Which prior assumptions
Epistemology is difficult. (Remember that long discussion between G and Ben the other day? Shop talk. Difficult shop talk.) This morning I was trying to figure out the meaning of a comment by Josh Rosenau on Jerry Coyne’s post last week on Dawkins and accommodationism and I followed a link to a three-year-old post by John Wilkins on agnosticism. It’s good, and interesting, and much of it I don’t understand. This for instance:
Probabilities are based in this case on prior assumptions – one uses Bayes’ theorem to determine whether or not the hypothesis under test is likely to be true, given other assumptions we already accept. And here is where the problem lies – which assumptions? To adopt and restrict one’s priors to scientific assumptions is question begging. You in effect eliminate any other conceptual presuppositions from being in the game. This has a name in philosophy – positivism. It is the (empirically unsupportable) claim that only scientific arguments can be applied. As Popper noted, this is self-refuting. You cannot prove the basic premise of your argument that only provable (or, let’s be generous, supportable) claims should be accepted. As this is not a supportable claim in itself, you have contradicted your own position.
You cannot prove the basic premise, but can you support it? If the basic premise of your argument is that only supportable claims should be accepted, can you support that premise, and is supporting it enough? Do you have to prove it? If support is enough then you haven’t contradicted your own position, right?
An agnostic says that since one can make God likely or unlikely by shifting one’s priors appropriately, at the level of metadiscourse there is nothing that can decide between them. As it happens, I share most of Dawkins’ assumptions about how knowledge is gained, and it does seem to me that God is unnecessary in scientific reasoning, but I cannot show, nor can he or anyone else, that scientific reasoning is all that should or can ever be employed. And that is not “fence sitting” but a recognition of the limits of this kind of metalevel argument…[A]ll I am doing is admitting that, at the level of philosophical discourse, I can neither affirm nor reject these entities, and that what makes them likely or unlikely depends crucially on the priors that one accepts.
And, if I understand him correctly, ‘at the level of philosophical discourse’ you can’t say one prior is better than another (or you can say but you can’t prove or demonstrate or even support the claim that). Is that right? Is that what he means, and if it is, can it be right? Does it all depend on careful wording (you can’t prove, but you can do something short of proving) or does it say something real and significant and compelling?
The Proofs of God that Dawkins reviews in the book are not decisive, true. Neither are the Disproofs of God. Dawkins is confusing personal conviction with formal demonstrability. He may be convinced there is no God. But he cannot demonstrate that. At best he can set up the dialectic conditions in which his conclusion is shown to be justified. But, and here’s the kicker, so can theists. It’s all about what prior assumptions you feed into Bayes’ Theorem.
Yes, I get that…but some prior assumptions are more reasonable than others – which one can’t prove or demonstrate, but one can support it. One can point out what works and what doesn’t – in the world and circumstances we are familiar with. Sure maybe there’s a metalevel where none of that applies, but for our purposes, here and now, where we can only go with our best information…some prior assumptions are more reasonable than others.
I suppose that’s why I find myself saying ‘yes all kinds of things might be true but without evidence there’s no good reason to believe they are true’ so often these days. Variations on agnosticism are popular when theists meet Militant New atheists.
Is it really good and interesting? I honestly can’t see anything other than the usual agnostic ignorance of parsimony and the burden of proof (but only for the concept which they’ve been culturally inculcated to believe is special, ie god). I know its almost cliche to say it, but replace “God” in that article with any other made up entity and its concept is completely unchanged.
Me, I’ve always seen my atheism as fundamentally an agnostic position, it’s the theists who believe they know what they can’t know so why don’t the “agnostics” go tell them that they don’t know? That ones easy to answer because the “agnostics” aren’t agnostics, they’re just dressed up apologists pulling yet another dishonest tactic.
I read the Wilkins post a while back and it made me appreciate my standing as an unschooled lay person, not obliged to be anything other than an unwishy-washy, commonsense atheist.
Kallan G, I’d really dispute that; I’m an atheist, I’m sure as hell not an agnostic, and given that the definition of agnosticism doesn’t comprise that of atheism I feel consistent in saying so. We can know there’s no god with exactly the same certainty we know there’s no Father Christmas, FSM, etc; it’s only god that agnostics prevaricate over so much, because they think you need absolute knowledge to dismiss a concept (just that one mind) when all you need is the complete lack of evidence for said concept and a grasp of Ockham’s razor.
In the context of practical things we ought to care about when cooking up knowledge, Dawkins argues that science is presupposed. Either science is useful for all practical epistemic purposes or it isn’t. a) Contrary to Wilkins’ claims, if it is useful, then that doesn’t mean it has to be a claim to prior knowledge (i.e., even Dawkins might be convinced to believe in the existence God if He were any good at answering prayers). And if it’s not prior knowledge, then it’s not question begging, since it’s revisable by future experience. b) If science isn’t useful for all practical purposes, we ought to hear details on why that is.
The positivists were bold — they presupposed that Hume’s fork underlined meaning, and didn’t give themselves enough tools to explain where this dogma comes from. Their zero-tolerance attitude towards bullshit was so rigid that it kept out lots of the kinds of things we care about. But Dawkins isn’t committed to that or anything like that. He’s pretty clear about the fact that he’s talking about the context of epistemology and practical affairs. Quite ironically, when dealing with the question of practical conduct, Wilkins is the one who comes across as a positivist: “in our present state of knowledge and capacities, until a Deoscope is invented, the issue has only the form of a question. It’s rather like asking “Is there a blurg?” The question is meaningless”. Hence he says that it is just as well to say you are acting as if there were a blurg as there weren’t. That’s fine, and I’ll stop short of following the trail of irony (i.e., by accusing him of begging the question via his fidelity to Popper). The problem is the one you pointed out just recently, that when the Blurg in question has made a deep impact in our lifeworld, it is perfectly meaningful. (Hence the Popperian style of argument doesn’t work either. If there were an idea of god who could only be falsified by a failure to provide life therapy, and this were idiosyncratic (i.e., only one person in a zillion actually believed this), then unless the anomaly were Martin Luther we’d probably ignore him/her and go with convention.)
