One need not hang around philosophers very long before realizing that what they do is speculate. If it were not so, it would be science, or maybe math. It has occurred to me that some of these speculations seem to be based on axioms that are not first principles. It is possible to make up one's own "axioms" and proceed from there to build a case.
The difference in axioms might be the difference between totally diametric conclusions, none of which are provable in an empirical manner.
I am thinking here of Philosophical Materialism. There is never an attempt to prove the underlying axiom that there is no non-material existence. It is taken as an axiomatic truth, upon which all other reality is based.
To question that axiom which is perceived as "truth" results in ridicule and character assassination as was discussed in my previous post. If one cannot see the "truth" of that axiom, then something must be presumed to be seriously wrong with that individual. But not wrong with the axiom.
In order to maintain a belief in an axiom rationalized and fabricated from an agenda, it is necessary to violate the actual first principles of logic and rational thought. For example, if Philosophical Materialism is to successfully claim a scientific basis for declaring "no non-material reality", it must provide empirical proof of its claim; after all, that is what science does, it provides empirical proof. But of course it is not possible to prove a negative and this leaves the Materialists with only inferential straw men such as a flying spaghetti monster and an orbiting teapot. Inferences are not proofs they are opinions; straw men are blatant fallacies; Materialists cannot prove scientifically that which they claim. So they have a non-coherent belief, that science proves all reality to be material, when it doesn't and can't prove any such thing.
But they must believe what they believe. So the recourse is to win arguments through denigration, character assassination and ridicule, all of which are also Ad Hominem fallacies of the nasty type. Nastiness wins guffaws from the intellectually juvenile, but it wins no logic successes. The Materialist relativism coupled with unrestrained nastiness produces some truly ridiculous output from these folk. But to them, it is logic, and to me that conclusion is scary.
10 comments:
Hi Stan, it's only indirectly related with your post, but materialist, atheist and "skeptic" James Randi has recently backed out of challenge with Homeopath George Vithoulkas:
http://www.vithoulkas.com/content/view/1973/lang,en/
Another good example of "skeptical" honesty.
PS.
I have no idea if homeopathy is useful or not; my point is not a defense of homeopathy, but a expose of professional pseudoskepticism.
Thanks ZC,
Skeptics are Philosophical Materialists in cheap clothes.
One of the earlier "skeptics" was David Hume, who attempted to use the term "skeptic" for himself in order to avoid the charge of "Atheism", which would be fatal to his attempts to get a job as a university professor.
It didn't work, since the dodge is quite transparent, and the universities at the time were religious oriented, having been founded by religous men and money.
Skepticism is necessary and even admirable until it becomes a religion in and of itself; today it is a front for Atheism and Philosphical Materialism.
So I think your term, psuedoskeptic, is close to accurate, because the skepticism they profess is not truly skeptical, it is a system of belief and disbelief. Things they don't believe they are not skeptical of; things they do believe they are not skeptical of. They are not skeptical of Atheism or Materialism, so it is a belief system with a false cover. And the belief system is rabid in its intensity as well as its disdain for non-believers. In this fashion it resembles a cult.
You complain about strawmen, and then set up this laughably naive characterization about ¨philosophical materalism,¨ which isn't even the most common nomenclature for physicalist ontologies.
Of course you aren't going to "prove" that there is no supernatural realm using empirical science, but you can begin to use Occam's Razor and empirical means to investigate into the historical origin of supernatural beliefs. Once this is done, you can conclude that at some point beliefs in the supernatural began with wholly human origins. This in itself is a biting argument against supernaturalism unless you imagine yourself capable of arguing against the edifice that evolutionary theory or want to propose some feeble watchmaker Deism.
Furthermore, there are numerous philosophical arguments against ontological dualism, such as the interaction problem, problems of parsimonious explanation, and many others.
Can you honestly rail against something like Haugeland's brilliant defense of physicalism via ontological supervenience? You are clearly out of your league in this area given that your primary complaint towards physicalist atheists is that we are mean and are simply affirming our own biases instead of using philosophical reason to weigh the alternatives and come to a decision. This is likely a result of your ignorance regarding the philosophical literature on physicalism. Please see the Haugeland article and perhaps you will realize that not every one who disagrees with you is "juvenile" or has to resort to ad hominem attacks to defend the philosophical viability of their position.
