Specter of Reason

Newcomb's Paradox is a well-known problem, and I won't try to go through all the angles, interpretations and arguments.  The basic problem is this (taken from Wolfram ): Given two boxes, B1 which contains $1000 and B2 which contains either nothing or a million dollars, you may pick either B2 or both. However, at some time before the choice is made, an omniscient Being has predicted what your decision will be and filled B2 with a million dollars if he expects you to take it, or with nothing if he expects you to take both. It's common to suppose that the Predictor is not necessarily omniscient.  It can just be an extremely reliable supercomputer, say.   Grey's Labyrinth  gives a nice introduction to the problem and a very clever go at a solution , too.  The claim is that it is most rational to choose just one box.  I agree.  Here's why. First off, I don't think the paradox should be taken as an argument against free will, or against the com...

I ended my last post by saying that I hope Dennett declines Sam Harris' invitation to publicly discuss free will with him.  That might not seem very fair or friendly.  Why shouldn't I want to see Dennett and Harris discuss free will publicly? The reason is this:  Harris has not shown that he can treat well-tread philosophical subject matter fairly and authoritatively.  He has only begun a career in neuroscience, and has yet to distinguish himself as anything other than a popular writer and speaker on matters related to atheism.  His abilities to write and speak are certainly praiseworthy, but they do not earn him the stature of a great intellect.  Furthermore, his reasoning on philosophical topics is highly suspect, often problematic, occasionally incoherent, and overtly Buddhist (in an irrational and self-contradictory way, which is perhaps the norm for Buddhism in general, but shouldn't make Harris very comfortable).  Harris is not an authority on ...

I want to quickly point out some major problems I have with Sam Harris' recent comment on his disagreement with Dennett on the issue of free will. His main idea is that, while he and Dennett agree on everything about how people actually function, and while they agree on what sorts of free will are worth having, they disagree on what ordinary people mean by the phrase "free will."  He thinks Dennett is just redefining the term and thus changing the subject, rather than engaging with how people actually think about free will.  He suggests this strategy is dangerous, because people are living under an illusion which needs to be dispelled. Maybe he makes a stronger case for this in his book, but in the post there's a severe lack of support for this claim.  Dennett's arguments seem very well in tune with how people talk about free will, and Dennett seems more eager than most to identify how cognitive illusions influence our understanding of consciousness and relat...

In addition to Jason Stanley's Know How, there's another, even more recent book on the same topic:   Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind and Action . It's a collection of 15 new papers presumably commissioned by the editors of the volume, which are John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett. I've only just begun to peruse the bits that are available online.  I don't expect to get to the whole book any time soon.  But it looks like at least some of the contributors are defending Ryle, and in ways not unlike my own.  Still, there are some confused interpretations of Ryle, as well. For example, on page 65, Paul Snowdon admits, in his criticism of Ryle's "Knowing How and Knowing That" (1946), that Ryle "is very hard to follow."  Snowdon claims that the confusion is Ryle's, and not his own.  He thinks Ryle is confused in his presentation of knowing-that, as if Ryle conflated the state or condition of knowing-that with the act or process of contem...

Kent Bach has published  a review of Jason Stanley's  Know How .   It's a generally positive review, though with a strongly critical bent.  Bach is not sold on Stanley's variety of intellectualism, but he does not want to object prematurely.  He finds a lot worth taking seriously, but he also finds a lot of problems that need to be resolved. In pointing out one of these 'loose ends', as he charitably calls them, Bach suggests a small amount of sympathy for Ryle.  The concern relates to Stanley's claim that, while learning how to do something entails learning a fact, learning how to do something better does not entail learning a new fact.  Bach's fear is that Stanley might be inviting "a Ryle-style regress problem." Though I haven't read this part of Stanley's book yet (still don't have a copy), Bach's concern is plausibly justified, though not clearly expressed.  We might raise a general question against Stanley:  If knowing how...

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(...