Quodlibeta

Lovejoy on Behaviorism

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000

Arthur Lovejoy was an important philosopher in the early 20th century, and he presented something like Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, Lucas's Gödelian argument against physical determinism, and C.S. Lewis's argument from reason. Lovejoy's target was behaviorism, a view which reduces all human existence to responses to stimuli. Lovejoy presented his argument briefly in two essays, the first entitled "The Existence of Ideas" published in The Johns Hopkins University Circular 3 (1914): 42-99 (alternate pagination 178-235), which you can download here. He addresses the argument on pages 71-73 (207-209). The second was the essay "Pragmatism as Interactionism" (which you can read or download here) published for some reason in two parts in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 17 (1920): 589-96 and 622-32 (this journal later became The Journal of Philosophy). "Interactionism" is the claim that mind and body interact -- mental events causing physical events and vice-versa. The argument comes on pages 630-32 of part 2, where Lovejoy concludes,

Pragmatism insists that, whatever philosophical propositions be true, one class of propositions must certainly be false -- all those, namely, which either assert or imply that human intelligence has no part, or no distinctive part, in the control of physical events and bodily movements, in the modification of environment, or in the actual determination, from moment to moment, of any of the content of reality. That man is a real agent -- and that the distinctive quality of his agency consists in the part played therein by the imaginative recovery and analysis of a physically non-existent past and the imaginative prevision of a physically non-existent future -- these are the first articles of any consistently pragmatic creed. Such a creed is simply a return to sanity; for these two theses are the common and constant presuppositions of the entire business of life. Never, surely, did a sillier or more self-stultifying idea enter the human mind, than the idea that thinking as such -- that is to say, remembering, planning, reasoning, forecasting -- is a vast irrelevancy, having no part in the causation of man's behavior or in the shaping of his fortunes-a mysterious redundancy in a cosmos which would follow precisely the same course without it. Nobody at a moment of reflective action, it may be suspected, ever believed this to be true; and even the composing and publishing of arguments for parallelism is a kind of reflective action.

But Lovejoy finally wrote a full-length essay on his argument in response to an essay "Is Thinking Merely the Action of Language Mechanisms?" by the behaviorist John B. Watson published in The British Journal of Psychology 11 (1920): 87-104. You can read it online here. Watson's presentation is eerily similar to more recent defenses of eliminative materialism. For example, at one point (page 94) he contrasts the "introspectionist," that is, someone who believes that we can learn something about our thoughts by thinking, with the behaviorist who believes everything we can learn about our thoughts comes from the observation of the external effects -- the responses to stimuli, the external behavior.

The introspectionist hopes for a solution of the metaphysical problem through some mystic self knowledge. The behaviourist believes in no such transcendental human power. He himself is only a complex of reacting systems and must be content to carry out his analysis with the same tools which he observes his subject using. I cannot, therefore, agree with Mr Thomson that there is a mind-body problem in behaviourism. It is a serious misunderstanding of the behaviouristic position to say, as Mr Thomson does -- "And of course a behaviourist does not deny that mental states exist. He merely prefers to ignore them." He 'ignores' them in the same sense that chemistry ignores alchemy, astronomy horoscopy, and psychology telepathy and psychic manifestations. The behaviourist does not concern himself with them because as the stream of his science broadens and deepens such older concepts are sucked under, never to reappear.

Eliminativists say much the same: they claim their position is just the result of taking science seriously, and any denial of their position is because people don't want to give up some sacred aspect of life. Just like Watson, they compare their position with astronomy and chemistry and the denial of their position with astrology and alchemy. For an example, see here.

Lovejoy responded in "The Paradox of the Thinking Behaviorist" published in The Philosophical Review 31 (1922): 135-47, which you can read online here, although you'll have to scroll down to page 135. To summarize: the behaviorist claims that unvocalized thought is incoherent: laryngeal movements are all that occur. "Perceiving a thing, in short, is identical with the motion of the muscles involved in uttering its name." All "thoughts," therefore, can be completely explained in terms of the physical motions involved in speaking, without any reference to their contents, what the thoughts are about. And this would obviously include the behaviorist's thoughts about behaviorism. In this case, the behaviorist (along with everyone else) hasn't actually said anything, he's just made sounds with no meaning. In which case, the behaviorist thesis has not actually been put forward. We can only affirm behaviorism by tacitly presupposing that behaviorism is false, since it is only if it is false that the behaviorist thesis can have any meaning.

One objection raised against Lovejoy's argument, in that same issue of Philosophical Review is "Awareness and Behaviorism: Apropos of Professor Lovejoy's Critique" by Howard Warren (pp. 601-605). He suggests that Lovejoy begs the question by presupposing that the only way to make sense of the behaviorist's claims is if behaviorism is false. But of course, the behaviorist claims that there is another way to make sense of his thoughts, a way that is consonant with behaviorism. Again, this is very similar to one of the main objections that eliminativists give to the claim that eliminativism is self-defeating. The counter-objection is, as Nagel puts it in The Last Word,

the appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the challenge itself, so this is really a way of showing that the challenge is unintelligible. The charge of begging the question implies that there is an alternative -- namely, to examine the reasons for and against the claim being challenged while suspending judgment about it. For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed. The use of reason in the response is not a gratuitous importation by the defender: It is demanded by the character of the objections offered by the challenger.

So I think Lovejoy's argument that behaviorism is self-defeating is sound. One can only accept behaviorism is true if one ultimately presupposes that behaviorism is false. As such, behaviorism defeats itself.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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A couple of things to listen to

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:29:00 +0000

Audible have brought out an audiobook version of the Genesis of Science. This is very much a personal project of the narrator Rich Germaine, so I am very grateful to him for producing it. Unfortunately, for licensing reasons, this version isn't available outside the US.

Also, I've recorded the Faith and Life Lecture that I was privileged to give at St Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church in Minneapolis last November (this was my first attempt at recording straight to tape, so I hope it sounds OK). You can listen to it and all the other Faith and Life Lectures at their website.

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Birkbeck College, University of London

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 09:47:00 +0000

Very sorry to spam our own blog, but if any readers are graduates of Birkbeck College, please could they get in touch. For those unhappy enough not to have studied there, Birkbeck is a constituent college of the University of London and specialises in part time courses and evening classes. I took my MA in Historical Research there before moving to Cambridge for my PhD.

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Martyred in the USSR

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:10:00 +0000

Like many conservatives, I get annoyed at the free pass that the Soviet Union often gets in the history of 20th century tyranny. Students think nothing of having a poster of Stalin on their walls. And as I have blogged before, Stalinist academics somehow become national treasures. A decade ago, a woman who delivered our nuclear secrets to the Kremlin was let off on the grounds she was getting on a bit.

So, it is good to note that people are still trying to put the record straight. In particular, work is ongoing on a new film about the persecution of people of faith in the USSR. The atheism of the communist system is an embarrassment for modern secularists which they deal with in various ways. But most commonly, they just ignore it. It is unlikely that atheism per se made the USSR even more murderous than it would have been anyway. But there is little doubt that it did lead the communists to persecute believers simple because they were believers in a way that is little appreciated today.

The film is called Martyred in the USSR and if you think it is a worthwhile project, you can find more details here (note the film sampler is pretty gruesome).

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Fair to Middlin'

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 04:23:00 +0000

I was feeling a little left out at the recent flurry of activity here, so allow me to point all Quodlibeteers to a recent article on Cracked: 6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes. The comments are pretty good in general, but I encourage you good folk to further educate the masses.

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A Brown Land of Beauty and Terror

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

We British are obsessed with the weather. If it rains in the summer (which happens a lot) we get depressed. If it snows (which happens occasionally) the country grinds to a halt. And it only takes a day of sunny weather for crack teams of photojournalists to start hunting for nubile young ladies cavorting in public fountains.

So imagine what life would be like if you transported a few million Brits to a country where they get some real extreme weather. Or if that is too painful, you only have to look at Australia.

The bush fires raging across the southeast of Australia are a tragedy for all those involved, especially people who have lost their homes and livelihoods. But conflagrations are not an unusual feature of Australian summers. Every January, as I shiver is rural Kent, my in-laws in Perth report sweltering temperatures of 40 degrees. Leave an Australian city and you’ll see a plethora of road signs warning of the risk of fire. Of course, current technology, especially air-conditioning, makes extreme heat more bearable than it used to be. But modern life has also made Australians forget how hostile the environment in which they live really is.

Australia is a vast desert island. Its north coast is swamp, the east and southwest scrubland. The area which is both reasonably temperate and fertile is a small proportion of the whole. Admittedly, a thin veneer of Englishness overlays the desert (and it’s getting thinner as the country’s population gets more diverse). Bondi Beach looks surprisingly like Bournemouth and some of the older buildings in Australian cities can seem jarringly familiar to a visiting Englishman. But they didn’t ship convicts to Botany Bay because it was a holiday camp.

In the olden days, Australians faced the intimidating climate with a frontier spirit. They knew that carving a life out of the unforgiving environment was tough. The national character still reflects that. And, until recently, every Australian schoolchild used to learn Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country by heart.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror,

The wide brown land for me.

As so often, the poet gives us truth less varnished than any prose, despite being constrained by metre and rhythm. During the Queensland floods on 2011, Clive James, an elderly Australian exile and no mean poet himself, wrote a beautiful article for Standpoint about this poem. Those flooding rains, like today’s fires, were a terror for all concerned. But, contrary to the media narrative, they were not a surprise or a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. They were the inevitable consequence of living somewhere as inhospitable as Australia, even if modern comforts had made people forget where they were.

Today, Australia is fabulously wealthy. That means that floods, droughts and fires cause enormous monetary loss, even while the cost in human lives is mercifully low. And with a population of 22 million, there are now many more people living in marginal areas where these three apocalyptic horsemen like to gallop. Their wealth and healthy economy will allow Australia to recover quickly and perhaps, once again, forget what a miracle it is that they have been able to turn their country into the wonderful place it is today.

By the way, this blog post isn’t about climate change. But if it was, it would say much the same as this excellent piece from the Tom Chivers in the Telegraph.

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The Magic of Reality

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

I expect many young people will have received a copy of Richard Dawkins's book The Magic of Reality for Christmas. I even saw someone reading a copy on the tube this week. This was the paperback which lacks the illustrations by David McKean. This is a shame since the pictures were the best feature of the original hardback edition of the book.

