August 2008 Archives

The argument in Filters and Reliable Cognitive Faculties (below) is probably longer and more complicated than necessary. The problem discussed there is pretty easily displayed, I think, by analogy. The following argument is analogous to O. Mirza's.

1. There is no ball in box B or it is inscrutable whether there is a ball in B. (From PT)

2. There is no ball in B or I am not capable of rationally accepting that there is a ball in B. (From 1, Def. 'inscrutable').

3. :. I have good reason to doubt or deny that there is a ball in B. From (2)

It is the inference from (2) to (3) that seems unjustified. Suppose I'm allowed to peer into box B. After looking closely, I can't tell whether there is any ball in B. The box is too deep or there's not enough light, or something along those lines. Mirza is right that I should say that "I am not capable of rationally accepting that there is a ball in B'. But I cannot also conclude that "I have good reason to doubt or deny that there is a ball in B". I clearly could not rationally deny it. What could be the reason to doubt it?

For perfectly analogous reasons, naturalists cannot conclude that they have good reason to doubt or deny that the process of natural selection included a filter for unreliable faculties. But if someone sees how this argument could be made valid, let me know!

[Cross-posted at Parableman] Open theists distinguish between two different varieties of their view. There are actually a number of ways to divide up open theism into varieties, but one particular division that open theists make among themselves is between the following two positions:

1. There is no such thing as a future to be known, and that's why God doesn't know the future exhaustively. It's not a limitation on God that he doesn't know everything that will happen. There's nothing to be known, so God can't know it. So God is omniscient in knowing all the facts about the future. There just aren't very much such facts yet.

2. God could know the future, but it would prevent our freedom, so God chooses to limit his knowledge, knowing that knowledge about what we would choose to do would make us unfree. God doesn't know all he could know metaphysically, but he does know all he could know given his choice not to know future free choices.

I'm not really sure these are distinct views.

O. Mirza has lately defended the claim in (C), indeed it is central to his overall argument for a viable EAAN.

C. Naturalists that accept the Probability Thesis have good reason to doubt or deny that the operation of the process of natural selection that resulted in the creation of human cognitive faculties involved a filter of unreliable faculties.

The Probability Thesis (PT) states the following.

PT. Either P(R/N&E) is low or P(R/N&E) is inscrutable.

The conclusion in (C) is supposed to follow from (A) and (B) for anyone who accepts (PT). But the argument seems mistaken.

A. If P(R/N&E) is low, then the evolutionary process responsible for creating human cognitive faculties did not involve a filter of unreliable cognitive faculties.

Let K stand for the sentential operator 'The naturalist is capable of rationally accepting that', and (B) states the following,

B. If P(R/N&E) is inscrutable, then ~K(the evolutionary process responsible for creating human cognitive faculties involved a filter of unreliable faculties).

It follows from (A) and (B), and the Probability Thesis, by disjunctive dilemma that,

D. Either the evolutionary process responsible for creating human cognitive faculties did not involve a filter of unreliable cognitive faculties or ~K (the evolutionary process responsible for creating human cognitive faculties involved a filter of unreliable faculties).

And we are told that if we have good reason to accept (D), then if we accept (PT), then we have good reason to accept (C).

As many of you know, I'm the philosophy of religion area editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  I'm always on the lookout for more articles in this area.  A list of desired articles can be found here. 

As the IEP's coverage expands to include most of the major issues in the field, I thought it would be good to begin a series of articles on influential contemporary philosophers of religion.  I'm thinking of (though certainly not thinking only of):

• Adams, Marilyn
• Adams, Robert
• Alston, William
• Flew, Anthony
• Hasker, William
• Hick, John
• "New Atheism," the (Dennett, Dawkins, etc...)
• Plantinga, Al
• Rowe, WIlliam
• Swinburne, Richard
• van Inwagen, Peter
• Wolterstorff, Nick

Given the overlap with existing IEP entries, most of these would likely be fairly short (approximately 4,000 words).  If interested in contributing such an entry, please feel free to send me an email.  Since all IEP articles are blind reviewed, contributing is also a good way to add to one's cv (as many Prosblogion contributors have already done or are in the process of doing).

I wouldn't normally post announcements here for the Pop Culture books, but things have been a little slow around here, and this editor seems particularly interested in philosophy of religion chapters (although for Dune it would have to be a little offbeat as philosophy of religion goes), so I thought it might help to distribute the announcement where people interested in philosophy of religion might see it.

