This post is to move a discussion from Sandbox(4) at Entropy’s request.
Over on the Sandbox(4) thread, fifthmonarchyman made two statements that I disagree with:
“I’ve argued repeatedly that humans are hardwired to believe in God.”
“Everyone knows that God exists….”
As my handle indicates, I prefer to lurk. The novelty of being told that I don’t exist overcame my good sense, so I joined the conversation.
For the record, I am what is called a weak atheist or negative atheist. The Wikipedia page describes my position reasonably well:
“Negative atheism, also called weak atheism and soft atheism, is any type of atheism where a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not explicitly assert that there are none. Positive atheism, also called strong atheism and hard atheism, is the form of atheism that additionally asserts that no deities exist.”
I do exist, so fifthmonarchyman’s claims are disproved. For some reason he doesn’t agree, hence this thread.
Added In Edit by Alan Fox 16.48 CET 11th January, 2018
This thread is designated as an extension of Noyau. This means only basic rules apply. The “good faith” rule, the “accusations of dishonesty” rule do not apply in this thread.
Entropy:
In other words:
Like it or not, Plantinga says that our beliefs are furnished by our cognitive faculties. Nothing in the rest of his argument contradicts that.
Deal with it.
fifth:
Yours isn’t justified. And I think it’s feigned, too, since you are hiding behind your Ignore button. Actions speak louder than words.
Fmm, you make a ton of cuckoo statements (and enjoy repeating them ad nauseam), but this ‘I’m not making any claims’ biz, just might be the silliest. When someone S asserts a proposition P, it’s simply correct to say that S claims that P. When you deny it, it just makes everything else you say seem even more ridiculous and belligerent (which, admittedly, is an achievement, but still). In a word, if you’d stop saying that you make no claims, it would be a smidge easier to take your other posts/claims more seriously.
Of course, this is up to you, and you’re pretty predictable about not taking even well-meaning advice. So, I expect you’ll simply go on with the nuts stuff.
Btw, I have had a computer fry-up (I’m posting via my phone), so I have not been able to download whatever the dennett stuff was that you linked to. I may try to do so when I get my computer replaced, but it’s unlikely that I’d be able to find your links again in this shitshow of a thread without a lot of slogging, so if you wouldn’t mind pming me, I’d appreciate it.
Otoh, if it’s just a summary or summaries, don’t bother with it. Those are all over the Web, and I wouldn’t want to comment on dennett based on any of those.
Thx.
Entropy,
You’re easily distracted from the poin. So I repeat:
Exactly keiths! The genes leading to X! There’s no genes leading to a belief in evolution or in naturalism. There’s genes leading to a cognitive system, and it’s the system that may or may not be able to evaluate the evidence for the individual to accept or reject evolution. Nobody is born with a belief in evolution. Nobody is born with a belief in naturalism. So how could anybody inherit the belief that the best way to pet a tiger is to run away from it?
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Beliefs are not eye colors!
Yes you are. “God loves me and reassures me” is a claim.
I’m not trying to demonstrate that I am justified in trusting my cognitive faculties, I’m trying to show keiths where Plantinga’s problems lie.
That doesn’t change the fact that you’re limited and that you make mistakes regardless of your confidence.
I think that you have a very twisted conception of what truth means.
Your confidence is useless because it doesn’t help you out of your limitations. It doesn’t matter if you feel justified. What matters is whether or not you allow such confidence to overcome your judgement when things are not the way you thought they were. It would be a hindrance if you really held to that confidence. But you don’t. You have hypocritical confidence at most. Good for you. Otherwise you’d be unable to learn anything.
P.S. I’ll leave you to whatever you want to claim next. Nothing you might claim will change the fact that you’re in the very same boat as anybody else. So yell, cry, misquote, twist, rhetorice, claim that God loves you, claim that God tells you that you can be certain, or that you can know the actual truth, whatever. It won’t change things one bit. You’re still going to be limited and your confidence will be as useless.
Entropy:
keiths,
Thanks for making my point keiths. Now I leave you to it. I must be crazy if I think you’ll read what I write for comprehension.
(I’d never suspected that you truly thought that beliefs are eye colors though.)
