On Finitism and the Beginning of the Universe: A Reply to Stephen Puryear

Stephen Puryear argues that William Lane Craig's view, that time as duration is logically prior to the potentially infinite divisions that we make of it, involves the idea that time is prior to any parts we conceive within it (Priority of the Whole with respect to Time: PWT). He objects that PWT entails the Priority of the Whole with respect to Events (PWE), and that it subverts the argument, used by proponents of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) such as Craig, against an eternal past based on the impossibility of traversing an actual infinite sequence of events. I argue that proponents of KCA can affirm that time is not discrete, nor is it continuous with actual infinite number of parts or points, but rather that it is a continuum with various parts yet without an actual infinite number of parts or points. I defend this view, and I reply to Puryear's other objections.     

Evidentialism and skeptical arguments

Cartesian skepticism about epistemic justification (??skepticism??) is the view that many of our beliefs about the external world??e.g., my current belief that I have hands??aren??t justified. I examine the two most influential arguments for skepticism??the Closure Argument and the Underdetermination Argument??from an evidentialist perspective. For both arguments it??s clear which premise the anti-skeptic must deny. The Closure Argument, I argue, is the better argument in that its key premise is weaker than the Underdetermination Argument??s key premise. Next I examine ways of motivating each argument??s key premise. I argue that attempts to motivate them which appeal to one??s having the same evidence in skeptical scenarios, to skeptical hypotheses?? alleged ability to explain our evidence just as well as real world hypotheses, or to the fact that if skeptical scenarios were true everything would appear just as it does all fail to provide any motivation for the premises or for skepticism. But I close by considering a different argument for the key premises and skepticism that lacks the central defect of these other arguments. Future work on skepticism should focus on this final argument at the expense of the others.     

Van Inwagen on the Cosmological Argument

Abstract

In his book Metaphysics, Peter van Inwagen constructs a version of the Cosmological Argument which does not depend on the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He goes on to reject the argument. In this paper, I construct an alternative version of the Cosmological Argument that uses some of van Inwagen's insights and yet is immune to his criticisms. If we suppose that for each contingent truth, there is some at least partial explanation, then it follows that there is some necessary truth that explains the conjunction of all the contingent truths.     

AVOIDING OR CHANGING THE PAST?

Some philosophers argue that any attempt to model changing the past will either be contradictory or really model avoiding the past. Using Nicholas Smith's (1997) argument as a basis, I formulate a generic version of this Avoidance Argument. I argue that the Avoidance Argument fails because (i) it involves an equivocation of what is meant by ‘bifurcation of the time of an event’ and (ii) resolving the equivocation results in the falsity of at least one of the premises. Hence, the Avoidance Argument will not support the claim that changing the past is logically impossible.     

Professor Fisher on suppositions

I first support Alec Fisher's thesis that premises and conclusions in arguments can be unasserted first by arguing in its favor that only it preserves our intuition that it is at least possible that two arguments share the same premises and the same conclusion although not everything that is asserted in the one is also asserted in the other and second by answering two objections that might be raised against it. I then draw from Professor Fisher's thesis the consequence that in suppositional arguments the falsity (or unacceptability) of a supposition does not tell unfavorably in the evaluation of the argument, because the falsity (or unacceptability) of a (nonredundant) premise counts against an argument if and only if that premise is asserted. Finally, I observe that, despite the fact that they are neither expressed nor even alluded to, implicit assumptions in arguments are always asserted, unless the conclusion, but none of the explicit premisses, is unasserted. Hence, apart from an exceptional case of the kind just mentioned, the falsity (or unacceptability) of implicit assumptions always counts against an argument.I am indebted to Thomas E. Gilbert and Alec Fisher for their criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.     

Eternalism and Propositional Multitasking: in defence of the Operator Argument

It is widely held that propositions perform a plethora of theoretical roles. They are believed to be the semantic values of sentences in contexts, the objects of attitudes, the contents of illocutionary acts, the referents of ??that??-clauses, and the primary bearers of truth. This assumption is often combined with the claim that propositions have their truth-values eternally. Following Kaplan??s and Lewis??s Operator Argument, I argue that the compositional semantic values of sentences do not correspond to eternal propositions. Therefore, we cannot hold on to both assumptions at the same time: either we regard the non-eternal entities that realize the compositional role of propositions as fulfilling the remaining theoretical roles, or we abandon the assumption that there is a unique realizer. The Operator Argument has recently come under attack, mainly for its intensional assumptions. However, rejecting these assumptions is not a sufficient defense of eternal propositions as compositional semantic values of sentences. Firstly, we can give a generalized version of the Operator Argument that seems independent of the contested assumptions. Secondly, the extensional alternative to the intensional framework does not allow us to retain eternal propositions as unique semantic values either.     

