Saints and Skeptics on the AFR

Here. 

Saints and Skeptics on the Argument from Reason

Here. 

Reasons, causes and ontological commitments.

A redated post. 

Explanations, causal or non-causal, involve ontological commitments. That which plays an explanatory role is supposed to exist. Therefore, if we explain the existence of the presents under the Christmas tree in terms of Santa Claus I take it that means that Santa Claus exists in more than just a non-realist “Yes, Virginia,” sense. What this means is that even if reasons-explanations do not exclude physical explanations, even if reasons-explanations are somehow not causal explanations, the naturalist is not out of the woods. The naturalist maintains that the universe, at its base, is governed by blind matter rather than reasons. So if reasons-explanations are true, we still need to know why they are true and why reasons exist in a world that is fundamentally non-rational.

Ben Schuldt replies to me on behalf of Carrier

Here. He also replies to Darek Barefoot here.

Sins of the physicalist literature

Back before I opened Dangerous Idea, I gave this response to physicalist critics of the AFR, on Bill Vallicella's blog.

 A lot of the physicalist literature is guilty of one or all of the following sins, which in my estimation are:
1) A dogmatic pre-commitment to materialism.
2) Changing the explanandum in order to make the physicalistic explanation possible.
3) Presuming the very ideas one is trying to explain naturalistically.
4) Issuing gigantic promissory notes to future science, when we have no idea how future science will go.

The Brain Fallacy

A redated post.

I've been revising a paper of mine that I did in England in response to Carrier, and I have added this section, on what I call the brain fallacy:

But more than that, here again we find Carrier explaining one kind of mental activity in terms of another mental activity and then explaining it “naturalistically” by saying “the brain” does it. My argument is, first and foremost, that something exists whose activities are to be fundamentally explained in intentional and teleological terms. In order for talk about the brain to play its proper role in a physicalistic (non-intentional and non-teleological in the final analysis) analysis of mental events, we have to be sure that we are describing a brain that is mechanistic and part of a causally closed physical world. What I wrote in response to Keith Parsons, who had said that we could take what in Philosophia Christi applies here as well: (Parsons had argued that we could simply take all the characteristics that I wanted to attribute to the non-physical mind and attribute them to the brain).

But we should be careful of exactly what is meant by the term “brain.” The “brain” is supposed to be “physical,” and we also have to be careful about what we mean by “physical.” If by physical we mean that it occupies space, then there is nothing in my argument that suggests that I need to deny this possibility. I would just prefer to cal the part of the brain that does not function mechanistically the soul, since, as I understand it, there is more packed into the notion of the physical than just the occupation of space. If on the other hand, for something to be physical (hence part of the brain) it has to function mechanistically, that is, intentional an teleological considerations cannot be basic explanations for the activity of the brain, then Parsons’ suggestion (and Carrier’s as well-VR) is incoherent.

I think that a many people fail to see the difficulties posed by the arguments from reason because they think they can just engage in some brain-talk (well, the brain does this, the brain does that, etc.) and call that good. I call that the brain fallacy. The question should always be, “If we view the brain as a mechanistic system in the full sense, does it make sense to attribute this characteristic to the brain?” Using brain-talk doesn’t mean that the work of physicalistic analysis has really been done.

The Magician's Twin

I have a contribution in this Discovery Institute volume, which is another presentation of the AFR.

Al Moritz's AFR

Here.

An old AFR interview

Here's an interview I did on the AFR way back in 2006. My segment starts aroung minute 48.

I'm interviewed on Apologetics 315

Here.

Angus Menuge on the AFR

Here.

More on the AFR

II. C. S. Lewis’s argument, and mine

            In reading John Beversluis’s new edition of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, it occurred to me that while I have developed Lewis’s argument a great deal, I have not been as explicit as I might have been in delineating exactly how my argument differs from, and develops his. Of course, Lewis didn’t invent the argument, and it has an important predecessor in Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister-philosopher of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Lewis’s role was to introduce the argument to a popular audience, and to revise the argument in response to the criticisms of Elizabeth Anscombe.  There have been other important contributors to the argument, in particular William Hasker and Alvin Plantinga.

            At several points along the way I have introduced some structure to the argument that was not originally present in Lewis. I am certainly following Lewis’s fundamental idea in this, but a number of the nuances in the argument are my own. Explicating exactly what I have done on this might be helpful in understanding my argument.      