Plantinga doesn’t say they are.
Plantinga doesn’t say they are.
Plantinga doesn’t say they do.
Reality, Entropy. Accept it or be defeated by it.
From the horse’s “mouth” (as, ironically, quoted by keiths himself):
Clearly, behaviour-beliefs under natural selection. Therefore they’re inherited according to Plantinga’s “model.”
Entropy:
No. Again:
I’ll freely confess to having made one egregious error in treating beliefs as endorsed claims: the concept of a belief is a dispositional concept, and the concept of an endorsed claim is not (at least, I don’t think it is). It might well be that the content of a belief is an endorsed claim, but not that beliefs are as such.
On the account of empirical judgments that I’m working on, empirical judgments involve two dimensions. The first dimension is sensorimotor responsiveness to affordances. The second dimension is discursive commitments and entitlements. (Roughly, Gibson + Brandom.) In the example that keiths has invited us to consider — that of a person forming the empirical judgment “that’s a lightning-strike on the other side of this valley!” — there are two different cognitive states.
There is the sensorimotor response: seeing the lightning and perhaps hearing the thunder, being aware of the contrast between lightning and the sky, seeing how the lightning briefly illuminates the valley below, and all accompanying motor responses. (This is the dimension of cognitive activity that we share with non-human animals.)
Then there is the discursive dimension: being prepared to form the judgment “that’s a lightning strike!”, to understand that one’s sensory experience is the appropriate circumstance for making that judgment, and under what conditions it would be appropriate to assert it.
In other words, the judgment is formed as a response to the sensory state (or sensorimotor state) that one is in.
This account has the following implication for the EAAN: since there are two distinct dimensions (maybe strata?) of cognitive activity involved in empirical judgments, they need to be addressed separately. So one question is going to be, “can evolutionary theory explain why our sensorimotor responsiveness to affordances is usually reliable?” and another question is going to be, “can evolutionary theory explain why our discursive commitments and entitlements are usually reliable?”
But evolutionary theory is going to give quite different explanations for those cognitive capacities. The function of sensorimotor responsiveness is to guide an animal’s navigation of the obstacles and opportunities of its environment (insofar as it has any). The function of discursive commitments and entitlements is to coordinate action by sharing information via the exchange of semantic contents. And while the first capacity is at least as old as the oldest animals, the second capacity evolved, no doubt through several stages, over the course of hominid evolution.
No, again:
Entropy,
How does your endless repeating of “Beliefs are not eye colors!” help you?
Plantinga knows that, and he knows that beliefs aren’t inherited — they’re produced by our cognitive faculties, as he has clearly stated.
Reality — accept it or be defeated by it.
No they aren’t. They’re downstream products of the interaction between cognitive faculties and the environment. Huge difference compared to eye colors keiths.
It’s not supposed to help me. It’s supposed to help you distinguish the difference between eye colors and beliefs in terms of whether it’s proper to talk about either as being under natural selection.
He might know that, but if he does, he’s pretty good at pretending that he doesn’t. The problem is that he keeps presenting “models,” and even claims (as exemplified in the quote you provided yourself), that beliefs are inherited via their linkage to behaviours. It’s amazing that you don’t see this. Authentically amazing.
keiths:
Entropy:
Our cognitive machinery itself is a downstream product of the interaction between genes and the environment. Here’s my full sentence:
Come on, Entropy. This is basic evolutionary biology.
Entropy:
No, he doesn’t. Read that quote again:
Nothing in that quote says that beliefs are inherited.
It’s amazing that you do see it, because it’s simply not there. You’re unable to distinguish between what you want to see and what you actually see.
Of course. This is why I cut that out of the list.
Here the part where you make the categorical mistake:
No, they aren’t. Beliefs are the downstream products of the interaction of cognitive faculties and the environment, which is why beliefs are not under natural selection (not even the behaviours resulting from those beliefs). The capacity for the cognitive faculties to interact with the environment and make judgement calls is what can be under natural selection. So, concentrating on silly examples, like a guy running from a tiger believing that’s the way to pet it, besides being a conceptual mess, is a stupid way to “model” the evolution of cognitive systems. It’s not even modelling the evolution of a cognitive system at all. It’s modelling a system for instincts at best, and instincts don’t need to come attached with beliefs.
