A thread at UD that was just beginning to get interesting was unfortunately cut short when Elizabeth departed.
As is oh so typical over at UD, those silly IDiots were appealing to obvious truths and the primacy of logical reasoning. Elizabeth, in contrast, was championing her empirical methodology.
During the exchange, Elizabeth made the following statements:
My method is the standard empirical method.
If you can’t establish the truth of the premises how can you know your conclusion is correct, however impeccable the logic?
My question to Elizabeth was simple. How did you arrive at the truth of that statement [assuming it’s a rhetorical question] using the standard empirical method?
I’d really like to give Elizabeth an opportunity to answer.
For reference:
A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid.
A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
Given the above explication of valid and invalid arguments and sound and unsound arguments, does Elizabeth’s question even make sense? IOW, logic does not and cannot tell us whether the conclusion is “correct.” Logic can only tell us whether an argument is valid. Logic cannot and does not tell us whether an argument is sound.
How do we discover these facts/truths of logic using Elizabeth’s standard empirical method? If they cannot be established as facts/truths using the standard empirical method, should logic be abandoned? If so, why?
William,
The latter is a particular instance of the former.
Guiding someone to a sound conclusion via a rational argument is ultimately a physical process, sure — but it operates through a person’s (physically implemented) cognitive faculties, rather than bypassing them.
I have to go to bed now, but can we take, as an example, the idea of “conservation of quantity”?
Small children, when you show them a squat glass of liquid and a tall glass of liquid, will say that there is more liquid in the tall glass (or sometimes the squat glass), even if they watch it being poured. Even if they pour it themselves from one to the other, they will still say they are different. It seems to be because they cannot figure out that it is impossible – illogical – for there to be more liquid in the glass – they cannot get over the longer dimension of one glass than the other.
Conservation of Liquid
I probably agree with you that “physically reprogramming” someone (if I understand what you mean by that) a person is not “in principle” (or in some kind of principle) different from “arguing with them”. However, rather than saying that they are both just “how molecules happen to be moved around” I would say that the physical configuration, if you like, of the molecules that allow someone to come to a “logical” understanding of conservation of quantity, rather than the “concrete operations” stage the child is at, is different in kind (and thus different in some other principle) from the configuration that leads to the “illogical” configuration. And I think it is different because it makes better predictions.
The “kind of knowing” that the concrete-operations-stage child has is different from the “kind of knowing” that the formal-operations child has because the child has been “programmed” – both by her developmental genetic timetable and by contact with other people including older people, and can now “know” the principle of conservation of quantity – she has not been argued into it, she has indeed been “reprogrammed”.
But that doesn’t mean that her new state is no better than flinging feces, or whatever. Her new state is measurably more functional. So to that extent, her current state of understanding is objectively truer than her previous state.
Anyway, I’ll leave it there for now. Got a big week, so may or may not be dropping back in shortly!
William J. Murray,
If it were possible to create a brain-state which, to all intents and purposes, was the same as that resulting from argumentation alone, then indeed one must accept that ‘changing’ a material mind (if you’re not talking of ‘immaterial minds’, what the hell are you talking about?) can ultimately only be equivalent to physically rearranging the stuff in which it is manifest. Equally, you could turn me into Marilyn Monroe, atom by atom. So what?
It is certainly a fact that physical lesions, electrical stimulation, drugs etc can substantially ‘change the mind’. If you could take brain matter away one atom at a time, I’d suggest the mind would appear very clearly to erode along with it, to both observer and subject. The executive, the mind’s ‘I’, goes too. Eventually you are left with something you can’t argue with at all.
Allan,
Let’s do it!
As far as I can tell, William’s problem is that he can’t see how a physical system can be rational.
His reasoning seems to go something like this:
1. Physical systems change their state according to the laws of physics and nothing else.
2. The laws of physics don’t care about logic, reason, and valid or sound arguments.
3. Therefore a physical system cannot ‘care’ about those things. It cannot be rational.
What he’s missing is that logic can be implemented on a physical substrate even though the laws of physics don’t ‘care’ about logic.
No, let’s not. 🙂
One was enough, one was lovely, one was perfect as is. (As was.)
One more would be … superfluous.
I don’t doubt that “materialism” is false. And it is completely refuted by the latest guest post at UD.
