Alvin Plantinga is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Christian philosophers. Watch the video below and ask yourself, WTF?
So as not to spoil your fun, I’ll refrain from offering my take on the argument until readers have had a chance to comment.
Robin,
I agree with you. That oddness is part of the nature of (even maybe a good sign of?) metaphysical claims. Carnap called them a recommendation for speaking a certain way that should be made on pragmatic bases. And I don’t think that’s far off –it’s my view that, to the extent it’s up to us, we make these kinds of categorial choices based on stuff like simplicity, comprehensiveness, coherence with common sense and modern science, Occam’s razor, and, I guess, personal taste.
Kantian Naturalist,
FWIW, those are quite similar to Hall’s criticisms of Sellars. He actually ridicules the latter’s scientism quite prettily in one of his last works.
I agree with that. And well stated.
I nearly gave up when he said beetles had eight legs – how one Earth can some-one supposed to be a great thinker not know that? – but I’m glad I didn’t because then I’d have missed the part where his entire argument rests on his not knowing what a corpse is.
Roy
I definitely agree. I just prefer to be a “glass half full” type of guy
(unfortunately, often the rest of the glass gets spilled on my pants.)
keiths:
You are judging the argument base on the words used in a five muntes answer in a filmed interview. Doing that, that sentences do not comply with Leibniz`s principle. It is smart try to understand the argument that one is making, not going to correct his spelling.
I’m as materialist as anyone on this board, and a hard-core evilutionst. But I’m such a hard-core evilutionist that I think irreducible complexity can only be achieved by evilution. When you see it, you know it’s the product of evilution. No designer could have done it. 😉
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m curious. Why do you think Quine is “vastly overrated”? FWIW, I think he’s brilliant. There are at least a half-dozen papers and a couple of books by him that I’d feel, If I’d written any one of them, that my life wouldn’t have been wasted if I’d not done anything else with it. Calling him overrated seems to me like calling Bach overrated because, you know, then there was Brahms.
Fair enough, but if we study its results, could we not copy what it has learned? That would require biology/neuroscience much more advanced than ours, of course. I don’t think that AI uniformed by biology can solve the issues.
I am talking about replacement substrates for existing people, not the development of an artificial person from scratch. Such an artificial person would required even further deep understanding of biological development and human development after birth, including interaction with a world.
I’d say we are a century away from anything like that, and may always be. Being slightly more pessimistic, I say that chemistry will always be faster than emulations of chemistry. Just a conjecture on my part. I suppose quantum computing could change that, Right after we have cheap fusion power.
Ok, that might be fair — I tend to get exuberant. 🙂
I think that most of what is correct in Quine is either there in Carnap (“the unit of significance is the whole of science” is already there in the Aufbau) or in C. I. Lewis’s pragmatist epistemology. Quine’s major contribution, I think, is to recast Lewis’s pragmatist epistemology in extensional semantics. While that is a formidable achievement, it commits the terrible sin of imposing on natural language the criteria of precision that are appropriate for formal languages, thereby negating the essential difference between them. (Think of Wittgenstein’s criticisms in the Investigations of the Tractatus — Quine’s thinking about language is held captive by a picture — that of set-theory as the key to language and to ontology.)
And while I don’t think that Lewis’s commitment to the given is entirely “Mythic,” in the Sellarsian sense — and defending that claim is central to my book — I do think that what is Mythic in Lewis’s conception of the given is retained by Quine in his account of stimulus meanings.
By the way, what’s the title of the book by Hall you had in mind? I’d like to look into it.
Have you ever heard of Frederick Will? He was about the same generation as Hall, Bergman, and Sellars. Most folks my age have never heard of him but I was recently introduced to Will by one of Will’s last students, and I find him utterly fascinating.
It will definitely be after we’re both dead, so there goes that hope.
walto,
I think the confusion lies elsewhere.
Of course Plantinga doesn’t think he’s identical to his body. He’s a dualist, and the entire point of his argument is to support that position!
