Fides Quaerens Intellectum

I’m currently writing a paper on epistemic circularity for a seminar on Michael Bergmann’s excellent new book, Justification Without Awareness.  As luck would have it, I ran across an ad for this t-shirt in my inbox.  I just might buy it, here.

 

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The past week and a half has been really crazy. My wedding is quickly approaching, this is the last week of classes, paper & grade deadlines are around the corner, and my favorite basketball team is in peril. Given all of this, I haven’t had time to write new posts on my blog or respond to the comments. I figure I should say something before someone calls the police to notify them that I’ve gone missing.

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The SEP presents the “problem of the many” by thinking about the composition of clouds. The article explains this with a blockquote from David Lewis:

Think of a cloud — just one cloud, and around it a clear blue sky. Seen from the ground, the cloud may seem to have a sharp boundary. Not so. The cloud is a swarm of water droplets. At the outskirts of the cloud, the density of the droplets falls off. Eventually they are so few and far between that we may hesitate to say that the outlying droplets are still part of the cloud at all; perhaps we might better say only that they are near the cloud. But the transition is gradual. Many surfaces are equally good candidates to be the boundary of the cloud. Therefore many aggregates of droplets, some more inclusive and some less inclusive (and some inclusive in different ways than others), are equally good candidates to be the cloud. Since they have equal claim, how can we say that the cloud is one of these aggregates rather than another? But if all of them count as clouds, then we have many clouds rather than one. And if none of them count, each one being ruled out because of the competition from the others, then we have no cloud. How is it, then, that we have just one cloud? And yet we do.

The article, then, shows the paradox with the following set of claims:

1. There are several distinct sets of water droplets s_k such that for each such set, it is not clear whether the water droplets in s_k form a cloud.
2. There is a cloud in the sky.
3. There is at most one cloud in the sky.
4. For each set s_k, there is an object o_k that the water droplets in s_k compose.
5. If the water droplets in s_i compose o_i, and the objects in s_j compose o_j, and the sets s_i and s_k are not identical, then the objects o_i and o_j are not identical.
6. If o_i is a cloud in the sky, and o_j is a cloud in the sky, and oi is not identical with o_j, then there are two clouds in the sky.
7. If any of these sets s_i are such that its members compose a cloud, then for any other set s_j, if its members compose an object o_j, then o_j is a cloud.
8. Any cloud is composed of a set of water droplets.

I have to admit, I’ve always been sympathetic to rejecting claim (2).

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The Spurs finally win their first-round series (4-1) against the Suns. I think the series was much closer than the win-loss record shows. The first and fifth games were very close, and those could have easily been won by the Suns. As a Spurs fan, I’m more optimistic about their chances of beating New Orleans than their shot at beating the Suns (perhaps I’ll regret writing that after we see how the Spurs do against the Hornets). Tim Duncan had a solid game with 29 points and 17 rebounds (9 offensive!); Tony Parker had 31 points and 8 assists. One of the definitive differences in this defense-dominated game was that Spurs shot 80% from the free throw line, while the Suns 54%. Here are the highlights from the game:

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Here’s an argument against internalism that Bergmann defends in the first half of his recent book, Justification without Awareness.

1. An essential feature of internalism is that it makes a subject’s actual or potential awareness of some justification-contributor a necessary condition for the justification of any belief held by that subject.
2. The awareness required by internalism is either strong awareness or weak awareness.
3. If the awareness required by internalism is strong awareness, then internalism has vicious regress problems leading to radical skepticism.
4. If the awareness required by internalism is weak awareness, then internalism is vulnerable to the SPO, in which case internalism loses its main motivation for imposing the awareness requirement.
5. If internalism either leads to radical skepticism or loses its main motivation for imposing the weak awareness requirement (i.e. avoiding the SPO), then we should not endorse internalism.
6. Therefore, we should not endorse internalism.

Since we should endorse internalism, at least one of the premises of his argument is false. If given enough time, I would argue that 1, 3, and 5 are dubious, if not false. Probably the best way to respond to Bergmann would be to focus on what is wrong with premise 1. Any thoughts from others who have read Bergmann’s book?

