My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. (Volf, Free of Charge, pp. 138-9)
Monday, September 10, 2007
The Wrath
In a post on James Alison, Lee has an interesting quotation from theologian Miroslav Volf:
Sunday, September 09, 2007
The Evitable Conflict: Progress in Moral Disagreement
If you get a large group of very diverse nations together and try to give some order to it, you run quite quickly into the problem of moral disagreement. If we are to write a sort of moral charter of the civilized world, we seem to be stymied: moral disagreements abound. How can you rally people around principles on which they do not agree?
This very problem was faced by those who gathered together to work on the UNESCO Charter. A world containing the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, China, France, and others is going to have plenty of disagreements. Trying to find a theoretical consensus on matters like human rights will be impossible. It was soon recognized, however, that even whether there is theoretical divergence, practical convergence is possible. As Maritain put it:
That is, while our theoretical views are different, people with different theoretical views can nonetheless have common experiences. They won't understand these common experiences in quite the same way, of course; but they can come to analogous understandings. And for practical purposes 'analogous' is often close enough to 'same' to be counted as such. Thus, even though you and I may have different reasons for saying that people should be protected from arbitrary search and seizure, and therefore not have exactly the same idea of 'protection' or 'arbitrary' or 'search and seizure' or 'should' or even 'people', our broadly common experiences of home, privacy, etc., allow for overlap in practical application. We can both take "People should be protected from arbitrary search and seizure" as a regulative principle, a standing reference point to which we can both appeal. Particular differences in how this is understood can be argued out -- again, to some solution adequate for practical purposes -- on the fly as they happen to become relevant.
Thus Maritain proposed that each group involved in the moral charter should formulate their own Declaration of Rights, laying out the practical conclusions they have arrived at from their particular ideological standpoint. These Declarations could then be compared, the formulae recast, and by conversation and compromise combined into one Declaration, representing a "convergence of practical views". This task, though formidable, is far easier than what would be required to build a convergence of rational justifications for these views. That would require an immense cooperative philosophical labor, one require superior intuitions, new modes of systematization, radical criticism of vast oceans of error (both minor and major), and would still leave us with a result that would need to be put into practice. It would require an immense degree of foresight and wisdom to yield such a universal system, and yet more to make it practical. As a matter of ordinary human nature we can often do better by solving our moral problems ambulando.
Of course, Maritain has his own perspective and operates within his own tradition. So he also gives a set of philosophical reasons for believing this is the best approach, and since I am in broad agreement with him, I'll briefly summarize his points here. The best rational justification or theory of human rights, and certainly the theory that Maritain and I share, is that of natural law. This natural law is universal as far as its general principles go; but it requires a supplementation that takes into account the specific circumstances found at a given time and place. This supplementation consists of custom and positive law which, however, supplement it imperfectly. As time goes on, however, and custom and positive law are rigorously held up to standards of practical reason, they become refined, more detailed, and also more consistent as measured according to the general principles of natural law, which are related to them as ends to means. However, because of the contingency of positive law, it is simply impossible for there ever to be a definitive, final, exhaustive declaration of human rights, because as circumstances change any positive law will be forced, if it is to remain in conformity with natural law, to make relevant adjustments. Thus, while prior written declarations of rights are important, it is valuable for human beings to renew their declarations from age to age. Likewise, it is valuable for human beings in different cultural and political circumstances to cultivate their own declarations. (The divergence that necessarily results from these contingencies is counterbalanced by the convergence that arises from broadly common experiences: experiences like parenting, home, family, work, hunger and thirst, and dying.)
A further corollary of this view is that declarations of rights, not only heavily dependent on contingent circumstances, will tend to group together "rights of varying degreesl" That is, it may have formulations that are among the best approximations of requirements of natural law across society that are available at that time and place (like basic rights of conscience), formulations that derive indirectly from natural law by way of common conventions such as those established in international law or widespread custom (like general rights of property and exchange), formulations that do not derive from natural law but protect from undue influence mechanisms that have shown themselves to be reasonably effective in facilitating common good in general and the preservation of individual rights in particular (like freedom of the press), and so forth. One of the weaknesses of most forms of modern liberalism is that they are incapable of recognizing this distinction among different rights, treating them all as on the level, and are therefore committed to impossibilities: either they are forced to contradict themselves by treating rights as both unlimited and limited, or they are forced into the hypocrisy of treating them in one case as one and in another case as the other as practically convenient. They are, moreover, forced either to treat contingent institutions and mechanisms as if they were general and absolute moral necessities, or to treat the moral necessities as if they were contingent institutions and mechanisms, or, again, waver back and forth between them as they find convenient under whatever circumstances happen to prevail at the time. In fact, we should expect natural divergences in the views people have of these things, arising from different circumstances and histories; standards can be set up that cover everyone not by setting down univocal principles that everyone recognizes as basic principles, but by recognizing in the particular principles each group develops through reasoning on its own particular experiences the analogies that grow up due to analogies among these different particular experiences, analogies that allow us to formulate rules or guidelines that are shared, always or for the most part, in actual practice.
