Quote of the Week, 2014-12-31

An end is an object of the free elective will, the idea of which determines this will to an action by which the object is produced. Accordingly every action has its end, and as no one can have an end without himself making the object of his elective will his end, hence to have some end of actions is an act of the freedom of the agent, not an affect of physical nature. Now, since this act which determines an end is a practical principle which commands not the means (therefore not conditionally) but the end itself (therefore unconditionally), hence it is a categorical imperative of pure practical reason and one, therefore, which combines a concept of duty with that of an end in general.

III. Of the Reason for conceiving an End which is also a Duty, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, by Immanuel Kant

Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

This paragraph contains a basic logical fallacy. Given A(x) meaning "x is an action that leads to an end" and B(x) meaning "x is an idea of an object of the elective free will", the first two sentences make the argument (∀x[B(x)⇒A(x)])⇒(∀x[A(x)⇒B(x)]). This is the Fallacy of the Converse.

Moreover, the reality is that actions come not only from acts of will toward an end, but also from habit, and more importantly even from confusion. Sometimes we have an end in mind, but have no idea of how to proceed toward that end, except that we know the current state of affairs is not the end we seek. We then use our will to enact any random change, without any guarantee such action will put us any closer to our end (and indeed with the understanding that we may end up further away). Some might try to explain this as the change itself is the end of the action, a short-term end in support of a larger end, but this explanation is wanting, as change is the description of the movement between the current state and the end, and therefore can not also be an end unto itself.

One analogous example occurs with inexperienced chess players, who understand the goal is checkmate, but see no method by which to secure it. This results in the seemingly random movement of pieces. It would be a mistake to say that the end of the chess player was to move pieces about.

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Quote of the Week, 2014-10-15

There is not any superfine brand of knowledge, obtainable by the philosopher, which can give us a standpoint from which to from which to criticize the whole of daily life. The most that can be done is to examine and purify our common knowledge by an internal scrutiny, assuming the canons by which it has been obtained, and applying them with more care and precision. Philosophy cannot boast of having achieved such a degree of certainty that it can have authority to condemn the facts of experience and the laws of science.

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture 3

Retrieved from Project Gutenberg

Russell was a logical realist, in that he believed the principals of logic were basic facts; I am closer to being a fictionalist, in that I believe they are constructed by humans, for humans, and have been used to create a useful model that is simple enough to be understood and flexible enough to handle many things. So, I would agree with this quote from Russsell even more strongly than, perhaps, he would.
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A Maverick Philospher's quest for objective morality

Many theists believe there is an objective morality to be discovered. However, since you can't uncover such a morality in the same way you can lift a stone and find a pill bug, empirical systems are not use for this process. Instead, many rely on various works that they give implicit trust to, except when the advice of such books goes against their innate beliefs. Hence, we see homosexuals barred from military service, but don't see single women non-virgins barred in such a fashion, much less executed for being a single non-virgin.

Some attempt a seemingly more sophisticated approach of creating a morality based upon a few accepted notions and creating a formal system to reflect it. That's when you see people like the Maverick Philosopher examining the details on what their basic positions entail when examined in detail. Below the fold, I'll go into why I think this helps to pinpoint the inherent lack of objectivity in this construction of a moral system.

I'm not really concerned with the particular argument that Dr. Vallicella is making in his post, rather, I want to highlight what happens when he finds his argument is inadequate. In particular, he doesn't like the breadth of the conclusion of the argument, so he proposes a new starting point. That is, in creating this supposedly objective moral position, he changed his starting point to get the conclusion that he felt was the right one.

Now, I have no objections to this activity per se. In fact, this is one of the better advantages of operating strictly within a formal system. If the starting positions lead you to a situation you can't use, changing the starting positions is to be expected. If you are tracking the movements of ships on the surface of the earth, you don't pretend that the surface of the earth matches Euclid's parallel postulate; instead you assume that no lines (aka great circles) are parallel and use a Riemannian geometry. It will have the tools you need to look at ship movements around a globe.

