A certain popular writer speaks of a God delusion. This prompts the query whether there might be a 'No God' delusion. Is it perhaps the case that atheism is a delusion? Bruce Charlton, M. D. , returns an affirmative answer in Is Atheism Literally a Delusion? In this post I will try to understand his basic argument and see if I should accept it. The following is my reconstruction of the core of Charlton's argument:
Category: Truth
No Beliefs? Then No Truths Either!
Peter Lupu e-mails:
A comment to mull over regarding your premise (A) in your recent post about Eliminative Materialism.
A. If a proposition is true, then it is possibly such that it is believed by someone.
Premise (A) says that in order for a proposition to be true, it is a necessary condition that it can be the content of someone's belief. But there may be true propositions that cannot be for one reason or another the content of our beliefs. For instance, perhaps there are true mathematical propositions that are so complicated or so long or require such a complicated proof that it would be simply impossible for the human mind to believe. Perhaps some other mind, for instance God's mind, can comprehend them, know them, and hence believe them: but no mortal mind can do so. Thus, it seems that premise (A) requires the existence of a deity in order to make it work.
Good point. (A) is subject to scope ambiguity as between:
A*. If a proposition p is true, then there exists a subject S such that, possibly, S believes that p.
A**. If a proposition p is true, then, possibly there exists a subject S and S believes that p.
Given Peter's point above, (A*) would seem to require for its truth that there be a divine mind. But all I need for my argument against eliminative materialism is (A**), which does not require for its truth that there exist any mind, let alone a divine mind. What (A**) says is that a necessary condition of a proposition's being true as that it be possible that there exist a believer of it.
My point was that the concept of truth is the concept of something that cannot be coherently conceived except in relation to the epistemic concepts of belief and knowledge. Now there needn't be any beliefs for there to be true (or false) propositions. But if beliefs are not possible, then neither are true propositions. Now eliminative materialism implies not only that there are no beliefs, but that there cannot be any. But then there cannot be any true propositions either.
Recall the argument against beliefs. It went like this: (1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. Since each of the premises is a necessary truth if it is a truth, the conclusion, which validly follows, is a necessary truth if it is a truth.
Thus the EM-er does not merely claim that, as a matter of fact, there are no beliefs; his claim is that there cannot be any. Of course, that renders his position even more absurd. But that's not my problem!
CORRECTION (12/18): Peter rightly points out that (A**) needs tweaking. Consider its contrapositive which is logically equivalent: If it is not possible that there exist a subject S such that S believes that p, then it is not the case that p is true. Unfortunately, the consequent of the contrapositive conditional could be taken to mean that p is not true, and thus (assuming Bivalence) false, when the idea is rather that p lacks a truth-value. So (A**) ought to be replaced by
A***. If a proposition p has a truth-value, then, possibly there exists a subject S such that S believes (disbelieves, entertains, etc.) that p.
Adorno on the No Longer Believable
Theodor Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter, indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, as someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of facade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.
Rorty on Truth: An Argument Refuted
In an earlier Rorty installment I said, among other things, that "He wants to substitute rhetoric for argument but without quite giving up argument. So he ends up giving shoddy arguments . . . ." You think I'm being unfair, don't you? Well, let's see. Here is a passage from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge UP 1989, p. 5:
Truth cannot be out there — cannot exist independently of the human mind — because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own, — unaided by the describing activities of human beings — cannot.
Contra Negantem Prima Principia Non Esse Disputandum
"One should not dispute with those who deny first principles." I found this Latin tag in Luther's Tischreden (Table Talks) in a section entitled Unnütze Fragen (Useless Questions), Weimarer Ausgabe, III, 2844. He applied it to those who deny the authority of the Bible. I agree with the maxim but I find that the good doctor has misapplied it. One who is serious about the truth should want to enter into dialogue with intelligent, sincere, civil, and serious people regardless of their point of view, and this includes those who deny the authority of the Bible. How can one care about the truth and not want to study every philosophy, every religion, and every political ideology? Study everything! How can a serious inquirer not want to know whether what he holds to be true really is true?
But a maxim that can be misapplied can also be correctly applied. There are some principles so fundamental that they cannot be rationally disputed. Among these are the principles that make possible rational discourse. There was a nincompoop of a leftist commenter at the now defunct Right Reason once who opined that truth is a social construction. Anyone who maintains a thesis of such stark absurdity is not one on whom one should waste any words. That truth is absolute, and as such the opposite of a social construction, is a first principle to which Luther's maxim applies. If you have truth, you have something absolute — which is not to say that you have truth!
Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?
This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth. Not that one should be a deflationist. But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.
There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?
Truth Is Absolute! Part Two
Part One is here.
Michael Krausz, "Relativism and Beyond" in Relativism, Suffering and Beyond, eds. Bilimoria and Mohanty (Oxford, 1997), pp. 97-98:
The classical 'self-refuting' argument against relativism runs roughly along the following lines. If relativism is true then the thesis of relativism itself must be relatively true. It would be contradictory to affirm that relativism is true in an absolute sense. But while one could affirm that relativism is true in a relative sense, the counter-argument goes, to say that relativism is only relatively true has no general force. In order for the thesis to have general force it should include itself and should be presumed to be absolutely true. But that, again, would be contradictory.