DUNE AND PHILOSOPHY
CALL FOR PAPERS

Volume Editor: Jeffery Nicholas (jefferynicholas@gmail.com)

Open Court continues their Pop Culture and Philosophy series with a volume
on Frank Herbert's Dune series (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune,
God-Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse Dune) or the movies
based on the books.

Any philosophical perspective is welcomed. Particular areas of interest
include Environmental Philosophy and Ethics, Philosophy of Technology,
Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophical
Anthropology, but we strongly encourage you to be creative, and welcome
submissions from less obvious areas.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:
∑ Cloning: What is the Value of Gaining a Lost Love?
∑ Riding the Sandworm: The Place of Practices in Human Life
∑ Using Religion for Statecraft
∑ The OCB: Do the Monotheistic Religions Share a Central Core
∑ Religion as a Source of Civilization
∑ Environmental Literacy for Americans
∑ Water-price: To Whom Does the Earth Belong
∑ Seeing in the Dark Spaces: Essential Differences between Men and
Women?
∑ Identity and Place: Are we where we were born?
∑ The Butlerian Jihad: Can Machines Replace Man?
∑ Is Baron Harkonnen a Disciple of Machiavelli?
∑ Is Paul Plato's Philosopher-King: The Mentat as Thinker

GUIDELINES: Accepted proposals will bring philosophical concepts, arguments,
and/or sensibilities to bear on issues or ideas latent in, or raised by, the
Dune series. Essays should be jargon-free and appealing to an intelligent
lay reader who seeks to learn about Dune and its various connections to
philosophical ideas and traditions. Papers should be around 12 to 20 pages
total.

DEADLINES:
Abstract (400-800 words) Due 15 December 2008
First Draft for Selected Papers: 1 May 2009
Final Draft for Selected Papers: 1 November 2009

Congratulations to Jeremy and Samantha Pierce one the birth of their fourth child, Jewel Elisabeth Pierce. She was born at 10:36 pm on August 18, 2008, weighing in at 6 lbs. 9 oz. Jeremy reports that mommy and baby are both doing fine.

This is the last installment of the Prosblogion Reading Group. I've found reading these posts and comments edifying, and I hope the rest of the readers have as well. I'd like to thank Matthew for setting this up, and for the other participants--both posters and commenters--for their great thoughts.

Below I discuss Tooley's response to Plantinga's response to Tooley. Or, put another way, Tooley's "Yes way!" to Plantinga's "No way!" To keep my comments at a manageable length I've referred back to Trent and Andrew's posts, rather than presenting the whole dialectic here. But I've tried to summarize the dialectic briefly in most places. For more detail on the original argument or Plantinga's response, be sure to see the discussions of the last two weeks.

I'm just going to go through each section and briefly summarize the interesting arguments and offer potential responses on behalf of Tooley.

0. Plantinga's Warm-Up Exercises
Plantinga warms up by noting that that even if Tooley's conclusion that God's existence is improbable given the evil in the world is true, the conclusion would not be enough to show that belief in God is unjustified (or in some other way epistemically bad) because the fact that there is evil in the world is a small subset of our total evidence. This is a point he returns to in the third section.

I. Justification
In this section, Plantinga spends some time presenting problems with Tooley's evidential probability account of justification. He has two main criticisms. The first is that Tooley's account of justification is circular. His second criticism is that it entails that all necessary truths are maximally (and equally justified). Let's briefly look at those arguments.

The Circularity Charge
According to Tooley, epistemic justification for a proposition is a function of the evidential probability of that proposition. Plantinga seizes on Tooley's candidate definition of evidential probability as - logical probability relative to one's evidence.

Plantinga then pins an account of evidence on Tooley - Evidence must be whatever propositions one is justified in believing. And now we've got an account of justification that's circular.

On Behalf of Tooley
Tooley could resist the claim that one's evidence is whatever one is justified in believing. That seems like an odd characterization of evidence. Seeming states and perceptual experiences are often counted as evidence and those are not propositions that one is justified in believing. These things are not propositions that one could be justified in believing. Many would hold that they have propositional content. What's odd is that Plantinga seems to countenance seemings states as evidence in section III (p. 175). (Of course, Tooley may have difficulties working this broader account of evidence into an account of evidential probability.)

