On the church's critique of popular culture

Written by Christopher Neiswonger | 25 August 2010
Posted in Blogs - Christopher Neiswonger

Belief Revision: Part 1

Written by Daniel Martin | 20 August 2010
Posted in Blogs - Daniel Martin

GE Moore was famous for refuting skepticism concerning the external world by raising each of his hands in turn and saying “here’s one hand, and here’s another.”[i] But most philosophers don’t take the project of refuting global skepticism very seriously.[ii] They might offer arguments to rebut or refute it, or they might not.  Why?  Skepticism of this radical kind – which quips that there is no external world – seems incorrigible.  It seems as though no matter how convincing ones arguments are, the skeptic will always be prone to say, “That’s a good argument, but it’s possible that you’re wrong.”  And on the basis of that retort alone, they’ll continue on spouting their skepticism.  What to do with people like this (if any such people exist)?  Simply leave them alone.  They aren’t going to change their minds.  Don’t waste your time.  We’ll talk about replies to this in the next section.

Easy enough.  Don’t argue with skeptics about the external world.  But what about people who seem to be just as “stuck” in their beliefs as the global skeptic?  Here’s a handy evidentialist (more on Evidentialism in the next article) way of knowing when someone might actually change their beliefs:

1) You’ve built a positive case for your position that is more plausible than your opponent’s

2) You’ve sufficiently rebutted or refuted their position

3) You’ve undercut their position by showing them possible defeaters to it

4) You’ve shown them that your position is the only alternative to theirs.  Or, you’ve shown them that among all of the possible alternatives, your position is the most plausible

If after all of that, your interlocutor is unwilling to give up his position and move to yours, he might be bouncing around in the labyrinth between cogency and psychological bias[iii], or perhaps he has one last legitimate concern.  It’s parallel to a response one might make to a skeptical argument that tries to show there is no external world.  Let’s find out what it is.

1.1 Moorean Facts

Here are some commonsense examples of Moorean facts:

1) Things move

2) Induction is rational

3) The past actually happened

Here are more controversial candidates:

1) Moral perception corresponds to reality

2) God (or something like God) exists

3) I am not the same thing as my body (that is, I am not a wholly material, physical object)

Princeton philosopher Thomas Kelly, following GE Moore, wrote a paper titled “Moorean Facts and Belief Revision, or Can the Skeptic Win?”[iv] In the paper he tries to wrestle through this question of skepticism and belief revision.  Suppose, as stated in the intro, you encounter a skeptic who claims that there isn’t really an external world, and so you don’t really have any hands.  They are merely projections of your mind.  An initial Moorean response to the skeptic includes naming something wrong with the argument without knowing what it is.  By assuming that there is a hidden flaw in the argument one can deflate it.  Or the Moorean can sift through the arguments against his position that he’s encountered thus far, and conclude that they were all failures.  Then a prediction can be made that skeptical arguments will continue to fail in the future.  An even stronger policy is to claim that any argument that has the denial of a Moorean fact as its conclusion should be rejected!  Nice.

The thing to note is that, in the end, we believers in the external world can reject the skeptic’s argument even if we can’t put our finger on what’s wrong with it.  Is this dogmatic and narrow-minded?  We’ll find out in the next section which is in the second post of this essay.  I've called it "Belief Revision: Part 2."  And yes, I came up with the title all by myself.

Take me to part 2!

[i] (My paraphrase).  This almost legendary argument comes from his “A Defense of Common Sense” which can be found here: http://www.ditext.com/moore/common-sense.html

[ii] Global skeptics are those that are skeptical about everything.  It’s unlikely that people like this exist, and it’s used more as a heuristic (learning) device in philosophy to test the plausibility of theories and arguments (kind of like a “good” hacker poking holes in the security systems of computers).

[iii] http://www.apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=523:intellectual-honesty-and-psychological-bias&catid=101:daniel-martin&Itemid=84

[iv] The paper can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/Moore.pdf

Belief Revision: Part 2

Written by Daniel Martin | 20 August 2010
Posted in Blogs - Daniel Martin

(Belief Revision continued...)

1.2 Moorean Facts and Belief Revision

When should Mooreans change their beliefs?  Many potential norms of belief revision are available.  The first idea is to treat Moorean facts as special propositions immune to skeptical arguments.  The second is to treat them as being known better than the premises of any argument to the contrary (as stated earlier).  And since it would be unreasonable to abandon a belief known better than its alternative, this has intuitive appeal.  On this view Moorean facts are not special by rule, but by fact.  Kelly builds on this line of argument to formulate a clearer notion of what “knowing better” means.  If a belief is known better than another perhaps it is more plausible.  This sounds good at first blush, but even false beliefs can be plausible, thus plausibility is not the best candidate for belief revision.  We have to figure out a stronger notion of “knowing better” or something relevantly similar.

Perhaps a Moorean fact could be a belief that one is more certain of than other beliefs.  Psychological certainty is confidence in the truth of a belief.[i] Kelly uses this notion of certainty and calls it confidence.  On this view, Moorean facts are beliefs which one is more confident in than other beliefs.  If two beliefs conflict, one should drop the belief that they are less confident in as soon as possible.  However, Kelly criticizes this view because one’s confidence that a belief is true is linked with the perception of the strength (or weakness) of evidence that could be brought against it.  He suggests that waiting for the outcome of belief conflict for resolution is not the issue, but rather what one thinks the outcome should be.  He states the problem as being about the reasonableness of holding a belief after all relevant arguments and evidence have been examined.  This is evidential certainty.  Maintaining belief in a Moorean fact is always more reasonable than conceding to the skeptic.  However, Kelly concedes that this is just a restatement of the Moorean thesis itself.  So where do we go from here?  Something is wrong with the skeptic.

