I'm pretty sure Scott's were demonstrably false, and Barrett did a good job of demonstrating them false. Except, of course, to the extent that Scott's were just vague anti-Obama paranoia, in which case, they're not demonstrably false, or true, or falsifiable/verifiable. They're just the result of a vague sense that Obama is anti-American.
It's clear that Obama, and the U.S. government generally, have gone after Assange in ways that, should the charges prove to be suprious (and they appear to be), no conservative or liberal should support, but for Scott, and it appears for you as well, this is only unacceptable because it's not enough.
And she's got a history of anti-Wikileaks posts, including being furious, furious I tell you, that Wikileaks had endangered the lives of informants, because the U.S. government said that it did. Then, when it came to light that Wikileaks probably hadn't endangered the lives of any informants, Charli's response to facts rather than conjecture was to criticize Wikileaks for not taking precautions to prevent endangering informants in case informants had, counterfactually, been endangered. To put it mildly, she's not a big whistleblower fan, which is strange coming from someone who's scholarly work is (largely) on human rights.
I'd be lying if I said I had any idea what that had to do with virtue ethics. Richardson’s work, as well as the others who’ve been studying monks over the last decade or so, has shown that monks are, after years of meditation training, able to do some interesting things with visual imagery and positive emotions, but I’ll be damned if I can put that work together and come up with neuroscientific support, or even a neuroscientific basis, for virtue ethics.
I wonder what you see in modern brain science that will lead to a renaissance in virtue ethics. Are you thinking of Casebeer or some other naturalized ethics?
You really should read Either/Or first, as Fear and Trembling is about what comes after Either/Or, and makes the most sense in that context. Sickness Unto Death is very good, but it doesn't have the same scope. The Concept of Anxiety is right out, though a must read down the line.
If you're dead set against starting with E/O, then I will break from the consensus a bit and recommend Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. It's short, it can stand alone, ad it's a good intro to K.'s style of writing (which can be sublime) and thinking.
@Pat Cahalan, that agnosticism canard is almost as common as "atheists don't exist." The idea is that you can't prove or disprove God's existence, either logically or empirically, so agnosticism is the only valid position. Even if the impossibility of proof and disproof were true, it's not clear why absolute proof is necessary for belief or disbelief. If it is, then just about all knowledge outside of math is in trouble.
Just to be clear, that wasn't meant as an attack on anyone's intelligence. It's just that atheists vs. evangelicals always seems to bring out the stupid in otherwise smart people. Witness P.Z. Myers.
I didn't bring up Kant to endorse his resolutions to the antimonies or his counters to the ontological and cosmological arguments, but to point out that, when Kant picked the four most persistent and unsolvable problems in philosophy, one of them, perhaps the main one, was the very problem that Joe not only treats as solved once and for all, but as so clearly solved that it renders atheism impossible without the need for any argument. It's symptomatic of this sort of debate, in which everyone is so convinced of their position that the other side's arguments can't have even the slightest merit, and their own is self-evident and incapable of even the smallest flaws. It's inevitably a train wreck.
By the way, has anyone ever proposed a Bob Cheeks drinking game?
Jason, the passage from Aquinas that you reference is neither an ontological nor a cosmological argument, nor is it an argument to a (or from a) first cause. It's something altogether different: an argument that we can know God from his effects. It's only the beginning of a different argument.
@Joe Carter, Jason, that's not his cosmological argument. That is, it's not his argument to a first cause. That's him saying that we can know God from his effects, which is something quite different. The point he's making is simply that if effects follow from causes, and we can know causes from their effects, then we can know God from his effects.
@Joe Carter, Jason, if you admit that the existence of the world is not necessary, then no induction is needed. But just for the sake of argument, can you present an example (from the history of philosophy) of someone arguing that because observable things have causes, then there must be a first cause, or some approximation of such? It's not present in Aquinas' third way, or in Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason. So I'm wondering where you find the induction.
