Buckingham Inquirer

A Unified Account of Moral Action

2015-06-01T20:17:00.001-07:00

One way of making the complicated relations in objects of action simpler to understand is to begin at the beginning, with “the first precept of law that good ought to be done and pursued and that evil ought to be avoided” and follow Aquinas’ lead that “all the other precepts of the law of nature are founded upon this principle.”[1] The first way in which one principle may follow from another is by logic, so if practical reason chooses a means, thus making it a proximate end, the form of the reasoning itself has thus shown the Pauline principle that evil may not be done that good may come.[2] If evil were done that good may come, evil would be a means to good, which would make it a proximate end and thus something pursued, a logical violation of the first precept. The next level of analysis, the primary subject of the book under review, can be understood as a kind of metaphysical entailment. To introduce the proper accident of evil into an action is to make it metaphysically impossible for it to be the good action, since good and evil acts differ in species,[3] so the proper accidents of both cannot be present. Finally, consequences must be weighed, because an action cannot be indifferent even if it be indifferent in species,[4] as “not only are human beings good by being directed to the good; more profoundly, they exist for the sake of the good.”[5]

[1] Thomas Aquinas, “Prima Pars,” in Summa Theologiae, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso, accessed September 22, 2014, http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/summa-translation/TOC-part1.htm q 94, a 2, c.
[2] Romans 3:8.
[3] I-II, q18, a5, c.
[4] I-II, q18, a9, c.
[5] Steven J. Jensen, Good & Evil Actions: A Journey Through Saint Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 295.

When do Circumstances give Species to Acts?

2015-06-01T20:15:00.000-07:00

Despite substantial difficulties with interpreting the texts of Aquinas on this point[1] (which Jensen earlier defended against Cajetan’s charge of inconsistency),[2] Jensen arrives at the following formula for when circumstances give species to acts:

Everything hinges, then, on the form that reason seeks to introduce into the materia circa quam. Those aspects by which the material is able or unable to bear this form will give species to human actions. All other aspects of the material will be circumstantial.[3]

He then glosses the above as “[the circumstance] adds something pertaining to reason”[4] or when “[the circumstances] are the proper accidents of some new motive.”[5] Only the last formulation, from the Summa Theologiae, is adequately precise: a circumstance adds something pertaining to reason when it introduces a new form, we know it introduces a new form because the old form is unable to bear the form reason seeks to introduce, and we know the old form is unable to bear the new form (in the case where they are not simply contraries or contradictories) because it has proper accidents which are contradictions or contraries of the proper accidents of the old form. Taking a chalice must be sacrilege as well as theft because consecrated objects are necessarily not reducible to their monetary value. The Sabbath may be for man, but not by way of mammon.

This approach to determining when circumstances give species is also relevant to the case of whether moving cargo off of a ship at sea to avoid sinking is the same act as putting the cargo into the sea.[6] The issue is less that “some negation is involved” but, as Jensen notes, that the cargo becoming waterlogged or sinking is a further result of lightening the ship rather than a means. Why, though, is becoming waterlogged and sinking not a “proper accident” of the act of jettisoning cargo from a ship at sea? It certainly seems to follow with basically 100% certainty, much as shooting a man in the head with a magnum revolver or crushing the skull of a child in-utero lead to their deaths. Aquinas defines a proper accident, however, as “non contingit quin proprium accidens praedicetur de subiecto,”[7] and while jettisoned cargo certainly becomes waterlogged and sinks, it doesn’t necessarily do so. It certainly doesn’t become waterlogged and sink with the kind of necessary force involved in Aquinas’ examples of proper accidents, such as all natural numbers being even or odd, all rational creatures being risible, or all happy states being delightful. The species of the action is thus determined by its intended ends, the chosen means to those ends, and the accidents those ends necessarily entail.

If jettisoning cargo and self-defense are allowed, however, why not craniotomy? The doctor does not, after all, intend the death of the child or harm to the child, and while resizing the child’s head in-utero by crushing it with forceps leads with moral certainty to the death of the child, the death is not itself the means to the end. Unlike in the self-defense case, maiming the organ is not even a means to the end, because whereas in the self-defense case if the bullet passed through without damaging an organ the attacker would continue to pose a threat, in the craniotomy case if the skull somehow squished without being harmed that would be a cause of joy to all concerned, allowing the baby to be delivered alive. Even if the maiming were somehow causally necessary, why should the circumstance of endangering innocent life give species, since maiming is not malum in se? The answer is to be found in Jensen’s remarkably nuanced treatment of the way “things” are the objects of human acts, by their conception in reason.[8] In the case of the jettisoned cargo, it is the same thing which the captain throws overboard to save his ship and would be happy to recover intact after the storm had passed. In the case of the armed defender, the presumptive aggressor is stopped from being an aggressor whether he trips from the noise, is maimed but recovers in handcuffs, or is killed outright. In the case of the consecrated chalice, however, the cup-as-invaluable is stolen, but the cup-as-valuable is fenced. In the case of the craniotomy, the doctor begins by crushing the skull-as-organ, which is to say, crushing the baby, but ends by crushing the postmortem skull-as-calcium-aggregate. His action, which he wishes to describe as “reducing the size of the baby’s head,”[9] turns out to only involve “the head” in an equivocal sense, since at the beginning it is not a thing in itself but a part of a baby, and at the end it is not a thing in itself but an aggregate of flesh and bone. In killing the baby, he has changed the thing upon which he is acting, but the action as he wishes to describe it does not take stock of this fact, and thus cannot be a correct description. The armed defendant, insofar as he attempts to act upon the entirety of the aggressor, which he is deputized to do by the aggressor’s presumptive guilt (thereby explaining the earlier condition), does not suffer from this difficulty.

[1] Steven J. Jensen, Good & Evil Actions: A Journey Through Saint Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 114.
[2] Steven J. Jensen, “Do Circumstances Give Species?,” The Thomist 70, no. 1 (2006): 1–26.
[3] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 125.
[4] Ibid., 113 cf de Malo, 7, 4.
[5] Ibid., 114 cf I-II, q72, a9.
[6] Ibid., 99.
[7] In Post. An. I.10.157
[8] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 117–121.
[9] Ibid., 15.

Difficulties with Jensen's Account of Self-Defense: Why maiming is not malum in se

2015-06-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Jensen rejects most contemporary Thomstic accounts of self-defense because they attempt to place the harm to the aggressor, or particularly his death, outside the intention of the defender, which Jensen finds implausible and contrary to the relevant Thomistic texts.[1] Instead he provides an account of self-defense as implicitly deputized state action, which he acknowledges is not found explicitly in the texts but he judges the most textually compatible means of saving our intuitions that deadly self-defense can be morally justified.[2] While Jensen’s interpretation of St. Thomas is plausible enough, its ability to save our moral intuitions regarding self-defense seems less assured.

Jensen sets the case as follows:

To avoid certain confusions we will press the case to its farthest extreme by considering a situation in which merely injuring the assailant is not likely to stop him, so that the only plausible way to defend oneself is to fire the gun with a near certainty that the assailant will die (supposing that one has good enough aim). Later, we will see that the same considerations apply to situations in which one fires the gun thinking that one will would (but not kill) the assailant.[3]

But why should this causal closeness of firing with death be at all relevant to the moral species? The soldier blowing up a bridge is not committing the moral species of murdering a child playing on the bridge, even if it seems certain that the child will die when the bridge is blown up. Only when “injuring the child…is one of the causes that brings about his goal” is the soldier so culpable.[4] No matter the likelihood of death, however, some degree of injury from the gunshot would surely stop the assailant without causing his death, so the death of the assailant is not actually one of the causes (as conceived by reason) that brings about the goal, even if it is a highly likely concomitant effect of some of those causes and also an alternate cause. Rhonheimer’s interpretation thus seems more plausible:

It entirely depends on what is going on in my heart, that is, whether I want the enemy soldier to be dead, or simply to stop his aggression and to win the battle. Therefore, if as a soldier you do not want to be a murderer, you must care for wounded enemy soldiers. This shows that the object of your acting—the intention involved in your action—obviously was not wanting them to be dead, not even in the moment of battle, even if killing them in the moment was the foreseeable and necessary physical outcome of violence proportionate to stop their aggression.[5]

While one might have reason to quibble with Rhonheimer’s construction of a soldier’s actions in wartime as a case of self-defense, the fact remains that showing solicitude for the wounded illustrates a desire not to kill even if death results in the vast majority of cases from the means chosen. On the other hand, a defender who chooses not to call 911 after incapacitating his assailant with gunfire is a murderer, though perhaps a murderer possessed of some mitigating circumstances.

Much of the cast of Jensen’s approach to self-defense, therefore, relies on his claim that maiming is malum in se,[6] since it seems incontrovertible that the destruction of some part of a person is part of the causal chain (and thus the proximate intention) by which a defender stops an aggressor by means of a firearm. Jensen here follows Thomas, who states that “Si ergo membrum sanum fuerit et in sua naturali dispositione consistens, non potest praecidi absque totius hominis detrimento”[7] which would be evil, making an exception only for the judicial case where sin has corrupted the person in a manner analogous to disease corrupting an organ. Since consent cannot make a malum in se action licit, this poses a host of difficulties which go well beyond self-defense. First, an operation to remove a diseased organ (an inflamed fallopian tube, say) requires cutting through healthy organs (skin and muscle, at minimum). Certainly those organs aren’t intended to be completely destroyed (depending on how sharply ‘membrum’ is defined) but the same could be said of those organs damaged by a bullet in self-defense. In both cases the destruction of the healthy organ is a means to the end; contra Long Jensen wants to maintain that the means is indeed a proximate end in itself,[8] and contra Rhonheimer Jensen wants to maintain that this proximate end in itself gives rise to a human act.[9] Thus the puzzle: according to the strict reading of II-IIq65a1c of maiming a healthy organ as an act malum in se, while Aquinas’ example may work for a case of gangrene where the whole part of the body removed by the doctor is already less than healthy and naturally disposed, it does not work for the case of salpingectomy, which Jensen wishes to affirm as morally licit.[10]

Jensen’s reading is too strict to conform with his own moral intuitions or those of the mainstream Catholic bioethics community. His reading also fails for the case of Aron Ralston, who cut off his own (still healthy) arm to escape likely dehydration after being trapped by a rock,[11] in a microcosm of the fat spelunker case that Jensen judges obviously immoral.[12] While Ralston has received plenty of criticism for his lack of prudence in entering the situation in which he became stuck, he does not seem to have received any for the supposedly malum in se action of cutting off his healthy arm for the further end of saving his life. A third difficulty for this reading is that it would decisively prohibit kidney transplants from living donors, where a complete healthy organ is cut out for some further end, yet both the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services affirm that “Organ transplants are in conformity with the moral law if the physical and psychological dangers and risks incurred by the donor are proportionate to the good sought for the recipient.”[13] If Pope St. John Paul II, who promulgated both Veritatis Splendor and the Catechism is not to be considered a proportionalist, then maiming must not be malum in se.

Given the difficulties with treating maiming as malum in se, what are the alternatives? Jensen could yield to Rhonheimer’s claim that cutting the skin in surgery is not a human act, or to Long’s that it has an intrinsic teleology, but his arguments against these positions are strong. A better approach would be to make use of openings in the Thomistic text to treat maiming differently, much as Jensen already does with the deputization argument. A start might be made by noting that in II-IIq65a1, Thomas is arguing against those who believe maiming to never be lawful, and provides the counterexample of maiming for explicitly judicial purposes. While that may pass even a very strict standard, as Thomas establishes, that need not imply that such a standard is optimal with regard to cases envisioned neither by Thomas nor his objectors. Indeed the replies to objections open up this strategy. Replies one and two make reference to the common good and the good of the man, respectively, as ends to which the particular nature or member are subjected, and without reference to any defect of the member. The third reply provides an even more explicit criterion: “membrum non est praecidendum propter corporalem salutem totius nisi quando aliter toti subveniri non potest.”[14] This solves the salpingectomy case explicitly, and while it must be extended to solve the live-kidney-donor and self-defense cases, by making bodily integrity only a proportionate good it provides the ground for that solution. The presumption in both cases is that the health of the kidney-recipient and the defender may not be saved by means other than maiming.

The need for consent to maiming in the case of the kidney donor but not in the case of the assailant can be explained in that the latter is either not in a rational state of mind or is already making a choice to forfeit the common good, but in either case has already shown his inability to recognize and respond to the common good in consent. To Jensen’s credit, however, the likelihood of death is not totally irrelevant. As the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services put it, “The transplantation of organs from living donors is morally permissible when such a donation will not sacrifice or seriously impair any essential bodily function”[15] and the Catechism notes that “it is furthermore morally inadmissible directly to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons.”[16] This restriction makes sense in light of II-II, q65, a1, ad2 where Thomas orders the part to the whole of the person, but why would the same not be true of deadly force in self-defense, triggering the broader common good argument of ad1? In parallel, if maiming is not malum in se, and the blowing up of the bridge is a proportionate common good, why may the soldier not fire to maim the child so as to trigger the detonator and blow up the bridge? The answer is that insofar as each person is a complete instance of the common good,[17] maiming that endangers life requires some (even prima facie) judgment of guilt,[18] which in turn can only be made by a public authority or one deputized as such,[19] for it to be proportional to the life of another. The reason for this will become clearer in the next section, because this is a circumstance which gives a species.

[1] Steven J. Jensen, Good & Evil Actions: A Journey Through Saint Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 52–66.
[2] Ibid., 219–221.
[3] Ibid., 52–53.
[4] Ibid., 86.
[5] Martin Rhonheimer, The Perspective of the Acting Person: Essays in the Renewal of Thomistic Moral Philosophy, ed. William F. Murphy (Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 88.
[6] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 62–63.
[7] II-II, q65, a1, corpus.
[8] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 46–48.
[9] Ibid., 88.
[10] Ibid., 211.
[11] Michael Brick, “Climber Still Seeks Larger Meaning in His Epic Escape,” The New York Times, March 31, 2009, sec. Sports / Other Sports,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/sports/othersports/01ralston.html.
[12] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 68.
[13] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Image, 2003), para. 2296; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2009), para. 30.
[14] II-II, q65, a1, ad3.
[15] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, para. 30.
[16] Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2296.
[17] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 155.
[18] Ibid., 221.
[19] Ibid., 64–66.

Is Jensen a Moderate Physicalist or a Moderate Abelardian?

2015-06-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

In Good and Evil Actions, Jensen’s dialectical middle course seems closer to Abelardianism than in previous and later works. In a 1997 article he wrote “physicalism is the view that the exterior action has a moral character in itself, by the very nature of its physical features, and that acts of the will receive their good or evil from the exterior action…I hope to show that Aquinas was a physicalist.”[1] By the end of that article Jensen took the position that this is only true of the exterior action “as conceived” which he calls “moderate physicalism” because it is not controlled by the will,[2] but of course the exterior action “as conceived” is not exactly exterior or physical, either. In this work, however, he criticizes physicalism because it “provides little guidance for identifying the proper order of actions; we are left to our own intuitions of the natural orders of actions, which is to say that the account has not helped us to identify the species of actions”[3] without referring to that view as “extreme physicalism.” Jensen also undercuts some of the motivation for physicalism by joining Finnis against Long in the argument that for Aquinas the end-intention of the interior act of the will regards the means, understood as proximate ends,[4] thus giving the Abelardians a way to reject actions involving immoral means. In Jensen’s understanding, the middle course will not approach too closely to the physicalist shore.

Despite Jensen’s review of Rhonheimer’s 2012 book as “laid upon some not-so-Thomistic foundations, culminating in questionable, perhaps even dangerous, conclusions,”[5] in this work he ends up siding with Rhonheimer more often than not. Of twenty substantive citations,[6] twelve are marks of wholehearted agreement,[7] two are ambiguous (regarding teleology)[8] and three of the disagreements are specific to the act of theft.[9] Jensen does have substantive and important disagreements with Rhonheimer over the line between acts of a human and human acts,[10] whether appeals to intention in specifying acts are infinitely regressive,[11]and whether circumstances can ever give species,[12] all of which continue in his 2012 article. With regard to Stephen Long, however, the physicalist to whom Jensen is most indebted, these ratios are nearly reversed: eleven negative citations on core issues,[13] five more regarding the particular problem of self-defense,[14] and only eight positive citations.[15] Either the dialectical middle course is closer to the Abelardian (“In place of physical actions, they provided mental intentions. Rather than human goods depending upon our physical human nature, they presented human goods immediately grasped by a practical reason that could do without teleology.”[16]) than the physicalist shore, or Martin Rhonheimer’s stress of “a material element that enters into our actions and our moral judgments”[17] must be fairly substantial. Jensen’s position remains largely what he called “moderate physicalism” in his earlier taxonomy, but that approach seems to have more in common with contemporary Abelardians than it does with contemporary physicalists.

[1] Steven John Jensen, “A Defense of Physicalism,” The Thomist 61, no. 3 (1997): 377.
[2] Ibid., 402.
[3] Steven J. Jensen, Good & Evil Actions: A Journey Through Saint Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 33.
[4] Ibid., 46–52.
[5] Steven J Jensen, “Thomistic Perspectives?,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (February 10, 2012): 135.
[6] Jensen, Good & Evil Actions, 323.
[7] Ibid., 38n39, 40n42, 41n46, 70, 84n11, 91, 123n90, 125, 126n96, 240–241, 255n24, 265n30.
[8] Ibid., 237–238, 246n20.
[9] Ibid., 184n7, 283n4, 285n6.
[10] Ibid., 88.
[11] Ibid., 80–82.
[12] Ibid., 117–121.
[13] Ibid., 32–33, 46, 48, 49n11, 51, 118n72, 158n32, 265n30, 266–267, 268n36, 272.
[14] Ibid., 56, 58n31, 64n45, 188n18, 218–221.
[15] Ibid., 29, 60n37, 99n41, 102, 152n26, 171n49, 215, 224n76.
[16] Ibid., 4.
[17] Ibid.

Reviewing Jensen's Good and Evil Actions

2015-04-17T11:08:00.002-07:00

The flip side of my engagement with Martin Rhonheimer is engagement with his interlocutor Steven Jensen, who wrote the excellent book Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through St. Thomas Aquinas, that I finally got around to reading. You can read a draft of my review as a pdf or as a four-part series here on the blog:

Conference Audio

2015-04-16T19:12:00.002-07:00

Since it's audio posting day and my academia.edu page makes them hard to find, here are pointers to the lectures for which Lonergan Resource is kindly hosting the audio. Sorry I haven't put the work in to sync the slides with the audio.