As a consequence, Wilkins’s position in the “meta-discourse” can be rebuffed on the grounds that were obvious all along: its uselessness. Strictly speaking, it isn’t even fence-sitting, since the fence is imaginary.
Part of the problem seems to be that Wilkins thinks that the idea of “philosophical discourse” is only about logical necessity or one of its cognates. For these sorts of debates, things like mounds of evidence and support get to be dismissed on prior grounds, because nothing short of dogged certainty arising from logical trivialities will cut the mustard. In these cases, providing support for some thing happens to coincide quite a lot with proving some thing (like deriving a formula in natural deduction). But these are exceptions, not the rule.
If that’s an accurate interpretation of Wilkins, then he would not be alone in holding them. (Philosophy departments everywhere are desperate at justifying their distinct place on the modern university campus.) But that doesn’t make any difference to the fact that philosophical naturalists don’t agree. We think the language of necessity, if it is useful at all, is about conceptual schemes and regular contexts. We own up to the fact that we’re real people with real goals, and that any epistemology that’s worth doing will respect that.
If I can venture to diagnose the problem with Wilkins’s perspective, it seems as though “our goals in context” are being confused with “prior assumptions”. Our epistemic goals are practical, and so even if we enter into a debate with prior assumptions about the usefulness of science, these assumptions can be changed midway through if there is some useful alternative put forward to challenge them.
On the other hand, if “prior assumption” means something like “a priori knowledge”, in its original unmolested-but-historically-interesting sense, then of course they’d still be standing whatever the evidence had to say — but that’s not relevant, since Dawkins has restricted his interest to practical contexts. (Hence the whole 6-out-of-7-atheist thing, which I’m not sure Wilkins caught on when he wrote that post. D’oh!)
Pangloss, sometimes we’re useful — I swear! (Not this time though.)
I used to regularly read and post on Wilkins site. Until I saw how he would indulge in atheist bashing a la Mooney. He had a very similar M.O. of trying to put himself in the (reasonable) center and atheist were said to be at the exact opposite extreme as fundamentalists. The old mirror image gambit.
I consider myself an agnostic atheist, in that I have no knowledge (agnosis) of any god, and I don’t believe in any god (atheist) because there’s no compelling reason for believing. Wilkins went to town on that because that would’ve made him an atheist and thus a fundamentalist and removed him from the center.
As for the claim that saying science works etc. is positivism and refutable. I think Benjamin got that one nicely. I like how people read Hume then declare his fork self-refuting. If you bother to read what Hume says, his fork isn’t a logical law or something deductive. It’s based on Hume “gleaning up” from introspection. It is a quasi-scientific conclusion. He was an empiricist after all. So while you can say his assumptions of ideas, relations of ideas are all bogus in the light of modern neuroscience. You can’t say Hume’s fork is self-refuting because it’s neither a matter of fact or relation of ideas. It’s indeed a matter of fact for Hume, thus admissible.
“sometimes we’re useful”
I agree. But, I’m happy to leave philosophy to the professionals. It makes my head hurt.
I recently enrolled in a philosophy course at Russell’s Alma Mater. I left it after a month. I was getting excellent marks but got into a quarrel with a tutor. The course was online, so the quarrel occurred online and thus my impressions of the tutor might not be, in fact probably aren’t, accurate qua everyday person. In any case, the subject was metaphysics (with a logic component) and specifically Descartes conception of self. At one point I mention something about maths, specifically algebra, the tutor said most algebra in maths wasn’t algebra which struck me as wrong headed. He had a really abrupt manner as well. Later I mentioned the neuro-science and physics shows Descartes assumptions wrong. The tutor replied that science can’t comment on pre-scientific notions like logic and maths. By which he meant that science can’t comment on what is the mind/self I suppose. He continued that my pointing to neuroscience showed how ignorant and whatever I was. On the whole he was quite rude and seemed to be a suffer of the Dunning Kruger effect. Anyway, he was supported by the course coordinator. She told me to be nice, when all I did was say that I found his attitude childish. He was wrong on the neuroscience and physics. He was probably wrong about the maths. Interestingly Russell Blackfords lecture notes for that unit agreed with what I said, not the tutor.
It seems that philosophy, or some philosophers want to pretend that philosophy is the queen of the sciences still and that philosophy mandates what is science and what its domain is. In reality philosophers of science don’t understand the cutting edge of science and are trying to play catch up. They can offer insights but scientists don’t need to go to philosophers when doing science.
I love the ideas of philosophy. I’d love to be better at critical thinking and logic and make more sense. But if it requires turning off all I know about science or pretending that the mind/self is a unity and all that, then I’m not cut out to be a philosopher. I don’t have enough brains now to afford the lobotomy.
Okay. That’s what I thought, but being an outsider, I wanted more opinions.
I know, about the recent atheist bashing, or at least close to that. (I don’t read him regularly, so may have missed full-on bashing.) There was a very dismissive post about Roy Brown’s opposition to the UN’s ‘defamation of religion’ resolution – that put me right off.
Brian, we all have horror stories with TA’s. I had a tutor who had no grasp of the distinction between validity and soundness (!!!), and was stunningly arrogant about it. Talking with her was a “1066 And All That” kind of experience, except incredibly intimidating for the novice fresh out of high school to deal with. If you have a decent prof, they’ll transcend their special fuzzy teacher-tutor bond and give the student a courtesy by taking it for granted that they have a functioning brain. In my case I was lucky enough to have a prof who immediately recognized the error and gave me full marks.
In other cases, notsomuch. I’ve run the gamut, from being “thrown out” of a logic course for being too “continental” in my vocabulary (whatever that means), to being given bad grades for constructing in depth arguments against things the prof believes in (after multiple three-hour-long marathon session dialogues with him, taking notes on his arguments, and trying to come up with counters that don’t end with the conversation-stopper, “I don’t share that intuition”).