@Joe Carter, Even if we agree that it is not based on materialism (and most, if not all contemporary compatibilism is based on physicalism at least), then the fact that there are coherent philosophical versions of compatibilism by physicalists/materialists is still undeniable. You may disagree, and may even have arguments against them (and there are several versions, so you'll need several arguments), but it's not a given that materialism or physicalism are incompatible with free will. This is a conclusion, not an argument.
@Joe Carter, Joe, compatibilism is the position that materialism (or physicalism) and freedom are not incompatible. If it's a coherent position, then compatibilism is compatible with materialism by definition. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's not obviously false. Compatibilism.
While I'm not sure that most people are proper materialists (as opposed to physicalists), even proper materialism doesn't necessarily preclude free will. Compatibilism is not an incoherent philosphical position.
Jason, in referring to "first-cause" arguments, I assume you mean Aristotle and the Christian cosmological arguments, in which case, it is not the case that they are in the least bit inductive (that is, your 1. above is false). They are quite explicitly deductive: they move from the concept of contingency, namely that the existence of things is not necessary (there could be nothing, or things could not exist), which is not inductive, to the position that there must be a necessary, or non-contingent (or in Joe's terminology, non-dependent) existence. It is an assumption, though an analytical, not an inductive one, that the world's existence is contingent, and as I mentioned in another comment, this has been a point of dispute in philosophy for more than two thousand years, but neither position is incoherent or inductive.
Your point number 2 is also a conceptual issue, and has nothing to do with induction. Anselm, for example, or at least those who've interpreted Anselm for the last 900 or so years, argue in such a way that there can be only one non-contingent (or necessary, or non-dependent, or redundantly, unconditionally non-dependent) being, because a necessary being has to be perfect, or at least more perfect than any other being that can be conceived. Again, this is a conceptual, a priori, analytic position, not an inductive one. That premise is pretty hard to dispute, too. That is, there's nothing wrong with it conceptually. Where the disputes arise is generally on the issue of whether such a necessary being is possible, and there are all sorts of ways of approaching that from both sides. However, those are all conceptual approaches, which is to say, this is not an inductive issue either.
Your point 3 is of course a matter of theology, and since the Christian God is, obviously, uncaused, it seems like a strange point of argument. Whether such a God exists is a point of contention, but the Christian God, conceptually, is uncaused.
@Pat Cahalan, Pat, you never made the error. A lot of classical logicians reject the premise of the atheist outright because they’ve been trained all their life to look at arguments in the form of P implies Q, and the immediate objection is: lack of evidence does not prove non existence.
But the not-P argument is still logically valid if one accepts the premise that the default assumptions are all negative, rather than positive.
None of this really follows. ~P ⊃ ~ Q works the same way, logically, as P ⊃ Q. That is, ~P ⊃ ~Q also implies that Q ⊃ ~~P (modus tollens, but doesn't imply ~Q ⊃ P (affirming the consequent), and so on. Logicians know this, of course, and to show that any positive statement can be turned into a negative, and vice versa, is a trivial procedure. That’s why the old canard that you can’t prove a negative is obviously false, for example. You’re not really arguing against the logicians here, present or past, as you’d be hard pressed to find one who makes the argument you attribute to them.
Evidence is really a separate matter. No evidence for a proposition does not alone imply (logically or empirically or whatever) that a proposition is false. It just means that there’s no evidence for the proposition. What’s more, evidence for a proposition does not logically imply that it is true.
It’s interesting that Joe brings out the “no true atheists” trope in his first post, claiming that atheism is ultimately “incoherent” (at least as much as it implies the lack of a “non-dependent reality”). Charity bids me to assume that, instead of simply dismissing his opponents’ beliefs out of hand, as it might appear to anyone who’s been around these sorts of discussions long enough, Joe has in fact solved one of the most difficult and persistent antimonies, as Kant called them (this was actually one of his antimonies of pure reason), of western philosophy, namely whether the world (universe, reality, whatever) has its origin in something non-contingent (uncaused, etc.), or is in fact eternal and without a first cause. I look forward to his description of his solution. If he is simply denying the existence of his opponents’ position, well, I guess we all know how much is likely to come from this debate.
