Rosenberg roundup

Having now completed our ten-part series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, it seems a roundup of sorts is in order.  As I have said, Rosenberg’s book is worthy of attention because he sees more clearly than most other contemporary atheist writers do the true implications of the scientism on which their position is founded.  And interestingly enough, the implications he says it has are more or less the very implications I argued scientism has in my own book The Last Superstition.  The difference between us is this: Rosenberg acknowledges that the implications in question are utterly bizarre, but maintains that they must be accepted because the case for the scientism that entails them is ironclad.  I maintain that Rosenberg’s case for scientism is completely worthless, and that the implications of scientism are not merely bizarre but utterly incoherent and constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that lead to them.

Mad dogs and eliminativists

As an epilogue to my critique of Alex Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” let’s take a brief look at Rosenberg’s recent interview at 3:AM Magazine.  The interviewer styles Rosenberg “the mad dog naturalist.”  So perhaps in his bid to popularize eliminative materialism, Rosenberg could put out a “Weird Al” style parody of the old Noël Coward song.  Or maybe he and fellow eliminativist Paul Churchland could do a re-make of ZZ Top’s classic Eliminator album.  Don’t know if they’re sharp-dressed men, but they’ve got the beards.  (I can see the video now: The guys, electric guitars swaying in unison and perhaps assisted by Pat Churchland in a big 80s hairdo, set straight some benighted young grad student who still thinks the propositional attitudes are worth salvaging.  Romance ensues, as does a job at a Leiter-ranked philosophy department…)

Eliminativism without truth, Part II

We’re looking at Alex Rosenberg’s attempt to defend eliminative materialism from the charge of incoherence in his paper “Eliminativism without Tears.”  Having set out some background ideas in an earlier post, let’s turn to the essay itself.  It has four main parts: two devoted to arguments for eliminativism, and two devoted to responses to the charge of incoherence.  I’ll consider each in turn.

Eliminativism without truth, Part I

Suppose you hold that a good scientific explanation should make no reference to teleology, final causality, purpose, directedness-toward-an-end, or the like as an inherent and irreducible feature of the natural order.  And suppose you hold that what is real is only what science tells us is real.  Then you are at least implicitly committed to denying that even human purposes or ends are real, and also to denying that the intentionality of thought and the semantic content of speech and writing are real.  Scientism, in short, entails a radical eliminativism.  Alex Rosenberg and I agree on that much -- he defends this thesis in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and I defend it in The Last Superstition.  Where we differ is over the lesson to be drawn from this thesis.  Rosenberg holds that scientism is true, so that eliminativism must be true as well.  I maintain that eliminativism is incoherent, and constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the scientism that leads to it.  I responded to Rosenberg at length in a series of posts on his book.

In his paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” Rosenberg attempts in a more systematic way than he has elsewhere to respond to the charge of incoherence.  Rosenberg kindly sent me this paper some time ago, and I note that it is now available online.

Post-intentional depression

A reader asks me to comment on novelist Scott Bakker’s recent Scientia Salon article “Back to Square One: toward a post-intentional future.”  “Intentional” is a reference to intentionality, the philosopher’s technical term for the meaningfulness or “aboutness” of our thoughts -- the way they are “directed toward,” “point to,” or are about something.  A “post-intentional” future is one in which we’ve given up trying to explain intentionality in scientific terms and instead abandon it altogether in favor of radically re-describing human nature exclusively in terms drawn from neuroscience, physics, chemistry, and the like.  In short, it is a future in which we embrace the eliminative materialist position associated with philosophers like Alex Rosenberg and Paul and Patricia Churchland.

The limits of eliminativism

Eliminativist positions in philosophy are a variety of anti-realism, which is in turn typically contrasted with realist and reductionist positions.  A realist account of some phenomenon takes it to be both real and essentially what it appears to be.  A reductionist account of some phenomenon takes it to be real but not what it appears to be.  An eliminativist view of some phenomenon would take it to be in no way real, and something we ought to eliminate from our account of the world altogether.  Instrumentalism is a milder version of anti-realism, where an instrumentalist view of some phenomenon holds that it is not real but nevertheless a useful or even indispensible fiction.

Eliminativism without truth, Part III

Now comes the main event.  Having first set out some background ideas, and then looked at his positive arguments for eliminativism about intentionality, we turn at last to Alex Rosenberg’s attempt to defend his position from the charge of incoherence in his paper “Eliminativism without Tears.”  He offers three general lines of argument.  The first purports to show that a key version of the objection from incoherence begs the question.  The second purports to give an explanation of how what he characterizes as the “illusion” of intentionality arises.  The third purports to offer an intentionality-free characterization of information processing in the brain, in terms of which the eliminativist can state his position without implicitly appealing to the very intentionality-laden notions he rejects.  Let’s look at each argument in turn.