I know! That’s why I’m so surprised that you just don’t get it.
Oh, really? Let’s see:
Yes, it does. See? Beliefs selected from their linkage to behaviours. From the horse’s mouth.
KN,
That doesn’t help you. You still run into the problem I described above, just slightly modified:
KN,
Why are you so attached to this “endorsed claim” business? It’s causing you nothing but trouble. Why keep trying to shoehorn it, somehow, into the concept of belief?
Is this something you’ve been working on and hope to publish? Otherwise, I’m at a loss to explain your insistence.
Entropy:
“Selected for” does not imply “inherited” in that quote. Again, it’s genes that are inherited.
This is evolutionary biology 101, Entropy.
If the physical structures that are inherited as a member of a species are not different in kind from those that result from interacting with the environment (learning), our thoughts and beliefs just are. The concept of truth is just a restatement of utility or of fitness. That doesn’t make it unimportant, but it removes the woo.
Plantinga is pretty clear that what’s under selection are cognitive capacities, not beliefs or behaviors. His thought is that what makes a cognitive capacity adaptive (tending to produce survival-promoting behaviors) doesn’t have to be what makes a cognitive capacity reliable (tending to produce true beliefs).
One way of parsing my objection to Plantinga is that his basic understanding of a cognitive capacity is based on Thomas Reid’s introspectionist faculty psychology, blissfully uninformed by any scientific psychology or cognitive science. Plantinga thinks that cognitive capacities are just what Reid thought they are: perception, memory, reasoning, etc. And while that’s surely not wrong, cognitive science has developed some pretty complicated models of how these capacities actually function. And that’s important because he isn’t starting off with the assumptions internal to naturalism, despite what he claims.
A related but distinct objection turns on how he defines “reliability” in terms of “tending to produce true beliefs”. As I understand it, an animal’s cognitive capacities are reliable if they tend to produce action-guiding representations that allow an animal to navigate the affordances of its environment. But it’s very easy to see why that’s adaptive!
Against my better instincts, I’m going to do Plantinga’s work for him here: what Plantinga should say is that there are two different kinds of reliability at work here.
The real question is why we should think that the same process — unguided natural selection — which produced cognitive capacities that are reliable in the action-guiding, affordance-tracking sense of reliable (“Gibsonian reliability”), which can be explained in terms of “unguided” natural selection (as many people, including Paul Churchland, have shown) also produced cognitive capacities that are reliable in the quite different sense of tending to produce warranted assertions corresponding to objective reality (in Platinga’s terms, “true beliefs”).
Even a hard-nosed naturalist like myself should be worried that Churchland thinks he gets the second sense of reliability for free if he’s explained the first kind. He conflates them because Plantinga conflates them. But with the right distinction in place, it’s clear that Plantinga’s objection isn’t resolved just because Churchland is right about how affordance-tracking, action-guiding map-like representations tend to increase overall fitness.
petrushka,
No, and that’s the point Plantinga is capitalizing on. “False adaptive belief” is not an oxymoron.
For the record, I did not speak of encoding. The code metaphor is pretty ingrained, but I don’t see that it adds anything. I think it’s particularly misleading when applied to brains and behavior.
Code implies grammar and syntax, and I see no evidence of grammar and syntax in neural structures. More specifically, I see no evidence that we could read minds by examining the brain.
We can make something like a lie detector by looking at brain activity, but I suspect a motivated spy could learn, through biofeedback, to lie with brain waves.
KN,
That isn’t “doing Plantinga’s work for him.” You’re just restating what he’s already claimed.
“Reliable” (in your Gibsonian sense) is just “adaptive”. “Reliable” in the second sense is just “truth-producing”. Plantinga’s argument is that while evolution will favor cognitive faculties that are reliable in sense 1, it won’t necessarily favor reliability in sense 2.
ETA: KN:
Plantinga doesn’t conflate them, and his entire argument depends on not conflating them.
