"If a pragmaticist is asked what he means by the word 'God,' he can only say that just as long acquaintance with a man of great character may deeply influence one's whole manner of conduct, so that a glance at his portrait may make a difference . . . so if contemplation and study of the physico-psychical universe can imbue a man with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great man's works or conversation, then that analogue of a mind-for it is impossible to say that any human attribute is literally applicable-is what he means by 'God.' . . . the discoveries of science, their enabling us to predict what will be the course of nature, is proof conclusive that, though we cannot think any thought of God's, we can catch a fragment of His Thought, as it were."
This thought is similar to that presented briefly by Lewis in MAPS and developed by Hugo Meynell in The Intelligible Universe: A Cosmological Argument. Here is my own version of it, any weaknesses of which should be attributed solely to me. It is fashionable to talk about virtual models of the world that we create and then test against external reality. There is some truth in that. Take as an example the difference between "scientific laws" and "laws of nature." Scientific laws can be thought of as the laws that govern our mental model of the world, and which are subject to correction to bring them into better alignment with the laws of nature that they approximate. It is notable about our models of the world that their intelligibility--to the extent that they are intelligible--owes to the exercise of our creative intelligence in conceiving them. I don't think its possible even to imagine that these mental models could possess intelligibility otherwise. How then could the archetype, the actual universe, which these models presume to re-create, possess that same property except as a result of the exercise of creative intelligence in its conception?
Why co-opt science (with all its attendant philosophical baggage) for such an argument? Why not choose something simpler, like cartography?
Ever since the 16th century we have been continually improving our maps of the world. Blanks have been filled in, the positions of topographical features have been narrowed down from miles to yards to inches, extra layers of information have been added. Our maps of the world are continually being brought into better alignment with the ideal map of the world that they approximate. Our maps of the world are intelligible because of the exercise of our creative intelligence in conceiving them. How then could the archetype, the ideal map of the world, which these maps presume to re-create, possess that same property except as a result of the exercise of creative intelligence in its conception? {smile}
I trust that the point of this analogy is clear. Scientific theories and maps are just representations of the world around us. They improve as our knowledge of the world improves, but there is no more an ideal set of "laws of nature" than there is an ideal map of the world. The fact that maps and scientific theories are intelligible speaks to the existence of _human_ intelligence and nothing more.
The analogy you draw is flawed. The nature of the world is such that map makers can infer physical relationships without observing each and every one of them, and can depend on the constancy of the laws of nature over time. For example, we don't need to map every foot of every river to know that rivers flow from higher elevation to lower elevation. We can rely on coloration of terrain on satellite photos to indicate desert versus forest without having to stand in front of every tree in British Colombia and scoop a handful of sand from every square meter of the Sahara. And because of the dependability of the laws of physics, features of the earth cannot quickly and arbitrarily change--we don't have to wonder whether the Great Barrier Reef will tomorrow be a snow-capped mountain range or whether Greenland will in the next hour migrate to the Indian Ocean. Do we take such things for granted? Of course. Do they have the force of logical necessity? Of course not. Like all scientific projection over time and space, cartography relies relentlessly on inductive reasoning that assumes the intelligibility of nature. A good illustration is a kaleidoscope. There is a random element in a kaleidoscopic image, but the random element does not account for its symmetry. There could be a random element to the shape of a coastline, but it is not a matter of randomness that the shape of the coastline only changes in an understandable way, due to forces that can potentially be projected across time and space.
Of course an argument from analogy is convincing only if one's opponent agrees that the analogy is exact. And it does not surprise me that you claim it to be inexact.
However, I find the rest of your remark a bit baffling. You seem to be going to great lengths to establish that cartography is just a branch of physics. I agree with this claim completely, but it has the effect of subverting your whole argument. The analogy, it seems, _is_ a good one after all. And because no-one seriously believes in the existence of an ideal map of the world, we have grounds for being skeptical about the existence of ideal laws of nature as well.
(I am aware that your basic line of argument is this: Maps and the laws of physics are intelligible because the world itself is intelligible. But your original justification of this claim appealed to the existence of something akin to Platonic forms. And the Platonic image of a map is not something that most people would accept has an independent existence.)
What is the difference between "ideal" laws of nature and intelligible laws of nature--or simply real ones? If the laws of nature are real, then we can really predict--on the basis of those laws--things like the trajectory of a satellite or the reactions of chemicals when they are combined. If laws were merely descriptions of the way things have behaved in the past, then we could not make predictions based upon them. In other words, the utility of science depends on the laws of nature being real and having an existence independent of the events from which we infer those laws.
If we were not familiar with the game of chess, we could watch the way the players move the pieces on the chess board and eventually infer the rules of chess. But the rules of chess do not consist of past movements of chess pieces. The rules of chess are mental objects in the minds of the players that generate the patterns in the movements of chess pieces. I hardly think that the rules of chess are forms in a timeless, spaceless Platonic realm. But they are mental objects, nevertheless.
