tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post2131514820006614977..comments2024-03-18T21:06:42.546-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: D. B. Hart and the “terrorism of obscurantism”Edward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger316125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-43700394419213654502015-06-19T10:46:09.287-07:002015-06-19T10:46:09.287-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-55433216762413335102015-06-19T10:33:57.213-07:002015-06-19T10:33:57.213-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-65402715663188059982015-06-19T10:11:15.335-07:002015-06-19T10:11:15.335-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1178565113345662732015-06-18T23:06:52.446-07:002015-06-18T23:06:52.446-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-62975639079231404742015-06-18T19:44:21.371-07:002015-06-18T19:44:21.371-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-83739779349867079592015-06-18T18:42:49.284-07:002015-06-18T18:42:49.284-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-37081264298811041412015-06-18T18:04:26.499-07:002015-06-18T18:04:26.499-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-18737717867204679152015-06-18T15:58:09.857-07:002015-06-18T15:58:09.857-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-41355389133229612042015-06-18T15:47:23.296-07:002015-06-18T15:47:23.296-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-5205235316382009302015-06-18T15:01:37.470-07:002015-06-18T15:01:37.470-07:00You may be confusing something like L(LFx → Lβ) or...<i>You may be confusing something like <b>L</b>(<b>L</b>Fx → <b>L</b>β) or (<b>L</b>Fx → <b>L</b>β) with (<b>L</b>α <b>L</b>→ β) or (α <b>L</b>→ β). Just a thought.</i><br /><br />My comment "any statement that can be derived logically from a necessary truth must itself be a necessary truth" was not about material implication →, but rather about logical deducibility which can be represented with the turnstile symbol I write as |- ...would you disagree that if we have both <b>L</b> α and α |- β, we should be able to conclude <b>L</b> β ? Material implication and logical implication are obviously distinct, for example if α is "The USA consisted of 55 states in the year 2000" and β is "1+1=3", then it is true in our world that α → β but not true that α |- β.<br /><br /><i>You also have modus tollens issues to face. </i><br /><br />Can you point out specifically where you think modus tollens would be a problem for my argument?<br /><br /><i>I've at this point given arguments for every single one of my premises, including that the PSR (as well as being eminently self-evident) can't be coherently denied.</i><br /><br />I'm not sure which post you're referring to it when you say you've argued it can't be coherently denied (could you quote a line from that comment so I could find it?), but most arguments for the PSR try to show a problem with the view that there are contingent facts that have no explanation, and that's not my own position. My own view is that there probably is no such thing as a "contingent truth", and that all truths about the world are necessary truths, thus making the PSR not so much wrong as inapplicable (since it's specifically stating all contingent truths have explanations), unless you extend it so that it talks about the explanations for necessary truths (and of course we do sometimes talk of 'explaining' necessary truths in terms of other necessary truths, as in mathematics--the idea is usually to deduce a necessary truth that's less self-evident to us from some other necessary truths that are more self-evident to us, like the Peano axioms of arithmetic).JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-13706171289872592672015-06-18T14:57:37.964-07:002015-06-18T14:57:37.964-07:00Insofar as your first premise asks that the q (the...<i>Insofar as your first premise asks that the q (the explanandum) be deducible from p (the explanans), these stipulations block off your own first premise. Conclusions are always, in some sense, contained in the premises. This might, I think, become clearer to you if you attempt to formalize the argument.</i><br /><br />The specific meaning of "contained" I was using was the one I stated, saying that proposition p "contains" another proposition q if p is identical to q, or if p is a molecular sentence and one of the more basic sentences it's made up of is identical to q. I did not mean for "contained" to be more general than that, and in particular I did not mean for p to "contain" q simply because q is logically deducible from p.<br /><br /><i>This is where you lost me earlier. Whether or not an ideal reasoner can deduce the necessary truth “There exists a necessary being” in world w (the actual world) but can't in some other world s should have no impact on whether or not the necessary being exists.