Specter of Reason

In my last post, in response to Timothy Williamson's hesitations regarding naturalism, I rambled a bit about possible difficulties in sorting out a naturalistic understanding of mathematical truth.  I was reflecting on the problem of universality:  Logical and mathematical truths are not truths about the actual world, but extend to all possible worlds.  That would seem to be very hard to explain, if logical and mathematical truths are limited by local factors--factors which ground them in facts about our world.  Today I have worked out a possible solution. The first step is to distinguish between two types of possibility:  logical possibility and physical possibility.  Another way of putting it is that possibility can be relative to a logical framework or a physical one.  When we say that something is physically possible, we mean it cannot be ruled out by the laws of physics (or, if you don't want to favor physics above other sciences, we can just sa...

In a 2011 Stone column, Timothy Williamson writes : "One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method. Although a few naturalists, such as W.V. Quine, argued that the real evidence in favor of mathematics comes from its applications in the natural sciences, so indirectly from observation and experiment, that view does not fit the way the subject actually develops. When mathematicians assess a proposed new axiom, they look at its consequences within mathematics, not outside. On the other hand, if we do not count pure mathematics a science, we thereby exclude mathematical proof by itself from the scientific method, and so discredit naturalism. For naturalism privileges the scienti...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I'm not aware of any satisfactory arguments against Kant's demonstration that the freedom of the will can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.  Kant puts forward that argument in his Critique of Pure Reason .  Yet, in his Critique of Practical Reason , he makes a pragmatic argument for belief in free will: We need to believe in free will because it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Kant's arguments are not just about free will.  They're also about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  Yet, these days, the latter two are not seen as practically required for morality.  We can have moral responsibility without eternal souls or Divine judgment.  But can we have it without free will? Kant was a deontologist--he believed that morality requires duty and dignity, and not just behavior calculated to maximize some quantity of happiness, pleasure or goodness.  Yet, even those pursu...

I'm very disappointed in Jon Stewart. He passed up a great opportunity to stand up for science and reason, and instead he promoted ignorance and confusion. It happened a few days ago, when he interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson , who was promoting her new non-fiction work, Absence of Mind . The discussion was about the public conversation on science and religion. Robinson claims that both religion and science have been poorly represented in the public domain. She says can help us understand both, and why both science and religion must work together to help us understand ourselves and the world. She doesn't spend any time criticizing religion or religious leaders, however, so it's not clear what problem she has there. She's a Calvinist , in fact, though she says she loves science. She tells Stewart that the "new cosmologies and so on are among the most beautiful things that people have conceived." (As I'll explain, I have ...

My view is that there are no theoretical limits on what science can discover. To put it another way, there are no inherently undiscoverable facts. This is naturalism as I understand it. I think this is an a priori truth. It doesn't make sense to say that there are things that exist but which science cannot study. I know it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say; but when analyzed, it doesn't stands to reason. What it would mean is that there are facts which cannot be described by any process of describing facts. It would mean there were inherently indescribable facts. But facts are describable by definition. So it's a contradiction in terms. You can believe in the indescribable--you can believe in the supernatural--but not rationally. That's why people call it "faith." Wittgenstein wrote, "A nothing would do just as well as a something about which nothing could be said." The relevance is thus: When discussing what is possible...

I've gotten involved in an interesting discussion of naturalism at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club . The discussion was instigated by the work of Richard Carrier, who is neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but a historian who writes about both. Unfortunately, I think he should probably stick to history. His attempt to define "naturalism" and "supernaturalism" is marked by fallacy and inconsistency. (Update: I point out several problems with his arguments in a comment attached to this post.) Carrier's definitions are as follows: "naturalism is true if everything that exists is causally reducible to the nonmental. . . . If naturalism is true, everything mental is caused by the nonmental, whereas if supernaturalism is true, at least one thing is not." Yet, naturalism and supernaturalism are not exclusively theses about minds or mental entities. For example, Carrier excludes the possibility of David Chalmers' variety of naturalis...

Over the past several months or so, I've approached discussions of science by focusing on the concept of discovery. Science is the formalization of discovery. There are as many scientific methods as there are formal methods for discovering phenomena. Accidental discoveries can be utilized by science, in so far as they can lead to formal methods of discovery. It occurs to me that this view of science, while essentially valid, might be easier to communicate if I adopt another term: demonstration. Science deals in what is demonstrable. A method of discovery is a set of rules or procedures for demonstrating facts. A scientific method is defined by its rules and procedures for demonstrating facts about the world. We might ask, what is being discovered here? Is it the rules, or is it the facts? The answer is: both. A scientific discovery is defined in terms of the facts discovered as well as the rules/procedures for demonstrating those facts. It is the relationship between rul...

The following is a slightly improved version of a post I recently contributed to the PhilPapers discussion forum . It is a response to Alvin Plantinga's "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism ." I do not know how much serious discussion among professional philosophers has been devoted to Plantinga's argument, though I know it is widely heralded by many non-professionals who do not like evolutionary theory. Plantinga wants to use evolutionary theory to attack naturalism, but his argument fails on epistemological grounds. His error is two-fold. First, he fails to state his general epistemological position, and so leaves us wondering what he means by "truth." Second, and more detrimental to his argument, he fails to consider the possibility of epistemological behaviorism, which I take to be the most robust and compelling approach to epistemology (following the work of Peirce, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, and Rorty, to name but a few). Consider ...

I recently read a paper by Robert A. Delfino, “ Replacing Methodological Naturalism ,” and t he only logical conclusion I've come to is that the author (an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University) is a junk philosopher. It is telling that Delfino’s paper was not published in an academic philosophy journal, but rather in “The Global Spiral,” a publication of the Metanexus Institute, which calls itself “a global interdisciplinary group.” What that apparently means is that they analyze a variety of disciplines from religious perspectives, and promote the injection of religious views into all disciplines as much as possible. I am not sure if they are in any way associated with the infamous Discovery Institute, but they are funded by the Templeton Foundation. Based on what I've seen, their standards of intellectual integrity are highly questionable. My goal here is not to criticize the Metanexus Institute, however, but to criticize Robert A. Delfino an...