If we can watch patterns in the behavior of physical objects in general and from those patterns infer rules (laws of nature) that have predictive value, then those rules likewise exist in a mind or minds capable of enforcing or instantiating the rules across all of space-time. Sure, the rules we infer--scientific laws--may not perfectly reflect the laws of nature. But the fact that we can improve scientific predictability over time shows that the laws of nature are real and that our mental reconstructions of them can substantially conform to them.
"What is the difference between "ideal" laws of nature and intelligible laws of nature--or simply real ones? If the laws of nature are real, then we can really predict..."
To answer your question with another question, what is the difference between "predicting" and "really predicting"? Is there some way of proving that when we make a scientific prediction we are doing something more than just making an inductive generalization based on "the way things have behaved in the past"? That in fact we are tapping into some source of divine intelligence that runs the universe and are thereby making a prediction that is infallibly true? I think not.
At base, your argument for the existence of one metaphysical category (divine intelligence) turns on the existence of another (ideal laws of nature) whose ontology is equally questionable.
And your chess analogy illustrates the difference in metaphysical status between scientific laws and your postulated "laws of nature" very nicely. It is only because we know that chess is a game invented by intelligent agents and played by intelligent agents that we infer that chess has rules at all. (And that these rules are mental objects, as you quite rightly claim.)
Without such knowledge, we could do no more than codify the regularities that we observe in the motion of the pieces. We might even be tempted to call these regularities "laws". But to call the regularities "rules" because we suspect that some intelligence has invented them, and then to infer the existence of just such an intelligence from nothing more than the putative existence of these "rules" would be an exercise in circular thinking.
>To answer your question with another question, what is the difference between "predicting" and "really predicting"?<
By that I meant, is the ability to predict by scientific means--such as the ability to predict the future position of Jupiter based on its orbit--actual or is it illusory? For example, say that a gambler rolls 7 twice in a row with fair dice and then on the basis of those events predicts that he will roll 7 on the next try. Now, say that 7 in fact turns up on the third role. The gambler may claim that he predicted the third role on some reasonable basis, but this is illusion. Without the imposition of actual rules, the events of the universe merely occur, like dice rolls. Each event is a brute fact and the pattern they form is likewise a brute fact. And brute facts entail no genuine predictability.
>Is there some way of proving that when we make a scientific prediction we are doing something more than just making an inductive generalization based on "the way things have behaved in the past"? That in fact we are tapping into some source of divine intelligence that runs the universe and are thereby making a prediction that is infallibly true?<
No, there is no way to prove that all events that have ever occurred or ever will occur are not due to chance. However, science would then be a mirage. I doubt either of us finds it plausible that all things occur by chance. We both probably think that there are rules that are prescriptive in that they dictate how matter and energy behave not only now but an hour from now, next week, next month. As Stephen Hawking has said, "A law is not a law if it only holds sometimes." Rules are required even for probabilistic insight, such as in quantum mechanics. However, there is a philosophical price to be paid for belief in laws of nature.
David Hume pointed out that physical event sequences have no native intelligibility. If we see that an event of type B often has followed an event of type A, we tend to expect B when A occurs. But there is no logical connection between A and B, simply considered as physical events, that justifies this expectation. We can go back to dice rolls. The fact that one roll of 7 is followed by another roll of 7 says nothing about the likelihood, let alone the certainty, that yet another 7 will follow. Our expectation is justified only if a rule--a mental object--is conditioning the sequence. No, believing that there are rules does not make us infallible, it just gives us a clue. But mental objects such as rules are invented and instantiated by minds. If we assume that rules in the form of laws of nature are real, this logically entails a mind that has existed as long as the rules have and is capable of enforcing them across the universe--a pretty good definition of God.
The rules of chess exist in human minds, but it would be futile to look for some process or object in the brain that we can identify as a "rule." How rules in the mind produce effects in human brains, nervous systems, and muscles-- and finally cause pieces to move the way they do on a chess board--is fairly mysterious and in principle unobservable. So we can't expect to look around at nature and see the rules in God's mind orchestrating matter and energy. But we must assume that to be occurring to be logically consistent.
If you want a more detailed treatment, with citations in contemporary philosophy of science lit, I recommend John Foster's The Divine Lawmaker: Lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature and the Existence of God (Oxford Univ Press, 2004).
Your last response highlights the dependence of your argument on the existence of a slew of related metaphysical constructs: "genuine predictability", science that is real rather than a "mirage", "clues" (to some sort of cosmic crossword puzzle?) It does not strengthen your argument to use language that imputes native intelligibility to the universe, when this is precisely the question at issue.
DB asked: "...is the ability to predict by scientific means...actual or is it illusory?"
A false dichotomy. Our "ability to predict" is neither "actual" (which again I can only read as a synonym for "infallible") nor "illusory" (by which I presume you mean "unreliable"). It is merely reliable: good enough to help us survive in the world around us. Our abductive and inductive faculties have been honed over millions of years, to the point where they allow us to generalize from quite complicated sequences of events to fairly abstract predictive principles. But all we know is that these predictive principles have worked in the past: we can only trust that they will continue to work in the future.
