Discourse about the so-called problem of evil frequently proceeds under the supposition that there are two categories of evil: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is seen as evil that results from the action of a morally free agent and natural evil is understood as any evil that results from some kind of non-rational physical force; person S punching person S’ with the intention of doing her harm is an example of the former and a child being crushed under the rubble of an earthquake is an example of the latter. I propose that, given the Christian narrative, these two categories are illusory and what philosophers usually describe as natural evil can, on at least one understanding of this narrative, be reduced to moral evil. Toward the endeavor of reduction, it will be helpful to formulate a broad construal of moral evil and of natural evil, each with three necessary conditions. Let us formally define moral evil as:
(ME) An event e is a moral evil only if: (1) e is caused either directly or indirectly by a rational agent S, (2) S is such that she is morally free with respect to making the decision to cause e, and (3) the harm, h, in e to another agent, to an animal, or to an object, caused by S is such that S is morally culpable for h.
Moreover, natural evil may be understood as follows:
(NE) An event e is a natural evil only if: (1) e is caused by another event e1, (2) for any morally free agent, S, S did not cause e1, and (3) the harm, h, in e to another agent to an animal, or to an object, caused by e1 is such that no morally free agent, S1 is morally culpable for h.
Notice that I have broadened my understanding of ME to include cases of mediate or indirect causation. That this broadening is justified will prove to be key to my argument. A preliminary justification: suppose I knock over my coffee mug and the contents conveniently find their way into my computer’s keyboard, ruining the delicate electronics under the plastic keys. When I take the machine to Apple for repairs, I am asked for an explanation: how did this happen? I would likely relate my tale of woe, that I spilled my coffee into my keyboard and that it subsequently stopped working. Who broke my computer? I did. What broke my computer? My coffee did. This is a form of what I will call mediate agent causation. I, an agent, initiated a chain of events, the first of which (my mug’s spilling) was immediately agent caused, and the terminus of the chain (my keyboard’s breaking) was not. Consider, therefore, the following definition of immediate and mediate agent causation:
(1) An event e3 is mediately agent caused only if the first event, e1, in the causal chain leading up to the occurrence of e3 is directly agent caused and the second event, e2, is not.
(2) An event, e1 is immediately agent caused only if some agent S causes e1 to occur and e1 is such that it is not preceded by anything other than S’s action that causes e1.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Religious Experience, Testimony, and Skepticism, Part 2 (A Very Rough Draft)
3. Multiple persons and multiple testimonies
If something like (A2) is correct, then surely another principle is true. It seems to me fundamentally obvious that if S1’s receiving T from S2 counts as evidence for his belief in the veracity of T, then surely if S1 receives the same sort of testimony from other persons, S3, S4, S5, etc… S1 has better evidence for his belief in the veracity of the report than he did when he received just S2’s account. Just how much more evidence should this count for? It seems to me impossible to calculate precisely, but surely if a person receives testimony about an event or experience from two or three people, he or she will have much less evidence than if he or she receives accounts from, say, one or two billion other persons.
Before we formulate a rule about justification of beliefs occasioned by testimony from multiple persons, a proviso seems necessary. When receiving a report from multiple persons about their individual experiences or perceptions, I hold that one’s belief about the reports’ veracity is justified in proportion to the degree of coherence exhibited by the testimonies. The classic case of accident witnesses should illuminate this distinction. Suppose that four people claim to have recently seen a car accident; each one, however, reports something slightly different. The first person claims to have seen three cars involved in the accident, while the second person claims to have only seen two. Perhaps also the third person attests to hearing a loud screeching sound before the collision, while the other three testify only to hearing a loud boom at the moment of impact. The fourth witness disagrees with the other three about the color of the automobiles involved, while all four present the accident as happening at different times, perhaps as many as fifteen minutes apart. Suppose that our generic person S1 has been listening to these testimonials. Upon recognizing the incongruities in the four witnesses’ accounts, what does S1 remain justified in believing? Ought he totally disbelieve that the entire incident took place?
In the absence of any defeaters (see below), it seems to me that S1 ought to, in accordance with the (A2) form two beliefs, one that the four witnesses experienced what they claimed to experience (that is, they are not lying to him) and second that something, x, caused them to experience what they claimed to experience. Now, obviously (all other things being equal; assuming the witnesses have about the same level of reliability and S1 has no other justified beliefs about the nature of the event) he cannot justifiably adopt four mutually exclusive stories about what took place. He can, however, use what I will call the LCD (or lowest common denominator) approach in forming his beliefs. If I receive conflicting testimonies about an event, I ought to look for a common core of description. In the case of our four witnesses, although their versions of the story appear markedly different, there exists a number of commonalities between the four accounts; first, they all agree that there certainly was an event, an event that seemed to them to involve more than one but less than four automobiles. Further, they all agree that there was in fact a collision, that it happened on the road, and that it happened sometime within a fifteen-minute time-span. Note here that while some details are mutually exclusive (the precise times given for the accident, for example, or the color of the individual automobiles) others appear incompatible but upon further investigation we see that it is coherent to suppose them to have happened. For instance, witnesses one, two, and four all only heard the sound made by the collision while witness three claimed to hear a screeching sound, S1 need not view these as mutually exclusive accounts. Perhaps witness three was situated in just the right location to hear the screeching while one, two and four were not. Maybe witness three was paying close attention to her surroundings and was attentively listening to the noises going on around her while the others were distracted at the time of the screech. The LCD approach to incoherent testimonies will be broached further below.