(I know I haven’t explained his terms (strong/weak awareness, SPO, etc), but given my current time constraints, this is the best I can do for now. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, and I’ll answer them as I have time.)

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The Phoenix Suns dominated yesterday’s game against the Spurs. Boris Diaw nearly had a triple-double, which was more than enough to make up for Grant Hill’s absence. The whole Suns team was playing perfectly. In the third quarter, I was convinced that they couldn’t miss a shot. Frankly, this performance was what I feared the Phoenix Suns would give in every game of this series. The Suns are a terrific team, and I’m glad to see that they aren’t going down without a fight. Check out the highlights here:

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The Spurs pull further ahead and make the series 3-0. Tony Parker was utterly amazing last night! He scored 41 points (his career playoff high) 12 assists. Ginobili (20 points, 4-7 3-pointers) and Duncan (23 points, 10 rebounds) weren’t so bad either. In the third quarter, I’m pretty sure that the Spurs couldn’t miss a shot even if they tried. With over two minutes left in the game, the Suns fans started leaving the game, and throughout the second half you could hear fans booing their own team. Even though I feel bad for the Suns (they are a much better team than these past two games make them appear to be), I’m happy to see the Spurs in an advantageous position to advance in the playoffs—especially since the Suns are such a formidable team to meet in the first round of the playoffs. Here are the highlights:

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In 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, the Apostle Paul seems to be highlighting the differing perspectives on the apostolic message of Jesus Christ and his propitiating work on the cross at Calvary. Particularly, he seems to be contrasting how this “word of the cross” is God’s wisdom and power, whereas this message is often viewed as a stumbling block or folly by “those who are perishing” (v. 18).

Paul says in verse 21: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” It seems obvious that Paul is claiming that one cannot merely think their way to salvation. But the beginning of verse 21 caught my eye. It seems to say that the world cannot know God through wisdom due to God’s wisdom. In other words, it seems to claim that wisdom is useless in coming to know God.

This is a very cursory reading and I know of many other biblical verses that affirm wisdom. But I’m concerned about the implications of this verse in light of the testimony of some people like C. S. Lewis and Augustine. Their spiritual journeys seem to go against my cursory reading. Does anyone have any suggestions on what Paul is saying in these verses that would coincide with these sorts of intellectual testimonies?

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The Spurs win game 2 in their series against the Phoenix Suns. Check out the highlights here:

My favorite moments included Tim Duncan stuffing Shaq in the first quarter (not shown in the highlight clips) and Ginobili’s incredible assist to Duncan in the fourth quarter.

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David Hume has a very interesting and influential account of morality. It’s difficult to nail down, but I think it goes something roughly like this: the moral values that we attach to certain actions are a consequence of what is useful to humans and perceiving certain facts to be useful. When creatures with a human nature perceive events that are useful to human nature, there is a corresponding inward, moral, sentimental, impression that we ascribe to the event. It is human nature along with utility that causes us to have moral sentiments attached to certain sorts of events.

In the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume writes the following, which shows the role of utility that I’ve sketched above.

It appears to be matter of fact, that the circumstance of utility, in all subjects, is a source of praise and approbation: That it is constantly appealed to in all moral decisions concerning the merit and demerit of actions: That it is the sole source of that high regard paid to justice, fidelity, honour, allegiance, and chastity: That it is inseparable from all other social virtues, humanity, generosity, charity, affability, lenity, mercy, and moderation: And, in a word, that it is a foundation of the chief part of morals, which has a reference to mankind and our fellow-creatures. (EPM 5.44)

The last sentence of that quote informs us how important utility is for Hume’s moral theory: “it is the foundation of the chief part of morals, which has a reference to mankind and our fellow-creatures.” For the sake of easy reference I will use (U) to refer to the claim that utility is the foundation of the chief part of morals. I take (U) to be a necessary condition for Hume’s moral theory to obtain. The problem for Hume’s moral theory is that (U) is very likely to be false. Why? Because of the sensible knave problem.