1. The Diagram is More Important than is Ordinarily Believed (full paper) given at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for the West Coast Methods Institute 2011.

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2. The Aesthetic Pattern of Experience in Susan Sontag and Bernard Lonergan (full paper) given at Marquette University for Lonergan on the Edge 2011.

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3. From Practical Reason to Natural Law: A Lonergan-Rhonheimer Dialectic (coursepack) given at Marquette University for Lonergan on the Edge 2012.

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What is Non-Dualism: Comparative Theories of Nonduality by Milton Scarborough

2013-03-07T08:04:00.002-08:00

I am a beginner in Eastern philosophy, but I recently purchased Milton Scarborough's Comparative Theories of Nonduality: The Search for a Middle Way and this entry focuses on the question of what nondualism means in Scarborough's first chapter "Western Dualism and Buddhist Nondualism."

The author begins with racism as an example of dualism ("Dualism Observed"), and ends with an account of the Buddha's journey from the lap of luxury through strict asceticism to the Middle Way ("Buddhist Nondualism and the Middle Way"), thereby framing the importance of nondualism in ethical terms. Positions bordering on dualism are dangerous, even if not strictly erroneous:

binary oppositions and even binary distinctions have become the objects of criticism; such binaries are not, it turns out, utterly innocent. For one thing, they are a first step, a necessary one, toward dualism. This fact alone is not sufficient cause to reject them, but perhaps it should send up a red flag of warning. Moreover, despite being essential to reflection, distinctions are dangerous because of the variety of ways in which they can mislead us into distorting our experience of reality.

This is consistent with an ethical focus, whereby activities not wrong in themselves can still be troubling if they make us more likely to commit wrongs. "More important for the purposes of this volume, however, is the notion of a metaphysical middle way, which is expressed in the Buddha’s doctrines of no-self (Anatman), impermanence (anicca), and dependent co-origination (pratityasamutpada)." So while the impact may be ethical, the underlying question of the volume is metaphysical. So what are the possible Western formulations of the insights underlying nondualism?

Is Non-Dualism Non-Sense?
One strong sense of non-dualism would be conceptual non-dualism, the claim that all distinctions are meaningless. Like verificationism, this seems self-refuting, because it presumes a distinction between the meaningful and the meaningless. Scarborough rejects this sense of non-dualism and its consequent problems, however: "It is important to state that mere difference, opposition, polar opposition, or even contradiction, however, still do not in the strictest sense constitute dualism."

Is Non-Dualism (Physicalist) Monism?
Scarborough follows that denial with the affirmation that

For both the West and Asia, dualism consists of a dichotomy in which the paired terms, concepts, or things have a static substance or fixed essence...Substance is an unchanging, underlying, metaphysical reality in which the qualities or attributes of a thing inhere. A fixed essence consists of changeless attributes, qualities, or meanings that are essential to the nature or identity of a concept or thing. Contradictions or dichotomies with substances or fixed essences are dualisms.

This might be interpreted, especially in light of his reference that "Descartes’s metaphysical dualism of mind and body consists of 'thinking substance' and 'extended substance'" to mean mere substance monism, or physicalism. As I've pointed out, however, there are problems with simultaneously holding to physicalism and common-sense distinctions of physical objects. Insofar as these distinctions are physical, this doesn't necessarily reduce non-dualism to non-sense, but it would vitiate Scarborough's claim that "mere distinctions and the binary terms that usually express them are helpful. They demarcate semantic domains, enabling us to be discriminating." Indeed, he even grants the retorsion argument:

Such distinctions make us intelligent and civilized, give us increased clarity and control, defuse arguments, ease our journey in myriad ways, and even delight us. For both philosophy and other modes of thinking, they are the coin of the realm, the air thought breathes, the energy that propels it forward.They are the indispensable tools for acknowledging boundaries and the ticket price for entry into intelligible reflection or discourse. They are not to be abandoned or disparaged. Indeed, they cannot be abandoned because they are unavoidable. If we think about the matter realistically, utter silence is not an option.

Furthermore, while supervenience physicalism is certainly substance monism, the distinction between that which supervenes and that which is supervened upon would itself seem to be the kind of dichotomy essential to identity of things that non-dualists wish to reject.

Is Non-Dualism Idealism?
Of course there's another substance monism available besides physicalism, namely pure idealism. Indeed Westerners often characterize Buddhism in just this way. An idealist reading of nondualism, however, seems incompatible with Scarborough's worry that "despite being essential to reflection,
distinctions are dangerous because of the variety of ways in which they can mislead us into distorting our experience of reality." He gives three reasons why this is so:

One rather common and simple way they can mislead us is by prompting us to draw boundaries too narrowly and precisely...A guidebook depicted Arkansas as a woodland state dotted with lakes; Oklahoma was said to be a plains state. Yet as we drove across the state line from Arkansas into Oklahoma, the woods did not vanish, the land did not flatten out...Only after continuing for 75 miles or so into Oklahoma did the landscape, which had changed imperceptibly slowly, suddenly appear different. “Woodland” and “plains,” to be sure, are not altogether wrong. In a rough-and-ready way they are helpfully descriptive, yet compared to the actual terrain, they are clearly simplifications.

A second way binary distinctions distort is by numerical simplification...Consider sex, for example. It is usually described by a binary opposition that has become a full-blown dualism...we have believed that there are but two sexes, male and female. But why merely two? Is it because there are two kinds of chromosomes (XX and XY) involved in the genetic determination of sex? Yet the dualism of the sexes preceded our knowledge of chromosomes...

There is a third distortion, one that characterizes dualism in particular. To speak of an essence or substance that is fixed, permanent, or eternal is to deny time and change. Perhaps during the era of Parmenides and Heraclitus it was possible to point to the flowing water of a river as an example of change and to a mountain as an example of the unchanging. At least as late as Newton one could still speak of the “fixed stars.” Edmund Halley, a contemporary of Newton, was the first to understand that even the so-called fixed stars move. Until Charles Lyell, geologists did not understand that rocks were still being laid down by water and also that due to ice, wind, sand, and water were being altered by erosion. Until Charles Darwin, biology continued to speak of fixed species. Until the arrival of the Big Bang theory, astronomers and other physicists could speak of fixed physical laws. Nowadays, we talk of “natural history.” We understand all of these former fixities as flowing; stasis is merely what moves relatively more slowly than other things. If there is something absolutely eternal or fixed, it is beyond perception. At best, such concepts survive largely as “limiting concepts.”

How can an idealist worry about simplifications relative to the actual terrain or the potency of nature discovered in perception? These passages sound too realist for even the weak idealism of Rorty's liberal pragmatic irony, let alone the strong idealism of Hegel or Berkeley traditionally associated with Buddhism. As Scarborough says with regard to Hegel, idealism "for all of its genius, does not fit all situations."

Is Non-Dualism Aristotelianism?
You might be tempted to dismiss this as the nuttiest theory you've ever heard, but hear me out. First, while Aristotelianism might speak of multiple substances, underlying metaphysical realities with fixed essences, they aren't opposed realms, or contradictories. The method of division is not a method of opposition, as species are understood together in their shared genus. Change is attended to rather than denied, and distinctions are drawn carefully from perception, avoiding overreach. Aristotle's anthropology seems resilient to

the seemingly endless pendulum swings of Western culture, what I term the “zigzag effect.” Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, for example, established a rationalist epistemology that affirmed the power of unaided reason to arrive at clear and certain knowledge by means of innate ideas, deduction, intellectual intuition, or a priori categories. This was the zig. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume launched a contrary movement that emphasized the role of sense data generated, in most cases, by causal relations with an external, physical world. Here was the zag. Both movements were overstatements, lacking descriptive sensitivity and nuance.

Furthermore, Scarborough links non-dualism with the Buddhist Middle Way: "Food is neither to be rejected nor pursued gluttonously but ingested as medicine. Neither extreme asceticism nor lavish living eliminates ego; both strengthen it." That certainly sounds very similar to Aristotle's golden mean. And in metaphysics, also, both Aristotle and the Buddha would apparently affirm a contingently existing (neither astitta nor nastitta) self (namarupa) made up of proper parts (skandhas), making choices with multiple causes. They might differ over the temporal directedness of causality, but that would seem to pale next to their commonalities.

Is Non-Dualism Phenomenology?
Without discarding the Aristotelian parallels, it's also worth considering whether nondualism might be well understood as a branch of phenomenology (especially as there are Aristotelian branches of phenomenology, like transcendental Thomism). As Scarborough notes:

Such a metaphysical middle way also implies an epistemological middle way. If the self is constituted in and by a web of causal relations, it is not independent of the world. Thus, while there can be a subject-object distinction, there can be no subject-object dualism. The absence of an inner-outer, subject-object gap to be inexplicably crossed means that the necessity of complete skepticism is ruled out.

That certainly sounds an awful lot like, say, the phenomenology of Cassirer or what is sometimes described as Lonergan's non-dualism. It's not clear, however, why Scarborough jumps from the rejection of naive realism to the rejection of certainty:

On the other hand, since knowledge is based on the self’s experience as part of the web of interacting events, absolutely certain knowledge is rejected as well. The self cannot step outside the web in order to view it as an object arrayed with utter clarity before either the eye or the mind’s eye.

There's no real argument there, especially since Scarborough's treatment of Nagarjuna on interdependence sounds suspiciously like Lonergan's account of explanatory knowing (which gives rise to ontological pluralism rather than dualism):

On the other hand, if asked to define “present,” we would almost certainly do one of two things: (1) supply a synonym for “present” or (2) offer a definition that includes a reference, tacit or explicit, to “future” and/or “past.” In the first case, one might say that the present is “now” or “this very moment,” which may not be helpful because those terms themselves may need to be defined. In the more likely second case, one might say, “The present is what comes after the past and before the future.” Nagarjuna’s tactic is to focus on the second case, pointing out that the meaning of any one of the three terms is dependent on the meaning of the other two. Consequently, the terms are interdependent. Viewing the words as interdependent leads to viewing the three concepts of time and then the three realities of time as interdependent,

It's clear why metaphysics must be interdependent in order to make sense of our experience, but it's not clear why this means it must be destabilizing, unless the fixed essences are understood to be those of naive realism. Lonergan's notion of the empirical residue also seems consonant with Nagarjuna's account of emptiness, since while it's not real (it has no immanent intelligibility to be verified) it is nonetheless the ground of the real. It remains unclear to me whether the Two Truths are better understood as an idealism (transcendence of the conventional world) or as critical realism (acceptance of the conventional world as contingently known). Much of Scarborough's account, which is unfortunately too long to quote, makes the latter seem plausible even if it is ambiguous. The difficulty with ascribing non-dualism as critical realism comes in with his account of attachment:

What concerned Nagarjuna is that if people became bound to the doctrine of emptiness, then liberation would elude them. After all, clinging to views is itself a form of clinging (tanha), the principal cause of suffering, according to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths). Clinging to “right view” (Buddhist teaching that leads to awakening) itself binds one to suffering. The ultimate meaning of emptiness, then, is the cessation of clinging to any views at all, even Buddhist ones.

That's presumably the perspective underlying Scarborough's critique of Kant and his medieval forbears:

Kant’s attempt at a synthesis of the two positions, based as it was on the oppositions of a priori vs. a posteriori, phenomenal vs. noumenal, form vs. content, and theoretical reason vs. practical reason was no more satisfactory than the long disintegrated and overly simple “medieval synthesis” of revealed theology with natural theology and faith with reason. There was merely the substitution of one set of oppositions for another, a sleight of thought that brought but a temporary and illusory relief. The real culprit, the intellectual habit of reliance on simple binary oppositions, was left unidentified and, thus, “allowed” to perpetuate its deleterious effects.

But what's the real objection here? Is it just that the claims are too simple, which the critical realist would affirm in the case of Kant and also in the case of predominant naive realist readings of the medieval synthesis? If the claim is stronger than that, why doesn't it destabilize Nagarjuna's language beyond any capacity for meaning? Scarborough critiques Derrida, saying that deconstruction is predicated on opposition, but couldn't Derrida return the favor here? Or is the claim again about contingency, that what privileges Nagarjuna over Kant is the understanding that knowledge comes from emptiness and will itself be transcended? If so, the transcendental Thomists are on the same page, as "All that I [Thomas] have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me" (A Taste of Water : Christianity through Taoist-Buddhist Eyes by Chwen Jiuan Agnes Lee and Thomas G. Hand). “Not being able to do the work of the angels in choir, we can at least write about them,” but we should not become so attached to such writing as to not joyously join the angels in choir. It's difficult to understand what stronger claim for contingency against essences could be made without either reverting to naive realism or giving up on meaning itself.

AT: AT: Natural Theology

2012-10-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not a theologian or even primarily a philosopher of religion, but beyond my confessional and temperamental partisan interests in promoting it, I have relied upon it for a few scholarly projects. So when James K.A. Smith says in Christian Scholars Review and on Twitter that his objection to "natural theology" is strongly based on that of Alvin Plantinga and uses this to object to references to natural law or naturalized methods in the sciences more broadly, it's worth a look at the substance of Plantinga's objections.

First it's relevant to note that Plantinga defines natural theology only as "proof or demonstration" while Smith seems to apply the objection much more broadly to analysis of God without explicit faith commitments. I haven't seen a warrant for that broadening: if one exists I'd appreciate a pointer so I can read and evaluate it. It's also unclear why arguments against the possibility of rational proof for the existence of God would automatically extend to rational proof for ethical norms or scientific methods, though in some cases I'll try to infer the analogy.

Second let's look explicitly at the various arguments Plantinga makes and/or cites.

1. The traditional arguments for the existence of God don't work. That largely depends on how they're construed (at more length, or even more length). When analysis is correctly construed as largely abductive rather than purely deductive, they seem to work pretty well. Also, this argument is by far the hardest to generalize to natural theology broadly, let alone to the possibility of natural law or naturalized scientific method, since it relies on the failure of particular arguments particularly construed.

2. Belief in God is as basic (independent of premises) as belief in the external world, other minds, etc. First, it's again almost impossible to understand how this generalizes--is the whole of ethics and scientific method also known as a first principle? If that seems unlikely, then this argument provides no support for why the principles underlying those disciplines must be based on faith. Second, I think this argument is true but does not go far enough. If you read the link from above you'll see that indeed deductive reasoning is doing little of the work in arguments from God, so in that sense Plantinga is perfectly correct to call such belief basic. However, as I've pointed out before and as is clear from the longer link above, saying that a belief does not rest on other beliefs via deduction does not mean that there's nothing more to be intelligently said about how one comes to such belief. In fact, in Lonergan's account the argument for the existence of God is closely intertwined with the argument for the existence of the "external" world (again, see links above).

3. The Christian's belief in God should not be based on natural theology. Given Plantinga's previous claims (natural theology doesn't work and isn't necessary) this would be trivially true. He also cites various theological reasons for the claim, however. Again, I don't really dispute the claim and this is more or less the position Lonergan came to as well. But of course this is only an argument against natural theology in general (rather than its use for particular purposes, or over-reliance on it) in conjunction with Barth's dilemma about adopting the standpoint of the unbeliever--but of course Plantinga himself successfully argues that this is a false dilemma. So there's no actual argument here about why natural theology (in Plantinga's narrow sense or Smith's broad one) is bad practice, other than that it may not work or isn't necessary (which aren't strong arguments to begin with, and are refuted above in any case).

So maybe the argument against natural theology is more in the vein of tactical advice rather than philosophic proscription. First, Smith admits that advice has limits. Second, I've shown that it's exceedingly difficult to see what that advice entails (how it successfully engages scholarly questions beyond the limits of the merely defensive model). Plantinga is certainly adept at avoiding reductio ad absurdum and retorsion arguments in his responses on the Great Pumpkin and the role of argumentation with respect to faith, but I suggest that his responses more or less amount to lapsing in to the defensive posture Smith wants to avoid. In the quest to make explicit faith commitments into explicit philosophical premises (under what I've suggested is a flawed interpretation of the correct desire that faith in Christ make "all the difference" and/or that Christ is Lord over all things), Plantinga and Smith have not only failed to make much philosophical difference but also given up much of the potential for philosophy to prepare the ground for faith. What Aquinas did for Aristotle, Lonergan does for the Enlightenment: take the philosophers on their own terms to show how their anti-theistic beliefs are self-defeating and their pro-theistic beliefs can be enlarged for consistency. Certainly Plantinga attempts to do that on occasion, but his externalism makes the effort ham-handed. Maybe Plantinga himself isn't obligated to believe in the Great Pumpkin, but he forsakes philosophy as a tool to bring the unbeliever to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob instead. On a stern reading of depravity and a claim of double predestination this might make sense, but absent those philosophically and theologically unmotivated dispositions (yes, I realize that's controversial, but I'm just not seeing it) it's not likely to engender much support.

In short, I suggest that Smith's objections to natural theology (and even Plantinga's) rest more on Kuyper than they do on anybody else before or since. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does suggest that Smith needs to either accept that his views won't be shared by those outside the Dutch neo-Calvinist fold, or needs to argue for Kuyper's position in this regard on the merits. Until he does either, his position on natural theology will likely only be narrowly heeded.

On Christian Philosophy: Philosophy--A Student's Guide by David Naugle

2012-09-30T21:41:00.002-07:00

This post began life as a review of David Naugle's brand new book Philosophy: A Student's Guide but inevitably broadened as I realized that many of my issues with the book went back to Alvin Plantinga and indeed John Calvin himself. A more complete treatment would also involve Roy Clouser and Hermann Dooyeweerd, but I haven't had time to read and re-read those sources just yet (if you're at all moved to do so, I'm sure Hearts and Minds would give you a great deal on all of these books together). I'll begin with what I take to be our major point of agreement, then outline our major difference, show its implications, and try to finish by drawing on shared resources for rapprochement.

Our major point of agreement comes under the heading of what Naugle calls Christian Humanism, and treats explicitly in the second-to-last section of chapter three, though I take it to be a major implicit theme of the book. The most fundamental truth about mankind is that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and that cannot fail to have the most profound consequences for our shared self-understanding. Plantinga brings this home in his Advice to Christian Philosophers with the watchwords of integrality and courage. The Christian philosopher, unlike Christ, does not have two natures, the Christian and the philosopher, and so must give an integral account of faith and reason. Insofar as the culture derides faith as irrational, this will require courage as well as intelligence. When Calvin opens the Institutes by noting that "Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves," it would be a mistake to read these two parts as separate rather than merely distinct, as Charles Partee makes clear in the first chapter of Calvin and Classical Philosophy. In my view Martin Rhonheimer spells this out more fully:

What in principle looks intrinsically reasonable and human, such as the ideal of inseparable fidelity in marriage or the unconditional respect for human life, ends up appearing to unassisted human reason, at least in many cases, as unattainable in practice and therefore unreasonable and even inhuman. So—and this is my main point—Christian morality, to a large extent, throws light on the possibility of living a moral life which fully meets the intrinsic demands of human nature. This means that we can speak of a true specific Christian humanism which differs from the purely secular humanism of the nonbeliever. Thus, what initially appears unreasonable regains reasonableness through faith, hope and charity. That is how faith in fact rescues reason and reason recovers all its power to make faith both human and effective. Rightly understood, reason therefore needs revelation for being capable of effectively working as moral reason and to maintain the “reasonableness of morality.”