Kelly muses that the skeptic is using a bankrupt philosophical methodology.  G.E. Moore is cast as a particularist[ii] while the skeptic is committed to a type of methodism[iii].  A good method should not destroy our knowledge claims in particular cases the way skepticism does.  Kelly summarizes three possible methods for approaching knowledge: particularism, methodism, and reflective equilibrium – a balance between the two – and hyper versions of both.  Hyper-particularism gives little or no priority to general rules, while hyper-methodism gives little or none to individual cases.  Reflective equilibrium gives neither greater priority over the other, but uses both to achieve a balance.  When judging cases, the reflective equilibrium theorist would agree with the particularist in rejecting the skeptic’s methodism.

The only option left to the skeptic is hyper-methodism.  Kelly charges the skeptic with giving principles a special priority over our judgment about cases.  This is not special pleading for particularism because this intuition is the same in reflective equilibrium and moderate forms of methodism.  Therefore a Moorean need not be a particularist.  Kelly’s final charge against the skeptic turns the dialectic on its head.  It is the skeptic, not the Moorean, who is devoted to a strong metaphilosophical view (a philosophical thesis on how to do philosophy) that seems unreasonable in light of specific cases that undermine it.

The bottom line is it’s the skeptic who’s being dogmatic and holds to a highly dubious method of doing philosophy. Mooreans are not being unreasonable when holding to their beliefs in light of these kinds of skeptical attacks.  And they shouldn’t allow themselves to be goaded into defending their beliefs when skeptics come squawking.

2 Conclusion

When do we finally revise our beliefs?  If one is an evidentialist, then it’s simply a matter of weighing the evidence for and against a view.  Whichever view passes fifty percent plausibility, that’s the view to adopt (see criteria 1-4 in the intro).  However, if one has other, non-evidential reasons for holding a view, then it might take something more, something like undercutting and rebutting defeaters (a defeater for a belief is another belief that somehow contradicts or undermines the former belief.  I’ll talk about these in the next article).

This last part of the dialectic will be the hardest since it involves our psychological biases the most.  What if I don’t want to give up my belief?  That’s fine.  All of the evidence in the world won’t force you to believe that God does or does not exist, macroevolution by natural selection is true, or that the earth is round.  It really is up to you what to decide when faced with formidable arguments that oppose your position.  There need be no pretense about this.  I’ll be the first to say that it will be very difficult for me to give up my belief that God exists, and that’s mostly due to the fact that evidential considerations make up a very small fraction of the reasons for my belief (however, that doesn’t mean that I won’t give up my belief that God exists.  I’ll talk about this and more in the next article).

This brings up an interesting question which happens to be the focus of the next article: If it is unlikely that people will change their beliefs about God’s existence on the basis of theistic arguments, is natural theology valuable at all?  What can we expect from these arguments?  What should we expect?

What’s at stake in having these kinds of conversations and debates in the first place?  Maybe everything or maybe nothing at all.  But I, like many of you, think it’s important to try and find out.

[i] For example, I have psychological certainty in my belief that God exists.  I’m extraordinarily confident about it.  This should not be confused with epistemic certainty, however.  Epistemic certainty would mean that it’s logically impossible that I be wrong about my belief that God exists.  But surely it’s logically possible that I’m wrong about my belief.)  An example of a belief that I claim to hold with epistemic certainty would be: “I exist,” or “2+2=4”.  It’s impossible to be wrong about such beliefs.

[ii] A particularist is one who picks out particular paradigm cases of knowledge and claims them as such.  For example, I know that the computer in front of me is sitting on my lap, I know what I had for breakfast, and I know that there’s a rumble in my tummy.

[iii] A methodist (no, not John Wesley’s brand of Christianity) starts with general principles for ascertaining cases of knowledge and then judges alleged cases against these principles.  This is roughly the opposite of particularism.

A Child's place in the Kingdom of God

Written by Christopher Neiswonger | 11 August 2010
Posted in Blogs - Christopher Neiswonger

A Child's place in the Kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God is one that is visible in the words and works of those that follow Jesus, even if the best that we can do is follow at a distance.  In this, the advancement of the due rights of children is the first and foremost duty of every community.  The strongest protections of law and tradition should be reserved for the weakest members of any given society.  There is no more attractive target for abuse and neglect than children because they have the smallest voice and the least ability answer their harm.  Therefore it is contingent upon all persons of goodwill everywhere to provide that voice and to act toward their safety, protection, education, nourishment, nurture, and grace.  Laws need to be changed, but more needful is the change in attitudes and awareness that can sometimes be achieved only through an intergenerational commitment.  If we change the rules (because that too must be done) we can change the immediate effects and the institutional character of the violations of the rights of women and children, but without a transformation that is holistically interpreted and developmentally balanced, such gains might be short lived or even largely ignored.  Permanent change is impossible.  The kinds of changes that come about through transformational development as a fully integrated view of human flourishing is one that will be hard fought to achieve in the short term, and require ongoing nurture and care to prolong its life.  It can be sustained, but not guaranteed.  These are the kinds of changes that must be renewed in every generation or they will be lost as soon as social conditions out pace their popularity and convenience.  This is why the protection and care of children and the support of their maternal and familial environment is the most needful thing; we can change the future only if we change it now.