However, the process of choosing these starting positions is strictly based on the conclusions you want to derive. That makes the starting positions arbitrary, and those positions will be carefully chosen so the results conform to the desired outcome. So, far from getting some objective morality that can be applied to all, you get a tailored morality designed to support a specific set of positions. Some of these systems, like natural law, were debated for hundreds of years before they were codified, and even then still generate disagreements around the edges.

When people come up with another method of knowing things that can exhibit certainty, reality, and demonstrability, that method of know may indeed lead to an objective morality. Until that time, there will be no such creature. All the construction within formal systems will not be able alter the shaky foundation upon which they rest.
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Is "necessary" more than just a word?

The Maverick Philosopher blogged some thoughts designed to offer evidence that there are necessary beings. Overall, the argument relies on the common co-mingling of the formal and the real, between the description and an actual existence. We've looked at such arguments before, (for example, in this post) and in my series reviewing The Last Superstition. Proponents of the supernatural go to a great deal of trouble to convince us in the existence of archetypes for the descriptions we use for things, because they wish to use those archetypes to cast some being as the thinker of the archetypes. Here, the archetype is "necessary".

Dr. Vallicella breaks his argument down in 6 parts, which I will address in six paragraphs below the fold.

The first part gives the general idea of the descriptions of "contingent" and "necessary". It provides no reason to think of these descriptions as having any sort of independent existence, just as labels we might apply to various phenomena.

The second part introduces a new description, concrete (defined as objects which are or can be involved in causal chains/lattices) and abstract (things that by their nature make them not causally relevant. Non-physical items, such as emotional states, can still be concrete as long as it is possible for them to influence things. However, the items offered for abstracta seem curious. The claim is that ideas like "7 is a prime number" or the set containing Socrates (i.e., not Socrates himself, but the set containing him) are abstracta. Yet, if "7 is a prime number" is abstract, by definition that idea could not have resulted in Dr. Vallicella, nor me, typing that clause into the keyboard. Under these definitions, there are no abstracta that can be discussed, because to discuss them is to have them participate in causing the discussion.

The third part makes the case that there are necessary truths, offering the example that "7 is a prime number" is a necessary truth. As I have mentioned before, this is like claiming that "the Fool's Mate is the shortest chess game" is a necessary truth. People set up the rules of chess, just like people create the number system. There is nothing necessary about the rules we used to create the number system; we can change them at our convenience. So, I am actually unconvinced that necessary truths exist. Nonetheless, I will grant that for the sake of the rest of the argument.

The fourth part has a discussion of what a truth is (a true truth-bearer), and how such a thing can exist, by pointing out that neither marks on a paper nor a brain inscription can be true in and of themselves. Rather, it is the interpretation that we give to those marks, or that inscription, that is true or false. I think the phrase "true thought-bearer" or even "true proposition-bearer" would have been closer to what Dr. Vallicella is trying to convey. After all, if a bearer could only carry truths, it would not need the redundant description "true truth-bearer". Another point of disagreement is the need for there to be a proposition bearer at all. Propositions don’t need to be born to be true, they merely need to be born to be seen as true by the bearer. Especially if the truth is necessary, it will be true regardless of the existence of a bearer. This is another attempt to take a description, in this case "true", and impose some sort of underpinning or instantiation to it.

The fifth paragraph notes that since the marks/inscriptions are themselves contingent, the truths themselves might not be necessary. Applying modus tollens and the existence of necessary truths, Dr. Vallicella arrives at the conclusion there must be non-contingent proposition-bearers. This is where the underpinning attempted in the prior part bears fruit within Dr. Vallicella’s argument, and why the argument fails to be convincing to people who distinguish between descriptions and instantiations of descriptions.

The sixth arguments attempts a reducito ad absurbum on the possibility that all truth bearers are contingent, by using the notion that all descriptions are instantiated to show that, since a proposition can be conceived in any possible world, there must be something to conceive it within that world. It fails to be convincing for the same reason, namely, that there is no reason to think all descriptions are instantiated, so there does not need to be something to think a proposition in any particular possible world.
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Would Cothran wear a coat inside a freezer?

Over at Vital Remnants, Martin Cothran has some fun (because, he is so very seldom serious) sneering at Josh Rosenau's comprehension of English, with gems like

Rosenau is not familiar with Latin, of course, but that is not really his problem. His problem is that he doesn't seem to understand English too well.