The Magic of Reality is intended to provide a general introduction to science for teenagers. They can learn a great deal about the state of modern science from reading the precise prose. Unfortunately, the book also gives a very misleading impression of how science works and why it is so successful. Dawkins is especially inaccurate about the relationship between science and religion.

Each chapter begins with an account of some of the myths with which humans once explained different aspects of nature. These myths are admirably wide ranging. We learn of the Tasmanian legend in which the god Moinee crafted the first men with kangaroo's tails. The African sky god, Bumba, is invoked for vomiting up the sun. Dawkins lavishes careful attention on the gory Aztec practices of human sacrifice. He includes tales from the Bible, such as Adam and Eve, or Noah's flood, in this picturesque gallery of pagan mythology to make his unsubtle point that these stories are all alike.

Dawkins then asserts that a scientific view of the universe has displaced all the myths. Humanity, he implies, has grown out of the fairy tales that gave comfort to its youth. As a mature species, we have now learnt how to discover the truth - a truth that is just as exciting as the legendary tales it replaced. Of course, we no longer directly blame angry deities for earthquakes and plagues. But Dawkins is peddling a naive myth himself to explain the rise of science. He imagines that the only requirement for a scientific worldview to take root was for man to look upon the world with eyes unclouded by religion. This is not only patronising to just about every culture that has existed on Earth. Propagating his own myth means that Dawkins distorts the story of science even if he accurately describes scientific theories. And more dangerously, he explicitly states that science is the only road to truth and that alternative modes of thought have no value.

The story of how modern science really arose shows the danger of uncompromising rationality and the importance of other ways of looking at the world. In particular, religion had an essential role in scientific advance. Even by the standards of their day, many great scientists were especially devout, if not always orthodox, Christians. Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were all unusually religious men. And this ignores the host of Jesuit scientists, like Roger Boscovich, who have been written out of English-language histories of science.

This should alert us to the risk that Dawkins's vision of science is overly simplistic. Today, it is commonly believed that science was invented by pagan Greeks and held back by Christianity. But Dawkins denigrates even the scientific achievements of ancient Greece. For instance, he files the theories of the physician Hippocrates, which were the keystone of medicine until the nineteenth century, under mythology. It is true that Greek science, Hippocratic medicine included, was very often mistaken. But it had almost nothing to do with the legends with which we are all so familiar. You don't find many mentions of Zeus or Apollo in the works of Aristotle. Hippocrates specifically denied that the "sacred disease" of epilepsy had a divine cause at all.

Aristotle's careful demonstrations, derived by a method of observation and logical analysis, meant that his science stood on a foundation of pure reason. Dawkins should have been proud. The trouble is, as Dawkins is well aware, Aristotle's science was almost completely wrong: wrong to say the sun and other planets orbit the earth; wrong to say that moving objects must be moved by something else; wrong to say heavier objects must fall faster than lighter ones; wrong to say vacuums are impossible; wrong to say the universe was eternal; and wrong to say animal species are fixed and unchanging.

All these mistakes are forgivable. Aristotle did not fail to discover the workings of nature because he was careless or foolish. His problem, like that of his fellow Greek philosophers, was too much reason and not too little. He lacked the scientific method of experimentation and the radically irrational idea that we must test theories even if we already think they are right. It is no good blaming religion or superstition for the Greeks' scientific errors. And the central message of Dawkins's book, that modern science arose when faith was rejected for reason, is clearly wrong too.

Contrary to Richard Dawkins, Christianity has a central place in the rise of science. And he is wrong to imply that modern science was something that happened when clever men and women started to investigate nature with their blinkers removed. It was not the triumph of reason over faith. Scientific advance requires us to look at the world in a very special way, and Christianity provided a reason to start doing it.

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Creation according to the Greeks and Babylonians

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

In around 700BC, a shepherd left his flocks on the slopes of Mount Helicon in central Greece and travelled east. When he reached the coast, he took passage to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, just off the mainland. It was the first time the shepherd had been at sea. At Chalcis, the funeral of a local king was taking place and, as part of the mourning rituals, athletes were competing in honour of the dead. As usual, alongside the sporting events, there was a poetry competition. A later legend even pretended that Homer himself had entered the lists. The shepherd from Helicon did take part in the contest and performed his poem about the origins of the gods. His name was Hesiod and he won a bronze tripod.

The poem that Hesiod sang at the competition is today called Theogony. Together with Homer’s epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad, it is among the earliest surviving Greek verse. Theogony recounts how the gods were born, how they fought each other and how Zeus ended up as the leading deity. The story is a Freudian nightmare of fathers eating their sons and sons mutilating their fathers.

After a hymn of praise to the Muses, Hesiod began,

First came the Chasm, and then broad breasted Earth... Earth bore first of all one equal to herself, starry Heaven, so that he should cover her all about, to be a secure seat forever for the blessed gods.

Thus, for Hesiod the world just existed. It was not created and had no creator. The Earth simply sprang spontaneously into being from the emptiness of the Chasm (the Greek word is more usually translated 'chaos'). Here the gods, even the oldest, are of the world and exist only within it. Zeus himself is among the third generation of the gods. Despite being immortal and enjoying marvelous powers, he cannot claim any credit for making the world. He is as much part of it as the humblest insect. This must mean that the gods are comprised of the same stuff that the universe is ultimately made of. As to what stuff that is, or where it came from, Hesiod provides no answer. It is doubtful he ever thought to ask the question.

In the first episode of Theogony, the god Kronos castrated his father, Heaven, with a sharp-toothed sickle on the advice his mother, the Earth. Admittedly, Heaven deserved it. He had imprisoned all his previous children in a cavern deep within the Earth, which she found mightily uncomfortable.

Kronos himself, now ruler of the gods, knew he was destined to be overthrown by one of his children. He attempted to curtail this fate by swallowing them all at birth. His wife, the goddess Rhea, grew angry with this behaviour, and substituted a large rock for her youngest son Zeus. Kronos gulped down the boulder without even noticing the subterfuge. Zeus was brought up in secret on the island of Crete. On reaching maturity, he castrated Kronos and became king of the gods himself. Zeus learnt that a son of his first wife, Metis, would replace him. To avoid the fate of his father he swallowed his wife before she could give birth. So far, this desperate measure seems to have worked. Or at least, when Zeus was finally deposed, it was by the God of the Hebrews and not by the son of Metis.

All this raises very difficult questions about Greek religion. If Hesiod and his fellow countrymen really did believe that the gods, and Zeus in particular, were fornicating patricides with a sideline in cannibalism, why did they worship them? And if they didn’t believe this, how dare they say such things about the gods? Because, with the exception of a few intellectuals, almost all Greeks did believe in the gods and worshipped them sincerely. The amount of wealth that went into building temples and idols tells us that this was a genuinely religious society. Hesiod was fully aware that Zeus had deposed his father and eaten his wife. But he still expected that the king of the gods should be the guarantor of justice.

Classicists continue to argue over these issues. Perhaps the answer can be found in the way that a monarch is regarded by his subjects. They can distinguish between the sacred office of the king and the pathetic individual who might occupy the throne at a given time. Kings demanded loyalty not because they were good, but because they were royal. Maybe Hesiod worshipped Zeus because he was divine, not because he was Zeus. And if he had been deposed by his son, as was foretold, Hesiod would have had no qualms in transferring his reverence.

Much of Hesiod's material for Theogony came from the mythology of other Middle Eastern civilisations such as the Babylonians. But it is only since the original texts have been found in archaeological digs that scholars have realised the extent to which Greek myths have their roots in the East.

The Babylonian creation myth preserved in these tablets is usually known as the Enuma Elish after its first two words. For a long time, scholars assumed it must date from the early second millennium BC, making it far older than the Greek equivalent. However, nowadays many prefer a date of about 1100BC.

The Enuma Elish was primarily intended to celebrate Marduk, the chief deity of the Babylonians. Nonetheless, it has some key similarities to the Greek story told by Hesiod. Both the Babylonians and the Greeks imagined that creation sprang from pre-existing chaos or emptiness. In the Babylonian cycle, the chaos was called Apsu and had some sort of evil personality. His wife was a great monster called Tiamat.

The initial creation is described as follows:

When the skies above were not yet named

Nor earth below pronounced by name,

Apsu, the first one, their begetter

And maker Tiamat, who bore them all,

Had mixed their waters together…

Then gods were born within them.

The reference to a mingling of waters sounds like some sort of sexual reproduction. In any case, as a result, Tiamat had several children who resided inside her. They started to make a racket and this led Apsu into a plot to murder the child-gods. Tiamat helped their leader Ea to kill him. The resemblance to the story of Kronos as told by Hesiod is obvious. However, the motif of god slicing off his father’s genitals is found in a Hittite rather than Babylonian source. These tales must have been carried westward by traders or settlers, perhaps, as Robin Lane Fox suggests, the Euboeans who hosted the poetry competition where Hesiod had triumphed. As texts produced by the Hittites and other near eastern civilisations are translated and published, it has become clear that Hesiod, Homer and their fellow poets had a rich stock of traditions to draw upon.

Ea himself had a son called Marduk, like Zeus a third-generation god. And like Zeus, Marduk did battle with the old gods, led by Tiamat. After the battle, Marduk celebrated his victory by creating the earth and heavens from her carcass. He then created plants, animals and mankind. The Greeks would have instantly recognised the Babylonian legends as resembling theirs. Both feature a plethora of gods engaged in an orgy of sex and violence. But neither the Greeks nor the Babylonians claimed their gods created the universe. Creation just doesn't seem to be a religious question. No wonder the philosophers of Melitus stepped in.

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Eric Hobsbawn was still an old Stalinist

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Over the Christmas period, The Guardian has been has remembering famous people who passed away this year. Unfortunately, Neal Ascherson's piece on Eric Hobsbawn is as obsequious as the obitories at the time of his death in October. Here's what I thought about that, from First Thing's On the Square.

The death of Eric Hobsbawn in October, at a grand old age of 95, has shown the British Left in its worst light. Hobsbawn was a lifelong apologist for some of the most monstrous crimes in history. For this, the British Establishment welcomed him to its bosom. He was professor and then president at my alma mater of Birkbeck College at the University of London. Prime Minister Tony Blair consulted him and advised the Queen to make him a Companion of Honour in 1998. His death has produced the predictable deluge of tributes. Labour Party Member of Parliament Tristram Hunt wrote a particularly oleaginous piece for the London Daily Telegraph concluding Hobsbawn was “a great scholar and undaunted public intellectual”. Blair’s successor and the current leader of the Labour Party, Edward Miliband, mourned the loss of “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics, and a great friend of my family”.