</i><br /><br />I'm not assuming that at the outset, but rather deriving it from some other assumptions about what counts as a good "explanation". Even if you don't agree with me about what a good explanation is, the argument at least shows some subtleties that I think should be made explicit so everyone reading it can decide for themselves which side they take. For example, one of the many contingent facts contained in the BCCF is the bare fact that a contingent being exists at all--my argument makes more explicit that <i>if</i> explanations can be expressed as logical deductions, then the only way to "explain" this particular fact is by a deduction which assumes as a starting premise that some contingent being exists, which might not be obvious on first glance at your argument. Some who might have initially been inclined to accept your argument might balk if this point is made explicit, which is why I think it's a good idea to do so, unless you disagree that my if-then statement is implied by your argument.<br /><br /><i>The proposition “There exists a necessary being” isn't true in virtue of contingent facts</i><br /><br />My argument isn't about the issue of deducing "there exists a necessary being", since I am allowing that to be assumed as a starting premise without the need for any further justification. I'm pointing out that the necessary properties of this necessary being cannot in themselves be the "full" explanation for any contingent facts including the BCCF (where 'full' means detailed and formal enough that the explanandum can be deduced logically from the explanans). And I'm pointing out that if you use as starting premises both those involving the necessary being (g) and some other premises which we know to be true (i), then for the explanation to work logically i will have to include some contingent facts about the world at the outset. To me this seems to make the explanation a circular one, since we will be using some contingent facts to explain why <i>all</i> contingent facts are true, including the ones we assumed from the start.<br /><br /><i>Incidentally (I think I pretty much got the gist anyway), I'm not sure about your contrasting of "conditional" with "necessary" here: "[...] neither [...] can contain any conditional truths--both g and i must consist solely of necessary truths". Are you using "conditional" to mean contingent here?</i><br /><br />Yes, sorry, I mixed up my terms in that comment. In the two sentences in that comment where I said "conditional", "contingent" should be substituted.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-8987460183224014622015-06-18T13:38:08.860-07:002015-06-18T13:38:08.860-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-9665922035384850652015-06-18T13:23:54.200-07:002015-06-18T13:23:54.200-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-16694119023779279352015-06-18T13:19:26.643-07:002015-06-18T13:19:26.643-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-50358148586296835492015-06-18T13:12:50.428-07:002015-06-18T13:12:50.428-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-56506783395331178572015-06-18T12:56:39.162-07:002015-06-18T12:56:39.162-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-70850865532360726652015-06-18T11:26:12.555-07:002015-06-18T11:26:12.555-07:00After considering the quoted statement somewhat fu...<i>After considering the quoted statement somewhat further, I think I'm going to deny it. Primarily, this is because it at least appears to pointlessly strengthen full explanations to something else with all sorts of provability and deducibility stipulations that seem to ask for them to be something much more like ultimate explanations (in which case, I would have just spoken of ultimate explanations instead).</i><br /><br />I was just using "full" to suggest "more complete and precise than the ordinary colloquial explanations we give in natural language", do "full" and "ultimate" explanations have some more technical meaning in some area of philosophy? And would you accept the initial part of my argument, along with the non-circularity condition I just added above, if I substituted "ultimate explanation" for "full explanation"?JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-20156414245347244172015-06-18T11:21:33.392-07:002015-06-18T11:21:33.392-07:00I would prefer and appreciate if you lay out the r...<i>I would prefer and appreciate if you lay out the rest of your argument anyway, explicitly and up front. It might also save time.</i><br /><br />Sure. In the previous argument I said that if some proposition p is to serve as the explanation for some other proposition q, it must either be that q is deducible from p in a purely logical way by an ideal reasoner (and thus at least in principle deducible by us), or that there are some implicit background assumptions--label them 'i'--being assumed, such that q is deducible in a purely logical way from the combination of (p & i). To continue the argument, I want to add a non-circularity condition saying it doesn't count as an "explanation" if you just assume q at the outset, meaning that neither p nor i can be identical to q, nor can they contain q if they are "molecular sentences" in the sense described <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_sentence" rel="nofollow">here</a> (for example, p could not be (p1 & p2 & q), since that contains q). Also, if q itself is a molecular sentence containing multiple more basic propositions (q1, q2, … , qn), then neither p nor i can contain any of those more basic propositions either--if for example p contained q2, then the explanation would be circular with regards to q2, though it might not be circular with regards to other parts of q like q1. All of this seems reasonable to me in terms of the usual assumption of what counts as circular reasoning, and the assumption that you haven't really "explained" some fact if you just assumed it at the outset, whether explicitly or implicitly (since that would be begging the question).