I’m puzzling over the meaning of “most algebra in maths wasn’t algebra”. The only way I could figure that to be true is if they were insisting that there’s a proprietary distinction between logic and mathematics that they were fond of; i.e., if they said that much of algebra is more logical than it is mathematical. I don’t know what Descartes had to say about that, but for their part I quite doubt the logicists (and the Other Russell, Bertrand) would have been very happy. Still, people can be passionately motivated about these sorts of things because they have to stake claims over whatever conceptual real estate they can to justify their continued funding.
Giving that benefit of the doubt, if the tutor’s idea was to get you to put yourself in Descartes’s shoes, then I could see where the resistance to neuroscience might come from. But that’s only if we’re supposed to be talking about Descartes and the Cartesian view (or any dualisms). If we’re talking about the fact of the matter — well, Descartes was mistaken, and we should know that by now. But it’s interesting to see where he was at at the time, even if his super awesome great solution is “the soul connects to us through the pineal gland”.
I think the key to the philosophy/science discussion that’s starting to kindle up again is that scientists at the cutting edge of their fields (even in rapid-discovery science) are themselves people who don’t much need additional lectures on the philosophy of science or metaphysics. I can think of a handful of exceptions, like Feynman, but then you have others like Damasio, Einstein, Poincare, Dawkins that are immersed in fruitful philosophical discussion (and in the case of the first three, philosophical novelties). What’s worse, avoiding philosophy can lead to disaster. E.O. Wilson is case in point — on my reading, he (however innocently) took reductionism for granted just when we were coming to understand why it was the case that reductionism wasn’t the only game in town. When this reductionist premise was combined with certain moral premises, the whole thing took on unfortunate political dimensions. If he had just said something like “I believe in anomalous monism”, then Sociobiology might not be synonymous with “white racist scum” today.
The problem children I think you have in mind are those philosophers who find themselves whittling away their time nitpicking at some relatively isolated and insignificant conversation that a few Important People had one time over tea. These sub-scholars have no sense of productivity, and worse yet have lost all sense of what it would mean to be wrong and/or interesting. For my part, I just sort of make frowny faces at them, get “thrown out”, etc. It’s good fun.
Creating false equivalences is a constant pitfall in philosophy. Many attempts to defend the rationality of theism boil down to pointing out the obvious (we all have to make some assumptions) and then erroneously treating all assumptions like they are equal. It frustrates me quite a bit.
In a seminar once a professor had us read a paper by theologian and apologist William Alston. The argument drew a dubious distinction between two types of “practice”: Perseptive practice and Christian practice. He then went on to point out the obvious fact that individual perception must be reinforced by perceptions from others if it’s to have any worth. He then made the totally unjustified leap that this puts it on a level playing field with Christian practice, which must also be reinforced by tradition, scripture, and a religious community.
I pointed out to the professor in the seminar that I could go through Alston’s paper and replace with word “Christian” with some term of my own invention–say “Hurbly-Burbly”–without in any way affecting the content of the argument. That is, I could support the equality of perceptive practice and Hurbly-Burbly practice with precisely the same argument, because absolutely nothing in his argument showed why Christian assumptions should be entertained in the first place.
He didn’t seem to understand why that would be a problem.
Since OB mentioned our prior conversation, Ben, I thought I’d jump in here as well – except that I have little to say. I agree with everything you stated in your first post. (I also share Brian’s experience; I formerly read Wilkins’ blog semi-regularly, then stopped because he’s wrong-headed and frequently arrogant/condescending about some things, especially (but not exclusively) his agnosticism and atheist-bashing.)
In fact, I can only find one tiny thing to disagree with. Your (Ben’s, that is) parenthetical comment about motivations – “(Philosophy departments everywhere are desperate at justifying their distinct place on the modern university campus.)” – is given as a reason why views like Wilkins’ are common. While I agree that Wilkins-like notions that philosophy is all about logical minutia and a priori certainty (what a pipe dream!) and such are common, and I agree that philosophy departments are often desperate to justify their existence, I don’t think the latter explains the former in any way. The divide between philosophical approaches that focus primarily on ideas and “pure” reason and everything else that happens solely inside the confines of human skulls* versus philosophical approaches that are more engaged with the world in a pragmatic and empirical way can be traced back to the foundations of the discipline. This is Plato v. Aristotle stuff, really: The same divide can be seen later in different forms – Descartes v. Locke, Kant v. Hume, and eventually on down to Wilkins v. people like you and I. Such opposed approaches to philosophy as a discipline (along with lots of variations and in-between positions) have existed longer than there have been philosophy departments and struggles for funding, and I don’t see any reason to think that the latter has much at all to do with the persistence or prevalence of any particular approach to philosophy. Rather, some philosophers are just that way – always have been, probably always will be.
And by “that way,” of course, I mean consistently wrong. ;-)
*Of course, philosophers of this sort often don’t acknowledge that thoughts are actually brain activities, postulating a realm of Ideas or Mind/Soul as a substance or whatever nonsense is philosophically current.
Woohoo! I didn’t get the philosophical equivalent of you’re an inbred scientistic bumpkin . From this I conclude that you’re my kind of philosophers.
Benjamin, the whole most algebra isn’t algebra skirmish didn’t last long as I’d enrolled to study philosophy and it seemed tangential and I thought I could avoid the guy. The tutor was basically telling another student that there was no connection between logic and algebraic manipulation. I unthinkingly mentioned that in a Discrete Mathematics course I did earlier this year, we did algebra of logic and provided an example. Something like
~(A -> B)
~(~A or B) (A -> B = ~A or B)
~~A and ~B (De Morgan’s law)
A and ~B (double negation)
I only brought it up to find out if that was an algebra. What came back was a very abrupt treatise from upon high on how most of mathematics that is termed algebra wasn’t algebra because algebra had to be “about” something. And abstract algebra wasn’t “about” something. Or some such. I admitted that I wasn’t a mathematician and so couldn’t tell if he was mounting a straw-man or not and left it at that.
Really, I didn’t want to get into it with him. He seemed rude and I don’t do confrontation well at all. It was only later when he started critiquing comments I had about Descartes and his conception of the mind to another person that he jumped in and proceeded to tell me of my ignorance and how science and all that has little or nothing to say about the mind/self. I got so pissed off that I was not enjoying the course. I only enrolled because I like learning (didn’t need to diploma). So I quit.