DB: "We both probably think that there are rules that are prescriptive in that they dictate how matter and energy behave not only now but an hour from now, next week, next month."
I do not believe this at all, and I thought it was clear that the locus of contention lies here. There are no _prescriptive_ rules, just _predictive_ principles which we have constructed as a formal representation of our past experiences. We trust that these principles are reliably predictive, and we might even hope that they are prescriptive. But beyond that we can say nothing definitive.
DB: "David Hume pointed out that physical event sequences have no native intelligibility."
Quite so. It is we, human beings, who impose our notions of regularity and intelligibility on event sequences. If all human minds were to vanish from the world then all intelligibility would vanish as well. Citing Hume on this point does not seem to help your argument.
DB: "Our expectation is justified only if a rule--a mental object--is conditioning the sequence."
This is of course a standard Humean position ("bare induction cannot be justified"), but I doubt if anybody takes it seriously. For example, the inductive inference "the Sun will rise tomorrow" is believed by everyone, but only a small minority could cite the relevant justifying law (conservation of angular momentum) from Newtonian physics. Do you seriously propose to argue that the vast majority of the world's population is therefore not justified in believing that the Sun will rise tomorrow? I think not. As Hume himself conceded, bare induction is justified by the fact that we cannot live without it.
DB: "How rules in the mind produce effects in human brains...is fairly mysterious and in principle unobservable."
I couldn't agree more. And it follows immediately that the proper inferential path is to establish the existence of intelligent agents _before_ making claims about the existence of systems of rules. To prioristically assume the existence of cosmic rules (which, as you say, are unobservable) and then use this assumption to argue for the existence of a ruling intelligence is ontologically very shaky.
>A false dichotomy. Our "ability to predict" is neither "actual" (which again I can only read as a synonym for "infallible") nor "illusory" (by which I presume you mean "unreliable"). It is merely reliable: good enough to help us survive in the world around us.<
Nothing I have written requires interpreting "actual" as "infallible." If I have an actual ability to walk, does that mean I never stumble? If I have an actual ability to learn, does that mean I learn everything perfectly?
I thought my example was clear, but I'll elaborate. Suppose a gambler blows on his dice before he rolls them because he thinks that doing so will increase his chances of rolling a winning number. Whenever he does roll a winning number, he says to himself, "See, my trick works!" When he fails to get a winning role, he says, "Well, the trick does not guarantee the result I want, it only makes it more likely." The gambler is not claiming infallibility for his trick, nevertheless he has no justification for believing that it has any bearing on the likelihood of one result versus the other. The insight the gambler supposes that he has in predicting the likelihood of dice rolls is not actual. The gambler need not believe his alleged insight is infallible to be laboring under an illusion regarding it.
>I do not believe this at all, and I thought it was clear that the locus of contention lies here. There are no _prescriptive_ rules, just _predictive_ principles which we have constructed<
Am I reading you correctly to say that you do not believe there are laws of nature? Calling such laws rules seems trivial--Einstein, for example, referred the the laws of nature as "rules" that are assumed but not proven. He believed that these rules must exist and that it was the job of scientists to figure them out. If your argument is that there are no laws of nature, I think you have the shaky end of things.
>We trust that these principles are reliably predictive, and we might even hope that they are prescriptive.<
The predictive value of rules (principles if you prefer) lies precisely in their prescriptive quality. To say they are not prescriptive is to say that events in the future might simply happen to conform to them, that there is no kind of necessity involved. The winning roll might happen to follow the act of blowing on the dice. In that case, we have no justification in relying on these principles, hoping in them, or paying them any attention.
>It is we, human beings, who impose our notions of regularity and intelligibility on event sequences. If all human minds were to vanish from the world then all intelligibility would vanish as well.<
If humans vanished, the universe would then fail to work intelligibly? Really? Do humans enforce Kepler's Law, or would planets suddenly gyrate out of their orbits if humans obliterated themselves? Before humans were around, did chemicals combine in predictable, intelligible ways? If not, how did life forms stick around, let alone evolve? If humans are not around, will light and matter stop conforming to the equations of General Relativity? As God asked Job, is it you that causes the sun to rise?
>Do you seriously propose to argue that the vast majority of the world's population is therefore not justified in believing that the Sun will rise tomorrow? I think not. As Hume himself conceded, bare induction is justified by the fact that we cannot live without it.<
The vast majority of the world's population intuitively assumes the world to be an intelligible place. Most people do not realize that reasoning purely from observed events we cannot justify induction, so to that extent their inductive reasoning is not justified. Those who believe that nature is intelligible because an all-governing mind so wills it have a firmer logical basis for expecting the future to be consistent with the past than those who think that it is all just "atoms and space."