With the notion of coherence of multi-person testimony in mind, let us formulate one more principle of testimony that can be conjoined to (A2), yielding a more precise examination of justification, testimony, and multiple persons:
(R1) Multi-person testimony (MPT) that occasions S1’s beliefs B1 and B2 justify S1’s holding of those beliefs more strongly than does single-person testimony (SPT). The degree of justification enjoyed by those beliefs occasioned by MPT rises in proportion to the coherence of the testimonies and falls in proportion to the mutual exclusivity of the testimonies.
IV. Externalist constraints and proper function
(A2), with the addendum of (R1), although close to being right, is open to serious criticism from the externalists. I have already worded (A2) so as to exclude cases of a true belief occasioned by a break in the right causal chain; if you testify to me that it seems to you a chair is sitting in the room and just at that moment I am struck soundly over the head, giving me neurological damage, and occasioning the serendipitously true belief in me that there is a chair sitting in the room, I remain unjustified in my believing despite both your testimony and the truth of the belief. In this case, it was the blow to the head that occasioned in me the belief, rather than your testimony. The reason I am unjustified, Alvin Plantinga would say, is because of a facultative malfunction.[1] When I receive a blow to the head, my belief-forming faculties (perception, memory, induction, and the like) ceased to function the way my design plan specifies.
A very short summary of Plantinga’s form of externalism should suffice. The distinguishing feature of Plantinga’s epistemology is that he views proper function as a necessary condition for a person’s having warrant (roughly equivalent to epistemic justification) for her beliefs. With a number of caveats and slight adjustments that will take too long to adequately treat here, Plantinga summarizes the conditions under which a true human belief has warrant: “a belief has warrant for me only if (1) it has been produced in me by cognitive faculties that are working properly… in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for my kinds of cognitive faculties (2) the segment of the design plan governing the production of that belief is aimed at the production of true beliefs, and (3) there is a high statistical probability that a belief produced under those conditions will be true.”[2]
Plantinga’s criteria for epistemic warrant can help us understand why an externalist constraint is needed for our principle, (A2). Suppose that instead of S1 having a cognitive malfunction, S2 (the person delivering the testimony) experiences a dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps S2 is suddenly struck with a neurologically damaging radiation that causes it to seem to S2 that some object, x, is present itself to him as such-and-such. In such a case, even if it just so happened that an object actually was present and indeed was presenting itself to S2 as such-and-such, we would not ordinarily say that S2 would be externally justified in his believing that an object was presenting itself to him as such-and-such. Such a case is an exception to the aforementioned Alston-Swinburne principle of rationality, that if “it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic)…” In cases of cognitive malfunctions that produce perceptual hallucination or delusion, its seeming to a person that something is the case does not count toward externally justifying her belief that something really is the case, since her faculties are not functioning the way they ought to.
Moreover, if S2, the giver of the testimony about his experience, remains (externally) unjustified, then I posit that so does S1. In cases of malfunction on the part of the testifier, the receiver of the testimony may be internally justified (and also rational) in adopting B1 and B2 in accordance with (A2), but remains externally without justification for those beliefs. Beliefs occasioned by the testimony of a person whose cognitive faculties are malfunctioning remain unjustified from a Plantingian standpoint. Plantinga may see this as a failure of warrant transfer from S2 to S1, but I will speak of it as a basing error; that is, S1’s B1 and B2 are based on the wrong kind of testimony, the kind that is delivered by a person whose own perceptual beliefs are externally unjustified. Robert Audi makes a similar point in “The A Priori Authority of Testimony”: “…even if the recipient is justified on some ground or other in thinking the attester is justified in believing p, the latter’s justification could still be grounded on such inadequate bases as plausible but unsound reasoning, or on hallucination, or on false but credible testimony.”[3] Thus, a further developed principle is required for cases in which a person is both internally and externally justified in accepting the veracity of another person’s testimony:
(A3) For some person S1, two beliefs, B1 and B2, about the veracity of the testimony, T, of another person, S2, are justified by virtue of their being occasioned by T in S1, where B1 is the belief that S2 is not deceiving S1, and B2 is the belief that that something, x, is, indeed, causing it to S2 to seem that x is present only if both S1 and S2 have properly functional cognitive faculties.
