It has been over a month since my last post, and for this I apologize. I doubt if I will be posting any more frequently in the near future as I am getting married on August 2 and moving from Philadelphia to Los Angeles immediately after the honeymoon. I'm sure the Internet will get by just fine without me.
Right now, however, I do have a bit of time, and I want to discuss an argument for phenomenalism about the physical world. When I wrote a while back about the idealist strategy, I said that the second step was to "argue that our physical statements - both ordinary statements about physical objects and statements about the discipline of physics - are best construed as talking about perception." What I want to do here is to unpack this statement. First, let's examine what the argument is supposed to do, and then we'll look at the argument as it appears in a brief section of Berkeley's Three Dialogues.
This piece of the argument is a reductio against representative realism. The first step of the idealist strategy is supposed to eliminate direct realism (the view that the very same things we experience in sense perception exist mind-independently and are known by us directly). I will assume this has already been accomplished. This leaves representative realism, the view that our perception are representations of mind-independent reality.
There are effectively two flavors of representative realism, both of which are, I think, fairly popular among philosophers today. The first is causal representation, which claims that our mental states come to represent things in the world in virtue of having been caused by them. This view has been supported by Fred Dretske. It has some problems which many philosophers have tried to shore up by a variety of strategies. The most important problem for it is the possibility of misrepresentation - e.g., how can we mistake a cow for a horse (from a distance, in the dark) if horse-thoughts represent horses precisely because they are caused by horses (but this one was caused by a cow)? I will not dwell on this objection, but there is a vast literature on it.
The second flavor is primitive or mysterian representation. This view takes representation as a primitive -i.e. one of the fundamental concepts of the theory, which does not admit of further analysis. The main objections to this view have to do with (1) whether you can adequately define the formal properties of representation in a coherent fashion, and (2) whether representation makes a good primitive. The latter is probably the most important, but the question of what makes something a good or bad primitive is extremely complex.
For the idealist's purposes, what matters is that when I perceive a table, there are two things: the 'real' table, and my perception or representation of the table. These are not the same thing. This much is conceded by the representative realist. It is customary to refer to the mental tokening which represents the table as a 'table', after the way we discuss words in philosophy of language, but this is going to get really confusing in this particular argument, so from here on out I will use tablei to refer to mind-independent table objects, tablem to refer to mind-dependent table-representations, and 'table' to refer to the English word spelled t-a-b-l-e. (I'm not sure how much less confusing that will be, but I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to follow.)
Suppose the phenomenalist grants, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as a tablei and that, under ordinary circumstances, there is a one-to-one correlation between tablesi and tablesm. Now listen to Berkeley:
Ask the gardener, why he thinks yonder cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him, why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real being, and saith it is, or exists; but that which is not perceivable, the same, he saith, hath no being. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 234)
The realist needs to argue that 'table' refers to the tablei. Now, Berkeley's principal target is Locke, and this argument immediately overcomes Locke. Consider:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? ... To this I answer, in one word, from experience ... Our observation employed either about external, sensible objects; or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that, which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.2, emphasis original)
More recently the cause has been taken up by Kripke:
When I refer to heat, I refer not to an internal sensation that someone may have, but to an external phenomenon which we perceive through the sense of feeling; it produces a characteristic sensation which we call the sensation of heat. Heat is the motion of molecules. (Naming and Necessity, 129)
The phenomenalist wants to argue that this is not a good analysis of 'heat'. Heati isn't a sensation. It can't be felt. If you ask the gardener to define 'cherry tree', he will describe a cherry treem: something that is seen, felt, smelled, etc. If you ask an ordinary person to define 'table', she will describe something that looks and feels (and therefore is) flat, that you can set objects on, etc. No one who has not been reading Aristotle, Locke, and friends will say anything about a "material substratum." No one will say "the object that causes my table perceptions." The table doesn't cause something to feel flat, the table itself feels flat.
Physicalists tend to be very adamant about believing only in the objects of their senses, but then begin describing things that can't be sensed at all, and claiming that those are the objects of their senses. If the phenomenalist can make this case that physical-talk is best understood as referring to objectsm, then matter will be superfluous to metaphysical explanations of the world we experience. Furthermore, if Kripke's "pass-through" reference fails, then his theory will make it impossible to refer to objectsi, for the same reason it is impossible for Putnam's brains in vats to wonder whether they are brains in vats.
