Brief Hiatus

Thanks to all of you who have participated with the blog throughout the semester. We've had some very good discussions, and we plan to continue to have many more next semester. We'll be holding off on new posts until late January, but in the meantime, feel free to scroll through and comment on any of the topics posted so far. Have a great break, Adam (on behalf of QUB Philosophy staff)

Divine Omnipotence

Today I’d like to open up the issue of divine omnipotence. Unreflective thinking would suggest that there is no real issue here since omnipotence simply means an ability to do anything, or that there is nothing that an omnipotent being cannot do. Whilst these understandings are somewhat correct, there is a deep fissure between defenders of divine omnipotence to the effect that whilst both accept that there is nothing that an omnipotent being cannot do, they differ as to their account of how this is the case.

On one account, attributable to Descartes, when we hold that there is nothing an omnipotent being cannot do, we hold that an omnipotent being can do anything it wants. Thus, if such a being wanted to create a universe within which 2+2=5, then such a being could have done so. On this account, possibility is located in the will of a divine being.

On the other hand there is the position attributable to Aquinas. Assuming that possibility is a necessary though not sufficient condition for actuality, Aquinas holds that whatever an omnipotent being can do must in principle be possible. Now, Thomas holds that what is possible is what does not admit of a contradiction, and what is impossible is precisely what admits of a contradiction. Thus, what is impossible is incapable of being actual, and therefore precisely nothing. So, for Aquinas when we say that there is nothing that an omnipotent being cannot do, the ‘nothing’ here is understood precisely as what is impossible. Consequently, on Aquinas’s account, omnipotence is an ability to bring about any possibility, where a possibility is understood as what does not involve a contradiction.

On Aquinas’s account then, there are imaginable states of affairs such as going back in time and changing a past that has already been, bringing about 2+2=5, and arguably creating a universe with no evil therein, which whilst imaginable are not possible and therefore not open to divine omnipotence. On the other hand, on the Cartesian account of divine omnipotence, any imaginable state of affairs is open to such power since an omnipotent being can bring about anything it wants.

What do you think?

Traditional Empiricism and the Space of Reasons

John McDowell holds that empiricism as it has been traditionally conceived leads to a radical incoherency. In order to avoid this incoherency, he proposes a different though not new model for understanding the relation of experience to the empirical world and how we ground empirical judgements.

As he sees things, McDowell characterises traditional empiricism as making a strict distinction between a space of reasons and a space of facts. The space of reasons is the space wherein concepts, reasons, justifications etc are operative, whereas the space of fact is the space of scientific normativity. What is crucial about the distinction for McDowell is that the space of fact is so juxtaposed from the space of reasons that whatever is located within the space of fact is not conceptually imbued, but conceptually naked as it were; whereas what is located in the space of reasons is located in a space wherein conceptuality is present. Given this strict distinction, McDowell goes on to charge traditional empiricism with radical incoherency.

Traditional empiricism holds that our empirical judgements are justified by the empirical world, by facing the tribunal of experience as it were. On this account, the empirical world so interacts with the subject that the subject is able to justify his or her judgements about the world through an appeal to the empirical world itself. By McDowell’s lights however, this is absurd for the following reason. When we seek to justify a judgement, we seek to give reasons for why we think the content of that judgement is the case. Thus, if asked why we think that x is the case, we say 'because…'and thence give reasons for its being the case 'that x'. McDowell claims that by putting the conceptually naked given in the place where we would give reasons for why we think that our empirical judgement is the case, we are merely exculpating ourselves from blame rather than giving a reason. In other words, the given, considered precisely as lacking in conceptual content, cannot justify our empirical judgements because precisely as lacking in conceptual content, the world cannot be a justifying reason for any belief about the world. As McDowell sees things, what we are left with in traditional empiricism are two sui generis spheres, one of reasons and the other of facts, standing aloof from each other with no meaningful interaction between the two, and this is intolerable.