By “materialism”, I mean the ridiculous strawman that is repeated attacked by UD denizens. That latest guest post could almost be in The Onion, given the absurdity of what it attacks. I don’t know of anybody who holds the postions that are attacked there.
I agree that virtually nobody holds those positions in any functional sense. Unfortunately, those are the positions materialists are logically, necessarily left with, as indefensible as they are. At its core, materialism must mean that physical processes driven by physical law and stochastic processes ultimately account for everything, and that nothing exists or occurs independent of or uncaused by those causal factors.
If materialism doesn’t even mean that, why bother using the term at all?
Allan Miller said:
You didn’t answer the questions. Here it is again:
Let’s say you and I agree to debate whether or not god exists. Let’s postulate I have figured a long sequence of utterances that appear to be nonsensical, but affect any human being the same way: the sequence causes a physical cascade of physiological effects that will make any human believe that god exists, and also believe that they have come to this conclusion by a careful examination of the logic and evidence available.
We begin the debate. Should I utter my string of nonsensical sounds and win the debate, converting you to theism? If not, why not?
I’m sorry, that’s just not believable. You’ve already given away the store:
Given the argument is sound, the conclusion is necessarily true.
What empirical method did you use to derive that?
OMagain gets it. Now how does empiricism arbitrate?
Presumably this is taking place within his mind.
The universe is both 6,000 years old and 13.62 billion years old.
Fair enough.
That should mean that you are able to provide the logic. That is, you are able to clearly state the premises that are required by materialism, and then provide all of the steps for a logical inference to those conclusions.
May we expect a thread on this?
Someone who’s got a non-banned sock at UD should be sure to post this quote from Mung there.
They should know what their brave boy does with the Law of Non Contradiction when he’s not directly under their thumb.
William, to Allan:
My own answer is ‘no’, but in any case you are still conflating two questions, as I pointed out earlier:
Can you answer my question Mung?
KN thinks that we are failing to understand William because William is talking about epistemology and the rest of us are talking about metaphysics.
But it seems to me that William is saying that we need to make a specific metaphysical assumption in order to justify our assumption that our debate is rational.
And that as we do assume our debate is rational, then we are, without acknowledging it, accepting that metaphysical assumption.
If so, he is talking about both.
And where I think some of us disagree is that that metaphysical assumption IS an implicit assumption of rational debate.
So we are back to metaphysics.
One again you claim victory before you even start. That can only be a hollow sort of victory. One wonders why you bother having the argument at all, having won it already.
@Elizabeth
It’s not really just one metaphysical assumption at stake here. What’s at stake is what justifies metaphysical assumptions at all.
On empiricism, metaphysics (ontology and logic) are themselves suspect (because empiricism presupposes primacy of sensory data), whereas on rationalism, anything else can be justified only after the metaphysical presuppositions have been properly clarified and demonstrated to be logically coherent. Sensory input cannot be taken unquestionably. Sensory input must be taken critically. Hallucinations must be distinguished from valid or true input, and this distinction is logical, not sensory or empirical.
The point of controversy in this kind of discussions is not just between atheism and theism, between science and philosophy. It’s crucially between the empirical approach and the rational approach.
Now, i don’t think for a moment that William properly represents rationalism and that he has sound metaphysics. He clearly doesn’t, even though he is currently defending the side of rationalism against empiricism – and so would I. Anyway, it should really give a pause to atheists and scientistists (if this is a word; well, it is now) to drop rationality and try to trump sense data over logic. Seriously, when you deny logic, then what are you left with? Based on what will you continue to argue at all?
Let’s examine the curious test cases that have emerged in the discussion:
OMagain:
The statement below is false.
The statement above is true.
Elizabeth:
Tell me how “logic” can “arbit” between these two statements:
The universe is 6,000 years old.
The universe is 13.62 billion years old.
These contrasts come from different categories. Clearly there’s no *empirical* way to resolve OMagain’s puzzle, whereas there is an empirical way to resolve Elizabeth’s questions. However, note that the distinction between empirical and logical is itself not empirical – it’s logical. The determination that Elizabeth’s questions are empirical is itself logical, not empirical. Therefore, when rationalism and empiricism clash, I choose rationalism over empiricism any day, always and without fail, and I stand by it. But sorry, William, I won’t stand by you, because ID falls apart on logical scrutiny (not to mention empirical).
