Sharon Street’s unsuccessful argument against theism

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - Sharon Street has argued that we should reject theism because we can accept it only at the cost of having good reason to doubt the reliability of...     

Naturalized truth and Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism

There are three major theses in Plantinga’s latest version of his evolutionary argument against naturalism. (1) Given materialism, the conditional probability of the reliability of human cognitive mechanisms produced by evolution is low; (2) the same conditional probability given reductive or non-reductive materialism is still low; (3) the most popular naturalistic theories of content and truth are not admissible for naturalism. I argue that Plantinga’s argument for (1) presupposes an anti-materialistic conception of content, and it therefore begs the question against materialism. To argue for (2), Plantinga claims that the adaptiveness of a belief is indifferent to its truth. I argue that this claim is unsupported unless it again assumes an anti-materialistic conception of content and truth. I further argue that Plantinga’s argument for (3) is not successful either, because an improved version of teleosemantics can meet his criticisms. Moreover, this version of teleosemantics implies that the truth of a belief is (probabilistically) positively related to its adaptiveness, at least for simple beliefs about physical objects in human environments. This directly challenges Plantinga’s claim that adaptiveness is indifferent to truth.     

On Reichenbach’s argument for scientific realism

The aim of this paper is to articulate, discuss in detail and criticise Reichenbach’s sophisticated and complex argument for scientific realism. Reichenbach’s argument has two parts. The first part aims to show how there can be reasonable belief in unobservable entities, though the truth of claims about them is not given directly in experience. The second part aims to extent the argument of the first part to the case of realism about the external world, conceived of as a world of independently existing entities distinct from sensations. It is argued that the success of the first part depends on a change of perspective, where unobservable entities are viewed as projective complexes vis-à-vis their observable symptoms, or effects. It is also argued that there is an essential difference between the two parts of the argument, which Reichenbach comes (somewhat reluctantly) to accept.     

The troublesome explanandum in Plantinga’s argument against naturalism

Intending to have a constructive dialogue with the combination of evolutionary theory (E) and metaphysical naturalism (N), Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” (EAAN) takes the reliability of human cognition (in normal environments) as a purported explanandum and E&N as a purported explanans. Then, he considers whether E&N can offer a good explanans for this explanandum, and his answer is negative (an answer employed by him to produce a defeater for N). But I will argue that the whole EAAN goes wrong by assuming that R is a qualified explanandum crying out for scientific explanations, since it cannot meet either of the two criteria for any scientifically qualified explanandum: Realizability Criterion and Informativeness Criterion. Hence, EAAN is simply setting a task that E&N, as a scientific theory, will not care at all. Therefore, EAAN cannot substantially shake E&N.     

A user’s guide to the evolutionary argument against naturalism

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating, and cannot be rationally accepted. I distinguish between two different ways of understanding this argument, which I call the "probabilistic inference conception", and the "process characteristic conception". I argue that the former is what critics of the argument usually presuppose, whereas most critical responses fail when one assumes the latter conception. To illustrate this, I examine three standard objections to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism: the Perspiration Objection, the Tu Quoque Objection, and the "Why Can't the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?" Objection. I show that Plantinga's own responses to these objections fail, and propose counterexamples to his first two principles of defeat. I then go on to construct more adequate responses to these objections, using the distinctions I develop in the first part of the paper.     

What’s wrong with the evolutionary argument against naturalism?

Alvin Plantinga has argued that evolutionary naturalism (the idea that God does not tinker with evolution) undermines its own rationality. Natural selection is concerned with survival and reproduction, and false beliefs conjoined with complementary motivational drives could serve the same aims as true beliefs. Thus, argues Plantinga, if we believe we evolved naturally, we should not think our beliefs are, on average, likely to be true, including our beliefs in evolution and naturalism. I argue herein that our cognitive faculties are less reliable than we often take them to be, that it is theism which has difficulty explaining the nature of our cognition, that much of our knowledge is not passed through biological evolution but learned and transferred through culture, and that the unreliability of our cognition helps explain the usefulness of science.     

Analyzing Sterba’s argument

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Strawson’s modest transcendental argument

Although Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ was published over fifty years ago and has been widely discussed, its main argument is still notoriously difficult to pin down. The most common – but in my view, mistaken – interpretation of Strawson’s argument takes him to be providing a ‘relentlessly’ naturalistic framework for our responsibility practices. To rectify this mistake, I offer an alternative interpretation of Strawson’s argument. As I see it, rather than offering a relentlessly naturalistic framework for moral responsibility, Strawson actually develops a transcendental argument, which grounds our moral responsibility practices in the practical perspective of social agents. However, the aims of this essay are not purely interpretative. Strawson’s essay continues to have important implications for a number of issues that arise in the contemporary debates that concern free will and moral responsibility. In particular, it puts significant pressure on moral responsibility sceptics like Derk Pereboom [Living Without Free Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001] who think that the truth of moral responsibility scepticism has no worrisome implications for our lives with others.     

