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.

Rosenberg responds to his critics

Well, sort of (scroll to the bottom). It seems to me that he mainly just repeats what he already said in his original piece, this time with a little testiness. I certainly don’t think he grapples seriously with the main difficulties facing his position (some of which I outlined in my earlier post).

Eliminative materialists like to complain that they are always being falsely accused of incoherently “believing that there are no beliefs” – “as if I had never heard of the ploy and would be stopped dead in my tracks by it,” says Rosenberg, making this complaint his own. “Actually,” he continues, “you won’t find the locution ‘I believe that….’ any where in my précis… just to avoid such puerile objections.” But does Rosenberg really think we anti-eliminativists have never heard that dodge before? Yes, fine, we realize that advocates of eliminative materialism (EM) studiously avoid the word “belief,” lest they be refuted in ten seconds rather than ten minutes. The trouble is that they inevitably help themselves to some other concept which leads them into exactly the same sort of incoherence, even if in a more subtle way.

In Rosenberg’s case, after reiterating that there is no such thing as “aboutness” or intentionality, he tells us in the same breath that “the brain receives, stores, and conveys information… [and] misinformation.” But “information” and “misinformation” are themselves intentional notions. (For you non-philosophers, “intentional” in this context means “exhibiting intentionality.”) This is obviously true of the ordinary, everyday sense of “information.” But it is also true of the technical, information-theoretic sense that Rosenberg has in mind – or at least, it has to be true of it if the notion of “information” is going to do the work Rosenberg and other naturalists need it to do. In particular, it has to be true if EM is to leave open the possibility of “naturalistically” reconstructing the notion of a “true” “theory” – such as a scientific theory, or a philosophical theory like naturalism or EM itself. And EM must reconstruct it somehow, otherwise the scribbles we make when we type things like “The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality” will no more count as correct guides to reality than do books on astrology, or indeed, than do the scratches my chair is making on the wood floor below me as I type this.

As John Searle has emphasized, the causal chains information theory regards as carriers of information – the processes that lead up to a tree’s having 33 rings, for example – count as “information” only in the sense that an outside observer can infer certain things from them. For example, someone counting the rings in question can, given his knowledge of elementary botany, infer that the tree is 33 years old, in a way he could not infer this from other aspects of the tree. But if we remove the observer and focus only on the objective physical facts, what we are left with is merely a set of causal processes having no more inherent significance than any others have. A year’s worth of growth caused a new ring to appear. It also thereby caused the tree get a little thicker; and the growth was itself caused in part by the presence of water in the soil around the tree’s roots. The collection of such causal chains is what exists objectively. But what makes the ring specifically – as opposed to the thickness or some other effect – significant with respect to the age of the tree specifically – as opposed to the water or some other cause? What makes the one “the” thing about which the other is “the” thing that conveys the “information”? The answer to both questions can only be the presence of an outside observer who takes these two particular points in the overall causal situation to have such significance. Absent the observer, to speak of “information” is just to speak of the enormously intricate network of causes and effects itself, but where no one part of it is more or less “informative” than any other. (This is a point which, as I noted in an earlier post, has been emphasized by Karl Popper and Hilary Putnam.)

More to the present point, the causal chains in Rosenberg’s brain, for example, will in this de-intentionalized sense of “information” no more count as a correct “guide to reality” – or as some “naturalistically respectable” “successor” to the concept of a “correct” “guide” – than the causal chains in his pancreas or his large intestine do, or indeed than the causal chains holding between my chair and the wood floor do. To be sure, an outside observer might be able to infer things from what is going on in the brain that he couldn’t infer from the intestine or the chair. But there is nothing left corresponding to such an inference – and in particular, nothing left that could correspond to a “correct” “guide to reality” (one that might be typed out as an essay and then cut and pasted onto a website, say) or any EM analogue to such a guide – when the observer is removed from the picture. There is just causation qua causation.

So, for the term “information” to do what Rosenberg needs it to do, it has to retain its intentional connotations. But in that case we are back to the problem that EM is incoherent insofar as it has to make use of concepts of the very sort it officially rules out. Yes, this need not be as crude as “believing there are no beliefs,” but as with the white collar criminal who eschews mugging but has no qualms about embezzling, the end result is essentially the same.

One reason Rosenberg fails to see this is that he says that the information the brain stores is not propositional or sentential in form, and he seems to think that this entails that it is not intentional. But whether the information in question is propositional or not is irrelevant to the point at issue, because propositional content is not essential to intentionality. What is essential to intentionality is directedness upon an object, and this “directedness” need not involve the expressing of a proposition about the object. It may be a mere “pointing to” the object without the making of a “statement” about it. Thus, even if the “information” Rosenberg says the brain contains does not amount to complete propositions, if it is to do the work Rosenberg needs it to do it will still have to involve certain brain processes “pointing to” or being “directed at” certain specific things beyond themselves. Otherwise it cannot ground a “naturalistic” “successor” to or reconstruction of the concept of a “correct” “guide to reality.” For example, whatever it is that is going on in neuroscientists’ own brains when they come up with correct neuroscientific theories will have in some way to “point to” brains specifically, rather than (say) to plates of spaghetti, seaweed, or kidney stones.