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Lewis begins his discussion by distinguishing between naturalism and supernaturalism. A naturalist is someone who thinks that the privilege of “being on its own,” belongs to “the whole show,” in much the way that sovereignty, in a democracy, belongs to the people not to some particular person or group of persons. A supernaturalist thinks that there are certain real things (or One Thing) that have the privilege of existing on their own, and that other objects depend on that for its existence. Further, he distinguished a “strict materialism,” which he thinks can be refuted by the one-line Haldane quote (If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, then I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true, and hence I have no reason for supposing that my brain is made up of atoms.), from naturalism that is not purely materialistic, and must be refuted with a more complex argument. Lewis says that if naturalism is true, there can be no free will, because determinism would be true. He mentions quantum mechanics, but he describes quantum-mechanical indeterminacy as a “threat” to naturalism, in which the “subnatural” can invade nature “from below,” as it were. However, he expresses doubt that this kind of indeterminism will continue to be affirmed by science.

            Because of this, Beversluis responds that his argument against naturalism works, if at all, against deterministic forms of naturalism, and unless the naturalism in question is of the determinist variety, Lewis’s argument is not an argument against that. But does determinism really make a difference? In deterministic forms of naturalism, events are guaranteed by the action of non-rational causes. In non-deterministic forms of naturalism, there is brute chance instead of determinism, but do events ever happen because of reasons? It doesn’t seem as if determinism makes a relevant difference.

            I think Lewis’s exposition of the naturalist-supernaturalist distinction needs some further development for philosophical argumentation today. I ask the question of whether the basic causes of the universe are mentalistic or non-mentalistic. If the basic causes of the universe are non-mentalistic, then if we have a mentalistic explanation, such as “Smith believes in evolution, in part, because the fossil record supports it,” then there has to be some explanation underlying that one which in non-mentalistic cause-and-effect operation of mindless atoms moving in accordance with the laws of nature is what is happening in the final analysis. On the other hand, if we look at those same atoms from the standpoint of theism, we find that those particles have the powers and liabilities they do because God created them that way. Scratch far enough, and you get a mentalistic explanation, not a non-mentalistic one. It is interesting that when you look at what makes something “material” or “natural,” you end up defining “material” in terms of the absence of mental characteristics. If a naturalistic worldview is true, then reason comes late to the party, when a brain of sufficient sophistication develops. Lewis describes his argument as an argument for supernaturalism, which is fine so long as we understand that by supernatural, what we mean is that it has, at bottom, and not a non-mentalistic explanation. Richard Carrier, perhaps the Argument from Reason’s most prolific critic, puts it this way.

Hence, I propose a general rule that covers all and thus distinguishes naturalism from supernaturalism: If naturalism is true, everything mental is caused by the nonmental, whereas if supernaturalism is true, at least one thing is not.

            But what are the characteristic of the mental? I have identified four characteristics of the mental. The first mark of the mental is purpose. For anyone who denies the ultimacy of the mind, an explanation in terms of purposes requires a further nonpurposive explanation to account for the purpose explanation. The second mark is intentionality or aboutness. Genuinely non-mental states are not about anything at all. The third mark is normativity. A normative explanation must be explained in terms of the non-normative, in the mental is not on the ground level of reality. The fourth mark is subjectivity.  There is no inner perspective at the physical level.

            Hence, a naturalistic view has, on my view, three basic elements. One of them is a mechanistic, that is non-mentalistic, basic level of reality. The second is the doctrine of the causal  closure of the physical. This does not require determinism, but what it does require that nothing outside of the physical be in causal connection. The third doctrine, is the doctrine of supervenience. Whatever is not itself physical must in fact, supervene on the physical. Therefore, this conception of reality is one which prohibits skyhooks, that is, anything from a higher level that is not accounted for on the lower level.

            Having laid out these elements, we can proceed to consider what I maintain a naturalistic view has difficulty accounting for. We could begin by looking at what human rationality is, or how it is supposed to manifest itself. Atheists very often perceive themselves has having the more rational view. The claim that, instead of believing things on faith, they look at the evidence and believe only what the evidence supports. But let’s take a look at how this works. If someone, let’s say, believes in evolution because they believe the fossil record supports it, that seems to imply that one set of mental events, those involved in examining and evaluating the fossil evidence, helps to bring about that fact that the person believes in evolution. But, it looks as if, at the basic level of analysis, mental states do not play any role qua mental states. What we have to be calling an instance of mental causation has to in fact be an example of physical causation in which the real causes are in the non-mental supervenience base, not amongst the mental states themselves.

            In fact, Lewis said that all knowledge, apart from the knowledge of our sensations, is inferred from those sensations. This led Beversluis to presume that his argument is essentially committed to the idea that, for example, our knowledge that there is a tree in the quad which I see, is really inferential knowledge. He points out that Lewis doesn’t really defend this view of sensory knowledge as inferential, and it would be odd for him to construct an argument based on this kind of view. But Lewis did not have to take such a strong view of inferential knowledge in order for his argument to work. What he needs, instead, is simply to argue that inferential knowledge is essential to science, since no modern atheist is going to argue that science does not acquire knowledge at all. If you consider the process of doing a mathematical equation, or basing a belief in evolution on the evidence, you will see that if your worldview says that this never happens, then this is certainly a very serious problem. These seem to be clear cases in which one mental event cause another mental event.

