Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
One cannot live without being onesided, without choosing, preferring, favoring oneself and one's own, without staking out and defending one's bit of ground. One cannot live without being onesided, but one cannot be much of a philosopher if one is. The philosopher's optics are a synoptics, but life's optics are perspectival.
And so philosophy is enlivened at the approach of decline, death, and doom. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.
We are enticed by what is hidden, out of reach, around the corner, over the horizon. It is the lost mine lost, not the lost mine found, that inspires and focuses our energies. Our metaphysics is visionary and revisionary, not descriptive. We study the world to see what is beyond the world. We study the Cave to find an exit, not to inventory the paltry stuff found within it, or even the categories of paltry stuff found within it. Our speleology is transcendental, not empirical: we would know what makes the Cave possible and actual, and what is its point and purpose.
And if there is no exit? And no ultimate condition of possibility? Then we want to know that and why the Cave exhausts the cartography of being.
Flannery O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" in Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 40-42:
All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality. Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances. If the novelist is in tune with this spirit, if he believes that actions are predetermined by psychic make-up or the economic situation or some other determinable factor, then he will be concerned above all with an accurate reproduction of the things that most immediately concern man, with the natural forces that he feels control his destiny. Such a writer may produce a great tragic naturalism, for by his responsibility to the things he sees, he may transcend the limitations of his narrow vision.
On the other hand, if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward towards the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than in probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves — whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not. To the modern mind, this kind of character, and his creator, are typical Don Quixotes, tilting at what is not there.
I was struck by this passage because in philosophy too there is a similar distinction. There are those philosophical speleologists who are content to describe and explain the furnishings of Plato's Cave seemingly oblivious to its being a cave, and there are those who are always pushing their own limits outward towards the limits of mystery. For the latter, philosophy's technical minutiae are meaningless unless in the service of a transcending vision.
Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is dead while Meinongianism thrives. But Ryle too will be raised if my converse-Gilsonian law of philosophical experience holds.
Etienne Gilson said, famously, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." I say, rather less famously, "Philosophy always resurrects its dead."
Philosophy is primarily an activity, not a body of doctrine. If you were to think of it as a body of doctrine, then you would have to say there is no philosophy, but only philosophies. For there is no one universally recognized body of doctrine called philosophy. The truth of course is one not many. And that is what the philosopher aims at: the one ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, including the ultimate truth about how we ought to live. But aiming at a target and hitting it are two different things. The target is one, but our many arrows have fallen short and in different places. And if you think that your favorite philosopher has hit the target of truth, why can't you convince the rest of us of that?
Disagreement does not of course prove the nonexistence of truth, but it does cast reasonable doubt on all claims to its possession. Philosophy aspires to sound, indeed incontrovertible, doctrine. But the quest for it has proven tough indeed. For all we know it may lie beyond our powers. Not that this gives us reason to abandon the quest. But it does give us reason to be modest and undogmatic.
Philosophy, then, is primarily an activity, a search, a quest. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant remarks that "Philosophy cannot be taught, we can at most learn to philosophize." I agree. It cannot be taught because it does not exist as teachable doctrine. Philosophy is not something we profess, except perhaps secondarily; it is something we do. The best professors of philosophy are doers of philosophy. A professor, obviously, need not be a paid professor, an academic functionary.
How then should we do philosophy? Conversation face-to-face with the like-minded, intelligent, and sincere is useful but ephemeral and hard to arrange. Jetting off to conferences can be fun especially if the venue is exotic and the tab is picked up your department. But reading and listening to papers at conferences is pretty much a waste of time when it comes to actually doing productive philosophy. Can you follow a technical paper simply by listening to it? If you can you're smarter than me.
So we ought to consider the idea that philosophy in its purest form, its most productive form, is 'blogosophy,' philosophy pursued by weblog. And there is this in favor of it: blogging takes pressure off the journals. Working out my half-baked ideas here, I am less likely to submit material that is not yet ready for embalming in printer's ink.