There are many who argue that Hobsbawn was indeed an excellent historian. Others might disagree, believing that historians need to work at the coalface of the sources, mining information and refining it into new knowledge about the past. Ironically, for such a defender of the working class, Hobsbawn rarely went near a coalface, metaphorically or literally. He was a teacher (by all accounts, quite a good one) and a synthesiser (again, a good one).

Leaving aside his academic achievements, Hobsbawn should have been notorious as the last of Stalin’s foot soldiers. He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and remained loyal even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when several of his comrades left. While Khrushchev’s extinction of the Hungarian bid for freedom caused a crisis among British communists, they had been able to swallow Stalin’s purges and the Nazi/Soviet pact of 1939. Hobsbawn has a particularly malodorous record in this respect. He wrote a pamphlet with Raymond Williams defending Stalin’s alliance with the Nazis, thus destroying at a stroke the justification for their support of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism. On the purges, Hobsbawn told the Canadian journalist (and later, politician) Michael Ignatieff in 1994 that they would have been a price worth paying for the Marxist workers’ paradise.

Eric Hobsbawn wasn’t the only Stalinist to rise high in the esteem of British academia and society. His fellow traveller, Christopher Hill, was another example. When he died in 2003, also in his 90s, encomiums filled the newspapers. In Hill’s case there is now little doubt about his significance as a historian. He was thoroughly second-rate. He did read the primary sources relating to his favoured period of seventeenth-century England but his reconstructions were so tendentious that historians of the period no longer take them seriously. My graduate research overlapped with Hill’s work on the subject of England’s universities, so I included a passage refuting his views in my PhD dissertation. My supervisor rebuked me for flogging a dead horse.

Whereas Hobsbawn thought Stalin’s murders might be justified, Hill simply denied they ever happened. In a television interview broadcast shortly before his death, he insisted that he’d been in Russia in the 1930s and had seen no evidence for the atrocities. And it’s true. He was there. Like many contemporaries on the Left, he enjoyed a carefully supervised tour of the Soviet Union’s wonderful achievements. When Stalin died in 1953, Hill announced “He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt.” The reward for his unwavering admiration for Uncle Joe was election as Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

How did these men remain fêted throughout their lives? In large part, a popular misapprehension about communism saved them from the opprobrium they deserved. Too many people still accept the good intentions of communists to make the world a better place, even if, in practice, it all went terribly wrong. This is a fundamentally flawed analysis. At its most basic level, communism must crush freedom. It is the forcible merger of the individual into the system. It is not a utopian system that went wrong, but the antithesis of much that is best about humanity. That the perpetrators of communism’s crimes thought they were acting for the greater good is no mitigation. In many ways, it made the situation worse. As CS Lewis observed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Stalin didn’t take in everyone on the Left, especially once his crimes were manifest. George Orwell saw communism for what it was and, in Animal Farm and 1984, gave us dreadful illustrations of its true nature. A one-time comrade of Hill and Hobsbawn, EP Thompson, became a fierce critic of Stalin while remaining on the hard left. Today, writers like Nick Cohen and Martin Amis keep alive the tradition of leftwing liberalism. And the Labour Party itself, when in government, gave no quarter during the Cold War.

So let us hope that, with Hobsbawn’s passing, we will no longer have to endure sentimental fawning over men like him: Men who can praise a society which would have packed them off to Siberia with alacrity and where they surely would not have lived into their nineties.

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Q&A

noreply@blogger.com (Humphrey) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 18:40:00 +0000

Happy new year everyone. I''m afraid - aside from a brief burst of activity at the beginning of last year - I haven't done a lot of blogging. I have however managed to settle into my adopted country, kit my house out with a load of cheap furniture and unnecessary plastic objects and - like the late historian John Keegan - adopt a very large and unruly Maine Coon cat which stands sentinel over my bookcase.

On the history front, I did come across a site called Quora. At first glance I wrote this off as some kind of Stephan Fry cult or a space for self styled 'entrepreneurs' to chest-beat about how much they know about 'freemium' and 'crowd sourcing'. However I can't resist the opportunity to delve into a few historical debates. Here's a few of my answers.

1) Would the USSR have collapsed if Reagan like polcies had occured earlier

Nope - the Soviets were raking it in from oil revenues in the 70s.

2) History of Science: Is the NoBeliefs.com chart comparing scientific advancement vs. time truthful?

No; it is the work of a half-wit.

3) What were the greatest events of medieval history?

There's quite a few of them....

4) Did Christianity cause the Dark Ages ?

The 'Dark Ages Boot Camp' is sorely needed

5) World History: Was it a right decision for Hadrian to surrender Trajan's conquest in Mesopotomia (Iraq)?

He had lost them anyway...

6) Why did Britain lose the American War of Independence?

Those damn colonials (and Euroscepticism)

If you get bored Tim O'Neil has about 230 answers on there which as always are worth reading.

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Labour is tough enough without the National Childbirth Trust

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Kirstie Allsopp, the host of UK TV show Location, Location, Location, has discovered that the National Child Trust (”NCT”) is politicised,dogmatic and scary. One of the NCT’s tutors has demanded that Allsopp be sued for describing the NCT as politicised, dogmatic and scary, which rather proves the point.

My youngest is now five, but I can remember all the NCT propaganda that we were subjected to. We were assured that home births are the natural way to deliver a child and that anything other than breast milk for your new born is a sin. But like Kirstie Allsopp, my wife endured two emergency caesareans. Both our children were delivered by a surgeon in an operating theatre. We had a friend who was determined to give birth at home. She too ended up in an ambulance with her child emerging into this world through an incision in her abdomen rather than the more conventional orifice. Thankfully, she gave up on the home birth malarkey for her next two children. Experience is a wonderful school.

It is not often talked about, but labour can be sheer agony over a long period of time. I’m not talking about “stubbing your toe and hopping around” agony. It’s more like a red hot poker in your nether regions... for hours and hours and hours. When you have seen what childbirth is like, the NCT leaflets no longer seem wrong-headed. They become downright sinister. The advice, to “welcome” contractions and that “pain is progress”, sounds like the preaching from a sect of flagellants. But far worse is the way that mothers who have had caesareans or epidurals feel like failures, as if they haven’t given birth properly. Worse follows once the baby is safely delivered, with massive pressure to breast feed. Again, if this isn’t suitable for a particular mother, they feel like they have betrayed their child. Breast milk remains slightly better than the artificial alternatives, especially for the first few months, but not by enough to get very stressed about.

Where there are no complications, home births are fine. It’s also true that delivering a baby at home is likely to be a less stressful for the mother. But it’s impossible to know in advance that a labour will go smoothly. Depriving the baby of oxygen for just a few minutes can lead to irreparable brain damage and that doesn’t seem to be a risk worth taking. So, I would discourage home births even though the scientific literature remains inconclusive on their safety. Certainly, I have little time for the earth-mothers who seem to think that “natural” birth is intrinsically better than taking advantage of modern medicine.

Luckily, the traumatic experience of giving birth almost always has a very happy ending. Welcoming new life to the world is such a great reward that women are willing to go through labour all over again. For that, men should be very grateful, while silently giving thanks that we don’t have to go through it ourselves.

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Dennett, Darwin, and Deity

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Several times in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the author Daniel Dennett discusses religion in order to argue that it is incompatible with Darwinian evolution. However, he tries to portray himself as a reluctant convert to this position. He begins and ends the book with a hymn and claims that it is "a song which I myself cherish, and hope will survive 'forever.' I hope my grandson learns it and passes it on to his grandson." I'm afraid I simply don't believe him. The space in between the beginning and end of his book indicates that Dennett has nothing but contempt for any and all religious conceptions. He's playacting, trying to portray himself as the loving parent who very reluctantly tells his less knowledgeable children that Santa Claus doesn't exist. But Dennett obviously delights in mocking religious ideas and those who would take them seriously. There is no such thing as a weeping iconoclast.

One particular passage stands out, partially because Alvin Plantinga has recently commented on it in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, writing that "I'm sorry to say this is about as bad as philosophy (well, apart from the blogosphere) gets." So I would like to take a closer look at it. Dennett's passage is below, in red font, with my comments interspersed (like I did here). Note that by doing so, I am, however, putting it on the blogosphere and therefore Plantinga's qualifier is no longer necessary.

In the passage, Dennett is specifically discussing the origin of genetic information. This, allegedly, cannot be explained in a Darwinian fashion, since evolution only comes into play once this information is already in place. It is a precondition for evolution, and so cannot itself be explained by evolution. (Again: allegedly.) The probability that all of the parts that make up the simplest possible living being is so remote that it is effectively impossible by natural processes.

The probability is Vanishing indeed -- next to impossible.

First point: Dennett decides to capitalize the words Vast and Vanishing in order to draw attention to them. I found this a little silly. He also uses the word "kazillion" a disturbing number of times.

And it looks at first as if the standard Darwinian response to such a challenge could not as a matter of logic avail us, since the very preconditions for its success -- a system of replication with variation -- are precisely what only its success would permit us to explain. Evolutionary theory appears to have dug itself into a deep pit, from which it cannot escape. Surely the only thing that could save it would be a skyhook!

"Skyhook" is Dennett's name for any mind-first argument or claim, in contrast to a "crane" which explains things in a matter-first manner. Anything that ultimately suggests that mind precedes matter -- even if it only suggests it to Dennett -- is a skyhook, and such explanations are ruled out of court a priori. Of course, Dennett doesn't say this, since it would be inconsistent on his part, but he makes clear that any such explanation is disallowed, regardless of whatever merits it may have. Of course, calling such explanations skyhooks is an attempt to mock the very idea. The imagery he compares it to is deus ex machina solutions, where some god swoops in from on high (the sky) and solves the problem with a wave of his or her hand (the hook).

This was Asa Gray's fond hope, and the more we have learned about the intricacies of DNA replication, the more enticing this idea has become to those who are searching for a place to bail out science with some help from religion. One might say that it has appeared to many to be a godsend. Forget it, says Richard Dawkins:

What follows is an extended quote from Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, wherein he makes a similar argument to what he spends an entire chapter on in The God Delusion.

Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the day-to-day succession of evolutionary events, maybe he did not frame the tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set up the original machinery of replication and replicator power, the original machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible.

This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. ... But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself.

I suspect that, at this point, Dennett may regret having sanctioned Dawkins's argument as it has been sent through the ringer in devastating fashion since the publication of The God Delusion. I have heard it referred to as one of the worst arguments every posited. To just make one point that I've made before (here and here): traditionally the God of monotheism is conceived as being the simplest of all beings. In fact, this has been one of the central doctrines throughout Christian history: divine simplicity. It's not as accepted among philosophers of religion as it used to be, but even those who reject do not claim that God is complex, only that he is not as absolutely simple as was traditionally argued. Dawkins -- and Dennett by proxy -- are completely unaware of this major doctrine. Since a material intelligence is composed of many parts, and is therefore complex (in a sense), they assume that an immaterial intelligence must also be complex -- and the greater the intelligence, the greater the complexity. It's difficult to take this seriously: what are the parts that an omniscient God would be composed of? Is he composed of an infinite number of God-bits? Isn't it obvious that the issue of complexity does not transfer over from material beings to immaterial beings? Of course, Dawkins and Dennett would deny that an immaterial being (much less an immaterial intelligence) could exist, but that's irrelevant. The point they are trying to make here is that the traditional concept of God as an immaterial intelligence requires said God to be more complex than what it explains, and this is obviously false. Dawkins and Dennett don't understand what they are criticizing. They simply don't have enough information to justify even having an opinion, much less expressing it as vociferously as they do.

As Dawkins goes on to say, "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." This is one of the key strengths of Darwin's idea and the key weakness of the alternatives. In fact, I once argued, it is unlikely that any other theory could have this strength:

It's not evident that evolution explains in general how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity. Evolution is about biological organisms changing with respect to time. Dennett (and Dawkins) extend it into non-biological realms. Of course Dennett doesn't just assume this, he explains at length why he thinks this is a valid procedure, but it should be noted that it's a very contentious point. And Darwin certainly did not apply it this way: indeed, Darwin thought "the Universe is not the result of chance." What follows is a quote from an earlier essay by Dennett that was republished in Brainstorms.

Darwin explains a world of final causes and teleological laws with a principle that is, to be sure, mechanistic but -- more fundamentally -- utterly independent of "meaning" or "purpose". It assumes a world that is absurd in the existentialist's sense of the term: not ludicrous but pointless, and this assumption is a necessary condition of any non-question-begging account of purpose. Whether we can imagine a non-mechanistic but also non-question-begging principle for explaining design in the biological world is doubtful; it is tempting to see the commitment to non-question-begging accounts here as tantamount to a commitment to mechanistic materialism, but the priority of these commitments is clear. ... One argues: Darwin's materialistic theory may not be the only non-question-begging theory of these matters, but it is one such theory, and the only one we have found, which is quite a good reason for espousing materialism.

I haven't read this essay in its entirety, but Dennett brings the issue of question-begging explanations into play in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Skyhooks are question-begging and cranes are non-question-begging. In the quote above, mechanistic explanations are (or at least can be) non-question-begging, while non-mechanistic explanations are not (it is "doubtful" that any such explanation is forthcoming). This is of a piece with Dawkins's argument: to explain the emergence of the organized complexity that is mind by appealing to a primal mind is question-begging since it uses the very concept that we are trying to explain. A non-question-begging explanation would not appeal to the explanandum as explanans.

Unfortunately for both of them Plantinga absolutely nails them on this. Mind is only the explanandum given materialism. The whole claim of theism is that mind comes first, and is the explanation of matter. Since mind is primal, there can be no explanation of it. Of course, there can be an explanation of a particular mind (especially of a mind that is composed of matter), just so long as it is not the primal mind that explains everything else. Perhaps theism is wrong about this, but Dennett and Dawkins haven't given us any reason to think so. Rather, they have assumed that mind comes after matter and so is what must be explained. They have assumed that theism is false in order to argue that theism is false. In other words, their account is question-begging -- exactly what they are accusing theistic explanations of being.

Is that a fair or even an appropriate criticism of the religious alternatives? One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general,

This is an astute objection. Dennett is assuming that theism is functioning as a scientific hypothesis, which stands or falls according to its explanatory power (and other factors). But of course, most believers do not believe in God because of its explanatory power. Some may use the concept of God in an explanatory way, but even then, the alleged explanatory power is not why they believe in God (for a vaguely similar point, see here).

Dennett also makes an interesting statement here: "the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general." Failing to meet the standards of science does not mean that something fails to be rational. Science is a subcategory of rationality. To insist that theism must meet scientific standards is to ignore this distinction. I say this is interesting because Dennett is going to ignore this distinction, the very distinction he just made.

Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith.

Testing is the hallmark of scientific knowledge, but it is not the hallmark of "rational thought in general." One reason for this is that the suggestion that testing is a requirement for all rational thought is not itself testable and so fails to be rational. The suggestion is self-referentially incoherent.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.

Here it becomes obvious that Dennett is confused. He is apparently thinking that if something cannot be supported by purely rational considerations it is therefore not rational. But, as C. S. Lewis put it in Miracles, "Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, 'Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses.'" When theologians and philosohers of religion say that faith is "beyond" reason, they are saying it in the same way that knowledge of the cat's presence in the linen-cupboard is beyond reason. To say it's beyond reason is not to say that it contradicts reason. There's nothing contrary to reason about the cat being in the cupboard. It is not irrational, it is just not something that we argue to on purely rational grounds (given a particular definition of "rational"). There are other elements involved. That's all. And of course, if he weren't so dead-set on mocking faith as irrational, Dennett would agree to this. His philosophy is heavily indebted to science, and science is empirical, it requires information beyond reason, where we have to "Go and look."

It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!"

Right, because if something is not a matter of pure reason, then it is irrational. Except evolution itself is not a matter of pure reason, it depends on observation like all scientific discoveries. So substitute "evolution" for "God" in Dennett's response (which, to his credit, he recognizes as rude) and see if you still think the objection has any force. Assuming you thought it did in the first place. Dennett's not only playing tennis without a net, he's playing it without a racket. And a ball. (And an opponent, since I doubt there's anyone who does philosophical theology in the manner he suggests.)

If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything,

So if something is beyond reason, it is completely arbitrary, "and anybody can say anything." But we can imagine Dennett responding to an evolutionist in the same way, since evolution, again, is not a matter of pure reason, but something we have to deduce from observation: we have to "Go and look" to see if it is true.

This also raises a point I've made before and will probably make again: supernatural explanations are not necessarily ad hoc or contrived. Often they are, no doubt. But not always. The idea here is that if we are allowed to appeal to supernatural causes, it would be a slippery slope, since we then could appeal to them in any situation to explain anything and everything. But if we have specific reasons for positing a supernatural cause or explanation, then it isn't ad hoc, whatever other failings you may think it has. So it's not a slippery slope to allow supernatural causation to have a seat at the table. Dennett doesn't say that it is, but I suspect it was at the back of his mind since it's a common enough claim (but of course this is speculative on my part).

a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

You know, the thing that irritates me most about this is that Dennett's whole project is the reduction of rationality to nonrational forces. He wants to explain mind entirely and exclusively in terms of the nonrational functioning of the brain (its physical, neurological, material elements). In so doing he is evacuating rationality of its rational force. This is emphatically not the same thing as allowing extra-rational considerations come in, for the latter suggestion does not remove reason from the game, it just adds other players. Dennett, however, is removing reason. For him to turn around and accuse those who make a significantly more modest point than his of being as radically irrational as his tennis analogy makes out is just hypocritical.

I recently heard Dennett give a lecture on Alan Turing, where he said Turing's genius was in recognizing that a rational act is composed of a bunch of smaller acts which are not themselves rational (nor are they irrational; they just don't take any degree of rationality to perform). He said that, prior to Turing, we assumed that comprehension comes before competence, that in order to be competent at something one had to comprehend what one was doing. But, Dennett argued, Turing showed us that it goes the other way: competence comes before comprehension. This is very consonant with Dennett's conception of evolution. We don't figure out how to survive and procreate before we actually do survive and procreate. We don't learn to behave in certain ways, we just do, and the behaviors which were beneficial were selected -- more strictly, propensities towards behaviors were selected -- and those that were not beneficial were not selected (generally speaking). Thinking that comprehension comes before, and leads to, competence is to appeal to a skyhook.

He took a few questions after his lecture, and I was fortunate enough to be able to ask one of them. I said if competence comes before comprehension, then why would comprehension ever arise? You have everything you need, everything evolution would select for, with just the competence. He responded by appealing to sociobiology, saying that at a certain point, consciousness arises (and makes civilization possible) because some things are difficult or impossible to achieve competence in without comprehension of it. I found this answer very unsatisfactory. Certainly, consciousness does have this effect, but I don't see how Dennett has the epistemic right to appeal to it. His whole point was that we don't have to appeal to consciousness and the comprehension that comes with it in order to account for competence. To simply jump ahead to comprehension and work back to competence when it suits him, when it becomes difficult to explain competence without it, is to appeal to one of those skyhooks he otherwise decries. I still don't see the answer to my question: if Dennett is right that competence precedes comprehension, why would comprehension ever arise?

My general impression of Dennett's lecture is that he's a performance artist. Just as he reveals himself to be playacting in his writings, so he revealed himself to be playacting in his speech. I found it impossible to accept the character he presented in his lecture as his actual persona. Of course I could be wrong; I may have been biased by reading accounts like this. But completely independent of his philosophical positions, the man strikes me overwhelmingly as a sophist.

Anyway, to return to my main point, Dennett is arguing that rationality consists of behaviors that are not chosen for rational reasons. For him to then mock his interlocutors as playing tennis without "the net of rational judgment" in place is a bit much. By his own standards, there is no net.

Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play.

This passage confuses me, because Dennett seems to be saying that we have to provide an explanation in terms of pure reason of why faith is not a matter of pure reason (again, given a particular definition of "reason"). He seems to be demanding that the claim be self-referentially inconsistent. On the other hand, perhaps he just means that the extra-rational elements of faith not be irrational, that being beyond reason does not mean that it contradicts reason. If this is all he means (but I don't think it is), I have good news for him: this is precisely how faith has generally been conceived. In the same way, empirical beliefs are an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, since they are not arrived at by pure reason (they require us to "Go and look"); memory beliefs are an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, since they are not arrived at by pure reason; belief in other minds is an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, since it is not arrived at by pure reason; etc. (For that matter, reason is not arrived at by pure reason; you can't give a reasoned account of why we should trust reason, since any such account would be circular.)

