Thursday, November 16, 2017

Van Inwagen's Critique of Lewis's Revised Argument in Miracles

Here. 

25 comments:

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

Say Doc no way my understanding of Lewis is honing to rival your's.I want to see you write a paper about this. What do you say about VIW's?

ficino4ml said...

I learned from the article, thanks for linking.

Bilbo said...

Vic, I see he lists your book in his references. Now I'll have to go back and read your book, which I haven't done in a few years.

Bilbo said...

I just looked over Chapter Four of your book, "Several Formulations of the Argumrent from Reason." From what I can tell, Van Inwagen did not address any of your formulations. So he lists your book in his references, but doesn't address anything you have to say. Rather disappointing.

Unknown said...

Lewis's argument fails the "So What?" test, which is to say that it fails to be relevant to practical reason. Even if Lewis is right, human beings will continue to act as though they possess reason or rationality; we aren't anyways able to adjust our conduct or our thinking to the purported truth of Lewis's argument. Our commitments to our nature to act in ways we believe are reasonable or rational are too strong to abandon in the face of an irrelevant metaphysics, the veracity or falsity of which have no bearing on our interpersonal lives.

Victor Reppert said...

Rather disappointing in that doesn't develop the idea, present in Lewis's chapter, that nature isn't supposed to be rational, and therefore reasons can't play any causal role in the events that occur within nature. This is developed in Hasker's argument that any materialistic view needs to say that the material world is mechanistic and nonteleolgical, that it is causally closed, and that whatever else there is has to supervene on that. If all the causes are nonrational, then van Inwagen, at least on the face of things, can't say the reasons for the most recent causes. That would be to commit a skyhook, and Daniel Dennett's skyhook police will arrest you if you say that.

Bilbo said...

Vic, why would such a celebrated philosopher offer such a superficial analysis of the argument from reason?

Atno said...

Dan Gilson,

It doesn't fail the "so what" test. Lewis's argument EXPECTS us to continue acting as though we have reason, indeed it expects us to continue believing we are rational and reasonable. This is why it can be framed as a transcendental argument, a reductio ad absurdum, or an argument to the best explanation. Lewis's argument shows precisely that naturalism is false because it denies something that we know to be true, and something that we cannot even deny to be true. What belief should someone give up on -- rationality or the 20th century superstition called "naturalism"? Naturalism. And so the non-naturalist can be coherent and rational in his beliefs. The naturalist must deny reason in order to believe his savage superstition of irrational thoughts and brute facts.

Atno said...

Dan,

Lewis's arment does not fail the "so what" test. It EXPECTS us to continue acting as though we have rationality. In fact it expects us to continue believing we are rational and reasonable. Hence why it can be used as a transcendental argument, a reductio ad absurdum, or as an appeal to the best explanation. Lewis's argument shows that naturalism denies what we know to be true, and what we can't even coherently doubt. Lewis's argument shows that naturalism is incompatible with the true fact that human beings have determinate immaterial thoughts and can reason and follow conclusions in ground and consequent relations that could never be captured in terms of physical cause and effect relations. Faced with this, what belief should we give up on: the belief that human beings are rational and can reason validly, or belief in the 20th century superstition called naturalism?

The non-naturalist can be coherent in his beliefs and hold the obvious and necessary truh that we have reason. The naturalist must give up belief in reason in order to (irrationally) accept his savage superstition of brute facts and chaos.

Victor Reppert said...

Here is Dennett's description of a skyhook.

Let us understand that a skyhook is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process.

Can a naturalist say that there is an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity? If so then could I join the naturalist club?

William said...

I think that Van Inwangen winds up saying, in the key passage on pp 19-20, that if we allow subjective, rational "because" reasons as __another kind of physical reasons__, and thus put those subjective items into the category of physical things included within Lewis' Naturalism, then Lewis' argument fails.

Of course, that kind of Van Inwangen style physicalism is one that neither Lewis nor you, Victor, would consider to be the Naturalism the argument was about.


Victor Reppert said...

Thomas Nagel is an atheist who doesn't think there's a God, But thinks that somehow rationality is on the ground floor of the universe, and is not a recent evolutionary byproduct. He is getting holy hell from orthodox naturalists. Not just Dennett, but people like Pinker and Blackburn.

Victor Reppert said...

OK, what makes natural natural?

David Brightly said...