Counterexamples in sentential reasoning

How do logically naive individuals determine that an inference is invalid? In logic, there are two ways to proceed: (1) make an exhaustive search but fail to find a proof of the conclusion and (2) use the interpretation of the relevant sentences to construct a counterexample—that is, a possibility consistent with the premises but inconsistent with the conclusion. We report three experiments in which the strategies that individuals use to refute invalid inferences based on sentential connectives were examined. In Experiment 1, the participants’ task was to justify their evaluations, and it showed that they used counterexamples more often than any other strategy. Experiment 2 showed that they were more likely to use counterexamples to refute invalid conclusions consistent with the premises than to refute invalid conclusions inconsistent with the premises. In Experiment 3, no reliable difference was detected in the results between participants who wrote justifications and participants who did not.     

Three Arguments from Temporary Intrinsics

The Argument from Temporary Intrinsics is one of the canonical arguments against endurantism. I show that the two standard ways of presenting the argument have limited force. I then present a new version of the argument, which provides a more promising articulation of the underlying objection to endurantism. However, the premises of this argument conflict with the gauge theories of particle physics, and so this version of the argument is no more successful than its predecessors. I conclude that no version of the Argument from Temporary Intrinsics gives us a compelling reason to favor one theory of persistence over another.     

Thomas Aquinas on hylomorphism and the in-act principle

In Summa Theologiae I.76.1 Aquinas presents an argument for the hylomorphic union of body and soul that he attributes to Aristotle. Aquinas builds on Aristotle’s original argument, however, offering his own short but powerful line of reasoning in support of one of the main premises. This additional argument involves an appeal to the principle that nothing acts except insofar as it is in act. This principle has roots in the thought of Aristotle, but is not explicitly used by him. It is, however, fundamental for Aquinas and pervasive throughout his work. In this paper I examine the principle and its implications for Aquinas’ version of the argument. Furthermore, I argue that the principle is foundational to Aquinas’ criticisms of Averroes’ account of the intellective soul and that its inclusion renders Aquinas’ version of the argument incompatible with Averroes’ view.     

St. Anselm's Ontological Argument as Expressive: A Wittgensteinian Reconstruction

We offer a reading of Anselm's Ontological Argument inspired by Wittgenstein which focuses on the fact that the “argument” occurs in a prayer addressed to God, making it a strange argument since as a prayer it seems to presuppose its conclusion. We reconstruct the argument as expressive. Within the religious perspective, the issues are to be focused on the right object not to present an argument for the existence of God. While this sort of reading lets us understand much about the argument, it also opens new avenues of criticism, one of which is the problem of worship.     

Similarity Arguments in the Genetic Modification Debate

In the ethical debate on genetic modification (GM), it is common to encounter the claim that some anti-GM argument would also apply an established, ethically accepted technology, and that the anti-GM argument is therefore unsuccessful. The paper discusses whether this argumentative strategy, the Similarity Argument, is sound. It presents a logically valid, generic form of the Similarity Argument and then shows that it is subject to three types of objection: (i) It does not respect the difference between pro tanto reasons and all-things-considered judgments; (ii) it relies on the unproblematic transferability of reasons from one case to another; and (iii) it runs the risk of equivocations, especially in cases where the anti-genetic-modification argument relies on gradable features. The paper then shows how these issues play out in three specific Similarity Arguments that can be found in the literature. Finally, the paper discusses what conclusions we can draw from the fact that genetic modification and established technologies are similar for the ethical status of genetic modification.     

Leaping to Conclusions: Why Premise Relevance Affects Argument Strength

Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case.     