V. Defeaters and overrider systems
Defeaters, says Alvin Plantinga, are “reasons for giving up a belief b you hold.”[4] Defeaters may be either rebutting defeaters (beliefs that turn out to be inconsistent with the defeated belief) or undercutting defeaters (beliefs that remove one’s reasons for holding to the defeated belief.) Moreover, there are, says Richard Swinburne, four kinds of special considerations that defeat perceptual claims. Here I quote him at length:
“First one may show that the apparent perception was made under conditions or by a subject found in the past to be unreliable…. Secondly, one may show that the perceptual claim was to have perceived an object of a certain kind in circumstances where similar perceptual claims have proved false…. The third consideration then that defeats a claim to have perceived x involves showing that on background evidence it is very very probable that x was not present…. Fourthly, S’s claim to have perceived x may be challenged on the grounds that, whether or not x was there, x was probably not a cause of the experience of its seeming to S that x was there.”[5]
William Alston renders a broader understanding of defeat, arguing that attached to each doxastic practices (perception, reason, memory, and the like) is an overrider system of beliefs and procedures “that the subject can use in subjecting prima facie justified beliefs to further tests when that is called for.”[6] A belief, then, for Alston is what we can call prima facie justified simply when it is formed on the right basis and produced by a practice that is generally reliable and is unqualifiedly justified “provided it is prima facie justified… and there are no sufficient overriders…”[7] This seems correct. A belief for me is immediately justified just by being produced in me by a practice that is reliable in producing true beliefs (and properly functional cognitive faculties) and by being based as such in the right way, while it may not be unqualifiedly justified until I check it against my other beliefs, those that I already justifiably believe. If the belief in question has been in me produced by faculties subject to no dysfunction in the right cognitive environment and I can find no belief that can defeat it within my overrider system, it is justified.
How do defeaters and overrider systems relate to testimonial evidence? First, let us note that our principle (A3) is a statement about prima facie justification. Here, then, let us elaborate by introducing the notion of defeaters in order to determine when a person might be unqualifiedly justified in taking the testimony of another person about his or her experience or perception to be veridical:
(A4) For some person S1, the two beliefs, B1 and B2, about the veracity of the testimony, T, of another person, S2, are justified prima facie by virtue of their being occasioned by T in S1, only if both S1 and S2 have properly functional cognitive faculties. The prima facie justification of B1 and B2 can be defeated by S1’s justifiably believing any of the following four propositions: (1) That S2 is a generally unreliable reporter of his own cognitive states, (2) That S2’s purported perception is markedly similar to other cases which have been in the past shown to be unreliable (3) That on the background evidence, it is improbable that the object exists or else was present at the time, and (4) That it is not probable that the purported object could have appeared to S2 in such a way so as to make it seem to S2 that it was present as such-and-such, even if it was present.
[1] See Alvin Plantinga’s full treatment of warrant, proper functionality, and knowledge in his Warrant: the Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief.
[2] Warrant and Proper Function, p. 46,47.
[3] Audi, “The A Priori Authority of Testimony”
[4] Warranted Christian Belief, p. 359
[5] The Existence of God, pp. 310-14
[6] Perceiving God, p. 159
[7] Ibid.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Religious Experience, Testimony, and Skepticism, Part 1 (A Very Rough Draft)
My project here is not to show that God exists, or even to demonstrate that there exists anything beyond the realm of the natural world. It is my plan, however, to examine in what cases the unbeliever (by unbeliever, I understand one who disbelieves, lacks a belief regarding, or is agnostic about either, specifically, the existence of a personal, benevolent, omnipotent God such as that posited by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, or else one who regards the supernatural, generally, as impossible or improbable) is epistemically justified in her unbelieving. Further, I am directly concerned with the question of the justification of disbelief as it relates to the testimony of fellow human beings regarding their own religious experience.
A preliminary consideration: when I speak of perception and experience, I will be favoring in this paper the so-called Theory of Appearing. William Alston in Perceiving God explains what it means for a person to perceive an object: “For S to perceive X is simply for X to appear to S as so-and so. That is all there is to it.”[1] For Alston, then, sight of an object occurs if to one that object looks a certain way; hearing an object happens if an object sounds a certain way. Moreover says Alston, “the notion of X’s appearing to S as so-and-so is fundamental and unanalyzable,” and thus the Theory of Appearing remains remarkably simple.[2]'
I. Testimony About Non-Religious Experience
1. Testimony as a source of basic belief
Sources of both belief and justification are many; perception, memory, introspection, reason, and the like produce within us beliefs about the way the world is. One of the most often overlooked but certainly one of the most important sources of belief is what we call testimony. In his Epistemic Justification, Richard Swinburne defines the testimony of others as “what other people tell us orally or in writing about what they have perceived, experienced, or done… or what they claim to know on good authority to be so.”[3] Moreover, Swinburne distinguishes between two types of human testimony: direct and indirect. As I understand it, direct testimony occurs when person S2 reports an event or perception to person S1, where the event reported is not mediated by a third person’s testimony while indirect testimony is said to occur when person S2 reports to S1 a testimony received from another person, S3.[4] I am concerned almost exclusively with direct testimony, the kind of attestation that involves only two persons, S1 and S2. Furthermore, I will be dealing with cases of testimony about the testifier’s own experience or perception of an event or appearance.