Reading Rosenberg, Part V

In the previous installment of our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we began to examine what Rosenberg has to say about biological phenomena.  This time I want to take a brief detour and consider some of what Rosenberg says about the subject in his book Darwinian Reductionism.  I noted that while Atheist’s Guide pushes a generally uncompromising eliminative materialist line, Rosenberg resists the “eliminativist” label where issues in the philosophy of biology are concerned, and presents his views in that field as reductionist.  Darwinian Reductionism (a more serious book than Atheist’s Guide, and of independent interest) explains why.

The absolute truth about relativism

I don’t write very often about relativism.  Part of the reason is that few if any of the critics I find myself engaging with -- for example, fellow analytic philosophers of a secular or progressive bent, or scientifically inclined atheists -- take relativism any more seriously than I do.  It just doesn’t come up.  Part of the reason is that many other people have more or less already said what needs to be said about the subject.  It’s been done to death.

 
It is also possible to overstate the prevalence of relativism outside the ranks of natural scientists, analytic philosophers, theists, and other self-consciously non-relativist thinkers.

Mind-body problem roundup

For readers who might be interested, I thought it would be useful to gather together in one place links to various posts on the mind-body problem and other issues in the philosophy of mind.  Like much of what you’ll find on this blog, these posts develop and apply ideas and arguments stated more fully in my various books and articles.  Naturally, I address various issues in the philosophy of mind at length in my book Philosophy of Mind, of which you can find a detailed table of contents here.  (The cover illustration by Andrzej Klimowski you see to the left is from the first edition.)  You will find my most recent and detailed exposition of the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) approach to issues in the philosophy of mind in chapter 4 of Aquinas.  There is a lot of material on the mind-body problem to be found in The Last Superstition, especially in various sections of the last three chapters.  And there is also relevant material to be found in Locke, in the chapter I contributed to my edited volume The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, and in various academic articles.

Feynman’s painter and eliminative materialism

In case you haven’t been following it, my recent critique of novelist Scott Bakker’s Scientia Salon essay on eliminative materialism has generated quite a lot of discussion, including a series of vigorous and good-natured responses from Bakker himself both in my combox and at his own blog.  Despite the points made in my previous post, Bakker still maintains -- utterly implausibly, in my view -- that the incoherence objection begs the question against the eliminativist.  To see the problem with this response, consider a further analogy.

Scientism roundup

In several recent posts we have dealt at least indirectly with scientism, the view that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge.  Scientism is an illusion, a bizarre fantasy that makes of science something it can never be.  Seemingly the paradigm of rationality, it is in fact incoherent, incapable in principle of being defended in a way consistent with its own epistemological scruples.  It should go without saying that this in no way entails any criticism of science itself.  For a man to acknowledge that there are many beautiful women in the world does not entail that he doesn’t think his own wife or girlfriend is beautiful.  Similarly, to say that there are entirely rational and objective sources of knowledge other than science does not commit one to denying that science is a source of knowledge.  Those who cannot see this are doubly deluded – like a vain and paranoid wife or girlfriend who thinks all women are far less attractive than she is and regards any suggestion to the contrary as a denial of her own beauty.  Worse, like an already beautiful woman whose vanity leads her to destroy her beauty in the attempt to enhance it through plastic surgery, scientism threatens to distort and corrupt science precisely by exaggerating its significance.

Warby on Philosophy of Mind

Over at the online edition of Australia's Quadrant magazine, Michael Warby kindly reviews my book Philosophy of Mind. As Warby notes, the book is now out in a revised edition. (The first edition has the subtitle "A Short Introduction" and a surrealist cover illustration. The new edition, pictured at left, has a "brain in a vat" cover with the new subtitle "A Beginner's Guide." The only difference in content is the addition of an eight-page Postscript to the new edition.)

You can find a sample chapter here. Like the book in general (which first appeared in 2005), it is perhaps a tad too Cartesian and "representationalist" in spirit. Were I writing it today, I would make it more thoroughly Aristotelian-Thomist. (The philosophy of mind related portions of The Last Superstition reflect my transition toward a more consistent Thomism.) Still, Cartesianism is better than materialism, to say the very least.