Pedant and quibbler that I am, it annoys me when I hear professional philosophers use the phrase 'Leibniz's Law.' My reason is that it is used by said philosophers in three mutually incompatible ways. That makes it a junk phrase, a wastebasket expression, one to be avoided. Some use it as Dale Tuggy does, here, to refer to the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. (Roughly, if a = b, then whatever is true of a is true of b, and vice versa.) Fred Sommers, referencing Benson Mates, also uses it in this way. (See The Logic of Natural Language, p. 127)
Others, such as the distinguished Australian philosopher Peter Forrest, use it to refer to the Identity of Indiscernibles, a principle rather less luminous to the intellect and, in my humble opinion, false. (Roughly, if whatever is true of a is true of b and vice versa, then a = b.) And there are those who use it as to refer to the conjunction of the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Identity of Indiscernibles.
So 'Leibniz's Law' has no standardly accepted usage and is insofar forth useless. And unnecessary. You mean 'Indiscernibility of Identicals'? Then say that. If you mean its converse, say that. Ditto for their conjunction.
There is also the problem of using a great philosopher's name to label a principle that the philosopher may not even have held. Analytic philosophers are notorious for being lousy historians. Not all of them, of course, but the run-of-the-mill. If Sommers is right, Leibniz was a traditional logician who did not think of identity as a relation as Frege and Russell do. (p. 127) Accordingly, 'a = b' as this formula is understood in modern predicate logic does not occur in Leibniz.
In an interview a while back Christopher Hitchens said, "We are all dying." The saying is not uncommon. A friend over Sunday breakfast invoked it. The irony of it is that the friend in question in younger days was decisively influenced by the Ordinary Language philosophers.
Taken literally, the sentence is false: only some of us are dying. What must the sentence be taken to mean to be true? This: the life process in each human being issues eventually in death. But then why don't people say what they mean rather than something literally false?
The short answer is that man is a metaphysical animal with an ineradicable urge to gain perspective so as to be able to reconnoitre the terrain of the human predicament. The gaining of perspective requires the stretching of ordinary language.
When we say 'We are all dying' we forsake the lowlands of ordinary language and ascend to a higher point of view, a philosophical point of view. It is like someone who says, 'All is impermanent.' That too is literally false. Some addresses are permanent and some are temporary. To maintain that all is impermanent one must ascend to a higher point of view relative to which what is permanent 'here below' is, from that point of view, impermanent. And so one can say, without talking nonsense, that even a permanent address is impermanent.
As for 'We are all dying,' it too, though literally false, is not nonsense. When I look at my life as a whole, I see that it is temporally bounded, and that it must issue in death. And so even the most robust among us are dying in the sense that we are launched on a trajectory the culmination of which is death.
I once played chess master Jude Acers a series of games at his sidewalk hangout in New Orlean's French Quarter. During one endame he pointed to one of his pawns and said, 'This pawn has already queened.' But it hadn't; it was still several moves away from the queening square. So why did Acers say something literally false? His meaning was that I could not stop the pawn, and so, in that sense, it had already queened. It's the same pattern as before. I am not dying, but since I will inevitably die, I am now dying. The pawn has not yet queened, but since it will inevitably queen, it has 'already' queened. What is not yet the case, but will be the case, is in a higher sense, the case.
Or consider this Platonizing remark a variant of which one can find in St. Augustine: 'What once existed, but does not now exist, and what does exist but will in future not exist, never existed.' Taken literally as a piece of ordinary English, this is nonsense. If something did exist, then ex vi terminorum it is false that it never existed; and likewise if the thing now exists.
But only a philosophistine (a 'philosopher' who is a philistine) such as Carnap or David Stove could fail to appreciate that the Augustinian saying is meaningful, despite the stretching of ordinary language. A theory of how this 'stretching' works is necessary if we are to have a full understanding of what we are doing when we do metaphysics.
There is no doubt that in metaphysics we violate ordinary usage. But unless one is a benighted philosophistine chained and held fast in some dark corner of Plato's Cave, one will not dismiss metaphysics for this reason, but strive to work out a theory of how the linguistic stretching works.