Since you think I haven’t put the argument “carefully/correctly”, how about pointing out where my error lies?
How, exactly, is Plantinga’s argument not equivalent to the following? Please quote the specific sentence(s) you think are problematic, and explain why you think they don’t fairly represent his argument:
Blas,
I’m glad you acknowledge that Plantinga’s argument, as he presented it in the video, is flawed.
Would you like to tell us what he should have said?
Bruce,
Plantinga doesn’t assume the truth of dualism. He merely asserts that it is possibly true. From my summary of his argument:
Well, KN has already set me straight, but just to explain what I was trying to say:
I’m quite comfortable with proofs by contradiction where you assume something and then show that leads to a contradiction and the best course is to reject that assumption.
But this argument seemed different. It appeared to require you to assume something and then it demonstrated that the assumption must be true.
In other words, it appeared to me to be saying that if you accept dualism as a possibility, then it must be true. But if you don’t accept dualism as a possibility, the argument does not have any weight in convincing you, because you say, sure, I can conceive of a mind separate from a body if dualism is true, but that is what we are trying to prove.
So by my original thought, it would come down to whether you thought any modal argument could overcome your prior commitment against dualism.
But KN points out that it is not that simple.
And upon further reflection, I suspect my line of thought is already covered by walto’s original criticism of the second premise as he framed the argument in his first post.
Bruce,
No, the assumption is that dualism is possible, and the conclusion is that dualism is true.
That’s different — and true. Plantinga is actually claiming that he can use Leibniz’s Law to magically turn the possibility of dualism into a certainty, which ought to raise anyone’s eyebrows (and suspicions).
Sure. If you’ve already ruled out dualism 100%, on other grounds, then no argument will convince you of it. However, most of us acknowledge that dualism is at least a possibility, though perhaps only a very, very slim one. If Plantinga’s argument were sound, it would apply to us and compel us to accept dualism.
KN,
His argument doesn’t actually show that, it assumes it. “Dualism is not necessarily false” is just another way of saying that “dualism is possibly true”, which is one of his premises.
It doesn’t show that dualism is true in any sense, because it mistakenly applies Leibniz’s Law to possibility de dicto when it should be restricted to possibility de re.
OK, Keith. I don’t feel comfortable getting into the details the modal workings and the validity of the argument itself; I’ll leave that battleground to you and walto.
I’m happy with walto’s criticism of its soundness. I also want to try to better understand KN’s critique of whether this type of argument is even appropriate for talking about the actual world in the way I am interested in understanding it.
Kantian Naturalist,
Kantian Naturalist,
Yeah I know of Frederick Will. He’s George Will (the pundit’s) father. He wrote a book on induction that I own but have never opened, and he once made a funny joke about mayonaisse which I now forget.
The Hall book I was talking about is called _Philosophical Systems_, but the relevant excerpt is in my book which you should buy first!
“my book which you should buy first!”
Which book is that?
Cool. And FWIW, he’s an auditor on a project I’m currently affiliated with. The point is that there are people who acknowledge Plantinga’s contribution to ‘systematic philosophy’ that are much more competent than the disenchanted naturalist here who slagged him. Perhaps KN’s feigns to authority as ‘philosopher’ (more like philosophist) will be further revealed as esoteric nonsense by your presence here.
Wrt van Inwagon, I met him back in 2000 in interesting circumstances in Moscow. Decent guy, from what I remember. I’m just not much a fan of analytic philosophy, even of the Plantingian variety. Funny that, I’m surrounded for the moment by analytic philosophers on a project!
It’s reassuring that you’ve shown keiths there’s more to the argument than his title of this thread suggests (even if he still doesn’t seem to understand why). Often, as KN’s quasi-nihilism has shown, the suggestion at TSZ is that skepticism is synonymous with atheism or agnosticism – and hence, Plantinga simply must be lame, even to defend dualism (which not all religious defend).