And indeed Rhonheimer cites Ratzinger as support for this passage. So here the Reformed and Catholic traditions stand together: to be fully human is to be conformed (cruciformed) to Christ-the-new-Adam, and as our shared father Irenaeus said, "the glory of God is a person fully alive."

But from that shared base, I worry that Naugle (directly) and Plantinga (indirectly) read "Christian" as "Reformed," despite all of their advocacy for putting one's assumptions explicitly on the table (what Naugle calls "prolegomena"). Naugle says:

This guide to philosophy, written to help readers reclaim a Christian intellectual tradition in philosophy, is Augustinian in character. Among many possible things, this means I place faith in the lead position before reason, and I define Christian philosophy as faith seeking understanding. To elaborate on this Augustinian tradition just a bit, I would say two things. The first is that unless you believe, you will not understand. This means that in an Augustinian order of knowing, belief renovates reason, grace restores nature, and and faith renews philosophy. Second, Christian philosophy is essentially Christian faith seeking philosophical understanding.

Let's follow the intellectual history here. Augustine is commenting on John 7:14-18:

5. Therefore, to speak briefly, beloved, it seems to me that the Lord Jesus Christ said, My doctrine is not mine, meaning the same thing as if He said, I am not from myself. For although we say and believe that the Son is equal to the Father, and that there is not any diversity of nature and substance in them, that there has not intervened any interval of time between Him that begets and Him that is begotten, nevertheless we say these things, while keeping and guarding this, that the one is the Father, the other the Son. But Father He is not if He have not a Son, and Son He is not if He have not a Father: but yet the Son is God from the Father; and the Father is God, but not from the Son. The Father of the Son, not God from the Son: but the other is Son of the Father, and God from the Father. For the Lord Christ is called Light from Light. The Light then which is not from Light, and the equal Light which is not from Light, are together one Light not two Lights.

6. If we have understood this, thanks be to God; but if any has not sufficiently understood, man has done as far as he could: as for the rest, let him see whence he may hope to understand. As laborers outside, we can plant and water; but it is of God to give the increase. My doctrine, says He, is not mine, but His that sent me. Let him who says he has not yet understood hear counsel. For since it was a great and profound matter that had been spoken, the Lord Christ Himself did certainly see that all would not understand this so profound a matter, and He gave counsel in the sequel. Do you wish to understand? Believe. For God has said by the prophet: Unless you believe, you shall not understand. [Isaiah 7:7-9-- thus says the Lord God: “It shall not stand nor shall it come to pass. For the head of Aram is Damascus and the head of Damascus is Rezin (now within another 65 years Ephraim will be shattered, so that it is no longer a people),and the head of Ephraim is Samaria and the head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah. If you will not believe, you surely shall not last.”] To the same purpose what the Lord here also added as He went on— If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself. What is the meaning of this, If any man be willing to do His will? But I had said, if any man believe; and I gave this counsel: If you have not understood, said I, believe. For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that you may understand; since, except ye believe, you shall not understand. Therefore when I would counsel the obedience of believing toward the possibility of understanding, and say that our Lord Jesus Christ has added this very thing in the following sentence, we find Him to have said, If any man be willing to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.

So the doctrine of the Trinity requires living faith for understanding, and even then the understanding does not replace the faith but relies on that living faith for its perseverance. It's hard to imagine any Christian denying that. But in the Catholic understanding, this is precisely because God (and hence His trinitarian nature) is disproportionate to our being, even as it was originally created in the Garden of Eden. To say that Grace restores nature is not to say that my knowledge of natural things (proportionate being) is by faith. To say so is not to unify faith and reason from their false separation but to utterly destroy their distinction.

I gather that the reason Reformed thinkers want to problematize the distinction between nature and grace is not only in fear of their separation, but because of the doctrine of total depravity. A Catholic can certainly agree that every aspect and part of nature is touched by sin and requires grace, but if total depravity is distinguished from utter depravity then there's no need to invoke common grace, as Naugle and Al Wolters do, to explain the truths discovered and beauties created by atheists and pagans. Their souls are clearly afflicted, but not to the degree that would uniformly prevent them from attaining such goods by nature. It's not fair to summarize the Catholic perspective as "With the Fall, certain supernatural gifts were lost, but natural reason was substantially unaffected" as Plantinga does. Just read Veritatis Splendor if you have any doubts. Yes, as Calvin emphasizes we all live within the realm of divine providence, but it's important to remember that since God is simple, there is only one act of grace (love by the persons of the Trinity for that which they are not) encompassing creation, sustainment, and salvation. The Catholic distinction between nature and grace is not a distinction of God's acts but a distinction of whether we experience them as proportionate or disproportionate to our being. This is precisely what Calvin seems to misunderstand when he says that "Even the integrity of natural man is not a matter of nature but a special grace of God." Naugle says "grace restores nature" but of course the New Adam goes beyond the Old Adam: the incarnation, resurrection, and post-resurrection appearances show a nature not just restored but lifted up to glory. So there is then common cause between Christians and atheists in knowledge of proportionate being, even if the latter do not understand its first and final cause in disproportionate being, and this grounds the distinction of philosophy and theology. Systematic theology, which attempts to understand the truths of disproportionate being given by the grace of faith, must begin with belief, but the same is not true of philosophy.

Now what I have propounded above might be considered the Gilsonian Thomist view, that (as Plantinga puts it):

Christian philosophy is philosophy that receives a certain help from faith, help of two kinds. First, faith functions as a sort of error detector: the Christian philosopher knows she's gone wrong, in following out a line of thought or argument, if she encounters a proposition that is incompatible with Christian faith. Then she knows she's made a mistake somewhere and must go back and check her work. And second, faith can suggest topics for philosophical work to the philosopher: perhaps among the things that she believes by faith, there are some that she can prove by reason; the result of such effort would be a Christian philosophy.

Plantinga goes on to deride the latter as placing a higher priority on reason than faith, but the desire to understand is legitimate in its own right to the extent that it is possible, and does not in any way undermine faith. In response to the overall Thomistic vision of theology and philosophy, Plantinga suggests "an irenic compromise": merely working out the consequences of Christian faith conditionally (if it were true) would still count as philosophy, since it doesn't explicitly assume any truths of faith. If Catholics were just clinging to some merely verbal distinction, that would probably serve well, but there are at least two reasons for Catholics to insist on a substantial distinction here.

The first is that systematic theology is very hard, and when we philosophers indulge in it, we tend to get things wrong: the truths of Christian faith are not obvious or uncontroverted. Not only do Naugle and Plantinga miss the fact or import of the simplicity of God and the finer points of grace and faith, they also make more obvious mistakes like repeatedly referring to God as a person (God is the shared nature of three persons). This is no mere offhand remark: Plantinga says that "God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood." If we think that Christian Humanism is important because Christian faith delivers important truths about what it is to be human (precisely where Plantinga is going with this remark) we had better get those truths correct. Naugle says:

First, knowledge is personal. Truth is a person (God), and knowledge of the truth is knowledge of a person and, thus, personal. The implication is that we should know God and people, as well as places and things, in personal ways.

I'm not entirely sure what this means or what significance Naugle takes it to have, but insofar as God is the shared nature of three persons, if in Augustinian fashion it is God we are seeking, we must be seeking knowledge of substantial forms. Far from reinforcing the strong Kierkegaardian point that Christian and pagan knowing are separate worldviews with little to say to one another, this seems to provide dialectical resources to undermine the distinction in modes of knowing. So treating systematic theology and philosophy as distinct disciplines with much to learn from one another can keep philosophy honest and keep theologians from saying silly things like the line Plantinga records from David Tracy.

The second reason for insisting on the distinction between philosophy and theology is that it provides common cause with non-Christian philosophers and a reason to engage them charitably. Naugle and Plantinga are surely kind-hearted, so they mean to be charitable, but they have trouble doing so consistently. Naugle, for instance, calls out Hellenism in Christian philosophy while calling himself an Augustinian, worrying about the contaminating biased assurances and convictions of unbiblical philosophy. There is sense in this view to be sure: Plantinga gives plenty of examples of philosophical positions biased against Christian views. But Naugle gives no account of how Augustine was able to critically appropriate Hellenism, which he admits had insights worth borrowing, and thus no account of how to know when Christians he disagrees with (Thomas Aquinas?) go awry. He suggests that the answer is to be found by looking first to Biblical principles, but the arguments above should give ample evidence that such principles are themselves controverted among honest folk. Surely faith checks false philosophy, as Gilson notes, but a proper philosophical hermeneutic checks false readings of the Bible. And as Naugle notes freely with regard to others, our prolegomena are not easy to disentangle: we all have such a hermeneutic. Only with the aid of philosophy will we ensure that it's a good one. So one of the premier tasks of Christian philosophy (as Plantinga and Gilson both suggest, philosophy responsive to the needs of the Christian community) should be to give an account of the self-correcting process of knowing sufficient to undergird a biblical hermeneutics.

When Naugle insists that "sin is a moral matter, not a metaphysical one" or that "of course, we are not talking about whether we can understand the little 'easy to know' things in life (such as the content of the label on a soup can)" he indulges in an unfortunate Calvinist anti-intellectualism. The question of human freedom is not just "Satan's logic" (which is not to say that Satan can't make use of it) and the question of how we know the content of a soup can label can tell us a lot about how we know the truths of science or those of faith. Plantinga echoes this when we recoils from the notion that there could be anything of intellectual interest underlying "basic belief." Just because a belief is not justified by another belief does not mean that there is no understandable and epistemically important (because liable to error) cognitional process underlying it. If the model for the human is, as Naugle says, a microcosm of the macrocosm (where God inscrutably does good and Satan inscrutably does evil) then perhaps there is nothing further to be said--but "image and likeness" is not obviously interchangeable for "microcosm" and may give clues to a far richer anthropology with rather different epistemic import. I call this anti-intellectualism because it leads to claims like Naugle's that:

If God did use the medium of his deeds and words in history to make himself known, then to reason abstractly about him could rightly be called "faithless rebellion."

Wouldn't this rely on some argument that abstract reasoning diminishes rather than enhances our attention to deeds and words in history? And if so then why does Naugle constantly speak of "canonical trinitarian theism"?! I call this anti-intellectualism Calvinist to the extent that Calvin sees speculative philosophy and theology as themselves damaging rather than merely as occasionally symptomatic of Satan's desire to guide believers astray (Partee does an excellent job of problematizing this question). The important point is that it won't do to dismiss the "independent, fundamental" set as insufficiently intellectual and the Catholic scholastic as overly intellectualist without some principle by which the golden mean may be found. Without such a principle such dismissals seem partisan and capricious.

Engaging non-Christian or non-Calvinist philosophers requires not only charity (if Christianity makes such a difference, we should not be so pained when the unbeliever sees it as nonsense) and evenhandedness but some measure of common cause. While I've indicated my agreement with Plantinga that this is not always to be found, I think he underestimates the extent to which it is available. Not only is his new book positively reviewed by an atheist, his case studies from Advice to Christian Philosophers have largely evaporated: logical positivism has imploded and agent causation is now arguably the leading theory. Naugle's suggestion that many secular philosophers regard knowledge purely as "scientifically derived data, facts, and information" is today a straw man. Surely there are new examples to be found and we are not off the hook with regard to critically appropriating what we read, but is analytic philosophy really so dry and fruitless as Naugle suggests? Reductionism and naturalism sure look more like open questions than given assumptions in my glance at the literature. And for those who are committed to reductionism, Plantinga's arguments aren't convincing precisely because they don't give an account of why we're wrong sometimes and not others: they don't engage. Naugle's book is ostensibly directed at helping undergraduate Christian philosophy students engage their subjects with integrality and courage, yet goes beyond Plantinga's pure defense to an almost complete lack of engagement:

How does "Christian metaphysics" relate to the main achievements of the philosophical field? Grace is certainly worthy of metaphysical treatment (I would suggest in systematic theology) but what problems of philosophical metaphysics does it solve?
It's fine to suggest that we should look to "Trinitarian remnants" as hints of connection and direction but these obviously don't provide any kind of predictive power. What on earth does it mean that physics should look to "Trinitarian metaphysics" in its search for a grand unified theory? Not that theology and physics don't have metaphysical connections, but they're a bit more mediated than that.
Yes, Jesus was evidently an epistemically integrated person--but how does that fact help to solve any of the epistemic problems philosophers struggle with? If it just means that Christians can't be nihilists, well, few people doubted that, few philosophers are nihilists, and the few "Christian nihilists" wouldn't grant any meaning to a sentence about the epistemic integration of Christ.

And even the attempts at direct engagement fail: the question of whether human sexuality is social or biological in origin is neither philosophical nor resolved by appeal to the creation of mankind in the image and likeness of God.

So fundamentally, I applaud Reformed thinkers like Naugle and Plantinga when they urge an integral and courageous Christian philosophy as an important element of Christian humanism. I find their conflation of philosophy and theology antagonistic to this goal, however, insofar as it loses common cause not only with non-Christians but also with non-Calvinist Christians who both see all of the arguments as basically circular ("given that you accept my interpretation of the Bible and its claim to authority..."). Perhaps this approach is of some value in showing Reformed students the implications of their faith, but marketing it as "Christian philosophy" is much too broad for its actual prolegomena. So where shall we go if we want a Christian philosophy in the Gilsonian mold that makes common cause among Protestants and Catholics while allowing productive engagement with non-Christians? My general answer is that Lonergan can rescue the Augustinian synthesis of faith and reason from Kierkegaard's dichotomies. My unhelpful answer is that it's a complex topic which requires serious analysis of Dooyeweerd's claimed dualisms and a holistic theory of conversion, neither of which I've yet done and which would probably require a book to elaborate. I will try, however, to give an answer more specific than "read Lonergan" and more immediate than "wait for a book I haven't started writing yet." I think the generality of Plantinga's approach and the breadth of Naugle's reading and citation provide resources for rapprochement and the foundations of true Christian humanism.

I suggest that an examination of those resources should begin with a reappraisal of the Thomist tradition (I know, you're shocked that I would say such a thing, shocked). Naugle states that Thomism "pretends" to an autonomy of human thought from God, but doesn't elaborate on what he takes that autonomy claim to be or why it's only a pretension. I would suggest that a more careful reading of Augustine, Thomas, and even Calvin fails to bear out that claim. Naugle cites Alasdair MacIntyre, but still seems to fall into the trap of making genealogical arguments against the encyclopedists and encyclopedic arguments against the genealogists without really coming into the hermeneutic of tradition. Protestants are, admittedly, a bit stuck on this front: they can't become genealogists without giving up the idea that Christianity is true in some way that other claims aren't, they can't become encyclopedists (enlightenment thinkers) without diminishing to deism, they can't quite admit to a hermeneutic of tradition without going to Rome (this obviously warrants its own post), and there doesn't seem to be another mode of philosophical reasoning on offer, so the temptation to merge theology and philosophy is strong. But Naugle does provide strong resources for moving into the hermeneutic of tradition, even if he's not quite willing to do so himself: he grants the dialectic between theory and practice, and he recognizes that knowledge is covenantal, always pulling us to greater consistency of life. He even grants a certain natural piety with which to push.

Naugle may worry that this move would undermine his conviction that "Christ changes everything" or "Christ is Lord over all." That's a worry I take seriously. But how does Christ change everything? One answer is in the paper on Kierkegaard I linked above. Another is in Naugle's own quotation of Bernard Lonergan:

Redemption dismantles and abolishes the horizon in which our knowing and choosing went on and it sets up a new horizon in which the love of God will transvaluate our values and the eyes of that love will transform our knowing.

That obviously requires a little unpacking. Lonergan understands knowing as a process of verifying insights by asking and answering further pertinent questions (and eventually having the insight that there are no further pertinent questions). Insight, in turn, is the understanding resultant from inquiry, the process of attending to the phantasm with regard to a particular question and in light of prior understanding. Values are the knowledge of the good, choosing responds to values, and horizon is the arc of our questioning, what Donald Rumsfeld would call the "known unknown." It's all very Thomist (and very Augustinian, and indeed supremely Trinitarian). So what Lonergan is saying is that the impact of conversion is explosive: instead of asking "what's in it for me" we take up the cross. We understand human fulfillment in light of that cross, not in light of pagan pleasures. This Lonergan calls "the way downward:"

If indeed, as Lonergan claimed, every human being is gifted with God's love in the intimacy of her or his consciousness, this loving is still unconditional, unrestricted, and therefore ineffable. Each person is left with the immense, almost impossible task of trying to give finite expression to that ineffable gift in deeds and in words.

Still, Lonergan argued, the effects of the gift of love show up as a shift in people's values, people's experiences, and people's insights and judgments. When we fall in love with another human being, our experiences of the world dazzle and sparkle. This is even more true when we fall in love in an unconditional way. The natural world, other human beings, one's own life, pleasure, money, status, sex, poverty, power--they all take on dramatically new meanings when one is in love.

Likewise, the corrosive effects of bias, bitterness, hatred, despair, and sin begin to melt slowly when love begins to grow in a person's heart. When the love that one falls into is a participation in God's love of everything about everything, all of being becomes precious in a dramatically new way. This shift in a person's values is what Lonergan called conversion, and it begins to change what a person is willing to accept as real and true. It affects people's judgments about reality, and they seek to better understand the new realities revealed by the new eyes of love. It brings about keener attention to experiences previously ignored. This is what Lonergan meant by "the way from above downward" that flows from being in love unconditionally.

Is that not a true Christian humanism in which Christ changes everything? Yet far from taking the transformation of nature by grace, the sheer disproportion of God's love for us, to be a dimunition of nature, Byrne elaborates on the prior page what Lonergan calls "the way upward":

In theological method, the reflective self-awareness of metaphysics becomes reflexive self-appropriation of what Lonergan eventually called "development from below upward." In the context of his book Insight, this meant engaging in the work of intelligent discovery and critical judgment with regard to some realm of being, while at the same time being reflectively self-aware and taking responsibility for that work. "Below upward" refers to the movement from experience through inquiry to insight and further inquiry to judgment and beyond. In the context of theology, it comes to mean self-reflective responsibility directed toward understanding and judging the sources of the Christian religious traditions--especially Scripture and the historical records of Christian practices and teachings.