The importance of other persons’ testimonies for our epistemic lives is clear; as social creatures we know much of what we do by way of the attestation of others. I only know about geopolitical events around the world through reading news reports, articles, and books researched, compiled, and written by other human persons. My knowledge of history, physics, biology, and chemistry is based almost entirely on the testimony of experts written in textbooks and spoken in lectures. Further, my beliefs about the activities of my friends and family when I am not present are based almost solely on their say-so. Thomas Reid, in his An Inquiry into the Human Mind: on the Principles of Common Sense, in Section XXIV, entitled Of the Analogy between Perception, and the Credit we give to Human Testimony, has a fundamental recognition of the basicality of human testimony in the acquiring and justifying of beliefs and the strong analogy between knowledge gotten by way of perception and knowledge attained as mediated by other persons: "The objects of human knowledge are innumerable, but the channels by which it is conveyed to the mind are few.” Reid continues, “Among these, the perception of external things by our senses, and the informations which we receive upon human testimony, are not the least considerable." [5] Alvin Plantinga, in his Warrant and Proper Function agrees with Reid’s assessment, arguing that we generally hold beliefs occasioned by testimony in a basic way: “Reid is surely right in thinking that the beliefs we form by way of credulity or testimony are typically held in the basic way, not by way of inductive or abductive evidence from other things I believe.”[6]
The argument that we hold testimonial evidence as basic is a persuasive one; consider a case of direct testimony about perception, wherein S2 tells S1 a testimony, T, about its seeming to S2 that x is presenting itself to him or her as [phi]. Upon hearing S2’s words, S1 adopts the belief that T is true; S1’s belief that T is true is not based on another proposition or another kind of evidence. S1 does not induce or abduce the conclusion. When S1 receives testimony from S2, S1 does not perform a quick deduction (something like, I ought to believe people who tell the truth, S1 is telling the truth, therefore I ought to believe S1). The informational content of the testimony, T, is believed solely on the fact that it was delivered by S2 as testimony. However, one may ask, is S1 justified in holding his belief in such a way? To answer this question, let us formulate a general principle of testimony, modeled after Thomas Reid’s so-called principle of credulity:
(A1) For some person S1, a basic belief in the veracity of the perceptual testimony, T, of another person, S2, is justified by virtue of its being occasioned by T.
Something very much like (A1) seems to me correct. It is similar to Reid’s common-sense credulity, which he defines as, “a disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and to believe what they tell us.”[7] The mechanism of credulity, as it stands, is only descriptive; Reid simply notes that humans tend to believe what they are told. (A1) incorporates a normative element; my statement is that not only do humans tend to accept the veracity of testimony, but also that they are justified in doing so. I have, however, purposefully narrowed (A1) to cases of testimony about perception or experience of an object; (A1) is not concerned with testimony given about, say, the deliverances of a person’s reason, intuition, introspection, or non-perceptual memory. Note, also, that (A1) is careful to say that belief in the veracity of T is justified just in case that belief is occasioned by T. Suppose that instead of being occasioned by T, S1’s belief is occasioned instead by, for instance, a sound blow to the head by a baseball bat that causes neurological damage. In such a case, we would not generally say that S1 is justified in his belief, even if by some sheer coincidence it turns out to be a true belief. For more on externalist constraints, proper function, and epistemic practices, see below.
(A1) is grounded upon another principle, one that states that a man is justified in believing in the veracity of the deliverances of his own senses and faculties. Swinburne, in The Existence of God, explains: “…it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations), if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic)…”[8] This seems to be one of the most basic truths of epistemology. Suppose I am appeared to in a rose-like way. Perhaps I smell a flowery scent and I encounter a red, rose-shaped visual sensation. Few would doubt that the rational thing to do in such a situation, barring any defeaters (see below), would be for me to adopt the belief that there is a flower-scented, rose-shaped object causing my sensations. William Alston, in Perceiving God, formulates a similar axiom: “If S’s belief that X is [phi] is based on an experience in which, so it seems to S, X is appearing to S as [phi], the that belief is prima facie justified.”[9] Alston and Swinburne have a fundamental agreement here; when I seem to be appeared to in such-and-such a way by an object, that counts as evidence for my believing that the object appearing to me exists and predicates such-and-such a property so as to appear to me in such-and-such a way.
Swinburne’s “principle of rationality” must, however, be coupled with another principle, a rule Thomas Reid called the principle of veracity in order for (A1) to be fully supported. “The first of these principles is, a propensity to speak truth, and to use the signs of language, so as to convey our real sentiments.”[10] Now, the principle of veracity may not at first seem obvious. Don’t humans often deceive one another? Yes, however, Reid’s point is not so much a statement of universality as it is a generalization; people often equivocate and engage in deception. For the most part, however, it is obvious that humans tell the truth to one another; people who constantly deceive we call pathological liars and are unable to function normally in a working society. This is a point Reid makes cogently; if people tended to lie to one another more often than they told the truth, basic societal relations would become nearly impossible. Constant deception and thus mutual distrust would eat away at the foundations of human cooperative civilization.