Aside from having ridiculed me as being out of my league – thereby proving my assertion – and you have provided no empirical validation of your claim to the truth of a “physicalist ontology”.
Let’s discuss your claims one at a time.
First, ou charge that the terminology I use is incorrect; apparently you prefer “physicalism”, which is indeed used widely. I have explained elsewhere why I prefer "philosophical materialism", another term in use, and I will explain it again for you. The term “materialism” is more accurate, in my estimation, of the need to define all of existence in empirical terms: the universe is formed of mass/energy, which is material. Interestingly, Haugeland refers to “physicalist materialism”, which seems redundant. Mostly he refers to “materialism”.
Some use the term “voluntary” or “methodological” to modify the term “materialism” to fit its use as an axiom for empirical methodology in science. This allows one to see the difference between “voluntary materialism” which is science, and “philosophical materialism” which is not science.
Philosophical Materialism is not an ontology, it is an epistemology. It implies a truth value to that which it cannot prove.
Second, your use of Occam’s Razor is inaccurate and inadequate to provide a truth value. O.R. is a suggestion, a rule of thumb, not a law of physics. The dispute between Einstein and Bohr addresses that specifically.
And your reference to empirical investigation of history is also incorrect; history is not empirical, it is forensic and inferential, while containing isolated empirical factoids that are not historically conclusive. The forensic search for the beginnings of supernatural belief are wholly inferential and in no way empirical, other than identifying certain documents, from which human characteristics are inferred. Because inferences are subjective, not objective, they are not up to the standards of scientific proof that are exacted from empirical science.
Third, your reference to philosophical arguments in no way obviates the need for empirical verification of the Materialist claims to the truth value they place on “no non-material existence”. This of course cannot be done, so inference must suffice and then be inferentially imbued with Truth value.
I quote from Haugeland:
“Many philosophers, myself included, had been content to regard as physical any entity of which some suitable physical predicate is true – leaving it for another day to say just which predicates those are. Hellman and Thompson have a similar intution, but a much better strategy. They begin only with “basic physical predicates – like: ‘x is a neutrino’, ‘x is an electromagnetic field’, ‘x is gravitationally attracting y’, and so on. They assume that positive instances of basic predicates are uncontroversially physical, and that collectively these constitute the whole physical universe. We are still not told just which predicates are “basic”; but they are clearly less problematic than “suitable” predicates in general. In fact, as near as I understand it, the single predicate, ‘x has non-zero mass-energy’, would suffice, according to contemporary physics.
(continued in next comment, due to size limit)
(continued from previous comment):
"In any case, the essential innovation lies in what comes next: using the calculus of individuals (that is, of parts and wholes) to construct all physical entities out of positive instances of basic predicates. First the physical universe is defined as the fusion (that is the sum or spatio-temporal agglomeration of all those instances; then all and only physical entities are parts (spatio-temporal portions) of that universe. The point of fusing and then repartitioning the universe is that there are no constraints on the “boundaries” of the new parts. They may be arbitrary (perhaps infinitely) complex and bizarre; and they need not be definable, implicitly or explicitly in any particular language.”
This seems to encapsulate the thoughts of Haugeland and his predecessors, Hellman and Thompson, in Haugeland’s view.
Let’s look at this in detail.
a). Haugeland defines physicalism specifically without any knowledge of the predicates. His assumption then, is that there are no non-physical predicates; physicalism is presumed valid from the get-go, clearly a circular argument, placing the desired conclusion in the premises as an axiomatic assumption.
b). Haugeland’s assumption that “the single predicate, ‘x has non-zero mass-energy’, would suffice, according to contemporary physics,” is valid. But his conclusion ignores that physics is a “voluntary materialism” due to its stated inability to measure non-material entities. Physics in no way implies total materialism or Philosophical Materialism; physics is based on voluntary or methodological materialism, only. So his assumption that what is true of physics is also true of the entirety of the universe is unsupportable.
c). Hellman and Thompson clearly make assumptions without proof: first, that, “positive instances of basic predicates are uncontroversially physical”, and then that, “collectively these constitute the whole physical universe”. They have clearly assumed that physicalism/materialism is true as an axiom for their proof that physicalism/materialism is true. Again this is blatantly circular.
d) Then Hellman and Thompson make the fusion assumption, followed by this: “all and only physical entities are parts (spatio-temporal portions) of that universe.” Again, using the conclusion in the premises as a definition or axiom. And again, blatantly circular.
e) And finally, the coup d’ grace: everything becomes undefinable, by definition(!): “The point of fusing and then repartitioning the universe is that there are no constraints on the “boundaries” of the new parts. They may be arbitrary (perhaps infinitely) complex and bizarre; and they need not be definable, implicitly or explicitly in any particular language.”