Now perhaps Calvinists will take this to be arrogance: who are we to judge Scripture? But does the Reformed tradition accept the canonicity of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife? No? Then apparently Scripture is being judged. And do Reformed scholars debate the meaning of Scripture rather than merely taking the conviction of each believer as unassailably beyond reason? Then again Scripture is being judged.

A more philosophical (Kierkegaardian?) objection is that the way upwards and the way downwards are incompatible. Just becomes Lonergan claims that "in theology the reflective self-awareness of development from below upward is complemented by reflective self-awareness of development from above downward" doesn't make it so. Byrne naturally gives a taste of Lonergan's response to this concern:

According to Lonergan, we all have two First Philosophies--one that resides in our unrestricted, inquiring desire to know being, and the other that comes from some paradigm of reality. Initially our two First Philosophies are in conflict with and contradict one another. But when the divine self-gift of unconditional love becomes paramount in a person's life, it displaces the self-limiting paradigm of reality that is the other First Philosophy. Then, the sense of being that is the unrestricted objective of the inquiring spirit, and the sense of being that is the unconditionally loved come into harmony.

The knowing upward from general revelation, which must critically appropriate what Naugle calls "modernist knowledge structures" since we live, after all, in the modern and postmodern era, finds perfect fulfillment in the knowing downward from special revelation.

So what does this mean for metaphysics and epistemology? First, it means that Naugle is absolutely right to reject naive realism and idealism, but wrong to see "common sense realism" as the live alternative. Common sense realism is anti-intellectual, both in its inability to explain the successes of the intellect (you won't appeal much to modern scientists if you can't appreciate what is distinctive about their practice) and its inability to explain the failures of the intellect (Why do some intelligent, honest atheists miss God? Why do some intelligent, honest Christians miss important scientific insights?). The alternative is phenomenology, or critical realism, a term Naugle uses but does not expound upon. I've gone into detail on what that means elsewhere (or read any major work of Lonergan's, or any introduction to his thought, or anything by Cassirer) so I will just gesture rather than belaboring the point here. This doesn't contradict the story Plantinga tells about the externalist warrants of our basic beliefs, but it does suggest that there's a richer internal account that he's missing, and that comes prior to the external account. So our Christian commitments can and should be "control beliefs" as Naugle puts it in conformity with the Gilsonian picture, but the content of those commitments can and must be clarified by the upward and downward dynamic cognitional operations, lest we fall into not just a dogmatism but a subjectivism which resists the formation of conscience.

And what about ethics (which is, after all where we began with Martin Rhonheimer's comments about hope)? Here again, I think Naugle needs a richer Christian humanism if he is to have one at all. He suggests that natural law is an "inborn sense" but of course this gives no account of how our ethical sensibilities develop as individuals or as cultures. And tying natural law, synderesis of ethical precepts, virtue, and casuistry into a single account, as Naugle wants to do, requires a cognitional theory. In fact, that's exactly the project I've recently been working on. Martin Rhonheimer comes close, but doesn't have quite enough cognitional theory to answer the objections. I think this approach also yields a deeper resolution of the tension between voluntarism and essentialism than to say that some of God's properties are voluntary and some are essential, as Naugle does--after all, how does that square with the simplicity of God? The question of human nature runs very deep indeed.

Despite our deep differences on what it means to be a Christian philosopher, I think David Naugle and I more or less begin and end at the same place. Whether Lonergan or Dooyeweerd is right about how to read the Western philosophical tradition against Christianity, we must begin in Augustine with faith, hope, and love and we must end with a commitment to serious philosophical vocation. I've been working for some time on an as-yet unfinished post on what it means to be intellectually serious (in short, it means to be vulnerable, and writing about vulnerability means being vulnerable, which is hard), but in short we must be, as Plantinga reminds us, integral and courageous, and when that seems unattainable in practice, unreasonable, and inhuman, we must go back to where we started, in faith, hope, and love.

Philosophy Changes Lives (or at least mine)

2012-09-07T19:17:00.002-07:00

Since you know me as a person with numerous philosophical research interests who insists that studying hermeneutics is a major source of educational value, you probably weren't surprised when I put a bunch of philosophical works on the list of books that changed my life. As with theological conversions, though, philosophical conversions take a long time. If you're curious about how my views on modern philosophy or Lonergan evolved over multiple readings and widening contexts during my time at Boston College, well, those essays are now posted. I know I'm at least a bit idiosyncratic, but I hope they give a glimpse of the way views can mature over time. It would be interesting to give them another pass now, given how much more I've read and written since then, but I think that will have to wait.

Multiple Realizability for Political Theory

2012-08-04T11:20:00.002-07:00

We usually think of multiple realizability as a tool of the metaphysical reduction debates around philosophy of mind, but remember that one of Jerry Fodor's original examples was in economics. A visit to the Imperial War Museum yesterday reminded me of this--the museum contains an exhibit questioning the need for secretive foreign intelligence, and another on the horror of Abu Ghraib. Neither of these is imaginable in a Federally-funded museum in the United States. And of course while the U.S. relies on enumerated powers, separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights to secure freedoms, the U.K. places its hopes in a democratically accountable House of Commons. In terms of political institutions or political culture, these nations seem as far apart as any in the developed world.

And yet, these two nation-states have managed to work in lock-step on the invasions of Iraq (including the bungled WMD intelligence) and Afghanistan, suppression of domestic civil liberties for dissent, extraordinary renditions, and the response to WikiLeaks. We know that emergent behavior doesn't preclude explanation, but rather implies shared constraints. So what are those constraints? Norway and Canada are presumably part of the same economic and cultural milieu, yet have reacted very differently. Great man theories and intellectual histories are hard to slip by the journal reviewers. And these paired reactions have even crossed multiple electoral reversals on both sides. So what is the common element? I don't profess to know, but merely to point out that the predominant political discourse in both nations seems to revolve around law, economics, and party--yet none of these factors seem to evidently make much difference on major issues of foreign policy. So what is going on? What should we be talking about if we want to see change, or even analyze the prospects for it?

UPDATE: while about domestic rather than foreign policy, there's a new study that strongly suggests informal "institutions" are much more important than formal institutions in checking government predation (i.e. rent seeking of the political class).

Across the Divide (Worldviews)

2012-07-30T15:20:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to bear in mind Arnold Kling's suggestion to open minds more than close them, both by embodying it (or trying to) and discussing how to embody it. Let's start by talking about how arguments work: valid inferences from already accepted premises are convincing conclusions. So if the people who disagree with you wouldn't accept the premises of your argument, you're really just arguing to close the minds of those who agree with you. That's not immoral or dishonest, but I think it's worth reflecting on whether that's really what we want to be doing, and most importantly being honest about our intended audience if that's the case. In full disclosure, let me begin with a motto:

The world is hard to understand.

What does that mean? First, it means that it is possible to understand the world. Really, objectivity is possible. If you don't believe that, please read the 700 page book I linked. Yes, it will take a long time, but it will be completely worth it, because you will begin to understand the world. If that's not worth a couple of months of work, what is? Since objectivity is possible, argument is possible. Second, however, it means that understanding doesn't come cheaply. There are no shortcuts in science or argument: if there were, I wouldn't tell you to read a 700 page book just to find out that science and argument are possible. Yes, it's true that in any given passionate political argument (and I mean the long-term ones over abortion, contraception, the scope of government, the meaning of the bill of rights--not the Fox News teapot tempest of the day) the particular arguers may not be that clear, coherent, and self-aware. But the reason these arguments have gone on for so long is precisely because there are good and intelligent people on both sides, which in turn is because the answers don't yield easily.

This is why I'm very hostile to cheap deployment of the notion of worldview (though I'll save my technical dive into Calvin, Dooyeweerd, and Kierkegaard for another post, or book). To say that an argument is between opposing worldviews is to say that the arguers don't actually share any premises in common, and so the only possibilities are purely defensive argument (demonstration of internal coherence) and extra-rational conversion. If it were true, that would be a mighty thin public square.

I'm also hostile, however, to the idea that people on either side of these deep debates are "just missing something obvious." The vast majority of argument on these subjects ends up (often unwittingly) in the "mind closing" camp because it doesn't even recognize, let alone address, the deeper issues in play. Take this Mother Jones article on the horrors of pre-Roe back-alley abortions. When pro-choice folks read it, they probably get infuriated that anyone could try to restrict abortion rights, pushing more women back into dodgy choices in the criminal underworld with frequently deadly consequences. When I (pro-life) read it, I first note that people often face difficulties, that some of them think up criminal solutions, and that attempting to carry those criminal solutions to fruition involves no end of shady characters and dangerous situations. Then I weep for the murdered unborn children.

[UPDATE: The same is true in the other direction--while the Kermit Gosnell trial reminds the pro-life that abortion is part of a larger culture of death, it suggests to the pro-choice that if abortion were federally funded, more reputable clinics would open.]

So in the end, the intuitions the articles generate, while strong, are completely dependent on the antecedent view of whether fetuses are persons and/or whether abortion should be legal. That turns on all sorts of questions about epistemology and metaphysics. Similarly, whether advocating against state marriages for homosexual unions harms people or violates their rights depends on quite a long discussion about the nature of rights and harms. The definitive work explaining just how deep our contemporary disagreements go is Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. As I've said before, if you've ever been party to a political disagreement this book is worth reading--while serious academic philosophy, it's also a lecture transcript so the writing isn't too heavy.

The other error to avoid is lack of seriousness, and I definitely don't mean laughing too much. Lack of seriousness comes in two flavors: outright not taking your opponents seriously and abusing the principle of charity. To the former I know of no solution but exhortation; for Christians I can recommend An Offering of Uncles and Doing the Truth in Love as exemplars of such exhortation. They both do a superb job of showing that seriousness and care are the way to joy and laughter, rather than antithetical to them. I'm sure there are similar books for other traditions (maybe Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?) but I'm obviously less equipped to suggest them.

As regards the latter, you might think charity difficult to abuse (unless you're an objectivist, if so go back and read paragraph four) but I assure you that it's not. The trick is that "assuming your interlocutor is speaking the truth" can't mean "assuming your interlocutor doesn't know anything you don't." Too often, when we attempt to translate our opponents' views into our own language for understanding and rebuttal, they sound foolish, so we attempt to improve them (but then of course they still turn out to be foolish in the end). That's a sign that we aren't sufficiently immersed in our opponents' traditions to understand what they're up to--what their words mean and why. Maybe it is the case that your opponent is unintentionally offering a weaker argument than she could be--but at least as likely is that you don't really understand the basis of the argument well enough to make the distinction.

Political arguments are often subject to a further extension of charitable interpretation abuse when they assume universal fiat--that the winner of the argument is the one whose proposed world would be more hospitable if everyone else agreed. In other words, you don't have infinite moral credibility, so you're responsible for the public choice consequences of your advocacy. You don't get to hold your opponent hostage to your assumptions, and you also don't get to hold your opponent hostage to the assumption that the whole rest of the world agrees with you, either.

Against this theoretical background, let me try to engage an overly charitable interpretation of the Christian tradition. You might think it fairer to pick on my own team, and you'd probably be right, but naturally I'm much less equipped to do so since I don't know my Marx or Derrida or Nozick nearly as well as I know Catholicism. Naturally, I'll start with The Oatmeal's How to Suck at Your Religion.

Does your religion make you judge people?

Nope, Jesus was pretty clear on that. But we are to use our given intelligence to judge beliefs and actions, which is not the same as judging people.

Does your religion hinder the advancement of science, technology, or medicine?

I'm gonna go with no. We do hinder butchery, which can be distinguished from medicine by the application of the Do No Harm principle.

Did you choose your religion, or did someone else choose it for you?

I'm a convert. But I don't know any serious adult Catholics who haven't done plenty of choosing for themselves. It's not exactly a default choice these days (more below).

Does your religion give you weird anxieties about your sexuality?

Nope. It does considerably reduce the drama though.

Do you validate your beliefs by constantly trying to convince others to believe the same thing?

Wait, I thought we were advocating for the scientific method, here. And if you discovered some really life changing truth, of any kind, wouldn't you try to share it?

Do you mock other religions for believing crazy things meanwhile believing some crazy shit of your own?

I don't spend much time mocking other religions, no. But "crazy" is not a synonym for unintuitive. Christians have given quite a bit of thought to what miracles are and why they believe in them. The same cannot be said of everyone who claims to have a religious belief.

Do you vote based solely on your religious beliefs?

I'd submit that it isn't possible to work out a political theory based purely on Christian tradition--a whole lot of empirical data is necessary. But how could a life-changing belief not have import in who you vote for? Would it make more sense to vote your narrow financial interest?

Would you die for your religion?

I hope so. Traditionally it's been considered worthy of respect to die for your deepest beliefs.

Would you kill for your religion?

I'm not quite sure what this means. Insofar as I answered "no" to "judging people" killing someone would never be "for my religion" in the narrow sense. But if my political theory is substantially formed by my religion, and I'm not a pacifist, then my decisions to kill won't be absent religious content, either.

Would you hurt, hinder, or condemn in the name of your god?

No. But my God is pretty opinionated about what counts as hurt, hindrance, and condemnation, and it's circular to apply your definitions.

Does your religion inspire you to help people?

Yes. This is an important test--faith must bear fruit to be alive.

Does it make you happier?

Yes, but my religion is also pretty clear that happiness doesn't mean pleasure.

Does it help you cope with the fact that you are a bag of meat sitting on a rock in outer space and that someday you will die and you are completely powerless, helpless, and insignificant in the wake of this beautiful cosmic shitstorm we call existence?

No, because it's false that I'm a bag of meat. But it is true that Christ died for us leaving death without sting.

So what is (admittedly, in comic hyperbole) intended as a friendly critique (religion isn't bad, just don't suck at yours) ends up not coming to grips with the fundament of what religion, especially Christian religion, is and does in its adherents. I think part of why people think it's fair to criticize without understanding (beyond turnabout is fair play, which if true is certainly unproductive), is that they see Christianity as a default religion and a religion of privilege. Some Christians even see it that way. So I'd like to go through that list as I did with the Oatmeal, and see what does and doesn't stick (which is not the same as denying being privileged in a whole host of obvious ways as an upper middle class white American man).

1. It is likely that state and federal holidays coincide with my religious practices, thereby having little to no impact on my job and/or education.

Yes, definitely a point of privilege, and one many of us overlook.

2. I can talk openly about my religious practices without concern for how it will be received by others.

No, absolutely not. I've been called both bigoted and crazy for my beliefs.

3. I can be sure to hear music on the radio and watch specials on television that celebrate the holidays of my religion.

True, but this is probably more hindrance than privilege, given how watered down they are.

4. When told about the history of civilization, I can be sure that I am shown people of my religion.

True. I should hope this would be true for basically all world religions, but I suppose poor history curricula know no bounds.

5. I can worry about religious privilege without being perceived as “self-interested” or “self-seeking.”

Nope. Have a look at the HHS contraception debate, will you?

6. I can have a “Jesus is Lord” bumper sticker or Ictus (Christian Fish) on my car and not worry about someone vandalizing my car because of it.

Probably, never tried it. That's really scary that stars of David or crescents or whatever might lead to vandalized vehicles.

7. I can share my holiday greetings without being fully conscious of how it may impact those who do not celebrate the same holidays. Also, I can be sure that people are knowledgeable about the holidays of my religion and will greet me with the appropriate holiday greeting (e.g., Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, etc.).

No longer true in the Northeast.

8. I can probably assume that there is a universality of religious experience.

As in everyone has it or everyone has it in the same way, or what? I'm just not clear on why this is any more true for any particular religion.

9. I can deny Christian Privilege by asserting that all religions are essentially the same.

Wha? That would make me a pretty bad Christian.

10. I probably do not need to learn the religious or spiritual customs of others, and I am likely not penalized for not knowing them.

True, though a dubious privilege.

11. I am probably unencumbered by having to explain why I am or am not doing things related to my religious norms on a daily basis.

True only with strong emphasis on the word "daily"--and that's probably true of anyone who doesn't wear distinctive religious clothing. Otherwise totally false.

12. I am likely not judged by the improper actions of others in my religious group.

Are you kidding?

13. If I wish, I can usually or exclusively be among those from my religious group most of the time (in work, school, or at home).

Absolutely false.

14. I can assume that my safety, or the safety of my family, will not be put in jeopardy by disclosing my religion to others at work or at school.

True, and deeply disheartening that it's false for some.

15. It is likely that mass media represents my religion widely AND positively.

Again, are you kidding?

16. It is likely that I can find items to buy that represent my religious norms and holidays with relative ease (e.g., food, decorations, greeting cards, etc.).

True, and definitely a privilege that I take for granted.

17. I can speak or write about my religion, and even critique other religions, and have these perspectives listened to and published with relative ease and without much fear of reprisal.

True, but I think basically true for everyone in the United States.

18. I could write an article on Christian Privilege without putting my own religion on trial.

I'm not sure what this means.

19. I can travel without others assuming that I put them at risk because of my religion; nor will my religion put me at risk from others when I travel.

Mostly true, though I've been asked not to make the sign of the cross over dinner in the Balkans.

20. I can be financially successful without the assumption from others that this success is connected to my religion.

True.

21. I can protect myself (and my children) from people who may not like me (or them) based on my religion.

True, I guess. I'd be more likely to lump this with the above privileges of not needing protection.

22. Law enforcement officials will likely assume I am a non-threatening person if my religion is disclosed to them. In fact, disclosure may actually help law enforcement officials perceive me as being “in the right” or “unbiased.”

I don't think cops in the Northeast would care, except for the incredibly unfortunate general perception of Muslims, against which I have railed extensively.

23. I can safely assume that any authority figure will generally be someone of my religion.

Mostly true, and another thing I've definitely taken for granted.

24. I can talk about my religion, even proselytize, and be characterized as “sharing the word,” instead of imposing my ideas on others.

Nope, see above!

25. I can be gentle and affirming to people without being characterized as an exception to my religion.

I probably wouldn't be the person to answer this one, but I bet Sarah Vanacore would get called out as an unusual Catholic for this.

26. I am never asked to speak on behalf of all Christians.

False.

27. My citizenship and immigration status will likely not be questioned, and my background will likely not be investigated, because of my religion.

True. This also pains me to no end.