In fact, this is the whole point of Plantinga and others. Plantinga's first book, God and Other Minds, compared belief in God to belief in other minds, and argued that the objections to one would apply equally to the other. Since you'd have to be a lunatic to deny the existence of other minds, the objections to belief in God don't work either. In Warranted Christian Belief (which he says functions as a sequel to both God and Other Minds and Warrant and Proper Function) he argues that there is a cognitive faculty, the sensus divinitatis, that causes us to immediately (i.e., non-inferentially) form beliefs about God when faced with certain circumstances. In the same way, we form beliefs about the physical world when faced with certain circumstances: I see a tree before me and form the belief, "There's a tree." I don't reason to this belief -- my senses indicate that a tree is before me; my senses are generally reliable; therefore there is probably a tree before me -- I just immediately form the belief. In fact, it would be irrational if I didn't. Of course, Plantinga may be wrong about this, but that has to be argued. Dennett doesn't even address it.

I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of geting to the truth,

You can't give a reasoned ground for taking sensory beliefs seriously as a way of getting to the truth. Or memory beliefs. Or belief in other minds. (Or reason.) In order to give a reasoned ground for taking sensory beliefs thusly, you would have to have evidence that your sensory beliefs are generally reliable. But how could you get such evidence? Because other people corroborate what your senses tell you? But you only know that these people are telling you, "Yes there's a tree in front of you" if your sensory beliefs are reliable. In other words, you have to presuppose that your sensory beliefs are reliable in order to obtain evidence that your sensory beliefs are reliable.

The point being that such beliefs are innocent until proven guilty. We do not have to provide evidence that they are reliable before we take them to be reliable. The burden of proof is on the one who demands that these beliefs be established via reason before they be taken to be reliable. Otherwise you get caught in an infinite regress: you have to have a reasoned ground that some class of beliefs is reliable; but then you have to have a reasoned ground that the reasoned ground in question is reliable; and then a reasoned ground of the reasoned ground of the reasoned ground; etc.

The claim of Plantinga, Alston, Wolterstorff, and others is that belief in God is in a similar position. It is innocent until proven guilty, and so the believer does not have to provide a reason for believing in God, anymore than she has to provide a reason for believing that there are other minds or that the physical world exists. This is a controversial claim, but again, Dennett doesn't even address it.

and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously).

Again, I don't mean any disrespect, but I simply don't believe Dennett considers this a worthy function or that he takes it seriously.

But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify.

Why not? I expect him to go along with my defense of sensory beliefs and memory beliefs as paths to truth, even though they cannot be established by appeal to reason alone. Putting religious beliefs into the same category as these other beliefs is certainly controversial, but Dennett doesn't give us any reason to think that there is a category at all. Since his philosophy is dependent on science and science is dependent on observation, which cannot be established by reason alone, this is inconsistent.

Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.

"Abandon reason"? Who's abandoning reason? Am I abandoning reason when I realize that I have to "Go and look" to see if the cat's in the cupboard? Once again we see that Dennett is just confused about what the claim is: there is nothing in reason that tells us that we must rely exclusively on reason and not also on, say, our senses or memories. Indeed, it would be unreasonable to to reject these sources of information.

You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land?

This, and what follows, are what Plantinga called "as bad as philosophy gets." I think Plantinga's overstating the case. Dennett is certainly guilty of extremely sloppy thinking -- of not playing with the net up -- but philosophers have blind spots just as much as laymen do. I suspect that since Plantinga has been engaged in this subject for the last half century or so, he doesn't suffer a fool who comments on it in ignorance.

I don't really need to say anything more about Dennett's story about the murder trial. It's premised on the idea that reason is the only source of justified or warranted beliefs, something which Dennett himself would never accept since he believes a) our senses are a source of justified or warranted beliefs, and b) reason can be entirely explained in terms of nonrational factors. Well, I can say this: he points to sources of beliefs (mere emotion, sentimentality) that are not reliable. But the jump from "not all extra-rational sources of belief are reliable" to "no extra-rational sources of belief are reliable" is not a valid move. And this should have been obvious to him.

Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice?

What if the surgeon disregarded his medical training because of sensory beliefs? For example, he sees that the person's heart is in the right side of his chest instead of the left side. Would you want a surgeon who, when faced with such a scenario, continued to operate as if your heart was on your left side instead of your right? To ask this question is to answer it.

I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement.

Dude, seriously? No you don't. You revel in holding people's feet to the fire. You delight in mocking people who dare to disagree with you.

But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here.

Once again, we see the pose: "I don't want to have to say what I'm about to say, but the seriousness of the matter compels me to." You know who else writes like this? Flat-earth creationists. I've quoted flat-earthers before who insist -- insist -- that they are merely following the evidence where it leads and they are just "seriously trying to get at the truth." That's what you say when you know you don't really have the truth, but want to manipulate people into agreeing with you regardless.

And if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this)

I'm not sure exactly what the issue is that no philosopher "has ever come up with a good defense of." If he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of the compatibility of science and faith, this is obviously false. If he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of faith-beliefs, such as that God exists, this is also false. Dennett may not think these arguments are successful, but he has not even told us what they are, so we (his readers) cannot tell whether the defenses in question are good or not.

On the other hand, if he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of the claim that there are extra-rational sources of belief (like our senses) that are perfectly valid, then this may be true, but it is irrelevant, since the claim is that we don't have to defend such sources. (Although the claim that we don't have to defend them has been extensively and adroitly defended.) If he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of measuring your words and not challenging people's dearly-held beliefs when there is no need to do so, then this may also be true but irrelevant, since I don't see how common courtesy is a philosophical subject.

or you are kidding yourself. (The ball is now in your court.)

Because . . . why? Do all the cosmological arguments fail? Why and how? Do we have to defend our senses and memories as valid sources of beliefs before we can trust them? Why, and how does Dennett avoid the infinite regress? You are kidding yourself because you disagree with Dennett, and nevermind why.

Dawkins' retort to the theorist who would call on God to jump-start the evolution process is an unrebuttable refutation,

Holy crap. Really? Does Dennett really think this? It's not only an unsuccessful argument, it is an obviously unsuccessful argument. It is question-begging (as Plantinga shows), it is premised on conditions that no form of theism accepts, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

as devastating today as when Philo used it trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier.

Hume's Philo lost that debate. Moreover, I'm not confident that Dawkins's argument is all that similar to Philo's. I'd have to reread Hume first though.

A skyhook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume couldn't think of any cranes, so he caved in.

Right, because Hume was known for caving in. Dennett is accusing David Hume of not being as intellectually bold as himself (just like he accuses other materialists like Fred Dretske). Moreover, the "problem" that a skyhook would not really solve is only a problem given materialism. And of course, we are not given materialism.

I'll stop the quote here and just reiterate a point I made above: Dennett is so ignorant of the subject he is pontificating on that he has no business even having an opinion about it. He doesn't have the first clue about the subject, and his "reasoning" about it is so faulty, so sloppy, so transparently feeble, that it should embarass him. Although I doubt it will.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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A salute to the London Library

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 19:03:00 +0000

We are coming up to the annual general meeting of the London Library and I’ll be attending in my capacity as a Trustee. Founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, the Library remains one of the leading cultural institutions of London. Its membership has always been an eclectic mix of authors, journalists, freelance scholars and the general public. Scattered among this potpourri of writers and readers, you find many of the greatest literary figures of every era since the Library’s foundation. Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Charles Darwin were all members in the mid-nineteenth century. Back then, the President of the Library was Alfred Lord Tennyson. Today, it is Sir Tom Stoppard. The formidable list of alumnae means that if you pick a book off the shelves, you’ll sometimes find it inscribed by the author.

Still, all this name-dropping isn’t really the point of the Library. After all, membership is open to everyone: just fill in the form on the website. There is none of this business of proposers, seconders and waiting lists. Contrary the impression sometimes given in the media, the Library is not some sort of gentleman’s club. If it were, it would be a singularly poor one. You can’t meet friends there, have a meal or even get a drink (although there is a coffee machine).

The real reason to join the Library is to gain access to over a million books, spread over eight labyrinthine floors tucked into one corner of St James’s Square, off Piccadilly. Almost all of them are on open shelves that you can browse until your feet ache from the walking. And when you have found the books you want, you can take them home. And keep them for months, unless another member requests them. There is a reference section, of course, but in relative terms it isn’t very big. So you can borrow many books that other libraries insist stay in-house.

While you are working at home, the Library provides remote access to its on-line resources including JSTOR, the OED, the Dictionary of National Biography and many more. Access to all this is almost worth the Library’s subscription of £37 a month on its own. And if you need a book, the Library staff will post it to you.

Of course, the serious business of writing is sometimes best done surrounded by the books you need to refer to. If you suddenly find you need to check the eighteenth volume of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (which you could have borrowed, but it is quite heavy) or compare the new translation of Newton’s Principia against the Latin text, it’s best to actually be in the Library. Luckily, it is an excellent place to work. There are many desks scattered around the stacks. Alternatively, you can sit, surrounded by others engaged in all manner of intellectual industry, in one of the generously-sized reader’s spaces. I wrote my PhD thesis next to John Julius Norwich as he consulted a formidable pile of tomes for his History of the Papacy, piled precariously on his desk. Wifi and power outlets provide the modern trappings for some wonderful interiors.

In all, I can’t recommend membership of the London Library highly enough. And, you’ll be participating in an institution with over a century and a half of literary history behind it.

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Please tell me there's more to this story

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:57:00 +0000

Italian scientists have been convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison for ..... failing to predict an earthquake.

There has to be more to this, right? Some exculpatory detail that makes this story not crazy?

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Talk tomorrow in Oxford and Minneapolis in November

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:44:00 +0000

Sorry this is rather late notice. I am speaking tomorrow 18 October at 8.30 in the Sutro Room, Trinity College, Oxford on ancient Greek and medieval science. The talk is a seminar for the Ian Ramsey Centre but everyone is welcome. Do drop by if interested.

I am also giving a Faith and Life lecture at St Philip the Deacon Church in Minneapolis at 7pm on 15 November. Again, this is a free public event.

Update: you can watch a video of the Oxford talk here.