By “primacy of mind” Murray meant primacy of intellect/reason over the senses/perception, i.e. rationalism over empiricism, an epistemic position. At one point, if I noticed correctly, he even put it a bit better “pimacy of mind/logic”.
Ontologically, primacy of the mind means mind first, matter later, but it seems to me the discussion is not quite there yet, and it would be a separate discussion anyway, as brilliantly elucidated by KN. Or if you please, you can have all these discussions at once. Carry on.
Erik said:
Where in this thread have I said anything about ID?
Inference to best explanation.
EL said:
Those are not metaphysical assumptions; they are the assumptions logically required by the unspoken debate expectations. It doesn’t matter if mind is “material” or “immaterial”, what matters is that the mind is presumed (1) in some capacity independent of strict causation via physics/chance and can reach conclusions based on formal logical principles regardless of the interference/influence of the physics involved (IOW, if the matter/physics of a brain state is currently representing an erroneous inference, deduction or conclusion, it can be somehow overridden and a state of awareness about the error be achieved independent of erroneously-patterned physical substrate), (2) assumed to have access to some form of objectively valid arbiter of true statements (logic), and (3) assumed to have the top-down capacity to recognize and impose valid conclusions over old views on the existing physical architecture.
These necessary assumptions, which drive the unspoken expectations of any rational argument, IMO, include things that appears to contradict materialism (some aspect of mind independent from causation, free to logically assess in a logically valid (and not necessarily physics-mandated) way, and the ability to top-down impose new views on existing architecture), but that doesn’t mean those assumptions/expectations are metaphysical in nature per se.
They’re just the assumptions we have to make (even if unrecognized and/or denied) in order for our arguments (and expectations thereof) to be something other in principle than monkeys flinging feces. If materialism can account for a universe/existence where those assumptions can be true, then wrt rational arguments, materialism will have provided a coherent framework for such arguments and our expectations thereof. If not, it doesn’t prove materialism false, it just means materialists should accept arguments for what they really would be if materialism was true – haphazard (and probably seriously flawed) attempts to physically reprogram others into thinking more like whomever is doing the arguing/flinging.
I assume we all agree it would be wrong to employ a method that physically reprograms others to think more like us if we could; the problem is that, under materialism, that is all that you have: different labels for physically reprogramming others so that they think more like you do. The “rational argument” label is just an individual, subjective label you put on one set of physical reprogramming techniques whereby you fool yourselves into thinking something other than physical reprogramming is going on.
Under materialism, it all boils down to my molecules, either directly or through some representational media (photons, wrt reading the monitor?), interacting with your molecules, causing physical reactions determined by physics, so to speak, the systemic brain state result of which is represented as you changing your mind. It makes no principled difference if I use what I call logical molecules, baseball bat molecules, medicine molecules, or “magic word gibberish” molecules, it’s the physical arrangement of the molecules that cause the effect, not the presumed logical quality of the “information” supposedly contained in the arrangement.
IOW, even if the arrangement of molecules you produce in an argument represents a perfectly valid logical argument in your particular system, it would only be by incredible coincidence that the same arrangement would represent a perfectly valid logical argument in the other person’s system. And, even if it did, it’s not what the arrangement of molecules “represents” that effects the brain-state change in the other person; it’s the actual physical arrangement of the molecules, and it can generate a state-change whether the receiving person understands what it represents or not. In fact, under materialism, they could understand it in a completely different way where it makes no rational sense to them at all, but the physical structure of the molecules can still generate the change in brain-state.
So, under materialism, all my system is doing is arranging molecules and sending them into your system with the hope that that arrangement will effect a physical change (reprogramming) in your system so that you will think more like me. Heck, it may be that most people’s brain-state system is physically immune to being changed by what we call “logical argument” style molecular interactions, and they may be immune to brain-state changes via empirical evidence – we may call this being close-minded and stubborn, that would be a rather nonsensical label to put on what is just a particular physics-driven brain state.
You (and Mung) have a longer history than this thread, as does this fundamental discussion that never seems to be settled. I should probably have mentioned you together with Mung as an inseparable entity, because this is what you are.
EL asks:
First, logic doesn’t arbit, EL. People do. Oh, snap!