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This is one the best NBA playoff games that I have watched live. Here are the highlights:

When Tim Duncan sunk that three-pointer, I nearly started crying. Seriously.

This is going to be a great series to follow. I hope the Spurs are able to win the series, but I think Phoenix is a great team that is capable of coming back and taking the series.

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David Hume has an interesting view of the nature of justice. Rather than accepting that justice is a virtue that is fundamentally or intrinsically good, Hume claims that the good in justice is derived entirely from its utility. Few would doubt that justice has a useful component to it, but it is another more radical thesis to claim that justice is nothing more than the product of utility measurements and applications.

To make his point, Hume uses a series of thought experiments. The first one involves imagining a world with an abundance of resources—such an abundance that there would arise no need for wanting anything. Everything you could possibly want is available at one’s fingertips in an unlimited supply without requiring any work to obtain it. In this world, people spend their time composing poetry, writing songs, and contemplating philosophy. In this thought experiment, Hume concludes:

It seems evident that, in such a happy state, every other social virtue would flourish, and receive tenfold increase; but the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of. For what purpose make a partition of goods, where every one has already more than enough? Why give rise to property, where there cannot possibly be any injury? Why call this object Mine, when upon the seizing of it by another, I need but stretch out my hand to possess myself to what is equally valuable? Justice, in that case, being totally useless, would be an idle ceremonial, and could never possibly have place in the catalogue of virtues.

Hume goes on to give another thought experiment—this one involves a modification of the actual world. Suppose that the distribution of resources remains limited (and human needs remain the same), but that human nature is altered so that each person regards the other with maximal generosity and friendship. In this second scenario, Hume also thinks that there would be no need for private property or rules of justice. Here is Hume’s explanation:

Why should I bind another, by a deed or promise, to do me any good office, when I know that he is already prompted, by the strongest inclination, to seek my happiness, and would, of himself, perform the desired service; except the hurt, he thereby receives, be greater than the benefit accruing to me? in which case, he knows, that, from my innate humanity and friendship, I should be the first to oppose myself to his imprudent generosity. Why raise landmarks between my neighbour’s field and mine, when my heart has made no division between our interests; but shares all his joys and sorrows with the same force and vivacity as if originally my own? Every man, upon this supposition, being a second self to another, would trust all his interests to the discretion of every man; without jealousy, without partition, without distinction. And the whole human race would form only one family; where all would lie in common, and be used freely, without regard to property; but cautiously too, with as entire regard to the necessities of each individual, as if our own interests were most intimately concerned.

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There has to be at least one proposition that is necessarily true. Otherwise, the claim that there are no necessary truths would be true in all possible worlds. If that claim is true in all possible worlds, then it would satisfy the definition of a necessary truth. Put more formally, we can the argument following these premises:

1. If there are no necessary truths, then there are no propositions that are true in all possible worlds. (Given)
2. If there are no necessary truths, then the proposition that there are no necessary truths is true in all possible worlds. (Given)
   3. There are no necessary truths. (Assumption for reductio)
   4. There are no propositions that are true in all possible worlds. (1,3, MP)
   5. The proposition that there are no necessary truths is true in all possible worlds. (2,3, MP)
   6. Both (there are no propositions that are true in all possible worlds) and (the proposition that there are no necessary truths is true in all possible worlds). (4,5, Conj)

7. It is not the case that there are no necessary truths. (3-6, IP)

Since it is not the case that there are no necessary truths, that logically implies that there is at least one necessary truth. Perhaps, this proof is a little too quick and loose. Then again, it might be unimpeachable and prove nothing interesting (maybe no one has seriously maintained that there are no necessary truths).

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Is it the case that the existence of multiple inconsistent sets of religious beliefs is an undercutting defeater for believing any particular set of religious beliefs are correct? The objective of this post is to sketch out some reasons for thinking the answer to the previous question is no. Defeaters are conditions that cast doubt on an argument or claim to the extent that the argument or claim is no longer deemed reasonable to hold. An undercutting defeater is a defeater that shows the grounds for holding the belief in question are inadequate. For example, suppose you are observing widgets coming off the assembly line at the widget factory and judging by the way they look, you judge the widgets are red. You are justified in this belief until someone points out that the lighting in the factory consists entirely of red-colored lights. Given this new information, your belief that the widgets are red is defeated.