The beginning of my new AFR paper

                C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Reason

            Lewis’s contribution to Christian apologetics is many and varied, but one of his contributions seems to be of great contemporary relevance, and that is his argument from reason. The argument from reason is only indirectly an argument for Christianity or even for theism, but is instead an argument against one of Christian theism’s most popular rivals, and that is a doctrine called metaphysical naturalism.  In recent years, we have seen a very aggressive version of this doctrine propounded by advocates of what is today called “The New Atheism.” Of course, the atheists we have always had with us, but led by popular writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, atheists have made it their goal to eliminate religious belief in general, and Christianity in particular, from the face of the earth. At the same time, these atheists have made if very clear what they want to replace religious belief with. They want to people all over the world reject whatever religions they currently accept and embrace instead a doctrine of scientific naturalism. This effort has found its way onto sign on British buses that say “There is almost certainly no God. Now go on and enjoy your day.” To people like Dawkins, belief in the existence of God, or in Christianity, isn’t just false, it is delusional, which means it believed by its adherents in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that it is not true.  Further, they maintain that religious beliefs are not a benign delusion, it is a delusion that blocks the advancement of science at every turn, and actually leads its followers to resort to violence, as is evidenced by the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, and George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

            One of the assumptions made by the New Atheists is that they suppose that religious believers believe as a matter of faith, which to them means that believers believe in spite of the evidence. I do not know what someone like Dawkins would make of Lewis’s famous statement from Mere Christianity, in which he says “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in.” But they are quite convinced that the weight of the evidence is against religious belief, and that such faith does considerable harm.

            I noted earlier that the New Atheists not only want to make religious belief disappear, they want to replace it with a non-religious doctrine which is called philosophical naturalism. It is expressed in Carl Sagan’s famous pronouncement that “The Cosmos is all the was, or is, or ever will be.” But there is more to it than this. In the book entitled Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, (the book whose title I cannibalized in “C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea) Daniel Dennett contrasts two types of explanations, one of which he calls cranes, and the other he calls skyhooks. Cranes are bottom-up explanations, which explain the more intelligent and more complex in terms of the less intelligent and less complex. Where you have a mental explanation, you must explain that mental explanation in terms of something that is non-mental. For example, if you say that the purpose of your eye is to see, that might be an acceptable thing to say, so long as you can cash that explanation out in terms of something that is not so purposive. In Darwinian biology, if you say that the purpose of your eye is to see, what that means is that the function and survival value of the eye is that it enables the one who has it to see. Evolution will select for something that gives its possessor a survival advantage, but will not do so as a matter of a deliberate mental process. If we say that God designed you eye so that you can see, that would be, on Dennett’s view, and unacceptable skyhook, which he describes as a mind-first explanation with no underlying non-mental explanation. However, the Darwinian version of this statement is acceptable, because even though there is a mental explanation on the surface of things, it is merely a stand-in for a proper scientific explanation that excludes the mental. The mental is, according to naturalism, a system by-product of an inherently non-mental universe. It is not literally true that the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side. The history of science, on this view, is the history of displacing mental explanations, at least at the basic level of analysis, with non-mental ones. Every day, in every way, we’re getting closer and close to the time when all the skyhooks are gone, and all we have are cranes.

            The argument from reason essentially says that this can’t be the comprehensive story of the universe.  Remember, atheists say that religious believers believe in spite of the presence of overwhelming evidence against what they believe. What that implies is that there is an alternative to this, namely, believing in accordance with, and because of the evidence. But if everything in the universe has to be explained from the bottom up, then can it be literally true to say “I reject belief in the existence of God because if there were a God, there would be evidence of his existence which we do not find?” In the final analysis, stuff moves not according to the laws of reasoning or logic, but according to the laws of physics, without intention or purpose. If this is so, then how is it possible to believe anything on the basis of evidence? Scientists believe what they do because they evaluate the evidence for scientific hypotheses, and accept the one which has the most evidential support. Thus, Darwin, we are told, found evidence for his theory of natural selection based on evidence taken from his observations of finches on the Galapagos Islands. Science would not exist if it were not possible to give mentalistic explanations for the activities of scientists. Hence, the ban on skyhooks has to stop when we start talking about the rational formation of beliefs, whether this is the formation of scientific beliefs based on evidence, or the mathematical underpinnings of the sciences (as both Lewis and I learned to our chagrin in school, you can’t get very far in the sciences without being good at math), or the rational consideration of the question of whether or not there is a God, or whether Christianity is true. If we explain reason in terms of the non-rational, we invariably end up explaining it away.