The principle of veracity, in conjunction with the Alstonian-Swinburnian rationality axiom, seems to me powerful enough to make (A1) look like a fairly modest proposal. Insofar as Swinburne’s principle of rationality and Reid’s principle of veracity relate to (A1), we ought to note that if it is true that a person’s apparent perceptions of such-and-such a thing with such-and-such properties count toward justifying his belief that something actually stands in such a causal relation so as to be perceived as such-and-such and if it is true that human persons tend not to lie about their experiences, perceivings, and beliefs, then (A1) seems to follow quite readily.
2. Two beliefs justified by testimony
(A1) states that whenever a person receives testimony from another person (in the absence of defeaters), he or she is justified in believing that the testimony is valid. What, exactly, does the term validity entail? Well, if (as on Swinburne’s principle) S2 is justified in his believing that an object x is causing him to have such and such a sensation on the basis of its seeming to S2 that x is present and if (as on Reid’s description of credulity) people normally tell the truth to one another about their experiences, it seems that S1 is justified in believing two propositions. First, S1 is justified in believing that S2 is not deceiving him. Second, S1 is justified in believing that something, x, is, indeed, causing it to S2 to seem that x is present. A clarification to (A1):
(A2) For some person S1, two beliefs, B1 and B2, about the veracity of the testimony, T, of another person, S2, are justified by virtue of their being occasioned by T, where B1 is the belief that S2 is not deceiving S1, and B2 is the belief that that something, x, is, indeed, causing it to S2 to seem that x is present.
[1] Perceiving God, p.55.
[2] For a brief treatment of Alston’s Theory of Appearing and competing theories of perception, see Perceiving God, p.54-59
[3] Epistemic Justification, p. 123.
[4] See Swinburne’s Epistemic Justification, pages 123-128.
[5] Reid, p. 228
[6] Warrant and Proper Function, p. 79
[7] Reid, p. 232
[8] The Existence of God, p. 303
[9] Perceiving God, p. 100
[10] Reid, 231
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Thomas Reid on Testimony
As part of a project I am doing on religious experience, skepticism, and testimony, I have been reading Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind: on the Principles of Common Sense. In Section XXIV, entitled Of the Analogy between Perception, and the Credit we give to Human Testimony, Thomas Reid's fundamental recognition is of the basicality of human testimony in the acquiring and justifying of beliefs and the strong analogy between knowledge gotten by way of perception and knowledge attained as mediated by other persons:
"The objects of human knowledge are innumerable, but the channels by which it is conveyed to the mind are few. Among these, the perception of external things by our senses, and the informations which we receive upon human testimony, are not the least considerable" (Reid, 228.)
Although the notion that much of our knowledge relies upon trusting the veracity of other peoples' word tends to upset our Enlightenment constitution, Reid's point is an important one; one that I hope to utilize in a somewhat modified argument from religious experience for the existence of God (but more of that in another post).
Thomas Reid begins by making a distinction between original and acquired perception, and natural and artificial language. There is, he says, a great analogy between acquired perception and artificial language, but there is a stronger connection between original perception and natural language. Man's original perception is said to understand a sign; this sign is representative of reality. It is the interpretation of how the sign connects to what it symbolizes that yields a belief within a given man. What makes this faculty original, argue Reid, is that our ability to interpret the sign is itself implanted by nature; we have within us a natural understanding of the relationship between, say, the cooing sound of our mother's voice and her actual face and body. Similarly, Reid posits a relationship between the signs of the body (gestures, tone, etc...) and the thoughts and dispensations of the mind that are perceived in our ability of natural language. As is the case with original perception, our capability to understand this relationship is implanted in us from birth; it is something 'natural' in the sense that we need not cultivate or develop it in order for it to function.
On the other end of the spectrum we have what Thomas Reid calls acquired perception and artificial language; both of these faculties understand a connection that exists between signs and reality as is the case with the original perception and natural language. Acquired perception discovers the relationship between novel signs (sensations) and a novel reality (say, a skyscraper or the ocean) by experience; this understanding is not innate as it is in original perception and thus must be honed. Analogously, our capacity for Reid's artificial language is said to discover the connection between particular articulated sounds (novel words or phrases, new semantics, or grammatical arrangements) and a man's thoughts and intentions; thus beliefs about the relation between the two are grounded in experience. Suppose I encounter a new word that has been circulating around my University lately, Word X. If I have never heard Word X before, apart from asking someone outright for a definition, I would likely come to understand its meaning only if I paid close attention to the way it was being used in sentences, its similarity to other words I already knew, and the like. My understanding of the connection between these syntactical, grammatical, and semantic clues and the actual meaning of the word would be what Reid would call my artificial language. Eventually, says Reid, I would come to form principles (something akin to concepts) and would be able to form generally accurate predictions about the meaning of new words through my artificial language and perceive the reality of novel objects through my acquired perception. I would come to understand that when such-and-such a sensation is present within me, an object with such-and-such properties is probably the cause of my sensation.