McDowell recognises the appeal of the given. On the one hand there is recognised the need for some spontaneity in human thought, a spontaneity without which the genius moments wherein one exclaims ‘Eureka’ would be impossible. On the other hand, such spontaneity needs to be curtailed in order that one cannot just think about the world in any way that one likes; one’s thought must be accountable to the world. As McDowell characteristically states, if we have nothing to curtail our spontaneity, we spin frictionslessly in the void. The given was intended to introduce friction and curtail our spontaneity, but, as we have seen, appeal to the given merely offers us exculpation and not a justifying reason for why we think about the world as we do.

With the issue sufficiently motivated, McDowell goes on depict his own view of the relationship between mind and world. Recognising the need for both spontaneity in thought and answerability to the world, but the incoherence of appealing to a conceptually naked given to ensure the latter, McDowell claims that the whole picture of two distinct sui generis spheres is a flawed one that will always lead to inconsistency. He recommends that in order to ensure worldly justification for empirical judgements, the world itself must be conceptual. Only if conceptuality is present in the world can the subject give a justifying reason for an empirical judgement, rather than just pointing to some conceptually naked given. On McDowell’s account then, the world is conceptual insofar as when the subject engages with the world, the subject’s conceptual capacities are brought into operation. Thus, when I experience the world, I experience the world as thus and so, and such experience is conceptual precisely because it is experienced as thus and so. The world’s being thus and so in turn brings into operation the subject’s conceptual capacities, and when asked why I have a particular belief to the effect that the world is thus and so, I can reply because the world as revealed to me in experience is revealed to me as thus and so.

McDowell’s position thus represents a definite shift away from traditional empiricism insofar as it sees the world as itself conceptual and as thus conceived the subject is able to engage with the world in a rational manner. This is not a new understanding of the mind world relationship, in fact, it can be argued that it is coloured by some very traditionalpre-modern views of the mind/world relationship. For the purposes of this discussion, I would like to know what you think about the issues involved the position outlined above.

Further Reading

John McDowell, Mind and World, Lectures 1 - 3.

Friday Question: What is fiction?

We (and libraries) frequently distinguish between fiction and non-fiction.  But how do we do this? A first stab might be to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction by appealing exclusively to the notions of truth and falsity. Here's a rough first try:

(1) A work is a work of fiction iff its claims are false, non-fiction iff its claims are true.

Though this might seem right at first blush--after all, non-fiction works contain(among other works) such works as reference works, works comprised of facts--whilst works of fictions, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, do not have "facts"--after all, Huckleberry Finn wasn't real. 

The first stab doesn't pass even a first inspection, though. Both sides of the biconditional (A work is a work of fiction iff its claims are false) seem problematic. . First, it could be argued that the claims of fiction are not false because the proposition expressed by each fictive claim is of the form "According to work W, X" as opposed to "X." On such a view, the utterance "Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Jim" is true because the proposition it expresses,  ["In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Jim"], is true. This aligns with our pre-theoretical thinking that "Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Jim" is correct in a way that "Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Nurse Ratched" is not. Along similar lines, the conditional (if a work is a work of fiction, its claims are false) could be rejected on the grounds that works of fictions contain claims that are not truth-apt and so not false. The idea could be that fiction, by nature, is non-representational discourse and so is capable of truth or falsity no more than commands or expressions of attitudes are. So it's false that: if a work is a work of fiction, its claims are false. The other side of the biconditional can be challenged as well: a work can be comprised of false claims and not be a work of fiction. Suppose someone wrote a very poorly researched bibliography of former U.S. President John Adams. Suppose that each sentence in the biography was nearly true (verisimilitudious) but strictly speaking false. The biography for instance says that Adams came in second to Washington in the 1789 Presidential Election vote by a margin of 69-35 votes in the electoral college. Adams actually lost the 1789 Presidential Election by a margin of 69-34 votes. So this claim is false. Suppose our biography is full of claims like this. This work is a work whose claims are false, but it doesn't seem to follow that this rubbishly researched biography of Adams counts as fiction, as a book that belongs next to novels and story books, for instance. It seems instead to be just a very bad example of non-fiction. This consideration counts equally against the suggestion in (1) that a work is non-fiction iff its claims are true. The bad Adams biography is an example of non-fiction whose claims are false. So truth and falsity seem to be a poor litmus test for distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction.

