Month: September 2012

Thomas Nagel Reviews Alvin Plantinga

Plantinga's latest is entitled, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Here is Nagel's review.  Like everything Nagel publishes, it is well worth careful reading.  The review ends as follows:

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly—in response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand is a valuable contribution to this debate.

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

I didn't finish my series of detailed posts on Plantinga's Where the Conflict Lies, but here are  the ones I posted:

Notes on the Preface

Notes on Chapter One

Plantinga Versus Dawkins: Organized Complexity

Can God Break a Law of Nature?

Obama the Feckless

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Having demonstrated his domestic incompetence, Obama is now showing us his fecklessness in matters foreign.  Is it 1979 all over again?  As a certain American philosopher of Spanish extraction is supposed to have said . . . .

One can hope that Romney will play Reagan to Obama's Carter.  For the good of all of us, those who understand these matters, and the liberal fools who don't.

 

More on the Kraussian ‘Bait and Switch’

I wrote:

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy.  Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.'  Krauss  is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense.  That is the same type of trick  he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing.  He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something.  So instead of answering the question he baited us with — the old Leibniz question — he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question.  He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term.  Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in.  Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria.  World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants.  Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

Joel Hunter responds:

. . . this causes me to wonder, in a charitable vein, whether Krauss is not, after all, performing an intentional bait-and-switch in his theorizing about "nothing," morality, and the will. Rather, because of his unassailable prior commitment to naturalize all phenomena, perhaps he's engaged in simply translating away genuine philosophical problems in much the same way that an emotivist translates away the propositional content of general moral principles. There's a logic to the naturalizing procedure whereby concepts of the nonphysical must be translated as something physical. That's the only way "nothing" is intelligible given his ground convictions. Of course, this doesn't excuse his equivocation on such matters. But if he had proposed something like the following, perhaps the bait-and-switch charge wouldn't stick: "The Leibniz question is a real puzzler. But in its classic form it is unanswerable because it is unintelligible using the explanatory tools we have at our disposal. The good news is that we can make it intelligible by translating physically nebulous terms into terms with definite physical meaning." As we both know, he is unlikely to speak this way because it is too intellectually humble, an indulgence of virtue he cannot afford since the more important aim of the translation project is to ghettoize the religious.

If I understand Professor Hunter, he is, with admirable exegetical charity, raising the question whether Krauss,  rather than engaging in an intellectually dishonest 'bait and switch' ploy, is instead proposing that intractable philosophical questions such as the one Leibniz famously  raised be replaced  by tractable scientific ones.  Accordingly, Krauss is not trying to the answer the questions of philosophy using empirical science, but is instead aiming to replace the philosophical questions with different ones, questions that are amenable to scientific solutions.  Clearly, the following strategies are different:

1. Answer the traditional questions of philosophy using scientific methods.

2. Replace the traditional questions with scientifically tractable ones since the former have proven intractable.

On (1), the traditional questions can be answered, but not by the 'arm chair' methods of philosophy, but empirically.  Science comes to occupy the domain of philosophy.  On (2), the traditional questions cannot be answered and so must be replaced by questions that can be scientifically  answered.   Science does not come to occupy the domain of philosophy; it establishes its own domain.  (Here is an example that would require a separate post to exfoliate.  When psychology first broke away from philosophy, it ceased to concern itself with the topics philosophers of mind treated: it changed the subject to observable behavior.  It is not just that psychology  abandoned the method of introspection; it also abandoned the subject matter that introspection was thought to reveal.)

Consider the Kraussian metaphor of "growing up and leaving home." When a young person does this he does so without prejudice to his diachronic identity: it is not as if the person-at-home perishes to be replaced by a numerically different person-away-from-home.  One and the same person is first at home and then away.  So the metaphor suggests that Krauss' strategy is (1).  That  is also the impression one gets from his awful book on something and nothing.  But there is also evidence that his strategy is (2).

I suggest that the man is just not clear as to what he is up to.  Hence the impression of 'bait and switch.'  He baits us with a traditional questions as if he is out to solve it scientifically; but then  he switches to a different question, replacing the philosophical question with a different one.

For example, instead of answering (or rejecting as senseless) the Leibniz question as to why  anything at all exists, he substitutes an entirely different question about how the physical universe has evolved from an initial material state (which is obviously not nothing).   Not that there is anything wrong with the second question; it is just not the question he baited us with.  Krauss' how-question and its answer are simply irrelevant to the why-question.  And yet our man thinks that somehow they are relevant.  Hence I say he is, if not intellectually dishonest, then badly confused. 

Is College a Lousy Investment?

This piece by Megan McArdle is required reading.

The role of government in causing the college bubble cannot be gainsaid.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.  For the painful details, see Paul Campos' law school scam blog.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of
fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the
corruption of the rating agencies. 