I realize that some of Hume's statements are a bit ambiguous, but I think the tenor of his argument in the Enquiry is not that our inductive thinking is justified because we survive by it. Rather, he seems to say that we cannot help but think inductively, and implies that we cannot help but believe that such thinking helps us survive. But in neither case is he construing this mental habit as a logical justification. He says, "All these operations [mental habits of inductive expectation] are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent."
The question Hume never asked was, "How is it that we can can conceive of the world as an intelligible place if there is no such thing as intelligibility?" Hume might reply that the world's intellgibility could be illusory, and that all events occur by chance. But if intelligibility were illusory, how could we form a mental conception of it? How could we even understand its denial? If there were no such thing as light, we could not be expected to understand the statement, "There is no such thing as light." Illusions are mistaken combinations of simple concepts, not mistaken simple concepts.
Intelligibility cannot be an illusion. But we find that our conception or internal model of the world only has intelligibility to the extent that we construct it intelligently to begin with. We invest this internal model with scientific laws, turn the crank with mathematical computations, and then compare the results with what we observe. To put this another way, when we attempt to "tune in" to the physical universe, we can only do so by deliberate, intelligent reverse-engineering. Therefore the world itself can only be the way it is if it has been intelligently engineered (but note, this is not Intelligent Design theory).
We know that in dreams events can occur inconsistently--precisely because dreams are not intelligently conceived--and that if our conception of the world were dream-like it would not be intelligible. The real world is not dream-like, therefore it too has been intelligently conceived. We are back where we started in my original post.
DB: "Nothing I have written requires interpreting "actual" as "infallible." If I have an actual ability to walk, does that mean I never stumble? If I have an actual ability to learn, does that mean I learn everything perfectly?"
I must say that none of this throws any light on what you intend to mean by "actual ability to predict". Perhaps you are an Aristotelian and mean to contrast "actual" with "potential"? This seems unlikely, given that you were contrasting "actual" with "illusory".
No matter. I think I made it clear that my position is that our ability to predict is merely reliable. This should have answered your question "...is the ability to predict by scientific means...actual or is it illusory?" whether our understanding of the word "actual" agrees or not.
In view of all this, your gambler example strikes me as somewhat irrelevant. The gambler's belief that his blowing on the dice increases his chances is either reliable or not. And this is easily tested (good tests of statistical significance being of course a familiar stock-in-trade of mathematicians). I see no need (and indeed no way of testing) for alternative metaphysical classifications like "actual" and "illusory" prediction. Unless of course you believe that actual=reliable and illusory=unreliable.
DB: "Am I reading you correctly to say that you do not believe there are laws of nature?"
I am a bit disheartened that it has taken you 9 posts to grasp this. Yes, there are no transcendental laws of nature existing independently of the human mind. Just as there is no transcendental map of the world existing independently of the human mind. There are just scientific laws whose intelligibilty (as you aptly put it) "owes to the exercise of our creative intelligence in conceiving them".
DB: "If humans vanished, the universe would then fail to work intelligibly? Really? Do humans enforce Kepler's Law, or would planets suddenly gyrate out of their orbits if humans obliterated themselves?"
Of course the universe would no longer be intelligible. You seem to be committing a category error here. Intelligibilty is a property of human discourse, not a property of planetary orbits.
If we assume that the unverse is part of a discourse by a divine intelligence then, yes, it is possible to argue that the universe is intelligible. But this prior metaphysical assumption is needed first. And the assumption is neither logically nor empirically necessary. We can take it or leave it: it cannot be proved either way.
"The vast majority of the world's population intuitively assumes the world to be an intelligible place. Most people do not realize that reasoning purely from observed events we cannot justify induction, so to that extent their inductive reasoning is not justified."
I don't think you fully appreciate the epistemological ramifications of your claim here. You are asserting that no sequence of physical events, no matter how closely they conform to a clear pattern (like the Sun rising each morning) can justify induction without an ontological commitment to some system of rules, and conversely that any sequence of events, no matter how patternless, can justify induction provided that the subject is sufficiently inventive in dreaming up a set of justifying rules (no matter how convoluted or arcane they might be). Your hypothetical gambler, for example, needs only to believe that God will reward him for blowing on the dice for his belief in the value of blowing to be justified.
And on top of this you concede that "Most people do not realize" that inductive justification proceeds in this way. I would contend that there are very good and obvious reasons why most people would not agree to such an arbitrary and unworkable definition of "justification".
DB: "Intelligibility cannot be an illusion."
Once again I stress that intelligibility is a property of human discourse (of ideas, theories and models), and that there is no question of it being an "illusion" (whatever that may mean). If you wish to extend intelligibility to the universe as a whole, then you are making a metaphysical assumption which begs the whole question of whether or not there is a divine intelligence. I'm not sure that anything further can be profitably said on either side of this argument.
I agree that from this point forward we will be going aroung in the same circles. Anyone who wants to grasp our respective arguments has enough to judge them by already.
