than argue their causal inertness. One argument FOR their causal inertness appeals to their lack of spatio-temporal location. Something that is not in space or time, it seems intuitively, does not effect change in things that do have spatio-temporal location (God is not held to be an abstract object). By this is meant efficient causation. I don't know what other term to use, so please don't accuse me of cheating by importing Aristotle! I think we both know that final and formal causes were dropped by many after the late Renaissance. (A few philosophers say that abstract objects are eternal so they lack only spatial location.)

      A further argument for the causal inertness of abstract objects seeks to explain change in concrete objects as effected by concrete tokens, not by the abstract type: a particular bumblebee or a given performance of a concerto, not properties of the universal type, "The Bumblebee", or the "score" of the concerto existing as infinitely reproducable in concrete performances. Tim Juvshik has developed an argument along these lines in Erkenntnis 2018 (805-27).

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    19. @bmiller: "Should I give up expecting an answer from you as to why you think all abstract objects lack causal power in the face of the examples we've discussed?"

      Your examples serve what I take as an argument for formal and final causes. I think that's a different topic from the topic of the causal inertness of abstract objects. A hypothesis that one might consider: abstract objects properly so called don't have formal or final causal power, but (if A-T is correct) other things -- perhaps their concrete tokens -- do. This hypothesis is just me thinking off the top of my head. But without running it through in a rigorous way, I am wondering whether cases that Aristotle would consider cases of formal or final causality would NOT be cases where the causal power is attributed to an abstract object. The formal and final cause of a particular house or animal operates from a concrete token, no? The universal is not ontologically prior to the substance in Aristotle, although it is in historic Platonism with a capital P.




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    20. ficino4ml,

      it means that they do not impart motion or change to concrete objects.

      What does "motion or change" mean? If it only means "apply physical force" then it is clear that the story of War and Peace cannot do that so no proponent of the definition should wonder for a moment. However it's also clear that the story brought a change to the emotional state of the reader. No? Is the confusion due to an implicit assumption of materialism? That's the only thing I can come up with.

      Something that is not in space or time, it seems intuitively, does not effect change in things that do have spatio-temporal location (God is not held to be an abstract object).

      Maybe if you're trying to pass a physics exam. But our discussion of various concepts indicates otherwise. BTW. Why should God be an exception?

      so please don't accuse me of cheating by importing Aristotle!

      Not so fast! Do your philosopher "buddies" use the term "efficient causation"? :-)

      Regarding your paragraph discussing "concrete tokens". How is that different from reading a particular copy of War and Peace and crying? It is the immaterial intelligible content that affects the content consumer not the squiggles of the text. Likewise the construction of the music rather than the notes.

      As an aside, one of the remarkable things about Aristotle's philosophy is how he points out how universal the concept of form and matter is. Words can be thought of as the matter of language, but are meaningless unless they are in the form of a sentence. The same goes for musical notes and the pleasing arrangement of music. So it not only applies to form and matter of the objects we perceive in world, but seems to be part of what makes things intelligible to us.

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    21. @bmiller: at this point I feel as though the discussion has morphed into a debate about formal and final causes.

      SdP denied that abstract objects exist. I affirmed that they do exist. Do you have a position on abstract objects? What do you think they are? Do you think they exist?

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    22. ficino4ml,

      Looks like I last posted before your response regarding formal and final causes.

      I think the response misses my point which is that one shouldn't use philosophical concepts that are rejected within the philosophical tradition(?) that rejects those concepts. If the philosophers worried about abstract objects reject those 2 A-T causes, then they can't coherently be used in the discussion of that worry.

      SdP denied that abstract objects exist.

      I think he ended up agreeing they did.

      You ask if I have a position on abstract objects but the concept seems ill defined to me. That is why I've been asking questions. To flesh out the definition. I don't think it makes sense to develop a position on something that is not defined.

      Immaterial things are part of reality so they do exist. I don't see how that is controversial. Their existence affect reality in ways depending on the type of thing they are as we've discussed. To me, that seems they can be classified as having causal effects. Maybe passive causes, but I consider things like the Good, True and Beautiful to be a causes of attraction for us humans.

      Nominalism is unreal. In a not good way.