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Dennett contra Weinberg

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 05:00:00 +0000

There's a relatively famous quote by physicist Steven Weinberg : "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion." I think this is an incredibly naive claim. I would replace "religion" in that quote with "ideology." After all, good people do evil in the service of political ideologies all the time. But that's a post for another day. Right now I want to point to an interesting passage from Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea that contradicts Weinberg's claim. It's from page 264 of my copy, the third page in chapter 10; the emphases are mine.

Anybody as prolific and energetic as [Stephen Jay] Gould would surely have an agenda beyond that of simply educating and delighting his fellow human beings about the Darwinian view of life. In fact, he has had numerous agendas. He has fought hard against prejudice, and particularly against the abuse of scientific research (and scientific prestige) by those who would clothe their political ideologies in the potent mantle of scientific respectability. It is important to recognize that Darwinism has always had an unfortunate power to attract the most unwelcome enthusiasts -- demagogues and psychopaths and misanthropes and other abusers of Darwin's dangerous idea. Gould has laid this sad story bare in dozens of tales, about the Social Darwinists, about unspeakable racists, and most poignantly about basically good people who got confused -- seduced and abandoned, you might say -- by one Darwinian siren or another. It is all too easy to run off half cocked with some poorly understood version of Darwinian thinking, and Gould has made it a major part of his life's work to protect his hero from this sort of abuse.

So Dennett not only affirms that science can lead good people to do evil, but evolution in particular can do so. Of course, Dennett and Weinberg and I would respond to this charge that such people are obviously misunderstanding science and evolution in such cases. But then I don't see why this defense isn't available for religion as well.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Fakes: Jesus' wife, boyfriend and brother's coffin

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:17:00 +0000

I have a post at On the Square, the blog for First Things magazine, looking at the Jesus' wife papyrus and some other notorious forgeries.

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Luddites and the internet

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 19:00:00 +0000

When I was young, Yellow Pages was ubiquitous. Businesses paid a modest fee to appear in the directory (or a less modest one if they wanted a bigger notice). The big yellow books of listings were delivered free to almost every household. The company brought together Balham’s plumbers with its inhabitants’ leaking taps; and summoned minicab drivers wheresoever they were needed at 2am on a Sunday morning. So Yellow Pages made a healthy profit by providing a valuable service. They also produced some outstanding television advertisements. No more. The internet has seen to that. Hibu, as the company is now called, appears to be on its last legs.

Has the internet destroyed the value in this once profitable company? It has certainly destroyed many viable businesses. And not just Yellow Pages. It has done the same to bookshops and it is beginning to eat into other retailers as well. So where has the value gone? The answer is that it has moved to you and me. We find it more convenient to do things online. It frees up time and saves us money. But our extra free time isn’t immediately monetised and we might not spend the cash we save. Eventually, we’ll reassign our time and money to more profitable activities, but that isn’t much comfort if you publish a telephone directory.

It was the same in the late eighteenth century. New machinery like the spinning Jenny and the mule meant that fewer workers were needed to produce the same amount of cotton fabric. People saw the machines as a threat to their livelihoods. And they were right. A few went so far as to try to hold back progress by force. My old friend Jenny Jones, a Green Party London Assembly Member, recently described the luddites as fiery and reasonble. And you can see their point, even if they turned out to be on the wrong side of history (although when household appliances made domestic service obsolete, no one seemed so worried).

Productivity is a good word. Businesses and governments strive for it. But basically, it means fewer people doing the same amount of work. An increase in productivity removes money from the pockets of workers and deposits it in the pockets of consumers (as well as companies’ coffers). The service sector used to be immune to this effect (which is why the number of jobs in the manufacturing sector always seems to be shrinking relative to the services sector). No one ever managed to automate salespeople or waiters. But the internet has begun to increase productivity (or destroy jobs, depending on your point of view) in the service sector as well. For instance, I’ve stopped using my firm’s helpline when I have an IT problem. Just logging into a chat room is so much easier while the worker at the other end can manage multiple queries at the same time.

But of course, this is only part of the story. Markets reassign resources, including workers, to where they are needed. We can enjoy our extra free time or work even harder if we want to. We can write blogs, play computer games and read to our children. The hole in GDP left by the loss of telephone directories is filled by App designers and delivery drivers. Companies invent things like iPads that we never knew we wanted or needed. Making things more efficient is ultimately good for all of us. Doing away with Yellow Pages increases the demand for other things. But we should not forget that, even though capitalism’s destruction is creative, the destruction is still real.

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Islam: the Untold Story

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 07:46:00 +0000

Tom Holland wrote and presented Islam: The Untold Story for Channel 4. The show follows on from his book In the Shadow of the Sword on the early history of Islam. Most commentary on the show has concentrated on the complaints and threats it has engendered from the Muslim community. Holland himself deserves a great deal of praise for tackling this subject. I caught the show on Channel 4’s internet service (a screening for journalists and experts was cancelled due to security concerns). I haven’t read Holland’s book, so the comments below are based on the show rather than his more detailed written treatment.

Holland takes a sceptical approach to early Islamic history that echoes the work of the nineteenth-century higher critics on Christianity. His thesis is that the Arab invaders who destroyed the Persian Empire and took over the Levantine provinces of Byzantium was not originally Muslim. Islam only arrived sixty years later when it was introduced to hold the disparate Caliphate together.

The early written sources for Islam are indeed scarce. So, what do we know? Professor Patricia Krone, the dean of critical studies of Early Islam, summarised the situation in Holland’s film. There is the Koran, which dates from the early-seventh century. Muhammad certainly lived about that time. But the Koran contains almost no historical information and exists in a vacuum. There is no way to connect it to Mecca (which it only mentions once) and no evidence of the Arabs being Muslims until sixty years after Muhammad died. Holland and the critics assume this absence of written evidence is evidence of absence and fill it in with their own speculations.

Let me say from the outset that I think Holland is wrong and that the traditional account of Islam’s origins, in its rough contours, is basically correct. We can’t trust the early biographies of Muhammad to be completely accurate, but alternative accounts (that Mecca was in Syria, or that the Arab invaders weren’t Muslims) are simply implausible. Looking only at the evidence presented by Holland in his show (which, you’d hope, is the best he’s got), his alternative hypothesis of a late adoption of Islam by the Arabs simply falls apart.

For instance, he notes that the Arabs initially worshipped at the Jewish temple. They were certainly monotheists, but not Christians or Jews. Early Christian sources have no idea what they were and they would surely have recognised a Jew if they saw one. But sixty years later, we are asked to believe that these Arabs became Muslims; that they did so right across there now vast Empire; and that no one else converted at the same time. We know the early conquerors made no effort to proselytise their subject populations. But a new religion coming from outside after the conquests would surely have led to conversions across the board and not just in a single narrow strata of society. Far more likely that the Arabs were Muslims from square one and that Islam spread across their new Empire as they conquered it, not following a couple of generations later.

In fact, the earliest record of Muhammad comes from a coin minted by a pretender to the throne of the Umayyads called Ibn al-Zubair. But, al-Zubair, who was based in Medina and controlled Mecca, lost the resulting civil war. So, Holland asks us to believe that the Umayyads defeated the rebel and then successfully adopted his new religion over their vast domains. Again, it is far easier to imagine that both sides were already Muslims and that the rebellion only prompted the Umayyads to advertise their religious adherence more widely. This they did with spectacular effect at the Dome of the Rock.

Holland also notes that much of the Koran is addressed to farmers. This is odd because Mecca was a trading entrepôt in the middle of the desert. There were no farmers to address. What Holland forgets to mention is that Muhammad spent much of his life in Medina (he is even buried there) and it was here that he made his first converts. Medina is an oasis city which had plenty of agriculture. Of course, the Saudi authorities have been industriously destroying all trace of early Islam from Mecca and Medina in their misguided iconoclasm. Many ancient mosques and monuments have been bulldozed and dynamited in an orgy of destruction that makes the Taliban look like museum curators.

Still, the traditional story of Islam’s origins is likely to be accurate in its main themes. Admittedly, a huge bundle of traditions grew up around Muhammad’s life, many of which are not true. These were culled into the received version of his biography and teachings between one and two hundred years after his death. Critical analysis of these texts is likely to give us a picture of Islam’s origins with more nuance than we currently possess. But today’s critical scholars have, like Christianity’s higher critics, gone too far in their scepticism. None of this means this isn’t a debate worth having. But non-Muslims need to be careful that they don’t gleefully turn it into a rod to beat Islam. This, at least, is something Tom Holland could never be accused of.

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Lukewarmism

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 18:10:00 +0000

England has had a cool wet summer. The relevance of this in the debate on global warming is pretty close to nil. Likewise, the cold winters in 2010 and 2011 didn’t tell us much about the long term trends of the world’s climate either. The data that does matter, the average world temperature records, show that temperature rose to about 0.7 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels in the years up to 1998. Since then, it has basically stood still. And not all the climate alarmism of all the lefties and greens on this Earth has managed to budge it one iota.

I’ve long struggled to articulate my position on global warming. Obviously, I’m a sceptic about the silly claims about tipping points, massive rises in sea level (we’ve had about 8 inches in the last 150 years) and extinct polar bears. The world isn’t going to see temperatures rise by 6 degrees any time soon, and if it does, it won’t have anything to do with us. But there is also no point in denying the temperature records that do show moderate warming in the last half-century or that carbon dioxide is part of the reason for this. Doubling the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels should lead to an increase in average global temperatures of about 1 degree. This means that we can expect some further moderate warming in the coming decades.

You can only reach the alarming figures of warming of 3 degrees plus by adding feedback mechanisms to the mix. The scientific justification for these mechanisms is that they are needed to explain the past. Climate scientists have found that to get their computer models to reflect temperature records from the last hundred years accurately, they need to add more factors than just carbon dioxide to the mix. Then they extrapolated their models into the future and declared, on this basis, that things would get a whole lot hotter. They might be right. But simply using a model that explains the past to make predictions about the future is scientific garbage. You cannot take a complicated model that you’ve tweaked to fit a certain curve and then rolling it forward. This is about as accurate as a predictive device as tossing a coin. Unfortunately, it is also human nature. We are very good at spotting trends and expecting them to continue. There is even a name for this: it’s called the gambler’s fallacy.