What is so far lacking here is that religious can be ‘skeptical’ too, without necessarily falling into atheism. The only reason I continue to post here (less & less) is that I’m skeptical of IDT and willing to say why from a theistic perspective, not for any endorsement of ‘skepticism’ as a disenchanting, self-identity threatening ideology.
Then again, I was just told yesterday by analytic philosophers that generally analytic philosophers don’t (like to) think they are ideological at all; they just do ‘scientific philosophy.’ Sellars’s ‘science is the measure of all things’ worldview in such a state of denial becomes a laugh because scientism is self-refuting. But KN won’t help lead one out of that forest, he’ll just convince himself into being a lower creature and celebrate Gaia with his feminist, environmentalist operators and call that ‘re-enchantment’.
I don’t think anyone claims science can PROVE anything, as I am sure you are aware, so I know you must have meant something more than this.
What I would say is that scientific explanations are to be preferred for any phenomena which are part of the world open to scientific study.
So a question would be what, if any, claimed properties of the soul are open to scientific study. In other words, where do we have to seek the input of science before concluding things about the soul/mind. (I’m going to assume mind and soul are the same for the following.)
In your very first note in this thread, I understood you to question the soundness of a premise like “there are modal properties of the mind which are not modal properties of the body”. You said we did not know this to be the case.
I don’t believe you ever said explicitly why we did not know this to be true. I am guessing it is because you believe this question is one where science can contribute and where the scientific work is incomplete. And because metaphysics must be consistent with the relevant science, it is too soon to say whether the mind might have any properties different from those of the body.
That would make sense to me. It is the point I was groping to make with my earlier argument about how one’s attitude to the assumption of dualism would affect one’s acceptance of the soundness of Plantinga’s argument. If one thought the conclusion needed to be consistent with science, and that scientific study was ongoing, then one would not be convinced by any metaphysical argument about what the conclusion should be. One would always find some premise to question.
I also suspect KN’s division of modal arguments into those applying to analytical statements and those applicable to synthetic statements is making a similar point.
But then the question becomes: how does one decide what metaphysical issues must be consistent with science?
It seems to me that depends on your choice of worldview. Mine is to not to give up on science in areas where it might apply until all scientific avenues are exhausted.
Others who post on this board have different worldviews. Although they have not convinced me yet, I do enjoy being challenged by their posts.
It’s absurdly expensive, though. Not really expecting too many sales. Maybe some rich college libraries?
BruceS,
That post has some hard questions in it. Robin said that the philosophical assertions seemed weird. I think that sums it up pretty well. I wanted my remark about Plantinga’s premise to suggest that it isn’t obvious, in spite of P’s apparent attitude in that interview. I can doubt it, anyhow: my sense is that if we’re uncertain of the boundaries of some entity, then it would be unsurprising if we’re also uncertain about its modal properties and whether the complete set of them is the same as those of some (maybe) other item.
Of course THAT assertion (that its unsurprising that people hold this or that) is empirical: we can conduct surveys, etc. and see what surprises people. But the question of whether, e.g., the morning and evening star MUST have all their properties in common or whether their identity is contingent, is philosophical. It’s of no real value to anybody in one sense but those questions, non-empirical and apparently useless though they are, do not go away. And when they involve things like personal identity and survival, how one should live etc. no other questions may seem more important. But it’s crucial that, in discussing these matters philosophy renders unto science absolutely everything that science can cogently opine on.
I admit that some versions of that cogency question, seem to me to be within philosophy’s provenance rather than science’s. But the borderlines I or anybody else draws are often mistaken, and when that happens, it’s science that takes over another area. I note that as that stuff develops, I’m personally glad rather than sorry for philosophy’s loss–science gives these questions a kind of real world significance or usefulness that philosophy can’t. It’s just that I don’t see how the entire field can ever disappear. That may be a kind of Wittgensteinian sentiment. Philosophy can’t tell us anything but remains what we really want to GET nevertheless. Schlick’s (Tractarian) structural realism said we couldn’t KNOW anything but what science could tell us. But he also held that there’s more nevertheless that we can’t strictly know, but can only experience. Maybe It’s a kind of mysterianism or mysticism, this resort to the “ineffable.” Dunno.
