Religion and Problems of Scope

Certain theistic stories seem to have some problems of scope. Melville, in his “Moby Dick” (ch.10) presents one of them.

“What is worship? –to do the will of God- that is worship. And what is the will of God? –to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me – that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.”

Some theistic stories seem to have this problematic principle, also known as “The Golden Rule”, according to which one should do onto others what one wants them to do upon oneself. The sheer existence of different, incompatible, theistic stories, adds another problematic element: not everyone, even among theists, share the same story. But that is not all, there’s a third problematic element: theistic stories tend to be universal in scope. They intend to be true of everything everywhere.

These three elements, golden rule, incompatible theistic stories, and universality, get theists into trouble. The latter makes it so that no other, incompatible, story can be true. This, in turn, makes it desirable (when not necessary) to evangelize the mislead believers without, of course, misleading yourself. This evangelical obligation, however, conflicts with the golden rule. It seems as if it is inherent to the evangelical purposes that believers are not created equal: some are correct and some are mistaken. How can we fix these theistic stories?

What is Contagious about Imaginative Contagion?

In most cases, our pretense episodes are quarantined from reality. This is usually taken to mean that the imaginings have no effect outside of the pretense, particularly with regards to behaviors. But imaginative quarantine also fails systematically. Broadly speaking, imaginative contagion are cases where imaginings do have effects outside of the pretense, noticeably with behaviors. Tamar Gendler (2006) points to three sets of cases: visual and motor imagery, affective response, and social priming.

I think imaginative contagion is a really interesting phenomenon. There is a rich body of empirical evidence, and it seems like accounting for the phenomenon should impact our functional analysis of the mind. I am puzzled, though, about how exactly to interpret the phenomenon. What part of the mind is affected in contagion cases? Or, to put it metaphorically, what is contagious about imaginative contagion?

The Argument from Error

(surely this has already been thought by someone else, if so, excuse it)

In the Meditations Descartes says “if it were repugnant to the goodness of Deity to have created me subject to constant deception, it would seem likewise to be contrary to his goodness to allow me to be occasionally deceived; and yet it is clear that this is permitted.”

This made me think of an epistemological version of the problem of evil. I will present the argument, say some things abut it, and then wait for you to tell me whether you find it ridiculous or not. The argument goes like this.

P1 If (summing up) there is a three-O God then it cannot be that humans are constantly deceived.
P2 Humans are constantly deceived (by their senses, reasoning, intuitions, etc.)
C There is no three-O God.

If I remember properly, the usual reply to the “Problem of Evil” argument is that of Free Will. It is obvious that the same argument will not work here. The Free Will argument requires the possibility (or actual instances) of Evil, but not of error (or deception). One might be omniscient and still be free to take the dark side. So there is at least something attractive about the “Problem of Error” argument.

philosopher makes mistake

In “How to Define Theoretical Terms” (1970), David Lewis says the following. Take a theory T that introduced a new term ‘t’. Replace ‘t’ in T with an appropriate variable to form an open sentence R`. Lewis now claims that ‘t’ is correctly defined as follow:

t = the unique x such that R`

Note the uniqueness requirement. If there are multiple realizations of R` (that is, variable assignments that satisfy R`) differing in what they assign to x, then ‘t’ is denotationless. Van Fraassen (1997) argues that, provided only that T is consistent and has an infinite model, such will always be the case.

the illusion of superficially contingent a priori knowledge

I suppose the fact that I think it is easier to get examples of deeply contingent a priori knowledge than of superficially contingent a priori knowledge puts me in the minority. Anyway, Hawthorne (in “Deeply Contingent A Priori Knowledge”) cites Evans’ Julius case as a paradigm example of superficially contingent a priori knowledge:

(E) ∃!x(x invented the zip) → Julius invented the zip

(E) is contingent, I presume, because there are worlds in which someone uniquely invented the zip, but it wasn’t Julius. It is, according to Hawthorne, superficially contingent because the name ‘Julius’ has been stipulated to designate the inventor of the zip, so simply understanding the meaning of (E) puts one in a position to recognize that the actual world verifies (E).

The problem is that there are two readings of (E), one on which ‘Julius’ takes narrow scope with respect to the antecedent, and one on which ‘Julius’ takes wide scope over the whole conditional. I contend that only the narrow scope reading is knowable a priori, but the narrow scope reading is necessary, not contingent.

the (x) habits of highly productive philosophers…

so i’m not really sure this is a methodology question, but…

i’ve been suffering from some serious jetlag, which has got me waking up at 3am. i’ve been finding, though, that 5am to 7am is a fantastic time for me to write. however, for various reasons, i suspect this schedule will prove untenable in the long run.

this got me wondering about other people’s writing habits (both good and bad), and, more generally, any tips or advice other people might have about how to increase one’s productivity, get more writing done and increase the quality of said writing, spend less time writing random blog posts when one should be finishing papers, etc etc.

example: i’m pretty good at starting papers, but i suck at finishing them. as a result i have like ten drafts of papers that are about 70% done. but that always seems to be the point at which i decide that the original idea is junk, or untenable, or uninteresting. how can i become more of a ‘closer’?

in sum: what are your best (and maybe worst) work habits? how can a grad student, who is typically balancing teaching and coursework and more personal projects, maximize his or her productivity? what sorts of habits (besides the obvious: drinking) undermine one’s productivity?

input is greatly appreciated by me, and, i suspect, other readers of this blog.