It’s because of this well-worn idea that beliefs are propositional attitudes, or an attitude taken towards a proposition. I don’t want to be a Platonist or Fregean about propositions as weird entities that have a non-physical and non-mental existence, so I take them to be claims or assertions — part of the social practice of asserting or claiming. And the attitude in question is one of endorsement — one doesn’t believe X and also think that X is false, right?
Put otherwise, beliefs are assertoric mental attitudes, and as such as taken up in normative practices of assertion and negation, tracking commitments and entitlements across the space of reasons. That’s not to say (obviously) that non-human animals can’t have complex mental representations of their situations!
By the way, it was suggested to me by another philosopher that beliefs aren’t endorsed claims. Opinions are endorsed claims. As he put it, dogs have beliefs; they don’t have opinions.
I’ll be thinking about this for a while.
Well, he certainly would have been in better shape if he’d made this distinction between two different kinds of reliability more clear.
Anyway, the crucial bit is this: “while evolution will favor cognitive faculties that are reliable in sense 1, it won’t necessarily favor reliability in sense 2.”
That’s true. But so what?
It does not follow as a matter of logical necessity that evolution must favor reliability in the second sense just because it does so in the first sense. But no one ever said that it did, so it doesn’t matter.
What we want to know is not whether it is logically necessary that natural selection favors cognitive capacities that are reliable in the second sense, but whether we have good reasons to believe that it actually did.
This question has always been an interesting one to me, but I take it even further than you-what does it even mean to say instincts are inherited? I think we can even make a distinction between instincts and other behaviour, because we have no idea how any of it is inherited regardless of what we call it. A gene for an instinct, I don’t think so. Some make the claim that because we can knock out certain genes, like say in a spider, that would make it stop building webs, that this means there is a spider building gene. But that’s not really true, because there is no one to one correlation, genes do many things together. If you knocked out a gene for part of the human brain, you might affect speech or visual skills, but that doesn’t make the gene a speech gene.
But once we start talking about complex learned behaviours, Darwinism has no explanations for those, and that is why it is such an inadequate theory of life. If it can’t explain it, than what does?
phoodoo,
Neither do evolutionary biologists. That’s a straw man.
An instinct doesn’t need to depend on a single gene in order to be inherited, phoodoo.
It’s not a claim, It’s an observation. I’m simply sharing my own personal experience. Just like when I say that it’s cold outside or that tomato is red.
Your mileage may vary.
We all have opinions.
I like ice cream and I think that you would never let a child in your charge get away with defining truth in the way you are trying to do here.
My confidence was never intended to help me out of my limitations. God does that.
I would say it’s a humble thankful confidence. At least that is what it should be.
Of course it won’t change things you have too much invested to ever change absent God’s grace.
The point was never to change anything it was just to draw attention to the fact that you don’t have a basis for making the claims you do.
peace
fifth:
Entropy:
fifth:
It’s a claim, and so are these:
You’re constantly making claims, fifth. Man up and take responsibility for them.
KN,
He did make it clear, and he had to, because his argument depends on the difference.
I think you’re projecting your own confusion onto him. Plantinga consistently uses the word “reliable” in sense 2. You use it in sense 1:
It’s the same word in both cases, so you seem to find that confusing. But Plantinga doesn’t. He uses “reliable” only in sense 2.
So for him, there is a very clear distinction between saying that our cognitive faculties are adaptive or fitness-enhancing versus saying that they are reliable.
He really makes it quite clear, and I got the message on my first reading of the argument.
KN,
It’s essential to Plantinga’s argument. Think about it — if it weren’t logically possible for reliability (sense 1) to be decoupled from reliability (sense 2), then the EAAN would never get off the ground.
keiths,
I think you’re being too uncharitable here towards me. I’m on your side here (except for that side-bar debate we’re having about the nature of beliefs. But you may convince me yet. It’s early days still.)
The question is whether a Churchlandian argument establishing that cognitive capacities are reliable in the Gibsonian sense is sufficient to show that they are reliable in the sense that Plantinga, as an epistemologist, cares about (rightly or wrongly). I agree that that’s a good question. [Side-bar: one thing we see in the Churchland-Plantinga debate is the communicative gulf between scientific philosophers of mind and a priori epistemologists.]