And as with declarations of rights, so with declarations of responsibilities or obligations. And thus we find room for both moral disagreement and moral progress on at least some issues. There is, of course, more to be said on this and other points.
***
You can read Maritain's reasoning in his own words (PDF) thanks to UNESCO.
This very problem was faced by those who gathered together to work on the UNESCO Charter. A world containing the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, China, France, and others is going to have plenty of disagreements. Trying to find a theoretical consensus on matters like human rights will be impossible. It was soon recognized, however, that even whether there is theoretical divergence, practical convergence is possible. As Maritain put it:
Owing to the historical development of mankind and to ever-widening crises in the modern world, and to the advance, however precarious, or moral conscience and of reflection, men have to-day become conscious, more fully than ever before, though still to a very imperfect extent, of a number of practical truths regarding their life in common upon which they can agree, but which derive from the thought of each of them.
That is, while our theoretical views are different, people with different theoretical views can nonetheless have common experiences. They won't understand these common experiences in quite the same way, of course; but they can come to analogous understandings. And for practical purposes 'analogous' is often close enough to 'same' to be counted as such. Thus, even though you and I may have different reasons for saying that people should be protected from arbitrary search and seizure, and therefore not have exactly the same idea of 'protection' or 'arbitrary' or 'search and seizure' or 'should' or even 'people', our broadly common experiences of home, privacy, etc., allow for overlap in practical application. We can both take "People should be protected from arbitrary search and seizure" as a regulative principle, a standing reference point to which we can both appeal. Particular differences in how this is understood can be argued out -- again, to some solution adequate for practical purposes -- on the fly as they happen to become relevant.
Thus Maritain proposed that each group involved in the moral charter should formulate their own Declaration of Rights, laying out the practical conclusions they have arrived at from their particular ideological standpoint. These Declarations could then be compared, the formulae recast, and by conversation and compromise combined into one Declaration, representing a "convergence of practical views". This task, though formidable, is far easier than what would be required to build a convergence of rational justifications for these views. That would require an immense cooperative philosophical labor, one require superior intuitions, new modes of systematization, radical criticism of vast oceans of error (both minor and major), and would still leave us with a result that would need to be put into practice. It would require an immense degree of foresight and wisdom to yield such a universal system, and yet more to make it practical. As a matter of ordinary human nature we can often do better by solving our moral problems ambulando.
Of course, Maritain has his own perspective and operates within his own tradition. So he also gives a set of philosophical reasons for believing this is the best approach, and since I am in broad agreement with him, I'll briefly summarize his points here. The best rational justification or theory of human rights, and certainly the theory that Maritain and I share, is that of natural law. This natural law is universal as far as its general principles go; but it requires a supplementation that takes into account the specific circumstances found at a given time and place. This supplementation consists of custom and positive law which, however, supplement it imperfectly. As time goes on, however, and custom and positive law are rigorously held up to standards of practical reason, they become refined, more detailed, and also more consistent as measured according to the general principles of natural law, which are related to them as ends to means. However, because of the contingency of positive law, it is simply impossible for there ever to be a definitive, final, exhaustive declaration of human rights, because as circumstances change any positive law will be forced, if it is to remain in conformity with natural law, to make relevant adjustments. Thus, while prior written declarations of rights are important, it is valuable for human beings to renew their declarations from age to age. Likewise, it is valuable for human beings in different cultural and political circumstances to cultivate their own declarations. (The divergence that necessarily results from these contingencies is counterbalanced by the convergence that arises from broadly common experiences: experiences like parenting, home, family, work, hunger and thirst, and dying.)