To answer the title question, we must first answer the logically prior question as to who the greatest philosophers were. But this presupposes an answer to the equally vexing question of who counts as a philosopher. Heidegger published two fat volumes on Nietzsche, but dismissed Kierkegaard as a mere "religious writer." Others will go him one better, dismissing both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — and Heidegger as well. Was Aquinas a philosopher? Or was he merely a brilliant man who used philosophical tools to shore up beliefs of an extraphilosophical provenience, beliefs that he wouldn't have abandoned even if he hadn't able to find philosophical justifications for them?
Note also that the question as to who counts as a gen-u-ine philosopher presupposes an answer to the hairy and hoary question as to what philosophy is.
In any case, here is my ranking of the philosophers that made it onto a BBC shortlist from a few years ago. The ranking is mine; the list is from the BBC.
1. Plato (c. 429-347 BC)
2. Aristotle (384-322 BC)
3. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)
4. René Descartes (1596-1650)
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
6. Socrates (c. 470-399 BC)
7. Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677)
8. David Hume (1711-1776)
9. Epicurus (341-270 BC)
10. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
11. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
12. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
13. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
15. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
16. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970)
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
18. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
19. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
20. Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)
Here are my criteria in order of importance:
1. Truth of the philosopher's conclusions
2. Belief in reason's power to discover some of the ultimate truth
3. Rigor of argumentation
4. Appreciation of the limits of reason
5. Depth and centrality of the problems addressed
6. Breadth and systematicity of vision
7. Originality
8. Long-term influence
The first seven philosophers on my list are great philosophers, the rest are important but not great. Kierkegaard, for example, though original and influential, and (too) appreciative of the limits of reason falls short on the other criteria.
It goes without saying that my ordering of the philosophers, my criteria, and their ordering are highly subjective. They reflect my interests, my biases, and my own philosophical conclusions. For example, my primary interest in a philosopher is not in his literary merit. If that is your primary interest, then you will probably rank Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ahead of Kant. Indeed, if you do not, then you have very poor taste!
You will notice that I am biased toward the rationalists. Thus all the philosophers I call great are either rationalists, or like Aristotle and Kant, have a strong rationalist side to their thinking. And when I list truth as my numero uno criterion, it is clear that that is truth as I take it to be.
On the score of truth, Nietzsche really falls short. For not only is there little if any philosophical truth in his writings, the poor soul denies the very existence of truth.
When one studies the first seven on the list, one actually learns something about the world. But when one reads Nietzsche and (later) Wittgenstein, one learns highly original and fascinating opinions that have little or no chance of being true. One learns from them, and from some others on the list, how NOT to do philosophy. But that too is something worth knowing! So they have their place and their use.
Now to our question whether the greatest philosophers were theists or atheists. The greatest philosophers on my list are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Socrates, and Spinoza. All of these are theists of one sort or another. But even if Spinoza is excluded, that leaves six out of seven. And if you argue that Aristotle's Prime Mover is not God in any serious sense, then I've still got five out of seven.
If you say I rigged my list so that theists come out on top, I will deny the charge and argue that I used independent criteria (listed above). But if you disagree my assessment, I will consider it par for the course.
Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, hrsg. v. Medem (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), S. 213 (14. I. 49):
Das Feindschaftpotential des Denkens ist unendlich. Denn man kann
nicht anders als in Gegensätzen denken. Le combat spirituel est
plus brutal que la bataille des hommes.
The enmity potential of thought is infinite. For one cannot think
otherwise than in oppositions. Spiritual combat is more brutal than
a battle of men. (tr. MavPhil)
There is something to this unrepentant Nazi's onesided observation. Philosophy in particular sometimes bears the aspect of a blood sport. But thinking is just as much about the reconciliation of oppositions as it is about their sharpening. A good thinker is rigorous, precise, clear, disciplined. These are virtues martial and manly. But there are also the womanly virtues, in particular, those of the midwife. Socratic maieutic is as important as ramming a precisely formulated thesis down someone's throat or impaling him on the horns of a dilemma. The Cusanean coincidentia oppositorum belongs as much to thought as the oppositio oppositorum.