Logic is used to first clean up your sloppy language into contradictory statements. Logic is then used to theorize about what physical imprints the universe would leave as it ages, and figure out the best methodology for gathering data pertaining to those physical imprints. Logic would be used for developing protocols that protect the integrity of data collection. Logic would be used then in identifying, interpreting and sorting the data into the the aging-universe theory. Logic would be used to generate inferences towards a sound conclusion, and also in figuring out ways to check the premises for fault. ETC.
The only way to arbit the truth value between two statements is via use of logic; everything else, including scientific theory and data, are just tools people using logic create and use towards that end.
(BTW: self-evidently true statements are not arbited as being true, they are recognized as being true on pain of absurdity.)
This argument has nothing to do with ID. Why bring it up as if it had something to do with this argument?
William J. Murray,
I’ll be quite honest, I don’t really understand the question. If you have a cast-iron means to change my mind, ‘should’ you? You can do what you like, I guess (or you can declare victory at the start and say everyone else is ‘flinging faeces’; that seems to satisfy you too).
If it mattered to you that I believe in theism (rather than just that you enjoy a bit of a debate) then you might wish to employ your method. But for me to advise I’d need a bit more info on motivation, I think, and I’m still not sure it’s for me to tell you what you should do in order to achieve your desired result. I certainly wouldn’t bother. What a monotone world where everyone thought like me!
But I am, I suspect, missing some deep and brilliant point.
Indeed, it doesn’t have anything to do with ID. And I will remind you at once when you begin pretending otherwise.
Keith answers my magic word gibberish question by saying that no, he wouldn’t (and I suppose, shouldn’t) use the magic gibberish to change the other person’s mind:
No, I’m using the moral implications to draw attention to the unspoken and often unrecognized assumptions we make and expectations we have when we engage in rational arguments with assumed rational agents.
That’s the moral question, but the divergence from materialism your arrangement of terms in that question indicates is that there is a distinction between one addressing a “faculty of reason” and “modifying beliefs directly”. Since ones “faculty of reason” is just as much a physically embedded aspect of their personhood as anything else one might interact with, using medicine, a baseball bat, magic word gibberish or logic are all equally direct methods of altering beliefs. Some are just more effective than others in certain situations and for certain people.
No, that’s not the empirical question. The empirical question is: under materialism, is appealing to whatever a physically-embedded “faculty of reason” may be functionally any different than using a baseball bat, medicine, or magic-word gibberish? The answer is no; they are all direct forms of attempted physical reprogramming, because regardless of what you you use, physical causes generate mechanical & stochastic effects which the receiving individual has no independent means of resisting. IOW, you are physically causing their brain state to change due to the physical arrangement of your input. Given the correct physical input, “they” cannot help but have their minds changed as a result, whether you refer to what you are employing as “logic”, or as “magic-word gibberish”.
Allan Miller said:
Oh good grief. What’s not to understand?
I didn’t say I had a “cast-iron means to change your mind”. I said I have a string of nonsensical words I can utter that will physically cause a cascade effect in your physiology which will result in your becoming a theist and believing you changed your mind based on logic and evidence. When I ask “should I” use that magic word gibberish to win the argument and change your mind, I’m asking you if you think it is right or moral to use the magic-word gibberish to change someone else’s beliefs.
And if the person you are arguing with is supposed by you to not have free will does that change anything?
It seems to me that Murray wants to say the following:
(1) If one starts off by assuming that materialism is true, then one cannot account for rationality; and also
(2) If one starts off by assuming that rationality is an indispensable starting-point for any meaningful human interaction (as it surely is), then one should not endorse materialism.
In other words, materialism and rationality mutually exclude one another.
It’s not entirely clear what the argument for (1) is supposed to be. At various times Murray talks about “monkeys flinging feces”. (I’m not sure why Murray is compelled by this phrase, but I’ll leave that to the psychoanalysts.)
Interestingly enough, people who have actually studied fecal flinging in chimpanzees have found that it is a sign of considerable intelligence; see here. And fecal flinging in chimpanzees is not just a way of communicating; it is integrated into a wide repertoire of learned behaviors that play a constitutive role in social cohesion of highly intelligent animals. (But I have not yet found any evidence that wild chimpanzees engage in fecal flinging, so it might be a response to boredom under captivity.)
I’m intrigued by how materialism implies the reduction of rational discourse to fecal flinging, and I want to see if I make sense of this claim.