Defending Carrier Against Me

This is a response by Carrier admirer Ben Schuldt to an early response of mine to Carrier. He uses the fallacy of composition charge against my argument.

Physicalist analyses of mental start by defining the physical by excluding the mental, but then combinations of the physical are supposed to be mental. Yet, when the physical descriptions are complete, it looks as if the marks of the mental have disappeared and have been replaced by something that doesn't look mental at all. I call this changing the subject, but Schuldt thinks that I am question-beggingly insisting on a "magical" analysis of mind. I say I am insisting on a mentalistic analysis of mind. The mental is what it is, and is not something else.

It doesn't seem that all part-to-whole inferences commit the fallacy of composition. For example, if every part of the shed in the back yard is made of wood, then the shed is made of wood, isn't it? (Even if it doesn't weigh the same as a duck).

A Youtube Attack on my AFR

At least Richard Carrier read my book. I'm not sure this guy has.

For example, he makes the simplistic "argument from computers", which I responded to in my book, and numerous times subsequently, including here. 

I am not saying that there aren't more sophisticated ways of using computer science to critique the AFR, but this is not one of them.

The Argument from the Reliability of our Rational Faculties, or Should We Attack Water Balloons? (With a postscript from a commentator)

This is a redated post. 

IV. Argument from the Reliability of our Rational Faculties
If naturalism is true, it is often argued that natural selection would support the emergence of rational as opposed to irrational belief-forming mechanisms. But it is not at all clear to me that the most reliable belief-forming mechanisms are the most advantageous from an evolutionary point of view.
First of all I argued that simpler procedures often have more selective advantage over more complex cognitive ones. Carrier ridicules the example that I use, which is

If the chief enemy of a creature is a foot-long snake, perhaps some inner programming to attack everything a foot long would be more effective than the more complicated ability to distinguish mammals from amphibians.

Carrier thinks that this commits me to the idea that this creature will attack everything a foot long, including rocks, which is clearly not what I meant. Most universal statements presuppose a universe of discourse; thus if you were to go into a store having a clearance sale in which I find a sign that says “Clearance Sale: Everything Must Be Sold” and proceed to ask the price of the salesgirl, you would get slapped upside the head and rightly so.

But of course very often nature uses short-cut mechanisms to provide for the survival of creatures. In my home state of Arizona we have lots of rattlesnakes, and they are designed in such a way as to track warmth. Very often a warm object will be an enemy, but it need not be one. If you put a hot water balloon outside a rattlesnake’s hole it will attack the water balloon. So I might say “Perhaps nature could give a creature a tendency to attack anything above a certain number of degrees in the environment, and that would be more effective from the point of view of survival than the ability to discriminate between animate and inanimate objects,” and it seems to me that if I said that Carrier could produce all of his arguments ridiculing that claim and saying that of course being able to figure out whether something is alive or not is better from the point of view of survival than just hitting something above a certain number of degrees. Carrier also says

It will always be a more efficient use of resources (energy, time, risk, and tools) to avoid attacking all non-threats and to attack all actual threats—including entirely new and unanticipated threats. And the only means an organism can maximize efficiency in this respect is to optimize its ability to categorize and discriminate objects and events. There is literally no other way.

But if this were the case wouldn’t Mother Nature have hit upon rational creatures a whole lot sooner, instead of using a wide range of other kinds of mechanisms to promote survival? I pointed out in my book that the reason in humans requires the development of large brains which, while providing the advantage of enhanced knowledge capacities, have the disadvantage of making the creature more vulnerable, requiring longer periods of immaturity, etc. The emergence of reason involves trade-offs from an evolutionary standpoint, though of course it can be very well seen why a naturalist might say that trade-off is worth it. If we consider such natural occurrences as the dance of the bees, we find sophisticated ways of discovering where nectar is (and where it is not), without anything like conscious reasoning being involved. It seems just false to say that there is, and can be, no substitute for reason.

Darwin once raised doubts about his own capacities to understand the world accurately on the assumption of evolution by natural selection. The possibility that false beliefs can promote reproductive fitness seems impossible to deny. I don’t know if any scientific studies have been done on this, but I remember high school, and I distinctly had the impression that the guys who held egregiously inflated views of their own attractiveness to the opposite sex tended to have more successful dating lives than those of us who assess our attractiveness more realistically.