Plantinga on Whether Belief that God Exists is Properly Basic

Alvin Plantinga argues for the following two claims (Warranted Christian Belief, 186-190):

(1) If God exists, then basic belief that God exists is probably properly basic.

(2) If God does not exists, then basic belief that God exists is probably not properly basic.

Let’s assume that he’s right about (1) and (2). However, from (1) and (2) Plantinga infers that

(3) To answer the question of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic, we must answer the question of whether God exists.

Here is what Plantinga says when he makes the inference:

And this dependence of the question of warrant or rationality on the truth or falsehood of theism [the dependence stated in 1 and 2] leads to a very interesting conclusion. If the warrant enjoyed by belief in God is related in this way to the truth of that belief, then the question whether theistic belief has warrant is not, after all, independent of the question whether theistic belief is true. So the de jure question we have finally found [of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic] is not, after all, really independent of the de facto question [of whether God exists]; to answer the former we must answer the latter. (191, bold added)

There seem to be two importantly different readings of (3)—and, similarly, the bolded line above. On the first reading, (3) is unimportant. On the second, the inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is fallacious.

personal and doxastic justification

In their “The Basic Notion of Justification” (Phil. Studies, 1989), Kvanvig and Menzel incredibly attempt to defend the equivalence (J) by appeal to the lambda calculus:

(P) S is justified in believing p

(D) S’s belief that p is justified

(J) (P) ≡ (D)

Kent Bach and my friend Clayton hold that (P) involves the notion of personal justification — roughly, the kind of justification that is a property of responsible cognitive agents — while (D) involves the notion of doxastic justification — the kind of justification that is a property of justified beliefs. According to them, these are distinct notions and so (J) is a false equivalence; there are cases where an instance of (D) is true of some person, but the relevant instance of (P) is not, and vice versa.

Kvanvig and Menzel give a counterargument which I think is wrong. They begin by assuming that the logical form of (D) is as follows:

x-phi + a-phi = phi

This is the mathematical equation for reconciling philosophical methods that Dave Chalmers put up at the end of his excellent talk that closed the ‘Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis’ conference here at ANU.

Dave’s talk raised some interesting questions about what exactly experimental philosophy is and what exactly conceptual analysis is. ‘A-phi’ refers to ‘a priori philosophy’, which Dave suggested better captures the traditional projects of analytic philosophy better than ‘conceptual analysis’ does. After all, it does seem as though many ‘experimental philosophers’ are engaged in conceptual analysis of a sort, so using these as dividing lines might be a bit misleading.

A distinction was also drawn between ‘experimental philosophy’ and ‘empirical philosophy’; my work on moral disagreement was cited as an example of the latter, since I didn’t actually do any of the experiments myself. The kind of work done by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, on the other hand, falls squarely into the former category.

Finally, ‘negative’ experimental philosophy was distinguished from ‘positive’ experimental philosophy; the former, Dave claimed, seeks to raise doubt about the philosophical status of intuition by finding disagreement in those intuitions, while the latter attempts to detect interesting and informative patterns in intuitions. I’m a bit skeptical of the stability of this distinction. My work on disagreement initially seems to fall into the former category, but I think it can also be argued that cross-cultural variation in moral beliefs is, in its own way, an ‘interesting and informative pattern’. So it seems that it’s possible to read one paper in both of those ways.

The overall message of the conference was extremely positive; the point made by lots of speakers (including myself) was that experimental, empirical, and a priori philosophy are all part of the same project, and that these methods can usefully complement one another. Thus while aspects of a question may require empirical or experimental philosophy- as in the case of moral disagreement, for example- other aspects of these questions may require more straightforwardly a priori inquiry — such as the question of whether expressivism is a conceptually coherent view.

Slides of Dave Chalmers’ talk should be available on his website soon, although they were not at the time of this writing. Those of you with access to GoBleen will be able to see the slides from my talk, ‘Moral Disagreement: Empirical and Conceptual Issues.’ In the meantime, feel free to use this space to discuss: what is at issue between experimental philosophers and their a priorist counterparts? Can’t we all just get along?

presuppositions and the a priori

I’ve written a paper proposing the following constraint on knowability a priori and arguing that it has some wide-ranging implications for the study of the a priori. You can see the paper for more on that. In this post, I’ll be concerned to motivate the constraint and to defend it against some looming objections. Here is the constraint:

(AK) For any p, p is knowable a priori only if, for any presupposition q of p, q is knowable a priori.

Here are several arguments for (AK), or something close enough.^[1]