Elsewhere on this site, and repeatedly, Murray worries that if bottom-up, mechanistic causation is “all that there is,” then there’s no such thing as rationality. We can put a bit more meat on this claim as follows:
Hence semantic properties such as meaning, sense, reference etc. merely supervene on the properties of the fields that generate the particles that comprise my body, including my brain, and the same is true of epistemic properties such as reasonable, warranted, confirmed, etc. Any description of, say, the activity of weighing the relative merits of two or more different theories in light of best available evidence could be replaced, in principle, with a description of the underlying fields.
I don’t think anyone at TSZ is a materialist in that sense, though there are people who do hold the view. Alex Rosenberg, for example, is clearly committed to something like this when he claims that “the physical facts fix all the facts”. (I actually don’t know if Rosenberg thinks that there are semantic or epistemic facts — he certainly doesn’t think that there are moral facts — so he might be assuming that there are no normative facts, but that all facts are empirical descriptions. So Rosenberg’s metaphysics is a hierarchy of levels of empirical descriptions.)
The question I now want to ask is this: if materialism (so defined) were true, then why would our discursive practices count as indistinguishable from fecal flinging? The line of thought seems to be that fecal flinging is reducible to fundamental physics, but that discursive practices are not, or put otherwise:
(1) All aspects of animal behavior can be understood in term of fundamental physics;
(2) Discursive practices cannot be understood in terms of fundamental physics.
I quite agree with (2), but I think (1) is clearly false.
(I would also point out that (1) is also inconsistent with biological ID, since the whole point of biological ID is to show that since biological phenomena are irreducible to merely physical phenomena, “something else” (intelligence) is necessary to get from mere physical and chemical reactions to life.)
But if one rejects (1) and accepts (2), then one could also accept
(3) Discursive practices can be understood in terms of animal behavior.
As it stands, however, (3) is too vague to be true or false, because it’s completely mysterious what “can be understood in terms of” means.
Here we need to make sure we’re keeping our epistemology and our metaphysics distinct (though eventually to be re-united).
In terms of how we describe our epistemic situation, the structure of our discursive practices is, so to speak, the Ground Floor. Everything that we say and do that can be justified or even understood, is justified or understood in terms of the embodied discursive practices that we’ve got.
But that does not preclude us from offering an account as to how an infant is initiated into discursive practices and acquires rationality, it does it preclude us from offering an account as to how discursive practices evolved from older, more “primitive” kinds of animal behavior, and it does not preclude us from offering an account of the neurological processes that enable one to engage in discursive practices.
To summarize: while “materialism” of the extreme variety might indeed undermine the intelligibility of our discursive practices, there is nothing in child developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, or cognitive neuroscience which does so.
William J. Murray,
Your words, mainly, and the point you wished to convey.
You didn’t use those words, but that’s what it amounts to. You have a string which will reprogram me in a way that will result in my becoming a theist. Seems pretty cast-iron to me, while not, actually, being made of iron, nor cast.
Ah. It sounded like you were asking if I would recommend it!
I don’t see it as a moral question. Plenty of religions do use magic-word gibberish, and it occasionally produces the result you describe. I don’t think they are wrong to do so.
KN said:
No. What I am saying is that one cannot account for the expectations we have about what a “rational argument” with a “rational agent” is and about what is going on in that process. It is up to the materialist to provide a materialism-consistent description of rationality, rational agency, rational debates and the convincing and installing of new belief process that also conforms to these often unspoken expectations inherent in such an argument, or else they are arguing under false expectations (false wrt materialism).
One of those expectations is that rationally debating with someone to convince them is categorically different than simply brainwashing/reprogramming them: how does a materialist provide a materialism-consistent distinction between the two? As far as I can see, my magic-word gibberish system and the rational debate system are physically the same process with the same results, except mine is more efficient – in fact, it’s guaranteed. They would both be causing physically non-resistable (at least by that particular brain-state system) alterations in the other person’s brain state.
What difference does it make if the argument you utter is logical or not? What difference does it make if the words themselves make any sense?
No. I’ve never said one must assume that rationality is such.
William,
Your objections apply whether the mind is material or immaterial. Let me make the point as starkly as I can.