I've mentioned before that, for an instructor in logic, Mr. Cothran is rather incompetent at it. It turns out his English is not nearly sufficient to warrant his casting of dispersion on other posters, or maybe it's his grade-school-level-science that is lacking. I would hate to prejudge on that score, as Mr. Cothran is ignorant in so many areas that I would not presume to pick just one. More below the fold.

Later on in the same post, he presents

I had pointed out the record level of snowfalls (something Global Warming advocates said there would be less of because of Global Warming--when they're not saying the complete opposite) and I pointed it out as a subtle way of mocking their own process only using opposite evidence. And when the Warmers began lecturing me about weather not being the same thing as climate, I simply pointed out that if it wasn't for me, then it shouldn't be for them.

and

So let me put the implicit argument of my post in the form of a logical syllogism (And I should probably issue a warning, in doing so, about the possibility that Rosenau might once again try to imitate this exercise himself on his own blog with the usual amusing results):

If individual warm weather events are confirming evidence for Global Warming, then individual cool weather events are disconfirming evidence for Global Warming

But cool weather events are not disconfirming evidence for Global Warming

Therefore, individual warm weather events are not confirming evidence for Global Warming.

Now this is not tu quoque argumentation, it is the logical process called modus tollens. But then we are speaking Latin again, aren't we? To someone who doesn't know Latin--or logic.

Notice the slide from "the record level of snowfalls" to "individual cool weather events"? However, it snows regularly during individual warm-weather events in places like Nome (where even a warm winter day can be well below freezing), while I certainly experienced a few cold-weather events this year with no snow at all falling from the sky. The phenomena are distinct, and treating record snowfalls as indicative of cold weather is a non sequitur. Of course, that's a Latin phrase, so Cothran can obviously translate it. Unfortunately, he apparently does not understand its importance to logical thinking.

So, here's an example to help him out. I'd suggest he get a job at any local fast-food or convenience store (I believe he can stretch his intellectual capabilities that far) and stand in the freezer in the back (say, unloading the weekly shipment). It will not snow inside the freezer, I positively guarantee it. So, according to Cothran-logic, it can't be cold. How long will he be willing to stay in there without a coat?

Of course, this type of confusion is typical of the denialists, pretending that one sort of event is really another.
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Would Data be immune to woo?

Recently, there was a post over at Respectful Insolence on the possible anti-vaccination leanings of Brent Spiner, who played Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. In particular, Orac wrote:

I realize Data is a fictional character, but, even so, I wish that the spirit of Data would infuse the actor who played him and drive out the Malibu-inspired woo that has apparently lodged itself into his brain.

Naturally, thus leads me to the question of why we assume Data would be woo-free. Given that he is free of emotional responses and uses logic alone to formulate his world, will that suffice to keep woo out of Data's understanding of the world? What role does logic play in the separation of superstition from fact? I will give my impressions and understandings below the fold.

First, I want to briefly reiterate what logic is: a formal system of combining definitions, and operations in a well-defined manner to derive results based on those axioms, definitions, and operations. In classical Western logic we accept certain fundamental notions and classification as the starting points. For example, that propositions can be meaningfully discussed, that every proposition must be assigned a value of True or False, that you can invert the truth value of a proposition by negating it, what it means for one proposition to imply another, etc. All of these assumptions are needed just to form the calculus of logic, the well-defined manner we use to derive true propositions from other true propositions. Then, we need to throw into the mix our undefined objects and axioms. We need undefined objects because you have to have a starting point. The alternative is that if you try to define everything, at some point you will be using term A to define term B, when A has already been defined in a manner that B is important to the definition of A. So, we avoid this circularity by allowing some term to be undefined. Axioms now have a key role to play: they describe the behavior of the undefined objects. We can then define other objects based on the undefined objects. As an example, in a typical geometry class, I note that there are four undefined notions: a point, a line, a plane, and space. We describe what we intend these things to represent, but you can formally define them with using circular terminology. Then, we introduce axioms like Line Creation (there will be one line connecting any two points) to describe one of the relationships between lines and points. We introduce definitions based on these concepts (rays, line segments, angles, etc.). We generate theorems to show what other statements our axioms and definitions imply under the accepted logical calculus. So, logic can be used to show what you accept has additional consequences you may not have realized.