Anyway, like other EM advocates, Rosenberg never actually tells us what the reconstruction in question will look like – that is, what exactly is going on in the brain that corresponds to “accepting a scientific theory” and “affirming naturalism,” if it isn’t the having of beliefs and other intentional mental states. And like other EM advocates, he assures us that it is in any event to future neuroscience rather than to current naturalistic philosophy that we must look in order to find these things out. Rosenberg dismisses as “puerile” and a “trivial ploy” the claim that EM is self-undermining. “If only philosophy were that easy,” he laments. But it isn’t easy in that way. Instead, it’s easy in this way: Don’t bother me with your objections to EM. The neuroscientists will answer them some day, probably after I’m dead.

But the problem is not merely that this fails to answer the question. The problem is that it begs the question, because whether neuroscience can solve such philosophical problems – indeed, whether it is coherent to suggest that EM or any other claim can be restated, even at some future date, in a way that involves only non-intentional neuroscientific concepts – are precisely what is at issue. Moreover, Rosenberg never answers the question raised in my original post about why exactly we are supposed to accept EM if (a) EM entails that there is no fact of the matter about whether any argument, including any argument Rosenberg has given or could give for EM, is valid, sound, inductively strong, etc., and (b) neuroscience has at this point given us no “successor” concepts to validity, soundness, inductive strength, etc. Rosenberg is implicitly conceding that he has as yet no coherent way either of stating his position or arguing for it. Instead, he is issuing a promissory note that he assures us some future neuroscientists – someday, or some century, or some millennium – will make good on. Nor will they even give us (or our distant descendants) actually “rationally compelling” “arguments” for a “claim,” but rather a something-or-other (we know not what) that is somehow-or-other (we know not how) a “successor” of what we now call a rationally compelling argument for a claim. Why on earth should anyone accept such a bizarre promissory note? (Imagine some avant-garde mathematician told you that 2 + 2 = 23, admitted that he had no way of establishing this claim or even making it intelligible, but insisted that the mathematicians of the future would someday be able to do so. Would you take him seriously? Me neither, but there’s a guy at Duke University who would, and if you have any bridges for sale you might look him up.)

Rosenberg’s only answer is to beg the question some more, and indeed to repeat himself some more, with some hand-waving about what was “ruled out” by 17th century physics or “explained away” by Darwin. I’ve already explained what is wrong with this sort of move in my previous post on Rosenberg, and at great length in The Last Superstition.

So, why do Rosenberg, the Churchlands, and other EM advocates insist repeatedly on dismissing or even ignoring objections that are so obvious, and so obviously fatal, to their position? Part of the answer, as I’ve noted before, has to do with the ideological or even quasi-religious status naturalism has taken on in the thinking of so many contemporary philosophers – a status acknowledged by philosophers like Tyler Burge, William Lycan, Thomas Nagel, and John Searle (all quoted to this effect in The Last Superstition).

But there is likely a more personal component as well. The logical positivists no doubt thought that refuting their verifiability criterion of meaning just couldn’t be as easy as pointing out that it is self-undermining. “I’m A. J. Freaking Ayer! I don’t make obvious mistakes like that!” Actually, Freddie, you do. And here’s the painful truth: So do Paul Freaking Churchland and even Alex Freaking Rosenberg. If you don’t know it now, fellas, you’ll know it by the time you’re ready for your own Library of (Barely) Living Philosophers volumes. But be of good cheer – in contemporary academic philosophy, what is grounds for failing an undergraduate paper can be Festschrift material for a professional.

Monkey in your soul?

Before we get to part II of my series on modern biology and original sin, I want briefly to reply to some of the responses made to part I.  Recall that my remarks overlapped with points recently made by Mike Flynn and by Kenneth Kemp in his American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis” (which, I have since discovered, is available online).  If you haven’t yet read Flynn and Kemp, you should do so before reading anything else on this subject.  As they argue, there is no conflict between the genetic evidence that modern humans descended from a population of at least several thousand individuals, and the theological claim that modern humans share a common pair of ancestors.  For suppose we regard the pair in question as two members of this larger group who, though genetically related to the others, are distinct from them in having immaterial souls, which (from the point of view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and Catholic theology) are a necessary condition for the possession of genuine intellectual powers and can be only be imparted directly by God.  Only this pair and their descendents, to whom God also imparts souls and thus intellects, would count as human in the metaphysical and theologically relevant sense, even if the other members of the original larger group are human in the purely biological sense.  As Kemp writes:

Reading Rosenberg, Part II

We saw in part I of this series that Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is less about atheism than it is about scientism, the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality.  This is so in two respects.  First, Rosenberg’s atheism is just one implication among others of his scientism, and the aim of the book is to spell out what else follows from scientism, rather than to say much in defense of atheism.  Second, that it follows from his scientism is thus the only argument Rosenberg really gives for atheism.  Thus, most of what he has to say ultimately rests on his scientism.  If he has no good arguments for scientism, then he has no good arguments either for atheism or for most of the other, more bizarre, conclusions he defends in the book.