Not sure that makes any sense as I reread it. Your post is more sensible, certainly.
Gregory,
I get the sense here that while you want to defend religion–and indicate that skepticism is possible among the religious too, you don’t think such things as mysticism or “gaiaism” or the other stuff of which you accuse KN get to count as religions–they aren’t on the accepted list. Is that right?
That’s an interesting question. Probably best for KN to answer for himself. Does he consider himself ‘religious’? Is he a proponent or believer in a particular ‘religion’ or not? Is he an atheist?
Certainly I don’t want to put words in his mouth. He’s already told people here that he was once a ‘Reform Jew’ or at least (personally detached) he was raised in that religious tradition. But since then, it seems he has become a Secular (read: non-religious, agnostic) Jew. That would seem to suggest he is anti-religious or non-religious.
You’re relatively new here, walto, it seems. So, perhaps these info features about one particular poster (the self-styled lone ‘philosopher of TSZ’) haven’t reached you?
Imo, there are mystics that are ‘religious.’ And even ‘Gaiaists’ could count as ‘religious’ depending on the definition. But KN is a disenchanted naturalist, etc. (eclectic mix) as indicated above. That’s just a summary of what he’s said here, i.e. self-proclaimed identity ‘facts’ of a USAmerican philosophist.
With Plantinga (or van Inwagen), even if you disagree with him religiously, at least you know what the guy believes, promotes and defends. Un-philosophical atheists, agnostics and secularists (read: the majority of people posting at TSZ) may not and likely won’t agree with him. Nevertheless, many professional philosophers acknowledge his significant contribution to knowledge via systematic philosophy. It’s enough to show the amateurish notions of ‘wisdom’ present here at TSZ, where ‘skepticism’ is the preferred worldview.
p.s. thanks for the link to your book
walto,
p.s. yeah, you’re right. Almost $80USD is a bit steep! What are these academic publishers thinking?
Gregory,
Then perhaps you can do what walto can’t, which is to show exactly how my summary misrepresents Plantinga’s argument, and why it isn’t logically equivalent to my Obama example.
Shame on you, Gregory, shame, shame.
Ask a ‘scientist,’ keiths. Surely that’s the only answer that will possibly satisfy you. Bah humbug to philosophy at TSZ (except compliant ‘naturalists’ like KN that can be humoured and patted on the head)!
Thinking hurts – stop it already! Blasted Plantinga. Theist.
Yawn, you’re boring this thread and the title is absurd showing the lack of knowledge of its author.
No time for that.
Gregory,
Apparently you haven’t noticed that I routinely defend philosophy here.
It must hurt, since you’re unwilling to do even a tiny bit of it to show me where I’ve misrepresented Plantinga.
Bruce,
I think that any sound argument is relevant to the real world, whether it comes from a philospher, a scientist, or someone else. The catch is that a sound argument requires true premises, and the truth of a premise often needs to be demonstrated by science.
Like walto, I would say that where there is overlap, science should prevail. We should let science lead our metaphysics, rather than the other way around.
walto,
On the science-philosophy question, I started reading last night Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason (2001). He has some really elegant and I think quite sound ideas about the science-philosophy relationship:
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From this point of view it is folly for philosophy to attempt to incorporate itself into the sciences (as a branch of psychology, say, or as mathematical logic), for its peculiar role is precisely to articulate and stipulate new possibilities, at the meta-scientific level, as it were, and it cannot, on pain of entirely relinquishing this role, itself assume the position of a normal science. For the same reason, it is also folly for philosophy to attempt to become ‘scientific’, in the sense of finally leaving behind the traditional conflict of opposing schools for a new stable consensus on generally agreed upon rules of inquiry. We never know in advance what new paradigms (and philosophical meta-paradigms) might be needed at a given moment of revolutionary science, and so, in philosophy (and, mutatis mutandis, also in the other humanities), it is always to our advantage to let a thousand flowers bloom. Finally, it is folly as well for philosophy (and for the other humanities) to regret this lack of scientific status, and even worse, to seek compensation by attempting to strip away such status from the sciences themselves. We should rather rejoice, along with the sciences, in our fundamentally distinct, yet mutually complementary contributions to the total ongoing dialectic of human knowledge. (p. 24)
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That sounds exactly right to me!