There is more to philosophy than the Butlerian "A thing is what it is and not some other thing." There is also the Heraclitean "The way up and the way down are the same." To take either as one's motto would be to philosophize onesidedly. Sometimes a thing is what it is in virtue of not being what it is not, its not being its Other being constitutive of what it is. That is indeed the case with the way up and the way down. Each is what it is by not being what it is not as non-independent moments of a whole which is their unity.
There is no philosophy without analysis and distinction, but there is also no philosophy without a concern for unity and wholeness. Discursive reason is diremptive but is also somehow aware of this fact and so seeks its Other, the reason that reconciles and harmonizes.
Every judgment, after all, is both an analysis and a synthesis. To judge that a is F is to separate a subject and a predicate while combining them. This holds for both what we in the trade call analytic and synthetic judgments. There is a clear sense in which the analytic Every cygnet is a swan is synthetic and the synthetic Some cygnets have broken wings is analytic.
The ability to listen and lay oneself open are as important in a philosopher as the ability to probe, penetrate, and dissect. When the manly and martial squeezes out the feminine and receptive, then philosophy can degenerate into a blood sport.
You know, your inquiry into burden-of-proof (BOP) has put the idea in my mind that we could, if we wanted, institute something like a “court of philosophy”. Bear with me for paragraph—I don’t mean what follows as parody.
It would work like a civil action in which a claimant appears before a judge and files his motion: “I believe the following version of the Ontological Argument is sound and I will prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judge examines the claimant's motion and informs him precisely what his BOP will be at trial with respect to each of the key premises of the argument. If the claimant agrees, the judge accepts the case. At this point the claimant must deposit a hefty bond with the court. It will be returned with interest if he carries his motion at trial but otherwise forfeited. The judge appoints a prosecutor/opponent who will argue against the claimant. A trial date is set and a jury of unbiased academics (philos?) seated. At trial the claimant set out his thesis as the opening statement and the prosecutor attacks it. The claimant gets to respond. The prosecutor gets his redirect. Expert witnesses may even be called on technical points like modal logic. The judge decides when the back and forth has continued long enough and then charges the jury. “You will decide whether the claimant has proven his thesis beyond a reasonable doubt.” The jury deliberates and reaches a verdict. “We the jury find that the claimant has not shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the Ontological Argument is sound.”OK, I think we could do something like this. We could structure a philosophical debate like a civil action at law with clear assigned BOPs and a clear winner and loser. The question is, have we compromised anything essential or important about philosophical debate by imposing this kind of structure? Wouldn’t it be interesting to try this format and see what we get? Accumulated “case” law from these trials might be highly instructive. For example, suppose a dozen people have tried to sustain the Ontological Argument and all have failed at trial.You have been arguing in several posts that BOP doesn’t belong in philosophical debate as we know it. I agree, but the question I’m now asking you is whether we could do philosophy in the style of a civil action? And if we could, wouldn’t it be useful to try?
One important difference is that the dialectical situation in the court room is practical whereas the dialectical situation in the stoa or seminar room is theoretical. By a dialectical situation I mean a context in which orderly rational discussion occurs among two or more competent and sincere interlocutors who share the goal of arriving as best they can at the truth about some matter, or of resolving some question in dispute. Legal and philosophical proceedings are both dialectical in this sense, but in the legal context the issue in dispute must be decided and in a timely manner, whereas in the philosophical context there is no need for a decision — a 'verdict' if you will — and also virtually no prospect of one.
One way decisions are arrived at in the law is via presumptions. Suppose Peter has one child, Paul, and no wife. One day Peter vanishes and is not heard from by anyone for years. He leaves behind his house and various other assets. Paul decides that he should inherit the assets. But he cannot inherit his father's estate until the man is dead. There is a question of fact here, the question whether Peter is dead or alive. But there is no conclusive evidence either way. The law deals with this via the presumption that a person who, without reasonable explanation, has not been heard from for at least seven years is dead. Given this presumption, all that Paul or his attorney has to show is that he is Peter's only living heir and that the father has been incommunicado for seven years or more. One can see from this example that the presumption makes possible the decision, and that without it no definite decision could be arrived at.