A prominent philosopher of fiction Kendall Walton has proposed that we can individuate what counts as fiction  by appealing to the concept of imagination rather than to the concepts of truth and falsity. Roughly, what individuates fictive utterances Walton thinks is that they (unlike non-fictive utterances) are a prescription to imagine. This account seems to capture something important about fiction: fiction involves a sort of make believe, and to read (in the case of written fiction) and enjoy fiction is to participate in the author's invitation to imagine. An author of non-fiction extends a different invitation: an invitation to believe, and perhaps to know (on testimony). Does Walton get things right then? Maybe. There are quite a few objections to his view. Here's one I'd like to consider. Suppose Dostoevsky had an uncle named Raskalnikov, and who seemed to Dostoevsky to be shrouded in mystery, leaving only a trunk full of documents in an attic that detailed his life. Suppose Dostoevsky wished to write a biography of Raskalnikov and so read through the documents in the attic, finding all sorts of court documents, diaries and other evidence that suggested Raskalnikov had murdered his landlady as well as a visitor Lisabetta. Dostoevsky then writes up a large biography and entitles it "Crime and Punishment*." Suppose further that Crime and Punishment is word-for-word identical with Crime and Punishment. Crime and Punishment* is not a prescription to imagine. Crime and Punishment is. So Walton's view suggests that fictionality must be a relational property; two works with all the same intrinsic properties can be such that only one is a work of fiction. Perhaps this is not problematic? I think this result is awkward and so counts against an otherwise very good account of fiction. Any thoughts? 

Rorty and Boghossian on Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine

Copernicus's De Revolutionibus made a then-revolutionary assertion: that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo, through the use of his telescope, found evidence that stood to support Copernicus's theory and was summoned to the Vatican, where he was prosecuted for heresy by the Cardinal Bellarmine. As Boghossian (2006) put it, Cardinal Bellarmine, "when invited to look through his telescope to see for himself, is reputed to have refused, saying that he had a far better source of evidence about the make-up of the heavens, namely, the Holy Scripture itself." (Boghossian 2006: 60)

One line we can take here is to say that Galileo was right, and Cardinal Bellarmine was wrong, that Galileo's epsitemic principles and judgments were superior to Cardinal Bellarmine's. As Boghossian notes, there is some resistance to this sort of thought that is widespread throughout the humanities. The resistance is embodied by what Boghossian calls the Equal Validity view:

Equal Validity: There are many radically different, yet "equally valid" ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. (2006: 2)

Boghossian considers a range of positions that would count in favour of equal validity, focusing in his monograph on constructivism and relativism. Let's consider here the plausibility of what Boghossian describes as epistemic relativism.

Epistemic Relativism: 
A. (Epistemic non-absolutism) There are no absolute facts about what belief a particular item of information justifies
B.(Epistemic relationism) if a person, S's, epistemic judgments are to have any prospect of being true, we must not construe his utterances of the form
"E justifies belief B"
as expressing the claim
"E justifies belief B"
but rather as expressing the claim: According to the epistemic system C, that I, S, accept, information E justifies belief B. 
C. (Epistemic pluralism)There are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems, but no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others (2006: 73)

If epistemic relativism is correct, it would seem as though there is no privileged perspective from which to claim that Galileo's epistemic principles and judgements are superior to Cardinal Bellarmine's.

Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, attempts to defend something akin to Equal Validity by way of arguing in favour of just the sort of position Boghossian is calling epistemic relativism. Rorty writes:

But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—the scriptural description of the fabric of the heavens—were ‘‘illogical or unscientifc?’’. . . [Bellarmine] defended his view by saying that we had excellent independent (scriptural) evidence for believing that the heavens were roughly Ptolemaic. Was his evidence brought in from anothersphere, and was his proposed restriction of scope thus ‘‘unscientifc?’’ What determines that Scripture is not an excellent source of evidence for the way the heavens are set up? (Rorty 1981: 328-9)

Boghossian here quotes Rorty at some more length, noting that he answers his own question. Here, again, is Rorty with some provocative remarks:

So the question about whether Bellarmine . . . was bringing in extraneous ‘‘unscientific’’ considerations seems to me to be a question about whether there is some antecedent way of determining the relevance of one statement to another, some ‘‘grid’’ (to use Foucault’s term) which determines what sorts of evidence there could be for statements about the movements of planets. Obviously, the conclusion I wish to draw is that the ‘‘grid’’ which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not there to be appealed to in the early seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial. No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of human knowledge, could have ‘‘discovered’’ it before it was hammered out. The notion of what it was to be ‘‘scientific’’ was in the process of being formed. If one endorses the values . . . common to Galileo and Kant, then indeed Bellarmine was being ‘‘unscientific.’’ But, of course, almost all of us . . . are happy to endorse them. We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and philosophy, and so on. This rhetoric has formed the culture of Europe. It made us what we are today.We are fortunate that no little perplexity within epistemology, or within the historiography of science, is enough to defeat it. But to proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are ‘‘objective’’ and ‘‘rational’’ standards for adopting them. Galileo, so to speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common ground of the ‘‘grid’’ of relevance and irrelevance which ‘‘modern philosophy’’ developed as a consequence of that victory. But what could show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue ‘‘differs in kind’’ from the issue between, say, Kerensky and Lenin, or that between the Royal Academy (circa 1910) and Bloomsbury? (Op. cit. 330-1)

What exactly are we to make of this? Does Rorty here give us any reason to approach the Galileo-Bellarmine issue as the epistemic relativist does? Boghossian's answer is a resounding "no." I will not retrace his arguments against epistemic relativism here. Rather, I invite readers to assess whether Rorty's take on the issue gives us any good reason to favour any of the three components of what Boghossian is calling epistemic relativism.

Eavesdroppers and epistemic modals

Sometimes, we make claims of the form: "A might be F." For example, "Keller might be taking a nap," or "Zane might be guilty." Such claims are called epistemic modals. What makes them true, when they are, seems to be an epistemic matter. That is: what makes a claim of the form "A might be F" true is whether A's being F is epistemically possible relative to some body of knowledge. But whose body of knowledge? This is where things get tricky. Some contextualists claim that the relevant body of knowledge will always at least include the speaker's body of knowledge. A rather flatfooted version of contextualism (which MacFarlane 2011: 146) calls "solipsistic contextualism")) says the speaker's body of knowledge is all that matters. And so when Clint says, "Keller might be taking a nap," the proposition expressed by his utterance is true (on solipsistic contextualism) just in case Keller's taking a nap isn't ruled out by what Clint knows. This view might sound plausible at first blush. There are however several problems. Perhaps, for example, the relevant body of knowledge should be extended to include not only what Clint knows but also what others involved in the conversation know. But suppose it is. The problem I want to consider is one that appears to infect any form of contextualism about epistemic modals. I'll use John Hawthorne's (2007) example of an eavesdropper case here:

EAVESDROPPER: Someone is on the way to the grocery store. I hear her say: 'Susan might be at the store. I could run to her.' No party to the conversation that I am listening in on knows that Susan is on vacation. But I know that she is. Despite the fact that it is compatible with what the conversants know that Susan is in the store and that the speaker will run into her, I am inclined to judge the speaker's modal judgements to be incorrect. (Hawthorne 2007: 92)

For the contextualist, this is awkward. It seems that the person who utters 'Susan might be at the store" has said something true. After all, Susan's being at the store is entirely compatible with the speaker's body of knowledge (and the body of knowledge possessed by those in the conversation I'm overhearing). However, having overheard this conversation, I am inclined to judge the speaker's claim to be incorrect. 

