MYTHIC RELIGIOUS NATURALISM

In his book Religion Is Not About God, Loyal Rue presents an evolutionarily based explanation of religion as a means to further the personal and social fulfillment of human beings. Rue argues that religions in the form of myths, adaptive falsities, provide an account of the connection between what is (facts) and what matters (values). Myths are false because they attribute subjectively based values to valueless facts, but adaptive because they motivate personally and socially beneficial actions. He maintains that the current crises of humankind, evidenced by both social conflict and environmental degradation, indicate that the major religious traditions—all of which project values onto some transcendent reality—are failing to serve humanity. To overcome these crises, Rue maintains that we need a new, scientifically based naturalized religion, one that attributes subjectively based values to Nature instead of a transcendent reality. I accept Rue's naturalism about values but reject his subjectivist account of them. Contrary to Rue, I show that the naturalistic fallacy sets no barrier to the existence of objective moral values. Modeling my view on the selection theories used in biology and psychology, I offer a scientifically based explanation of the origin and existence of objective values and support it with empirical findings from developmental psychology. Whether this account can count as religious, I do not address.     

Two contextualist fallacies

I examine the radical contextualists’ two main arguments for the semantic underdeterminacy thesis, according to which all, or almost all, English sentences lack context-independent truth conditions. I show that both arguments are fallacious. The first argument, which I call the fallacy of the many understandings, mistakenly infers that a sentence S is semantically incomplete from the fact that S can be used to mean different things in different contexts. The second argument, which I call the open texture fallacy, wrongly concludes that a sentence S lacks context-independent truth conditions from the fact that there are circumstances in which the truth value of S would be indeterminate. I do however defend the claim that a certain class of sentences not containing any indexicals do lack context-independent truth conditions, and put forward an argument to that effect. But this argument, as I show, does not generalize to all sentences, and thus fails to support the semantic underdeterminacy thesis.     

Of faculties, fallacies, and freedom: dilemma and irony in the secularization of American psychology

In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890) articulated an influential, boundary-setting argument against faculty psychology, subsequently dubbed the Fallacy of the Faculty Psychology. This argument was reiterated in American psychology textbooks for the next several decades, arguably solidifying and simplifying American perceptions of the "old" faculty psychology and establishing belief in the superiority of the "New Psychology." When placed in the context of American theological and philosophical history, however, the New Psychology argument appears unoriginal, somewhat unfair, and deeply (and even tragically) ironic. Despite their best intentions, a fallacy did emerge in the old psychology as they sought psychological foundations for libertarian free will. For those members of the New Psychology still committed to free will, then, the Fallacy argument cut both ways - refuting the fallacy also meant tearing down a long-standing foundation for free will in American psychology. Offering no viable alternative to fill the moral void, the New Psychology appeared at times conflicted with its new deterministic identity.     

The Smuggler's Fallacy

Abstract: David Hume has warned us not to endeavor to derive an “ought” from an “is” (1990, 469–70), reprimanding those who attempt to draw value judgments from empirical facts. But Judith Jarvis Thomson refuses to accept that values and facts are logically disjoint in this manner, primarily because of her worry that such a partition of our moral values from the “facts” will place a grave limitation on any ethical system, namely, that its claims apparently cannot be proven. Consequently, Thomson is on the lookout for some provably true facts that can be used, contra Hume, to draw conclusions about moral values. Thomson begins by rejecting all generalist conceptions of the good (specifically, the utilitarian's identification of the good with pleasure) and proceeds to fracture the good into various kinds of “goodness in a way,” hoping to produce by this disintegration some moral facts that can be used to set ethics on an objective foundation. But I will argue that Thomson's so‐called objective facts are actually nothing but disguised moral claims, and that in attempting to sidestep the classic fallacy identified by Hume, she has blundered into another pitfall—the Smuggler's Fallacy, the offense of concealing her moral conclusions inside the premises of her argument.     

The Slingshot Argument: An Improved Version

In the paper I exploit Frege's notions of sense and synonymity in order to amend the slingshot argument. The main emendation is to replace the assumption about logical equivalence by an assumption about synonymity. While the replaced assumption begs the question about the reference of sentences, the replacing assumption has much more theoretical support from Frege's general conception of sense and reference and the relation between them. In the paper I use a specific notion of synonymity which I believe is faithful to Frege's discussion of the subject. I notice that if a stronger (and to my mind implausible) notion of synonymity is used, my version of the argument fails. The failure is explained by showing that this stronger notion of synonymity enables the assignment of facts, and not truth values, as the references of sentences.     