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  8. In my opinion, Mary Midgley's 1981 paper titled "Tsujigiri: Trying Out One's New Sword" is an excellent argument against cultural and moral relativism. While there have been some criticisms of her work, such as those by Jordan Sand, I still find it to be a compelling and convincing piece. Putnam's variation on the same theme is certainly interesting, but I do not believe it adds much to the overall discussion.
    At a moral level, we must also consider the implications of relativism, both individual and cultural. In the absence of any superior principle to govern conflict resolution, violence becomes the norm and the law of the strongest prevails. Therefore, it is essential to recognize the importance of shared principles and values that can govern our actions and resolve disputes in a peaceful and orderly manner.

    Furthermore, when it comes to the Platonic or Aristotelian process of knowledge, we must understand that knowledge is about sharing the same "whatness" or form between the knower and the known object. This sharing occurs through "pattern recognition" either knowingly or unknowingly, and it is crucial for our understanding of the world around us. On the other hand, any kind of -ism, be it naturalism, materialism, or any other narrative, is a second thought and cannot serve as a substitute for this fundamental process of knowledge acquisition.

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    1. @Gaëtan Cantale-Miège

      Thanks for the reference to Mary Midgley; I read the paper that you recommended and have just ordered a copy of her book Wickedness.

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  9. What is true, justified, rational, etc. relative to one culture’s standards will not be true, justified, rational, etc. relative to another’s. And that is all that can be said. To ask “But which culture’s standards are the right ones?” would presuppose that there is some neutral or objective higher-level standard by reference to which the standards of different cultures could be judged, and that is precisely what the cultural relativist denies.

    So, the cultural relativist is saying that if I am a white male, it's perfectly natural for me to be an oppressing, enslaving, overbearing type who forces everyone to cater to my preferences and accepts my superiority? Since doing so is simply following my cultural values, and there's no place from which anyone can claim my cultural values are less right than theirs. Good to know.

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    1. Nah, the cultural relativist is saying that there is no criteria to judge any culture that is not the western one, which happens to suck.

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    2. There may be many cultural relativist views out there but I know no cultural relativist which would say such a thing. Do you have a precise quote to share? Or maybe you have logically derived the latter paragraph from the former. If yes, how? If not for both, I would suspect a misrepresentation.

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    3. Georges, if you can't see how I arrived at the second paragraph out of the first, I can't help you.

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    4. Tony, well… Not only I do not see how you arrived at the second paragraph out of the first but it does not seem to me that the second follows at all from the first.

      If you are unable to even give a hint about how you made it, I have to point out that your “So, the cultural relativist is saying …” is just yet another gratuitous, unsupported and doubtful instance (or variant) of the usual “So you’re saying …” meme.

      Still, I am curious. Would you be able to certify that you really and precisely see how you arrived at the second paragraph out of the first? Is this really that ineffable? Pure intuition? Anything else?

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    5. Tony,
      "So, the cultural relativist is saying that if I am a white male, it's perfectly natural for me to be an oppressing, enslaving, overbearing type who forces everyone to cater to my preferences and accepts my superiority? Since doing so is simply following my cultural values, and there's no place from which anyone can claim my cultural values are less right than theirs."
      No objective place, correct.

      Objective morality is logically impossible, with god, without god, or in any case. Objective morality is logically ruled out by questions of the form of the Euthyphro dilemma.

      And your description is just what we have seen throughout history, not just with white men, but with the strong dominating, subjugating, conquering and enslaving the weak.

      The Mongols, Japanese, city states of Meso America, and on and on. People have been killing and dominating and enslaving each other for thousands of years.

      What we can say objectively, however, is that those who claim to have written an egalitarian constitution, yet continue to practice oppression are in point of objective fact being hypocritical.

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    6. @ sd,

      "Objective morality is logically impossible, with god, without god, or in any case. Objective morality is logically ruled out by questions of the form of the Euthyphro dilemma"

      Absolute poppycock. Your "nothing" god (you told us it was "nothing"), the god of your mind whom you fear to abandon leaves you nowhere to go. Nothing in the mind leads to nothing, not to some pseudo-intellectual "Euthyphro dilemma". The only people who find it to be an actual dilemma are those who imagine that they are above God. But from the nothing god comes nothing while from God, from nothing comes everything, especially Love (you don't need to play illogical definition games here with me about what "everything" means).

      "Objective morality is logically impossible"

      Well probably with you anyway, with your fear that there is something beyond your circular denialism.