But the picture that emerges is not a friendly one for the contextualist. It looks as though we have a case of disagreement: I reject what the speaker I overhear accepts. It also looks like neither the person I overhear nor I myself am mistaken: "Susan might be at the store" thus seems true relative to the body of knowledge operative in the conversation I overhear and false relative to what I know. But this sort of 'faultless disagreement' implies a sort of truth-relativism about epistemic modals. In order to avoid this result, the contextualist has got to explain away why the eavesdropper case only appears to be a disagreement (or at least a case where my denying what the speaker I overhear asserts is felicitious) when it's actually not, or alternatively, why the case is one that only appears to be faultless, when in fact either I or the person I overhear believes something false. 

No matter how the contextualist tries to get out of this puzzle that appears to motivate truth-relativism about epistemic modals, one thing is clear: the contextualist is going to have a hard time explaining just whose body of knowledge is supposed to be the relevant one in this context.

Reference:

Hawthorne, John (2007). "Eavesdroppers and Epistemic Modals," in Philosophical Issues, 17, The Metaphysics of Epistemology, 2007. 

MacFarlane, John (2011). "Epistemic Modals are Context Sensitive," in Epistemic Modality, eds. Egan, A. & Weatherson, B. (Oxford: OUP).

Epistemology and the Ought-Can Principle

In certain contexts, it can be fairly natural to give voice to an assessment of somebody's belief by using the word 'ought'. For instance, suppose that your friend is engaged in wishful thinking: this friend believes that some guy will call her when (unfortunately) that is pretty clearly fantasy on her part. You might say to her (if you were trying to wake her up to the cruel reality), "That's not what you ought to believe. We both know that this guy rarely calls anybody the day after." She might respond, "That is what I ought to believe. My case is different because ... ."

Now, as natural as these assessments might be, there is some room for discomfort as to whether we can ultimately make sense of them. One concern revolves around the alleged entailment from 'ought' to 'can'. The idea is that in order for it to be the case that one ought to bring about a particular outcome (e.g. a belief or action), one must have the (appropriate kind of) ability to bring about that outcome. In other words, if one cannot control the outcome, then it is not possible that one ought to bring it about. Where the outcome in question is belief, it boils down to this: if it is not possible for the subject to exert control in order to have better beliefs (i.e. beliefs that fit the evidence better), then it cannot be that the subject ought to have better beliefs.

As this suggestion applies to our fictitious example, it appears that what you've said to your friend may not be strictly correct. Supposing that your friend is just incorrigibly prone to wishful thinking (as many of us are), it may be that she does not have the cognitive resources to take a position that respects her evidence. Assuming so, the suggestion is that it cannot be that she ought to believe other than how she does on this matter. Perhaps we can assess her belief as bad, but not as a belief she ought not have.

I find this result fairly unsatisfactory although the issues here are complex. One consideration that concerns me is that this way of thinking appears to let people off the hook for bad decisions merely because they are incorrigibly bad at managing their beliefs. Think about somebody who you consider to (1) have terrible beliefs about public policy or religion (whether for or against), and (2) be so entrenched in these terrible beliefs and so bad at thinking that there is no way that they could give them up. Presumably, people of this sort are a bad influence on society; they make bad decisions about, for instance, whom to vote for. It strikes me as fairly reasonable that we should hold them responsible for this bad influence, even if they sincerely take themselves to be doing what is best. However, if it really is the case that the prospects for them to improve their beliefs are hopeless, then the suggestion last paragraph appears to have the result that it cannot be that they ought to be believing differently. On what grounds, then, can we hold them responsible?

Maybe we should we give up the idea that the 'ought' in question entails 'can' of the relevant sort. What do you think?