Douglas Henry, in the 2003 edition of Philosophia Christi, provides an excellent example of how systematically false beliefs can benefit survival, in his essay “Correspondence Theories, Natural-Selective Truth, and Unsurmounted Skepticism.” He considers the attempt by Ruth Millikan to provide an evolutionary foundation for realism and the correspondence theory of truth. He maintains that the fact that humans tend to respond positively to placebos suggests that false beliefs can, and often do, have survival value. The placebo effect is well-documented in medical literature, showing that if someone receives some medication that they think will benefit their health, then that will benefit their health even though it is nothing more than a sugar pill. On the other hand trading the false belief “This is the latest cancer medicine” for the true belief “This is just a sugar pill” will result in the loss of the positive health effects of believing that a person is receiving beneficial medicine.

If false beliefs about matters that are of immediate concern can be false yet helpful, is it also possible natural selection could, in various ways, incline us toward a whole range of false beliefs? Could our beliefs be systematically false and still adaptive? I see no reason to think they could not.

The Arguments from Reason are far from finished products, either as a result of Lewis’s efforts or as the result of my own or other people who defend them. Far more than I have been able to do already will be required to make a persuasive case to most people that reason is a phenomenon that fits far better into a supernaturalist world-view than into a naturalistic world view. A good deal more needs to be done by defenders of the arguments from reason, especially in addressing naturalistic philosophers like Dennett, Millikan, and Dretske who had attempted to tackle the problem of how reason can exist in a naturalistic universe. There is a long struggle ahead to try to show first that the central elements of reason to which I have alluded are ineliminable, secondly, to show that reductive analyses of these elements of reason are unsuccessful, and third to show that an alternative world-view, such a theism, provides a better way of understanding these phenomena. However, I firmly believe, and continue to believe, that the more we study attempts to naturalize reason the more plausible it will seem that “Something’s rotten in Denmark, ” and that a fundamentally mentalistic world-view, like theism, can clean up the stench.

Postscript: The following comments, by an anonymous commentator some four years later, strike me as very interesting: 

A few comments to some of Ahabs points:

In fact humans do not tend to respond positively to placebos. 70% or more of those taking them will not get better.

If 30% of those taking sugar pills will get better, then humans often respond positively to placebos. That's quite astonishing and fits well with other reasearch in psychology about the influence of positive thought about the future.

Actually, if one found out that they were taking a placebo they would want the real medicine and consequently increase their chances of survival.

I agree with this, but the point is that the placebo effect promoted survival in the past, not that it does now. Many traits don't serve survival well now but did so in the past (adrenaline in a stress situation).

But now you've jumped from an individual belief to a system of beliefs.

I agree that this is the best objection to the "systematic error" argument. I guess this could be turned into a good argument, but nobody has done this so far.

Natural selection does not select for individual beliefs. It selects for the mechanism which is capable of forming beliefs. A person whose brain is able to arrive at enough true beliefs to increase its chances of surviving the hazards of this dangerous world is, all else being equal, going to have a greater likelihood of passing on her genes than a person whose brain is less adept at good belief formation.

This is the typical answer to any argument from reason. I think the problem with this answer is that it requires and presupposes a huge metaphysical framework that is highly controversal and becomes less and less plausible. It requires the "naive" view of mental causation, the idea that the content of our thoughts directly influence behavior. David Chalmers has made a great case against the kind of mental causation required for this view.

Usually it also presupposes that evolution delivers an explanation for our phenomenological mental life. But this is highly implausible and disputed by many in the philosophy of mind. My zombie twin would have the same advante in natural selection that I have.

I can't make a cogent case against this objection in a comment here because it presupposes so much. But overall it seems to me that the premise of the objection is highly disputed and that contemporary philosophy of mind actually moves away from it. This makes the objection useless.

The reason why this objection is so common seems clear to me. It is very simple and fits very well with ordinary common sense convictions about the mental. This makes it attractive to anyone who is not familiar with the metaphysical problems it causes.

An essay by Avery Cardinal Dulles on Lewis as an apologist

Lewis’ second favorite proof, the argument from reason, appears in his book Miracles. A certain kind of naturalism, he observes, characterizes rational thinking as a mere product of nervous reflexes, instincts, and habits. Lewis replies that physical or psychological conditioning cannot explain our power to make judgments about truth and error. We are conscious that our judgments are determined not by subrational forces but by reality as it impinges on our minds. The power to reach understanding through rational explanations is evidence of an affinity between the mind and reality. It is explicable only if there is an aboriginal mind that accounts for both intelligence and intelligibility.

Lewis’ sketchy presentation of this argument leaves further work to be done. Having an ancestry that goes all the way back through Plato to Anaxagoras, it resembles the argument for the existence of God proposed in highly technical terms by Bernard Lonergan and popularized in several apologetical works of Hugo Meynell. For all these authors the wonderful correspondence between reason and reality implies that reality is imbued with an order that stems from a creative Mind. Lewis’ focus is not so much on the intelligibility of the world as on the mind’s capacity for truth, which in his opinion cannot be explained by natural selection but only by an intelligent Creator.