11 comments:
Peirce wrote:
"If a pragmaticist is asked what he means by the word 'God,' he can only say that just as long acquaintance with a man of great character may deeply influence one's whole manner of conduct, so that a glance at his portrait may make a difference . . . so if contemplation and study of the physico-psychical universe can imbue a man with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great man's works or conversation, then that analogue of a mind-for it is impossible to say that any human attribute is literally applicable-is what he means by 'God.' . . . the discoveries of science, their enabling us to predict what will be the course of nature, is proof conclusive that, though we cannot think any thought of God's, we can catch a fragment of His Thought, as it were."
This thought is similar to that presented briefly by Lewis in MAPS and developed by Hugo Meynell in The Intelligible Universe: A Cosmological Argument. Here is my own version of it, any weaknesses of which should be attributed solely to me. It is fashionable to talk about virtual models of the world that we create and then test against external reality. There is some truth in that. Take as an example the difference between "scientific laws" and "laws of nature." Scientific laws can be thought of as the laws that govern our mental model of the world, and which are subject to correction to bring them into better alignment with the laws of nature that they approximate. It is notable about our models of the world that their intelligibility--to the extent that they are intelligible--owes to the exercise of our creative intelligence in conceiving them. I don't think its possible even to imagine that these mental models could possess intelligibility otherwise. How then could the archetype, the actual universe, which these models presume to re-create, possess that same property except as a result of the exercise of creative intelligence in its conception?
Why co-opt science (with all its attendant philosophical baggage) for such an argument? Why not choose something simpler, like cartography?
Ever since the 16th century we have been continually improving our maps of the world. Blanks have been filled in, the positions of topographical features have been narrowed down from miles to yards to inches, extra layers of information have been added. Our maps of the world are continually being brought into better alignment with the ideal map of the world that they approximate. Our maps of the world are intelligible because of the exercise of our creative intelligence in conceiving them. How then could the archetype, the ideal map of the world, which these maps presume to re-create, possess that same property except as a result of the exercise of creative intelligence in its conception? {smile}
I trust that the point of this analogy is clear. Scientific theories and maps are just representations of the world around us. They improve as our knowledge of the world improves, but there is no more an ideal set of "laws of nature" than there is an ideal map of the world. The fact that maps and scientific theories are intelligible speaks to the existence of _human_ intelligence and nothing more.
Anonymous
The analogy you draw is flawed. The nature of the world is such that map makers can infer physical relationships without observing each and every one of them, and can depend on the constancy of the laws of nature over time. For example, we don't need to map every foot of every river to know that rivers flow from higher elevation to lower elevation. We can rely on coloration of terrain on satellite photos to indicate desert versus forest without having to stand in front of every tree in British Colombia and scoop a handful of sand from every square meter of the Sahara. And because of the dependability of the laws of physics, features of the earth cannot quickly and arbitrarily change--we don't have to wonder whether the Great Barrier Reef will tomorrow be a snow-capped mountain range or whether Greenland will in the next hour migrate to the Indian Ocean. Do we take such things for granted? Of course. Do they have the force of logical necessity? Of course not. Like all scientific projection over time and space, cartography relies relentlessly on inductive reasoning that assumes the intelligibility of nature. A good illustration is a kaleidoscope. There is a random element in a kaleidoscopic image, but the random element does not account for its symmetry. There could be a random element to the shape of a coastline, but it is not a matter of randomness that the shape of the coastline only changes in an understandable way, due to forces that can potentially be projected across time and space.
Of course an argument from analogy is convincing only if one's opponent agrees that the analogy is exact. And it does not surprise me that you claim it to be inexact.
However, I find the rest of your remark a bit baffling. You seem to be going to great lengths to establish that cartography is just a branch of physics. I agree with this claim completely, but it has the effect of subverting your whole argument. The analogy, it seems, _is_ a good one after all. And because no-one seriously believes in the existence of an ideal map of the world, we have grounds for being skeptical about the existence of ideal laws of nature as well.
(I am aware that your basic line of argument is this: Maps and the laws of physics are intelligible because the world itself is intelligible. But your original justification of this claim appealed to the existence of something akin to Platonic forms. And the Platonic image of a map is not something that most people would accept has an independent existence.)
Anon
What is the difference between "ideal" laws of nature and intelligible laws of nature--or simply real ones? If the laws of nature are real, then we can really predict--on the basis of those laws--things like the trajectory of a satellite or the reactions of chemicals when they are combined. If laws were merely descriptions of the way things have behaved in the past, then we could not make predictions based upon them. In other words, the utility of science depends on the laws of nature being real and having an existence independent of the events from which we infer those laws.
If we were not familiar with the game of chess, we could watch the way the players move the pieces on the chess board and eventually infer the rules of chess. But the rules of chess do not consist of past movements of chess pieces. The rules of chess are mental objects in the minds of the players that generate the patterns in the movements of chess pieces. I hardly think that the rules of chess are forms in a timeless, spaceless Platonic realm. But they are mental objects, nevertheless.