28. My place of worship is probably not targeted for violence because of sentiment against my religion.

True, and an incredible privilege. Though I have been to Mass at Catholic churches in parts of the world where this was not true (Serbia).

29. I can be sure that my religion will not work against me when seeking medical or legal help.

False. Catholics get considerable pushback from doctors around fetal and end of life issues.

30. My religion will not cause teachers to pigeonhole me into certain professions based of the assumed “prowess” of my religious group.

True enough.

31. I will not have my children taken from me from governmental authorities who are aware of my religious affiliation.

True, though that would seem hard to get away with in the United States.

32. Disclosure of my religion to an adoption agency will likely not prevent me from being able to adopt children.

True, but it might make the government stop funding my adoption agency.

33. If I wish to give my children a parochial religious education, I probably have a variety of options nearby.

True, and a definite privilege.

34. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence and importance of my religion.

Not obvious.

35. I can be sure that when someone in the media is referring to God, they are referring to my (Christian) God.

No idea what this means. Differentiating from wiccans?

36. I can easily find academic courses and institutions that give attention only to people of my religion.

True, and a privilege.

37. My religious holidays are so completely “normal” that, in many ways, they may appear to no longer have any religious significance at all.

True, but not a privilege.

38. The elected and unelected officials of my government probably are members of my religious group.

True, but basically a repeat.

39. When swearing an oath, I am probably making this oath by placing my hand on the scripture of my religion.

True, and an enormous privilege. How does this survive constitutional muster?

40. I can openly display my religious symbol(s) on my person or property without fear of disapproval, violence, and/or vandalism.

True, but a repeat.

So there are at least a dozen serious privileges on there that can be added to my invisible knapsack along with those of race, class, nationality, and citizenship. The rest, though, betray a real confusion about what Christianity is and how it works that would make dialog difficult. So this is not an apologetic, just a plea for deeper understanding (by which I genuinely mean understanding, not empathy). Without it, argument hasn't got a chance.

Lonergan on Levels

2012-07-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

This is probably more for my benefit than anyone else's, but insofar as I'm trying to craft a Lonerganian philosophy of chemistry, I figured I should collect Lonergan's initial work on the subject and indicate its relation to my own. Basically, I'm up to three things (for now):

1. Bring Lonergan's insights into dialogue with the current state of chemistry and the philosophy thereof.

2. Respond to Lonergan's implied call:

To conclude, let us remark that we have been concerned merely to reveal the possibility of genera of things and their compatibility with the sciences as they exist. A much longer investigation would be needed to prove that in fact there are such genera. We are convinced that the longer inquiry can be omitted safely enough, for the contention that things are all of one kind has rested, not on concrete evidence, but on mechanist assumption. (Insight 283)

I can demonstrate, following Eric Scerri on the mathematics of quantum theory, that chemistry treats objects of different genera than physics does.

3. To heed Lonergan's manifesto and follow up on his apprehension:

In the past the philosophic appetite of scientists was satisfied commonly enoughq with a scientific monism. The philosophies were regarded as misguided efforts to attain the knowledge that science alone can bestow. Common sense was considered as mere ignorance that the advance of science and the legal enforcement of universal education soon would eliminate. In this fashion the integration of human knowledge was identified with the unification of the sciences, and that unification was obtained by the simple device of proclaiming that objectivity was extroversion, knowing was taking a look, and the real was a subdivision of the 'already out there now.' It followed that the universe consisted of imaginable elements linked together in space and time by natural laws; because the elements were imaginable, the universe was mechanist; because the laws were necessary, the mechanism was determinist. Mechanics, then, was the one science, and thermodynamics, electromagnetism, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, politics, and history were just so many provisional macroscopic views of a microscopic reality. Finally, to add a note on method, it was unsuspected that there was involved an extrascientific supposition in the pronouncement on the meaning of objectivity, knowledge, and reality. That was far too obvious to be questioned. It followed that to doubt mechanist determinism was to doubt the validity of the sciences, and so doubters were summoned to explain which of the methods or conclusions of the sciences they thought to be mistaken. (Insight 450)

From the incubus of this fallacy, the more recent development of the sciences has been effecting a salutary liberation. Darwin introduced a type of explanation that had its basis not in necessary laws but in probabilities. Freud, despite his involvement in mechanist determinism, established the concept of psychogenic disease. Einstein removed the space and time in which the imaginable elements were imagined to reside. Quantum mechanics removed from science the relevance of any image of particles, or waves, or continuous process. No less than his predecessors, the contemporary scientist can observe and experiment, inquire and understand, form hypotheses and verify them. But unlike his predecessors, he has to think of knowledge, not as taking a look, but as experiencing, understanding, and judging; he has to think of objectivity, not as mere extroversion, but as experiential, normative, and tending towards an absolute; he has to think of the real, not as a part of the 'already out there now,' but as the verifiable. Clearly, the imagined as imagined can be verified only by actual seeing, and so there is no verifiable image of the elements of mechanism. Moreover, what science does verify does not lie in any particular affirmations, which are never more than approximate; what science verifies is to be found in general affirmations, on which ranges of ranges of particular affirmations converge with an accuracy that increases with the precision of measurements and with the elimination of probable errors. (Insight 451)

I can demonstrate that modern physics itself is incompatible with the fallacy of scientific monism.

So here are Lonergan's explanations from Insight on the relation of chemistry and physics.

There also are the similarities of things in their relations to one another. Thus, they may be found together or apart. They may increase or decrease concomitantly. They may have similar antecedents or consequents. They may be similar in their proportions to one another, and such proportions may form series of relationships, such as exist between the elements in the periodic table of chemistry or between the successive forms of life in the theory of evolution. (Insight 62-3)

Fourthly, [the canon of relevance] notes that this intelligibility immanent in the immediate data of sense resides in the relations of things, not to our senses, but to one another. Thus, mechanics studies the relations of masses, not to our senses, but to one another; physics studies the relations of types of energy, not to our senses, but to one another; chemistry defines its elements, not by their relations to our senses, but by their places in the pattern of relationships named the periodic table; biology has become an explanatory science by viewing all living forms as related to one another in that complex and comprehensive fashion that is summarily denoted by the single word 'evolution.' (Insight 101)

For in the first place, an acknowledgment of the nonsystematic leads to an affirmation of successive levels of scientific inquiry. If the nonsystematic exists on the level of physics, then on that level there are coincidental manifolds that can be systematized by a higher chemical level without violating any physical law. If the nonsystematic exists on the level of chemistry, then on that level there are coincidental manifolds that can be systematized by a higher biological level without violating any chemical law. If the nonsystematic exists on the level of biology, then on that level there are coincidental manifolds that can be systematized by a higher psychic level without violating any biological law. If the nonsystematic exists on the level of the psyche, then on that level there are coincidental manifolds that can be systematized by a higher level of insight and reflection, deliberation and choice, without violating any law of the psyche. In brief, an acknowledgment of the nonsystematic makes it possible to conceive (i) psychic health as a harmonious unfolding of a process that moves at once on distinct yet related levels, (2) psychic aberration as an orientation of the stream of consciousness in conflict with its function of systematizing underlying manifolds, and (3) analytic treatment as an effort to reorientate an aberrant stream of consciousness and to effect a release from unconscious obstructions with a psychic origin. (Insight 229)

Again, an acknowledgment that the real is the verified makes it possible to affirm the reality no less of the higher system than of the underlying manifold. The chemical is as real as the physical; the biological as real as the chemical; the psychic as real as the biological; and insight as real as the psychic. At once the psychogenic ceases to be merely a name, for the psychic becomes a real source of organization that controls underlying manifolds in a manner beyond the reach of their laws. (Insight 230)

Thus the thing is the basic synthetic construct of scientific thought and development. It embraces in a concrete unity a totality of spatially and temporally distinct data. It possesses as its qualities and properties the experiential conjugates that can be determined by observation. It is subject to change and variation inasmuch as its data at one time differ from its data at another. Through observations of qualities, things are classified by their sensible similarities. Through measurements of changes, there are reached classical laws and statistical frequencies. Such laws and frequencies are subject to revision, and the revision is effected by showing that the earlier view does not satisfy completely the data on the thing as described. Finally, not only experiential conjugates, explanatory conjugates, and probabilities of events are verifiable; the construct of the thing is itself verifiable; for the ancient list of four elements - earth, water, fire, and air - has been rejected, and the new list of the periodic table has been established on the scientific ground of hypothesis and verification; both the old list and the new are lists of kinds of things. (Insight 273)

Mechanist determinism is bound to conceive all things as of a single kind. For mechanism posits things as instances of the 'already out there now real'; determinism makes every event completely determined by laws of the classical type; and the combination of the two views leaves no room for a succession of ever higher systems, for mechanism would require the higher component to be a 'body,' and determinism would exclude the possibility of the higher component modifying lower activities. (Insight 280)

On the other hand, the notion of the thing as an intelligible concrete unity differentiated by experiential and explanatory conjugates clearly implies the possibility of different kinds of things. Moreover, since explanatory conjugates are defined by their relations to one another, there is the possibility of distinct sets of such conjugates. There follows the notion of the explanatory genus. Consider a genus of things Ti9 with explanatory conjugates C-, and a second genus of things TJ} with explanatory conjugates Ci and C, such that all conjugates of the type Ci are defined by their relations to one another, and similarly, all conjugates of the type C are defined by their relations to one another. Then, since Ci and C differ, there will be two different systems of terms and relations; as the basic terms and relations differ, all logically derived terms and relations will differ, so that by logical operations alone there is no transition from one system to the other. (Insight 281)

Now it seems that such explanatory genera exist. The laws of physics hold for subatomic elements; the laws of physics and chemistry hold for chemical elements and compounds; the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology hold for plants; the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and sensitive psychology hold for animals; the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, sensitive psychology, and rational psychology hold for men. As one moves from one genus to the next, there is added a new set of laws which defines its own basic terms by its own empirically established correlations. When one turns from physics and chemistry to astronomy, one employs the same basic terms and correlations; but when one turns from physics and chemistry to biology, one is confronted with an entirely new set of basic concepts and laws. (Insight 281)

No doubt, a mechanist would have to claim that biology does not differ essentially from astronomy. He would argue that biology introduces its special terms and laws merely as a matter of convenience, that biology deals not with a new genus of things but with extremely complex macroscopic products of the same old things. Already we have stated the case against mechanism and determinism, and so we have only to indicate how the possibility of new genera arises. (Insight 281)

Consider, then, a genus of things T-, with explanatory conjugates C,, and a consequent list of possible schemes of recurrence S,-. Suppose there occurs an aggregate of events E- that is merely coincidental when considered in the light of the laws of the things Ti and of all their possible schemes of recurrence St. Then, if the aggregate of events E{- occurs regularly, it is necessary to advance to the higher viewpoint of some genus of things Tj, with conjugates Ci and Cy, and with schemes of recurrence 5. The lower viewpoint is insufficient, for it has to regard as merely coincidental what in fact is regular. The higher viewpoint is justified, for the conjugates C; and the schemes Sj constitute a higher system that makes regular what otherwise would be merely coincidental. (Insight 281)

Accordingly, if the laws of subatomic elements have to regard the regular behavior of atoms as mere patterns of happy coincidences, then there is an autonomous science of chemistry. If the laws of chemistry have to regard the metabolism and division of cells as mere patterns of happy coincidences, then there is an autonomous science of biology. If the laws of biology have to regard the behavior of animals as mere patterns of happy coincidences, then there is an autonomous science of sensitive psychology. If the laws of sensitive psychology have to regard the operations of mathematicians and scientists as mere patterns of happy coincidences, then there is an autonomous science of rational psychology. Nor does the introduction of the higher autonomous science interfere with the autonomy of the lower; for the higher enters into the field of the lower only insofar as it makes systematic on the lower level what otherwise would be merely coincidental. (Insight 281)

As has been remarked, the succession of sciences corresponding to the succession of higher genera does not admit any purely logical transition. Each of these main departments has its own basic terms defined implicitly by its own empirically established correlations. Still, this negation of a logical transition must not be interpreted as a negation of any transition whatever. For logical operations are confined to the field of concepts and definitions, hypotheses and theories, affirmations and negations. This field is only part of the larger domain that includes as well sensitive presentations and imaginative representations, inquiry and insight, reflection and critical understanding. Within this larger domain, the successive departments of science are related, for the laws of the lower order yield images in which insight grasps clues to laws of the higher order. In this fashion, the Bohr model of the atom is an image that is based on subatomic physics yet leads to insights into the nature of atoms. Again, the chemistry of the cell can yield an image of catalytic process in which insight can grasp biological laws. Again, an image of the eye, optic nerve, and cerebrum can lead to insights that grasp properties of the psychic event 'seeing,' and so the oculist can make one see better, and more generally the surgeon can make one feel better. Finally, it is with respect to sensed and imagined objects that the higher levels of inquiry, insight, reflection, and judgment function. (Insight 282)

This linking of the main departments of science runs parallel to the notion of successive higher viewpoints outlined in our first chapter. Just as elementary arithmetic and elementary algebra are distinct systems, with different rules yielding different operations and different operations yielding different numbers, so the main departments of science are distinct systems without logical transitions from one to the other. Just as the image of'doing arithmetic' leads to the insights that ground algebra, so images based on the lower science lead to insights that ground elements of the higher science. Finally, it is because new insights intervene that the higher science is essentially different from the lower.
Naturally, the reader will be inclined to view these images as pictures of reality. In this fashion intelligence is reduced to a pattern of sensations; sensation is reduced to a neural pattern; neural patterns are reduced to chemical processes; and chemical processes to subatomic movements. The force of this reductionism, however, is proportionate to the tendency to conceive the real as a subdivision of the 'already out there now.' When that tendency is rejected, reductionism vanishes. The real becomes the verified, and one can argue in the opposite direction that, since there is no verifiable image of the subatomic, there can be no verifiable image of objects composed of subatomic elements. The verifiably imagined is restricted to the sensibly given. One has to be content with reasonable affirmations of intelligently conceived terms and relations. On that showing, the function of the transition images is simply heuristic; such images represent, perhaps only symbolically, the coincidental manifold that becomes systematic when subsumed within the higher genus. (Insight 282-3)

Once things are recognized to be of different kinds, there arises the obvious question whether there are things within things. Are electrons things within atoms, atoms things within compounds, compounds things within cells, cells things within animals, animals things within men? The difficulty against an affirmative answer is that the thing is an intelligible unity grasped in some totality of data. It follows that if any datum pertains to a thing, every aspect of the datum pertains to that thing. Hence, no datum can pertain to two or more things, for if in all its aspects it pertains to one thing, there is no respect in which it can pertain to any other.(Insight 283)

The difficulty against a negative answer is that the laws of the lower science can be verified in things pertaining to a higher genus. If the laws of the electron are observed in the atom, it would seem that electrons exist, not only in a free state, but also within atoms. If the laws of the chemical compound are observed within the living cell, it would seem that chemical compounds exist, not only in their free state, but also within cells. (Insight 283)

Strangely, it is the argument against a negative answer that has the weak point. The fact that the laws of the lower order are verified in the higher genus proves that the conjugates of the lower order exist in things of the higher genus. But it is one thing to prove that conjugates of the lower order survive within the higher genus; it is quite another to prove that things defined solely by the lower conjugates also survive. To arrive at conjugates, abstractive procedures are normal; one considers events under some aspects and disregards other aspects of the same events. But to arrive at a thing, one must consider all data within a totality, and one must take into account all their aspects. It follows that one cannot consider the aggregate of events E^ insofar as they satisfy the laws of the lower order, and then conclude to the existence of things of the lower order. For this would be to abstract from the aspect of the aggregate that cannot be accounted for on the lower viewpoint and that justifies the introduction of the higher viewpoint and the higher genus. Accordingly, if there is evidence for the existence of the higher genus, there cannot be evidence for things of lower genera in the same data. (Insight 283-4)

Naturally enough, the reader will be inclined to ask what happens to the things of the lower order. But perhaps a moment's reflection will recall that there is quite a difference between things and 'bodies.' If the objects of the lower order were 'bodies,' then it would be mere mystification to claim that they do not exist within higher genera. Our claim does not regard alleged 'bodies.' It is the simple statement of fact that in an object of a higher order, there is an intelligible concrete unity differentiated by conjugates of both the lower and the higher order, but there is no further intelligible concrete unity to be discerned in the same data and to be differentiated solely by conjugates of some lower order. In other words, just as the real is what is to be known by verified hypothesis, so also change is what is to be known through correct, successive, and opposed affirmations. (Insight 284)

As there are classifications based on the relations of things to our senses, so also there are classifications based on the relations of things to one another. The latter classifications are explanatory, and they imply not only explanatory genera but also explanatory species. (Insight 287)

The key notion in the explanatory species is that any lower species of things T,, with their conjugates C- and their schemes S^ admit a series of coincidental aggregates of events, say Etjm, Eijn, Eijo, . . . which stand in correspondence with a series of conjugates Cjm, Cjn, Cj0, . . . of a higher genus of things T}. (Insight 287)

For example, let Tz stand for the subatomic elements, Ci for the terms implicitly defined by the laws governing such elements, 5, for all the combinations of laws that yield schemes of recurrence for subatomic events. Then the terms of the series E^x stand for a sequence of aggregates of subatomic events, where each aggregate is merely coincidental from the viewpoint of subatomic laws and schemes. Such coincidental aggregates can be represented by symbolic images, and in such images there are clues leading to insights that pertain to the higher viewpoint of chemistry. Such insights form two levels. A first level yields the series of relations constitutive of the periodic table; these relations define implicitly the conjugates C-x; such conjugates both differentiate the chemical elements which are the things Tj, and stand as the higher system that makes systematic the coincidental aggregates Etjx. A second level yields the multitudinous series of chemical compounds, where combinations of aggregates E^x yield new and larger aggregates Eljy that become systematic under the conjugates Cjy. (Insight 287-8)