Your scenario:
1. Suppose that minds are physically instantiated.
2. Your friend Gertrude’s mind is in state A, wherein she does not believe X. Imagine that by uttering a series of nonsense syllables you can change the state of her physically-instantiated mind from state A to a state in which she believes X just as you do.
3. Should you utter the nonsense syllables? Or should you proceed the old-fashioned way, trying to persuade her by rational argument? After all, both accomplish the same end result — changing her physically-instatiated mind from one state to another.
A slightly modified scenario:
1. Suppose that minds are immaterial.
2. Your friend Gertrude’s mind is in state A, wherein she does not believe X. Imagine that by uttering a series of nonsense syllables you can change the state of her immaterial mind from state A to a state in which she believes X just as you do.
3. Should you utter the nonsense syllables? Or should you proceed the old-fashioned way, trying to persuade her by rational argument? After all, both accomplish the same end result — changing her immaterial mind from one state to another.
The moral question is the same in both cases:
Alan MIler said:
That sounds consistent with materialism to me. Thanks.
When there is a complete, and demonstrably so, knowledge of physics then perhaps you’ll have a point. But we don’t know what conciousness is right now and we can’t say what generates it.
So if you can wait till then, I’ll be happy to oblige.
Keiths said:
No, it’s not, keiths, because “faculty of reason” is assumed to be two entirely different things under materialism and under some non-materialist concepts of mind, as is “mind” and its relationship to “brain states”. You can phrase a moral question the same way under both paradigms, but they do not, and cannot, mean the same thing.
Note: I talk about “our discursive practices” rather than, as Murray does, “the mind”, because I think that talking about “the mind” rushes past lots of different issues.
If we want to talk about “logic”, or as I would prefer, inference — “logic” being a set of techniques for making explicit inferential relations — then we need to talk about what we do, and what the norms are that govern what we do, and that means that inference must be a social practice. That’s going to be different from, say, consciousness. (My cats are perfectly conscious, but they aren’t rational.) And the discourse of neuroscience is going to be different yet again, in terms of explaining how non-rational and rational animals behave.
It seems true that if the description of our epistemic situation necessarily involves a fine-grained structure of our embodied discursive practices, as answerable both to each other and to the world, then any metaphysics which cannot account for this description is prima facie false.
The materialist then faces an impossible task: she would need to show that the reasons for accepting reductive materialism are stronger than our reasons for accepting the description of our epistemic situation, but (it would seem) one cannot give reasons as reasons without presupposing that one is playing, with others, the social game of giving and asking for reasons, which is precisely what our discursive practices are all about. If she were to to stick to her metaphysical guns, she would have to say that reasons aren’t what we thought they are, or something like that. (To my knowledge, the only person who has really thought this position through to its logical conclusion is R. Scott Bakker over at Three Pound Brain with his “blind brain theory”.)
That said, one would need extremely compelling reasons to accept materialism to begin with, and I don’t think the arguments in favor of materialism are good enough. Rosenberg’s materialism starts off with the idea that we should ground our metaphysical commitments in science, and nothing but. I actually don’t have a real problem with that.
But notice: firstly, Rosenberg never engages in any epistemology to account for the priority of scientific knowledge over other kinds of knowledge; secondly, he makes free and wild use of non-scientific metaphysics in the process of constructing a metaphysics from science. Most egregiously, the concept of “level of reality” is not a scientific concept. It is a pre-scientific, metaphysical notion that has no place in a scientific metaphysics of the sort that Rosenberg is attempting to construct. There’s a stark contrast between what scientific metaphysics ends up looking like in Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and in Ladyman and Ross’s Every Thing Must Go, precisely because L&R explicitly acknowledge that since neither “reduction” nor “emergence” are scientific concepts, neither has any role in a scientific metaphysics. I find this approach quite promising. And it has the extremely interesting conclusion that scientific metaphysics does not entail materialism. If anything, materialism is just as much a vestige of pre-scientific metaphysics as idealism is!
Needless to say, I share the criticism, often made at UD, that one cannot reject normativity, agency, and rationality without sawing off the branch upon one sits. Any metaphysics that rejects normativity would be, indeed, nihilistic — just as our critics at UD insist. They’re quite right about that.