Responsibility and the ‘Pie Fallacy’

Much of our ordinary thought and talk about responsibility exhibits what I call the ‘pie fallacy’—the fallacy of thinking that there is a fixed amount of responsibility for every outcome, to be distributed among all those, if any, who are responsible for it. The pie fallacy is a fallacy, I argue, because how responsible an agent is for some outcome is fully grounded in facts about the agent, the outcome and the relationships between them; it does not depend, in particular, on how responsible anyone else is for that same outcome. In this paper, I explore how the pie fallacy can arise by considering several different kinds of case in which two or more agents are responsible for the same outcome. I’ll end with some brief remarks on the potential consequences of my arguments for how to think about responsibility in war.

     

Can There Be Brute,Contingent Moral Facts

In this paper I argue that whether or not a world is good can be a contingent fact about the world that is not dependent upon that world's natural facts, or, indeed, upon anyother facts. If so, the property, good, does not supervene upon the facts of nature (or upon any other facts). My argument for this claimis that it is possible to view the very world in which we live (viz. the natural facts that constitute it) as good and to view it as bad.     

The Kuhnian mode of HPS

In this article I argue that a methodological challenge to an integrated history and philosophy of science approach put forth by Ronald Giere almost forty years ago can be met by what I call the Kuhnian mode of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). Although in the Kuhnian mode of HPS norms about science are motivated by historical facts about scientific practice, the justifiers of the constructed norms are not historical facts. The Kuhnian mode of HPS therefore evades the naturalistic fallacy which Giere’s challenge is a version of. Against the backdrop of a discussion of Laudan’s normative naturalism I argue that the Kuhnian mode of HPS is a superior form of naturalism: it establishes contact to the practice of science without making itself dependent on its contingencies.     

Reconsidering Contentious Argument: Augustus DeMorgan on Fallacy

This essay examines Augustus DeMorgan's chapter on fallacy in his Formal Logic (1847) in order to show how DeMorgan's treatment represents an expansion and advance upon Aristotle. It is important that Aristotle clearly distinguishes among dialectical, didactic, demonstrative, and contentious types of argument, based upon the acceptability of premises and the aims of participants. Appropriating Aristotle's list of fallacies, DeMorgan discusses examples that reveal how the charge and countercharge of fallacy function in contentious argument, which is more widespread than Aristotle imagined. DeMorgan's treatment of fallacy is in the spirit of Aristotle because of its focus on dialogue arguments, but it represents an advance because it expands the possible scenes of contention and shows how unshared premises and the will to win inform many argument situations. The emphasis on contention in natural-language argument puts DeMorgan in the company of his l9th century peers, Mill and Whately.     

Evolutionary psychology is compatible with equity feminism, but not with gender feminism: A reply to Eagly and Wood (2011)

I comment on Eagly and Wood's biosocial constructionist evolutionary theory (2011; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-011-9949-9). Although this gender feminist theory allows for evolved physical differences between men and women and evolved psychological similarities for men and women, it fails to consider evolutionary accounts of psychological sex differences. I hypothesize that gender feminists' reluctance to acknowledge that evolution has left different fingerprints on men's and women's bodies and brains stems from two common misunderstandings of evolutionary psychology: the myth of immutability and the naturalistic fallacy. I conclude that although evolutionary psychology is eminently compatible with equity feminism, evolutionary psychology and feminist psychology will conflict as long as the latter adheres to gender feminism and its unwillingness to acknowledge the evidence for evolved psychological sex differences. Gender feminism's dualistic view of evolution hinders the search for and understanding of the proximate and ultimate causes of inequality. Feminist psychology needs to evolve by embracing equity feminism, which has no a priori stance on the origin or existence of differences between the sexes.     