In this fashion we are confronted with a basic fact which a mechanistic viewpoint has tended to overlook and to obscure, namely, that immanent intelligibility or constitutive design increases in significance as one mounts from higher to still higher systems. The periodic table of chemical elements is dominated by atomic numbers and atomic weights that are explained by underlying subatomic entities. A first degree of freedom appears in the vast diversity of chemical compounds, in which patterned aggregates of aggregates render subatomic limitations indirect. A second degree of freedom appears in the multicellular plant: each cell is an aggregate of aggregates; and the plant not only is an aggregate of cells but also it is the aggregate determined by its own laws of development and growth. A third degree of freedom appears in the animal, in which the second degree is exploited to provide the materials for the higher system of biological consciousness. In other words, because the multicellular structure is an immanently controlled aggregate of aggregates of aggregates of aggregates, there is the possibility of an organic nervous system that stands in correspondence with a still higher psychic system. Hence, while the chemical elements appear as dominated by the manifolds that they systematize, a multicellular structure is dominated by an idea that unfolds in the process of growth, and this idea can itself be subordinated to the higher idea of conscious stimulus and conscious response. While chemical compounds and unicellular entities systematize aggregates that, at least initially, are put together nonsystematically, multicellular formations systematize aggregates that they themselves assemble in systematic fashion. There follows an enormous shift of emphasis and significance from the materials to be systematized to the conditioned series of things and schemes that represents possibilities of systematizing. No doubt, plants and animals cannot emerge without the initial aggregation of chemicals in their initial cell or without an environment in which there are the possible and probable schemes of recurrence in which they function. Yet the fulfilment of these necessary conditions seems to differ enormously from the developed plant or animal; and the ground of the difference is that development has its ultimate basis, not in outer conditions or events, but in the realm of intelligible possibility.In this fashion we are confronted with a basic fact which a mechanistic viewpoint has tended to overlook and to obscure, namely, that immanent intelligibility or constitutive design increases in significance as one mounts from higher to still higher systems. The periodic table of chemical elements is dominated by atomic numbers and atomic weights that are explained by underlying subatomic entities. A first degree of freedom appears in the vast diversity of chemical compounds, in which patterned aggregates of aggregates render subatomic limitations indirect. A second degree of freedom appears in the multicellular plant: each cell is an aggregate of aggregates; and the plant not only is an aggregate of cells but also it is the aggregate determined by its own laws of development and growth. A third degree of freedom appears in the animal, in which the second degree is exploited to provide the materials for the higher system of biological consciousness. In other words, because the multicellular structure is an immanently controlled aggregate of aggregates of aggregates of aggregates, there is the possibility of an organic nervous system that stands in correspondence with a still higher psychic system. Hence, while the chemical elements appear as dominated by the manifolds that they systematize, a multicellular structure is dominated by an idea that unfolds in the process of growth, and this idea can itself be subordinated to the higher idea of conscious stimulus and conscious response. While chemical compounds and unicellular entities systematize aggregates that, at least initially, are put together nonsystematically, multicellular formations systematize aggregates that they themselves assemble in systematic fashion. There follows an enormous shift of emphasis and significance from the materials to be systematized to the conditioned series of things and schemes that represents possibilities of systematizing. No doubt, plants and animals cannot emerge without the initial aggregation of chemicals in their initial cell or without an environment in which there are the possible and probable schemes of recurrence in which they function. Yet the fulfilment of these necessary conditions seems to differ enormously from the developed plant or animal; and the ground of the difference is that development has its ultimate basis, not in outer conditions or events, but in the realm of intelligible possibility. (Insight 289-90)

Priority and Philosophy in Science

2012-07-19T16:00:00.001-07:00

It's widely claimed that underdetermination is a significant obstacle for scientific theorizing. Those claims fall into three categories, none of which stand up to serious analysis.

1. Inability to reject particular hypotheses (explanatory holism). The center of the Quine-Duhem thesis is that Hypothetico-Deductive method works by reductio ad absurdum, and of course RAA doesn't discriminate in terms of which premises it allows you to throw out. The solution, of course, is to employ RAA and jettison H-D method. Instead, look at science as the search for explanations of data, and having found a candidate explanation, the seeking and finding of further pertinent explanations until there are no more unanswered questions standing in the way of affirmative judgment of the candidate explanation. In a way, this might sound like H-D method: good, because H-D method has intuitive appeal. What differentiates it is that hypotheses are not arbitrary but rather formulations of insights (actual human understandings) and verification is not by falsification of the null hypothesis (What is the appropriate null hypothesis anyway? It's rarely no-effect.) but rather by the exhaustion of questions (i.e. the completeness of explanation). Once science is understood to be the generation and rejection of real theses rather than the merely logical manipulation of possible theses, reductio ad absurdum isn't necessary for the ordinary progress of science. Of course, sometimes models do actually compete.

2. Inability to discriminate between actually competitive theories (geocentrism/heliocentrism). Sometimes rather than merely seeking confirmation or extension of one theory there are actually multiple theories on the table, with the canonical example being the Copernicus/Ptolemy dispute over the center of rotation of the planets. Philosophers of science seem to want to either give some reason to prefer the Copernican heliocentrist theory or to suggest that the theories were underdetermined by the evidence available at the time. Those who want to epistemically credit Copernicus seem to see him as the ancestor of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, while Ptolemy is the holdout of the old guard. But why look for a projection of their successes into the past at all? Copernicus' theory didn't have fewer epicycles or better observational accord. It did of course remove the need to explain covariant epicycles, but also implied unobserved celestial parallax. Just because Copernicus' model looks more like Kepler's, which looks more like Newton's, which looks more like Einstein's, which seems to fully accord with the astronomical data, doesn't retroactively mean that it had some greater epistemic virtue in its actual formulation and given the actual data available at the time. Copernicus' heliocentrism is only philosophically interesting as a question of priority, which are among the least interesting in science. If, however, evidence didn't discriminate in favor of Copernicus doesn't that indicate underdetermination? No, first because neither was a proper theory in the first place, and second because neither was even a very compelling model. Until Newton, no theory of planetary motion actually implicitly defined its terms, but merely took "planets" as descriptive realities. Until Kepler, no model of planetary motion had predictive power for new planetary discoveries. So Ptolemaic geocentrism and Copernican heliocentrism were in no meaningful sense competitive models, let alone theories.

Of course the failure of a particular example cannot possibly prove that competing theories are never underdetermined, but neither can the burden be to prove a negative. To continue the illustration, I'll draw on string theory and super-symmetry, often considered exemplars of underdetermination by evidence in modern physics. One potential roadblock for that philosophical conclusion would be if such theories end up with provably equivalent predictions, like the nine formulations for quantum mechanics or its 17+ interpretations. As with Langrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics or polar and Cartesian coordinates, these are not properly different theories at all--just different mental schemas or systems of notation. Alternatively, these these models could make differential predictions only at energies incompatible with the existence of human beings (e.g. in the period immediately following the big bang). Insofar as a model is properly theoretical only insofar as it explains data (by prediction or accomodation), however, this would not be a case of genuinely competing theories. You might wonder how a single theory could span two competing models, but if the objects of the model are only separable at high energies then at low energies their Hamiltonians don't commute and they don't, strictly speaking, exist. This construal also assumes that quantum theories are models at all, which considerable physical and philosophical evidence suggests they are not. The final possibility is that string and supersymmetric theories do make differential predictions that are not yet experimentally accessible but might be in time. This, however, isn't underdeterimination in any strong sense. Of course discriminating between theories requires evidence, and sometimes finding evidence is hard and time consuming, but in this case the solution falls to the ordinary course of physics rather than philosophy.

3. Inability to discriminate against possible theories (Cartesian demons). If gradual accommodation of evidence and incremental prediction are abandoned in favor of de novo possibilities, alternative models can certainly be constructed to explain any data. But these models don't obey cognitive or statistical canons of inference. Put differently, the existence of a Cartesian demon isn't actually an insight into any data, and doesn't explain why we observe the data we do rather than some other set. Since such models aren't explanatory, they aren't theories, and we don't have to worry about discriminating against them.

So what's the point? I suggest that without long-term underdetermination, coherence converges to correspondence, meaning that philosophers of science should spend more time explaining the power and limits of science and not worry about whether they can help scientists do science.

A Theory of Miracles

2012-07-09T11:42:00.002-07:00

Beware that I am not a theologian, and I haven't taken more than a cursory glance at the literature, so take this with a full salt-shaker. Nonetheless I begin as St. Thomas defines miracles:

Things that are done occasionally by divine power outside of the usual established order of events are commonly called miracles (wonders). We wonder when we see an effect and do not know the cause. And because one and the same cause is sometimes known to some and unknown to others, it happens that of the witnesses of the effect some wonder and some do not wonder: thus an astronomer does not wonder at seeing an eclipse of the sun, at which a person that is ignorant of astronomy cannot help wondering. An event is wonderful relatively to one man and not to another. The absolutely wonderful is that which has a cause absolutely hidden. This then is the meaning of the word 'miracle,' an event of itself full of wonder, not to this man or that man only. Now the cause absolutely hidden to every man is God, inasmuch as no man in this life can mentally grasp the essence of God. Those events then are properly to be styled miracles, which happen by divine power beyond the order commonly observed in nature.

There are actually three definitions here:

(M1) "things that are done occasionally by divine power outside of the usual established order of events"

(M2) "an event of itself full of wonder, not to this man or that man only"

(M3) "those events...which happen by divine power beyond the order commonly observed in nature"

Leaving aside the equivocation of 'things' and 'events,' M1 and M3 are troubling for at least two other reasons. First, if miracles are analytically divine, what on earth is Thomas doing in the following section ("That God alone works Miracles") or in ST TPq43a2,4 ("Did [Christ work miracles] by divine power?" and "Are His miracles a sufficient proof of His Godhead?")? These would all be trivial. Also, as alluded to in title of the latter article, we take miracles to have epistemic value, to be evidence for the divine presence or approbation, which is rather useless if divine action is the definitional precondition for a miracle.

Second, what does it mean for something to be "outside the established order of events" or "beyond the order commonly observed in nature"? We observe new and puzzling events, discover new and puzzling things, all of the time. Why shouldn't this new event count against our flawed understanding of the order of nature rather than standing outside the order of nature altogether? This is more or less Hume's objection. [UPDATE: Miles Kimball gives a contemporary version.] Swinburne's notion that the event is unrepeatable (therefore a counterexample to the law, but not one justifying a new law) doesn't really help, either. Trivially, Lazarus and Jesus were both resurrected from the dead. If we mean a more scientific notion of repeatability, then how are claims of miraculous healings sorted out? Certainly they can't be repeated on demand experimentally, but much of medicine is poorly understood and many phenomena of medical science can't be repeated experimentally on demand. Moreover, neither understanding of repeatability would allow the immediate identification of a miracle, something we observe repeatedly in Scripture.

So what of M2, does it lend us a hand? Despite its greater development in the passage, it looks at first as if it is subject to the same objections. Don't the legends of eclipses being taken for miracles give us the same problems as above? It also can't just mean things for which we are sure there is no physical cause, or quantum physics would be a catalog of miracles (but of course quantum physics is actually a catalog of regularities of nature). So the wonder needs to be stronger than mere nomological impossibility if it is to be more than nomological wonder (wonder about the laws of nature). But the sense of wonder must be less strong than logical impossibility, as St. Thomas explains. So that leaves us with the notion that miracles are metaphysical impossibilities.

What could that mean? Well, Lonergan shows us that a metaphysics of proportionate being is isomorphic to the structure of human cognition (or at greater length). So explicit metaphysics is both known in self-appropriation and circumscribes proportionate being (thereby setting off what goes beyond it). Thus metaphysical wonders would be wonders for every man. This seems to square well with the metaphysics of incarnation, whereby only the psychological constitution of Christ is isomorphic to his unique ontological constitution (further development in unfortunately unpublished papers of Bernard Lonergan and Charles Hefling on special metaphysics). It also seems to square with the metaphysics of resurrection, in that Christ trampling down death by death seems to be an act unconditioned by potency. I do worry about whether it squares with the metaphysics of the Eucharist since St. Thomas endeavors to describe transubstantiation in hylomorphic metaphysics. Of course it's possible that the distinctions he uses to do the job don't entirely correspond to anything in explicit metaphysics (or maybe I should just read Joe Mudd's dissertation). But mostly, so far, so good.

What of St. Thomas' typology of miracles in the next paragraphs?

(T1) "those events in which something is done by God which nature never could do"

(T2) "those events in which God does something which nature can do, but not in this order" e.g. sight after blindness, mobility after paralysis, life after death

(T3) "when God does what is usually done by the working of nature, but without the operation of the principles of nature" e.g. "a person may be cured by divine power from a fever which could be cured naturally, and it may rain independently of the working of the principles of nature"

To the modern eye these all look metaphysically identical. T1 seems like a restatement of the definition of miracle above, and again I suggest that "nature could" must be read metaphysically, not logically or nomologically. As for T2, well, modern medicine shows hope of sight after blindness and mobility after paralysis, so those would reduce to T3. And "life after death" could be described as the animation of a corpse into a living mature human person, something "done by God which nature never could do," i.e. T1. In other words, why are temporal necessities less rigid than other necessities? In T3, it seems like curing malaria by means other than antibiotics or immune responses would be an "event in which something is done by God which nature never could do," regardless of whether the effect of the event is in that category.

If they are metaphysically identical, it's only in their epistemology or theology that these types are distinct. I do, think, however, that they help to confirm my reading above. T1 says that miracles are things that happen that can't happen in nature, not just things that don't happen in nature--and scientific laws just describe nature as it is. The elements of T2 which modern medicine has pushed into T3 show that nomological possibility doesn't justify unconditional claims about miracles soon after their occurrence. And T3 explicitly pushes miracles out of the realm of proportionate being, that which man can know as a consequence of his unrestricted desire to do so. The principles of nature could be other than they are, but we cannot explain something happening other than by nature. We are reduced to wonder. Thankfully, our unrestricted desire to know leads us to extrapolate beyond proportionate being to unrestricted being, in which God's grace of special revelation allows us some explicit knowledge.

Catholic Political Theory

2012-07-08T18:42:00.001-07:00

In accord with the Fortnight for Freedom (and yes, it's over, but this is as timely as I get) I'm going to lay out what I understand the requirements of a political theory acceptable to Catholics to be, and try to indicate why neither I nor anybody else (that I've read) has yet met the test. I'll try to rise to Arnold Kling's challenge to open minds more than close them. Much of what I say will probably be applicable to mainline Protestants or Orthodox believers as well, though I'll leave that judgment to them. Certainly Catholics are in a rather different position than Anabaptists or Neo-Calvinists. I guess first I need to explain why Catholics need a new political theory in the first place, rather than being able to use something already extant, or nothing at all.

First, Catholics need political theory. Politics matters--if we are to be ethical individuals, we must also do the right thing en masse, lest we be Francoists. Politics must also be grounded in reason if we are to gain assent from non-Catholics. And given the emergent nature of human social functioning, politics cannot just be ethics writ large: ethical choices rarely require broad consensus and halfway measures or extensive scientific calculation and horrifying unintended consequences. In other words, ethics can mainly be understood as virtue and a few rules for hard cases where passions tend to get the best of us. In politics, we must work with people whose virtue we are unlikely to improve in the short term, and hard cases are everywhere.

Just as politics isn't reducible to ethics, nor is it reducible to theology. I have great respect for the Mennonite tradition of pacifist eschatology (and even epistemology)--the moral witness of the Church has surely never been stronger, and its conversions more numerous, than in the time of the martyrs before Constantine. Where confessing Catholics are not numerous and/or are confronted with great evil (not just imperial Rome, but under National Socialism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) this is probably a more profound witness than compromise. And I'm open to argument that the present is more like those cases than is generally realized (I may have even made this argument with some frequency). But I don't see how this gives us much guidance about what to do when most of the polity are Catholic, or even enough so that Catholics might be on the ballot for powerful offices, or hold them, or be sufficiently numerous so as to have a plausibly deciding vote on who does. That's not, in itself, an argument against pacifism (beyond the scope of this post), but it is I think a problem for a separatist, purely eschatological view of politics. It's fair to say that we shouldn't compromise in order to get power, but that doesn't tell us what to do when we actually have it through no fault of our own. Now perhaps the Mennonite tradition would say that this hasn't ever actually happened, but while Chesterton's rosy view of the middle ages is a bit much for me, I can't quite go that far.

Conservatism is also insufficient. Burkean conservatism may be a valuable cast of mind, but it isn't a political theory. It certainly doesn't help you pick out extant, systemic evils and build coalitions to dispense with them. Since as Christians we believe that the world is full of such evils, we need something stronger--though we are well advised to bear in mind the possibility of using such strength to fall into what is worse (totalitarianism &c). Neo-conservatism, a.k.a. Straussianism, is a theory, but a morally abhorrent one that I won't waste vile language on here.

Second, Catholics need a political theory for a pluralist age. Any theory that relies on religious conversion for assent, or even an acceptance of broadly Aristotelian metaphysics, is of little short or medium-term use. Thomistic natural law may very well be the right foundation, but even good, smart people like Robert George aren't sufficiently recasting it to speak persuasively to a broader audience. This might seem like it's in tension with the point above (if you don't have power, why not be separatist?) but I think it just brings into focus the comparatively new contemporary state of the world: Catholics are a sizable portion of the polity in most countries, but dominant almost nowhere. Certainly the right depends on the good, and the good depends in an ultimate way on God's grace, but just as nature allows all men to share in practical reason to formulate natural law without realizing that it is a sharing in God's eternal law, we must formulate some theory of right which is not dependent on either might or a metaphysical understanding of the good (for that will be perceived as either separatism or might).

Third, Catholics cannot consistently adopt a theory off the shelf, whether liberal or utilitarian. Utilitarianism is out because man's happiness does not consist in anything scientifically measurable. Classical liberalism/libertarianism is out because it ignores both historical patterns of injustice and the difficulty of ascertaining consent. Rawlsian liberalism assumes that personal identity and ultimate scales of value are independent of religious, moral, and intellectual conversions as habituated by action. In short, all of the prominent contractarian theories assume an original position/state of nature inimical to Catholic philosophical and theological anthropology, and then argue for structures of justice by contrast to this position. Since the arguments are unsound, we may frequently concur in their conclusions (with utilitarians on help for the poor wherever they live, with libertarians on absolute constraints on action, with liberals on legal structures that are fair for the disadvantaged) but we cannot do so in an unrestricted way.