Commentators have long recognized the existence of two distinct strains of thought in Berkeley's discussions of how our perceptions give rise to something that is properly called a world. According to the phenomenalist strain, the world is quite simply composed of perception and it becomes a world, rather than simply an unrelated collection of perceptions, by means of the orderliness with which God causes perceptions. According to the Platonist strain, the world (and each object in it) has an archetype in the divine mind and our perceptions are perceptions of the world because what we perceive is an "ectype" of that archetype. John Foster has argued that Berkeley is a reductive phenomenalist in the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, which he published in 1710, but that by the publication of the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in 1713 Berkeley has become a Platonist (The Case for Idealism, pp. 28-32). However, Berkeley cannot adopt the Platonist view so strictly as Foster tries to make him: to do so would undermine his refutation of skepticism. Berkeley needs to affirm that there is a sense in which our perceptions are the world so that we cannot be mistaken about it. Berkeley explicitly affirms this in Principles 87: "Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or images, referred to things or archetypes existing without the mind, then are we involved all in scepticism." Furthermore, despite this statement, the language of archetypes as it is used in the Dialogues is also used in the Principles: "whoever shall reflect, and take care to understand what he says, will, if I mistake not, acknowledge that all sensible qualities are alike sensations, and alike real; that where the extension is, there is the colour too, to wit, in his mind, and that their archetypes can exist only in some other mind..." (99). Foster does point to Principles 48 as showing that the idea of archetypes in the divine mind is regarded as a possibility in the Principles, but he claims that "in the Principles, the role of God as a perceiver of physical objects is left as a mere possibility and on to which Berkeley seems to attach little importance ... But in his later work, the Three Dialogues, the preceptive role of God takes on a new significance." (p. 28) Be that as it may, the presence of the doctrine in the Principles would seem to be indicative that Berkeley does not regard the two models as mutually exclusive in the way that Foster does. Finally, in Dialogues 175ff. Berkeley argues again for his doctrine that the esse of physical things is percipi. So Foster's view must be rejected and we must find a way to reconcile the two views.
I have just finished reading "Berkeley's Christian Neoplatonism, Archetypes, and Divine Ideas" by Stephen H. Daniel (Journal of the History of Philosophy 39:2 (April 2001): 239-258). This paper is in part an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly opposing views.[1] Readers of this blog can probably predict what I am going to say the solution is. What is the solution to every problem in Berkeley's philosophy? Sense perception as language. Daniel gets to this by rather a roundabout path, investigating Gregory's and Berkeley's accounts of the Trinity and of human minds, but here is his ultimate conclusion:
To the extent that our ideas seem significant or intelligible to ourselves alone, they are ectypes: their existence consists simply in being perceived by a particular mind. An archetype is the meaning of that idea and all others like it as determined by their place in the sequence of ideas that inscribes history. A divine idea is God's active comprehension of a thing in an eternal communicative relation to all other things ... and, as such, identifies the mind of God as a matrix of discursive exchange. By learning the connections of ideas in history - that is, by "endeavoring to understand those signs instituted by the Author of Nature" (P[rinciples] 66) - we learn about ourselves and "the nature of things" (D[ialogues] 245). For all practical purposes, this amounts to nothing other than the contemplation of archetypes. Through such contemplation, we recognize oursleves not as substances distinct from God but as participants in the divine discourse. (p. 258)
I want to state the same thing a little differently: the world is a language. Words in a language have meaning independent of what each individual speaker hears or says or thinks, but not independent of what all individual speakers hear or say or think. The structure of a language - both in terms of syntax and in terms of morphology and lexicography - arises from the words and thoughts of individual speakers and is not anything over and above them in terms of existence. Nevertheless, we speak of a grammar and a lexicon for a language as some sort of abstract entities - like perfect "archetypes" of the language!
In the case of the divine language, God is privileged as a speaker. The rest of us "understand" and "speak" the language in more or less the way a domesticated dog "understands" and "speaks" English when it responds to what the humans around it say by, for instance, jumping up excitedly at the word "walk." Or perhaps a more apt comparison would be to a gorilla who can hear English and answer in American sign language. Whatever the case, it is clear that God is the author of the language, and thus creates the grammar and lexicon. As such, it is true both that the world simply is our perception of it and that it is the ectype of an archetype in the divine mind. As Daniel argues, this archetype is not found in God's passive perception - since God is not passive - but in his active will, his will to bring about the world. In this way, Berkeley is both a phenomenalist and a Platonist.