What they are not right about is the implicit premise that naturalism and normativity are incompatible. It all depends on the specific conception of naturalism and of normativity. Epicurean materialism and Platonic realism are clearly incompatible; enactive cognitive science (that cognition involves a dynamic pattern of brain-body-world transactions) and essentially embodied neopragmatism (that norm-governed discursive practices are essentially modes of our contingent bodily histories and behaviors) are almost certainly not. (I’ll be writing about that specific issue this summer and I’ll have an argument eventually.)
In short, my general thesis is that essentially embodied neopragmatism, enactive cognitive science, and scientifically constrained metaphysics together form a three-legged stool that, taken together, refutes the argument that naturalism entails nihilism.
William,
Then your argument boils down to this:
1. Assume that the faculty of reason cannot be physically instantiated.
2. If the mind is physically instantiated, then by #1 it does not reason.
3. Since a physically-instantiated mind does not reason, there’s no principled difference between getting a person to believe X via a reasoned argument vs. nonsense syllables.
I hope it’s obvious that #1 assumes an answer to the very question being debated.
Would you explain what you mean by “discursive”? I’ve looked it up because what I thought it meant and how you used it doesn’t seem to make much sense, and the regular dictionaries actually give contradictory meanings, and philosophical dictionaries are all over the place.
I haven’t assumed a “faculty of reason” cannot be instantiated, only that whatever it is, under materialism, it is necessarily bound by physical restraints, cause and effect, and is the product of, and necessarily produces outcomes generated by, mechanical regularities (physics) and stochastic processes. So must be the mind, under materialism. This is incongruent with our expectations of what is occurring in rational arguments.
Except for maybe Allan, who thinks it’s just fine to convince people using gibberish if you can.
Using the same terminology doesn’t sneak the same concept in, keiths. Concepts of mind and faculties of reason used in arguments supporting materialism must be consistent with materialism.
William,
Which is equivalent to saying that a faculty of reason cannot be physically instantiated, because if it is physically instantiated, then what it is doing isn’t reason, it’s “producing outcomes generated by mechanical regularities and stochastic processes.”
But that’s silly. It’s like arguing that a pocket calculator can’t really add two numbers together because it’s merely “producing outcomes generated by mechanical regularities and stochastic processes.”
I do not understand the supremacy of rationality.
Rationality is esy to achieve. It is the first human-like behavior achieved by computers. And computers have far surpassed humans in any measurable aspect of rationality.
I am not a philosopher, so my terminology is crude, but what i see humans doing that is difficult to emulate in computers is to create meaning.
But this faculty exists on a gradient. plants and microbe have tropisms. frogs have the ability to isolate features of the environment that are flying and edible. Social insects and birds build structures.
And human infants, long before they have language, acquire a vast array of meaningful interactions with the environment. Non human apes survive in environments where 99.999 percent of humans would starve and die. Meaning is orthogonal to reason. Meaning can exist without rationality.
And rationality exists on a continuum. I, and I suspect most people reading this, consider ourselves capably of rational thought. But I have met and read about people who are vastly superior (almost computer-like).
I think a problem exists because meaning always boils down to personal, survival related experience. One can share meaning only to the extent that one can share experience, and that is limited. Sharing of meaning seems to work well on experiences that can be quantified, and to become increasingly sketchy as one moves toward emotional experiences.
Things that might seem obvious at first glance are not always obvious. i cannot share the meaning of “green” with my son, because he cannot experience green.
I present that as a analogy or metaphor for how these discussions go. People trying to win rational games without sharing meaning. I don’t think the concept of premises is adequate to convey this problem. Agreeing on premises is not the same thing as experiencing the greenness that the other person is experiencing.
Actually, this is not silly at all. Pocket calculators indeed are not adding in the same sense as humans. Humans can do it to indefinite (infinite) values, but pocket calculators do it up to a specified point and beyond that point they throw up an E.
Kripke calls this quaddition. The point is elaborated by James Ross http://www.newdualism.org/papers/J.Ross/Ross-immateriality.htm
No, it’s not equivalent to saying that. You’re free present a materialist concept of “mind” and “faculty of reason” that meets the expectations and assumptions we have when making rational argument with rational agents if you don’t think my descriptions of the limits available under materialism are correct.
IOW, I’m not arbitrarily imposing the a limit on what materialism can offer in terms of what one might label as “faculty of reason”; I’m explaining what seem to me to be the inherent, necessary limitations and nature of any such transplanted concept – much like “free will” under materialism cannot be “libertarian free will” but rather must be some form of “compatabilist” free will. I’m also explaining that such concepts are incongruent with our expectations of rational discourse.