For the record, I have very little interest in discussing my religious views; they are intensely personal and not part of the public persona, “Kantian Naturalist”, that I use here. As far as TSZ goes, I’m interested in discussing philosophy as it bears on science (and vice-verse). I would no sooner discuss my spiritual experiences and religious views with you than I would discuss my erotic experiences and views about gender and sexuality.
Bruce, to walto:
walto:
The boundaries do matter, but that isn’t the whole story.
In the case of Plantinga’s argument, the words ‘Alvin’s body’ pick out a particular, known object. The name ‘Alvin’ doesn’t. It points to some entity fulfilling the role of Alvin, but we aren’t certain what that entity is. It might be Alvin’s body or it might be something else.
That uncertainty is what enables us to say “it’s possible that Alvin could exist after Alvin’s body has been destroyed”. If we knew that dualism was false, we wouldn’t be able to say that, and if we knew that it was true, we would drop the “possible” part and just flat-out say “Alvin can exist after Alvin’s body has been destroyed.”
In other words, the sentence “it’s possible that Alvin could exist after Alvin’s body has been destroyed” depends on our uncertainty, not on any essential properties of the entity referred to by ‘Alvin’, whatever that entity happens to be.
In other words, it’s de dicto, not de re.
Despite walto’s protestations, Plantinga really is making a fundamental mistake in modal logic.
(And please, walto — no bogus complaints about my use of “enables us to say” and “able to say”. Everyone knows that I am not referring to our ability to control our lips, tongues, and typing fingers.)
I wonder how much hinges on the first-person indexical here.
The assertion,
(1) “I can conceive of myself existing without my body existing” (when uttered by KN)
might really be different from
(2) “KN can be conceived to exist even if his body did not exist” (when uttered by anyone else).
Morning star and evening star (H&P) are one of the standard examples for Kripke’s rigid designators approach to names, so I understand you to be alluding to that. As I understand the punch line to the rigid designators stuff, it is something like:
H & P must necessarily refer to the same thing in all possible worlds (which are the same as the actual world in the relevant, essential properties), even though we could not know that a priori, because
1. these are the type of names to which the theory of r.d.’s applies,
2. science is capable of determining whether they co-refer in the actual world,
3. science has determined that they do indeed refer to the same thing, Venus, in the actual world.
Now if we consider body and mind instead of H&P, I’d see 1 has as completely in domain of philosophy, 3 as completely science, 2 as mostly philosophy but closely informed by science.
I think it is the fact that science and philosophy are progressing in tandem that makes 2 such an interesting question for body versus mind. Can qualia be explained by science? Are brain processes that create the mind computational? Fascinating stuff to me because the best philosophy is constantly being updated by new science.
That last bit comes off as a bit negative to me; I’m not sure that your meant it that way.
I think there are many areas of philosophy where the important questions cannot be answered by science — morality, beauty, how to live a meaningful life, for example.
Even if science could provide an explanation of qualia and how body explained mind overall, I suspect any explanation it will provide will be orthogonal to interesting questions about the first person perspective that will remain philosophical (cough, cough, … direct perception, … cough, cough).
I think this in the same ballpark as the point I was trying to make by my confused references to beliefs in dualism.
Let the best philosopher win in assessing whether P’s argument is valid.
Regardless, I’m not going to concede its soundness without a lot of fuss since it uses metaphysics only to conclude something about the world where the science is both open and relevant. I’ll try very hard to question its soundness by close examination of the premises.