[1] Along the way the paper also argues that Berkeley holds a theory of mind modeled on Gregory of Nyssa's trinitarian theology and which eliminates the need for an immaterial substratum of mind distinct from volition and perception. Daniel finds support for this at Principles 98: "whoever shall go about to ... abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task." I like this proposal since I am often not certain that I understand the meaning of the word "substance." However, I don't understand the proposal very well due to lack of familiarity with Gregory, and, in any case, I don't think it can be Berkeley's view, due to Dialogues 233-234.
There is a particular strategy of argument generally employed by idealists in their arguments against materialism/physicalism/scientific realism and/or substance dualism. The strategy originates primarily with Berkeley. Some of the Parmenides fragments sound similar, but, absent context, it is not possible to determine exactly what he intended. Hume and Kant developed their metaphysical systems largely in response to it, and it is similar to the arguments of the so-called "modern Idealists" which Moore set out to refute. Finally, the strategy is, in recent literature, explicitly adopted in John Foster's The Case for Idealism, which I am currently reading. The strategy goes like this (note that I am not giving an argument, but an outline of an argumentative strategy):
There have been a variety of takes on this strategy, but the strategy itself remains fairly constant, and is certainly held in common between Berkeley and Foster.
Though I find a lot of Foster's arguments problematic, his part 2, "the topic-neutrality thesis," is, I think, an excellent example of steps 1 and 2.
The answer to the question in the title of this post may seem obvious (after all, isn't Bayesianism all about probabilities?), but I think that the long discussion that followed Lauren's post on van Fraassen's objection to Bayesianism from quantum mechanics shows that it isn't clear at all - or at least, that it wasn't clear to either of us as we were discussing the issue. I think that I now understand why. In this post, I'm going to give three answers to this question, which I will call The Primitivist Account (P), The Kripkean Possible Worlds Account (KPW), and the Lewisian Possible Worlds Account (LPW). This post will discuss what each view means, and where vagueness enters each account. I will also be identifying three crucial problems with (P) and showing how each of the other views answers these difficulties.
Here are brief definitions of each view, and how each one relates subjective degrees of rational confidence to probabilities (I will explain in more depth later).
Part of the reason for the previous confusion is that I was more or less assuming (P), and I think that Lauren had noticed some serious problems with it. First, a word on the reason for my assumption, and then I will try to state Lauren's objections.
(P) may be the dominant interpretation of Bayesianism. I don't really know. But there is good reason why someone reading the literature might think it's the dominant interpretation: it maps especially well to how Bayesian philosophers actually apply Bayesianism. Most philosophers who apply Bayesian reasoning (myself included) do it by simply making up numbers that are supposed to represent their degrees of confidence. Where do these numbers come from? We simply observe that we have varying degrees of confidence about different beliefs, and map these degrees of confidence to the real numbers between 0 and 1. Vagueness comes in from the fact that we don't have mathematically precise degrees of confidence, and our numbers are simply made up from our imprecise degrees of confidence, rather than computed somehow.
Now, as I have said, I believe that three important questions came out in our previous discussion which this theory leaves unanswered:
(P) does not answer these questions. This is, of course, to be expected from a theory called "primitivism," but I think the third question is particularly problematic. In the previous discussion, it was van Fraassen's assumption that we should do this very thing that brought up the issue. However, Bayesianism really needs these principles. Is it possible to provide an analysis of degrees of rational confidence that adequately answers these questions? (KPW) and (LPW) will attempt this very thing.
(KPW) is inspired by Kripke's treatment of possible worlds in terms of state spaces in the 1980 preface to Naming and Necessity, pp. 15-20. Kripke here argues that possible worlds are the same sorts of things as the "states" used in school probability theory, the difference being that possible worlds are maximally specific. Now, consider a view according to which the state space of Bayesian reasoning is the space of all epistemically possible worlds - that is, all the world-states (which are abstractions just like dice-states) which might for all we know be actual. Note that not all of these may be really possible. For instance, the Anselmian God either exists or does not exist, with logical necessity, but his existence and non-existence may both be epistemically possible for a particular person. So, when we say that we have subjective degree of confidence .5 for a given proposition, we are saying that that proposition holds in half of all epistemically possible worlds.