G. Felis. I really liked your comment. I think you make a great point about philosophy. The idealists stream (Plato) versus the scientific (Aristotle) stream in philosophy.
Wes, I like the way you put the point about the Hurbly Burblies. (I think Eric made a similar point not long ago when he talked about replacing “God” with “mystery”.) What’s interesting in the context of Ophelia’s post is that there are good ways to make that point, and bad ways. It seems to me that Wilkins’s “blarg” argument is an example of one of the bad ways.
G, oh sure, it’s just that the ‘a priori’ line has lost tremendous ground. Hartry Field, Boghossian, Chalmers… even assuming their arguments work on their own merits, they still at best end up defending a notion that lacks the sting of transcendental categories.
Thanks, Brian. My instinct of bygone days was to hedge or backpedal about this broad-brush philosophical divide, precisely because it is about somewhat nebulous streams of thought rather than precisely defined positions. But I kept finding clear evidence for the same fundamental division again and again, so I stopped worrying so much about the risk of oversimplifying and simply acknowledge it: The idealist/rationalist approach to philosophy is profoundly different from the empiricist/pragmatist approach, and the most starkly different figures and concepts on one side of that divide have more in common with each other than any of them have in common with the other side of the divide. (Without any exceptions in my experience, all the living philosophers who take God seriously – along with all the agnostics who are rude and dismissive towards atheists – consistently come from one side of this divide. Guess which?)
But it’s important to remember that there are also many individual philosophers and philosophical disputes that do not map onto this divide neatly, and others that don’t map onto it at all – such as the oft-discussed but very ill-defined analytic/continental distinction. Only egregiously shallow thinkers presume that, having identified an important conceptual opposition in a field, all disputes in the field can therefore be assigned to one side or the other of that opposition. (Not for the first time, Camille Paglia leaps to my mind, unbidden and unappreciated…)
G Felis, you know something? I thought that most philosophers didn’t do god and for some stupid reason thought that they’d come down on the empiricist side. The side I come down upon obviously. I figured the defenders of rational stuff in metaphysics and epistemology would be sparse on the ground. It appears not.
I’m probably too polluted by my education. I’ve done a computer science degree and a psychology degree. Both fields are empirical in nature. The first philosopher I read was Bertrand Russell and after that Hume. I have a lot admiration for both. Especially Hume who seems often prophetic with his philosophy. But that could be me just being overly charitable to him. When I first read Descartes Meditations and Plato’s forms I thought it was interesting but you wouldn’t take it seriously. It turns out that a lot of people do.
You’re right about philosophical disputes not mapping. I think Locke was an empiricist who held views about mind or self that were more akin to Descartes than his fellow empiricists. That could be incorrect. I’m not an expert on the early modern philosophers.
Brian, I think you’re close. For Locke, there is a distinction (albeit seemingly a shallow one) between ideas of sensation and reflection; one of the subheadings of reflection was volition. (Some interpreters think these ideas were rooted in internal sense-perception for Locke, but this point seems contestable.) I say “shallow” because he also admitted of simple ideas of both sensation and reflection.
Berkeley had a similar division in mind: to be is to be perceived, or to do the perceiving — people often leave that last part out. (It seems Berkeley regressed a little though. I don’t recall any analogue in Berkeley to the “sensation and reflection” category of simple concepts that you find in Locke.)
Hume, on the other hand, subjected personal identity and the idea of the will to heavy scrutiny due to his penny-pinching analyses in terms of constant conjunction of sensations. So really in a way Hume was the odd one out as far as the empiricists are concerned.
Thanks Benjamin. This topic really has gone off-topic. But I love picking the brains of knowledgeable types.
Berkley’s philosophy was right out there, though he maintained it was common-sensical. Things only exist while being perceived. An empirical stance. He took Locke’s distinction of primary and secondary qualities to an extreme. If all we perceive is some phenomena or secondary quality, then what is real? What we think exists is only perception and thus it’s all ideal. The whole “if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody here?” would be answered in the affirmative by Berkeleyan because God would perceive it. Esse est peripere aut percipi. Poor old Samuel Johnston got a sore foot kicking the rock and still not refuting Berkeley.
From reading the Treatise, I’d say Hume didn’t think too much of Locke (he mentions that Locke perverted the meaning of the word idea) and he thought more of Berkeley because he esteemed his thoughts of abstracts or universals being annexed to a single idea and custom or habit allowing us to flow from one to another. Don’t quote me on that. It’s been a while since I read the Treatise.
Eek! Sorry to hear about that experience, Brian. We must talk about it over a beer some time. Obviously this is not the place to name names etc. (and you were careful not to, of course).
Thanks Russell. I can only give my side of the story, the other guy might have a completely different take. I might be totally wrong too, though I’m not sure how. If only I were omniscient. Oh well, c’est la vie.
May I make so bold as to suggest that almost everyone so far has missed the point of Wilkins’ rather sloppy piece of reasoning? (Of course, most of them have ignored the point of the thread anyway!)
Dawkins objects that the theist generally says two things: (i) since the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved, the existence of God is equiprobable (Alister McGrath states this very clearly, as I recall, in The Twilight of Atheism), and (ii) the onus is on the unbeliever to show that God does not exist.
Dawkins rejects both of these points, suggesting that there are grounds to believe that the probability of God’s existence is very low.
Wilkins responds by saying that God can neither be proved nor disproved decisively, and that any attempt to do so is positivistic, that is, it rules out certain kinds of evidence from the start. And he accuses Dawkins of doing so.
However, Dawkins acknowledges that no one can disprove God’s existence decisively (TGD, 51), no more than they can disprove the existence of a celestial teapot not observable by any existing scientific instruments. But he does suggest that God’s existence is very improbable. That is, the probability of the existence of God is not 0, but it is approaching 0.
Wilkins’ argument is that, in the probability calculus involving God, to speak of God’s imporobability must rule out certain prior assumptions upon which theists base their probability calculations. But to restrict these assumptions to scientific ones is, says Wilkins, question begging.