In philosophy, however, everything either is or can be called into question. This is the glory of philosophy — but also its misery. And so there is no room for presumptions and BOP-assignments in philosophy. There is no room for judicial fiat of any kind. One cannot just lay it down that, e.g., an ontology that posits n categories of entity is to be preferred to one that posits n + 1 categories. In a court of law neither the law itself nor the procedural rules are on trial; but in philosophy, everything is 'on trial' including the most basic principles of logic. And so it comes as no surprise that nothing is ever decided in philosophy: no question is definitely answered, and no problem solved, to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.
And so I suggest that a court of philosophy would not be a court of philosophy. For what would go on in that court would not be philosophy, but rather a sort of dogmatically constrained quasi-philosophy. One would get answers all right, but only because various arbitrary decisions had been made, decisions that would be philosophically questionable.
A reader presents two putative counterexamples to my claim that burden-of-proof considerations have no useful role to play in philosophy:
I agree that BOP’s in the legal sense don’t exist in philosophical argument, but there seems to be something like a BOP in certain kinds of philosophical debate. I’ll give you two examples and let you tell me what you think. (1) A candidate appears before his committee to defend his dissertation. Depending on the topic and the committee, the candidate knows (and he is told) that he has a significant BOP. His dissertation can be rejected if an examiner does not believe that the work is rigorous and credible enough. The candidate needs to persuade all his examiners that his dissertation is good enough or he will be an unsuccessful candidate. (2) A young Ph.D. wants to publish his dissertation with a top press like OUP. He knows the editor of that press (and his referees) have very high standards respecting clarity and rigor and substance. The young man has a difficult BOP in persuading OUP to accept his work.
0. I continue my investigation of the role of burden-of-proof considerations in philosophy. My ruminations are collected in the aptly titled category, Burden of Proof.
1. Consider a dispute in which one party claims that there are miracles and the other claims that there are no miracles. Where does the burden of proof (BOP) lie? I am open to the suggestion that both claimants incur an obligation to defend their claims if challenged, simply on the ground of having made a claim or advanced a thesis that cannot count as self-evident or foundational in the way in which the Law of Non-Contradiction is foundational. But if both have an obligation (dialectical if not moral) to defend their respective claims if challenged, on pain of being deemed unreasonable if they refuse to do so, that is not to say that both shoulder a burden of proof (BOP). For if I maintain that p and you maintain that ~p, and each of us has a burden of proof, then, given the correlativity of BOP and defeasible presumption (DP) lately explained, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of both p and ~p in the dialectical situation in which we confront each other — and that is absurd. In the context of a proceeding wherein the goal is to settle whether a proposition or its negation are true it cannot be provisionally assumed both that the proposition and its negation are true.
So we need to distinguish between the (dialectical if not moral) obligation to defend one's assertions, an obligation one incurs whether one asserts or counter-asserts, and burden of proof. Thus we talk of the burden of proof in a dialectical proceeding. It presses down on one interlocutor or the other, but not both, if it presses down on either.
What I want to resist, however, is the notion that there is a fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies. I want to suggest that there is no context-independent fact as to which side shoulders the BOP. As a consequence, arguing about where the BOP lies in philosophical debates is as pointless and out-of-place as arguing in a court of law whether the BOP is on the prosecution/plaintiff or on the defense. That the onus probandi lies on the former is constitutive of the courtroom 'game,' at least in the Anglosphere. As constitutive, it is not up for grabs in the legal context.
2. Some think that whoever who makes a positive claim assumes a BOP. But we should beware of the ambiguity of 'positive claim.' Are we referring to the content of a claim, or the claiming of the content? Are we talking logic or dialectics? 'There are miracles' is logically affirmative while 'There are no miracles' is logically negative. And this quite apart from the dialectical situation in which alone it is appropriate to speak of presumptions and probative burdens. The propositions expressed by those sentences are the contents of the respective claims or assertions. But both the miracle-affirmer and the miracle-denier are making a positive claim in that they are both positively claiming something. A counter-assertion is just as much of an assertion as an assertion.