A further corollary of this view is that declarations of rights, not only heavily dependent on contingent circumstances, will tend to group together "rights of varying degreesl" That is, it may have formulations that are among the best approximations of requirements of natural law across society that are available at that time and place (like basic rights of conscience), formulations that derive indirectly from natural law by way of common conventions such as those established in international law or widespread custom (like general rights of property and exchange), formulations that do not derive from natural law but protect from undue influence mechanisms that have shown themselves to be reasonably effective in facilitating common good in general and the preservation of individual rights in particular (like freedom of the press), and so forth. One of the weaknesses of most forms of modern liberalism is that they are incapable of recognizing this distinction among different rights, treating them all as on the level, and are therefore committed to impossibilities: either they are forced to contradict themselves by treating rights as both unlimited and limited, or they are forced into the hypocrisy of treating them in one case as one and in another case as the other as practically convenient. They are, moreover, forced either to treat contingent institutions and mechanisms as if they were general and absolute moral necessities, or to treat the moral necessities as if they were contingent institutions and mechanisms, or, again, waver back and forth between them as they find convenient under whatever circumstances happen to prevail at the time. In fact, we should expect natural divergences in the views people have of these things, arising from different circumstances and histories; standards can be set up that cover everyone not by setting down univocal principles that everyone recognizes as basic principles, but by recognizing in the particular principles each group develops through reasoning on its own particular experiences the analogies that grow up due to analogies among these different particular experiences, analogies that allow us to formulate rules or guidelines that are shared, always or for the most part, in actual practice.
And as with declarations of rights, so with declarations of responsibilities or obligations. And thus we find room for both moral disagreement and moral progress on at least some issues. There is, of course, more to be said on this and other points.
***
You can read Maritain's reasoning in his own words (PDF) thanks to UNESCO.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Argumentum ad Ignorantiam
Robert Larmer has an interesting little paper called Is there anything wrong with “God of the gaps” reasoning? on the proper characterization of the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, or appeal to ignorance. The "God of the gaps" charge is a very good place to examine that question, because it is probably the most widely known point in which it arises. It isn't the only such argument, though; for instance, many textbook characterizations of the fallacy would require us to put Dawkins's argument here in the same category. Much of Larmer's paper I find unconvincing, but he is quite right about how perversely uncritical some are when it comes to this sort of fallacy -- whose status of fallacy is not, in fact, even clear.
A common way of characterizing the fallacy is along these lines:
Statement p is unproved.
Therefore Not-p is true.
or
Statement not-p is unproved.
p is true.
But it's hard to see why this is fallacious; it is natural to read it as both defeasible and enthymematic. Walton, among others, has noted that as a matter of practical reasoning, this is often an excellent form of reasoning. (I have not determined that this gun is unloaded; it is reasonable to regard it as, for all practical purposes, a loaded gun unless it is shown to be otherwise.) But practical reasoning leaks into speculative inquiry; and as a purely speculative matter the above forms of reasoning can be quite reasonable. If I say, "There is no evidence that such-and-such drug has the effects attributed to it," I am not appealing to ignorance. I am appealing to the evidence of the inquiries themselves, the inquiries that have been made into the effects of the drug in question, and it stands or falls with the adequacy of these inquiries. Copi, in a typical hand-waving maneuver, tries to block this by saying that in such cases the argument is really based not on ignorance but on our knowledge that if the matter were to occur (e.g., if the drug were to have the effects attributed to it) it would be known. But this would save any supposed appeal to ignorance from being considered a fallacy. For surely they can all be interpreted as making the assumption that if p or not-p were true, this would be known or proven. Put them in the form of a modus tollens:
If p, it is proven.
It is unproven.
Therefore not-p.
If not-p, it is proven.
It is unproven.
Therefore p.
Thus the bar is so high that it seems absurd even to charge someone with the fallacy unless you have truly excellent reason to think they are basing their argument merely on a claim of general ignorance and nothing else, not even the assumption that we would discover it if it were true. But when are we ever going to encounter such an argument?
