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.

Martin's AFR powerpoint

This is really very nice. Here.

Al Moritz's AFR

Here.

John DePoe's version of the AFR

John DePoe is a former student of Tim McGrew at Western Michigan, who teaches at Marywood College.

Ben Schuldt replies to Darek Barefoot

Darek Barefoot wrote a defense of the AFR against Carrier. This is Ben Schuldt's response.

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 Yet, when the physical descriptions are complete, it looks as if the marks of the mental have disappeared and have been replaced by something that doesn't look mental at all.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).

An Anonymous Commentator on the Evolutionary Explanation for the Success of Reasoning

I put this up earlier, and it didn't get much response. So I'm trying again. 

 

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.

C. S.Lewis on the AFR and the Scientific Juggernaut

The link is to an article by Jim Slagle in Quodlibeta. 


The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of "Science" mounts higher and higher corresponds to nothing in my own experience. That grand myth which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory -- in other words, unless Reason is an absolute -- all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.

Hasker's version of the Argument from Reason from The Emergent Self

Here.

Lewis v. Anscombe: The Documents that Might be Hard to Find in Borders

This doesn't include the revised Lewis chapter which is in everyone's copy of Miracles these days, (not when I first heard about the AFR in 1972, when the copy of Miracles at my local library was the original edition), but that's here, and Tim McGrew has told me he just cleaned that one up, here.

Cleaning Up an Old Paper of Mine

My Infidels Argument from Reason paper, which started the ball rolling back in 1998 toward C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, (though I did write my Anscombe paper in 1989 and wrote a dissertation on the argument at the University of Illinois), had several typos in it, but Tim McGrew has done me the service of cleaning it up and putting it on his site. Thanks, Tim.

Though that paper doesn't really have the definitional analysis of naturalism/materialism that I developed later.
A slightly different version appeared in Philo in 1999.

Contingency, Science, and the OTF

No John, you're missing the point. What we have is a failure to communicate. In my view the question of who "I" would be in another culture is difficult to raise meaningfully because not only does the religion of choice change, but also the freedom to question one's beliefs differs. So saying that I would be a Muslim in a Saudi society doesn't mean a whole lot because the freedom to so much as question Islam is not granted. What makes someone in a Muslim or a Mormon culture me? Possible world semantics has the problem of identifying either persons or counterparts across possible worlds. When people make statements like "If you had been born in Saudi Arabia you would have been a Muslim," we need an account of the counterpart relation. 

My next point is that I have been influenced by a lot of other things besides my upbringing. My home church exposed me both to liberal Methodist theology and conservative evangelicalism. So it was not monolithic; it was a mixed bag. Lots of people grow up Christians and leave the fold, sometimes because of unbelief, and sometimes just they drift away without really thinking very hard about it. I was NEVER an unquestioning believer and I always took anything that seemed to me like brainwashing very ill. So the meaningful question is whether someone coming out of the Saudi Islamic community who questioned their religion as much as I did would come out as a Muslim. And the answer seems to me to be that a questioner like me would not be welcome in the Saudi community. I would be forced either to stop questioning or leave the fold. So there is no Saudi counterpart to me in any sense that is meaningful to the justification of my religious beliefs. My religious beliefs were, right from age 18, consistently exposed to criticisms from, I won't say all sides, but by many sides. It's anybody's guess how I would have evaluated the evidence had my ideas been formed in some other intellectually open environment. 

So I never said that I would still be a Christian philosopher like myself if I had grown up in the Saudi culture. You are reading me in a delusional way, I hate to say it, when you say that. 

You also missed my point about bad experiences. The point is that there are contingencies in all of our backgrounds, and if contingencies are sufficient to call beliefs into question, then your beliefs would be just as questionable as mine. But contingencies, in and of themselves, are not sufficient to call beliefs into question. 

So you, thinking your way from inside Christianity, assuming that it was true, concluded that it was all false. Fine, I am sure this was a serious intellectual effort. However, nothing guarantees that our intellectual journey will reach the right destination. It isn't humanly possible to consider all the relevant parameters. We call it as we see it, but nothing guarantees our infallibility, even if we end up crossing the aisle. Otherwise, Antony Flew's journey to theism or C. S. Lewis's journey from atheism to theism to Christianity would be proof that theism and Christianity are true. The idea that you MUST have reasoned correctly because you left the fold, and were motivated not to leave just doesn't hold water. 

But then you say, well, what we have to do is to go by the sciences. But whose sciences? The science of Francis Collins, or the science of P. Z. Myers? The science of John Polkinghorne, or the science of Victor Stenger? The science of Michael Behe, or the science of Richard Dawkins? Questions of religion are not strictly speaking scientific questions (unless one operates with an expanded notion of science, an idea that I am not unfriendly to, actually, but other people scream bloody murder when I suggest it), so you have to extrapolate from the sciences in order to get any kind of results. And then you have to ask questions as to why matter exists, or, further, why science exists. I have argued that if "scientific" naturalism is true, then it is not possibly true that humans literally add, subtract, multiply, divide, and take square roots of numbers. Hence if scientific naturalism is true, then science itself cannot exist. As I see it, the Christian world-view is the scientific world-view. Modern science was founded on the Christian watch, and presupposes a rational universe and rational minds to understand that universe that we would have no reason to believe in unless there is a God. 

The fact that you think that my recitation of something that is pretty much standard philosophy of science is some kind of tirade against science shows that you don't understand the very science that you claim to believe in so strongly. Richard Swinburne's philosophical theology is the most comprehensive attempt to bring scientific thinking to religious questions, but I know you don't like his conclusions. You see, when you say "follow science," what I fear is that a "heads I win, tails you lose" game is being set up. If I point to something in science that supports religion, you say "That's not science." If you point to something in science that refutes religion, then it is science. 