However, theists have always used other than scientific assumptions, and I cannot see where Dawkins has limited the assumptions which theists may use. On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to suggest that theists have never used scientific or empirical assumptions. In fact, until the 17th century, they were were the norm. God functioned as an explanatory hypothesis to explain the order of things, the existence of human beings, the correspondence between the human mind and reality. Today, intelligent design continues to suggest that the only explanation for the existence of ordered systems in nature is the existence of a designer. Theists today also very commonly use the ‘fine tuning argument’ to suggest that the probability of the existence of a universe in which life has developed, without the presupposition of God, is very low. Theists also argue that the existence of morality would be in doubt if there were no God. These are all, in some sense, empirical arguments based on empirical assumptions.
If we exclude this sort of argument – not as a matter of principle, but just hypothetically – what sorts of prior assumptions can theists base their probability calculations on? Wilkins does not say. If they have nothing to do with discernible outcomes of some sort, in what sense can we speak of probabilities here? It may be that Dawkins does not show that God’s existence is exceedingly improbable – and this is not something I wish to discuss here – but not for any of the reasons that Wilkins provides.
One of the most obvious problems having to do with calculating the probability of God’s existence has to do with the definition of God. Which God is or is not probable or improbable? Is there any agreement or basis for agreement here? How would we distinguish acceptable from unacceptable concepts of God? And what would a difference of definition do to the probability calculations pertinent to that particular idea of God and its instantiation?
So, yes indeed, as Ophelia says, which prior assumptions?
Eric, that’s all good, but I don’t think Dawkins needs to say he has an indefeasible prior assumption in scientific principles. He can just say, “My goal is to do practical epistemology, and science has shown itself able to do it. Show me a better way to do practical epistemology and I will.” That’s not question-begging, it’s an open invitation.
There are other candidates for practical epistemology that yield some kind of probability argument, like Pascal’s wager. But they are not excluded from the getgo. Rather, they’re excluded through argument.
Brian English wrote:
…some philosophers want to pretend that philosophy is the queen of the sciences still and that philosophy mandates what is science and what its domain is.
They have managed to convince any number of people of the truth of this claim, witness this remarkable statement by Nicholas Wade, from a review of Dawkins’ new book in yesterday’s NYT, “Philosophers of science, who are the arbiters of such issues, say science consists largely of facts, laws and theories.”
Ben, perhaps I haven’t read TGD closely enough, but I don’t see where Dawkins says that “he has an indefeasible prior assumption in scientific principles.” What would that mean, in any event? (That’s a question, not a put-down.)
What Dawkins argues, so far as I can tell, is that a being who created the universe would have to be improbably complex, unless there were a prior explanation of how this being came to be. And then we get into Aquinas’s or Aristotle’s regress. Theists argue, on the contrary, that God is simple, and yet they also claim that there is an astonishing internal complexity about God, since God can, nay, does think the entire range of possible worlds (if, that is, it makes sense for a disembodied being to have ideas of possible worlds – via., bodied things).
Dawkins’ argument, to the extent that I understand it, is that such a being is far more improbable than the existence of organic beings with minds. We can explain the improbability grade to organic minds, by means of evolution by natural selection, but there is nothing that helps us to understand how disembodied mind may have come into being.
Does this make the being of God improbable? Well, I don’t know, but it doesn’t depend upon the indefeasibility of scientific principles. You might think of it as a thought experiment, thinking backwards from where we are now, to where we were when we didn’t know about evolution. I can see how improbable the existence of mind must seem to someone who doesn’t know about evolution. But once that is explained, it’s no longer improbable, though it may indeed be the result of an entirely chance event (say, the survival of early hominids). But doesn’t the improbability of the divine mind still pose a problem (if the existence of that mind was thought to be presupposed by the existence of finite minds)?
So, I disagree that this is one of those ‘there’s no reason to believe it true’ sort of situations. I think it’s more in the realm of ‘there’s no reason to believe it is really conceivable.’ When people talk about gods we usually give them the benefit of the doubt. They really think they are talking about something, and they know what they are talking about. But why should we assume that either is true?
‘via’ above should be ‘viz.’
How about if ‘there’s no reason to believe it is true’ is the overall, blanket, pre-thought, pre-specifics version and ‘there’s no reason to believe it is really conceivable’ is the detailed version?
Lots of god talk is about a vague, overall, blanket, pre-thought kind of god, it seems to me. (It probably has to be, in order to avoid noticing stumbling blocks like the infinite regress and the problem of evil.)
Eric, feel free to intellectually spank me here, but doesn’t prior probability require that you have seen the race run before? I’m probably misunderstanding, it is 4 am and my kitten is attacking a toy mouse to distract me, but how do you calculate the prior probability of the universe being created or there being a creator unless this is past experience?
Swinburne seems to mount arguments where at bottom he just says the prior probability is 0.5. He has no way of knowing this, but it just feels right or something. I wonder how many creations he’s witnessed? If I see a group of kittens, 5 female and 4 male, the prior probability (?) that 1 of them is a female seems to be 5/9. But the prior probability of a created universe, created by the Christian god? …….????
I mentioned Swinburne, because Eric’s last comment seemed to cross into that territory.
I guess Dawkins can say that in our experience, the only case of intelligence is through the mechanism of evolution by natural selection. Thus Dawkins might think that prior probability is close to 1. Though he’d never say it is 1, because evolution is a contingent thing and not a logical truth.
Eric, for sure, Dawkins doesn’t say that. But it’s the position he would have to have in order for Wilkins’ point about begging the question and prior assumptions to be right.
When I say to somebody that they’re begging the question, it’s an allegation to the effect that they have a prior assumption, and this assumption isn’t itself a conclusion of some other argument. Suppose I finish up a lecture on the proof of evolution on Monday, and then take the truth of evolution for granted to use it as a premise on the non-existence of God(s) for my lecture on Tuesday. Then it would be a fallacy for a person to show up on Tuesday and accuse me of begging the question against creationism by taking evolution as a prior assumption, even though that’s what I did for the purposes of Tuesday’s class. A prior assumption in the context of the second lecture, is an argued conclusion in the context of the first. So just because we have a prior assumption, doesn’t mean it’s an arbitrary insertion of a suspiciously convenient premise. So it can’t be question-begging.