"There is, therefore, in the human mind an early anticipation, neither derived from experience, nor from reason, nor from any compact of promise, that our fellow creatures will use the same signs in language when they have the same sentiments.... The wise and beneficent Author of nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures two principles that tally with eachother" (Reid 231.)
These principles, says Thomas Reid, are first the propensity to speak the truth, to use the signs of language so as to convey our real sentiments, and second the "disposition to confide in the veracity of others." This second principle Reid dubs the principle of credulity. Richard Swinburne, in both his The Existence of God (p. 305) and his Epistemic Justification (pp. 141-50) devises a similar axiom by the same name. Alvin Plantinga, too, mentions Thomas Reid's principle in Warrant and Proper Function (p. 77). If humans are not implanted with a tendancy to accept prima facie what others have told us, Reid reasons, no proposition would go unexamined; we would be inclined to filter each and every report through reason and experience, weighing each testimony about the world against the evidence. This, says Reid, is obviously not the case. Even the most skeptical of us do not carefully and logically asses each and every claim we receive from others. This, to me, seems to be right. When I hear on the 7 o'clock news that there was a nasty accident on the highway, my first reaction is not skepticism, but epistemic assent. I tend to believe that I am told. Moreover, even witnesses that are perceived as less reliable than news organizations I generally meet with little to no skepticism. If my neighbor Fred comes over and tells me that his house was broken into last night, I take his claim at face value and adopt the belief, Fred's house was broken into last night into my epistemic web. Reid's principle of credulity is a kind of "innocent until proven guilty" with respect to the veracity of human testimony.
In addition to his argument from our apparent casual usage of the principle of credulity, Reid mounts a pragmatic argument in its favor: "...distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits of society, and place us in a worse condition than that of savages." Here, he makes the obvious point that without the normatization of the principle of credulity, human knowledge would diminish to a destructively low level; society itself would decline, and distrust and incredulity would slowly degrade our modern society. Thus, Reid argues, one ought to believe others about their testimony, at least prima facie.
Insofar as the principle of credulity relates to Thomas Reid's previous arguments about language and perception, we should here note that if, as a general rule, we should believe others, then it follows that we should believe others about specifics, such as the deliverances of their own acquired perception and artificial language. If, for instance, I observe my colleagues using Word X in a certain way, and I decide to take a stab at using Word X, I ought to follow their example and use it in the sense that they do. Similarly, if I am told that a number of people have just in the last few moments been appeared to in a rose-like way, I ought to first believe that this is probably not a lie (unless I know them to have good reason for deceiving me) and thus second that there probably was something rose-like that appeared to them in such a way so as to cause them to have a rose-like experience (since the best explanation for multiple experiences of a rose-like qualia is usually not hallucination or deception, but actual perception).
What exactly Thomas Reid's common-sense approach to testimony and credulity means for religion and religious experience is a topic I intend to explore soon.
"The objects of human knowledge are innumerable, but the channels by which it is conveyed to the mind are few. Among these, the perception of external things by our senses, and the informations which we receive upon human testimony, are not the least considerable" (Reid, 228.)
Although the notion that much of our knowledge relies upon trusting the veracity of other peoples' word tends to upset our Enlightenment constitution, Reid's point is an important one; one that I hope to utilize in a somewhat modified argument from religious experience for the existence of God (but more of that in another post).
Thomas Reid begins by making a distinction between original and acquired perception, and natural and artificial language. There is, he says, a great analogy between acquired perception and artificial language, but there is a stronger connection between original perception and natural language. Man's original perception is said to understand a sign; this sign is representative of reality. It is the interpretation of how the sign connects to what it symbolizes that yields a belief within a given man. What makes this faculty original, argue Reid, is that our ability to interpret the sign is itself implanted by nature; we have within us a natural understanding of the relationship between, say, the cooing sound of our mother's voice and her actual face and body. Similarly, Reid posits a relationship between the signs of the body (gestures, tone, etc...) and the thoughts and dispensations of the mind that are perceived in our ability of natural language. As is the case with original perception, our capability to understand this relationship is implanted in us from birth; it is something 'natural' in the sense that we need not cultivate or develop it in order for it to function.
On the other end of the spectrum we have what Thomas Reid calls acquired perception and artificial language; both of these faculties understand a connection that exists between signs and reality as is the case with the original perception and natural language. Acquired perception discovers the relationship between novel signs (sensations) and a novel reality (say, a skyscraper or the ocean) by experience; this understanding is not innate as it is in original perception and thus must be honed. Analogously, our capacity for Reid's artificial language is said to discover the connection between particular articulated sounds (novel words or phrases, new semantics, or grammatical arrangements) and a man's thoughts and intentions; thus beliefs about the relation between the two are grounded in experience. Suppose I encounter a new word that has been circulating around my University lately, Word X. If I have never heard Word X before, apart from asking someone outright for a definition, I would likely come to understand its meaning only if I paid close attention to the way it was being used in sentences, its similarity to other words I already knew, and the like. My understanding of the connection between these syntactical, grammatical, and semantic clues and the actual meaning of the word would be what Reid would call my artificial language. Eventually, says Reid, I would come to form principles (something akin to concepts) and would be able to form generally accurate predictions about the meaning of new words through my artificial language and perceive the reality of novel objects through my acquired perception. I would come to understand that when such-and-such a sensation is present within me, an object with such-and-such properties is probably the cause of my sensation.