However, one thing (among many) that logic is not is a validation system in any but the barest sense. Sure, logic can occasionally be used to produce contradictions that derive from a given set of axioms. That's really not saying very much. First, to be effective at all as a means of persuasion to change the axioms involved, there has to be a prior commitment to make a change when a contradiction is reached. However, real life is full of situations that seem contradictory and yet persist, saying that are both accepted as true when saying the opposite. For example, the advice offered by "haste makes waste" is seemingly opposed to "a stitch in time saves nine". We have ways of resolving those pieces of advice, of course. However, this skill gets carried into other types of contradictions as well. So, producing contradictions, the only form of validation logic is capable of, is not protection against accepting all sorts of outright nonsense. Indeed, many people who accept axioms like "Properly understood, every word of the Bible is completely true" are skilled at using logic to defend their positions, because logic can be used in cause of woo just as easily as in the cause of skepticism.

This means I don't see Data necessarily having a special protection from woo by virtue of his thought proceeding from a logical calculus only. Whatever skeptical traits Data would possess would be a matter of programming. The more his programming was set to look for, find, and act upon patterns, the more likely Data would have wooish beliefs. One example is the show where the Enterprise-D is stuck in a time loop where it keeps blowing up at the end. Data uses the occurrences of a highly unlikely aggregation of 3s appearing to decide to follow the suggestions of Riker, who has three buttons on his collar, as opposed to 2.5 for Data. Data was eager to find a sign or symbol, and made A rapid, spur-of-the-moment pattern connection with no evidence that the connection is causal in any way. What could be wooier?
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My oversight, apologies, and thoughts

After last week's post concerning the Cantorian argument against possible worlds being maximally consistent sets of propositions posted by Dr. Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, I sent an email to Dr. Vallicella for his thought, and his initial response was that I missed the point of the argument entirely. He was kind and patient through out the exchange, and entirely correct instating that I had missed the point. Using "e" to represent the element relation, I had entirely missed the point that the truths being constructed were of the form t₁ e {t₁, t₂} and ~(t₁ e {t₂, t₃}. This means that Dr. Grim/Dr. Vallicella have created a set of size T X P(T) of truths from set T. Why I missed this, and what it means for my analysis of the proof, is below the fold.

As for why I missed it, it just seems to be a blind spot with me. Ii will probably not make this error again in the next month or two, but it will happen eventually, because I see a fundamental difference in the type of between saying "the earth orbits the sun" and "t₁ e {t₁, t₂}", and I don't really see the latter belonging in T. The latter sort of statement I think of as being a formal truth, one that it true based on the initial definitions, definition that we select arbitrarily because of their usefulness. My understand of Dr. Vallicella's worldview (and if I mis-characterise him here, I apologize) is that there is no relevant difference between the two statements. As long as I carry the first view in my brain, I no doubt will fall prey to the same blindness about arguments founded in the second view in the future. I beg the patience of any readers in this regard.

Well, after being so kind and professorial in our exchange, Dr. Vallicella certainly deserves to have Grim's/his analysis validated, and it would have been my pleasure to do so. Unfortunately, I can't do this with honesty, because it turns out that the proof will still fail. One of the unfortunate side effects of mixing formal truths and non-formal truths is the formal truths have a tendency to grow past any reasonable size. When you include all the formal truths of the type "t₁ e {t₁, t₂}", you wind up with T being a proper class, and that means |T| does not exist, and to the degree P(T) can be defined, |P(T)| does not exist either, so obviously you can't have |P(T)| > |T|.

This is easy to see when you consider what must be included in T. For simplicity sake, let's start with a universe with one non-formal truth, t₀, and call the universe itself T₀. We can use the very process describe to create R₀ containing two truths: t₁ saying t₀ e {t₀} and t₂ saying ~(t₀ e {}). Defining T₁ as the union of R₀ and T₀, T₁ = {t₀, t₁, t₂}. Applying the same process to T₁, you get 24 elements in T₂, 402,653,184 elements in T₃, etc. Then, you need to combine the contents of all the T_n into T_aleph-0. From T_aleph-0 you can build (assuming without loss of generality the generalized continuum hypothesis)T_aleph-1, T_aleph-2, etc., so that there will be a version of T_x greater than any specific cardinal number. This means that, when you finally union all these T_x to create T, T has the size of a proper class.