My only point there was cognitive capacities that are reliable in the Gibsonian sense (i.e. affordance-detecting and action-guiding) are (of course) also adaptive. Plantinga never talks about reliability in that sense because he doesn’t think in terms of cognitive science. I think he should, if he wanted to meet naturalists on their own turf. And he should want to do that if he wanted to show that naturalism is self-undermining.
But that said, the epistemological question really does remain (contra Churchland): why should we believe the same processes that produced cognitive capacities that are reliable in the Gibsonian sense also produced cognitive capacities that are reliable in the epistemological sense?
I guess I agree with Plantinga that it’s a good question. Unlike Plantinga, I think that there’s a good naturalistic answer and that it can’t be summarily dismissed with thought-experiments.
keiths:
KN:
“Propositional attitude” need not be construed as “an attitude taken toward a proposition”. More on that later.
Meanwhile, if it were true that beliefs are “attitudes taken toward propositions”, it would mean that beliefs are possible only in creatures capable of forming and pondering propositions.
You would be forced to say, for instance, that the cat pawing under the door did not believe that the mouse was on the other side, which strikes me as ludicrous. It apparently seems ludicrous to you, too, because you wrote:
The problem vanishes if you let go of the idea that beliefs must be tied up with claims or propositions somehow. There’s no necessary connection that I can see, and you haven’t provided one.
In the context of these sorts of discussions the term “claim” has a specific connotation and claims have a specific form.
Compare the following statements
1) the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is low or inscrutable.
2) cotton feels soft against my skin
3) Darwinism is the best explanation for the diversity we see around us
4) certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.
which one of these is not like the others?
If you can understand what is different about statement two you understand why I say I’m not making a claim.
In everyday life it would never occur to anyone that a statement like number two needed to be supported or defended, it’s simply an observation of a personal experience.
With a statement like that, to proclaim it is to conclusively establish it.
It’s only at places like this that such a statement would ever be considered a “claim” to be supported somehow.
quote:
“If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the’ constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life,’ without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.”
end quote:
Thomas Reid
peace
It actually was Dennett’s book on pdf
I’ll see if I can locate something shorter but not too short and get back to you.
KN,
I think you’re being uncharitable toward Plantinga, by accusing him of conflating those two senses of “reliable”. He isn’t doing that, and in fact he’s very careful to distinguish them, reserving the word “reliable” for sense 2: predominantly truth-producing.
It’s not about “sides” for me. Entropy and I are on the same side in the sense of rejecting Plantinga’s argument, for instance, but we obviously don’t agree on what’s wrong with it.
He does talk about reliability in that sense. It’s just that he doesn’t use the word “reliable” when he does. He reserves that word for sense 2.
Again, he does. He just doesn’t use the word “reliable” when he’s doing so, unlike you.
I haven’t read the Churchland paper yet, so I can’t comment on whether he would object to that formulation. I’d be surprised if he did, though.
I think all of us do, except for fifth, Erik, and phoodoo.
I would say that it can’t be dismissed with thought experiments of the kind that Plantinga has provided. Nothing wrong with thought experiments per se, and in fact the lightning thought experiment proved quite useful in showing what was wrong with your notion of beliefs as endorsed claims.
fifth, to walto:
No, fifth.
First of all, you seem to think that the word “feels” gets you off the hook for making a claim. It doesn’t. When you say that cotton feels soft against your skin, you are claiming that cotton feels soft against your skin.
Second, even if the word “feel” did get you off the hook there, it wouldn’t help you with the statement under dispute, which doesn’t involve a word like “feel”:
Entropy:
fifth:
It’s a claim. You’re claiming that God, in reality, loves you and reassures you, in reality.
Again, man up and take responsibility for your claims.
KN,
Now, an explanation of why “propositional attitude” needn’t be construed as “an attitude taken toward a proposition”.
There’s another construal that will do the job just fine. Take it to mean something like “an attitude that would, in a creature capable of producing and understanding propositions, result in that creature’s assent or disagreement with certain propositions”.