No, it’s like arguing that a calculator will produce whatever result it’s programmed to produce whether the answer is correct or not. If “faculty of logic” under materialism is a calculator, the calculator can be programmed to produce all sorts of irrational outcomes and the system thinks/believes it is giving the correct answer.
That’s correct. Rational discourse is categorically different from re-conditioning, using drugs, etc. (I might add that all ideology, including propaganda and advertising, also subverts or by-passes the rational faculties.) It’s the difference between treating someone as another subject — intersubjectivity, or what Buber calls “the I-Thou relation” — and objectifying someone, or what Buber calls “the I-It relation”.
In saying that the I-You (actually, though this is not Buber, the I-You-We relation) is essentially “discursive,” I am only pointing that out that rationality essentially involves language (though there are also non-discursive aspects of language).
What I am calling here “the space of giving and asking for reasons” in turn corresponds to what Dennett calls “the intentional stance”, whereas treating someone as a mere object to be manipulated would correspond to what Dennett calls “the design stance” (if one were interested in what an object does) and also to “the physical stance” (if one were interested in how an object works).
(Two philosophers have argued at length for the importance of “the teleological stance,” and I think that’s importantly right.)
But, if that’s basically coherent — combining Brandom and Dennett in this way — then it’s not at all clear what the implications are for metaphysics. Certainly one could not combine a plurality of stances with any metaphysics that says that there is only one correct stance. So if “materialism” says that the physical stance is the only stance that really gets at the nature of reality, and the intentional stance is just a pragmatic book-keeping device (at best), that’s going to undermine the authority of reason, just as Murray has been claiming.
On the one hand, I think it be hasty and ill-advised to say that each stance corresponds to a different kind or level of reality — I don’t know how to motivate that view except by intellectualizing the stance, so that the stance is transposed into a system of sentences, and then endorsing a theory of reference according to which every true sentence refers to a state of affairs. I think that stances need to be thought of as particular modes of embodied discursive practices that aim at successful coping, rather than as true descriptions.
(As an aside, this means that the intentional stance must have a certain kind of transcendental priority over the other stances. That gives me a different angle of attack on a point I made in print several years ago, and then stopped making because I thought it couldn’t be right. Now I’m back to seeing how it’s right again, so thank you for that!)
On the other hand, I think that each stance, to be effective, must somehow encounter real patterns able to support counterfactuals. The stances can’t be cookie-cutters that arbitrarily cut out object-shaped and subject-shaped entities out of the formless dough of Being. Rather, Being or reality must have the right sort of structure to it such that stances are genuinely effective ways of coping with it and not mere projections.
KN said:
I completely agree – it not only subverts rational discourse towards others, treating the other as reprogrammable thing, it subverts internal reasoning in terms of cognitive biases. However, I don’t think most self-described materialists actually intend to treat others like programmable things, which is why they at least try to provide rational and evidence-based arguments.
Which is why I keep saying that whether it is true in reality or not, we must consider mind primary. If it is considered secondary, or without “a certain kind of transcendental priority”, we cannot account for the manner in which we think we are having rational discussions, our expectations thereof, and the responsibility we recognize that we have in not manipulating others falsely even into what we think are true beliefs. Mind must be considered primary. Our effort (in the form of a rational argument) is directed at the mind of the other person, which we hold (subconsciously or otherwise), as being the top-down or central seat of the other person, not at the configured physical molecules that make up a brain-state.
Rationally convincing the other person cannot be held as being the same as physically reprogramming their brain state, because it draws an equivalence between convincing and brainwashing. Under materialism, “convincing via rational argument” and “physically reprogramming a brain-state” are equivalent statements.
William,
Libertarian free will is incoherent even if the mind is immaterial.
Not so. Rational discourse is possible between any two entities that respond to reasoned argument, regardless of how that responsiveness is implemented — just as addition can be performed by any device or entity that takes numbers and sums them, regardless of how the summation is achieved.
Just like people. They produce whatever results they’re “programmed” to produce, and sometimes their answers are wrong, even when they think otherwise.
Shame! Shame!
You left out education.
In my view, education is profoundly subversive. If it were not subversive then it would not work.