By the way, you know you’re in for a fruitless debate on religion when one of the debaters uses the phrase “unconditionally non-dependent” (which is sort of like saying “obesely fat”), the other doesn’t recognize the idea of “non-dependence,” which is pretty much central to Christian philosophy (it’s usually described as non-contingent these days, though, and it’s at the heart of both the ontological and one of the two major versions of the cosmological argument), and the comments begin with a debate about whether modus tollens is true (with one of the deniers of modus tollens, a lawyer no less, confusing it with “affirming the consequent”), though I guess this last bit is not surprising. Seriously, this is a mess.
@Robert Cheeks, Yeah, I get that there are scholars who argue these points (though the Ebionite theory is pretty out there, and it's the Jewish, not the gnostic Ebionites that are implicated, I believe), but it's far from "obvious," and you haven't said how any of that implies a "represents a violent, gnostic, derailment."
Also, when was the last time you read a book by someone other than Veogelin?
@Robert Cheeks, How is it obvious? And how does any of that follow? Claiming that things that are, to put it mildly, at the fringe historical scholarship are obvious is odd enough, but then drawing unrelated conclusions from them as though they were self-evident is even odder.
@Robert Cheeks, "Inherent in the structure of noetic existence is the idea that something exists in the non-existent reality." Hahaha... That was an awesome bit of meaningless/bungled quoting-without-attribution.
But if you fix it up to say what Voegelin was actually saying when he writes something like, "I have tried to show that the knowledge of the something that 'exists' beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence," then part of Taylor's point, I take it, is to argue that this was so, but with the advent of new ways of seeing the world, it is no longer the case, or at least, it isn't necessarily the case.
But man, I did love the attempt to look like you smart or sumthin'.
With essential projects, contractors become the agents in a principal-agent problem. They’re difficult to control; they know more than you do; and they have a personal profit motive.
This isn't really about this project in particular, but a couple years ago, at my state university, contractors were hired to do some rennovations in my department's (3-year old) building. They took up a whole wing of the 3rd floor, and it was rather intrusive (our weekly area colloquia were held in that wing), so one day while getting my mail (the mail room was also in that wing), I asked one of the construction supervisors how long they were going to be there. His answer was, "Until the money runs out."
Of course, now the university is in dire financial straights, laying people off left and right, and cutting programs. I can't imagine how that ever happened.
@Andy Smith, Massive modularity, which most Evolutionary Psychology assumes, is improbable, given what we know about the brain (Patricia Churchland says it’s impossible), but even if one believes that the brain is massively modular, one can reject Evolutionary Psychology for a whole host of reasons. Hell, Fodor himself rejects it, though his reasons are bizarre. The truth is, most of empirical psychology rejects Evolutionary Psychology, because it’s methodologically and theoretically inferior to most of empirical psychology. And I won’t even say what biologists think of Evolutionary Psychology, except to note that when referring to it, they tend not to use nice words.
And Pinker does good research. He just doesn’t do research in Evolutionary Psychology (or much of it), as he’s a psycholinguist by training.
On “Wikileaks release begins; Updated with raw info”
I'm pretty sure Scott's were demonstrably false, and Barrett did a good job of demonstrating them false. Except, of course, to the extent that Scott's were just vague anti-Obama paranoia, in which case, they're not demonstrably false, or true, or falsifiable/verifiable. They're just the result of a vague sense that Obama is anti-American.
It's clear that Obama, and the U.S. government generally, have gone after Assange in ways that, should the charges prove to be suprious (and they appear to be), no conservative or liberal should support, but for Scott, and it appears for you as well, this is only unacceptable because it's not enough.