Lonergan's AFR is found in chapter 19 of his book Insight. Hugo Meynell's book The Intelligible Universe is based on Lonergan's argument.

Parsons on Mental Causation

The Secular Outpost: The Problem with Metaphysical Naturalism (According to Victor Reppert)

First, I do share Parsons' concern about getting definitions right. When I deal with a naturalistic view, I offer an account of what that is supposed to have in it, which includes the mechanistic character of the base level, the causal closure of the base level, and the superveniece of everything else on the base level. By mechanism I mean that we are excluding from that base level four properties: intentionality, purpose, first-person subjectivity, and normativity. Now someone might come along and say that they have a view that doesn't fit these characteristics but is still naturalistic in some sense, in which case we'd have to look at their theory to see in what sense they're calling it naturalistic and whether I think a version of the AFR can be advanced against it. Here, I am going to assume that Parsons agrees with this account, and move forward. 

Looking at this post, it seems to me that there are a couple of issues that we have to be careful about conflating. One of them is the claim that some version of nonreductive materialism can meet the argument from reason. In the combox, you get some discussion of that, and some responses to some exchanges with Clayton Littlejohn. However, the impression that I have had in discussion with Clayton is that he believes that mental events qua mental events do cause other mental states and physical states. Troubles with mental causation have been the focus of some of Jaegwon Kim's criticisms of nonreductive materialism, in particular the nonreductivism of Donald Davidson. Kim writes:

Davidson's anomalous monism fails to do full justice to psychophysical causation in which the mental qua mental has any real causal role to play. Consider Davidson's account: whether or not a given event has a mental description (optional reading: whether or not it has a mental characteristic) seems entirely irrelevant to what causal relations it enters into. Its causal powers are wholly determined by the physical description or characteristic that holds for it; for it is under its physical description that it may be subsumed under a causal law.

Jaegwon Kim, "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation" ch. 6 of Supervenience and Mind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 106.

Now, of course, there can be a debate as to whether a case cam be made for mental causation in a non-reductive materialist framework. I think it can't. It's not that I don't think higher-level properties can be causally relevant. They can be if the are configurational combinations of physical states. If a bowling ball knocks all the pins down, this is perfectly possible even though basic physics makes no reference to bowling balls and pins. However, I take it if you add up the physical states and know what words mean, you can't avoid the conclusion that the bowling ball knocked down the pins. What I don't see is how you can add up non-normative states and get normative states, how you can add up non-intentional states and get intentional states, how you can add up non-first-person states and get first-person states, or how you can add up non-purposive states and get purposive states.

Science always prefers the most tractable accounts it can get. Scientists are happy when they can analyze the movement of a bullet through space, and determine what kind of impact it would have to make given the speed at which it was traveling. But there is another type of explanation that we might be interested in with respect to the bullet. It was fired by someone who had some intention with respect to what he wanted the bullet to do. Perhaps, he fired the bullet to kill his mother-in-law, whom he believes to be the worst person he knows. That is an agent-explanation, and as such is less tractable to science than a ballistic explanation. However, it isn't a total mystery; we can understand the person's motivations, and perhaps not find the action totally unexpected. After all, we are talking about the motivations of a fellow human. Now, as action might be the action of a superior being of some kind, and there it is even less tractable. Still, I would not want to call it a pseudo-explanation, because we can have some understanding of a superior mind, even the mind of God.

But it is a natural impulse in science to want to analyze the world in as tractable terms as possible, and hence we can understand why materialism is appealing from the point of view of science. However, at the same time, science described the activity of scientists in mentalistic terms. Scientists gather evidence, they form hypotheses, they perform logical and mathematical inferences, etc. It would indeed undermine the scientific enterprise if these mentalistic explanations of the behavior of scientists were simply untrue. Few people would be materialists if it weren't appealing from a scientific standpoint, but if mentalistic explanations are all false, then there are no scientists, and therefore no science. So, some kind of explanatory compatibility thesis must be defended by materialists. Scientists are, in the last analysis physical beings whose actions can be fully explained at the physical level as part of a closed mechanistic system, and their rationality, such as it is, must be some supervening property that emerges through evolution in a materialist world.

Parsons' strategy for establishing explanatory compatibility is essentially the same as the one Elizabeth Anscombe, (not a naturalist herself, but surely the most famous critic of C. S. Lewis's AFR). The mentalistic explanations we need in order for science to be science are compatible with materialism because those explanations aren't causal explanations, while those offered by physics are causal explanations.

Now Parsons, like Anscombe, points out that there are compatible explanations. Of course there are. For example, if we ask why the soda-can is sitting on the bookshelf, I might say "Because I put it there yesterday, since I am planning on recycling it," or "because it has a cylindrical shape, and is sitting on its base." But there are, certainly, incompatible explanations. Otherwise, there would be no hope that scientific explanations could ever supplant religious explanations.