I want to thank Dr. Vallicella for his cooperation and gentlemanly behavior.


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Cantor offers nothing useful on maximally consistent worlds

I fully acknowledge that I am a philosophical amateur, and no doubt from time my thought and questions reflect this. However, I know enough to know that people who have studied philosophy professionally, but not mathematics, make ludicrous mathematical arguments. Such is the case with an attempt by Dr. Vallicella to export a standard Cantorian argument from mathematics to philosophical constructs. While you could say logic is the grammar of mathematics, the difference in vocabulary makes any sort of transition of proofs from one venue to the other a difficult procedure, and not one to be done casually.

So, lets say we have this maximal set T of true statements (truths, for short). {t₁, . . . , t_i, t_{i + 1}, . . .}. In particular, let's consider {t₁ ,t₂}. The first question we need to answer: Is this subset itself a truth? If this subset is not a truth, then the entire argument from the creation of the power set is meaningless, because the power set does not consist of truths, but of collections of truths, and there is no reason to presume the cardinality of all collections of truths would be the same as the cardinality of all truths. In fact, since the proof relies on looking at elements of P(T) as if there were in T, for Dr. Vallicella's argument to be cogent, we need to apply the standard that {t₁, t₂} is itself a truth. We are not given a definition for this truth, unfortunately, and how it relates to t₁ or t₂, possibly via some sort of truth table. At least, since we are using sets, we know that {t₁} = {t₁, t₁} = {t₁, t₁, t₁}.

However, that leads us to another area of fuzzy definition. Is {t₁} the same truth as t₁? Is {t₁} the same truth as {{t₁}}? Will {t₁ ,t₂} be the same truth as {t₁ ,t₂,{t₁ ,t₂}}? Basically, can we remove all internal braces (except for the empty set)?

If we we allow the removal of all internal braces, then the proof falls apart, because all of the elements of P(T) will already be elements of T, after removing the internal braces and reducing the duplications. For example, let's look at a world of one atomic truth (that is, truths that not sets of other truths). T = {{}, t₁}. Then P(T) = {{},{{}},{ t₁},{{},t₁}} = {{},{}, t₁,{},t₁} = {{}, t₁} = T.

So let us consider the construction where we can not remove internal braces. Now, since we have a valid method of creating a new truth from previously existing truths, by inclusion in sets, that means for any set Q of atomic truths, we find the power set of that set of truths, and the power set of that first power set of truths, and the power set of that second power set of truths, etc., already in T. How far can we go? Do we allow for there to be (loosely speaking) an infinite number of brace levels? If we do not allow that, then we know either |T| (the cardinality of T) = |{1, 2, 3, 4, ...}|, that is, T is countable, whenever Q is finite or countable, otherwise |T| = |Q|. However, this has the defect of removing much of P(T) from being eligible to be in T, because P(T) will include elements with an infinite number of braces.

In fact, if we place any limit M at all on the number of braces, we find that |Q| being less than or equal to M means |T| = M, otherwise |T| = |Q|, and either way P(T) will have elements that are not capable of being in T. So, the only way around this is place no restriction on the number of levels of inclusion. This has the side effect of making T a proper class even when |Q| = 1, so P(T) does not even exist.

So, it would seem regardless of set-up we are left with a choice of P(T) = T, P(T) having elements that do not qualify to be in T, or P(T) not existing. Regardless, the attempted proof fails.
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Category confusion persists

In My first post on this blog, I touched on the notion that formal systems are not derived from empirical facts, but are the result of the constructions we make to simplify the way we interact with reality. This would seem to be a very simple and elementary observation, but one that routinely escapes the notice of the believers in the supernatural, even those with philosophical backgrounds. One of the latest examples comes from the Maverick Philosopher, in his discussion of kinds of ontological arguments.