This view will be helped by Lewis's observation about the relationship between propositions and possible worlds: namely, that every proposition picks out a set of possible worlds, the worlds in which it obtains. (Lewis wants this to be a reductive analysis of propositions, but we need not do that.) So, consider any given proposition you believe. There is a set of possible worlds in which that proposition obtains. The set of epistemically possible worlds (for you) is the intersection of the sets for all the propositions you believe.
The (KPW) answer to question (1) has already been given - Bayesian degrees of confidence are probabilities. Let's proceed to give an interpretation of the math on (KPW).
Bayes' theorem is a relation between an initial probability - a probability over some state space S - and a conditional probability - a probability over some subset S' of S. Usually, we consider some proposition p and some evidence e. We already have assigned a particular degree of confidence to p and we want to adjust our confidence in light of learning the new evidence e. We use Bayes's theorem to calculate P(p|e). What has happened here? The new evidence e has eliminated certain formerly epistemically possible worlds - namely, all the worlds according to which ~e. In order to computer P(p|e) we have to know something about the relationship between p and e. In particular, we have to know P(e|p), P(p) and P(e) (all of them over the initial state space S). This involves knowing how many of our epistemically possible worlds certain conditions obtain in.
The (KPW) answer to question (3) should now be quite clear. Probabilities for events like dice rolls are, on this view, actually just special cases of degrees of subjective confidence. Why is there a 1/6 probability of a single die rolling 1? Because in 1/6 of all epistemically possible worlds it will land 1. (We should think of these world-states as covering the whole history of the world, so future events can be handled the same as past or present events.) In our school probability exercises, we simplify the case by supposing there are only 6 worlds. In fact, there are 6 sets of worlds. We know that the worlds will divide more or less evenly (we assume we know with certainty that the die will be rolled), because most of the propositions we are uncertain about vary independently of the result of the die roll. The ones that don't vary independently (e.g. propositions stating that the die is unfair in some particular way) are, for all we know, as likely to favor one side of the die as another.
Vagueness enters (KPW) by virtue of the fact that the worlds are created by us. They don't exist objectively. As such, there is vagueness as to how many worlds there are, and there is vagueness as to whether certain propositions are true in certain worlds. These things are simply not fully defined. We should nevertheless be able to fix upper and lower bounds by considering all of the possible resolutions of the vagueness (actually, we can probably do better by figuring out in advance which resolutions will lead to high values, and which to low values). In practice, however, we do something more like the die role case: we eliminate all the propositions that vary (more or less) independently (as far as we know) of the propositions under consideration, to divide the epistemically possible worlds into sets, and then consider each set as a single underspecified world.
(LPW) is very similar to (KPW) in its answers to the three questions. (LPW) holds that we are talking about real possible worlds, which are epistemically accessible - that is, which might, for all we know, be the world we're in. Vagueness on (LPW) is different. Because the worlds are fully defined and there is an objective truth about how many there are, there is only one source of vagueness properly so-called: vagueness about whether a given world is epistemically accessible. However, there is also second-order uncertainty - uncertainty about whether a certain world is genuinely possible, or whether a given proposition obtains in a certain world.
These two theories improve on (P) by providing explanations for why we use Bayesian reasoning the way we do, and why it works like probability theory at all. They also allow us to define our degrees of confidence much more clearly.
Hello. As a brief introductory reminder, I'm Lauren, Kenny's fiance, and a guest blogger here when I have time (which isn't very often.) However, I am going to take some time to discuss a paper by Bas C. van Fraassen, Conditionalizing on Violated Bell's Inequalities, in which he claims that quantum mechanics creates problems for Bayesian epistemology. I have two main points to make in response, the first is that he doesn't actually need quantum mechanics for his argument, and the second is where he has failed to account for the effect of choosing which events to talk about, which changes the conclusions of his paper. I will treat these in reverse order, though.
A brief summary of van Fraassen's argument is this:
In an experimental set up involving measuring the spin of entangled photons, there are two detectors, each of which has a 50% probability of detecting something (or registering something) for each run of the experiment. (Here I'm going to be slightly sloppy and use "register something" and "detect something" interchangeably to mean "made a positive spin reading".)