Since I’m wondering to myself, “what is Wilkins getting at, and how could he be saying something true?” The only case I can think of where we might accuse Dawkins as arbitrarily begging the question is if science were somehow taken as a priori true. This is to say that it can’t be defeated (“indefeasible”) by any future experience, and/or that we’re justified in saying we know it without appealing to experience; these sorts of things usually end up with conclusions to the effect of “it is beyond doubt that so-and-so”. (As I think you were pointing out, the very idea of taking scientific principles (whatever they are) as a priori has a ring of irony to it — it’s hard to know what that even means. But that’s Wilkins’ problem, not ours. In any case, suppose for the sake of argument that somehow it were possible.)
But Dawkins doesn’t do any of that a priori stuff, nor does he want to. The whole point of Dawkins’ 6/7 atheism is that he’s interested in doing practical epistemology, not in making an abstract claim about the logical possibility of error or about inconceivability of god(s). Dawkins and Wilkins actually agree on that as far as it goes. The difference is that Dawkins says, “so what?”. Wilkins doesn’t seem to have any answer to the practical question except “we’re having a philosophical conversation and it matters to philosophers”. So in my post, I cut right to the chase and said, “Actually, these days it doesn’t matter to many philosophers either”. That seems like a satisfying way of argument.
By contrast, you argue that we need reasons for a thing to be conceivable. I’m not sure. For my part, I can conceive a god, all kinds of god(s), but they all think Pat Robertson is an evil douche. Anyway, for sure, god-talk is so riddled with bullshit and therefore so unreliable that we can’t assume that we have the right idea about what people are talking about. Still presumably if we were able to talk to them and observe their behavior for a long time we’d be able to pin down their ideas within some reasonable standard.
Brian, the Bayesian probability theories are studies of degrees of belief, they measure subjective states. That’s different from the frequency theory of probability which actually has some kind of basis in terms of real world experience. This is likely the reason that Mario Bunge declared that subjective probability theories as the practice of charlatans in the 90’s, people who used it ought to be expelled from the academy, etc.
Thanks Benjamin. I thought Bayesian probability had some respectability. Not that I understand it as I obviously have confused it with probability that is used in statistics. I guess I thought it was respectable because it’s in my Discrete Maths book and the book has a hardcover. What more do you need for respectability. I mean, they wouldn’t print the bible in hardcover would they? ;)
Benjamin, this blog post seems to suggest that Bayesian probability is about real probabilities. It was vaguely in my mind when I wrote the previous post about probability.
http://scepticalthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/09/swinburne-chapter-6-explanatory-power.html
I have to say, this Wilkins guy sounds like a right fool. I’m very glad that I don’t think anything like what you say he thinks…
It may be of interest to note that in his later career Popper, who after being hostile initial came to the conclusion that Evolutionary Theory was good science and used a more useful model than the one engendered by Physics. One of his student William Bartley III extended Popper’s Critical Rationalism to an epistemolgy of Pan Critical Rationalism which explicitly included itself in the realm of criticism. The point being that all knowledge is fallible but a some parts of it have survived criticism (a lot) better than other parts.
There is a whole area of “Evolutionary Epistemolgy” though I am not sure how popular it is in philosophy departments.
Brian, no doubt it has objective applications, but it’s dependent on whether or not a person is being responsible with their prior assumptions.
John, nobody called you a fool, or used any language of that kind. But I have given arguments with reference to the linked post, and come out disagreeing with its content. I tried to be faithful to its intent. If you think I’ve gotten it wrong, then you should feel free to say why and where.
To be clear, this is the most relevant segment to the critique: “Probabilities are based in this case on prior assumptions – one uses Bayes’ theorem to determine whether or not the hypothesis under test is likely to be true, given other assumptions we already accept. And here is where the problem lies – which assumptions? To adopt and restrict one’s priors to scientific assumptions is question begging.” As I argue above, this isn’t right if the priors that enter into one’s probability formulation are themselves conclusions of other arguments. In my reading of Dawkins, they are.
It follows that I must disagree when you write, “If (say) John Henry Newman has priors that make a God hypothesis likely, how can Dawkins reject those priors without begging the question? All he can say is that if you take his particular view of scientific rigour on board, they are unnecessary”. He can say this: science works for practical epistemic purposes, revelation doesn’t. When cashed out with real examples and illustrations throughout TGD, is consistent with his 6/7 conclusion, with arguments against alternative conceptions of probability like Pascal’s wager, etc., it tells us that we have real reasons behind why we should choose all and only science.
So I have a great many honest questions for you. What do we do with the 6/7 argument and the argument against Pascal’s wager? Why does anyone find the quest for absolute certainty philosophically interesting or revealing, whatever the level of discussion? Who cares whether or not scientific reasoning “is all that… can ever be employed“, in your words, as if the decision to choose science as a prior were unrevisable? Indeed, do you think Dawkins believes that scientific reasoning “is all that can ever be employed”? (If so, I’d benefit from a passage.)
Hey John! Now that you’re here you can straighten us all out! Please do tell us what you did intend in that three year old post, or, if you’ve changed your mind, that do you think now?
Well now that’s obnoxious, Dr Wilkins. My post is full of questions, and I’d have thought it was obvious I was looking for elucidation. What do you think? I did quote from your post, after all – and I’m (obviously) not a philosopher, so I could well have simply misunderstood. You could explain instead of just sneering.
(If the post were new of course I would have asked there, but I assume it’s otiose to ask questions on a post that’s three years old.)
Uhm…Dr. Wilkins, I don’t think you’re a fool. I used to enjoy your blog, and some of your book suggestions, especially the Levi book about morality were very enlightening. I felt however that you were very unfair to several atheists and mischaracterized their arguments to portray them as extreme and you as benignly wise.
I stopped reading your blog in the end because of this. The few times I checked on your blog in last year or so you seemed to repeat the theme. Hence my last swipe at you a few months ago. (I think I called you a one trick pony or something unfortunate. Uhm, sorry. You are one of the good guys, science wise, in the end.)