The Caveman's Conscience: Evolution and Moral Realism

An increasingly popular moral argument has it that the story of human evolution shows that we can explain the human disposition to make moral judgments without relying on a realm of moral facts. Such facts can thus be dispensed with. But this argument is a threat to moral realism only if there is no realist position that can explain, in the context of human evolution, the relationship between our particular moral sense and a realm of moral facts. I sketch a plausible evolutionary story that illuminates this relationship. First, the sorts of adaptive pressures facing early humans would have produced more than just potent prosocial emotions, as evolutionary antirealists like to claim; it would have produced judgments—often situated within emotions—to the effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit of conduct, for an early human who cared deeply about how others might respond to her action enjoyed the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans who did not. Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism, moral facts just are facts about how others, ideally situated, would respond to one's conduct. Thus if any objectivist moral constructivism story is true, then we can intelligibly assert that a) our capacity for moral judgment is the product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans and b) some moral judgments are objectively true.     

Book Review

The main purpose of the paper concerns the question of the existence of hard mathematical facts as truth-makers of mathematical sentences. The paper defends the standpoint according to which hard mathematical facts do not exist in semantic models of mathematical theories. The argumentative line in favour of the defended thesis proceeds as follows: (i) slingshot arguments supply us with some reasons to reject various ontological theories of mathematical facts; (ii) there are two ways of blocking these arguments: through the rejection of the principle of extensionality for individual terms (Ext) or through the rejection of the principle of Wittgenstein; (iii) the first way cannot be accepted because it leads to the practice of softening mathematical facts; (iv) the second way, called fine-graining facts, cannot be accepted because it also results in the practice of softening facts. (v) Hence, only soft mathematical facts (SMFs) can be introduced into semantic models of mathematical theories. Because they should be rather interpreted as mental representations of mathematical objects, they no longer satisfy the semantic role of truth-makers in relation to mathematical sentences. The argument formulated in the paper is based on the analysis of mathematical extensions of the basic non-Fregean logic. Sixty-two definitions of potential fact-identity connectives are also presented. The paper's conclusion may be interpreted as undermining the situational paradigm of building semantics for mathematical languages.     

Empirical evaluation and justification of methodologies in psychological science.

The purpose of this article is to describe a relatively new movement in the history and philosophy of science, naturalism, a form of pragmatism emphasizing that methodological principles are empirical statements. Thus, methodological principles must be evaluated and justified on the same basis as other empirical statements. On this view, methodological statements may be less secure than the specific scientific theories to which they give rise. The authors examined the feasibility of a naturalistic approach to methodology using logical and historical analysis and by contrasting theories that predict new facts versus theories that explain already known facts. They provide examples of how differences over methodological issues in psychology and in science generally may be resolved using a naturalistic, or empirical, approach.     

Scepticism,defeasible evidence and entitlement

The paper starts by describing and clarifying what Williamson calls the consequence fallacy. I show two ways in which one might commit the fallacy. The first, which is rather trivial, involves overlooking background information; the second way, which is the more philosophically interesting, involves overlooking prior probabilities. In the following section, I describe a powerful form of sceptical argument, which is the main topic of the paper, elaborating on previous work by Huemer. The argument attempts to show the impossibility of defeasible justification, justification based on evidence which does not entail the (allegedly) justified proposition or belief. I then discuss the relation between the consequence fallacy, or some similar enough reasoning, and that form of argument. I argue that one can resist that form of sceptical argument if one gives up the idea that a belief cannot be justified unless it is supported by the totality of the evidence available to the subject—a principle entailed by many prominent epistemological views, most clearly by epistemological evidentialism. The justification, in the relevant cases, should instead derive solely from the prior probability of the proposition. A justification of this sort, that does not rely on evidence, would amount to a form of entitlement, in (something like) Crispin Wright’s sense. I conclude with some discussion of how to understand prior probabilities, and how to develop the notion of entitlement in an externalist epistemological framework.     

Epistemic modals, relativism and assertion

I think that there are good reasons to adopt a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a <world, time> pair). Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It's easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions of this kind, and how to understand what we'd be up to in our use of sentences like ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', if they have such peculiar truth conditions. After providing a very quick argument to motivate a relativist view of epistemic modals, I bring out and attempt to resolve this problem in making sense of the role of assertions with relativist truth conditions. Solving this problem should be helpful in two ways: first, it eliminates an apparently forceful objection to relativism, and second, spelling out the relativist account of assertion and communication will help to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it's interesting. Thanks to Brian Weatherson, John Hawthorne, Daniel Stoljar, Frank Jackson, Ben Blumson, Seth Yalcin, Karen Bennett, Kent Bach, Matthew Weiner, Jonathan Kvanvig, Eric Swanson, David Chalmers, Agustin Rayo, Dustin Locke, Aaron Bronfman, Michael Allers, Ivan Mayerhofer, and to the participants at the BSPC 2005 for helpful discussion.     