However, the detectors are not uncorrelated- the probability of one detecting something is related to the cosine of the angle between the detectors squared. This is well established in quantum mechanics.
Then, van Fraasen imagines a situation where someone named Hilary is asked to predict whether or not one of the detectors registers something. She initially answers that the probability is 50%. She is then told that the other, hereafter referred to as the second, detector did register something, but she is not told what the angle is between the detectors, although she does know of the cosine squared relation. She is then asked the same question, but she now no longer knows what the probability is, because she knows it could be anything between 0% and 100% depending on the angle between the detectors.
Van Fraassen then asks, if Hilary were forced to bet, what the best thing would be for her to do. He concludes that she ought to ignore this new piece of information, even though it is relevant to the probability of the first detector registering something, and to bet the first detector registers something 50% of the time, because, he claims, she would break even doing this. Then, van Fraassen questions why Hilary is justified in ignoring the information about the second detector, since it would change her opinion. This is especially a problem for Bayesian inference, which claims that we should include all relevant evidence in our probability calculus, and as we include more relevant evidence, our probabilities become "better".
I will argue that her initial answer of 50% is actually incorrect, because of the effect of only asking her about situations where the second detector registers something, which is not a sufficiently random subset, with respect to the first detector, of all the events. Thus, her second answer is, in fact, the better answer, and Bayesian inference still stands.
Consider, for a moment, this example. (I'll explain in a moment how it relates.) I have a perfectly fair coin, which you know is fair. I then flip the coin, and ask you to guess whether or not it's heads. You win if, when I ask you, your guess matches the coin. As is well known, you should guess heads 50% of the time, to maximize your likelihood of winning. If you answer yes 49% or 51% of the time, odds are that you'll win less often than if you answered yes 50% of the time. Now, however, imagine that I flip the same fair coin, but that I look at the coin before I ask you to guess whether or not it is heads. If it's tails, then I ask you to guess whether or not it's heads. (If it's heads, I just ignore it and flip the coin again, although you don't know this.) In this case, your likelihood of winning is greatest if you never guess heads. Similarly, if I only asked you when the coin landed heads, you likelihood of winning is greatest if you always answer heads. So, when we ask someone only about a specific subset of events, the properties of that subset are relevant to rate someone should guess at. So then, if you are playing this game with someone and tell them that you're only going to ask them about a certain subset of events, but don't tell them what the subset is, they will be at a loss as to what rate they should guess, and also if they continue to guess yes 50% of the time, they will not necessary break even (depending on your subset), even though the coin lands heads 50% of the time.
Now let's look at van Fraassen's argument again, and ask whether we are, at any point, asking Hilary to guess on only a certain subset of events, and if so, whether the features of that subset was chosen would influence the probability. Recall that we do inform Hilary that the second detector did register something. Now, since the second detector will not always register something, and since we presumably are not lying to her, we are thus picking out a subset of the events, namely, the ones where the second detector goes off. Next we need to question whether this is effectually a random subset with respect to the first detector (the one we are asking Hilary about). If it is, then she will still break even guessing it detected something 50% of the time, but if it's not, then just like in the coin game above, she will no longer break when guessing yes 50% of the time. However, we know that there is a correlation between the first detector registering something and the second detector registering something (namely, that this correlation is related to the cosine of the angle squared), and so this is a NOT an effectually random subset with respect to the first detector. Hence, Hilary will not break even by guessing 50%.
But wait, you say- doesn't the first detector have to register "yes" 50% of the time? Then why doesn't she break even? Yes, the detector does register yes 50% of the time- but only when we're talking about averaging over ALL the events. Similarly, the coin lands heads up 50% of the time, over ALL the flips I make- but not over all the flips I ask you about. Similarly, we're not asking Hilary about all the events- only some of them. If you were asking Hilary about all of them, independent of what the second detector did, then she would break even guessing yes 50% of the time. But this isn't the case, since we're only asking her about ones where the second detector registered something. Thus, the error in van Fraassen's argument is when he says that "For at the right [first} side the clicks come at the 50% rate, and changes in Hilary's personal information or opinions do not affect that at all. Thus Evelyn [a hypothetical person standing at the first detector] at least would be right to advise Hilary to just ignore the ...information [about the second detector]." Evelyn would NOT be right to advise that since Hilary is being asked about a specific subset of the events Evelyn is seeing, and those events DON'T come in at the 50% rate. Evelyn should inform her of the rate for that subset of events.