On the Argument from Divine Arbitrariness

William Rowe in his Can God be Free? (2004) argues that God, if there is a God, necessarily chooses the best. Combined with the premise that there is no best act of creation, this provides an a priori argument for atheism. Rowe assumes that necessarily God is a ??morally unsurpassable?? being, and it is for that reason that God chooses the best. In this article I drop that assumption and I consider a successor to Rowe??s argument, the Argument from Arbitrariness, based on the premise that God does not act arbitrarily. My chief conclusion will be that this argument fails because, for all we know, there can be non-arbitrary divine choices even if there is no best act of creation.     

Why Doomsday Arguments are Better than Simulation Arguments

Inspired by anthropic reasoning behind Doomsday arguments, Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument says: people who think advanced civilisations would run many fully‐conscious simulated minds should also think they're probably simulated minds themselves. However, Bostrom's conclusions can (and should) be resisted, especially by sympathisers with Doomsday or anthropic reasoning. This paper initially offers a posterior‐probabilistic ‘Doomsday lottery’ argument against Bostrom's conclusions. Suggestions are then offered for deriving anti‐simulation conclusions using weaker assumptions. Anti‐simulation arguments herein use more (epistemically and metaphysically) robust reference classes than Bostrom's argument, require no Principles of Indifference, abide better by the total evidence requirement, and yet use empirically plausible priors and likelihoods. However, while Doomsday arguments are probabilistically, epistemically and metaphysically stronger than the Simulation Argument, anthropic reasoning can (and should) refrain from embracing either.     

Conditionals,Context, and the Suppression Effect

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B (e.g., from If it rained, Alicia got wet and It rained to Alicia got wet). Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise (e.g., If she forgot her umbrella, Alicia got wet) can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional as a context‐sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm.     

The Possibility of Inductive Moral Argumets

Abstract

Is it possible to have moral knowledge? ‘Moral justification skeptics’ hold it is not, because moral beliefs cannot have the sort of epistemic justification necessary for knowledge. This skeptical stance can be summed up in a single, eat argument, which includes the premise that ‘Inductive arguments from non-moral premises to moral conclusions are not possible.’ Other premises in the argument may rejected, but only at some cost. It would be noteworthy, therefore, if ‘inductive inferentialism’ about morals were show to be at least possible. Some philosophers may suppose that inductive moral argumets from non-moral premises cannot get off the ground, but I show that a perfectly legitimate inductive moral argument exists. This argument has on-moral premises and a moral conclusion, its premises are related to its conclusion in the right way, and it avoids some of the problems of other, better-know argumets from ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’.     

Does the Traditional Treatment of Enthymemes Rest on a Mistake?

In many actual arguments, the conclusion seems intuitively to follow from the premisses, even though we cannot show that it follows logically. The traditional approach to evaluating such arguments is to suppose that they have an unstated premiss whose explicit addition will produce an argument where the conclusion does follow logically. But there are good reasons for doubting that people so frequently leave the premisses of their arguments unstated. The inclination to suppose that they do stems from the belief that the only way in which an argument's conclusion can follow definitely from its premisses is to follow logically. I argue that this belief is mistaken. I propose a revision of the current generic conception of logical consequence, and its variant specifications, to avoid the paradoxes of strict implication. The revised conception can then be naturally extended to include also what we might call 'enthymematic consequence'. This concept is a kind of consequence, whose properties merit investigation.     

The Limits of Explication

Part of logic consists in uncovering ways in which logical processes of great universality and utility are over-extended, e.g., in the misguided search for the cause of everything. It is suggested here that the search for missing premises defined as premises that make a deduction out of every argument has its own limits of sense. While often useful, it is sometimes just wrongly used by requiring that the reconstructed argument have the same categorical conclusion as the original one; and sometimes inappropriately used when the argument itself does not rest upon assumptions different from itself.     

A curious belief-bias effect: reasoning with false premises and inhibition of real-life information

Many studies have shown that inferential behavior is strongly affected by access to real-life information about premises. However, it is also true that both children and adults can often make logically appropriate inferences that lead to empirically unbelievable conclusions. One way of reconciling these is to suppose that logical instructions allow inhibition of information about premises that would otherwise be retrieved during reasoning. On the basis of this idea, we hypothesized that it should be easier to endorse an empirically false conclusion on the basis of clearly false premises than on the basis of relatively believable premises. Two studies are presented that support this hypothesis.     

Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.