"There is, therefore, in the human mind an early anticipation, neither derived from experience, nor from reason, nor from any compact of promise, that our fellow creatures will use the same signs in language when they have the same sentiments.... The wise and beneficent Author of nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures two principles that tally with eachother" (Reid 231.)
These principles, says Thomas Reid, are first the propensity to speak the truth, to use the signs of language so as to convey our real sentiments, and second the "disposition to confide in the veracity of others." This second principle Reid dubs the principle of credulity. Richard Swinburne, in both his The Existence of God (p. 305) and his Epistemic Justification (pp. 141-50) devises a similar axiom by the same name. Alvin Plantinga, too, mentions Thomas Reid's principle in Warrant and Proper Function (p. 77). If humans are not implanted with a tendancy to accept prima facie what others have told us, Reid reasons, no proposition would go unexamined; we would be inclined to filter each and every report through reason and experience, weighing each testimony about the world against the evidence. This, says Reid, is obviously not the case. Even the most skeptical of us do not carefully and logically asses each and every claim we receive from others. This, to me, seems to be right. When I hear on the 7 o'clock news that there was a nasty accident on the highway, my first reaction is not skepticism, but epistemic assent. I tend to believe that I am told. Moreover, even witnesses that are perceived as less reliable than news organizations I generally meet with little to no skepticism. If my neighbor Fred comes over and tells me that his house was broken into last night, I take his claim at face value and adopt the belief, Fred's house was broken into last night into my epistemic web. Reid's principle of credulity is a kind of "innocent until proven guilty" with respect to the veracity of human testimony.
In addition to his argument from our apparent casual usage of the principle of credulity, Reid mounts a pragmatic argument in its favor: "...distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits of society, and place us in a worse condition than that of savages." Here, he makes the obvious point that without the normatization of the principle of credulity, human knowledge would diminish to a destructively low level; society itself would decline, and distrust and incredulity would slowly degrade our modern society. Thus, Reid argues, one ought to believe others about their testimony, at least prima facie.
Insofar as the principle of credulity relates to Thomas Reid's previous arguments about language and perception, we should here note that if, as a general rule, we should believe others, then it follows that we should believe others about specifics, such as the deliverances of their own acquired perception and artificial language. If, for instance, I observe my colleagues using Word X in a certain way, and I decide to take a stab at using Word X, I ought to follow their example and use it in the sense that they do. Similarly, if I am told that a number of people have just in the last few moments been appeared to in a rose-like way, I ought to first believe that this is probably not a lie (unless I know them to have good reason for deceiving me) and thus second that there probably was something rose-like that appeared to them in such a way so as to cause them to have a rose-like experience (since the best explanation for multiple experiences of a rose-like qualia is usually not hallucination or deception, but actual perception).
What exactly Thomas Reid's common-sense approach to testimony and credulity means for religion and religious experience is a topic I intend to explore soon.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Necessity and Other Divine Properties
I have been intrigued recently by the doctrine of the Trinity and its relation to God's necessary attributes. Simply expressed, orthodox Christianity teaches that God is one in essence (ousia) and three in person (hupostaseis). Now, whatever can be said about God can be said either about only one person or else about all three. For example, by "omnipotence" Christians understand the property of being all-powerful. This property is predicated of all three persons. God the Father is all-powerful, and so is the Son and the Holy Spirit. Omnipotence, moreover, is predicated of God necessarily; God cannot fail to be omnipotent, in any possible world. Some properties, however, (such as being incarnate) are predicated of only one person. Many of these characteristics are metaphysically contingent; the proposition "the universe exists" isn't a necessary proposition (since God didn't have to create the world) and thus God's workings in spacetime are themselves contingent. It may very well have been that God decided not to create the world, or perhaps He may have created the world, but instead of filling it with free agents, he decided to fill it with robotic, non-rational beings who sang his praises day and night. Such a world would, of course, not experience a Fall and therefore would not require restoration. It follows that if things could have been this way, or at least something like this (i.e. there is at least one possible world in which God didn't create the universe, or in which He did but it didn't require redemption), that the Incarnation and the Atonement are both contingent events. The individual properties of being Incarnate and dying an atoning death for humanity are thus also contingent. That is to say, the Son of God, does not necessarily predicate those attributes. Similarly, the Father's relations to Israel in the Old Testament weren't necessary in the philosophical sense. Surely it could have been otherwise; God could have chosen the Egyptians as His people if He had so wished.