The Wikipedia article on the fallacy is about as close to perfectly incoherent as it could be. At one point it would seem to require us to say that every scientific conclusion commits the fallacy. For instance, it gives this as a nineteenth century instance:
Exactly where this example is from, I do not know. But on the suppositions presented in the article, this is an entirely reasonable argument that commits no fallacy; it provides a scientific reason for arriving at a conclusion, and one that was decent enough at the time. It errs in its assumptions about the nature of the sun, of course; but it doesn't appeal to ignorance in any way, shape, or form. Something doesn't count as an appeal to ignorance simply because there might be new evidence that could not have been pointed to as evidence at the time.
Walton points out, in an excellent discussion that the first classification of arguments that includes argumentum ad ignorantiam is given by Locke. It is one of "four sorts of arguments that men, in their reasonings with others, do ordinarily make use of to prevail on their assent; or at least so to awe them, as to silence their opposition." But Locke's argumentum ad ignorantiam is simply an argument by challenge: I argue that you should either accept my proof or provide a better one. As Locke notes, this argument does not advance us in knowledge, since knowledge can only come from "the nature of things themselves," not from my relative inability to avoid being outargued. But it does not follow from any of this that it is a fallacy, and Locke himself does not claim that it is. Locke's argumentum ad ignorantiam is inferior to the one form of argument that serves as a way to get knowledge, the argumentum ad iudicium, because it appeals to the interlocutor's ignorance (since you can't think of a better way than mine, shut up) rather than to his judgment. It shares this inferiority with the other two kinds of argument that don't tend toward knowledge, the argumentum ad verecundiam (which appeals to the interlocutor's modesty with regard to authority) and the argumentum ad hominem (which appeals to the interlocutor's own concessions). But it is not fallacious to appeal to experts (which is clearly a form of what Locke calls argumentum ad verecundiam), nor is it fallacious to show that if your opponent were consistent in his claims that he would agree with you (which is what Locke calls argumentum ad hominem); likewise, neither is it fallacious to appeal to the interlocutor's inability to have a better position than yours. It just doesn't give you "the nature of things themselves."
Walton always seems to assume that what Locke is describing is what later people would describe as the argumentum ad ignorantiam. It's not clear to me that this is so. Locke, I would suggest, is really talking about persuasion. His four sorts of argument are really four modes of rational debate, four ways in which you can persuade someone to assent to a position: by appealing to authorities and experts whose views they would or should respect (ad verecundiam), by pointing out their inability to argue for a better one (ad ignorantiam), by showing that what they have already conceded or would be willing to concede implies that position if they are to be consistent (ad hominem), and by giving them some direct evidence of the way things really are (ad iudicium). We all use these very often, and for good reason; they are essential parts of rational rhetoric, i.e., the rational means of persuading others. A longstanding attempt to salvage the notion of argumentum ad ignorantiam to see it as a fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. This clearly has the merits of both conveying something like what we usually mean by it and also conveying something like what Locke means by it. But it requires a very particular and very controvertible view of burden of proof even to hold that there are any fallacies related to burden of proof.
Leibniz had already pointed out in response to Locke's characterization of argumentum ad ignorantiam that there are cases where it is reasonable to accept a position until its contrary is proven. Whately, interestingly, claims in Elements of Logic that argumentum ad ignorantiam just means arguing with some kind of fallacy with an intent to deceive, and is therefore not a specific kind of fallacy at all. (Many informal fallacies are understood by Whately as only fallacious if there is an intent to deceive by substituting a not strictly relevant conclusion for the relevant one.) The same idea is found in Stock's Deductive Logic.
Which raises the interesting question of who started the use of phrase for arguments of the sort we usually mean by them. I find an obscure statement in McCosh's The Laws of Discursive Thought (1873) that the fallacy involves insisting that someone believe something "because he knows nothing to the contrary". He gives the right sort of examples, too: clairvoyance, animal magnetism, the cons of priests and pretenders, etc. But even earlier, William Dexter Wilson, in An Elementary Treatise of Logic (1856) says it "consists in proving that a given Proposition is true, because we know of no reason why it should not be true, or why the truth should be otherwise". His discussion has all the incoherence of modern discussions too: it's a fallacy, but not always, and the sort of reasoning is bad, except when it is not. (He does do better than Copi, however, in recognizing that cases of argumentum ad ignorantiam pretty standardly involve the assumption that if p were true we would or could know it.)