So we need a properly political theory, compatible with Catholic theology and ethics:

‎Of course, that is not to say that that inner freedom cannot expand outwards, cannot tend to liberate all human things (family, society, etc.), even purifying social structures from the effects of sin, error, the devil, and death...There is, then, nothing human that can be considered marginal to the Redemption and that should not be freed from the influence of sin. But it should not be forgotten that sin itself is the radical cause of all the tragedies that mark the history of human freedom, and that the course of human history has a kind of mysterious link with sin. So, the only place where true freedom can begin and where it can fully develop is in the heart of man. (The Mystery of Jesus Christ, p. 267. Ocariz, Mateo Seco, and Riestra)

But for the reasons discussed above, that theory (in our present circumstances, anyway) cannot simply be axiomatically derived from Catholic theology or ethics. What principles do we have to build from then? First, the end goal of all policy must be to promote human dignity. Obviously both "human" and "dignity" are contested terms (Are fetuses human persons? Is euthanasia dignified?) and those contests may only be settled by a thoroughgoing philosophical anthropology resting on a comprehensive metaphysics. Despite that obstacle, the term itself at least commends more or less universal agreement, and thus can be used to center debates and heuristically approach a definition. We can't agree to disagree on the content, however, because it makes a real difference who counts as a person and whether a given act increases or decreases their flourishing. There's no agreeing to disagree when you think a real human being is being abused or killed. But nonetheless the heuristic is useful for arguments--gay persons are, for instance, precisely trying to show that their intra-marriage is conducive to their flourishing. At this level, beyond heuristic to ultimate content, natural law ethics are indispensable, which is why Catholics can't go silent (in word or deed) about Humanae Vitae.

Second to human dignity is solidarity. If the goal is the true flourishing of every human person, the means is charitable attention to the needs of others, with a preferential option for the poorest among us (not just in wealth, but also in status or health). The needy are precisely those who can least help themselves, and who (given declining marginal returns) benefit most from our help. Only by solidarity will we aid the flourishing of those humans we know despite our aversion, who are bound to us by no prior affection and can offer us nothing in return. Solidarity is only true, however, when it is with respect to the true flourishing of all human persons. A false notion of human dignity leads to a false solidarity.

Solidarity in turn requires a further principle, subsidiarity. Solidarity has to work from the bottom up, by each person, family, town, region, and nation taking care of what they can on their own. Giving a lazy man money is no act of solidarity if he could instead work with dignity. Government demands and provisions often crowd out more genuine, innovative, and sustainable initiatives by private organizations or lower levels of government:

‎The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He's the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It's terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung today. (G.K. Chesterton: Interview with the Cleveland Press, March 1, 1921)‎

But in cases with large externalities, or those of natural or man-made disasters, lower levels are often unable to provide for themselves, so solidarity demands the cooperation of higher levels, and lower levels must contribute resources to enable that charity.

These principles are complex and nuanced, and their interactions have been discussed extensively. It's important to remember that they apply to the political broadly, as the distribution of resources, and not merely to the state--they may lead to state action, but they never begin with it. This is an important part of the way in which they point to a fuller conception of the human person than the liberal ideal without constraining their affective appeal to those who are already Aristotelians or Catholics. So what are the obstacles to a broader political theory in which human dignity is the goal, and solidarity and subsidiarity its necessary conditions? Well, the groundwork of Catholic political theory was laid in the Middle Ages by the doctors of the Church--saints and geniuses in one. So the problems we have seem to stem from situations they didn't experience or anticipate--pluralist society and post-Malthusian economics.

The first problem of pluralist society is how to agree on what is right while still disagreeing on what is good--when as seen in the definition of human dignity the right depends on the good. We may believe that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church even as empires rise and fall, but the secularist sees many mystical experiences vying for mindshare in the marketplace of ideas. If we are to be tolerated we must tolerate others in a principled way, which is to say we must provide a rigorous foundation for rights. This doesn't mean that we need to accept mandatory contraception coverage or gay marriage--only that we must provide a level playing field absent special pleading. Certainly the civil authorities have every right to enforce laws for the protection of children. This problem isn't even well defined enough to have a solution, but it suggests that we have work to do in clarifying the heuristic of human dignity, and in showing how other comprehensive doctrines and scientific results are critical resources for its elaboration. The authentic Catholic university has no shortage of tasks. It also means that we need to be careful about the public choice consequences of our alliances and second-best policies, so as not to create coalitions resistant to the end good.

The second, related problem is hinted at in my discussion of subsidiarity. Americans seem to have a reasonably workable (if insufficiently precise and inconsistently applied) theory of the responsibilities of different levels of government. The question of what should be provided publicly and what can be done privately, or what is a matter of private ethics and what of public mandate, is rather more contentious. Given the complexities of coercion and consent, when must the public regulate private contracts? Conversely, just because something is prohibited by natural law doesn't mean it should be illegal--if we are to receive an exemption from the HHS contraception mandate without winning the argument about the nature of preventive care (i.e. the nature of human sexual flourishing) then we must yield to Lawrence v. Texas as well. Once you bracket the question of the good, the sword cuts two ways. And we must be honest and transparent about that. Rights may be derivative from the pursuit of the good, but they must be real rights if they are to have any protective power. They cannot be abrogated arbitrarily, but only by democratic constitutional exercise--Franco is not to be the model of Catholic governance. Of course, even within a frame of the good these problems remain--prostitution is wrong, but whether it should be illegal might depend on the net consequences for people who might be victimized by pimps or johns. That logic doesn't extend to the abortion debate because death is the termination of human flourishing, and so outweighs any other impacts. And the good can't stay bracketed forever.

The first economic issue unanticipated by the medievals is the expanding economy itself, where individual and collective productivity push back the production possibilities frontier. Not only is productivity a precondition for changes that increase human flourishing, its effect is often so strong as to swamp merely static reallocations. Of course, what can't happen won't happen, so neither Moore's Law nor exponential economic growth will go on forever, but there's every bit of evidence that these trends last as long as governmental systems (hundreds of years) so they're rather relevant for political theory. So just as economists should learn from Catholics the dynamic rather than static nature of consent and desire, Catholics should learn from economists the dynamic rather than static nature of care for the poor. The poor will always be with us, but they need not be so numerous or so impoverished. The problem of incentives then adds to the complex interplay of solidarity and subsidiarity. Recent encyclicals have certainly acknowledged this, but a more complete understanding of how it impacts policy has not yet, to my knowledge, been done. Things done with the best of intentions that reduce the velocity of money, ability to take risks, or stable accretion of value can do great harm to the world's poor. Put differently, government expenditures should probably not be counted at face value in GDP. Of course, capitalism with Catholic characteristics is not equivalent to Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: getting rich is not glorious, and the accumulation of power is dangerous.

The other broadly economic factor that has qualitatively changed since medieval times is the nature of central government. Improvements in communications have made central government drastically more efficient at both assessing risks and effecting transfers of wealth but also dramatically more bureaucratic. As new kinds of solidarity become possible only with the help of central government, not only are subsidiary institutions weakened (public choice theory again) but we are faced with new paradoxes of bureaucratic rulemaking. From the first person perspective, do not kill is absolute, and the value of life is infinite--but from the bureaucratic perspective, what is the value of a life? Put differently, how should we ration interventions? Now here as well I think a dynamic perspective helps--we need not accept people's desire to consume rather than invest or be charitable as unchangeable. Perhaps if we treat those in need to the best of our ability as they arrive, people will be more willing to dig more deeply to finish out the year. But we need to be especially careful when interventions increase the cost of investment or charity substantially for perhaps minor protections. Just how safe are we willing to pay for our children to be? I also wonder about the difficult in reasoning in interventions where effect sizes are large but error bars are also large. Populations in the third world would benefit more from marginal income changes than those in my neighborhood, but it is difficult for me to translate resources as easily into stable accretions of value for them.

Despite these four related but serious problems with implementing subsidiarity in the cause of solidarity in the cause of human flourishing, I think there are some cases where the facts are so overwhelming that disagreement is a matter of rational or irrational egoism rather than principle. Strategic concerns and politician's syllogisms are no defense. Exhibit A: agricultural subsidies, holdovers from Nixon's Southern Strategy that's illegal under international law, fatten American children while starving African children, increase the deficit, and benefit mostly large corporations producing just four crops in only 5% of congressional districts. Exhibit B: zoning for the preservation of existing property value. It runs roughshod over subsidiarity (picking winners and violating property rights) in the service of a false solidarity (a preferential option for the rich) and reduces economic growth in the bargain. Exhibit C: immigration. As long as capital has freedom of movement and people do not, the playing field is fundamentally skewed against the poor. That's a pretty serious failure of solidarity. Oh, and it costs us economic growth and causes the government to strangle subsidiarity, as well.

I suppose in the end this is all (perhaps unsurprisingly) a plea for political virtue. We must be honest and courageous, unwilling to neglect the truth but also unwilling to bargain in bad faith. We must treat our coalition partners as friends, always seeking their genuine conversion. Remembering that we are all together in sin and together in grace won't hurt. We must always work with the best science available. But we have a lot of work to do laying out how that works in practice, because in practice there's a gap between theory and practice.

Philosophy Journals

2012-07-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

If you've taken the time to write a philosophy article and are considering submitting it to a journal, you probably have at least some of the following goals:

1. Prestigious publication, where it will be widely read, cited, and weighed by hiring and tenure committees.
2. Quick turn-around, so that if accepted for publication the aforementioned will happen faster and if rejected you can make improvements and/or resubmit to another journal.
3. Good peer review comments, so that your article will be as strong as possible, wherever it is finally accepted, and rejection will be less frustrating.

First, think about whether direct submission to a general journal is the best way to achieve these goals. There are at least two alternatives: published conference proceedings and specialist journals. Conference proceedings have the benefit of a natural audience for your work, both before and after publication, and some of them (American Catholic Philosophical Association, Philosophy of Science Association) are peer-reviewed, reasonably prestigious, and widely read and cited. Specialist journals, like Foundations of Chemistry in my subfield, tend to publish pieces on all sides of an ongoing debate, which naturally leads to ongoing citation and critical reaction. Some more targeted venues are still prestigious enough to be widely cited (and widely cited articles appear more often in specialist journals than you might think).

If, however, you're working on a major problem in Language/Epistemology/Metaphysics/Mind, want to shed light on those debates from a subfield, or want to garner a broader audience, it's time to look at the generalist journals. The first rule, I gather, is to look at where the debate you want to enter is currently happening. Most journals (other than Analysis) won't publish direct replies to pieces in other journals, but even beyond that published pieces indicate editorial and readership interest in the debate, and therefore hopefully in your contribution. Reading to find out which journals publish pieces like yours is also a good way to ensure that you haven't overlooked important pieces of the prior debate through over-narrow keyword searches. If those considerations haven't settled the issue, take a look at the prestige, turn-around time, and peer review comment rankings and pick something that's a good bang for your buck (time). Beyond those options, Thought is new journal with short turn-around times and prestigious authors that will probably feature in the next set of rankings.

Popper, Phenomena, and Philosophic Pluralism

2012-06-16T11:17:00.001-07:00

Because I can't resist another shave at the yak, I'm going to try to line up an isomorphism between two different philosophies of science and two different methods of philosophy generally, which risks being more polemic than fruitful, namely: phenomenology:analysis by intuition::Scerri:Popper. If you took the SATs before 2005, you'll recognize the notation. First I'll define my terms. I use phenomenology in the broad sense of rigorous first-person attention to mental action and experience. Analysis by intuition I take to be more or less the predominant method of contemporary philosophy in the anglophone world, where deductive reasoning from shared intuitions about carefully constructed puzzles is used to show the limits of our understanding of the world, or at least the meaning and function of language. Eric Scerri is a chemist and philosopher of science prefers close attention to the practice and limits of actual science to generalization from principles. Karl Popper is the father of falsificationism, whereby the scientific method consists of generating hypotheses (by whatever means), using deductive logic to form testable predictions from those hypotheses, and then attempting to disprove those hypotheses by discovering evidence beyond a predefined threshold of importance.

First let's talk about how what I'm calling "analysis by intuition" fits the Popperian paradigm. In mainstream anglophone philosophy of language/epistemology/metaphysics/mind the data relied upon is that of intuition (that's also true of ethics, despite Anscombe's complaints). Furthermore, these intuitions are typically ones of falsity rather than truth: if philosophically significant concepts had intuitively true analyses, they'd have been found long before Bertrand Russell kicked off the movement, and indeed most of what contemporary philosophers do is debunk or complicate such analyses (think Gettier vs knowledge as justified true belief). This is not to say that contemporary anglophone philosophers don't have positive programs, but these are in the main argued for by demolition of the alternatives (i.e. null hypotheses): think of Kripke's externalism in Naming and Necessity as a whole set of carefully constructed paradoxes which create intuitive reductios of internalism.

This approach has a number of strengths as well as weaknesses. One of its major benefits is in the social process of philosophy: checking intuitions on a variant of a problem is low cost, as is creating a problem variant which tends to trigger slightly different intuitions, so disciplinary entry is low cost. As every economics student knows, that's essential for a competitive market, and competitive markets have lots of other benefits. Scaling up market impact is also fairly linear: it just means finding an intuitive reductio which has broader applicability. Intuitions also seem reasonably stable through time, at least among professionals, so results are repeatable. Overall these characteristics create reasonable specialization among a flourishing broader scholarly community with copious academic output. There are also weaknesses to the approach, however, mainly in the discontinuities of discourse that it creates. First, constructed scenarios often seem to have little in common with everyday scenarios, or put differently it's often unclear to what extent the null hypothesis and the constructive proposal are logically exclusive. Second, there's no obvious connective path for those who don't share a set of intuitions, whether they be laymen, working scientists, or a different philosophical tribe. Third, like non-constructive proofs of existence in mathematics, externalist proposals frequently seem logically and intuitively sound without actually providing any guidance for speakers of the language.

Phenomenology seems to be in the inverse situation on almost all counts. Insofar as it focuses on simple and rigorous versions of everyday experience and action, it tries to solve the basic cases before the hard cases, and use the hard cases mainly to refine rather than reverse its results, a process highly successful in modern science. By treating intuitions as results rather than givens, and suggesting a method for rigorous reflection on the process leading to those results, phenomenology offers a way forward for those who start from different ground, and that method is explicitly therapeutic--those who use it actually (or at least supposedly) become better at experiencing carefully and acting intentionally. These strengths, however, come with correspondingly severe weaknesses stemming from the fact that learning and applying a phenomenological method takes a phenomenal (pun intended) amount of time and talent, which has a number of consequences. First, since the costs of both producing and consuming research is so much higher, the barrier for entry is enormous, and newcomers have difficulty getting noticed. Deeper apprenticeships (cf Heideggerians, Lonerganians) act to instill knowledge and detect talent, but this suppresses communication across schools. Furthermore, with captive students and obstacles to challengers, the penalty for unnecessary obscurity is minimal, and can even have positive returns via signaling. Follow-on work requires a more total grasp of the original than in analytic philosophy, so corrections, applications, and popularizations are rare and even then frequently of poor quality.

So what are we to do? There are some signs of hope. First, analytic philosophy is increasingly finding the time for methodological reflection and complication. Second, the problems of phenomenology are mainly those of lower productivity, so if we are patient the results should nonetheless be adequate to the task. In the medium term, though, I think the problems of philosophy are the problems of the modern university itself. Specialization is necessary for progress, but then limits it by creating artificial boundaries for understanding. I hope that an extension of Lonergan's functional specialties across academia can solve this problem, as they were an explicit reaction to its spread in theology, but I do not currently understand the nature of his proposal well enough to elaborate such an extension.

Order of Operations

2012-06-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

I've been banging the phenomenology drum and beating up on the alternatives, so it's only fair that I clarify what I mean and respond to the obvious criticisms.

1. Everything is mediated, including our access to the mediation. So it's crazy to say that the external comes first, because how do you know it? But it's also crazy to think that access to your own thoughts is unmediated, because there are a million ways to show that it is. That's why phenomenology requires rigor and hermeneutics. This means that you can't ask "what causes my thoughts" or "how do my thoughts refer to the world" as if you have some perspective other than that of the one thinking them. Externalism isn't so much wrong as it is meaningless, since it neither explains nor describes the data at hand in a particular case. Supervenience physicalism has the same problem: it takes for granted that all experience can be explained by physics and makes how the hard problem, rather than honestly asking what explains experience. Transcendental arguments do work, but they have to be used carefully. To say that an unconscious machine could spew true claims requires some viewpoint from which to understand them as true--conspicuously lacking if we are all such machines. Yet Tyler is right that we are all wrong all the time (even our access to our own thoughts is mediated, not privileged), and how we get simple things right and wrong is at least as interesting as anything about Gettier cases could possibly be, so the claims of transcendental arguments need to be carefully put and well scrutinized. Another way of putting it is that to accept a transcendental argument is to have a conversion of sorts, and cheap conversions are rarely true ones.

2. There is a real question about the status of system 1, just like there is about extended/embodied cognition. System 1 seems to directly inject content into system 2, not just constrain it (i.e. it is mental, not merely biological)--or is this the gap between psychological and philosophical? But in any case insights can be fused down into system 1. So any account of cognition needs to take at least the interface to system 1 as seriously as the (simple and complex) failures of system 2. In addition to tightening up every area of the argument, that should be a serious goal for my paper on cognition.

Epiphenomenalism is Just Alright

2012-06-13T09:08:00.003-07:00

Since I've just spent some time bashing physicalism, you might reasonably be entitled to wonder what I would propose instead. Insofar as I am not an emergentist (if that sounds like a category mistake, I'm sympathetic to Kim's claims that all meaningful physicalism is reductive physicalism), the answer, in short, is epiphenomenalism: "the thesis that the mental has no causal work to do in the production of behavior just is epiphenomenalism." Since that probably seems to you like an awfully implausible view, let me review how I got there, clarify what I mean by epiphenomenalism, and then answer the most common arguments against it in a way that I think transforms the debate.

1. Physicalism, in all of its reductive and supervenient variants, is philosophically and scientifically unattractive. Quantum Field Theory doesn't actually support any of the common formulations of physicalism, there's no evidence for the causal closure of the physical, there are lots of regularities in chemistry and other special sciences that are mathematically irreducible to Quantum Field Theory, and as Chalmers and the other dualists always point out there are plenty of problems with thinking that the mental supervenes on the physical.

2. Emergence is equally unattractive. How does something have causal powers beyond those of its microphysical constituents and their relations? Emergentism is just mysterianism. Also, while I disagree with Petit that physics is in the (uniquely) best position to understand the empirical world, I also find it implausible to say that physics isn't in fact very successful at understanding the empirical world. And if downward causation is a reality, then physics is context variant in ways outside its power to demarcate. So while reductionism is an empirically unfounded hope for the future success of physics, emergentism fails to grasp the magnitude of its achievement thus far.

3. Substance dualism with causal interaction isn't any better, as the interaction run's afoul of Hume's Dictum. It also falls prey to the above critique of emergentism, and given my third argument against physicalism would have to be a pluralism rather than a dualism (since the chemical is neither the physical nor the mental) which just makes all of dualism's problems worse.