The Constructive Curmudgeon

I don't know whether he is an antediluvian and a bibliomaniac, but Douglas Groothuis is a self-professed curmudgeon, albeit of a constructive stripe. I am not persuaded by his case for Biblical inerrancy, but I find his political observations astute, as in this list of reasons not to vote for Obama.  Read the list!

By the way, my opening sentence illustrates the principle that the antecedent of a pronoun need not come before  (in the order of reading) the pronoun of which it is the antecedent despite the following bit of schoolmarmishness from Grammar Girl:

Our second antecedent problem is what’s called “anticipatory reference,” which Bryan Garner calls “the vice of referring to something that is yet to be mentioned (5)," meaning that the writer puts the pronoun before the antecedent—a no no.

I say to hell with that.  I opened with a beautiful classy sentence.  Grammar Girl needs a good spanking not only for endorsing this stupid rule of the dumbed-down and inattentive but also for her use of 'no no' baby talk.

I should rant more fully on pronouns, their antecedents, with an application to Obama's "You didn't build that."

I do have a fine rant here on baby talk and first-grade English.

Observations on the Joys of Teaching

Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry.

Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who are neither hungry nor know what food is.

Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.

Philosophy, like a virgin, is wasted on the young.

The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.

According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.

"I would rather eat dry bread than teach." Franz Schubert, quoted in Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 233.

"I would rather sweep the streets than teach children!" Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 24.  Hone is quoting Sayers. 

The quotations borrowed from Dr. Gilleland, antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.

When Philosophical Questions Grow Up Do They Leave Home? Some Bad Arguments of Lawrence Krauss Exposed

A tip of the hat to Professor Joel Hunter for referring me to a recent discussion between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss. We have come to expect shoddy scientistic reasoning from Professor Krauss (see here) and our expectation is duly fulfilled on this occasion as on the others.

The issue under debate is whether there are any answerable questions in which philosophy has proprietary rights.  Are there any questions that are specifically philosophical and thus beyond the purview of the sciences?  Or are all answerable questions scientific questions?  For Krauss, ". . . all the answerable ones  end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science."  When philosophical questions "grow up, they leave home."

Moral (ethical) questions have traditionally belonged to philosophy.  If Krauss and his scientistic brethren are right, however, these questions, if answerable, will be answered empirically: "science provides the basis for moral decisions . . . ."  Baggini makes the expected response:

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions.

Baggini's is a stock response but none the worse for that.  Krauss' rejoinder is entirely lame:

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong".

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy.  Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.'  Krauss  is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense.  That is the same type of trick  he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing.  He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something.  So instead of answering the question he baited us with — the old Leibniz question — he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question.  He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term.  Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in.  Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria.  World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants.  Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

There is also this Kraussian gem:

. . . that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

Three non sequiturs in two sentences. That's quite a trick!

A. Yes, moral convictions vary from society to society, and yes, they are learned.  But Krauss confuses moral convictions as facts (which belong to psychology and sociology) with the content of moral convictions.  For example, I am convinced that rape is morally wrong.  My being so convinced is a psychological fact about me.  It is an empirical fact and can be studied like any empirical fact.  We can ask how I cam to hold the conviction.  But my being convinced is distinct from the content of the conviction which  is expressible in the sentence 'Rape is morally wrong.'  That sentence says nothing about me or about any agent or about the psychological state of any agent.   Confusing convictions and their contents, Krauss wrongly infers that moral questions are in the province of psychology as an empirical science when all he is entitled to conclude is that things like the incidence, distribution, and causes  of moral beliefs belong in the province of psychology, sociology and related disciplines.

B.  With respect to universal moral beliefs, Krauss falls into the same confusion.  He confuses the moral belief or conviction qua psychological fact about an agent with its content.  Even if my being convinced that X is morally wrong falls within neurobiology, because the being convinced is a state of brain, the content doesn't.  A further problem with what he is saying is that moral beliefs cannot be identical to neural states.  It is obvious that my moral convictions, as facts, belong to psychology; but it is the exact opposite of obvious that some of my moral convictions  — the universal ones — belong to neurobiology.  No doubt they have neurobiological correlates, but correlation is not identity.

C.   Krauss thinks that the belief in free will is "illusionary."  This is a nonsensical view shared by other scientistic types such as Jerry Coyne.  ( See here.) It is also difficult to square with Krauss' own apparent belief in free will: "We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony."  So, holding social harmony to be a value we freely restrain ourselves and override out biological tendencies when we get the urge to commit rape.  The man cannot see that his theory is inconsistent with the course of action he is recommending.

There is a bit more to the Krauss-Baggini discussion, but the quality is so low that I won't waste any more time on it. 

Too Many Lawyers in Government, Not Enough Doctors

Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government — and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

Lawyers are especially overrepresented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."