Of course, I think the 'God of the gaps' charge is often quite reasonable. I don't think it is so when it is understood as claiming that the argument commits argumentum ad ignorantiam. Rather, saying that an argument is a 'God of the gaps' argument involves saying that (1) there is a gap requiring some causal or explanatory factor; (2) God is posited as directly fulfilling the role of that explanatory factor; but (3) we have reason that we do not need, or in the end will not need, to posit God in this role at all. It's a claim that the argument is hasty, jumping to conclusions, by attributing something directly to divine intervention that we have reason to believe is directly attributable to natural causes, even if we are still in the process of determining exactly what they are. Understood this way, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fallacy of appeal to ignorance, being a claim about the best way to go about filling the gap. Thus I do think Larmer is on the right track in suggesting that it is really about whether the conditions for a good search-based inquiry have been fulfilled.
A common way of characterizing the fallacy is along these lines:
Statement p is unproved.
Therefore Not-p is true.
or
Statement not-p is unproved.
p is true.
But it's hard to see why this is fallacious; it is natural to read it as both defeasible and enthymematic. Walton, among others, has noted that as a matter of practical reasoning, this is often an excellent form of reasoning. (I have not determined that this gun is unloaded; it is reasonable to regard it as, for all practical purposes, a loaded gun unless it is shown to be otherwise.) But practical reasoning leaks into speculative inquiry; and as a purely speculative matter the above forms of reasoning can be quite reasonable. If I say, "There is no evidence that such-and-such drug has the effects attributed to it," I am not appealing to ignorance. I am appealing to the evidence of the inquiries themselves, the inquiries that have been made into the effects of the drug in question, and it stands or falls with the adequacy of these inquiries. Copi, in a typical hand-waving maneuver, tries to block this by saying that in such cases the argument is really based not on ignorance but on our knowledge that if the matter were to occur (e.g., if the drug were to have the effects attributed to it) it would be known. But this would save any supposed appeal to ignorance from being considered a fallacy. For surely they can all be interpreted as making the assumption that if p or not-p were true, this would be known or proven. Put them in the form of a modus tollens:
If p, it is proven.
It is unproven.
Therefore not-p.
If not-p, it is proven.
It is unproven.
Therefore p.
Thus the bar is so high that it seems absurd even to charge someone with the fallacy unless you have truly excellent reason to think they are basing their argument merely on a claim of general ignorance and nothing else, not even the assumption that we would discover it if it were true. But when are we ever going to encounter such an argument?
The Wikipedia article on the fallacy is about as close to perfectly incoherent as it could be. At one point it would seem to require us to say that every scientific conclusion commits the fallacy. For instance, it gives this as a nineteenth century instance:
The solar system must be younger than a million years because even if the sun was made of solid coal and oxygen it would have burned up within that time at the rate it generates heat.
Exactly where this example is from, I do not know. But on the suppositions presented in the article, this is an entirely reasonable argument that commits no fallacy; it provides a scientific reason for arriving at a conclusion, and one that was decent enough at the time. It errs in its assumptions about the nature of the sun, of course; but it doesn't appeal to ignorance in any way, shape, or form. Something doesn't count as an appeal to ignorance simply because there might be new evidence that could not have been pointed to as evidence at the time.
Walton points out, in an excellent discussion that the first classification of arguments that includes argumentum ad ignorantiam is given by Locke. It is one of "four sorts of arguments that men, in their reasonings with others, do ordinarily make use of to prevail on their assent; or at least so to awe them, as to silence their opposition." But Locke's argumentum ad ignorantiam is simply an argument by challenge: I argue that you should either accept my proof or provide a better one. As Locke notes, this argument does not advance us in knowledge, since knowledge can only come from "the nature of things themselves," not from my relative inability to avoid being outargued. But it does not follow from any of this that it is a fallacy, and Locke himself does not claim that it is. Locke's argumentum ad ignorantiam is inferior to the one form of argument that serves as a way to get knowledge, the argumentum ad iudicium, because it appeals to the interlocutor's ignorance (since you can't think of a better way than mine, shut up) rather than to his judgment. It shares this inferiority with the other two kinds of argument that don't tend toward knowledge, the argumentum ad verecundiam (which appeals to the interlocutor's modesty with regard to authority) and the argumentum ad hominem (which appeals to the interlocutor's own concessions). But it is not fallacious to appeal to experts (which is clearly a form of what Locke calls argumentum ad verecundiam), nor is it fallacious to show that if your opponent were consistent in his claims that he would agree with you (which is what Locke calls argumentum ad hominem); likewise, neither is it fallacious to appeal to the interlocutor's inability to have a better position than yours. It just doesn't give you "the nature of things themselves."