This entire exercise is a pretension of using the empirical science of physics to prove the Philosophy of Materialism (or physicalist materialism, if you prefer). It fails the basics of Logic: the conclusion is pre-embedded in the premises rendering the argument useless.
These arguments are false. If there are other arguments to be made, give me links and we can discuss them.
As always, I recommend the study of logic and the basics of rational thought.
A final comment. I suppose that Philosohical Materialism might be either ontological or epistemological or even both; at any rate it is a metaphysic, and it is false in its claims to prove that everything is material: as a metaphysic it is not physical in and of itself (having no mass/energy or space/time inherent in its existence). It self-refutes immediately and on the surface.
While I am impressed by your assiduous thoroughness and general dedication to logic and rational thinking, the overall impression I am getting your from argumentation is that you are "reactive" and not "productive." You are trying to bring down physicalism by appealing to circular reasoning, but fail to establish that we should be doing such "shallow" philosophy to begin with. Where is your alternative? What non-question begging system have you proposed to the philosophical world? Furthermore, I want to ask: is logic and rationality the only toolkit for which philosophers can utilize in establishing their epistemic and ontological systems? Perhaps logic and rationality are not the epitome of humanity, but rather, subservient derivatives of a more primordial being-in-the-world. I am speaking of course of Heidegger.
I mentioned Haugeland offhand because he seemed sufficiently logical in his analysis of physicalism, and you seem to have a thing for that kind of philosophy. You have impressed me with your logical attack on this form of argumentation, but I am curious as to whether you are capable of arguing against physicalism on the phenomenological/existential perspective, and not just the analytic/logical perspective.
So yes, I think there are good logical arguments stemming from the analytic/logical positivist tradition that argues for an ontological and epistemological physicalist monism. But, this is not the only angle for physicalism. Far from it. If you look to the work of Heidegger and the existential school of thought, you will see a different line of thought that nevertheless gravitates towards establishing a concrete,non-supernatural factical dimension for human existence that is fully constitutive of what it means to be human.
We are born in a temporal, finite world and we will die in a temporal, finite world. For Heidegger, this is both an ontic and ontological fact. Heidegger is no longer concerned with trying to "prove" the "existence" or "non-existence" of a physical/non-physical dimension. This is just an extension of Western philosophy's neurotic focus on Logic and Reason as the true seat of human mental experience. Heidegger overcomes this by showing how a broader, factical existence in a social world is a presupposition in any account of "Reason" being preeminent for humans.
In this way, your logical attacks on physicalism as being circular are insufficient to establish a non-physical reality unless you are capable -which I doubt - of introducing a non-question begging alternative and are insufficient on the grounds that your usage of terms like "logic and "reason" presupposes a factical background knowledge stemming from a concrete social existence, as Heidegger argues.
I appreciate the time you have taken to respond to my comments in such pain-staking detail. I did not expect you to go out and actually read Haugeland's paper. But Haugeland style arguments are just the tackling the surface level of philisophical argumentation for atheistic physicalism. There is also a deep existential and phenomenological tradition that is rooted in such thought and I think it would be wise to keep such traditions in mind as you sweepingly generalize against all atheists and physicalists. We do not all believe the same things (I am decidedly not an extreme relativist, and the same goes for many other atheist philosophers. Far from it, in fact).
Hi, I'm glad to see you back, I think this could be an interesting exchange if you are willing.
Perhaps you would give me a specific reference within Heidegger's works that you would like to use as a point of reference for discussion. Otherwise such discussions tend to be apples and oranges as the generalities (to which refer) are not resolved.
And how do you find it possible not to be a relativist if you reject absolutes, as do most Atheists? I presume that you have identified absolutes that are not "divinely revealed", and I hope that you will share those, and their source, thanks.
And perhaps your definition of relativist varies from mine, which is the reason that I try to get the definitions out in the open first.