If one makes a claim (advances a thesis, asserts something, etc.), then one does so regardless of whether the content of the claim is logically affirmative or logically negative. So why should the onus probandi rest on the one who asserts that there are miracles and not on the one who asserts the opposite? Since both make a claim, both reasonably incur the obligation to defend the claim if challenged. I am not assuming dialectical egalitarianism according to which, as Michael Rescorla puts it, "every asserted proposition requires defence when challenged by an interlocutor." There may be propositions that need no defense. I am only assuming that the propositions we are discussing can both be reasonably challenged.
3. One cannot therefore in general hold that only those who make assertions the content of which is logically affirmative assume a burden of proof. This may also be appreciated from the fact that some logically negative propositions entail logically affirmative ones. If there are no miracles, then there are no violations/suspensions of natural causal laws. If there are no such violations, then nature is a causally closed system into which nothing enters and nothing escapes. But 'Nature is causally closed' is logically affirmative. The naturalist who claims that there are no miracles is also committed to claiming that nature is causally closed. Clearly, if he bears a burden of proof with respect to the latter proposition then he bears it with respect to the former one as well.
4. So where does the BOP lie if it doesn't lie on the one the content of whose assertion is logically affirmative? Does it lie on the one who calls into question received opinion? That cannot be right either, enshrining as it does an extreme inquiry-inimical doxastic conservatism. The way 'burden of proof' is standardly used, the BOP lies on one party or the other but not both. But I fail to see why in the miracle case or any other it rests on one side rather than the other. I suggest, in line with what I maintained day before yesterday, that there is no fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies. It is a matter of decision, if not by an individual, then by a community.
5. So let's consider the scientific community. The members of this community are bound together by common goals and methods. The 'game' of natural science is played according to game-constitutive rules. One of these rules is that in natural science there can be no appeal to anything supernatural: everything that science explains — everything in nature — is to be explained using only other 'stuff' in nature, smaller 'stuff,' earlier 'stuff.' Thus the tides are explained in terms of the moon and its gravitational effect; earthquakes in terms of tectonic plate shifts; diseases in terms of viruses, etc.
For one who plays the scientific 'game' and abides by its rules, there is no question but that the burden of proof lies on the one who asserts that there are miracles. No scientist worth his salt could hold that there is a presumption in favor of the existence of miracles. It is the other way around: there is an exceedingly strong, if not quite indefeasible, presumption in favor of their nonexistence, and indeed of the nonexistence of anything nonnatural. But this onus-assignment is relative to the scientific 'game' and partially constitutive of it.
6. My point, then, is that BOP-assignments are context- and community-relative and depend on conventions that members of these communities collectively adopt. In the legal context the BOP is on the prosecution while in the science arena, where methodological naturalism rules, the BOP is on anti-naturalists: those who defend miracles, the existence of God and the soul, the libertarian freedom of the will, etc. But the science 'game' is not the only game in town. There is the religious 'game.' No one who takes the latter seriously could possibly think that science delivers the ultimate metaphysical low-down. Relative to the religious 'game,' the BOP will be on atheists.
And then there is the moral 'game.' Most of us play it: we think in moral categories and we cannot imagine not thinking in them. We speak of right and wrong, good and evil; we hold ourselves and others morally and not just causally responsible for what we do and leave undone. We judge and we are prepared to be judged. We praise, we blame, we distinguish among the impermissible, the permissible, the obligatory, and the supererogatory. We subject our thoughts, words, deeds, institutions and laws to moral evaluation. Committed as we are to moral responsibility, we are committed to the freedom of the will. So, from within the moral 'game,' it is clear that there is a presumption in favor of the freedom of the will so that the burden of proof lies squarely and nonnegotiably on the shoulders of those who would deny it.
My suggestion is that it makes no sense to ask where the BOP really lies, on, say, the moralist or on the one who holds that morality and its presuppositions (freedom of the will, etc.) are illusory and without standing in a physical world. The moral way of thinking brings with it a presumption in favor of the reality of its categories, a presumption which, if defeasible, is just barely so. The scientistic way of thinking brings with it an opposite presumption.