      It just amazes me how the dying cult of the "New Atheist" has been so busy dreaming up one false prop for the nothing god of their minds after another. It has been a real industry going only nowhere. It may not understand objective love, but it has been very good ay practising the inspiration ofobjective hatred, the results of which we see every day in murderous attacks on the worshippers of God and on those who freely choose to oppose the levelling of objective love into the pseudo-choice of binding people to fake and harmful categories. After all if "Saint Russell" said there is no choice then you can only be misleading those you "teach" to be "free" to be themselves, imaging fake sexual categories etcetera to be something they have no choice about so that they can choose them.

      Codswallop and balderdash.

      You have a long way to go from your truly hypocritical, mad, nothing to Something.

      "What we can say objectively, however, is that those who claim to have written an egalitarian constitution, yet continue to practice oppression are in point of objective fact being hypocritical."

      How could people who have no choice be hypocritical? 🤣 This is the kind of tripe that the dying cult of nothing leads you to pontificate about as "wisedom".

      Sorry, nope, your fake god can only lead you to nothing.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

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    7. Georges, would it help you to see the comment if I added the point that according to the wokists, the entirety of white male cultural standards are those of racist, oppressive, patriarchical, condescending control of all lesser beings? I thought that went without saying (considering that it forms the backdrop of the entire post), but I suppose I can make it explicit here.

      I don't usually bother to engage with you, Starry-eyed Psycho, because you rarely seem able to speak as if you knew that you propound with premises and assumptions, that many of your premises and assumptions do not agree with many who blog at this cite, and that you have factored this knowledge into your comments with (for example) an attempt to get down to an AGREED set of assumptions. But since (in this seemingly rare case) you appear to have at least tried:

      While I will admit that many today believe that the Constitution (and Declaration of Independence) were stated so as to initiate an "egalitarian" society, I doubt that this is really true: I believe that the Founders who wrote them were distinctly aware of political dangers of full-on egalitarianism, and intended rather to create a democratic republic in order to (at least attempt) to restrain some of the disorders that arise from simple egalitarianism as such.

      As to the hypocrisy involved in the Declaration saying "all men are created equal" while keeping slavery: As far as my recollection of the facts goes, some of the Southern supporters of the new Constitution, in 1787, were in favor of putting constraints on slavery, as were many in the Northern states, but they were faced with an absolute repudiation of such a constitution by at least 2 Southern states: arguably, the Founders who voted for the Constitution were, as a majority, not "in favor of slavery of blacks" so much as "MORE in favor of not dealing with slavery right now" than in either (a) no new constitution at all, or (b) a complete splintering of the 13 states, or the fact that (a) probably would have led to (b) anyway. They may well have said "better to get this draft into place now, than achieve nothing, and let the next generation solve slavery." (Which is, arguably, why they expressly put the "no federal laws restricting slavery" provision in the new Constitution with a sunset of 20 years.) Leaving the problem for the future is not an expression of "I am OK with slavery", whatever else it is. (And, to note, due to the gradual cessation of slavery in the Northern states by that time, and before the invention of the cotton gin making cotton slavery profitable, in 1787 they might have reasonably believed there was room for a gradual and natural eradication overall.)

      But even more directly to your point: aren't ALL of the oppressors that you mentioned guilty of some kind of hypocrisy? So, that wouldn't single out the one set of white male oppressors, would it? Surely hypocrisy isn't a distinguishing feature found primarily in white males alone?

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    8. Tony, I understand a bit better how you managed to arrive at the second paragraph out of the first but I respectfully disagree on several steps.

      Whatever “the wokists” might say, I don’t buy the concept of “white male cultural standards”. I happen to be a white male (nobody’s perfect) and I do not recognize myself in what you describe as what such standards would be (I do not buy much either the concept of “the wokists”).

      I understand though that there exists people (and probably not only white males) with such standards and I consider as very unfortunate that there's no place from which anyone can claim that their cultural values are less right than other’s. However, deducing from that that cultural relativism must be false is committing an argumentum ad consequentiam fallacy. Condemning or tabooing cultural relativism regardless of it being correct or not just because of such adversarial consequences (typically in a “the end justifies the means” way) would (in my humble opinion) be even worse.

      Now, If you think that you can establish that cultural relativism is incorrect or that you can justify the existence and the accessibility of a place from which we could claim that their cultural values are less right than other’s without invoking any argumentum ad consequentiam, circularity or brute fact, I am very interested in learning how you achieves it.

      I would add that, I see very few people if any, arguing for the standards you refer to as “white males’” on the basis of cultural relativism. Rather, as I see it, those holding them usually also holds that they are absolute and even absolutely justified (which I would certainly challenge too).