The Third Chapter of Miracles in online

This is the locus classicus of the argument from reason. It is Lewis's revised paper, in response to Anscombe.

The False Anscombe Legend Again

kbrowne: While I would agree that, as a result of his exchange with Anscombe, Lewis came to believe that his formulation of his argument was flawed, the claim that he believed the argument to be fully refuted is an urban legend, which I have dubbed the Anscombe legend. Anscombe herself attributed reports of Lewis's dejection over the exchange to the psychological phenomenon of "projection." Lewis in fact produced a short response to Anscombe's argument that appeared in the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe's own essay had appeared. In 1960, the Fontana edition of Miracles appeared, in which Lewis produced a revised and expanded version of the third chapter of Miracles, which he wrote in response to Anscombe, and which expanded on the ideas in his short response that appeared in the Socratic Digest. Anscombe thought that this effort was considerably improved, but pointed out a couple of areas where the argument needed further development if it were to succeed.

My own efforts, starting with my 1989 doctoral dissertation, through my book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and the Blackwell Companion article, has been to defend Lewis's overall argument. I think as an attempt to refute Lewis's overall argument, (as opposed to showing that it had been inadequately formulated) relies on some assumptions, popular amongst Wittgensteinians (that explaining the reasons for someone's belief can be done in a way that is completely separate and independent from the question of how that belief is produced and sustained), that most people, naturalists or otherwise, would not endorse, and which have unacceptable consequences.

It is of some interest to note John Beversluis, who is the leading critic of Lewis's apologetics, concludes that Lewis did not consider his argument refuted and did not give up apologetics after the exchange, as biographers such as Humphrey Carpenter and A. N. Wilson have claimed. He differs from me with respect to the merits of Lewis's argument, and does think it can be refuted on broadly Anscombian lines, but he has completely abandoned the Anscombe Legend with respect to the psychological impact of the exchange.

Koons on Lewis's argument against Naturalism

J. P. Moreland and A. C. Ewing on the Argument from Reason

If reasoning is to be possible, there has to be a metaphysically identical being that entertains the premise-thoughts and the conclusion-thought, and perceives the relation between the premises and the conclusion.

JPM: If human beings are to function are rational thinkers who can engage in rational deliberation, then not only must there be a unified self at each time in a deliberative sequence, but also an identical self that endures through the rational act. Consider A. C. Ewing’s argument:

To realize the truth of any proposition or even entertain it as something meaningful the same being must be aware of its different constituents. To be aware of the validity of an argument the same being must entertain premises and conclusion; to compare two things the same being must, at least in memory, be aware of them simultaneously; and since all these processes take some time the continuous existence of literally the same entity is required. In these cases an event which consisted in the contemplating of A followed by another event which consisted in the contemplating of B is not sufficient. They must be events of contemplating that occur in the same being. If one being thought of wolves, another of eating, and another of lambs, it certainly would not mean that anybody contemplated the proposition `wolves eat lambs’…There must surely be a single being persisting through the process to grasp a proposition or inference as a whole.”

If the conclusion of a syllogism is to be grasped as a conclusion, it must be drawn from the experiences of each premise singularly and, then, together. As Ewing notes, a successive series of I-stages cannot engage in such acts; only an enduring I can. Moreover, if the rational agent who embraces the conclusion is to be regarded as intellectually responsible for his reasoning, it must be the same self at the end of the process as the self who lived through the stages of reasoning that led to drawing the conclusion. One is not responsible for the acts of others or of other person-stages. So intellectual responsibility seems to presuppose an enduring I. But on the naturalist view, I am a collection of parts such that if I gain and lose parts, I am literally a different aggregate from one moment to the next. Thus, there is no such enduring I that could serve as the unifier of rational thought on a naturalist view.

The Argument from Reason: Its Scope and Limits (One More Time)

Again, I go back to Lewis on this. Lewis accepted the AFR against naturalism, and then accepted Absolute Idealism, which was extremely popular in his time. Then he found fault with Idealism and became a theist, and then finally a Christian. His argument against naturalism was a step on the way to theism, eliminating one of the major options. But he didn't take step into theism until later.




I am primarily concerned with what I would call the "great divide" between world-views for whom the mental is a basic cause, and world-views in which the mental is not a basic cause. If the AFR shows problems for the latter type of position, then I think the epistemic likelihood of theism becomes enhanced, as do all other "mentalistic" options.



I understand "naturalism" to encompass those world-views that are, at bottom, anti-mentalistic.



So we can distinguish two propositions:



A) The basic causes of the universe are mental in nature. They are inheretly perspectival, having a subject. They are inherently normative. Something being good or bad, or thought good or bad, has something to do with what goes on. They are intentional. What something is about makes a basic difference as to what happens in the world. They are also purposive. Purposes in human thought and action are not "skyhooks" that have to be analyzed out in favor of cranes. They are ground-level reasons why things happen.



b) What is fundamentally real is not inherently perspectival, is not inherently intentional, is not inherently normative, and is not inherently purposive. The appearance that these mental realities are operative in our world is a byproduct of biological evolution, and at the end of the day the skyhooks have to be replaced by cranes.



I have never said that you get theism automatically if the AFR is an effective argument for preferring A to B. When people point out non-theistic alternatives that are compatible with A, as if that were an answer to me, I have to say, with C. S. Lewis, "How many times does a man have to say something before he is safe from the accusation of having said exactly the opposite?"

A refutation of the AFR

This atheist website offers a refutation of the AFR, going not from actually reading my book, but from the Wikipedia commentary.