So instead of arguing the procedural question as to who has the BOP in a philosophical dispute one should simply get to work and make one's case.
A defeasible presumption in favor of proposition p is not evidence for p. In a legal proceeding there is a defeasible presumption of innocence (POI): one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. For example, Jones, who has been charged with Smith's murder, is presumed to be not guilty until such time as the presumption is defeated. But this presumption is not evidence of Jones' innocence. It is a rule that governs the adducing and evaluating of evidence. The attorney for the accused does not attempt to prove or provide evidence for Jones' innocence; his task is merely to rebut the positive arguments of the prosecutor. Thus POI does not play an evidential role but a procedural role: it amounts to a placing of ther onus probandi on the prosecutor.
In Why the Burden of Proof is on the Atheist, Ralph McInerny seems not to be clear about this ; he seems to confuse an argument for theism with an argument for a presumption in favor of theism. He writes,
I am asking whether the skeptic is justified in calling into question the truth of 'God exists.' Why not put the burden on him? Why not insist that he is attempting to convict of irrationality generations of human beings, rational animals like himself, whole cultures for whom belief in the divine and worship are part of what it is to be a human being? Were all those millions, that silent majority, wrong? Surely to think something against the grain of the whole tradition of human experience is not to be done lightly. It is, need one say it, presumptuous to pit against that past one's own version of the modern mind. This suggests that the present generation is in agreement on things incompatible with belief in God. Or that all informed people now alive, etc. etc. Meaning, I suppose, that all present day skeptics are skeptics.
Is there thus a prima facie argument against atheism drawn from tradition, the common consent of mankind both in the past and in the present time? I think so.
In this passage McInerny appears to be confusing the question whether there is a presumption in favor of theism (so that the onus probandi rests on the atheist) because of common consent with the question whether common consent amounts to an argument for theism. That God exists is a substantive claim made within the dialectical situation in which theist and atheist confront each other; that the burden of proof rests on the one who denies it is a procedural claim that helps define the dialectical situation.
McInerny begins by speaking of shifting the burden of proof onto the skeptic but ends by speaking of an argument against atheism. It may be that common consent is a good reason for presuming theism to be true until shown to be false without being a good reason for the truth of theism.
Joshua Orsak e-mails:
I've been following closely your recent discussions on the burden of proof in philosophy, as its been a particular interest of mine ever since I first read Alvin Plantinga. I've been linking to your posts on the matter on my facebook page. Your recent post reminded me vaguely of something my friend Andrew Jeffery once told me. He told me that a philosopher should want the burden of proof in any discussion, he should want the opportunity to expound in detail why he believes what he believes. He said to me, roughly, 'if someone gives you the burden of proof for a mile, pick it up and carry it two'. That has stayed with me ever since. I thought it was worth sharing with you.
In speaking of the 'burden of proof', we may tend to assume it is something to avoid. But burdens can be of enormous value. Think of the people who long to have the 'burden' of caring for thier very own child, or otherwise have 'dependents' who rely on them and respond with love to their supportive care. There is many a lonely philosopher who would love to be burdened with proving something, perhaps to a huge and critical audience, hanging on each step in his argument. Many would gladly drop their present position and espouse its opposite, if only this would arouse a chorus of 'Prove it! Prove it!'. 'Very well' they would calmly say, stepping with dignity to the podium. ("On the Burden of Proof," Philosophy, vol. 72, no. 279, January 1997, p. 75.)
1. The question this post raises is whether it is at all useful to speak of burden of proof (BOP) in dialectical situations in which there is no judge or tribunal to lay down and enforce rules of procedure. By a dialectical situation I mean a context in which orderly discussion occurs among two or more competent and sincere interlocutors who share the goal of arriving as best they can at the truth about some matter, or resolving some question in dispute. My main concern is with dialectical situations that are broadly philosophical. I suspect that in philosophical debates the notion of burden of proof is out of place and not usefully deployed. That is what I will now try to argue.