Back in 2001, the IPCC told us to expect rises in temperature of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees per decade. Since 2001, that simply hasn’t happened. Now, there might be good reasons for this tied up with long-term patterns that were not properly understood even ten years ago. But there might just as well be other even more long-term effects that could cause temperatures to fall in the next fifty years, or not, as the case may be. We simply don’t know. And until we have models that have been shown to work in advance of what they are supposed to predict, we can’t rely on them.

That’s why I am sceptical about predictions of future climate. You should be too. But that doesn’t make me a global warming denialist, since I certainly accept the solidly-based past temperature records. I also expect further moderate warming on the basis of the well-understood “greenhouse effect”.

So what am I? Matt Ridley, author of the excellent The Rational Optimist, has the answer. He calls himself a luke-warmist. And that is what I am too. As a luke-warmist, I accept the following aspects of climate change orthodoxy: the world is getting (a bit) warmer; atmospheric carbon dioxide is a major cause of this; and human activity has increased the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide from about 280 to 400 parts per million.

But thereafter, luke-warmists part company with orthodoxy. For instance, I do not claim that the world’s temperature was an optimum in 1970 (or whenever). Instead, I recognise from history that warmer climates have been beneficial in the past and this is likely to remain the case in the future. I reject forecasts of future climate change based on computer models that have not been shown to make accurate predictions. I believe it is abhorrent to encourage poor countries to use expensive energy when cheaper carbon-based alternatives would boost their economic performance. I believe wind power is an expensive white elephant and using agricultural land to grow biofuels a scandal (on this last point, I find I’m in agreement with many Greens). I note most anecdotal reports on the effects of global warming turn out to be false or misleading (from Himalayan glaciers to vanishing coral reefs). I note that the best way to reduce carbon emissions is to use more gas (thankfully there is plenty of it about and the fracking technology to extract it). And finally, I note that climate change propaganda is well-funded and pervasive (unlike climate change scepticism, which has to work on a shoestring).

In short, global warming isn’t yet much of a problem and is more likely to be mildly beneficial. If it does turn out differently, then we should adapt. But the current fad for slowly destroying the world’s economy by artificially increasing the cost of energy isn’t just stupid. Cheap energy drove the industrial revolution and much of the development that has given us such high standards of living today. The oil shocks of the 1970s caused two damaging recessions. Keeping energy affordable when we know the consequences of high prices will eventually be disastrous should be a much greater priority than preventing uncertain climate change.

Note: this post was amended on 14 September to clarify certain points. It seems that there are only two boxes allowed in this debate - denailist and true believer. I have tried to make clearer that I am neither.

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UK and EU: A Doomed Marriage?

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 19:00:00 +0000

With the Euro-crisis dragging on without any sign of resolution, even the most excitable journalists are beginning to get a bit fed up with waiting for nemesis. The most likely scenario is not a sudden collapse. The European elites are clearly willing to spend however many billions of Euros that are required to avert that possibility. They have also managed to convince their populations that such a collapse would be worse than the current impasse. So, crisis has become the new normal and we can expect it to drag on for many years. Europe will slowly stagnate. It won’t be until a new generation of politicians arise, without any commitment to the failed Euro-project, that a major change of direction becomes possible. The tragedy is that these politicians are most likely to come from the radical left or right, although in most cases the two polarities are difficult to tell apart.

This means that the UK finds itself shackled to a corpse and makes Daniel Hannan’s new book restating the case against British membership of the EU especially timely. He has called it A Doomed Marriage (and you can read an extract in the Daily Mail). The title comes from something he once heard about marriage guidance counsellors. They say, as long as the couple are still arguing, the marriage can be saved. The very fact of disagreement means both parties value the other’s opinion enough to want to change it. It is when they settle into silent contempt that the union is finished. And that is the attitude of the British towards the EU: icy distain. There is no longer even a token effort to put a positive case for rule from Brussels. Few think joining the EU has done us any good and, aside from a few harmless cranks (one of whom, regrettably, is deputy prime minister), British Euro-enthusiasm is dead. Particularly telling is the number of ex-Europhiles now claiming that they were sceptics all along. Our marriage with Europe has now got to the stage where the only reason we stay in is for fear of life outside . It is the equivalent of a warring couple sticking it out for the sake of the children.

Realising this, Dan has begun to develop a narrative for life outside the EU centred around our shared culture and strong trading relationships with the English-speaking peoples of North America, Australasia, India and (the honorary English-speakers) of Scandinavia. In parallel, his American bestseller, The New Road to Serfdom, warned Americans to avoid the mistakes of Europe. A Doomed Marriage catalogues the arguments that have been made in favour of the EU and systematically debunks them. We learn that we joined late in the day not because we deliberately stood aside, but because our constructive suggestions about what shape the nascent EU should take were ignored. Only when we ditched all our arguments and completely accepted the federalist model, common agricultural policy (“CAP”), external tariffs and the rest were we allowed to join. And yet, Euro-enthusiasts spent decades telling us we had to be in to have influence. After forty years, it is clear that our membership has had no influence at all. CAP still extorts money from consumers and third-world farmers, there is no single market in financial services (which the British are best at) and we have not been able to stall the constant flow of regulations from Brussels. To add pecuniary injury to diplomatic insult, we have been the largest net contributor to EU funds apart from Germany.

In his most shocking chapter, Dan explains how the EU has funnelled cash through charities like Oxfam and Friends of the Earth, to buy support. Millions of Euros are paid to these organisations who, in turn, provide useful propaganda. The same has long gone for Brussels journalists who are carefully cultivated in return for uncritical coverage. The EU has learnt the hard way that it is a waste of time trying to convince the public of its virtues. Referendum defeats in Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and France (all duly ignored) have put paid to that. Bankrolling pressure groups and NGOs serves the EU’s purposes much better. And there are now so many articulate people on the European payroll, it is hardly surprising that our elites cannot bring themselves to accept we are better off out.

The other main reason for Euro-enthusiasm that Dan identifies has been political tribalism. Never mind the arguments: the BBC, the intelligentsia and most politicians simply defined the EU as progressive, modern and moderate. They have dismissed the EU’s opponents as lunatics. Even though the sceptics have been proven right, it is very hard for the enthusiasts to admit this (see here for a pretty good example of Michael White both trying to claim he's a Eurosceptic himself and that Dan is nuts. White is refreshingly ignorant of Dan's politics and assumes he's a social conservative on marriage. Dan is actually a liberatarian supporter of gay marriage). After all, pro-Europeans would have to accept that they have been the lunatics all along and they have been the ones running the asylum.

Dan’s short book eloquently sets out what is wrong with the EU and our relationship with it. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Britain’s marriage to Brussels isn’t just doomed, it is abusive.

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Defining Ignorance

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:57:00 +0000

In the comments to a recent post, Tim argued that agnosticism should be defined according to its provenance in T.H. Huxley. By agnosticism, Huxley meant the claim that no one can know if God exists because God is inherently unknowable. I argued in the comments that the term agnosticism is much more diverse than this: it can be personal ("I don't know") or universal ("no one knows"), it can be diffident ("we don't know") or assertive ("we can't know"), it can relate to the object ("it can't be known") or the subject ("we're incapable of knowing"). Tim argued to the contrary that while agnosticism has taken on these colloquial meanings, its technical meaning is Huxley's definition, and we should stick with the technical definition because appealing to colloquial definitions is a recipe for disaster.

The problem with this is that Tim is wrong. I'm giving the technical definition of agnosticism. Tim thinks this is due to creeping colloquialism but he's simply incorrect. Here's why: agnosticism is used by philosophers to denote the withholding of belief in any proposition. If you are unpersuaded that there is life elsewhere in the universe but don't actively disbelieve it, you are agnostic about it, you withhold belief. If you think the evidence for string theory is lacking but think it is very possible that forthcoming evidence may shore up the gaps you are agnostic about it. This may also be how it is used colloquially, but that doesn't mean it's not also the technical definition.

Can we say that agnosticism means one thing when it bears on knowledge in general but something else when it bears on knowledge of God? Well we could but that's not how it's used by philosophers (not to mention the fact that using any term in such a way would be a recipe for disaster if anything would be). For example, agnosticism about God's existence can refer to an individual's claim to not know one way or the other or to the universal claim that no one really knows. I've heard this distinction referred to as subjective/objective, personal/universal, individual/general, but regardless this is a real distinction made by philosophers regarding agnosticism about God's existence. (In a debate William Lane Craig once called it ordinary agnosticism vs. ornery agnosticism.) To insist that the technical use of this term should be abandoned in favor of how it was originally conceived is incorrect. Of course we shouldn't read our definition of agnosticism back into Huxley's writings, it just means that regardless of how a term originated, its technical definition is determined by how it is used in technical discussions. I don't know if this is considered a linguistic fallacy -- treating a term's original meaning as its technical definition -- but it strikes me as one. It's a close cousin to the root fallacy where one defines the meaning of a term according to the parts that make it up as well as the fallacy of semantic obsolescence. Perhaps we can call it the fallacy of provenance.

Part of the problem is that Tim tried to define knowledge in an absolute way: "No-one can definitively know if something exists or not, unless they are omniscient." I presume his reason for this is that unless you know everything the possibility remains that one of the items you don't know would invalidate your claim to knowledge. But epistemologists know that knowledge doesn't work that way. The classical definition of knowledge is justified true belief but this has fallen on hard times in the last several decades. Regardless, whatever one wants to call the third condition of knowledge (or fourth condition if one wants to add something to justification) very few philosophers, if any, maintain that it requires the absolute assurance that only omniscience could provide. (Maybe Peter Unger would accept this, but I haven't really read his defense of skepticism.) Many epistemologists do make one of the conditions of knowledge be that one have a reasonably thorough knowledge of the object known in order for it to qualify as knowledge, but nothing like omniscience. Infallibilism is the view that knowledge is ... wait for it ... infallible and so would be in that general direction, but infallibilists don't make omniscience a condition of infallibility; far from it. In fact, as far as I can tell, the majority view among epistemologists today is fallibilism: knowledge doesn't have to be absolute or certain or anything like it. As long as one believes the proposition, even weakly, and the right conditions are met (and the belief is true) then it qualifies as knowledge.