Occasions of Identity: The Metaphysics of Persistence,Change, and Sameness

We divide analytic metaphysics into naturalistic and non-naturalistic metaphysics. The latter we define as any philosophical theory that makes some ontological (as opposed to conceptual) claim, where that ontological claim has no observable consequences. We discuss further features of non-naturalistic metaphysics, including its methodology of appealing to intuition, and we explain the way in which we take it to be discontinuous with science. We outline and criticize Ladyman and Ross's 2007 epistemic argument against non-naturalistic metaphysics. We then present our own argument against it. We set out various ways in which intellectual endeavours can be of value, and we argue that, in so far as it claims to be an ontological enterprise, non-naturalistic metaphysics cannot be justified according to the same standards as science or naturalistic metaphysics. The lack of observable consequences explains why non-naturalistic metaphysics has, in general, failed to make progress, beyond increasing the standards of clarity and precision in expressing its theories. We end with a series of objections and replies.     

Can ‘Big’ Questions be Begged?

Traditionally, logicians construed fallacies as mistakes in inference, as things that looked like good (i.e., deductively valid) arguments but were not. Two fallacies stood out like a sore thumb on this view of fallacies: the fallacy of many questions (because it does not even look like a good argument, or any kind of argument) and the fallacy of petitio principii (because it looks like and is a good argument). The latter is the concern of this paper. One possible response is to say that the tradition is right about the concept of fallacy but wrong about its extension: petitio principii is not a fallacy. If the only proper ways to criticize an argument are to say that it is invalid or that it is unsound, and petitio principii is not criticisable on either of these counts, then calling it a fallacy is tantamount to saying we should prefer invalid or unsound arguments Robinson (Analysis, 31(4): 114 ,1971). I will present a third way to logically criticize arguments and show that fallacious instances of petitio principii are so criticisable while other instances of petitio principii are non-fallacious; hence, this fallacy is not a reductio of the Standard Treatment. It is not my intention in this paper to come out on the side of any of the competing theories—the Standard Treatment, the dialectical theories, and the epistemic theories—as general theories of fallacy. I show only that petitio principii can be handled by something closely resembling the Standard Treatment in so far as that, on entirely logistical principles, there can be made a distinction such that circular arguments form at best a degenerate kind of argument. Circular arguments look like good arguments but are not, not because they are deductively invalid (which they are not) but because they do not deserve to be called arguments at all.     

Psychology of Science/Theology of Science: Reaching Out or Narrowing?

Formalizing a “psychology of science” today will constrain intellectual freedom in ways more likely stultifying than liberating. We should be more improvisational in seeking ideas from academic psychology to develop a more comprehensive purview. I suggest that a psychology of science should look at systematic theology and empirical theology. Liberal theologians have long experience trying to distill from religion those structural aspects that affirm openness in a search for truth. Science, as well as religion, has its myths and rituals, but theologians are more experienced than scientists at a large mythohistorical scale. There are distortions in the extreme degree to which psychological science has traditionally emphasized empiricism, positivism, hypothesis testing, and falsifiability. I argue for less critical reduction and more creative augmentation. This could include looking outside academia at cognitive competencies of people in trades. Exaggerated parsimony is an old story. This is illustrated by the opposition to David Hartley's 1749 theory of neural oscillations. There is an inexorable “margin of uncertainty” where scientific prediction and control can never outstrip the new uses to which human beings put ideas. Facts and values interact in this margin; theology has long made a home there, but scientists sometimes have been excessive in rejecting the “naturalistic fallacy.” There is also often a degree of disingenuousness in psychology's reluctance to take subjective phenomena seriously; here there may be lessons in how empirical theology has handled subjectivity, as well as in taking an honest look at the way much of the methodology of experimental psychology incorporates subjective assessments. Feist's book is a start, but these things need more thought before codifying a psychology of science.