I think that’s a misunderstanding of Plantinga’s argument.
There are AI people who talk about the possibility that, some time in the future, we will be able to upload Alvin into a computer. I took Plantinga’s argument to be based on the same kind of distinction between person and body that you see in such AI discussions. And Bruce seemed to see it the same way with his mention of a Star Trek transporter.
I have a quite different view about Plantinga’s argument. I think that it is both valid and sound. But I don’t think it tells us anything terribly interesting about the world.
Plantinga’s argument yields the conclusion that dualism is analytically possibly true. And of course it is. This means only that one is not transgressing against the basic principles of logic (including modal logic) in accepting it. But to say that dualism is not illogical is not to say very much about it.
Moreover, I think the problem of causal interaction is such a serious objection to dualism that one should not accept it as true, even though it is not analytically necessarily false. In other words, dualism is not illogical, but it is unreasonable to accept. There’s much more involved in the assessment of belief than what logic alone captures.
But I also think that materialism and idealism also face insurmountable objections. So I don’t think that any of the options bequeathed to us by the 17th and 18th centuries are really going to illuminate the metaphysics of mind.
I welcome posts on how a given worldview limits ones perspectives in fully understanding the world and in experiencing life to its fullest.
Why mystifies me is why someone would think that these types of valid and useful arguments need to include personal attacks on people.
KN,
I don’t understand that. The conclusion of Plantinga’s argument is that he is something other than his body — that dualism is true, in other words. If you think his argument is sound, then that implies that you think dualism is true, too. But you don’t think dualism is true, as far as I know.
What am I missing here? In what sense can Plantinga’s argument be sound if its conclusion is incorrect?
As I understand it, his argument is against the mind/brain identity theory.
Here’s how I see it: taking as a premise that identity is a necessary relation, then the mind-brain identity theory implies that I am analytically necessarily the same as my body. (My body and I are one in all possible worlds.)
But this cannot be right, Plantinga argues, because I can conceive of myself as being other than my body From the fact that I can conceive of myself as being other than my body, it follows that it is analytically possible that I am not my body.
Therefore I am not analytically necessarily the same as my body, and therefore (bearing in mind that identity is a necessary relation), I am not identical with it. Put otherwise, modal logic shows that mind-brain identity is false.
Now, to say that mind-brain identity is false and to say that dualism is analytically possibly true are, as I see it, equivalent statements. So I see that Plantinga’s modal argument gets us there. What I don’t see, of course, is whether that gets us any further. Perhaps Plantinga would like to assert something stronger than that, but his argument doesn’t entitle him to it.
Simply saying that my mind has the modal property of “possibly existing without my body” shows that mind-brain identity is false, but it doesn’t show that dualism is true, except in the weak sense of analytically possible true.
So I take the argument to be sound because I take the conclusion to be not “therefore dualism is true” but rather, “therefore, dualism is analytically possibly true” — which is correct.
Identity theory, which asserts the mind and brain are identical, can be expressed as:
So Plantinga comes along and gives us an argument for
From which it follow that
From this, nothing else follows, because the following inferences are invalid:
and
It’s obvious that the latter is invalid.
But the former is, too, for the simple reason that just because there exists a possible world at which not-P, we are not entitled to assume that the actual world is that one. There’s a possible world in which Nixon never resigned and served out his second term, but that’s not this one. Likewise, there’s a possible world in which minds persist independent of their bodies, but logic alone cannot tell us whether we live in that world or not. Only experience and science can tell us what the actual world is like.
I’ve only been following bits and pieces of this topic, but this doesn’t make sense to me. Without specifying a mechanism by which this might be possible, it’s nothing more than an unfounded assumption that dualism is true. That makes the whole argument quite unconvincing.
It seems to have taken a few comments to get to this very true point! 🙂
I don’t get it. I can fantasize something and and structure my fantasy to be logically coherent.
Therefore what?
But isn’t that the point of dualism? Assuming there’s something else?
Where is parsimony in all this?