If we can watch patterns in the behavior of physical objects in general and from those patterns infer rules (laws of nature) that have predictive value, then those rules likewise exist in a mind or minds capable of enforcing or instantiating the rules across all of space-time. Sure, the rules we infer--scientific laws--may not perfectly reflect the laws of nature. But the fact that we can improve scientific predictability over time shows that the laws of nature are real and that our mental reconstructions of them can substantially conform to them.
"What is the difference between "ideal" laws of nature and intelligible laws of nature--or simply real ones? If the laws of nature are real, then we can really predict..."
To answer your question with another question, what is the difference between "predicting" and "really predicting"? Is there some way of proving that when we make a scientific prediction we are doing something more than just making an inductive generalization based on "the way things have behaved in the past"? That in fact we are tapping into some source of divine intelligence that runs the universe and are thereby making a prediction that is infallibly true? I think not.
At base, your argument for the existence of one metaphysical category (divine intelligence) turns on the existence of another (ideal laws of nature) whose ontology is equally questionable.
And your chess analogy illustrates the difference in metaphysical status between scientific laws and your postulated "laws of nature" very nicely. It is only because we know that chess is a game invented by intelligent agents and played by intelligent agents that we infer that chess has rules at all. (And that these rules are mental objects, as you quite rightly claim.)
Without such knowledge, we could do no more than codify the regularities that we observe in the motion of the pieces. We might even be tempted to call these regularities "laws". But to call the regularities "rules" because we suspect that some intelligence has invented them, and then to infer the existence of just such an intelligence from nothing more than the putative existence of these "rules" would be an exercise in circular thinking.
>To answer your question with another question, what is the difference between "predicting" and "really predicting"?<
By that I meant, is the ability to predict by scientific means--such as the ability to predict the future position of Jupiter based on its orbit--actual or is it illusory? For example, say that a gambler rolls 7 twice in a row with fair dice and then on the basis of those events predicts that he will roll 7 on the next try. Now, say that 7 in fact turns up on the third role. The gambler may claim that he predicted the third role on some reasonable basis, but this is illusion. Without the imposition of actual rules, the events of the universe merely occur, like dice rolls. Each event is a brute fact and the pattern they form is likewise a brute fact. And brute facts entail no genuine predictability.
>Is there some way of proving that when we make a scientific prediction we are doing something more than just making an inductive generalization based on "the way things have behaved in the past"? That in fact we are tapping into some source of divine intelligence that runs the universe and are thereby making a prediction that is infallibly true?<
No, there is no way to prove that all events that have ever occurred or ever will occur are not due to chance. However, science would then be a mirage. I doubt either of us finds it plausible that all things occur by chance. We both probably think that there are rules that are prescriptive in that they dictate how matter and energy behave not only now but an hour from now, next week, next month. As Stephen Hawking has said, "A law is not a law if it only holds sometimes." Rules are required even for probabilistic insight, such as in quantum mechanics. However, there is a philosophical price to be paid for belief in laws of nature.
David Hume pointed out that physical event sequences have no native intelligibility. If we see that an event of type B often has followed an event of type A, we tend to expect B when A occurs. But there is no logical connection between A and B, simply considered as physical events, that justifies this expectation. We can go back to dice rolls. The fact that one roll of 7 is followed by another roll of 7 says nothing about the likelihood, let alone the certainty, that yet another 7 will follow. Our expectation is justified only if a rule--a mental object--is conditioning the sequence. No, believing that there are rules does not make us infallible, it just gives us a clue. But mental objects such as rules are invented and instantiated by minds. If we assume that rules in the form of laws of nature are real, this logically entails a mind that has existed as long as the rules have and is capable of enforcing them across the universe--a pretty good definition of God.
The rules of chess exist in human minds, but it would be futile to look for some process or object in the brain that we can identify as a "rule." How rules in the mind produce effects in human brains, nervous systems, and muscles-- and finally cause pieces to move the way they do on a chess board--is fairly mysterious and in principle unobservable. So we can't expect to look around at nature and see the rules in God's mind orchestrating matter and energy. But we must assume that to be occurring to be logically consistent.
If you want a more detailed treatment, with citations in contemporary philosophy of science lit, I recommend John Foster's The Divine Lawmaker: Lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature and the Existence of God (Oxford Univ Press, 2004).
Your last response highlights the dependence of your argument on the existence of a slew of related metaphysical constructs: "genuine predictability", science that is real rather than a "mirage", "clues" (to some sort of cosmic crossword puzzle?) It does not strengthen your argument to use language that imputes native intelligibility to the universe, when this is precisely the question at issue.
DB asked: "...is the ability to predict by scientific means...actual or is it illusory?"
A false dichotomy. Our "ability to predict" is neither "actual" (which again I can only read as a synonym for "infallible") nor "illusory" (by which I presume you mean "unreliable"). It is merely reliable: good enough to help us survive in the world around us. Our abductive and inductive faculties have been honed over millions of years, to the point where they allow us to generalize from quite complicated sequences of events to fairly abstract predictive principles. But all we know is that these predictive principles have worked in the past: we can only trust that they will continue to work in the future.