Walton always seems to assume that what Locke is describing is what later people would describe as the argumentum ad ignorantiam. It's not clear to me that this is so. Locke, I would suggest, is really talking about persuasion. His four sorts of argument are really four modes of rational debate, four ways in which you can persuade someone to assent to a position: by appealing to authorities and experts whose views they would or should respect (ad verecundiam), by pointing out their inability to argue for a better one (ad ignorantiam), by showing that what they have already conceded or would be willing to concede implies that position if they are to be consistent (ad hominem), and by giving them some direct evidence of the way things really are (ad iudicium). We all use these very often, and for good reason; they are essential parts of rational rhetoric, i.e., the rational means of persuading others. A longstanding attempt to salvage the notion of argumentum ad ignorantiam to see it as a fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. This clearly has the merits of both conveying something like what we usually mean by it and also conveying something like what Locke means by it. But it requires a very particular and very controvertible view of burden of proof even to hold that there are any fallacies related to burden of proof.
Leibniz had already pointed out in response to Locke's characterization of argumentum ad ignorantiam that there are cases where it is reasonable to accept a position until its contrary is proven. Whately, interestingly, claims in Elements of Logic that argumentum ad ignorantiam just means arguing with some kind of fallacy with an intent to deceive, and is therefore not a specific kind of fallacy at all. (Many informal fallacies are understood by Whately as only fallacious if there is an intent to deceive by substituting a not strictly relevant conclusion for the relevant one.) The same idea is found in Stock's Deductive Logic.
Which raises the interesting question of who started the use of phrase for arguments of the sort we usually mean by them. I find an obscure statement in McCosh's The Laws of Discursive Thought (1873) that the fallacy involves insisting that someone believe something "because he knows nothing to the contrary". He gives the right sort of examples, too: clairvoyance, animal magnetism, the cons of priests and pretenders, etc. But even earlier, William Dexter Wilson, in An Elementary Treatise of Logic (1856) says it "consists in proving that a given Proposition is true, because we know of no reason why it should not be true, or why the truth should be otherwise". His discussion has all the incoherence of modern discussions too: it's a fallacy, but not always, and the sort of reasoning is bad, except when it is not. (He does do better than Copi, however, in recognizing that cases of argumentum ad ignorantiam pretty standardly involve the assumption that if p were true we would or could know it.)
Of course, I think the 'God of the gaps' charge is often quite reasonable. I don't think it is so when it is understood as claiming that the argument commits argumentum ad ignorantiam. Rather, saying that an argument is a 'God of the gaps' argument involves saying that (1) there is a gap requiring some causal or explanatory factor; (2) God is posited as directly fulfilling the role of that explanatory factor; but (3) we have reason that we do not need, or in the end will not need, to posit God in this role at all. It's a claim that the argument is hasty, jumping to conclusions, by attributing something directly to divine intervention that we have reason to believe is directly attributable to natural causes, even if we are still in the process of determining exactly what they are. Understood this way, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fallacy of appeal to ignorance, being a claim about the best way to go about filling the gap. Thus I do think Larmer is on the right track in suggesting that it is really about whether the conditions for a good search-based inquiry have been fulfilled.
L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle died Thursday at the age of 88. A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters (somehow I never managed to read the final sequel, An Acceptable Time, or the other books in the related O'Keefe series) were the inspiration of a great deal of thought about time, friendship, and the like in my childhood.
In this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.
Omniscience and Necessity
There has been some lovely discussion over at Richard Brown's blog, "Philosophy Sucks!", devoted to the question of whether omniscience is compatible with free will. There is vigorous discussion in the comments. The posts so far are:
Plantinga on Free Will and Omniscience
(I Think) I Got It!
Third Time's the Charm
Re-Inventing the Wheel
Does God Know About Quantum Mechanics?
Much of the discussion has been less about God and more about to handle talk about possible worlds, but there are many other topics discussed in the posts and the comments on them.
Plantinga on Free Will and Omniscience
(I Think) I Got It!
Third Time's the Charm
Re-Inventing the Wheel
Does God Know About Quantum Mechanics?