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    9. Tony,
      "But even more directly to your point: aren't ALL of the oppressors that you mentioned guilty of some kind of hypocrisy?"
      I haven't surveyed all oppressors for hypocrisy, but for those who promise equality but deliver oppression, yes.

      In a monarchy or dictatorship or theocracy there is no pretense of equality. Inequalities are written into law. We can claim those inequalities are immoral by our standards, but in the case of both expressing inequality and practicing inequality the specific charge of hypocrisy does not apply.

      "So, that wouldn't single out the one set of white male oppressors, would it?"
      No it wouldn't, in general, there are lots of oppressors to go around, as I mentioned, pretty much on all continents for thousands of years, no shortage of examples.

      "Surely hypocrisy isn't a distinguishing feature found primarily in white males alone?"
      Right, all the human characteristics are pretty much across the board.

      In the modern era in the USA, however, it turns out that white males have been the primary tangible recipients of the benefits of various sorts of bigotry, discrimination, hypocrisies, and subjugation. At least, in the aggregate, with lots of anecdotal counterexamples available.

      For a long time here in the USA being non-white male meant being actively excluded from nearly all positions of power, wealth, and authority. Jim Crow, redlining, and pervasive discrimination were legal and pervasive.

      The laws were virtually all changed decades ago, but social behavior has a sort of inertia. Hearts and minds change more slowly than laws in this case.

      A very substantial form of social inertia is family wealth, family education, and family social contacts. A great deal of advantage goes to individuals born to a family with a history of wealth, property ownership, higher education, and powerful social contacts.

      We have not yet flushed out the social inertia of historical discrimination. To that extent it is justified to see racism, for example, wherever one sees inequality of average outcomes.

      Inequality of average outcomes by race today can in fact be traced to racism, but primarily of historical racism acting through social inertia.

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    12. Tony, I have a doubt. Did you reply to two interlocutors in the same comment? That is confusing.

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    13. @ sd,

      "the specific charge of hypocrisy does not apply."

      It applies always to anyone who claims to be able to "deliver" some version of "equality" by attacking the Church, which, you have made plain, is your _real_ intention and the people who get hurt can suck eggs.

      The pseudo-wisdom that comes from your nothing god enables you to make up anything that pleases you - even self contradictions in human described logic. Such contradictions in which one part or the other becomes conveniently "inoperative" are a standard feature of those who pretend to seek justice by attacking people, by terrorising them, and by inspiring hatred.

      "with lots of anecdotal counterexamples available"

      Interesting that counterexamples are just anecdotal whereas your claim is the "real" stuff. Don't give me the reply about "experts" and statistics. We see "experts" manipulating statistics by many means every day in the news. And don't try making the illogical claim (but typical for you) that if I decline to follow your priorities that I stand for the opposite.

      "A very substantial form of social inertia is family wealth, family education, and family social contacts. A great deal of advantage goes to individuals born to a family with a history of wealth, property ownership, higher education, and powerful social contacts"

      Ah I see, everything has to leveled - who cares who gets hurt - in your nothing god's psychotic revolution justified by nothing. God, His Church, and His, by free will choice, worshippers, seen by you as standing in your way, must especially be given the hatred treatment. And so we see it happening every day - evil acts of hatred justified by nothing.

      "On the assertion that all observed particles are actually localized oscillations of a particular sort of field, then the fundamental substance is the field"

      Interesting and funny🤣. Choose the premise you want and you get the built in conclusion you want when your well known circularity is at work. Especially when you are also known to run away from the fact that position and momentum are scientifically known to be non-commutative operators in the Hilbert space where such things have been studied.

      "On the assertion of god, then the fundamental substance is godstuff, whatever that turns out to be"

      Any assertion that comes from nothing, your god, leads to nothing.

      "Thus god is necessarily material, being godstuff, which is more fundamental than fields, else god is absolutely nothing at all. The assertion of a real existent immaterial being is incoherent."

      Here, you just repeat one of your stupidest arguments. You still fail to show that you understand the difference between logic and reason. You really avoid choosing to understand it.

      "Can god create a rock too heavy for himself to lift?"