DB: "We both probably think that there are rules that are prescriptive in that they dictate how matter and energy behave not only now but an hour from now, next week, next month."
I do not believe this at all, and I thought it was clear that the locus of contention lies here. There are no _prescriptive_ rules, just _predictive_ principles which we have constructed as a formal representation of our past experiences. We trust that these principles are reliably predictive, and we might even hope that they are prescriptive. But beyond that we can say nothing definitive.
DB: "David Hume pointed out that physical event sequences have no native intelligibility."
Quite so. It is we, human beings, who impose our notions of regularity and intelligibility on event sequences. If all human minds were to vanish from the world then all intelligibility would vanish as well. Citing Hume on this point does not seem to help your argument.
DB: "Our expectation is justified only if a rule--a mental object--is conditioning the sequence."
This is of course a standard Humean position ("bare induction cannot be justified"), but I doubt if anybody takes it seriously. For example, the inductive inference "the Sun will rise tomorrow" is believed by everyone, but only a small minority could cite the relevant justifying law (conservation of angular momentum) from Newtonian physics. Do you seriously propose to argue that the vast majority of the world's population is therefore not justified in believing that the Sun will rise tomorrow? I think not. As Hume himself conceded, bare induction is justified by the fact that we cannot live without it.
DB: "How rules in the mind produce effects in human brains...is fairly mysterious and in principle unobservable."
I couldn't agree more. And it follows immediately that the proper inferential path is to establish the existence of intelligent agents _before_ making claims about the existence of systems of rules. To prioristically assume the existence of cosmic rules (which, as you say, are unobservable) and then use this assumption to argue for the existence of a ruling intelligence is ontologically very shaky.
>A false dichotomy. Our "ability to predict" is neither "actual" (which again I can only read as a synonym for "infallible") nor "illusory" (by which I presume you mean "unreliable"). It is merely reliable: good enough to help us survive in the world around us.<
Nothing I have written requires interpreting "actual" as "infallible." If I have an actual ability to walk, does that mean I never stumble? If I have an actual ability to learn, does that mean I learn everything perfectly?
I thought my example was clear, but I'll elaborate. Suppose a gambler blows on his dice before he rolls them because he thinks that doing so will increase his chances of rolling a winning number. Whenever he does roll a winning number, he says to himself, "See, my trick works!" When he fails to get a winning role, he says, "Well, the trick does not guarantee the result I want, it only makes it more likely." The gambler is not claiming infallibility for his trick, nevertheless he has no justification for believing that it has any bearing on the likelihood of one result versus the other. The insight the gambler supposes that he has in predicting the likelihood of dice rolls is not actual. The gambler need not believe his alleged insight is infallible to be laboring under an illusion regarding it.
>I do not believe this at all, and I thought it was clear that the locus of contention lies here. There are no _prescriptive_ rules, just _predictive_ principles which we have constructed<
Am I reading you correctly to say that you do not believe there are laws of nature? Calling such laws rules seems trivial--Einstein, for example, referred the the laws of nature as "rules" that are assumed but not proven. He believed that these rules must exist and that it was the job of scientists to figure them out. If your argument is that there are no laws of nature, I think you have the shaky end of things.
>We trust that these principles are reliably predictive, and we might even hope that they are prescriptive.<
The predictive value of rules (principles if you prefer) lies precisely in their prescriptive quality. To say they are not prescriptive is to say that events in the future might simply happen to conform to them, that there is no kind of necessity involved. The winning roll might happen to follow the act of blowing on the dice. In that case, we have no justification in relying on these principles, hoping in them, or paying them any attention.
>It is we, human beings, who impose our notions of regularity and intelligibility on event sequences. If all human minds were to vanish from the world then all intelligibility would vanish as well.<
If humans vanished, the universe would then fail to work intelligibly? Really? Do humans enforce Kepler's Law, or would planets suddenly gyrate out of their orbits if humans obliterated themselves? Before humans were around, did chemicals combine in predictable, intelligible ways? If not, how did life forms stick around, let alone evolve? If humans are not around, will light and matter stop conforming to the equations of General Relativity? As God asked Job, is it you that causes the sun to rise?
>Do you seriously propose to argue that the vast majority of the world's population is therefore not justified in believing that the Sun will rise tomorrow? I think not. As Hume himself conceded, bare induction is justified by the fact that we cannot live without it.<
The vast majority of the world's population intuitively assumes the world to be an intelligible place. Most people do not realize that reasoning purely from observed events we cannot justify induction, so to that extent their inductive reasoning is not justified. Those who believe that nature is intelligible because an all-governing mind so wills it have a firmer logical basis for expecting the future to be consistent with the past than those who think that it is all just "atoms and space."