2. I will begin with the observation that the presumption of innocence (POI) in an Anglo-American court of law is never up for grabs in that arena. Thus the POI is not itself presumptively maintained and subject to defeat. If Jones is accused of a crime, the presumption of his innocence can of course be defeated, but that he must be presumed innocent until proven guilty is itself never questioned and of course never defeated. The POI is not itself a defeasible presumption. And if Rescher is right that there are no indefeasible presumptions, then the POI is not even a presumption. The POI is a rule of the 'game,' and constitutive of the 'game.' The POI in a court room situation is like a law of chess. The laws of chess, as constitutive of chess, cannot themselves be contested within a game of chess. The reason there is always a definite outcome in chess (win, lose, or draw) is precisely because of those nonnegotiable chess-constitutive laws.
As I pointed out earlier, defeasible presumption (DP) and burden of proof are correlative notions. The defeasible presumption that the accused is innocent until proven guilty places trhe onus probandi on the prosecution. Therefore, from the fact that the POI is not itself a defeasible presumption in a court of law, it follows that neither is the BOP. Where the initating BOP lies — the BOP that remains in force and never shifts during the proceedings — is never subject to debate. It lies on the state in a criminal case and on the plaintiff in a civil case.
3. But in philosophy matters are otherwise. For in philosophy everything is up for grabs, including the nature of philosophical inquiry and the rules of procedure. (This is why metaphilosophy is not 'outside of' philosophy but a branch of same.) And so where the BOP lies in a debate between, say, atheists and theists is itself a matter of debate and bitter contention. Each party seeks to put the BOP on the other, to 'bop' him if you will. The theist is inclined to say that there is a defeasible presumption in favor of the truth of theism; but of course few atheists will meekly submit to that pronunciamento. If the theist is right in his presumption, then he doesn't have to do anything except turn aside the atheist's objections: he is under no obligation to argue positively for thesism any more than the accused is under an obligation to prove his innocence.
4. Now we come to my tentative suggestion. There is no fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies in any dialectical context, legal, philosophical or any other: it is a matter of decision. This is because BOP is a procedural matter. If so, then there must be an adjudicator above the fray (i.e., a judge or arbiter who is not party to the dispute) who makes the decision as to where the BOP lies and has the power to enforce his decision. There must be an arbiter who lays down and enforces the rules of procedure. But in philosophy there neither is nor can be an above-the-fray adjudicator whose decisions are unquestionable and backed by the threat of violence.
For suppose I were to try to play the arbiter in a debate between a theist and an atheist. I give the following speech:
There is a presumption in favor of every existing institution, long-standing way of doing things, and well-entrenched and widespread way of belief. Now the consensus gentium is that God exists. And so I lay it down that there is a defeasible presumption in favor of theism and that the burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of the atheist. Theism is doxastically innocent until proven guilty. The theist need only rebut the atheist's objections; he needn't make a positive case for his side.
Not only would the atheist not accept this declaration, he would be justified in not accepting it, for reasons that are perhaps obvious. For my declaration is as much up for grabs as anything else in philosophy. And of course if I make an ad baculum move then I remove myself from philosophy's precincts altogether. In philosophy the appeal is to reason, never to the stick.
The situation in philosophy could be likened to the situation in a court of law in which the contending parties are the ones who decide on the rules of procedure, including BOP and DP rules. Such a trial could not be brought to a conclusion. That's the way it is in philosophy. Every procedural rule and methodological maxim is further fodder for philosophical Forschung. (Sorry, couldn't resist the alliteration.)
My tentative conclusion is as follows. In philosophy no good purpose is served by claims that the BOP lies on one side or the other of a dispute, or that there is a DP in favor of this thesis but not in favor of that one. For there is no fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies. BOP considerations are usefully deployed only in dialectical situations in which some authority presides over the debate and lays down the rules of procedure and has the power to punish those who violate them. Such an authority constitutes by his decision the 'fact' that the BOP lies on one side rather than on the other.
It follows from what I have said that if you disagree with me, then neither of us bears a burden of proving his metaphilosophical thesis. But this is paradoxical. For if you disagree with me, then presumably you think that BOP considerations are usefully deployed in philosophy, and that there is a fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies, and that therefore one of us must bear a probative burden.