In particular, I find that the examples he chooses for his proof and disproof on the existence of non-divine items are counter-productive, assuming he wishes to treat God as actually existing, because notions such as circle, square, and logical truth are assigned notions, as opposed to items with an independent existence of their own. The entire system of logic that we use is a constuct, highly useful in many ways, but ultimately the result of arbitrary decisions that were built into its construction. For example, the Law of the Excluded Middle and the Law of Non-Contradiction are results of the initial decision that there will be exactly two truth values, and that every proposition will receive exactly one of these values. If you choose to create your model differently (such as the addition of additional truth-states), one or both of these laws becomes untrue in the new system.

The other example actually makes for a bit of fun. If you use the definition for "circle" as the set of point in a plane that are the same distance from a given point, and the definition of square is "regular four-sided polygon", then all you need is to choose the appropriate difinition of distance, and in fact every circle will be a square, though not every square will be a circle. The taxi-cab metirc will do nicely.

I don't know if there are sound ontological proofs of the sort Dr. Vallicella mentions. I am sure that, by making his non-divine arguments strictly in the area of formal systems, he is basically saying that the primary proofs for God amount to making inital assumpitons about God and setting up rules that insure God's existence. Certainly, this has always seemed the case to me but I would nothave thought Dr. Vallicella would agree.
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A lesson in overly simple logic

Creationists really like their world simple, it seems to me. A simple interpretation of their holy book, simple ideas of right and wrong, and of course a simple logic to express it all in. Thus, we get a first lesson in logic from Martin Cothran that teaches a couple of ideas which are too simple to be correct.

Examples below the fold.
For example:

Just for fun, I am going to employ the most sophisticated and beautiful of all logical arguments: the dilemma. The dilemma is a way of putting your opponent in a box; it is a way of showing him that, no matter what in fact is the case, his assumption leads to an unacceptable conclusion. Again, there are numerous ways of attacking the truth of a statement—this is only one of them.

If I am making this argument, here’s how I do it: There are only two kinds of rights: those that originate in divine law and those that originate in human law. If the claim is that same-sex marriage is a right originating in divine law, then it must be false, since (if it is addressed at all) it is precluded by the holy books of all major religions. If the claim is that same-sex marriage is a right originating in human law, then it must, again, be false, since the law of the land (at least in the United States) does not acknowledge it. Therefore, in either case—whether the appeal is to divine or human law—the claim is false.

Note the nice clean division of originating in divine law or human law. Only the very naive, inexperienced would not that the argument does not address interactions between divine law and human law, nor the other potential sources of rights. This is not valid argumentation, it is a rhetorical trick. Unfortunately, Cothran seems to think this is some sort of valid method. Maybe this is a matter of necessity. maybe the world of the creationist can't survive in a world of shades and colors.

Then he gives what he imagines to be a lesson in reducito as absurdum, attempting to show that a lack of testability does rule ID out of science:

The best place to look for scientific theories that are not falsifiable is physics. Everyone accepts that physics, and the theories that are included under it, are scientific. But many of them are not falsifiable—at least not now. The most famous of these is superstring theory. Superstring theory is the theory that particles and fundamental forces in the universe can be explained by the vibration of very tiny symmetrical strings. The problem is that the theory is not only not falsifiable, but, as some scientists have pointed out, it isn’t even conceivably falsifiable. Some of Einstein’s thought experiments (many of which he later set forth as full scientific theories), the scientific status of which have never been questioned, are not falsifiable either.

Your opponent could swallow hard and say that these things are not science, but he will know he is on shaky ground—and he will know you know he knows it.

Note how he projects his own limited world-view onto others. In fact, I don't feel that I am at all on shaky ground in saying that any hypothesis which is not testable is not relevent scientifically. However, there are differences between hypotheses that are inherently untestable (Intelligent Design can not be falsified under any conditions) and those that are untestable under current technology, but may eventually prove testable. Neither is a part of science today, but the latter can at least eventually be scientific.
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On the difference between gradualism and relativism

Going back to Iliocnetrim's take on compromise, there is an interesting tidbit, almost a throwaway, that reveals a sadly limited mindset.

Just as it is impossible for you and me to compromise between my desire to murder you and your desire not to be murdered, it is likewise impossible to compromise between truth and non-truth. To put it bluntly: the world is black-and-white, after all.