Another way to think of it: If you gave the cat the ability to speak and understand propositions, would she agree with the proposition “the mouse is on the other side of the door”? I would say yes.
Both she and a human observer would mentally represent the mouse as being on the other side of the door. The difference is that the person would be able to express that belief as a proposition, while the cat would not.
But despite that difference, both would be able to respond to the belief. The cat, by pawing under the door. The human, perhaps by going and looking for a mousetrap.
There’s nothing special about propositions here. They’re just one more form of behavior that can follow from a belief.
Yep. This is an interesting question. Three problems are: (1) where to start thinking about the evolution of cognitive faculties, where we have to think about what they do, not about cartoons about cavemen-running-from-tigers. As far as I know, Willie El Coyote is not a good representation of coyotes hunting for roadrunners. (2) What the hell is truth. (3) Is it really true/false the way cognitive faculties work? or is it just the academic facilitation brought about by developing true/false systems that made them popular? Maybe we should consider that it’s not like that in terms of how cognitive faculties arose and work. After all, it seems more likely that the advantage of cognitive faculties is that they allow us to go beyond instinctive responses, thus giving us more opportunities than mere panic attacks, for example, would do. That’s beyond mere dichotomies, that involves maybes.
The fucking irony. The more the reason he should be ashamed.
keiths,
That definitely helps! Thanks!
So, now it seems you want to say that there are two kinds of belief: there are beliefs that would be expressed as asserting a proposition if the creature had acquired a language, and there are beliefs that aren’t expressed that way because the creature has not acquired a language. (Presumably a lot of our beliefs are also tacit, non-propositional — as with your lightning in the valley example.)
That’s helpful. But it defines beliefs in this weird counterfactual way — “a mental state that would be expressed as assent to a proposition if the animal had language.” What I want to know is why both this and the human case count as belief.
I can think of a few possibilities, but the gist is that we need a dispositional concept that can do the kind of descriptive and explanatory work in animal psychology that the concept of belief does in human psychology. And I think that the key idea here is the idea of habit. Not that all habits are beliefs, but maybe we can think about beliefs as a sub-set of habits?
That was pretty insightful phoodoo. I wholeheartedly agree. I’d just like you to know that geneticists are aware of the problem, and they understand that taking some shortcuts, like calling that gene a speech gene, is somewhat ok, as long as it’s still clear that such thing is a shortcut and that what they really mean is that such gene’s lack has an effect in the development of speech, and that the problem might be a “bit” more complex than that.
Darwinism is but one aspect of evolution phoodoo (the interactions between variability and the environment). You cannot expect it to explain everything, let alone something that happens way beyond where that single aspect of evolution plays a role. Complex learned behaviour is explained by the capacity of the cognitive faculties phoodoo. Darwinism would be a partial answer to how those cognitive faculties became that “potent,” but to understand how come we’ve got this far in complex learned behaviour, you have to take into account our cultural “evolution,” which is quite another beast.
All of those are claims if/when asserted. That various kinds of claims have different sorts of evidential support (if any) is entirely irrelevant. It’s like showing me three different shirts and denying one of them is a shirt because it’s black.
The Reid quote, for that reason, is also completely inapposite.
I’d love the whole book. Thanks!
The important distinction here is that about heritability. I don’t know if the “wires” are of the same kind either (I doubt they are), but it doesn’t really matter.
Sure. That doesn’t mean that there’s no distinction between behaviour coming from a dynamic system, like cognitive faculties, and instincts.
quote:
Assert: to state or declare positively and often forcefully or aggressively
end quote:
from here https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assert
You are going to have to elaborate on what you mean by assert.
Is it an assertion to say “it’s difficult for me to read in this light.”?
Or “My wife makes me happy”
I would call that sort of thing sharing an observation
I certainly would not consider then to be assertions and in the real world no one would be expected to support statements like that.
No, it’s like pointing out that a vest is not a shirt and being told “forcefully” that anything you wear on your torso is course a shirt.
peace
Yea, well, the problem is, coming to grips with the other aspects. You know, the ones where atheists like to cover their eyes and say, “You can’t see me, I can’t hear you…”
Materialist have no case without Darwin.