Parsons tries to establish the explanatory compatibility as follows, using as an example Sam's acceptance of Krugman's arguments that the Ryan budget is a recipe for disaster. 

When we say that Sam was convinced by Krugman’s arguments it seems to me perverse to attribute some very (I think in-principally) mysterious kind of causal power to the sense or propositional content of Krugman’s arguments. Attributing causal powers to Fregean Sinn (meaning), if this is what Victor wants to assert, just seems to me a straightforward category mistake. It is like saying that the set of all integers broke the deadlock between NFL players and owners. No, to say that Sam was convinced by Krugman’s arguments means that Sam considered Krugman’s claims, examined the supporting reasons, weighed them in the light of prior knowledge and norms of good reasoning, and judged that these were persuasive. However, considering Krugman’s claims, examining the supporting arguments, evaluating them, and judging them to be persuasive are things that Sam does with his brain, and happenings in Sam’s brain, being physical events, can cause things. 

Well, if Sam's considering and accepting Krugman's arguments is a brain process, it looks like we are going to end up attributing properties to Sam's brain that are going to violate the causal closure of the physical. If Sam finds Krugman's arguments persuasive, one of the things he has to be persuaded by is the logical connection between the Krugman's premises and his conclusions. To be aware of something is to be causally influenced by it. So, yes, my awareness of a stop sign causes me to stop, not the stop sign itself. If I don't see the sign, I'll barrel right through. But, the stop sign has to cause my awareness of the stop sign. And if the physical is causally closed, then everything that I am aware of has to be also physical, and by physical I take it we mean that it has a particular location in space and time. A logical relationship has no particular location in space and time, and so if I am aware of a logical relationship, and that logical relationship affects my brain, then the causal closure of the physical has been violated, because something that has no particular location in space and time is bringing it about that I think certain things.

If I am aware that the cat is on the mat, then there is a causal connection between the cat and my brain, which occurs within space and time. If I am aware of the fact that, if a=b, and b=c and a=c, then in order for this awareness to be fitted within the framework of a causally closed physical order, that truth has to have a particular location in space and time. But it has not particular location in space and time, so, if the physical is closed, I can't be aware of it.

Explanations have ontological commitments. If I explain the existence of presents under the Christmas tree by saying that Santa put them there, then I commit myself to the existence of Santa. If I say I believe something because I perceive a logical relationship, that means that there are logical relationships. But where is this logical relationship for me to be aware of?

I don't see that you really resolve the problem naturalism has with rational inference by denying the causal character of these explanations.

Some exchange with Keith Parsons

KP: Honestly, I do not know what to make of your suggestion that souls and gods might turn out to be natural entities. “Natural” and “supernatural” are flexible terms, but I fear that if we stretch language that far it will break. Are you suggesting that gods and souls might turn out to be constituted of energy or matter and are thus denizens of the space/time universe and, ipso facto, subject to the laws of nature? I earnestly desire not to make a straw man of you (or Lewis for that matter), so I just have to say that I do not follow you here.

VR: Mostly, here I am trying to get clear on exactly what you are taking the constraints of naturalism to be. I \use a working definition of what a naturalistic world-view is supposed to contain, and my argument against naturalism is an argument against that. But then I am told that I am really attacking a straw man, that my argument works against materialism but not against naturalism, or that it works against reductive materialism but not non-reductive materialism, etc. If we say what is natural has to be constituted of energy or matter, or if you say that what is natural has to be a denizen of the space-time universe, in other words, it must have a particular location in space and time, and it must be subject to laws of nature, well, we have a start. I suppose that makes God non-natural, since God is not supposedly located in a particular place. But with the soul, it's a little tricky, since I don't see why a soul should have to lack a particular location in space.

KP: As for whether we ultimately explain in “mentalistic” terms or not, it is not at all clear to me that we have an either/or here. If mental happenings are fully realized by physical happenings, i.e., if we think, feel, imagine, desire, etc. with our brains (as I think we do), then we have a choice, depending on our interests at the time, of how we explain those mental happenings. I can say “I concluded that the defendant was indeed guilty on the basis of the cumulative evidence against him, his clear motive, and the shakiness of his alibi” when I am discussing things in a legal or philosophical context. If I am doing neuroscience I could talk about the causal relations between evolving brain states, in particular those states that realize my reasoning about the defendant’s guilt. Why should one type of explanation preclude or take precedence over the other? Isn’t all explanation wholly context-dependent? 