"
Charli's not a guy.
And she's got a history of anti-Wikileaks posts, including being furious, furious I tell you, that Wikileaks had endangered the lives of informants, because the U.S. government said that it did. Then, when it came to light that Wikileaks probably hadn't endangered the lives of any informants, Charli's response to facts rather than conjecture was to criticize Wikileaks for not taking precautions to prevent endangering informants in case informants had, counterfactually, been endangered. To put it mildly, she's not a big whistleblower fan, which is strange coming from someone who's scholarly work is (largely) on human rights.
On “On Politics and Pigeonholes”
I'd be lying if I said I had any idea what that had to do with virtue ethics. Richardson’s work, as well as the others who’ve been studying monks over the last decade or so, has shown that monks are, after years of meditation training, able to do some interesting things with visual imagery and positive emotions, but I’ll be damned if I can put that work together and come up with neuroscientific support, or even a neuroscientific basis, for virtue ethics.
"
I wonder what you see in modern brain science that will lead to a renaissance in virtue ethics. Are you thinking of Casebeer or some other naturalized ethics?
On “The Moral Panic Continues”
I notice that Oklahoma and Utah, bastions of lefty liberalism, have banned the stuff.
On “Kierkegaard Bleg”
You really should read Either/Or first, as Fear and Trembling is about what comes after Either/Or, and makes the most sense in that context. Sickness Unto Death is very good, but it doesn't have the same scope. The Concept of Anxiety is right out, though a must read down the line.
If you're dead set against starting with E/O, then I will break from the consensus a bit and recommend Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. It's short, it can stand alone, ad it's a good intro to K.'s style of writing (which can be sublime) and thinking.
On “A Metaphysical Train Wreck is Music to Skeptical Ears”
@Pat Cahalan, that agnosticism canard is almost as common as "atheists don't exist." The idea is that you can't prove or disprove God's existence, either logically or empirically, so agnosticism is the only valid position. Even if the impossibility of proof and disproof were true, it's not clear why absolute proof is necessary for belief or disbelief. If it is, then just about all knowledge outside of math is in trouble.
"
Just to be clear, that wasn't meant as an attack on anyone's intelligence. It's just that atheists vs. evangelicals always seems to bring out the stupid in otherwise smart people. Witness P.Z. Myers.
I didn't bring up Kant to endorse his resolutions to the antimonies or his counters to the ontological and cosmological arguments, but to point out that, when Kant picked the four most persistent and unsolvable problems in philosophy, one of them, perhaps the main one, was the very problem that Joe not only treats as solved once and for all, but as so clearly solved that it renders atheism impossible without the need for any argument. It's symptomatic of this sort of debate, in which everyone is so convinced of their position that the other side's arguments can't have even the slightest merit, and their own is self-evident and incapable of even the smallest flaws. It's inevitably a train wreck.
By the way, has anyone ever proposed a Bob Cheeks drinking game?
On “Debate: Joe Carter’s Opening Argument (Updated with my reply)”
Jason, the passage from Aquinas that you reference is neither an ontological nor a cosmological argument, nor is it an argument to a (or from a) first cause. It's something altogether different: an argument that we can know God from his effects. It's only the beginning of a different argument.
"
@Joe Carter, Jason, that's not his cosmological argument. That is, it's not his argument to a first cause. That's him saying that we can know God from his effects, which is something quite different. The point he's making is simply that if effects follow from causes, and we can know causes from their effects, then we can know God from his effects.
"
@Joe Carter, Jason, if you admit that the existence of the world is not necessary, then no induction is needed. But just for the sake of argument, can you present an example (from the history of philosophy) of someone arguing that because observable things have causes, then there must be a first cause, or some approximation of such? It's not present in Aquinas' third way, or in Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason. So I'm wondering where you find the induction.