It's quite popular these days to sing peans to relativism: to assert either that there is no such thing as objective truth -- especially in regard to morality -- or, that if there is, it cannot be known (and so, is unimportant). I refer to this "All The Pretty Shades Of Grey."

It the typical fashion of Ilion's black-and-white thinking, he confounds the existence of shades of grey with the existence of relativism. Lest the reader think I am judging on the basis of this one small blurb, rest assured that this is a regular feature of his writing. The existence of objectively quantified shades of grey, and of bi-valued relative positions, are so commonplace that such thinking can only be considered a departure from reality.

An example of the former would be the question of taking a shot from the upper elbow on a fast break. You can quantify the value of this shot compared to the standard value of a possession for your team when you reset the offense. There is no absolute true or false answer to taking the elbow shot, but the answer is quantifiable probabilistically, and the means of evaluating those answers are certainly objective. In any area of endeavor that allows you to evaluate outcomes numerically, you wind up weighing costs, benefits, resources, commitments, etc. and generate a large array of variables, very few of which will correspond to 1 or 0. This reasoning can certainly be extended to moral issues. Money spent on the support for underage mothers will cause fewer of them to desire abortions. Saving lives, at need for increased taxation: absolutely good or absolutely evil?

On the other hand, how about kid's programming that is designed around a toy line? I have no trouble conceding that you could say it is good or evil, but how would you show either objectively? This becomes a matter of personal taste, in many respects.

Well, I don't expect this sort of thinking to change Ilion's ideas anytime soon. For him there may always be just two camps, even though the world of black-and-white is itself not black-and-white.
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Russell's teapot -- not grandiose enough?

I visited the Maverick Philosopher, who also responds to comments under the name Bill Vallicella, about a week ago, as I like to do from time to time. He had the most interesting post on Russell's teapot and why he felt it was not a persuasive example, which seems to be a reprint of an earlier post.

Let's start things off with his quote of Russell:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Vallicella first acknowledges the obvious points that just because there is no evidence A does not exist, we can not conclude A exists. However, he then seems to go into a third point that strikes me as not only being irrelevant to Russell's main point, but also completely avoids Russell's actual third point: belief in God, or the magic teapot, is not sustained based upon the evidence, but upon the inherited traditions and the tremendous amount of social pressure to be a believer. The number of believers who come to believe in God because of arguments like the Cosmological argument is very small, indeed. However, instead of addressing this point of Russell, Vallicella takes a turn which seems to take the analogy and discard it because Russell's teapot doesn't have a history of belief.

But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God.

Sticking with Russell's teapot for the moment, why don't we have any reason to believe it exists? I'm drinking tea right now, and typically drink 2-4 quarts of iced tea each day. On the days where I don't drink it, I get headaches. I can certainly interpret that as a the divine retribution of Russell's teapot to my failure to offer an appropriate worship for the day.

But perhaps we should distinguish between a strong and a weak reading of Russell's suggestion:


S. Just as we cannot have any reason to believe that an empirically undetectable celestial teapot exists, we cannot have any reason to believe that God exists.


W. Just as we do not have any reason to believe that a celestial teapot exists, we do not have any reason to believe that God exists.

Vallicella does not provide a reason for making this distinction. It's just as well, because (S) is not a valid interpretation of Russell's proposition. Unlike the teapot, any putative omnipotent God certainly could offer us any manner of reasons to accept Their existence, of essentially any possible level of reliability. Of course, that such proof has not been offered is not proof of Their non-existence, but that is very different from saying we can not have proof.

Now it seems to me that both (S) and (W) are plainly false: we have all sorts of reasons for believing that God exists. Here Alvin Plantinga sketches about two dozen theistic arguments. Atheists will not find them compelling, of course, but that is irrelevant. The issue is whether a reasoned case can be made for theism, and the answer is in the affirmative. Belief in God and in Russell's teapot are therefore not on a par since there are no empirical or theoretical reasons for believing in his teapot.