It seems that the existence of multiple inconsistent sets of religious beliefs is supposed to be an undercutting defeater for any particular religious belief. Let’s say that you grow up believing Christianity is true. Then, you go off to college and discover that there are many groups of people who hold religious beliefs inconsistent with your own. Moreover, many of these people are reasonable, well-educated, well-behaved, and generally good people. Psychologically, we know that some people do come to doubt the truth of their own religion when put in this sort of situation. What we are trying to assess, though, is whether such doubts are reasonable; whether such doubts constitute genuine defeaters for a particular religious belief. After all, it is a fact of human psychology that after losing a game of chance several times in a row, some people expect to win soon (e.g., the gambler’s fallacy). We don’t take this psychological phenomena to license a reasonable inference. So, when people come to doubt their religion is true, it is not enough to note that they have such doubts. What we need to determine is whether such doubts are reasonable.

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I’ve just finished upgrading to Wordpress’s 2.5 platform. It has some significant changes from the administrator’s perspective, and I want to make sure the reader isn’t experiencing any problems. I am aware that there is some messed up coding immediately below the recent comments and trackbacks, which I plan on fixing in the next couple of days.

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HT: Siris

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In Ayer’s book, The Problem of Knowledge, he begins with a nice account of philosophical work, especially in contrast to empirical work. This is, of course, not a settled issue among philosophers, but I find myself in basic agreement with Ayer on this point. For your reading pleasure (as well as for substance to spawn discussion), here is the beginning of Ayer’s book:

It is by its methods rather than its subject-matter that philosophy is to be distinguished from other arts or sciences. Philosophers make statements which are intended to be true, and they commonly rely on argument both to support their own theories and to refute the theories of others; but the arguments which they use are of a peculiar character. The proof of a philosophical statement is not, or only very seldom, like the proof of a mathematical statement; it does not normally consist in formal demonstration. Neither is it like the proof of a statement in any of the descriptive sciences. Philosophical theories are not tested by observation. They are neutral with respect to particular matters of fact.

This is not to say that philosophers are not concerned with facts, but they are in the strange position that all the evidence which bears upon their problems is already available to them. It is not further scientific information that is needed to decide such philosophical questions as whether the material world is real, whether objects continue to exist at times when they are not perceived, whether other human beings are conscious in the same sense as one is oneself. These are not questions that can be settled by experiment, since the way in which they are answered itself determines how the result of any experiment is to be interpreted. What is in dispute in such cases is not whether, in a given set of circumstances, this or that event will happen, but rather how anything at all that happens is to be described.

This preoccupation with the way things are, or are to be, described is often represented as an enquiry into their essential nature. Thus philosophers are given to asking such questions as What is mind? What sort of a relation is causality? What is the nature of belief? What is truth? The difficulty is then to see how such questions are to be taken. It must not be supposed, for instance, that a philosopher who asks What is mind? is looking for the kind of information that a psychologist might give him. His problem is not that he is ignorant of the ways in which people think and feel, or even that he is unable to explain them. Neither should it be assumed that he is simply looking for a definition. It is not as if philosophers do not understand how words like ‘mind’ or ‘causality’ or ‘truth’ are actually used. But why, then, do they ask such questions? What is it that they are trying to find out?

[...skipping a bit...]