"
@Joe Carter, Even if we agree that it is not based on materialism (and most, if not all contemporary compatibilism is based on physicalism at least), then the fact that there are coherent philosophical versions of compatibilism by physicalists/materialists is still undeniable. You may disagree, and may even have arguments against them (and there are several versions, so you'll need several arguments), but it's not a given that materialism or physicalism are incompatible with free will. This is a conclusion, not an argument.
"
@Joe Carter, Joe, compatibilism is the position that materialism (or physicalism) and freedom are not incompatible. If it's a coherent position, then compatibilism is compatible with materialism by definition. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's not obviously false. Compatibilism.
"
While I'm not sure that most people are proper materialists (as opposed to physicalists), even proper materialism doesn't necessarily preclude free will. Compatibilism is not an incoherent philosphical position.
"
Jason, in referring to "first-cause" arguments, I assume you mean Aristotle and the Christian cosmological arguments, in which case, it is not the case that they are in the least bit inductive (that is, your 1. above is false). They are quite explicitly deductive: they move from the concept of contingency, namely that the existence of things is not necessary (there could be nothing, or things could not exist), which is not inductive, to the position that there must be a necessary, or non-contingent (or in Joe's terminology, non-dependent) existence. It is an assumption, though an analytical, not an inductive one, that the world's existence is contingent, and as I mentioned in another comment, this has been a point of dispute in philosophy for more than two thousand years, but neither position is incoherent or inductive.
Your point number 2 is also a conceptual issue, and has nothing to do with induction. Anselm, for example, or at least those who've interpreted Anselm for the last 900 or so years, argue in such a way that there can be only one non-contingent (or necessary, or non-dependent, or redundantly, unconditionally non-dependent) being, because a necessary being has to be perfect, or at least more perfect than any other being that can be conceived. Again, this is a conceptual, a priori, analytic position, not an inductive one. That premise is pretty hard to dispute, too. That is, there's nothing wrong with it conceptually. Where the disputes arise is generally on the issue of whether such a necessary being is possible, and there are all sorts of ways of approaching that from both sides. However, those are all conceptual approaches, which is to say, this is not an inductive issue either.
Your point 3 is of course a matter of theology, and since the Christian God is, obviously, uncaused, it seems like a strange point of argument. Whether such a God exists is a point of contention, but the Christian God, conceptually, is uncaused.
"
@Pat Cahalan, Pat, you never made the error.
A lot of classical logicians reject the premise of the atheist outright because they’ve been trained all their life to look at arguments in the form of P implies Q, and the immediate objection is: lack of evidence does not prove non existence.
But the not-P argument is still logically valid if one accepts the premise that the default assumptions are all negative, rather than positive.
None of this really follows. ~P ⊃ ~ Q works the same way, logically, as P ⊃ Q. That is, ~P ⊃ ~Q also implies that Q ⊃ ~~P (modus tollens, but doesn't imply ~Q ⊃ P (affirming the consequent), and so on. Logicians know this, of course, and to show that any positive statement can be turned into a negative, and vice versa, is a trivial procedure. That’s why the old canard that you can’t prove a negative is obviously false, for example. You’re not really arguing against the logicians here, present or past, as you’d be hard pressed to find one who makes the argument you attribute to them.
Evidence is really a separate matter. No evidence for a proposition does not alone imply (logically or empirically or whatever) that a proposition is false. It just means that there’s no evidence for the proposition. What’s more, evidence for a proposition does not logically imply that it is true.
"
@Transplanted Lawyer, Didn't mean to imply that you didn't acknowledge it. That doesn't change anything I said though.