O’Connor’s argument for indeterminism

Timothy O’Connor has recently defended a version of libertarianism that has significant advantages over similar accounts. One of these is an argument that secures indeterminism on the basis of an argument that shows how causal determinism threatens agency in virtue of the nature of the causal relation involved in free acts. In this paper, I argue that while it does turn out that free acts are not causally determined on O’Connor’s view, this fact is merely stipulative and the argument that he presents for this conclusion begs the question.     

On Tichy’s determiners and Zalta’s abstract objects

It is not a common practice to postulate meaning entities treated as objects of some kind. The paper demonstrates two ways of introducing meaning-objects in two logics of natural language, Tichy’s Transparent Intensional Logic and Zalta’s Intensional Logic of Abstract Objects. Tichy’s theory belongs to the Fregean line of thinking, with what he calls ‘constructions’ as Fregean senses, and ‘determiners’ as object-like meaning entities constructed by the senses. Zalta’s theory belongs to Meinongian logics and he postulates a rich realm of abstract Meinongian objects to play the role of meanings. The paper analyses the mechanisms of reference in both conceptions and it offers a comparison of the mediating meaning-objects and the framework designed to expose this mediation in both theories. An attempt is made to expose how the treatment of the meaning entities depends upon the theory of meaning which is assumed.     

Hale’s argument from transitive counting

Synthese - A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications...     

Camus’s Absurd and the Argument against Suicide

There are striking differences between Camus’s early and late philosophical essays, but Camus often claimed that his works were part of one consistent project. This paper argues that, although Camus had a significant change in his views on the consequences of the absurd, throughout his life he also had a common concern with the relation of the absurd to morality. Showing this requires us to clarify what Camus meant by the “absurd,” and identify at least three different uses of the term by Camus: lacking a purpose; lacking an explanation; and a tension between purpose and purposelessness. Clarifying the meaning of “absurd” allows one to show that Camus’s late argument against suicide, often dismissed as inadequate, is valid. This also illustrates the consistency of his concerns over time.

     

Grim’s arguments against omniscience and indefinite extensibility

Patrick Grim has put forward a set theoretical argument purporting to prove that omniscience is an inconsistent concept and a model theoretical argument for the claim that we cannot even consistently define omniscience. The former relies on the fact that the class of all truths seems to be an inconsistent multiplicity (or a proper class, a class that is not a set); the latter is based on the difficulty of quantifying over classes that are not sets. We first address the set theoretical argument and make explicit some ways in which it depends on mathematical Platonism. Then we sketch a non Platonistic account of inconsistent multiplicities, based on the notion of indefinite extensibility, and show how Grim??s set theoretical argument could fail to be conclusive in such a context. Finally, we confront Grim??s model theoretical argument suggesting a way to define a being as omniscient without quantifying over any inconsistent multiplicity.     

Rowe’s new evidential argument from evil: Problems and prospects

This paper examines an evidential argument from evil recently defended by William Rowe, one that differs significantly from the kind of evidential argument Rowe has become renowned for defending. After providing a brief outline of Rowe’s new argument, I contest its seemingly uncontestable premise that our world is not the best world God could have created. I then engage in a lengthier discussion of the other key premise in Rowe’s argument, viz., the Leibnizian premise that any world created by God must be the best world God can create. In particular, I discuss the criticisms raised against this premise by William Wainwright as well as Rowe’s attempt to meet these criticisms. The Wainwright-Rowe exchange, I argue, highlights some insuperable difficulties in Rowe’s challenge to theism.     

Conceiving existence: on Hume’s argument against the distinctness of the idea of existence

There are two questions concerning Hume’s doctrine of existence which have not yet found any persuasive answer: (a) What is his argument in favour of the thesis that there is no distinct idea of existence? (b) What are the semantic and metaphysical consequences of this thesis within his philosophical framework? This paper mainly aims to answer question (a). In order to do that, I will first explain why some reconstructions suggested by interpreters such as Cummins and Bricke are problematic. One of them relies on exegetically dubious presumptions; the other departs too much from Hume’s text. Then, I will offer my own reconstruction that makes maximal use of some principles which are very familiar to Hume’s readers, including the principle stating the similarity between perceptions and their images. After that, I will discuss a potential objection to my reconstruction and make a brief remark on question (b), arguing that, as opposed to numerous interpreters’ concerns, Hume’s thesis that there is no distinct idea of existence does not by itself prevent him from being able to conceive negative existential propositions.