My opinions of your stances of course might be wrong. Errare humanum est and all that jazz.
Anyway, ignore my pratlings as there are far smarter and educated people here who have reasonable questions for you.
Don’t backpedal, Brian. You called out Dr. Wilkins for being pompous, arrogant, and dismissive of people who had substantive, non-trivial and honest disagreements with him. I stopped reading his blog when I noted exactly the same behavior more times than I could dismiss as mere chance or bad days. And frankly, I think his drive-by smart-assery above is another example.
As OB pointed out, she expressed honest questions about his position. More importantly, Benjamin’s analysis of Wilkins’ argument against Dawkins above has been admirably clear and focused, referring constantly back to Wilkins’ own words – and Wilkins saw fit to pop by and dismiss it with twenty-six words of snark lacking any actual defense or argument or clarification whatsoever. Such behavior, to borrow his own phrase, makes him sound like a right fool.
Not sure about back pedling. I admire those who can calmly engage those they disagree with. I was attempting that with my post to Wilkins.
He has done good work on talk.origins and on species concepts. That’s commendable and shows he’s not a fool. However, I really dislike his attitude towards the so called new-atheists, the MooneyBaum tactics that I’ve read, etc. Hence I don’t go to his blog no more. If I did I’d go off the handle again I’m sure.
Right now I have limited internet access, until the end of October and into November, as I am travelling. I was alerted to this discussion by one of Ophelia’s readers. I cannot therefore spend more than a few minutes responding.
However, I have a slew of posts on the blog about agnosticism and accomodationism and related topics. They are not essays; they are, as the blog blurb says, thoughts that go through my head. The essays are usually better constructed.
If you are interested, go to the scienceblog version of my blog and search of “agnostic”. I am not trying to be above the fray; as I make clear in many places I do not think the god of Christianity is real. But there is a kind of philosophical theism I have met in others than clearly is coherent and compatible with science, which is really all I care about. I am no deist myself, of course.
I will try to return here after my trip is done and I catch up on missed work.
John, that’s fascinating. I have exactly the opposite experience. Like you, I can see that there is a kind of philosophical theism, or at least a form of deism, that is (or at least might be) coherent and compatible with science. I am no deist myself, of course. But I do not think the god of Christianity is real, which is really all I care about (well, I also care about the gods of other actual religions). It’s the god(s) of Christianity (and other actual religions) that I’m an atheist about.
What matters to me, in the end, is whether some actual religion, such as Christianity, should actually be seen as having authority of some kind (epistemic, political, moral, whatever). If the answer to that is “No,” then the question of whether some kind of philosophical theism or deism might yet turn out to be true seems to have no great significance for human societies.
Thanks John; we’ll start over then.
Sure; I too have no quarrel with that kind of theism. But the other kind is alive and well and rather bossy – and that kind I do have a quarrel with.
Quote from OB: “Epistemology is difficult”
Erm, actually, it is a complete waste of time, since it rests on unproven, (and distinctly dodgy) religious assumptions.
The best response, surely to this rubbish is that of the emporer’s new clothes?
Or alternatively, that of Frank Tipler?
Greg. Tingey, I was under the impression that Epistemology was the theory of knowledge started by Plato (or Socrates) when he tried to determine how we know something. I think he came up with the Justified true belief formulation or some precursor. What’s your take?
It’s true that the terms involved are ancient (a priori, knowledge as justified true belief). But the standard line is that epistemology didn’t really develop as a field until the early modern period (i.e., with Descartes).
It’s also true that some people were titillated by the idea of finding foundations to our ways of thinking (i.e., what Kant treated as a priori knowledge). A critic of the a priori can look at it as staking out a claim to some prior assumptions. But that kind of claim has faced a lot of devious challenges and revisions ever since. Quine is a good example of someone who thought that there wasn’t anything especially prior about our prior assumptions. (This was one of the criticisms I made against John with the two-lectures example.)
Benjamin, Descartes and other early moderns were foundational I think. Rationalists founded knowledge on what they took as infallible truths (a priori knowledge?) such as every cause has an effect and Empiricists founded knowledge on perception I believe. What’s the state of the art these days?
I think pragmatists like Quine didn’t think you could build knowledge on secure foundations, that the analytic/synthetic distinction was a myth, and that all beliefs were in theory alterable and knowledge was some intertwined web. At least that’s what I got out reading Two Dogmas of Empiricism. I think turds like Plantinga have wanted to keep foundationalism going and add God as a properly basic belief. Though his warranted belief doesn’t seem so much concerned with truth but with warrant. Anyway, I’ve probably committed a few howlers there.
I’m with Russell. That is, I’ve read a few very empty forms of hyper-rationalized forms of theism & deism that are, at least on the surface (and what can there be but surface to such positions?), compatible with a broadly scientific world view – although none of them have any more actual positive evidence in their favor than the usual kinds of god beliefs. And?
Since no one beyond the inventors of such theoretical deities gives a fig about them, why should I? It’s the bloke down the street who wants to run the society I live in based on his semi-literate pastor’s interpretation of a bunch of old myths who I have trouble with. Or rather, it’s millions of people with millions of ignorant, uninformed, mythological bases for making decisions that affect our world that we all have trouble with whether we realize it or not.
But G Felis, don’t you know that that’s not what people have believed in all these millenia? No, it’s the ineffable frakin’ ineffable that they’ve all believed in. You’ve been duped if you think existence, providence and miracles play a part in common everyday believers beliefs. How vulgar!
Oh wait, vulgar means common as in everyday. Shot myself in the foot there didn’t I?
My two cents: the difference between an agnostic and an atheist is one of emphasis rather than of contradiction. An atheist and an agnostic will both agree that it’s impossible to disprove god; they will also both agree that there is no evidence for god.
But an agnostic will emphasize the former point and an atheist will emphasize the latter.
I think the difference has more to do with intellectual temperament and interests than with actual contradictory opinions. An agnostic is more interested in emphasizing and exploring doubt; an atheist is more interested in emphasizing and exploring what we can be certain about. Both approaches have their merits.