Much of the discussion has been less about God and more about to handle talk about possible worlds, but there are many other topics discussed in the posts and the comments on them.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Rationalists are Growing Rational
A Ballade of Suicide
G. K. Chesterton
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay--
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--
I see a little cloud all pink and grey--
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call--
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way--
I never read the works of Juvenal--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational--
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
ENVOI
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Notes and Links
* Susan Palwick has a lovely post on giving to the homeless.
* Terence Tao has a summary of the argument of the paper co-authored by Danica McKellar in mathematics. McKellar has been getting a considerable amount of publicity recently, since she's a former child actress who's published a paper in mathematics and, more recently, a book encouraging middle school girls to take an interest in mathematics.
* Apparently there are rumors that there will soon be a movie in the works based on Charles Williams's All Hallow's Eve. My favorite Williams novel is (far and away) The Place of the Lion, and AHE probably isn't even in my top five, but it's a decent enough story, and I can see why someone might think it would make an interesting movie.
* Pointing out mistakes that reporters make when talking about the Pope (or any major religious figure, for that matter) is usually like shooting fish in a barrel -- too easy to be anything more than tiresome. But occasionally there's a fun fish to shoot. Some Catholic blogs are noting a Reuters report on the Pope's September 2nd homily, which devoted some words to safeguarding creation. The report says:
Strictly speaking this is certainly true; the Pope was intentionally wearing green vestments. But, as Amy Welborn points out:
* An interesting post on the value-of-knowledge problem at Virtue Epistemology. I found it an interesting read even though I'm a skeptic about the value of knowledge: that is, while I have no doubt that there are particular cases in which knowledge is better than true belief, I don't think knowledge in general is better than true belief in general, nor that knowledge as such is better than true belief as such. (As I've noted before, there are many, many cases in which it is fairly obvious that knowledge is not more valuable than true belief, e.g., when the object of belief or knowledge is very trivial. Incidentally, it bugs me that this value problem, which I regard as relatively trivial, is usurping the name 'Meno Problem', which is already the name for a perfectly good and longstanding philosophical problem, namely, how we can come to know something that we don't know already and recognize that it was what we were trying to know.)
* Hurray! There's a website devoted to making the contribution of women to philosophy more widely known. It's only just getting up and running; almost none of my favorites are on the list: Lady Mary Shepherd, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edith Stein, and more; I look forward to seeing what's put up about them. They do have Anne Conway up, and the patron saint of philosophers, Saint Catherine of Alexandria; as also the two Saint Macrinas, Julian of Norwich, and many more. There is a blog that posts notices of new biographies put up.
ADDED LATER:
* Rebecca has a quiz on the Trinity (answers here). I think #29 is a little ambiguous, but in all it's a great quiz.
* Stephen Matheson, a biologist at Calvin College, has two posts on common descent: here and here.
* There are several discussions going on about the nature of sexual identity, sparked by the Craig scandal; Jon Rowe has some comments, and Mark and Macht does, too, for instance (see the comments on these threads as well). A phrase that keeps coming up is 'sexual orientation'. I'm skeptical that there's any such thing. Obviously there are developed sexual tastes; likewise there are sexual sentiments, partly original and partly learned, that tend to arise for different people on different occasions; moreover, we have sexual self-images; and there's a habitual mix of these that constitute our standing (but not perfectly stable) sexual interests. But 'sexual orientation' is, first of all, a phrase people who classify themselves as heterosexual often use to put everyone else in a comfortably opposed category of sexuality, ignoring large overarching similarities; second of all, it is continually used to elide the difference among standing sexual interests, sexual self-image, sexual experimenting out of curiosity, occasional sexual dabblings due to other reasons, and the like. Both of these are symptoms that the phrase tends to have more use for rhetoric than for designating anything in particular in the real world. It also, it should be pointed out to many of those who use the phrase who would abhor the suggestion in any other context, tends to imply a sort of sexual teleology. It is in fact often explicitly used to do so, and those who use the term have a responsibility either to tell us what sexual teleology they think is involved, or justify their use of a teleological term for something non-teleological. 'Sexual orientation', in fact, is one of the many instances in thought about sexual life where we have a perverse tendency to use the obscure and perpetually shifting to explain the less obscure and more stable.
