Specter of Reason

Alvin Plantinga (via email) kindly accepted my request for a response to my previous treatment of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).  What I didn't mention in my earlier post is that this is a revised form of EAAN.  So I'll refer to the new argument as "REAAN," so as to distinguish it from the original EAAN.  As far as I can tell, Plantinga stuck to EAAN for the past almost two decades, since he first presented it in  Warrant and Proper Function  (1993), and notably using it in his 2009 debate with Daniel C. Dennett.   I do not know when he first presented REAAN.  It might be quite new.   [Update:  Plantinga has informed me that he does not consider REAAN a revised version of EAAN, and that he embraces the premises and conclusions of both EAAN and REAAN.  The latter, he says, is a different but similar argument first proposed by Ric Otte some years ago, though well after EAAN was first proposed.  I'll c...

Alvin Plantinga's recently presented (via Maryann Spikes at Ichthus77) an explanation of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) . He's setting the record straight about what EAAN entails. I want to respond to Plantinga's presentation of EAAN (I'll ignore the details about the prior post to which Plantinga is responding.) I argue that EAAN is, at best, a straw man argument against an impoverished version of naturalism. At worst, it relies on a hidden premise which places an unacceptably high restriction on what is rationally acceptable. Here's Plantinga presenting the argument: The argument goes as follows. First, I’ll use ‘N’ to abbreviate ‘naturalism’, ‘R’ to abbreviate ‘our cognitive faculties are reliable with respect to metaphysical beliefs’ and ‘E’ to abbreviate ‘we and our faculties have come to be by way of the processes appealed to in contemporary evolutionary theory’). Then we can state the argument as follows:            P1 P(...

[See Update and Update II] Graham Oppy was kind enough to draw my attention to The Nature of Necessity   (1974), in which Plantinga puts forward his modal ontological argument (MOA). Plantinga considers an objection very much like my own  (pp. 218-219):  "consider the property of no-maximality, the property of being such that there is no maximally great being.  If this property is possible, then maximal greatness is not.  But, so claims the objector, [this property is] every bit as plausibly possible as maximal greatness." Thus, Plantinga imagines the following modal counter-argument to MOA: 1) No-maximality is possibly exemplified. 2) If no-maximality is possibly exemplified, then maximal greatness is impossible. Therefore, 3) Maximal greatness is impossible. Plantinga concludes that either MOA or this counter-argument is sound.  Clearly both cannot be.  I question whether either is sound, since I question the coherence of the notion of maxim...

Exapologist was kind enough to inform me that my objection to Plantinga's modal ontological argument (MOA) is similar to one made by Peter Van Inwagen.  I've just read Van Inwagen's argument, which can be found in the sixth chapter of his celebrated Metaphysics . I don't think his argument is strong enough, as I will explain. The MOA aims to show that belief in God is just as rational as believing that God is possible.  This would be an interesting result, since belief in God is widely regarded as less rational than belief in the mere possibility of God.  So if the MOA is valid, it would be very interesting.  What I have shown is that the argument is not valid.  It begs the question.  I show this by drawing attention to the premise that God's non-existence is possible.  That premise is just as plausible as the premise of the MOA, and yet it contradicts the conclusion of the MOA.  The defeat is therefore profound.  All the MOA really shows...

I was just checking out Ichthus77 , a philosophy blog that focuses on apologetics, because it is hosting the upcoming edition of the Philosopher's Carnival.  I noticed a recent entry on the modal ontological argument as developed by Alvin Plantinga and explained by William Lane Craig.  The modal ontological argument uses possible world semantics to recast the age-old ontological argument for the existence of God.  Here it is, as introduced by William Lane Craig (copied from Ichthus77): Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is "maximally excellent" in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to include such properties as omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls "maximal greatness." So Plantinga argues:            1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.            2. If ...

I'm not done reading and responding to Stanley's chapter on Ryle , but I've found another big mistake in his interpretation which deserves a post of its own.  Stanley says that Ryle claims the following:  If intelligent action is guided by rules or if it involves the application of criteria, then those rules or criteria must be intellectually acknowledged prior to the intelligent performance.  Stanley couldn't be more wrong.  [Stanley's error leads him to mischaracterize Ryle's knowing-how/knowing-that distinction. See update below.] Stanley rejects the position which he attributes to Ryle.  He says Ryle's view is unjustified, because Ryle has not demonstrated that the mere application of criteria requires an antecedent acknowledgment of that criteria.  Stanley says ( Know How , p. 13):  "Ryle therefore needs an argument that the view that 'intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria' entails that...

Gilbert Ryle begins the last section of The Concept of Mind (1949) with a prophecy:  "The general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'" (Ryle, 327).  He was certainly right about the stigma, but he may have grossly underestimated the threat it would pose.  Behaviorism is the pivot on which Ryle's legacy hinges. Jason Stanley, a prominent philosopher of language, and Julia Tanney, a leading Ryle scholar, disagree on how to characterize Ryle's relationship to behaviorism.   Tanney argues  that Ryle wasn't a behaviorist of any sort, not even a 'soft' behaviorist.  She says the "soft behaviorist" view is the standard (but mistaken) interpretation of Ryle, according to which "statements containing mental terms can be translated, without loss of meaning, into subjunctive conditionals about what the individual will do in various circumstances."  In chapter one of his recent book, Know H...

I have some more critical remarks to make about the first chapter of Jason Stanley's new book, Know How .  I've read a bit more of the chapter, thanks to amazon's "search inside this book" function, but it won't let me read the whole thing.  (Funds are tight and shipping to Poland ain't cheap, and neither is the kindle edition.) Reading Stanley on Ryle reminds me of the parable about blind men describing an elephant, but in this case, it's more like blind men describing various species of bird, but being told that they're all elephants.  I often feel like Stanley isn't talking about Ryle at all.  Even when he uses direct quotations, he sees birds instead of elephants. On page one, Stanley introduces Ryle's  The Concept of Mind (1949) as "the most systematic attempt to prove what philosophers and laypersons typically assume, that what guides us in action is a distinct cognitive capacity from what guides us in reflection." Tha...

A while back I got into a discussion of Plantinga's notion of properly basic beliefs with a philosopher who blogs under the suggestive pseudonym "exapologist."  I had thought the discussion had ended with one of my comments.  I was quite surprised this morning, almost two full years later, when I received a couple emails notifying me that exapologist had continued the discussion.  Since he doesn't show the dates of comments on his blog, I can't tell if the new comments are recent or several months old or what.  Could the notifications have taken almost two years to get to me?  Stranger things have surely happened in the online universe.  [Update: exapologist has informed me that his new comments were in fact made last night/this morning.]  In any case, I haven't done much research on the topic, and I never was any sort of authority on Plantinga, anyway, so my ability to contribute to the discussion is a bit limited.  With that disclaimer in hand,...

As I noted in my previous post on Jason Stanley's new book, Know How , Stanley makes the troubling claim that Gilbert Ryle appeals to verificationism. It's an odd claim if only because Ryle was a critic of verificationism (as Stanley observes in a footnote) and developed a very different theory of meaning. For Ryle, meaning is a matter of use. Therefore, if we are going to accuse Ryle of appealing to verificationism, we should make sure the evidence is very strong, or else charity would warn us against it. As it stands, the evidence looks exceedingly weak. Stanley's allegation is that Ryle supposes that mental-conduct terms would be meaningless if their correct application were not known in particular cases. That would look like a variety of verificationism, but it isn't what Ryle seems to be saying. Here is the passage from Ryle which Stanley quotes (the original can be found in chapter 1 of Ryle's The Concept of Mind ): "According to the [Car...