The whole discussion was raised by the issue of burden of proof. Many atheists claim that only the one who is making a positive claim bears the burden of proof, therefore, they do not have to have any evidence or reason or grounds for their atheism. This doesn't really work since the claim that God does not exist is the claim to know something, just as much as the claim that he does. Disbelief is the belief that a proposition is false. Some atheists respond by saying "You can't prove a negative" which was the topic of the post (quick answer: of course you can). So the atheist has to shoulder his share of the burden of proof. Some atheists respond further by redefining atheism to mean the absence of belief in God rather than disbelief. Disbelief is hard atheism, lacking a belief is soft atheism. I've written about that before too: I understand what belief means; I understand what disbelief means. I also understand what the withholding of belief (i.e. agnosticism) means. Further, I understand what it would mean to have no conception of something: prior to hearing about Russell's orbiting teapot or the flying spaghetti monster I had no conception of them. I could see calling this last case "lacking a belief," but this doesn't help the soft atheist since he has obviously heard of the concept of God. Once I've heard of a concept I no longer lack a belief in it: I believe, disbelieve, or withhold belief in it. So I asked Tim, as I've asked others, to define what lacking a belief in God means and how it differs from belief (theism), disbelief (atheism), and withholding belief (agnosticism). Tim, much to his credit, offered the first response to this I've ever received: he said it seemed to be closer to withholding belief. The problem is that this is not atheism, it is agnosticism. Hence the discussion. I kind of suspect that soft atheists disbelieve in God, but weakly; they're right on the border of being agnostic but leaning towards disbelief. But they insist that's not what they mean, they mean they lack a belief -- a concept I can't get them to define.

The believer must shoulder the burden of proof, but so must the disbeliever, the one who believes that the proposition up for grabs is false. I, for example, disbelieve in Russell's orbiting teapot and the flying spaghetti monster. I must therefore shoulder the burden of proof, I must supply a justification or reason for my belief that these proposals are false. I've written about this before too: The reason why I don't believe these claims -- and the reason why everyone else doesn't believe them either -- is because they are completely ad hoc. The more ad hoc, or contrived, a claim is, the less likely it is true. As I wrote before, "The degree to which it is ad hoc is the degree to which it is implausible. This is particularly evident with the absurdly ad hoc propositions mentioned above: we react against such suggestions because they are completely contrived. It's not merely that we have no reason to think they are true; we think, for whatever reason, that they are just "made up," and this is a specific reason to think they are not true." Of course, these ideas were originally conceived in order to try to compare them to belief in God, and to show that, just as the rational response to the orbiting teapot and spaghetti monster is to disbelieve them until we have evidence for them, so the rational response to God is to disbelieve until we have evidence. Obviously this attempt fails: the concept of God is not inherently ad hoc, it has been present in all cultures in all times. Of course the concept of God can be used in an ad hoc way, as can other concepts (Marxists, for example, use economics in an ad hoc way), but this does not mean that the concept itself is ad hoc.

Only the withholder of belief, the agnostic, does not have to bear any burden of proof, because he is not believing or asserting anything (and of course the one who has never heard of the concept does not bear the burden of proof for it). Soft atheism strikes me as an attempt to get the negative position of the atheist and the burdenfree position of the agnostic. It looks like an attempt to disbelieve in God without having to go through all the rigmarole of having any burden of proof placed upon one's shoulders. Until I hear a definition of lacking a belief that is distinct from disbelief and withholding belief, I see no reason to question this impression.

Let me just conclude by reiterating something I posted on Agent Intellect: "Agnostic" is the Greek-based term for someone with no knowledge. The Latin-based term is "ignoramus."

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God particle found

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 10:00:00 +0000

This is so cool. The Higgs-Boson particle has been discovered.

In physics terms, evidence for a new particle requires a “3-sigma” measurement, corresponding to a 1-in-740 chance that a random fluke could explain the observations, and a claim of discovery requires a 5-sigma effect, or a 1-in–3.5 million shot that the observations are due to chance. In December representatives of the two experiments had announced what one called “intriguing, tantalizing hints” of something brewing in the collider data. But those hints fell short of the 3-sigma level. The new ATLAS finding met not just that level of significance but cleared the gold standard 5-sigma threshold, and CMS very nearly did as well, with a 4.9-sigma finding.

So let the jokes begin:

-- The Higgs-Boson particle was recently found herding two of each kind of subatomic particle into a subatomic boat of some kind.

-- The scientists who discovered the Higgs-Boson particle announced today that its first commandment was "Thou shalt not misuse the name of the Higgs-Boson particle in the science/religion conflict."

-- Scientists have successfully detected a Higgs-Boson particle but were unable to determine if there were any others. There is one Higgs-Boson particle and the Large Hadron Collider is its prophet.

-- It has been determined that the Higgs-Boson particle used to be a lowly electron, but it died and was resurrected.

Yeah I know, they suck. Supply your own in the comments.

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Proof Positive

noreply@blogger.com (Jim S.) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:46:00 +0000

Last night I left a few comments on another blog that reported the news that a German court had declared it illegal to circumcise children under the age of consent. The comments on the blog veered to several side issues, one of which was condemnation of religions that practice circumcision. This led to a couple of commenters making the claim that atheism is not disbelief in God, it's merely the absence of belief in God. I've written about that before so I challenged them to define what the "absence of belief" is and how it's different from withholding belief (agnosticism) and disbelief (atheism as it has been understood historically and today). The "absence of belief" position was popular in the mid to late 20th century among some atheist philosophers, but they eventually abandoned it because they couldn't define it. Their motive for suggesting it was that if one simply lacks a belief then they (allegedly) do not share any burden of proof: the burden is entirely on the person who claims that God exists. If you assert that God does not exist, however, then you're making a claim to knowledge and so must shoulder the burden of proof just as much as the theist does. So the "absence of belief" position is basically an attempt to think whatever you want without having to go to the trouble of having reasons or evidence for it.

This led to someone else making a statement that is popular among atheist laymen. He wrote, "You can't prove a negative." I responded, "You can't? Why not? I can prove negatives. Who told you that you can't prove a negative?" Really, negatives are proven all day long and are very easy: you can prove that there is no full-sized elephant in your room right now. You can prove that, under normal conditions, if you drop a pencil, it will not fall up instead of down. These are perhaps silly examples, but proving negatives is one of the most common things to prove. Here's a more realistic case. Many scientists and philosophers of science follow Popper in claiming that science cannot prove anything it can only falsify. Science cannot prove "if A --> B" because A and B may just be occuring together by coincidence. However science can falsify "if A --> B" by finding an example of A occurring without B. If we accept this account then not only is it possible to prove a negative, it means that science only proves negatives.

Now I suspect the atheist who says you can't prove negatives is really thinking something else. Perhaps he's thinking that while you can prove negatives about observables you can't prove negatives about unobservables, like God. But of course this is false as well: you can prove that God did not just create a full-sized elephant in your room right now. The atheist may counter-respond that if we appeal to God we can make any absurd qualification we want. Maybe God just created a full-sized invisible elephant in your room right now. If you object that part of your anti-elephant proof is that your room is not big enough for an elephant, you can maybe qualify it further. But these attempts are non-starters. Absent the specific qualification that the elephant is invisible (or any other ad hoc qualification) the phrase "a full-sized elephant" by itself would mean that the elephant in question is visible (or lacks the ad hoc qualification). I think the people who make this objection are thinking something along the lines of: the concept of God has been repeatedly qualified to render it immune to disproof. It used to refer to a physical person-like object, but then when that became philosophically and scientifically untenable it was upgraded to a non-physical person-like object, etc. This seems to presuppose a naive view of the origin and development of religion which was common in the second half of the 19th century. Certainly, the theistic concept of God has developed -- as it should -- but it is not clear to me that this has been a series of ad hoc qualifications like, "Well, well, maybe he's just invisible!" At any rate, atheism is guilty of the same thing, so it strikes me as a tu quoque argument.

Or perhaps the atheist is thinking you can't prove a universal negative. That's a more respectable claim: to say there are no X's would seem to require that one had searched all of reality and determined that no X's exist. Even more, it would seem to require that one had searched all of reality simultaneously: otherwise, perhaps the X's were somewhere other than where you were looking at each particular moment; maybe they moved around so that they were always behind you or something. Unfortunately, this claim is still false. It assumes the only way you can prove something is via observation, that is, through scientific methods. This is scientism and scientism is a naive and foolish position. To make the most obvious point, you can prove things via logic -- specifically you can prove universal negatives via logic. If something contradicts a law of logic then it is impossible and cannot exist anytime, anywhere. If the atheist challenges the laws of logic we can simply point out that science presupposes the laws of logic. Once you've abandoned logic you've abandoned science (not to mention knowledge and rationality). However, this has a limited application. That's why this objection is more respectable: in many cases you can't prove a universal negative. It's only when the universal negative contradicts a law of logic that it can be disproven.

A third possibility: perhaps the atheist is defining "prove" in the logical sense. You can give an argument for something, you can demonstrate that something is more likely true than false, you can even show that it is very probably true. But a logical proof is an absolute proof. It cannot fail to be true (or, conversely, fail to be false). It holds of all possible worlds. But of course, this was already dealt with: to prove a universal negative via logic is to prove it absolutely.

Finally, I would just like to point out that the claim "You can't prove a negative" is a negative. So by its own lights, it can't be proven. This doesn't necessarily render it invalid, since there are many things we can know that we can't prove. However, it does mean, at the very least, that the person who claims you can't prove a negative must give us a reason for thinking why you can't prove a negative. This is likely to lead to one of the three possibilities above.

(Updated to add a point and clean up some awkward phrasings.)

Update, 12 July: On the definition of agnosticism, a point raised in the comments, see here.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Historians on their books

noreply@blogger.com (Humphrey) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:30:00 +0000

A cynic might conclude that - far from being one of humanity's greatest achievements - the Internet is in fact a seething mass of banality, pornography and contemptible dribble. There is something to be said for this view but occasionally you come across a site that redeems the entire project. One such is 'New Books in History' - a podcast series which interviews historians and talks to them about their latest work.

Highlights include Adrian Goldsworthy on the fall of the Roman Empire, Robert Gellately on Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, Norman Stone on World War One, Brett Whalen on Christendom and the apocalypse in the Middle Ages and Mark Mazower on Hitler's Empire. Probably the most engaging speaker is the chain smoking, Scottish Tory Norman Stone, whose pupils over the years have included Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, Richard Overy and Orlando Figes. You can find another one of his lectures here, this time on Turkey (where he is now based).

There's also Jay Rubenstien's 'Armies of God - The first Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse' which is very good & highly readable. Hopefully I will get around to posting a review of it shortly.

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