      Kooky. In the logic you allow yourself to assume you pose a question that has a contradiction, in that logic, built into it, and yet you think you can prove something, in your assumed logic, from the sense free nothing question. And from that nonsense you assign yourself "priority" over God. That kind of argument doesn't touch anything but a few easily confused people, in whom, sewing confusion, has been your "teaching" goal.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

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    14. @ sd,

      "We have not yet flushed out the social inertia of historical discrimination"

      Bring on the revolution by self contradictory kooks! Hatred feeds on hatred! Once a fire is started it is hard to put out😀!

      Thus we see the nut case doing his harm, following nothing to inspire dangerous, hypocritical, hatred.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

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    15. @ sd,

      Nir Hasson, March 26, "Haaretz", "Anti-Christian Hate Crimes in Jerusalem Soaring This Year" on a daily basis, much of it unreported.

      This is just Israel, but it is increasingly going on around the world every day including in the US - murderous hatred, as we all see from what is reported after typical American reporting manipulation of the facts. People murdered, Christians attacked, buildings and property defaced and destroyed.

      "it is gratifying to at least put a smile on your face"

      The nothing philosopher inspires and provides coverage for the growth of anti-Christian violence while pretending to be happy to put a smile on the face of one of his attempted targets. Agents of various death cults, like the New Atheists typically put on a "nice" face to lull their audiences.

      The nothing philosopher claims that he is "not joking". "Joking" has been the least condemning description of his speech, which in fact is far more malevolent as hatred inspired speech must be.

      The nothing philosopher spews out this self contradictory mush, about knowing only himself yet somehow able to think about the "reality" of other things (while not reifying, as nothing philosophy allows reifying to be not reifying) - "Cogito ergo sum. And therefore there is an existence as opposed to absolutely nothing at all, and my experiences must be real experiences, but the subject of my experiences cannot be known with absolute certainty to be real except for myself."

      Circular self contradiction is OK because the contradictory statements are not thought at the same time if you are a nothing philosopher. Absolute non-sequiturs like "the nothing god of my solipsistic mind does not exist therefore God does not exist" appear with the regularity of an institutionalised insane man beating his head on a wall.

      His statements about AI reprogramming itself are more circular misleading. If a program is changed through input from the environment then it is deterministic only if the environment is deterministic but that the environment is not deterministic is just his premise maintained by scorn ("there is no such thing as random"), thus we see his usual circularity. His nothing philosophy allows to be circular and not circular at the same time.

      He has been given one of several possible definitions of random that imply a branching, non-deterministic future, but this, he knows because he knows (so the nothing god in his head tells him) that an answer is obviously (to himself) not needed (and because he can't answer it, understanding it first, which is not allowed, being required).

      Thus that God created mathematics and logic is a thought that is not allowed and is therefore irrefutable by him in his solipsistic nothingness.

      Admittedly, though, much of his method is actually very funny and can be laughed at😀 even though insane hatred is dangerous and destructive.

      😏

      Tom Cohoe

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  10. Dr. Feser,

    Any thoughts about the progress in AI vis-a-vis the immateriality of the intellect? I recall that Adler mentioned in his book 'Aristotle for Everybody' that if AI becomes sufficiently advanced, we might have to revisit the arguments for the immortality of the human soul. Of course when the book was written, AI was much less impressive than today, so I didn't think much of it.
    But now (whether or not it is warranted), the attention AI has received lately has made this issue relevant again.

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  11. Say Dr. Feser, I just now read your article here and it is an especially good one. I excuse my posting before reading (so can I truly be penitent?), as a case of shortage of time and the need to reply to a certain monster of circularity who seems to be an excellent fit to your summary of Putnam's observations.

    But seriously, this was a great article.

    😏

    Tom Cohoe

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  12. It may be that there is an objective state of affairs about reality and there is probably not much point in doubting it. What can be doubted of is the possibility to adequately and coherently represent it –or parts of it– by statements in natural language.

    This is more a skeptical perspective than directly a relativist one but relativism follows.

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  13. "[...] philosophy is ultimately concerned precisely with the objective standards of truth and rationality [...]" That is begging the question.

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  14. "cultural relativism collapses into cultural imperialism. The cultural relativist must regard his own perspective as the only correct perspective. Hence he is not really a relativist at all."

    This claim assumes that the cultural relativist must not have available to him the distinction between the good and the guise of the good, or the true and the apparently true. It's a mere truism to say that every perspective takes itself to be correct. It's false to say that every perspective (in particular, that of the cultural relativist) must take itself to be infallibly, indubitably, exclusively ('imperialistically'/'wokely') correct.

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