<br /><br />From this non-circularity condition, we must conclude that if our explanandum is the BCCF (which we labeled 'a'), then since it contains <i>all</i> conditional truths about our world, then neither the explanans (label it 'g' for God), nor any implicit background assumptions i, can contain <i>any</i> conditional truths--both g and i must consist solely of necessary truths. But if a can be deduced in a purely logical way from necessary truths g & i, then since g & i are true in all possible worlds, and the logical rules of inference are the same in all possible worlds, then ideal reasoners in all possible worlds should be able to conclude a as well--in other words, a must be a necessary truth! I would imagine that the claim "any statement that can be derived logically from a necessary truth must itself be a necessary truth" is expressed as a theorem in some area of math, perhaps <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalogic" rel="nofollow">metalogic</a>, but even if it's not, the argument above about ideal reasoners in different possible worlds seems sufficient to establish it. And since the conclusion of my argument contradicts the initial assumption that a was supposed to be contigent, if the argument is sound it shows that some initial premise--either that the PSR applies to the proposition a containing all contingent truths, or that there are any truths that are ultimately contingent rather than necessary in the first place--must be flawed.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1531198628112092872015-06-18T11:21:04.490-07:002015-06-18T11:21:04.490-07:00But since we live in a finite world (ie. the stand...<i>But since we live in a finite world (ie. the standard model of cosmology, at least, agrees) and true propositions (truthbearers) are true just in case they correspond with something in reality (in virtue of corresponding with something in reality), I would deny that the BCCF (with redundancies removed) is or can be an infinitely long conjunction. I would need some type of argumentation for why the BCCF would be infinitely long before even letting that criticism get off the ground.</i><br /><br />Well, the standard model that's usually used in as a starting point cosmology is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre%E2%80%93Robertson%E2%80%93Walker_metric" rel="nofollow">FLRW metric</a>, which simplifies things by assuming that at each moment in cosmological time, matter is distributed with uniform density throughout space, and in this metric the space would only be finite if the density was high enough to curve space positively like a higher-dimensional analogue of the surface of a sphere, whereas space would be infinite in extent if the density is lower so that the spatial curvature is zero (a 'flat' universe--and keep in mind that cosmological observations suggest our observable universe has a curvature indistinguishable from flatness) or negative (a 'hyperbolic' space), though a flat or hyperbolic universe can be made finite if you assume an unusual topology as described in <a href="http://plus.maths.org/content/space-do-all-roads-lead-home" rel="nofollow">this article</a>. This assumption of uniform density at each moment of cosmological time is thought to be a good approximation on large scales, at least in the observable universe, though on smaller scales matter is obviously distributed in a more lumpy way. Also, inflationary theory differs from the FLRW metric in suggesting our observable universe might be a patch of an inflationary bubble of finite size, and outside this bubble the density might be totally different (inflationary theory also naturally suggest the possibility that the Big Bang was not the true beginning of time, but rather a sudden expansion of a small bit of space in a preexisting universes, with the process of new universes bubbling out from older ones potentially going back forever in time).