I realize that some of Hume's statements are a bit ambiguous, but I think the tenor of his argument in the Enquiry is not that our inductive thinking is justified because we survive by it. Rather, he seems to say that we cannot help but think inductively, and implies that we cannot help but believe that such thinking helps us survive. But in neither case is he construing this mental habit as a logical justification. He says, "All these operations [mental habits of inductive expectation] are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent."
The question Hume never asked was, "How is it that we can can conceive of the world as an intelligible place if there is no such thing as intelligibility?" Hume might reply that the world's intellgibility could be illusory, and that all events occur by chance. But if intelligibility were illusory, how could we form a mental conception of it? How could we even understand its denial? If there were no such thing as light, we could not be expected to understand the statement, "There is no such thing as light." Illusions are mistaken combinations of simple concepts, not mistaken simple concepts.
Intelligibility cannot be an illusion. But we find that our conception or internal model of the world only has intelligibility to the extent that we construct it intelligently to begin with. We invest this internal model with scientific laws, turn the crank with mathematical computations, and then compare the results with what we observe. To put this another way, when we attempt to "tune in" to the physical universe, we can only do so by deliberate, intelligent reverse-engineering. Therefore the world itself can only be the way it is if it has been intelligently engineered (but note, this is not Intelligent Design theory).
We know that in dreams events can occur inconsistently--precisely because dreams are not intelligently conceived--and that if our conception of the world were dream-like it would not be intelligible. The real world is not dream-like, therefore it too has been intelligently conceived. We are back where we started in my original post.
DB: "Nothing I have written requires interpreting "actual" as "infallible." If I have an actual ability to walk, does that mean I never stumble? If I have an actual ability to learn, does that mean I learn everything perfectly?"
I must say that none of this throws any light on what you intend to mean by "actual ability to predict". Perhaps you are an Aristotelian and mean to contrast "actual" with "potential"? This seems unlikely, given that you were contrasting "actual" with "illusory".
No matter. I think I made it clear that my position is that our ability to predict is merely reliable. This should have answered your question "...is the ability to predict by scientific means...actual or is it illusory?" whether our understanding of the word "actual" agrees or not.
In view of all this, your gambler example strikes me as somewhat irrelevant. The gambler's belief that his blowing on the dice increases his chances is either reliable or not. And this is easily tested (good tests of statistical significance being of course a familiar stock-in-trade of mathematicians). I see no need (and indeed no way of testing) for alternative metaphysical classifications like "actual" and "illusory" prediction. Unless of course you believe that actual=reliable and illusory=unreliable.
DB: "Am I reading you correctly to say that you do not believe there are laws of nature?"
I am a bit disheartened that it has taken you 9 posts to grasp this. Yes, there are no transcendental laws of nature existing independently of the human mind. Just as there is no transcendental map of the world existing independently of the human mind. There are just scientific laws whose intelligibilty (as you aptly put it) "owes to the exercise of our creative intelligence in conceiving them".
DB: "If humans vanished, the universe would then fail to work intelligibly? Really? Do humans enforce Kepler's Law, or would planets suddenly gyrate out of their orbits if humans obliterated themselves?"
Of course the universe would no longer be intelligible. You seem to be committing a category error here. Intelligibilty is a property of human discourse, not a property of planetary orbits.
If we assume that the unverse is part of a discourse by a divine intelligence then, yes, it is possible to argue that the universe is intelligible. But this prior metaphysical assumption is needed first. And the assumption is neither logically nor empirically necessary. We can take it or leave it: it cannot be proved either way.
"The vast majority of the world's population intuitively assumes the world to be an intelligible place. Most people do not realize that reasoning purely from observed events we cannot justify induction, so to that extent their inductive reasoning is not justified."
I don't think you fully appreciate the epistemological ramifications of your claim here. You are asserting that no sequence of physical events, no matter how closely they conform to a clear pattern (like the Sun rising each morning) can justify induction without an ontological commitment to some system of rules, and conversely that any sequence of events, no matter how patternless, can justify induction provided that the subject is sufficiently inventive in dreaming up a set of justifying rules (no matter how convoluted or arcane they might be). Your hypothetical gambler, for example, needs only to believe that God will reward him for blowing on the dice for his belief in the value of blowing to be justified.
And on top of this you concede that "Most people do not realize" that inductive justification proceeds in this way. I would contend that there are very good and obvious reasons why most people would not agree to such an arbitrary and unworkable definition of "justification".
DB: "Intelligibility cannot be an illusion."
Once again I stress that intelligibility is a property of human discourse (of ideas, theories and models), and that there is no question of it being an "illusion" (whatever that may mean). If you wish to extend intelligibility to the universe as a whole, then you are making a metaphysical assumption which begs the whole question of whether or not there is a divine intelligence. I'm not sure that anything further can be profitably said on either side of this argument.
Anonymous
I agree that from this point forward we will be going aroung in the same circles. Anyone who wants to grasp our respective arguments has enough to judge them by already.
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