VR: The problem has to do with how what our concept of the physical is. It seems to me that a physical explanation, if we are sticking with standard definitions and are not expanding the notion of the physical to include things it doesn't traditionally include, our concept of what it is for something to be a physical explanation, at least at the base level of analysis, is for it to lack four "mentalistic" characteristics. First, the explanation at the base level cannot include an purpose. Second it cannot include any intentionality. What a physical state is about cannot enter into the base-level explanation. Third, it cannot include any reference to normativity. No piece of matter, in the last analysis, goes where it goes because it ought to go there. Fourth, a naturalistic explanation of a material state cannot contain any reference to a first-person perspective. I take it the idea that naturalists typically have is that the laws the govern matter don't change because the matter is realizing a mental operation. And, according to the standard understanding of naturalism, the base level is causally closed. This doesn't mean that it's deterministic, it means that nothing outside the physical system can affect where a particular atom goes, whether it's an atom in a rock or an atom in a brain. If there is quantum-level indeterminism, it's brute chance and nothing more. Quantum mechanics doesn't provide a door for non-physical causes to enter. There are some pretty strict limits on what kinds of explanations can be offered at the base level, if we are going to be good naturalists. If you want to loosen the definition of the physical, be my guest, but then I'm going to have to ask what the parameters are, and what is being excluded. Otherwise, how can we exclude what use to be called souls, or what used to be called gods? I mean we can even call God the theon, to make His name a more scientific sound.

KP: Finally, might not the behaviorists or the eliminative materialists turn out to have been the consistent naturalists? No. Consciousness is as much a natural phenomenon as a hurricane. Like a hurricane, consciousness is complexly realized and difficult to model, but there is no reason whatsoever to see it as not amenable to human understanding or as inexplicable in physical terms. Behaviorism and eliminativism were, as Bertrand Russell said about positivism, ideas so bizarrely stupid that only a very educated person could ever have been made to believe them. They are monuments to the astonishing capacity of highly intelligent and educated ideologues to ignore the elephant in the room.  


Yes, but you have to realize that these were attempts to be consistently naturalistic. When you introduce consciousness, you introduce all four of the types of explanations which I had excluded. By using brain-talk, naturalists often mask the fact that they are in fact using personalistic explanations to describe what the brain is doing. In which case I reply  "Interesting fellow, Mr. Brain. Remarkable what he can do."

In the case of hurricanes, it seems to me that if you add up all the physicalistic in formation about where the water molecules are and what you are doing, it closes the question as to whether there is a hurricane. In the case of mental states, it seems to me that if you add up all the nonmental states, you don't get determinate mental states. The physical underdetermines the mental. There is a conceptual barrier similar to the kind of barrier that is said to exist between an ought and an is. Given the fact we define the physical in terms of a lack of the mental, you can't go from the physical to the mental and get a definite conclusion as to what mental state is present. You can't siphon off the mental to the realm of the mental, because that's precisely what we are trying to explain.

The Steve argument and the AFR

I need to go back over what the Steve argument is. It is a response to the "anti-causal" reply to the argument from reason, or, more particularly, the problem of mental causation. Actually, it's one of a few arguments I use against this position, which goes back to Anscombe's critique of Lewis. I have to give kudos to Clayton for keeping focused on what this post is about.

The Steve argument is an illustration of the fact that when we say that someone is rational, we are saying that evidential relationships are relevant to the actual occurrence of beliefs as psychological events. In particular, when we try to explain why we are rational in believing something, we make counterfactual claims about the relationship between evidence and our beliefs, such as "If the evidence for evolution weren't so strong, I wouldn't believe in it." A typical way in which people impugn the rationality of others is to say that smart people believe things for not-so-smart reasons, and then use their reasoning powers to justify what they have already committed themselves emotionally to believe. In fact, people like Loftus very often charge that Christians are something like Steve; that is, they for a belief in Christianity through processes that could just as easily produce a  false belief as a true belief, and then find whatever arguments they can to undergird those beliefs which were really reached in a non-truth-conducive way.

But what we are saying when we say we believe something for a good reason is that the presence of reasons is relevant to the production of our beliefs, that, unlike those benighted folks over there, we have actually paid attention to the evidence and are following it wherever it leads, whether it makes us feel good or not.

But what that means is that evidential relationships are relevant to what beliefs we hold, and therefore, what states our brains get themselves into. But evidential and logical relationships are abstract states. They are not physical things, and they do not have particular locations in space and time. Yet they are, apparently, causally relevant to the beliefs we form. Or, at least they can be.

But these same people will say that the mind is the brain, and that what goes on in the brain is simply physical causation playing itself out. Abstract objects don't, they say, cause anything to happen in the brain, since the brain is a physical system and events in the brain are caused just like any other events. It's just the laws of physics playing themselves out.

Lewis wrote: But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence
of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it? (1960b: 20)

(1960b) Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1974)

It seems to me that this points to something paradoxical in the naturalist's view of reasoning.