<br /><br />Another reason the BCCF might be infinite is that if we take it to contain all the contingent truths about the universe perceived timelessly by God, so unless God literally causes time to end on Judgment Day, the number of contingent truths about the future might be infinite. And one other reason for allowing the possibility of an infinitary proof, distinct from the possibility of the BCCF being infinite, is that the necessary statement (presumably about God) that is being used as the explanation for the BCCF might itself contain an infinite amount of information. For example, even for those who don't believe God actualized "the best of all possible worlds", God's omniscient knowledge of all the infinite possible worlds, and His evaluation of each one, might have had some role in His choice to actualize this particular world. But if you are willing to grant for the sake of argument that a purely finitary logical derivation of the BCCF is possible from some finite starting premises about God along with any other needed background assumptions, then that actually makes my argument simpler. I didn't bring up infinitary logic because I intended to suggest the "infinitely long contingent explanatory regress " you mentioned, just to cover all the bases, since if the facts about God or the BCCF would require an infinite number of symbols to express, one might object that even though an ideal reasoner (one capable of dealing with infinite propositions) could deduce the explanandum from the explanans, this should not be equated with being able to logically derive the explanandum from the explanans since ordinary logical deduction requires finite symbol-strings.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-7092532412070301802015-06-18T11:20:35.644-07:002015-06-18T11:20:35.644-07:00Or are you pointing to an issue not at the level o...<b>Or are you pointing to an issue not at the level of the formalism but at the level of interpretation?</b><br /><br /><i>Yes, I think this is correct. But it's also a problem for the logic and using the logic to analyze arguments insofar as we need to interpret what symbols like ∃x mean for the logical statements to be meaningful. The lines of symbols—like sentences, as opposed to statements or propositions—have no meaning on their own; without a speaker or mind assigning them meaning, they're just indeterminate garble.</i><br /><br />Sure, but we can break this down in terms of the <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/" rel="nofollow">traditional distinction</a> between logical validity (which only requires that the premises are well-formed formulas and all the logical inferences follow the syntactical rules, without regard for meaning) and soundness (which depends on the interpretation of the meaning of the statements and rules of inference, and requires that they all be objectively <i>true</i>). So I think you're saying there is no doubt that your argument is logically valid, but we must get into issues of interpretation and ontology if we want to decide whether it is sound.<br /><br /><b>OK. It also seems to me that since we are referring to an ideal reasoner here, there should be some notion that that the explanandum can be deduced from the explanans in some kind of logical way. </b><br /><br /><i>Well, to know something it has to be true (truth is included in the notion of knowing). So, if the ideal reasoner (IR) can know the explanandum from the explanans, then he can also deduce the explanandum from the explanans. So, yeah. That was included in my reply.</i><br /><br />Just to be clear, when I said "the explanandum can be deduced from the explanans in some kind of logical way", it's important to my argument that the explanans can be put into formal terms, and any implicit background assumptions needed for the deduction can be made explicit and put into formal terms as well, such that explanans + bkd. assumptions can be used to derive the explanandum in the purely syntactical way I mentioned above, where there is no doubt that the derivation is logically valid (using whatever logical system we are assuming). As above, there might be doubt about the soundness of the argument if we didn't think the explanans or the background assumptions were actually true, or if we had philosophical questions about the rules of inference in the logical system being assumed (for example, you might doubt a system that allowed for inferences from statements that use the existential quantifier). But suppose for the sake of argument that God has told the ideal reasoner that the explanans and background assumptions are true, and that some specific rules of inference are trustworthy--in that case the ideal reasoner can be sure, based on the logical validity of the derivation of the explanandum from explanans + bkd. assumptions, that the explanandum is true as well.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-9118588828552213392015-06-15T23:56:12.973-07:002015-06-15T23:56:12.973-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-6804771533430850722015-06-15T15:32:17.195-07:002015-06-15T15:32:17.195-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-76610791687818876682015-06-15T15:06:17.324-07:002015-06-15T15:06:17.324-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-69135401117122402622015-06-15T13:11:53.520-07:002015-06-15T13:11:53.520-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-56152639833914366392015-06-15T13:02:10.880-07:002015-06-15T13:02:10.880-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.com