Anyway, for interested readers, here is the complete table of contents:

Preface and acknowledgments

1. Perception

Dreams, demons, and brains in vats
Indirect realism
Skepticism
Appearance and reality, mind and matter
Further reading

2. Dualism

Minds and brains, apples and oranges
The indivisibility argument
The conceivability argument
The interaction problem
Further reading

3. Materialism

Tables, chairs, rocks, and trees
Reduction and supervenience
Cause and effect
Behaviorism
The identity theory
Functionalism
The burden of proof
Further reading

4. Qualia

The inverted spectrum
The “Chinese nation” argument
The zombie argument
The knowledge argument
Subjectivity
Property dualism
Further reading

5. Consciousness

Eliminativism
Representationalism and Higher-Order Theories
Russellian identity theory and neutral monism
Troubles with Russellianism
A more consistent Russellianism
Consciousness, intentionality, and subjectivity
The binding problem
Further reading

6. Thought

Reasons and causes
The computational/representational theory of thought
The argument from reason
The Chinese Room argument
The mind-dependence of computation
Thought and consciousness
Further reading

7. Intentionality

Naturalistic theories of meaning
1. Conceptual role theories
2. Causal theories
3. Biological theories
4. Instrumentalist theories
Eliminativism again
The indeterminacy of the physical
1. Representations
2. Concepts
3. Formal reasoning
Materialism, meaning, and metaphysics
Further reading

8. Persons

Personal identity
Consequences of mechanism
Hylomorphism
Thomistic dualism
Philosophy of mind and the rest of philosophy
Further reading

Postscript (2006)

Glossary

Bad lovin’

To love, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic analysis, is essentially to will the good of another.  Of course, there’s more to be said.  Aquinas elaborates as follows:

As the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 4), “to love is to wish good to someone.”  Hence the movement of love has a twofold tendency: towards the good which a man wishes to someone (to himself or to another) and towards that to which he wishes some good.  Accordingly, man has love of concupiscence towards the good that he wishes to another, and love of friendship towards him to whom he wishes good.

Nagel v Nietzsche: Dawn of Consciousness

While we’re on the subject of Nietzsche: The Will to Power, which is a collection of passages on a variety of subjects from Nietzsche’s notebooks, contains some interesting remarks on consciousness, sensory qualities, and related topics.  They invite a “compare and contrast” with ideas which, in contemporary philosophy, are perhaps most famously associated with Thomas Nagel.  In some ways, Nietzsche seems to anticipate and agree with points made by Nagel.  In other respects, they disagree radically.

Self-defeating claims and the tu quoque fallacy

Some philosophical claims are, or at least seem to be, self-defeating.  For example, an eliminative materialist who asserts that there is no such thing as meaning or semantic content is implying thereby that his own assertion has no meaning or semantic content.  But an utterance can be true (or false) only if it has meaning or semantic content.  Hence the eliminative materialist’s assertion entails that it is itself not true.  (I’ve addressed this problem, and various futile attempts to get around it, many times.)  Cognitive relativism is also difficult to formulate in a way that isn’t self-defeating.  I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics that scientism, and Hume’s Fork, and attempts to deny the existence of change or to deny the principle of sufficient reason, are also all self-defeating.  This style of criticism of a position is sometimes called a retorsion argument.

Conjuring teleology

At The Philosophers’ Magazine online, Massimo Pigliucci discusses teleology and teleonomy.  His position has the virtues of being simple and clear.  Unfortunately, it also has the vices of being simplistic and wrong.  His remarks can be summarized fairly briefly.  Explaining what is wrong with them takes a little more doing.

Augustine and Heraclitus on the present moment

On the subject of time and our awareness of it, Augustine says the following in The Confessions:

But how does this future, which does not yet exist, diminish or become consumed?  Or how does the past, which now has no being, grow, unless there are three processes in the mind which in this is the active agent?  For the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention to what it remembers…

Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know.  Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole.  But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory.  The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say.  But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past. (Confessions 11.28.37-38, Chadwick translation; an older translation is available online here)

Causality, pantheism, and deism

Agere sequitur esse (“action follows being” or “activity follows existence”) is a basic principle of Scholastic metaphysics.  The idea is that the way a thing acts or behaves reflects what it is.  But suppose that a thing doesn’t truly act or behave at all.  Would it not follow, given the principle in question, that it does not truly exist?  That would be too quick.  After all, a thing might be capable of acting even if it is not in fact doing so.  (For example, you are capable of leaving this page and reading some other website instead, even if you do not in fact do so.)  That would seem enough to ensure existence.  A thing could hardly be said to have a capacity if it didn’t exist.  But suppose something lacks even the capacity for acting or behaving.  Would it not follow in that case that it does not truly exist?

Summer web surfing

My Claremont Review of Books review of John Gray’s The Silence of Animals is now available for free online.

Keith Parsons has now wrapped up our exchange on atheism and morality at The Secular Outpost.

The latest from David Oderberg: “Could There Be a Superhuman Species?”  Details here.

Liberty Island is an online magazine devoted to conservatism and pop culture.  Music writer extraordinaire (and friend of this blog) Dan LeRoy is on board. 

James Franklin asks “What is mathematics about?”  (See also his new book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics.)