So, does Rosenberg have any good arguments for scientism?  He does not.  In fact, he has only one argument for it, and it is quite awful.

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.

Present perfect

Dale Tuggy has replied to my remarks about his criticism of the classical theist position that God is not merely “a being” alongside other beings but rather Being Itself.   Dale had alleged that “this is not a Christian view of God” and even amounts to “a kind of atheism.”  In response I pointed out that in fact this conception of God is, historically, the majority position among theistic philosophers in general and Christian philosophers in particular.  Dale replies:

Three comments. First, some of [Feser’s] examples are ambiguous cases. Perfect Being theology goes back to Plato, and some, while repeating Platonic standards about God being “beyond being” and so on, seem to think of God as a great self. No surprise there, of course, in the case of Bible readers. What’s interesting is how they held – or thought they held – these beliefs consistently together. Second, who cares who’s in the majority? Truth, I’m sure he’ll agree, is what matters. Third, it is telling that Feser starts with Plato and ends with Scotus and “a gazillion” Scholastics. Conspicuous by their absence are most of the Greats from early modern philosophy. Convenient, because most of them hold, with Descartes, that our concept of God is the “…idea of a Being who is omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely perfect… which is absolutely necessary and eternal.” (Principles of Philosophy 14)

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…)

Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura

In his essay “Classical Empiricism,” available in Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend compares the empiricism of the early moderns to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.  He suggests that there are important parallels between them; in particular, he finds them both incoherent, and for the same reasons.  (No, Feyerabend is not doing Catholic apologetics.  He’s critiquing empiricism.)

So you think you understand the cosmological argument?

Most people who comment on the cosmological argument demonstrably do not know what they are talking about.  This includes all the prominent New Atheist writers.  It very definitely includes most of the people who hang out in Jerry Coyne’s comboxes.  It also includes most scientists.  And it even includes many theologians and philosophers, or at least those who have not devoted much study to the issue.  This may sound arrogant, but it is not.  You might think I am saying “I, Edward Feser, have special knowledge about this subject that has somehow eluded everyone else.”  But that is NOT what I am saying.  The point has nothing to do with me.  What I am saying is pretty much common knowledge among professional philosophers of religion (including atheist philosophers of religion), who – naturally, given the subject matter of their particular philosophical sub-discipline – are the people who know more about the cosmological argument than anyone else does. 

In particular, I think that the vast majority of philosophers who have studied the argument in any depth – and again, that includes atheists as well as theists, though it does not include most philosophers outside the sub-discipline of philosophy of religion – would agree with the points I am about to make, or with most of them anyway.  Of course, I do not mean that they would all agree with me that the argument is at the end of the day a convincing argument.  I just mean that they would agree that most non-specialists who comment on it do not understand it, and that the reasons why people reject it are usually superficial and based on caricatures of the argument.  Nor do I say that every single self-described philosopher of religion would agree with the points I am about to make.  Like every other academic field, philosophy of religion has its share of hacks and mediocrities.  But I am saying that the vast majority of philosophers of religion would agree, and again, that this includes the atheists among them as well as the theists.

Della Rocca on PSR

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR), in a typical Neo-Scholastic formulation, states that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being” (Bernard Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, p. 15).  I discuss and defend PSR at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics (see especially pp. 107-8 and 137-46).  Prof. Michael Della Rocca defends the principle in his excellent article “PSR,” which appeared in Philosopher’s Imprint in 2010 but which (I’m embarrassed to say) I only came across the other day.

Among the arguments for PSR I put forward in Scholastic Metaphysics are a retorsion argument to the effect that if PSR were false, we could have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties, including any grounds we might have for doubting or denying PSR; and an argument to the effect that a critic of PSR cannot coherently accept even the scientific explanations he does accept, unless he acknowledges that there are no brute facts and thus that PSR is true.  Della Rocca’s argument bears a family resemblance to this second line of argument.

Noë on the origin of life etc.

UC Berkeley philosopher (and atheist) Alva Noë is, as we saw not too long ago, among the more perceptive and interesting critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  In a recent brief follow-up post, Noë revisits the controversy over Nagel’s book, focusing on the question of the origin of life.  Endorsing some remarks made by philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, Noë holds that while we have a good idea of how species originate, there is no plausible existing scientific explanation of how life arose in the first place:

This is probably not, I would say, due to the fact that the relevant events happened a long time ago.  Our problem isn't merely historical in nature, that is.  If that were all that was at stake, then we might expect that, now at least, we would be able to make life in a test tube.  But we can't do that.  We don't know how.

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.

Gelernter on computationalism

People have asked me to comment on David Gelernter’s essay on minds and computers in the January issue of Commentary.  It’s written with Gelernter’s characteristic brio and clarity, and naturally I agree with the overall thrust of it.  But it seems to me that Gelernter does not quite get to the heart of the problem with the computer model of the mind.  What he identifies, I would argue, are rather symptoms of the deeper problems.  Those deeper problems are three, and longtime readers of this blog will recognize them.  The first two have more to do with the computationalist’s notion of matter than with his conception of mind.