Jenavir
I have a differing view on your atheist/agnostic dichotomy. Mostly because of your vague use of ‘god’. They may grant that it is impossible to disprove a deistic or deceptive god, but they really don’t care about people that believe in the former and nobody really believes in the latter (not deceptive as in the trickster archetype, deceptive as in alters reality so that their presence is undetectable). It is perfectly possible to demonstrate that the gods people actually believe in are logically unsound, contradictory entities with no grounding in evidence aside from the frailty of the human brain. It seems odd to me that you characterize an atheist as being interested in what we can be certain about — we can judge where the evidence points, but that does not lend certainty. Perhaps I am understanding the word in too strict a sense.
An agnostic, while also taking the same position that it is impossible to disprove the philosopher’s god (mainly because it’s defined so as to be unfalsifiable), would prefer instead of concluding that there are likely no gods to stick to the warm fuzziness of not taking a positive position on the possible existence/nonexistence of said gods. I’ll have more respect for an agnostic position when they proclaim agnosticism about the existence of leprechauns that leave ineffable pots of gold near the ends of rainbows. It’s generally only things that people traditionally feel strongly about (e.g. ‘god’) that they are so unwilling to take a position on.
Then again, most of the confusion and the dichotomy between terms is caused due to vague definitions. Atheist has been taken to mean “belief in the lack of gods” as well as “lack of belief in gods”. Agnostic, while it used to refer to a position that it was impossible to know whether or not ‘god’ exists, is now generally used as a wishy-washy position in between theism and atheism, with people calling themselves agnostic because they ‘aren’t sure’ whether or not god exists. It used to refer to a matter of epistemology, whereas the most common use I see it in now is someone just saying they don’t know as opposed to taking a position that the question is fundamentally unknowable.
“An agnostic is more interested in emphasizing and exploring doubt; an atheist is more interested in emphasizing and exploring what we can be certain about.”
Hmm…I don’t think so. That doesn’t describe me anyway. I’m very interested in doubt – I’m just not very interested in doubt about god, because I don’t see much reason for doubt about that. The kind of doubt that I find interesting is, for instance, the doubt about just when humans started wandering out of Africa and settling in the rest of the world, or the doubt about how exactly feathers evolved.
And I’m not at all interested in emphasizing and exploring what we can be certain about, because I think that’s an empty set. I’m interested in emphasizing and exploring what we have good reasons to think is true though – along with the difference between that ‘what’ and the goddy kind.
Paul: But I have encountered many agnostics who *are* agnostic about leprachauns. Intellectually honest agnostics emphasize doubt on a number of issues.
Also, a “leprachaun” is of a different nature than an all-powerful god. I think the latter is even less susceptible to proof/disproof than a supernatural being of limited power. So I don’t think it would be necessarily dishonest to have different attitudes to them. Chattering-class agnostics who slam atheists for being “close-minded” are often intellectually dishonest, but they don’t represent the sum total of people identifying as agnostic.
I also don’t think it’s accurate that people don’t believe in a deceptive god. Plenty of theists think their god planted fossils on the earth to fool us and test our faith, after all! To me that sounds very deceptive.
You’re right that “certain” is technically the wrong word, but I don’t know what other word to use. I meant that atheists were more temperamentally inclined to say, “Let’s take this as a given and move on from here, since it’s pretty likely.” More temperamentally inclined to table a debate and move onto the next question, maybe.
To put it another way, I agree with Kallan G.’s comment at the top of this thread that true agnosticism and atheism are perfectly compatible, because it’s theists who are pretending to know stuff they don’t. But an honest agnostic would be more likely to respond to a theist with “You don’t know that so stop pretending you do,” while an atheist would be more likely to say “Nonsense, there’s no such thing.” The first emphasizes the lack of knowledge about the subject; the second emphasizes the sheer improbability of the particular contention about the subject.
I also don’t think it’s accurate that people don’t believe in a deceptive god. Plenty of theists think their god planted fossils on the earth to fool us and test our faith, after all! To me that sounds very deceptive.
To clarify, I meant a God that is deceptive to such a degree that it alters the entirety of existence to hide its presence. Having been raised in a rather evangelical church, I’ve of course encountered the “devil buried fossils to test our faith” meme. However, even those believers are more than happy to parade off telltale signs that show us God exists. And the truth claims about reality that those selfsame Christians make are what the atheist would use to show the belief as inconsistent with our scientific knowledge of the world. I know of no actually believed in theological entities that are believed to alter the whole of reality to leave no sign that they exist, which is what I meant in that context with the term “deceptive god”. I could have been clearer.
I find it curious that you agree with Kallan G.’s comment, yet your example still seems to put atheism and agnosticism on the same continuum instead of treating their meaning as different. Further, for most values of “god” actually believed by modern people, even your intellectually honest agnostic should be comfortable saying “Nonsense, there’s no such thing”. I mean, a god that is both omnipotent and benevolent yet is seemingly unable to tackle the Problem of Evil? Epistemology issues aside, intellectual honesty should lead to the rejection of the existence of said entity solely through the exercise of logic.
I’ve always conceptualized agnosticism and atheism as fundamentally different things. It seems faulty to treat them as part of the same continuum. Agnosticism is an issue of methodology, regarding whether it is possible to “know” whether a god exists. Atheism isn’t a methodology in the least, it is simply a conclusion — that is, based on the available evidence, the existence of gods seems less likely than their nonexistence.
I’m an agnostic atheist, although I consider the latter more important than the former (especially with the way so many people use the agnostic label). I gladly concede that it’s not possible for us to know there is or is not a god of the deceptive type, and even if there came along an entity that appeared to be and claimed to be a god in our finite capability we lack the ability to truly test it (sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, after all). But my beliefs are shaped by the available evidence, and right now that means atheism. I don’t expect it to change.
Paul, I don’t think they’re part of the same ‘continuum’–sorry if I gave that impression. I meant to say I think they’re compatible, and one can be an agnostic and an atheist at the same time. Since you call yourself an agnostic atheist, I presume you don’t disagree. My point was that which *label* one chooses to emphasize is a reflection of intellectual temperament or intellectual interests.