The Every Necessary Truth is Equally Justified Objection
The more serious worry that Plantinga raises for Tooley's account of justification is that it entails that all necessary truths are maximally (and equally) justified for a person. The idea is roughly that all necessary truths end up having a logical probability of 1 and so the evidential probability of any necessary proposition turns out to be 1 - and so all necessary truths are maximally (and equally) justified for me. But they're not. So, Tooley's account of justification is false.

I'll set this one aside and let the probability hounds sniff it out.

Plantinga then retreats a little and notes that perhaps we can get by with an intuitive account of justification and proceed. Let's turn our attention to Plantinga's criticism of Tooley's main arguments...

[cross-posted at Parableman]

I'm working on a chapter for the forthcoming Blackwell Philosophy and Harry Potter on the topic of destiny, and one of the things I'm trying to do in the chapter is distinguish between different metaphysical analyses of prophecy. I've come up with three, and I'm inclined to think that it might be exhaustive enough for the purposes of a popular-level work like this, but I'm curious if anyone here can think of any others.

Here's what I've got (and how I'm presenting it in the draft I'm writing):

1. They involve mere likelihoods. No one has access to the actual future, but someone might have magical access to information that's derived from what's likely. Given what's true about the various people involved, it's very likely that a certain outcome will happen. That means prophecies, even the ones Dumbledore is inclined to call genuine, are not infallible. They can turn out get it wrong.

2. They do not derive their content from the actual future. Rather, they make the future happen. When a genuine prophecy occurs, it influences those who hear it in such a way that they end up doing things that will fulfill the prophecy. This kind of prophecy is self-fulfilling in a very literal sense.

3. The seer has some intuitive connection with the way things will really happen, such that the words of the prophecy are true about a future that really will be that way. If it's a genuine prophecy, it can't be wrong, because its origin lies in the very future events that it tells about. In the same way that a report about the past can bring knowledge about the past only if there's some reliable connection with the actual events in the past, a genuine prophecy in this sense must derive its truth from a reliable method of getting facts about the future.

My understanding of J.K. Rowling's view of prophecy, judging by this interview and my sense that the Albus Dumbledore character represents her views when he discusses this issue with Harry Potter, is that she wants to treat Professor Trelawney's two genuine prophecies as the first kind, a kind of prophecy an open theist could accept.

There are hints in at least two of Dumbledore's conversations with Harry that he thinks something like the second kind is going on, but it's clearly not a reduction of prophecy to what happens in #2, because the characters in question (mostly Lord Voldemort) still make free choices and aren't simply caused by the prophecy to do anything the way some ancients thought Laius was caused by Apollo's prophecy to do what he did that led to Oedipus eventually killing him.

My argument at this point is that there isn't really a way for Dumbledore to distinguish between Trelawney's two genuine prophecies and all her vague predictions that can often be interpreted as coming true unless the genuine ones are of the third kind (because the pseudo-prophecies are of the first kind, and the genuine ones can't be completely explained by the second kind). Rowling doesn't seem to want to accept that, and Dumbledore is clearly with her, so there's a consistency issue here both for the character and the author. But my argument depends on the options I've listed being exhaustive. Is that true?

Keep thinking about evil! Meantime this panel discussion on Science and Religion features Quentin Smith, Al Plantinga, Richard Gale and W.L. Craig. Enjoy it, if you haven't already seen it. Enjoy it, even if you have seen it.

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but I wanted to go over my post with my summer Philosophy of Religion class here at Rochester.

First a preview for those who have carefully read the chapter, then I'll lay out the core argument for those who have or have not, finally I'll detail the objections in the preview.

PREVIEW

1. Premises (12) and (15) are more controversial than he lets on. It is hard to evaluate apart from the probability for one of God's existence.

2. re: Premise (16). There are oddities and worries about it--including the fact that the probability judgements seem utterly inscrutable. But the assumptions about properties are not unreasonable. I do think, however, that the a posteriori probability after taking into account the frequency of the tokens is different and relevant (he considers this objection but doesn't address it (at least not in my section).

3. (Most seriously) I don't think the extension from one evil to many (many) evils does much. For either they don't compound because they are not independent--due to being consequences of a common cause--or they do but not much comes from it due to the fact that if there is a defense/theodicy for one there is one for all.