* A lecture on James Clerk Maxwell, mostly biographical, by Ian Hutchinson of MIT. (ht: Claw)
* Terence Tao has a summary of the argument of the paper co-authored by Danica McKellar in mathematics. McKellar has been getting a considerable amount of publicity recently, since she's a former child actress who's published a paper in mathematics and, more recently, a book encouraging middle school girls to take an interest in mathematics.
* Apparently there are rumors that there will soon be a movie in the works based on Charles Williams's All Hallow's Eve. My favorite Williams novel is (far and away) The Place of the Lion, and AHE probably isn't even in my top five, but it's a decent enough story, and I can see why someone might think it would make an interesting movie.
* Pointing out mistakes that reporters make when talking about the Pope (or any major religious figure, for that matter) is usually like shooting fish in a barrel -- too easy to be anything more than tiresome. But occasionally there's a fun fish to shoot. Some Catholic blogs are noting a Reuters report on the Pope's September 2nd homily, which devoted some words to safeguarding creation. The report says:
Intentionally wearing green vestments, he spoke to a vast crowd of mostly young people sprawled over a massive hillside near the Adriatic city of Loreto on the day Italy's Catholic Church marks it annual Save Creation Day.
Strictly speaking this is certainly true; the Pope was intentionally wearing green vestments. But, as Amy Welborn points out:
Um, yeah. I’m hoping the Reuters reporter means “Intentionally wearing green vestments because that’s the liturgical color for Ordinary Time,” but I’m thinking, given the context into which the reference is woven…maybe not.
* An interesting post on the value-of-knowledge problem at Virtue Epistemology. I found it an interesting read even though I'm a skeptic about the value of knowledge: that is, while I have no doubt that there are particular cases in which knowledge is better than true belief, I don't think knowledge in general is better than true belief in general, nor that knowledge as such is better than true belief as such. (As I've noted before, there are many, many cases in which it is fairly obvious that knowledge is not more valuable than true belief, e.g., when the object of belief or knowledge is very trivial. Incidentally, it bugs me that this value problem, which I regard as relatively trivial, is usurping the name 'Meno Problem', which is already the name for a perfectly good and longstanding philosophical problem, namely, how we can come to know something that we don't know already and recognize that it was what we were trying to know.)
* Hurray! There's a website devoted to making the contribution of women to philosophy more widely known. It's only just getting up and running; almost none of my favorites are on the list: Lady Mary Shepherd, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edith Stein, and more; I look forward to seeing what's put up about them. They do have Anne Conway up, and the patron saint of philosophers, Saint Catherine of Alexandria; as also the two Saint Macrinas, Julian of Norwich, and many more. There is a blog that posts notices of new biographies put up.
ADDED LATER:
* Rebecca has a quiz on the Trinity (answers here). I think #29 is a little ambiguous, but in all it's a great quiz.
* Stephen Matheson, a biologist at Calvin College, has two posts on common descent: here and here.
* There are several discussions going on about the nature of sexual identity, sparked by the Craig scandal; Jon Rowe has some comments, and Mark and Macht does, too, for instance (see the comments on these threads as well). A phrase that keeps coming up is 'sexual orientation'. I'm skeptical that there's any such thing. Obviously there are developed sexual tastes; likewise there are sexual sentiments, partly original and partly learned, that tend to arise for different people on different occasions; moreover, we have sexual self-images; and there's a habitual mix of these that constitute our standing (but not perfectly stable) sexual interests. But 'sexual orientation' is, first of all, a phrase people who classify themselves as heterosexual often use to put everyone else in a comfortably opposed category of sexuality, ignoring large overarching similarities; second of all, it is continually used to elide the difference among standing sexual interests, sexual self-image, sexual experimenting out of curiosity, occasional sexual dabblings due to other reasons, and the like. Both of these are symptoms that the phrase tends to have more use for rhetoric than for designating anything in particular in the real world. It also, it should be pointed out to many of those who use the phrase who would abhor the suggestion in any other context, tends to imply a sort of sexual teleology. It is in fact often explicitly used to do so, and those who use the term have a responsibility either to tell us what sexual teleology they think is involved, or justify their use of a teleological term for something non-teleological. 'Sexual orientation', in fact, is one of the many instances in thought about sexual life where we have a perverse tendency to use the obscure and perpetually shifting to explain the less obscure and more stable.
* A lecture on James Clerk Maxwell, mostly biographical, by Ian Hutchinson of MIT. (ht: Claw)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)