"
It’s interesting that Joe brings out the “no true atheists” trope in his first post, claiming that atheism is ultimately “incoherent” (at least as much as it implies the lack of a “non-dependent reality”). Charity bids me to assume that, instead of simply dismissing his opponents’ beliefs out of hand, as it might appear to anyone who’s been around these sorts of discussions long enough, Joe has in fact solved one of the most difficult and persistent antimonies, as Kant called them (this was actually one of his antimonies of pure reason), of western philosophy, namely whether the world (universe, reality, whatever) has its origin in something non-contingent (uncaused, etc.), or is in fact eternal and without a first cause. I look forward to his description of his solution. If he is simply denying the existence of his opponents’ position, well, I guess we all know how much is likely to come from this debate.
By the way, you know you’re in for a fruitless debate on religion when one of the debaters uses the phrase “unconditionally non-dependent” (which is sort of like saying “obesely fat”), the other doesn’t recognize the idea of “non-dependence,” which is pretty much central to Christian philosophy (it’s usually described as non-contingent these days, though, and it’s at the heart of both the ontological and one of the two major versions of the cosmological argument), and the comments begin with a debate about whether modus tollens is true (with one of the deniers of modus tollens, a lawyer no less, confusing it with “affirming the consequent”), though I guess this last bit is not surprising. Seriously, this is a mess.
On “Obama does the Daily Show”
I figured Obama was making a Bush joke (remember his "heckuvajob" comment)? And The Daily Show audience would get that.
On “Anti-Muslim Bigotry & Double Standards”
@Robert Cheeks, Yeah, I get that there are scholars who argue these points (though the Ebionite theory is pretty out there, and it's the Jewish, not the gnostic Ebionites that are implicated, I believe), but it's far from "obvious," and you haven't said how any of that implies a "represents a violent, gnostic, derailment."
Also, when was the last time you read a book by someone other than Veogelin?
"
@Robert Cheeks, How is it obvious? And how does any of that follow? Claiming that things that are, to put it mildly, at the fringe historical scholarship are obvious is odd enough, but then drawing unrelated conclusions from them as though they were self-evident is even odder.
On “Charles Taylor Thursday #2: Against subtraction stories.”
@Robert Cheeks, "Inherent in the structure of noetic existence is the idea that something exists in the non-existent reality." Hahaha... That was an awesome bit of meaningless/bungled quoting-without-attribution.
But if you fix it up to say what Voegelin was actually saying when he writes something like, "I have tried to show that the knowledge of the something that 'exists' beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence," then part of Taylor's point, I take it, is to argue that this was so, but with the advent of new ways of seeing the world, it is no longer the case, or at least, it isn't necessarily the case.
But man, I did love the attempt to look like you smart or sumthin'.
On “Christie and Infrastructure Folly”
@Jason Kuznicki,
With essential projects, contractors become the agents in a principal-agent problem. They’re difficult to control; they know more than you do; and they have a personal profit motive.
This isn't really about this project in particular, but a couple years ago, at my state university, contractors were hired to do some rennovations in my department's (3-year old) building. They took up a whole wing of the 3rd floor, and it was rather intrusive (our weekly area colloquia were held in that wing), so one day while getting my mail (the mail room was also in that wing), I asked one of the construction supervisors how long they were going to be there. His answer was, "Until the money runs out."
Of course, now the university is in dire financial straights, laying people off left and right, and cutting programs. I can't imagine how that ever happened.
On “False dichotomies: Foragers vs. Farmers edition”
@Andy Smith, Massive modularity, which most Evolutionary Psychology assumes, is improbable, given what we know about the brain (Patricia Churchland says it’s impossible), but even if one believes that the brain is massively modular, one can reject Evolutionary Psychology for a whole host of reasons. Hell, Fodor himself rejects it, though his reasons are bizarre. The truth is, most of empirical psychology rejects Evolutionary Psychology, because it’s methodologically and theoretically inferior to most of empirical psychology. And I won’t even say what biologists think of Evolutionary Psychology, except to note that when referring to it, they tend not to use nice words.
And Pinker does good research. He just doesn’t do research in Evolutionary Psychology (or much of it), as he’s a psycholinguist by training.
"
@Chris, Sorry about the html issues there.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.