So what we have left is epiphenomenalism as Stoljar defines it above. I don't mean "the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events" as that either assumes non-supervenience physicalism or dualism. Rather, I stick to the claim that events at different levels (physical/chemical, chemical/biological, biological/psychological) can never exert causality in either direction. Epiphenomenalism might not be the best term for historical reasons (perhaps non-interactionist substance pluralism?) but it's the view I've been accused of holding, so it's the term I'll defend: I think epiphenomenalism is an elegant solution to the scientific facts, but what about its intuitive problems? Let's work through those given in the SEP, as representative.

1. "Epiphenomenalism is absurd; it is just plain obvious that our pains, our thoughts, and our feelings make a difference to our (evidently physical) behavior; it is impossible to believe that all our behavior could be just as it is even if there were no pains, thoughts, or feelings." First of all, many philosophers clearly don't feel the intuitive force of this sort of thing or Chalmers' arguments about zombies wouldn't be so compelling. I won't follow the line of reply made in the SEP article, because it relies on the idea that upward causation does occur, though I do think it does a good job of shifting intuitions. Beyond that, I think there are some fundamental problems with this statement, namely the idea that behavior is "evidently physical." In an explanatory framework in which behavior is physical, pains, thoughts, and feelings are understood as physical, too (talk to most cognitive scientists), and the mental does not actually have an explanatory role. The realm in which thoughts are understood to cause behavior is the realm of common sense, which is descriptive and pragmatic, and so does not yield ontology via explanation. We constantly categorize our worlds in ways which provide useful guides for action and discussion but fail to accurately supervene on any rigorous distinctions.

2. "The development of consciousness must be explainable through natural selection. But a property can be selected for only if it has an effect upon organisms' behavior. Therefore, consciousness (both qualia and intentional states) must have effects in behavior, i.e., epiphenomenalism is false." This is just equivalent to asserting the reduction of psychology to biology, since evolution and natural selection are biological concepts. One might as well say that biology must be explainable by chemistry, or that chemistry must be explainable by physics. You're permitted to wish for such an explanation, but that doesn't mean there is one.

3. "Our reason for believing in other minds is inference from behavioral effects to mental event causes. But epiphenomenalism denies such a causal connection. Therefore, epiphenomenalism implies the (exceedingly implausible) conclusion that we do not know that others have mental events." But neither the behavior nor the inference here is from physics, and in fact scientific study has been known to decrease belief in the mental.

4. On the self-stultification argument, I basically accept the responses already made in the literature. In short, knowledge is made up of verified explanations and descriptions, and neither of these is parasitic on causality.

5. "Knowledge, memory, justification, meaning and reference all seem to require the causal efficacy of what is known, remembered, believed, meant or picked out. How, for instance, could we say that Sarah knows that there is orange juice in the fridge or that her belief that there is orange juice in the fridge is justified, if her belief were in no way causally connected to the fridge or the orange juice?" This gets the order of operations wrong. The way we know things is by understanding the explanation for the data we have, and verifying that understanding. Physics is merely one (albeit powerful) set of such verified explanations. The data exist whether or not we have a satisfactory physics. Since the data are given rather than arbitrarily constructed, no account of how physics could give rise to the data is necessary for knowledge other than the knowledge of physics, and Sarah's beliefs about orange juice presumably belong rather to the realm of common sense.

Worries About Externalism

2012-05-29T11:58:00.003-07:00

Sometime in the 1960s, much of philosophy passed me by (even though I wasn't yet alive). I'm not referring to the incomprehensibility of later Heidegger or early Derrida: I mean David Lewis, and I don't even mean modal realism (I'm Catholic, after all, so metaphysical truths contrary to common sense aren't really so implausible to me). There's something about the way analytic philosophers in the wake of Lewis and Kripke talk about reference, justification, and causality that makes me deeply uncomfortable. I'll call it "externalism" but I'll leave it to you to judge how well that label sticks.

First, I suppose, I have to talk about why I find Quine comforting, which may sound rather odd, especially from a Catholic; obviously Quine's conclusions seem a bit impoverished to me. Nonetheless, Quine's problems are my problems, and I think I understand why his solutions fall short of my own. I worry a lot about how scientific theories are related to evidence, about the cognitive role of logic, about reductionism, and about understanding claims from other cultures and traditions. Quine does a great job of showing that Carnap's solutions to these problems don't work very well. I'm not worried about being stuck with Quine's solutions because I think he underestimates the self-regulation of cognition and overestimates the importance of underdetermination. If theory coherence is a very high bar rather than a very low one, then Quine's concerns are not such obstacles to a full-featured Thomist metaphysics (yes, I'm serious). Quine, like St. Thomas, realizes the importance of mediation--he just doesn't realize how well it works.

So why the concerns about Lewis and Kripke's revival of metaphysics? Broadly, because I don't think they take mediation seriously enough, and so I think their metaphysical intuitions aren't grounded in anything. The only authentic externalism (objectivity) is an authentic internalism (subjectivity). Let me try to explain what that means and motivate it via some examples.

1. Language. Quine is worried about language because he wants to know how you can understand it, and verify that your understanding is correct. Theories of direct reference avoid all of that. They might provide good explanations of the truth conditions of sentences, but they don't do any work to help you know whether those truth conditions are fulfilled.

2. This naturally filters through into epistemology. In one sense, I don't doubt Plantinga that knowledge is what happens when we have properly functioning systems that are appropriate for the environment. But how do you know when your systems are properly functioning? This externalist view of warrant and justification doesn't ever give you any way to know that you know. The person who knows that you're being Gettiered can explain why you don't know, but the person being Gettiered still has no reliable way to track the truth.

3. Counterfactuals and possible worlds. It's not that I doubt that other possible worlds exist, but I doubt extremely the reliability of our intuitions about what is necessarily true in them or how nearby they are. Philosophers' views change because of books they read and conferences they attend, yet we're supposed to think that we have any idea what must be true in another world that is incompatible in some fundamental ways with our own? Scientists experience paradigm changes when they do experiments far away from home in our own world (Darwin in the Galapagos, say), but I'm supposed to think that we have any idea what some other possible world would be like if only "X were Y and whatever follows from that"? You've got to be kidding me. So if talk of possible worlds solves problems in the philosophy of language, then fine, but I'll take phenomenology any day as a more reliable guide to metaphysics.

4. Of course, once you have counterfactual possible worlds, you're going to want some identity condition (or once you have an identity condition, you're going to want to try it out on possible worlds). Thus one of the more popular definitions of physicalism, even though that phrasing makes it much less scientifically tenable than more modest accounts. It seems to me like our ontology should be read off of the explanations which result from our inquiry, not posited as the most elegant and then searched after. Isn't that what everybody hated about late scholasticism?

Overall, I suppose I would be more comfortable with contemporary analytic metaphysics if it demonstrated more concern over the sources of intuition (and how those affect the contents) and the goal of analysis (better understanding). A good dose of phenomenology would go a long way in both regards and help better ground metaphysics.

Revisiting Pauli

2012-05-29T08:07:00.002-07:00

While I've rather enjoyed writing the series of posts blasting common misconceptions about physics, I may have gotten in slightly over my head the last time, so it's worth revisiting the Pauli Principle a bit. Certainly the argument from uncertainty and commutability is sound: electrons do not have well-defined quantum numbers in multi-electron atoms so approximate solutions to the Schrodinger equation do not even involve placing electrons into orbitals, let alone doing so on the grounds that two interacting electrons cannot share the same quantum numbers. Either they're interacting, in which case they don't have well-defined quantum numbers, or they aren't, in which case there's no problem with the sharing. So what's worth revisiting here?

1. Szabo and MacQuarrie suggest that "anti-symmetry of wave functions with respect to electronic interchange" is just a modern statement of the exclusion principle which does the same experimental and theoretical work without the problematic language, and is well-supported by experimental evidence. Scerri says that these two formulations of the principle do not amount to the same thing, and that anti-symmetry is strictly correct while the exclusion principle is strictly incorrect Pauling says that anti-symmetry is only true as an approximation, otherwise known as the zero-resonance case. I really have no idea what's going on here, and I need to get to the bottom of it. Perhaps the issue is that the Schrodinger Equation ignores the magnetic interaction of the electrons, but intuitively another layer of interaction would only make separability harder, not easier.

2. Of course, the primary motivation for Pauli Exclusion in the first place is as an explanation for orbitals (though it's a funny kind of explanation, since it's either introduced as an axiom, which explains nothing, or as a consequence of special relativity, in which case that should do the explaining), which are needed in turn to explain valence (which I suggest is actually a chemical relation not reducible to physics at all) and electronic energy quantization (shown in spectroscopic lines). But if spectroscopy shows quantization of electronic energy, then it seems like the probability densities must be discontinuous, though that is in tension with the ab initio mathematics which don't demonstrate such a result. I'm not sure if there's an issue in decoherence (the measurement problem) that I'm not understanding, or if it's a question of the causes and consequences of Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics.

With luck I'll be able to corner Eric Scerri sometime this summer and make him explain it to me.

Against Physicalism

2012-05-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

Physicalism is one of those theses that has become so pervasive in philosophy and indeed among practicing scientists and the culture at large that it is now difficult to define well enough to rebut. Indeed it is often thought to be so self-evident that its main detractors (dualists, Christians) are thought to be acting mostly out of parochial interests. Most current philosophical work on physicalism seems to address the question of how it can be true given what we observe of the world, rather than attempting to define it precisely or defend its truth in general. Consequently, many authors define the concept in ways they take to be synonymous though such definitions may have wildly different truth conditions when examined more closely. I originally thought that I had a novel argument against physicalism from physics, but research shows that plenty of voices have been crying in the wilderness on this subject--they just haven't gotten any attention. So before I recap their arguments, let me try to line up the target.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines physicalism as "the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical." Lewis, Jackson, and Chalmers favor a formulation whereby possible worlds are identical if they are identical in their physical properties. Petit's study offers two variants, "the empirical world is constituted out of materials which physics is in the best position to identify" and "the empirical world is governed by forces or regularities that physics is best equipped to describe." Other philosophers identify physicalism trivially with the causal closure of the physical (namely that all causes are physical causes). These definitions all have different truth conditions, but they are also clearly all part of what the SEP calls the physicalist world picture, and substantiate physicalism as some kind of family resemblance. In that vein, let me pass along three arguments from physics (that is, relativistic quantum field theory, the general theory of particle and condensed matter physics) that I take to completely vitiate that world-picture.

1. Quantum field theory doesn't provide any means for delineation of objects or events, thus it implies ontological holism (Esfeld 1999). Of course without objects or events, it's nonsense to talk about causes or duplicates or constitution, and nothing of scale smaller than the whole world can supervene on the whole world, so supervenience doesn't do any work either. Only Petit's second definition would be safe from this critique.

2. Quantum Field Theory doesn't allow states to be uniquely identifiable (Birman 2010). This is really as simple as Heisenberg's principle that the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be known with certainty at the same time. If this is the case, then there is no way to specify that two worlds are physical duplicates, since all of their physical properties could not be simultaneously specified or ascertained, even in theory. This is obviously bad news for the Lewis/Jackson/Chalmers definition, but that definition is generally preferred over the simpler claim "everything is physical" for philosophical reasons. Again only Petit's second definition seems survivable.

3. Petit's second definition, however, runs into the serious problem that Quantum Field Theory doesn't epistemically or ontologically reduce chemistry. Therefore there are many extremely important regularities of nature which physics is not best equipped to describe (such as those of the periodic table).

So physicalism just isn't compatible with the current scientific evidence, and the burden should be on physicalists to adduce metaphysical reasons for their position rather than the other way around. But if not physicalism, then what?

Research Interests

2012-05-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

Since I'm basically using this blog as a platform for things too long for Facebook and not long enough for a conference paper, I figure it's worth an updated preview of what I'm working on--if for no other reason than to remind me to keep to the grindstone.

1. Philosophy of chemistry, especially failures of determinism and ontological reduction (and setting the correct burden of proof in these areas). If the causal closure of the physical fails here, the program is over. The fear of dualism should be over too, because how afraid of the periodic table can you be? Yes, an explicit application to philosophy of mind will have to be made at some point, but with a much different background. This is the area I'm most actively working in at present, and I currently have papers under review for the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry 2012 summer symposium and the 3rd International Conference on the Periodic Table. All of this was inspired by Fred Lawrence, who told me that if I thought someone needed to prove Lonergan's hunch about chemistry that it might as well be me.

2. Phenomenology of ethics--since I'm committed to both a positional ethics (practical reason) and a Catholic ethics (natural law) there really isn't any substitute for a case-by-case concrete account of how you get from one to the other. I think Rhonheimer has the outline right, and Pat Byrne is doing a great job on the phenomenology, but the two need to spend some time in the forge before it's all ironed out. I'm leading a four-day discussion on this topic at this summer's Lonergan Workshop and hope to present on it at Lonergan on the Edge this fall as well. I haven't had many insights yet, but I have lots of questions!

3. Phenomenology of art. What is art? How does it function? What is the vocation of the artist? This is what happens when a philosopher has a bunch of artist friends. Who knows where it will go.

4. Epistemics of conversion. This project began as a long series of blog post drafts and conversations with friends (especially Byron Borger and Michael Dennis) that have been slowly knotting themselves together into a larger project. Questions I'm exploring include:

Can we meaningfully argue and share knowledge across worldviews? If so, then to what extent are Kierkegaard and Dooyeweerd counterpositional?
How does conversion actually work? What are the steps between judgment and conversion? Where does self-appropriation fit in? How does conversion affect our horizons and thus our knowing (the way downwards) in terms of cognitional primitives?
To what extent can a Thomistic theology of grace in conversion be made intelligible to Reformed thinkers?
If much of the meaning of questions is bound up in worldview (pace Alasdair MacIntyre) then how does discourse work in a pluralist society? Is evangelism the paradigm for all cross-worldview discourse?

I have no idea what the right answers to these questions are, or even the right conferences or publication venues to discuss them, but I think my work on the micro-structure of cognition and neocalvinism both point to this larger question which I'll have to seriously explore at some point.

5. Catholic political theory. Politics needs to speak across worldviews, but per above meaning transmission across worldviews is difficult and often must be done indirectly. So what does a Catholic political theory say to a pluralist society? I have a post in the works about the problems that must be overcome for a consistent theory, and they are legion. Certainly neither a simplistic application of ethics (a la Christendom) nor a merely tactical set of maneuvers will do. Actually answering those questions will probably be an enormous undertaking, but I hope to chip away at it slightly when I can.

Against Pauli

2012-04-18T14:04:00.001-07:00

As part of my general exploration of reductionism, I've been spending a good bit of time with the relationship of chemistry and physics, particularly whether chemistry reduces to physics (epistemologically or ontologically). Chemists often speak as if chemical behavior is just the result of molecular orbitals (even if the math is messy, and there are always unknown factors, and a certain amount of randomness, so in practice we have to use heuristics and approximations and experimental values). Furthermore, chemists and physicists often suggest that molecular orbitals are a mathematical consequence of quantum mechanics, and have a physical representation since the square of the orbital function is the probability density for the electronic location.

In general, the Pauli Principle, whether as an independent postulate of QM, the result of empirical studies substantiating anti-symmetric wave functions, or as a result of Dirac's formulation of QM including special relativity, are constantly invoked to explain separation of an atom's electron's into orbitals and shells. Even Feynman does this, and he's usually very careful to call out approximations. But they also tell you that "the simple picture, that chemists carry around in their heads, of electrons occupying orbitals, is in reality an approximation, sometimes a very good one but, nevertheless, an approximation—the Hartree-Fock approximation." So which is it? Is the Pauli Principle an approximation, or is it an axiom or corollary (if special relativity is taken as an axiom) of quantum mechanics? Szabo actually says both at different points in the text.

So I've been trying to actually work through the quantum chemistry to figure out what's going on. Bear with me, as the rest is a little technical and more a set of reading notes than an argument (I'm not about to try to teach the math here--but I do hope to provide an organizational scheme for those who were taught the math, physics, and chemistry, but never thought about it in this way).

1. Arbitrary Hamiltonians (the Hamiltonian operator is just the Schrodinger wave equation set up for matrix mechanics) do not commute (Macquarrie PC 3-3) and if they do not commute then sdA*sdB > ~ |AB - BA| is the non-zero Heisenberg uncertainty (Macquarrie PC 4-6). Since the wave equation doesn't have an exact solution for the two-electron case, the Hamiltonians for the electrons and the system as a whole do not commute. But of course probability distributions don't go to zero, so the electron is then logically not within any particular region of space, and supposedly "separate" orbitals must inter-penetrate.

2. The truly ab initio Hartree-Fock approximation has an error of the same order of magnitude as typical bonding energy (Macquarrie PC 8-3,7). That makes sense since covalent bonding is clearly an inter-electronic phenomenon and the approximation ignores inter-electronic effects. This can be papered over by layering 2-body peturbations (Szabo 3.8) but there's been no mathematical evidence that the iterated 2-body problem converges on the 3-body problem. So while this may be very useful to working chemists, and seems to match experiment up to four significant figures (the experiments being good to five or so), it's clearly an approximation method rather than a mathematical truth. But if Pauli's Principle isn't so, then why does experiment verify anti-symmetry of exhange of indistinguishables (Macquarrie PC 8-5) which is an equivalent statement?

3. At last I stumbled upon the physical explanation courtesy of none other than Linus Pauling (XIII-46h): orbitals/Pauli principle/experimental anti-symmetry of electronic wave functions imply zero resonance! So when resonance is minimal (on the same order of magnitude as other experimental error), the approximation works. But of course, resonance is taught because that's not always a good approximation. Theoretical chemists get by this obstacle by using an empirical exchange integral (combined Hamiltonian).

4. Ok, so that explains why Pauli can have good experimental support in some instances but not others. But if Dirac derived anti-symmetry of electronic wave functions from special-relativistic quantum mechanics, how can it be only an empirical approximation? Eric Scerri reminds us that if a particle's Hamiltonian doesn't commute with that of the system in which it's embedded, then you can't technically refer to the particle as possessing any quantum numbers at all. Since the values are undefined, there's nothing to exclude.

So the bottom line is that as a heuristic, it can be powerful to oscillate between math and experiment, much as economists oscillate between macro- and micro-pictures of the economy without consistent and adequate micro-foundations for their macroeconomic work. But Pauli's principle is not a principle about electronic distributions in multi-electron atoms and molecules, and should not be claimed as such. It is a rule of thumb that leads to adequate results without expensive or distracting computation in many cases (traditionally delimited as those where there is no substantial resonance effect: but resonance is just electrons repelling each other, which you might expect from physics that they would). As with Bernoulli the effect is certainly worth teaching, but it is not actually an explanation for the phenomena the students are trying to understand.

[Edit: updated, because reality is complicated.]