In response . . . one might observe that there is no reason to rule out of court any non-general thesis of relativism. That is, the claim that the thesis of relativism is a thesis embraced locally does not itself show that it has no content or is not locally defensible. Local knowledge is knowledge nonetheless. Rather along lines suggested by Nelson Goodman, the aim of justifying local claims, including the thesis of relativism itself, need not be the establishment of of a general or a universal or an absolutist claim but may well be in the name of unpacking local understanding.
Truth is Absolute! Part One
In an earlier piece I argued that one can be both an absolutist about the nature of truth while being a fallibilist about the knowledge of truth. But a reader demands to know why we should accept that truth by its very nature is absolute. One reason is that the doctrine that truth is non-absolute (relative) is self-refuting. Herewith, a first installment.
The alethic relativist holds that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative. Some call this cognitive relativism to distinguish it from ethical and other types of relativism. I prefer to avoid this terminology because it tends to conflate truth and knowledge, which are obviously distinct. (If S knows that p, then p is true; but a proposition can be true without being known by any (finite) mind.) To be relative, of course, is to be relative to something. Among candidate relata are individuals, social groups, cultures, conceptual frameworks, historical epochs, zoological species, and others besides. Thus there are different types of alethic relativism depending on the parameter or index to which truth is said to be relative. This being understood, there will be no harm in speaking simply of truth as relative.
To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism
There is much popular confusion concerning the topic of relativism. One fallacy I exposed earlier, namely, the mistake of thinking that Einstein's Theory of Relativity implies either moral relativism or relativism about truth. Even more widespread, perhaps, is the notion that one who opposes relativism about truth must be a dogmatist. But there are two distinctions here and they must not be confused. One is the distinction between relativism and nonrelativism, and the other is the distinction between fallibilism and dogmatism. The first distinction has to do with the nature of truth, while the second pertains to the knowledge of truth.
Continue reading “To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism”
Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism
A correspondent writes:
British (Catholic) historian Paul Johnson in his wonderful Modern Times attributes relativism's rise to Einstein! So does Einstein's latest biographer.
There are two questions that must be distinguished. The first is whether Einstein's Theory of Relativity entails either moral or cognitive (alethic) relativism. The second question is whether Einstein's revolutionary contributions to physics, via their misinterpretation by journalists and other shallow people (am I being unfair?), contributed to an atmosphere in which people would be more likely to embrace moral and cognitive relativism. The first question belongs to the philosophy of science, the second to the sociology of belief. The questions are plainly distinct.
Retortion and the Existence of Truth
Anthony Flood informs me that he has uploaded to his site an article I brought to his attention a couple of years ago: Retortion: The Method and Metaphysics of Gaston Isaye. Whether or not you agree with Tony's politics, and I don't, you should agree with me that his site is an ever-expanding repository of valuable articles and other materials from often neglected thinkers. The trouble with too many contemporary philosophers is that they are so bloody narrow: they read only the latest stuff, much of it destined to be ephemeral, by a few people. You've got young academic punks writing on free will who have never studied Schopenhauer's classic essay. That's contemptible. They suffer from a onesided philosophical diet as Wittgenstein said in another connection. Study everything! (But join nothing.) As I mentioned to Tony in an e-mail, retortion is a philosophical procedure that is fascinating but hard to evaluate. It seems to work on some topics, but not on others. It does seem to me to work when it comes to the topic of truth, as the following post explains:
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Retortion (also spelled 'retorsion') is the philosophical procedure whereby one seeks to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone (any actual or possible rational agent) who attempts to deny it. Proofs by retortion have the following form:
Proposition p is such that anyone who denies it falls into performative inconsistency; ergo, p is true.
If we agree that a proposition is ineluctable just in case it cannot be denied by anyone without performative inconsistency, then the retorsive proof-strategy can be summed up in the conditional:
If a proposition is ineluctable, then it is true.
On ‘Male Chauvinist’ and ‘Relative Truth’
A reader comments:
I'm confused about a claim you make. You say: "Take 'male chauvinist.' As standardly used nowadays, this refers to a male who places an excessively high valuation on his sex vis-a-vis the opposite sex. So a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist, and 'male' functions as as an alienans adjective: it does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'chauvinist.'"
I did a quick check at Merriam-Webster Online. It seems to me that when someone is called a male chauvinist, the second of the three senses of 'chauvinism' given by Webster's is meant, viz. 'undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged.' But if so, it seems that a male chauvinist is a chauvinist. Male chauvinism is one type of chauvinism. It is that type of 'undue partiality' shown to members of one's own sex.
Continue reading “On ‘Male Chauvinist’ and ‘Relative Truth’”
Nietzsche, Truth, and Power
Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534:
Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.
The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.
A criterion of X is (i) a property or feature that all and only Xs possess which (ii) allows us to identify, detect, pick out, Xs. 'Criterion' is a term of epistemology. So one could read Nietzsche as saying that the test whereby we know that a belief is true is that it increases or enhances the feeling of power of the person who holds the belief. To employ some politically correct jargon that arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche, if a belief is 'empowering,' then it is true; and if a belief is true, then it is 'empowering.'
A Cantorian Argument Why Possible Worlds Cannot be Maximally Consistent Sets of Propositions
In a recent comment, Peter Lupu bids us construe possible worlds as maximally consistent sets of propositions. If this is right, then the actual world, which is of course one of the possible worlds, is the maximally consistent set of true propositions. But Cantor's Theorem implies that there cannot be a set of all true propositions. Therefore, Cantor's theorem implies that possible worlds cannot be maximally consistent sets of propositions.