Well, what exactly does this tell us and why does it really matter? First, I think it is important to realize that on a theological level, it is tempting to try to extend God's necessity to all aspects of His Being, an extension that seems to me quite unwarranted. When I was first pondering this issue, for example, the idea that God might predicate certain attributes only contingently seemed to me repugnant; how can it be that the Foundation of reality exists in any way but in complete and brute necessity? I was seeing the scope of possible worlds and thinking, "if God doesn't exemplify the same attributes in each and every possible world, then He is inconsistent." But, is this really true? That each person of the Trinity predicates properties contingently actually speaks to God's freedom, sovereignty, and benevolence. If I were to posit, for example, that the Son necessarily predicates the attribute being Incarnate at time t1, I would be limiting God's freedom. That God might have done otherwise is a necessary condition for His being perfectly free (that is, being an agent with freedom of the will). Are we to say that God must have done as he did? Certainly not! Indeed, insofar as this notion relates to the Atonement, isn't it a wonderful thought that out of all the possible worlds, God actualized the one in which His Son was given over to death for out transgressions? As far as I see it, if it is true (as I have argued here) that the individual persons of the Trinity predicate many attributes only contingently (particularly those attributes that are relational or external), then we as Christians have all the more reason to rejoice!
Well, what exactly does this tell us and why does it really matter? First, I think it is important to realize that on a theological level, it is tempting to try to extend God's necessity to all aspects of His Being, an extension that seems to me quite unwarranted. When I was first pondering this issue, for example, the idea that God might predicate certain attributes only contingently seemed to me repugnant; how can it be that the Foundation of reality exists in any way but in complete and brute necessity? I was seeing the scope of possible worlds and thinking, "if God doesn't exemplify the same attributes in each and every possible world, then He is inconsistent." But, is this really true? That each person of the Trinity predicates properties contingently actually speaks to God's freedom, sovereignty, and benevolence. If I were to posit, for example, that the Son necessarily predicates the attribute being Incarnate at time t1, I would be limiting God's freedom. That God might have done otherwise is a necessary condition for His being perfectly free (that is, being an agent with freedom of the will). Are we to say that God must have done as he did? Certainly not! Indeed, insofar as this notion relates to the Atonement, isn't it a wonderful thought that out of all the possible worlds, God actualized the one in which His Son was given over to death for out transgressions? As far as I see it, if it is true (as I have argued here) that the individual persons of the Trinity predicate many attributes only contingently (particularly those attributes that are relational or external), then we as Christians have all the more reason to rejoice!
Ordering the Chaotic
This blog will be a dumping ground for my thoughts. I find that my mind works best when I have a place to write down, discuss, and even argue about my ideas. As such, though many posts will initially appear scattered and disconnected, I expect that through time my blogs will become more coherent and as I interact with my readers, I will be more fully able to clearly relate and explain my thoughts.
With that said, here are a few topics I will likely blog about, although this list is, of course, subject to radical and violent change without even an inkling of notice:
1. My current theological journey away from Protestantism.
2. The Philosophy of Religion, particularly natural theology, the so-called problem of evil, and religious epistemology.
3. Reformed Epistemology especially as manifested in the works of Alvin Plantinga.
4. My readings in and discovery of Eastern Orthodox theology.
5. General Christian apologetics; my emphasis will be primarily on philosophical apologetics, though I may dabble a bit in historical apologetics.
Finally, I want to make a note about the title of this blog. As the subtitle hints, hodos pros ton logon means something like "journey toward reason" or, perhaps, "the road to the Word." The first verse of St. John's Gospel describes Christ as "ho logos" or "the Word," a phrase that references God's eternal rationality, His Reason, and the Son of God, the second Person of the Eternal Trinity. The Stoics would have understood the Logos as an eternal principle of rationality, an all-pervading and Divine reason. For Aristotle logos simply designated logical argumentation, a device of rhetoric used in persuasion. You may take from the title of this blog whatever you wish, but for me it expresses a desire to travel along a path, one already walked by a multitude of men and women much greater than I, a path toward Reason, a path toward God.
With that said, here are a few topics I will likely blog about, although this list is, of course, subject to radical and violent change without even an inkling of notice:
1. My current theological journey away from Protestantism.
2. The Philosophy of Religion, particularly natural theology, the so-called problem of evil, and religious epistemology.
3. Reformed Epistemology especially as manifested in the works of Alvin Plantinga.
4. My readings in and discovery of Eastern Orthodox theology.
5. General Christian apologetics; my emphasis will be primarily on philosophical apologetics, though I may dabble a bit in historical apologetics.
Finally, I want to make a note about the title of this blog. As the subtitle hints, hodos pros ton logon means something like "journey toward reason" or, perhaps, "the road to the Word." The first verse of St. John's Gospel describes Christ as "ho logos" or "the Word," a phrase that references God's eternal rationality, His Reason, and the Son of God, the second Person of the Eternal Trinity. The Stoics would have understood the Logos as an eternal principle of rationality, an all-pervading and Divine reason. For Aristotle logos simply designated logical argumentation, a device of rhetoric used in persuasion. You may take from the title of this blog whatever you wish, but for me it expresses a desire to travel along a path, one already walked by a multitude of men and women much greater than I, a path toward Reason, a path toward God.
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