This is an interesting standard of evidence: it doesn't matter if the arguments are compelling or not, they just have to exist and be made into a reasoned case. It occurs to me that this is not a difficult thing to accomplish for the Russell's teapot (the Teapot); I can make a reasoned case, that almost no one will find compelling, for it's existence. First is the evidence I have already presented, which we might call the Argument from Compulsion: when I stop performing acts of worship to the Teapot, I have physical symptoms. Then there is the Argument from Dominant Language: of all the Western European countries, it is England whose language has become the commercial language of the world, because they are known for drinking tea, and the Teapot has rewarded them for it. I will end this list with the Argument from Antioxidants: the Teapot wishes to encourage our worship, and so has made our worship healthy for us.

Another suggestion embedded in the Russell passage is the notion that if God existed, he would be just another physical thing in the physical universe. But of course this has nothing to do with anything maintained by any sophisticated theist. God is a purely spiritual being.

Here in the USA, for most theists, their putative God at one time or another had a very physical incarnation, and many of them believe He still has that incarnation. Now, if you are a Jehovah's Witness (JW), or some other sect who believes that Jesus was not God, then you might accept a purely spiritual God (as the JWs do). If Vallicella belonged to such a belief system, I do not believe he would enjoy the positive reputation he has among a variety of Trinitarian bloggers, so I will venture that he does accept some sort of physical part of God at some point in God's existence,and so does not himself believe God is purely spiritual.

Also, there is nothing in Russell's logic or analogy that relies on the Teapot being a physical thing. The analogy works perfectly well with objects that have no physical instantiation, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). I am curious how Vallicella can specifically note the FSM earlier in his post, and yet forget here that the FSM meets his criteria here for being a purely spiritual being.

Another problem with the teapot analogy is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being.

That's a pretty remarkable jump, from simply being a purely spiritual being to being the grounding of the universe. More to the point, it seems to be saying that the analogy is invalid because this putative God has a good story behind it. Perhaps Vallicella is unaware of how easy it is to compose such background stories for the Teapot. For example: the Teapot did create the universe just to put our planet in the perfect position to grow tea and have a species to worship it through drinking that tea. That the universe is perfectly suited for the drinking of tea is all the proof you should need for the Teapot.

This is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.

That Vallicella fails to see how much these arguments favor to the Teapot jut as much as his putative God seems to be due to some blindness or lack of imagination on the subject.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

The interpretation of the evidence to provide inductive support for a putative God fails to account for the lack of specificity: the same arguments can be used to support any such construct, including the Teapot or the FSM.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve

To sum up, each of Vallicella points can be applied equally easily to the Teapot, much less the FSM. His own critique of the argument fails under the weight of the expectations he feels the need to employ for his God.
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Logic: everywhere or nowhere?

I just finished digesting Dr. Victor Repperts article, "The Argument from Reason", over at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/reason.html and was disappointed with one aspect in particular. Dr. Reppert describes how a formal system works in one paragraph, and them much later disregards the same properties when discussing a different formal system.

On the other hand, if I am playing chess, and I am missing a pawn, I can get a penny, a button, a half-eaten carrot, or just about anything else to play the role of a pawn. This is because unlike the frisbee[sic], the pawn's role is purely symbolic, determined by convention.
That seems clear, and I agree. Chess is one type of formal system, basically a instantiation of rules and procedures. Formal systems can be applied to a variety of objects with no change tot he structure of the system. They form a sort of model. Dr. Reppert seems to forget this in a later paragraph, though.

But principles like the laws of non-contradiction apply universally. Contradictions cannot be true in Phoenix, in Houston, in Antarctica, on Venus, in the Virgo cluster, in the furthest nebulae, or even in Southern California. From what particular experience could our knowledge of this have come?
Equally true would be, "But principles like the diagonal movement of bishops apply universally. Bishops cannot move orthogonally in Phoenix, in Houston, in Antarctica, on Venus, in the Virgo cluster, in the furthest nebulae, or even in Southern California. From what particular experience could our knowledge of this have come?" Of course, the obviously true answer would be that we set up the rules of chess the same everywhere, otherwise it's not chess. The same reasoning applies to logic. Any time you set up a system where you only accept two logical values (true or false) and only allow each statement to have one of those values, you get a formal system where the law of non-contradiction obtains. There is no experience this comes from, any more that there is an experience of a real-life bishop that never walks forward straightly. It's a feature that we built into the system, not one innate in the universe.
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