We have wandered off the topic of PVI's critique of Lewis. He concludes, bottom of p122, It seems therefore that Lewis has not shown that a belief fact that has a 'type C explanation' cannot also have a 'type A explanation'. This strikes me as the obvious lacuna in Lewis's argument. He assumes without justification that ground-consequent explanations and cause-effect explanations are exclusive. Here is an argument to the effect that they are not.

We don't know the nature of beliefs. But we do know that they can be expressed in sentences that have a physical realisation. So let's suppose that there can be a cause-effect relation between beliefs and sentences and also between sentences and beliefs. Then ground beliefs G1,...,Gn can cause sentences SG1,...,SGn. The latter may cause the consequent sentence SC. This is a matter of pattern matching and substitution over physical symbols. Sentence SC may then cause the consequent belief C. So there can be a cause-effect path from ground beliefs to a consequent belief that goes via physically realised sentences. The point here is that the ground-consequent relation between beliefs, like beliefs themselves, is mysterious and possibly other-worldly. But the ground-consequent relation over sentences is simple and physically realisable.

William said...

David,

Are cultural artifacts "merely" physical objects? The answer seems to be no: see

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.296.1210&rep=rep1&type=pdf

William said...

Hal,
If the paper (yes that one) is correct, it implies that something such as a book containing sentences which represent reasoning (which is the connection of that paper with the argument for reason) cannot be a purely physical substance if its meaning is one of its properties.

William said...

^^^ sorry that was ** "argument from reason" not argument for reason

William said...

Hal,

I'm rather loose with the substance term, since I think most but not all substances are made of substances. You seem much more conservative about what a substance is it seems. So, yes.

David Brightly said...

William, I take you to be saying that it's a corollary of Schneider's argument that if a book has its meaning as a property then the book cannot be wholly physical? One might see this as a reductio ad absurdum of the premises: either Schneider's argument is unsound or meanings are not properties. I find the latter plausible. To say a book's meaning is one of its properties is rather like saying that the flame produced when it's struck is one of the properties of a match.

William said...

Aren't virtual properties like "burning if lit" properties? If not, what are they?

David Brightly said...

I think they are called 'dispositional' properties. But the match's flammability is not the flame it gives rise to. Likewise, a book's meaningfulness is not the meaning it engenders in a reader.

William said...

I'm not sure how to categorize your "dispositional properties." Perhaps they are properties of both a thing and its potential contexts, seen together?

Bout anyway. Is the above "meaningfulness" of a book a property of the book? Is that property physical?


David Brightly said...

I think it would be stretching the notion of 'property' beyond breaking point to ascribe a property to a thing and a possible context in which it might find itself, in conjunction, as it were. Does the property vanish when the context is removed, for example? But context is clearly important and taken into account through conditionals. The flammability of the match manifests itself when the match is struck. The fragility of a wine glass becomes apparent if the glass is dropped, and so on.

Perhaps the meaningfulness of a text is an extreme example of this phenomenon, where the context plays as important a role, if not more so, as the thing itself. The meaningfulness of an English text is apparent only to readers of English, and sometimes only to specifically educated readers. I can't make much sense of Judith Butler, for example. And the 'interiority' of meanings makes a difference. We can all 'see' the fragility of a glass when it smashes on the floor. But I don't see the meaning that others say they find in Butler. I'm unchanged by it.

So I'm inclined to see meaning as a phenomenon that occurs in suitably prepared persons when exposed to texts. The relation between text and meaning is more one of cause and effect than one of object and property, I think. Certainly, the text itself is entirely physical. But if the text can cause such meanings then we ascribe to it the property of 'meaningfulness'.

William said...

This seems a little like the discussions of what color is, and whether it is only in the eye of the person or is also in some way in the colored thing. I guess I see color as being in things in some way, just as I see meaning as being in things in some way, and you do not, at least with the meaning in things part.

I don't see any real proofs of what is correct in these things, just varying intuitions of what makes sense.

David Brightly said...

Yes, this might be one of those strange inversions that occur when we move from explanations and understandings within the manifest image to explanations and understandings within the scientific image. But there are puzzles even with the manifest image. If meaning lies in an English text how come a non-English speaker cannot see it? What is going on in the lengthy period it takes to learn a language and subsequently to read it and write it? Why can't I make any sense of Butler?

But in any case, my argument against Lewis does not involve meaning. It says that sentences are syntactic entities---patterns of physical symbols---and that logic is mere syntactic substitution and rearrangement.