We may discover the sense of the philosopher’s question by seeing what further questions it incorporates, and what sorts of statement the attempt to answer it leads him to make. Thus, he may enquire whether the different cases in which we speak of knowing have any one thing in common; whether, for example, they are alike in implying the presence of some special state of mind. He may maintain that there is, on the subjective side, no difference in kind between knowing and believing, or, alternatively, that knowing is a special sort of mental act. If he thinks it correct to speak of acts of knowing, he may go on to enquire into the nature of their objects. Is any limitation to be set upon them? Or, putting it another way, is there anything thinkable that is beyond the reach of human knowledge? Does knowing make a difference to what is known? Is it necessary to distinguish between the sorts of things that can be known directly and those that can be known only indirectly? And, if so, what are the relationships between them? Perhaps it is philosophically misleading to talk of knowing objects at all. It may be possible to show that what appears to be an instance of knowing some object always comes down to knowing that something is the case. What is known, in this sense, must be true, whereas what is believed may very well be false. But it is also possible to believe what is in fact true without knowing it. Is knowledge then to be distinguished by the fact that if one knows that something is so, one cannot be mistaken? And in that case does it follow that what is known is necessarily true, or in some other way indubitable? But, if this does follow, it will lead in its turn to the conclusion that we commonly claim to know much more than we really do; perhaps even to the paradox that we do not know anything at all: for it may be contended that there is no statement whatsoever that is not in itself susceptible to doubt. Yet surely there must be something wrong with an argument that would make knowledge unattainable. Surely some of our claims to knowledge must be capable of being justified. But in what ways can we justify them? In what would the processes of justifying them consist?

I do not say that all these questions are clear, or even that they are all coherent. But they are instances of the sort of question that philosophers ask. The next step is to see how one would try to answer them.

That’s the kind of good old-fashioned philosophy that I like!

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this is kind of old news… but for any of you that are in, or have been in grad school, this recent post on the hilarious blog ’stuff white people like’ is too good not to post.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/81-graduate-school/

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In the field of metaethics, one of the key issues is whether moral claims have a cognitive or non-cognitive structure. The most natural way to understand what it means for a claim to be cognitive is probably whether the claim is propositional or is capable of taking a truth-value. For example, many epistemologists take the phenomenal experience of blueness to be non-cognitive, but the belief that I am experiencing blueness is cognitive. With respect to ethical claims, the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction can be illustrated with two extreme views. On an objectivist views, all ethical claims will take a truth-value based on the objective criteria of the objectivist theory in question. In contrast, non-cognitivism can be illustrated with a simplistic emotive theory of ethics. Moral claims, according to emotivism, are not true or false; rather, they expressions of one’s feelings towards certain actions. For example, when someone says “Rape is morally wrong,” the emotivist takes this to mean, “Yuck, rape!” or “Boo! Rape!” Of course, there are other ways to cash out non-cognitivism, but the salient point to grasp with these examples is to see the propositional or non-propositional nature of each view.

One criticism with non-cognitivism that seems to stick around is known as the Frege-Geach problem. The Frege-Geach problem highlights a problem with non-cognitivism based on moral reasoning. Consider the following argument:

1. It is morally wrong to torture babies for fun.
2. James is a baby.

Therefore,

3. It is morally wrong to torture James.

If non-cognitivism were true, we’d have to recast the first premise as “Torturing babies, BOO!” Once we do that, however, we no longer can infer the conclusion from the first two claims. After all, the non-cognitive interpretation of (1) with (2) doesn’t imply (3). In fact, you can’t infer anything from (1) on the non-cognitivist account because (1) isn’t true or false—it is just an expression of one’s feelings. The Frege-Geach problem highlights that since moral inferences like the one given above do occur, it must be the case that claims like (1) are cognitive. Without possessing a propositional nature, we couldn’t infer anything from (1). Since we do, in fact, make inferences from claims like (1), it follows that it must have a propositional nature. I suppose that a desperate non-cognitivist might simply accept that we never make inferences from moral claims, but that is a steep price to pay.

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If the universe is infinite, then it would seem that any possible point in the sky would eventually line up with a star. Given that the universe is infinitely old, it would follow that enough time has passed for the starlight to reach earth. Since every point in the sky would be occupied by a star and enough time has passed for the starlight to occupy that point, it would follow that at night when we look up at the sky we should see a luminous glowing plenum above our heads — perhaps with a few dark points where nearby celestial bodies have blocked the incoming light. But as we all know, the night sky is the opposite: it is mainly dark with a few points of light. Therefore, the universe is not infinite.

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