I have not bothered too much so far with the non-rationalist philosophies because stated irrationality in a worldview would seem to produce a desire to correct itself after a while; but I am certainly willing to discuss the need for rationality in a person's worldview, for example, and also the impact of the irrationalities of those philosophies on one's life under that type of irrational or anti-rational philosophy.
Most Atheists with whom I have spoken are Philosophical Materialists, Relativists, yet they allow exceptions (as one might expect under relativism) for evolution and certain aspects of science. I recognize that there are post-modernists and post-(this, that and the other), perhaps we should hit that subject directly?
I'm looking forward to this, if you are willing.
The best place to start with Heidegger is a commentary on Being and Time. I recommend William Blattner's "Reader's Guide" or Dreyfus's popular "being-in-the-world" commentary. "Heidegger's Analytic" by Taylor Carman is another good place to start on Heidegger's thought, but Blattner will probably be the easiest place to start unless you are already familiar with problems within the phenomenological tradition.
As for my moral system, this is a trickier question and I am unsure that this medium would be appropriate to fully discuss all the various complexities of the matter at hand. Nevertheless, I will try to give you a brief run down on my moral system, although do not consider myself an ethical philosopher so to call it a "system" might be stretching it.
Basically, I believe in the standard cultural relativism of modern liberalism. Every culture has its own standards and social norms that govern the behavioral mores of its people. The moral compass for each culture is slightly different in that different forms of morality/immorality are defended, practiced, and tolerated depending on the cultural context. This is standard, secular relativism.
However, where I differ from my postmodern friends is that I do think it is possible to evaluate and critique different cultural mores based on humanitarian impulses. For instance, a country which denies rights to women or tolerates the sexual rape and psychological torture of children should, in my eyes, be criticized as being immoral.
However, I realize the problem in this type of cultural critique, given that there is no independent standard for evaluating moral claims. Everything is "relative" to different perspectives. However, from MY perspective, which has been shaped by evolutionary programming and social conditioning, violence, rape, child abuse, genocide, etc. are all plain WRONG. This isn't to say that violence is *absolutely* wrong, such as in self-defense or just war, but in almost all situations, these things lead us away from a peaceful cohabitation on this earth.
This might sound like I am contradicting myself in saying that all morality is relative and also claiming that certain things are plain wrong. I just think that the evolution of civilization necessarily required the development of a system of norms that punished things like rape and murder. Even primates have primitive social mores which they reinforce through punishment. Eventually, our language and self-consciousness allowed us to translate these mores into ethical systems such as monotheism and Christianity, but the core moral compass is shaped by deeper, biological drives independent of belief in supernaturalism. Murder is simply abhorrent to me. It disgusts me. I don't need an absolute framework to explain how it is that I feel this way. I simply need to understand that I am biologically primed for such thinking, and that my parents raised me properly.
Ultimately, it comes down to the claim that an atheist family could raise a child to be such as disgusted by torture, rape, deceit, murder, etc. as any Christian family. The belief in God is not necessary for there to be a moral compass.
Actually what I am asking for is a specific tenet of Heidegger's philosophy that you might wish to discuss, not an introductory course for me to pursue... but thanks for the references.
Your moral compass is described as coming from two places, evolution and your parents.
I think that you might have better evidence for it coming from your parents than from evolution. Many of the traits you abhor are actually practiced in some cultures.
Also, if morals evolved, then they are practices of convenience that make the species easier to propagate. So they have no value beyond that, and therefore do not merit any abhorrence. Are you saying that your abhorrence of certain deviations is evolved? Or is it merely taught as part of the particular culture you inhabit? I suspect that your moral compass is closely attuned to Judeo-Christian tenets, but without the ecclesiasticism. After all, ours is still pretty much a Judeo-Christian culture.
The tendency to create "Just So Stories" for the evolution of human traits is an example of forensics aficionados with imagined hypotheses that cannot be proven. They are evidence-free, in the empirical sense. So they remain hypotheses and seem to gain contradictory baggage along the way: polygamy evolved as man needed to spread his seed; monogamy evolved as man needed to protect his seed... and so on.
It is interesting that you include absolutes in your moral compass, even though categorizing yourself as a relativist. I wonder if you consider truth as an absolute, or a non-existant fantasy?
For example, would you say that murder, rape etc are absolutely immoral? (in the universal sense of "absolute": everywhere and all the time)
Or are murder, rape etc relatively immoral? (immoral for you but not for others, say in other cultures).
Thanks for sticking around...
Post a Comment