Van Fraassen then goes on to investigate "Yet by what epistemic principle can one license ignoring evidence that would clearly change one's opinion if heeded?". However, this isn't necessary, because as we've seen, Hilary shouldn't ignore the evidence she has gained, because if she continues guessing 50%, she won't break even, as van Fraassen claimed. Thus, she does have a "better" probability after the evidence from the second detector than she did beforehand.
Now, you may be wondering how "I don't know anything" is "better" than 50%. The reason is that when we initially asked Hilary what the probability was of the first detector registering something and she answered 50%, she was implicitly assuming that there was no correlation between whether or not we asked here about the first detector and what the first detector registered. To be correct, she should have said "Depends- was this a randomly selected run?". As we've seen, it was not. So her answer of 50% is actually wrong- not because the second detector doesn't register something 50% of the time, but because we're asking her about a subset that she knows nothing about instead of the entire set. The extra information tells her that she was wrong in that assumption, and thus, the probability "something between 0% and 100%" is in fact better than "50%".
Now on to my second point, that this doesn't actually require quantum mechanics. Hopefully by stripping away the quantum mechanics, it will become clearer where the flaw is van Fraassen's argument is. So here is an argument isomorphic to van Fraassen's, but without the quantum mechanics.
Consider this case:
Assume that it rains in Timbuktu is 50% of the time.
Also assume that due to the global air flow, ocean currents, and everything else, there is a correlation between whether or not it snows in Philadelphia and whether it rains in Timbuktu. Examples of such relations would be:
1) Whenever it snows in Philadelphia, it always rains in Timbuktu, and never rains any other time. (In this case, it'd snow 50% of the time in Philadelphia).
2) Whenever it snows in Philadelphia, it never rains in Timbuktu, and always rains when it's not snowing in Philadelphia. (In this case again, it'd snow 50% of the time in Philadelphia).
Assume that I know this exact mathematical relation, but that Kenny doesn't. He can know the form of it, but not it's exact mathematical value.
Additionally assume that Kenny and I are both aware that it's not snowing here in Philadelphia.
Finally, assume Kenny has a friend in Timbuktu.
Now, assume I tell Kenny that if it rains in Timbuktu, I will make him hot chocolate. Kenny would like to know what the odds are that I'm going to make him hot chocolate. So Kenny calls his friend in Timbuktu. We expect the conversation to goes something like this:
Kenny: "Hi. What are the odds that it is going to rain there?"
Kenny's friend: "50%."
However, the conversation really should go like this:
Kenny: "Hi. What are the odds that is going to rain there?"
Kenny's friend: "I know that it depends on whether it's snowing over there, but I don't know how."
It's wrong for Kenny's friend in Timbuktu to say 50%, because the probability of it raining in Timbuktu is actually conditional on the probability of snow in Philadelphia, and I am forcing the case where it's not snowing in Philadelphia. Essentially, I'm making a cut and ignoring the days when it snows in Philadelphia. So, the relevant probability isn't the probability that it rains in Timbuktu on any day, but the probability that, on days it isn't snowing in Philadelphia, it rains in Timbuktu. Now, if Kenny bet that in 50% of these cases he'd get hot chocolate, as van Fraassen recommends, he's not necessarily going to average out even- in the first case, he's never going to get any hot chocolate. In the second case, he'll always get hot chocolate. Thus, the "extra information" that it depends on whether it's snowing in Philadelphia is not at all irrelevant, nor should he ignore it. I hope this case is somewhat clearer than the quantum mechanical case in his paper.
I read a very interesting paper by James Van Cleve today, regarding a pair of arguments originally made by Jorge Luis Borges to the effect that either Berkeley's idealism or Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernables could be used to prove the unreality of time. The paper is "Time, Idealism, and the Identity of Indiscernables," Philosophical Perspectives 16 (2002): 379-393. Van Cleve identifies three "axioms of time order" which Borges' arguments are designed to undermine:
- Given any two events e and f, either e precedes f or f precedes e or e and f are simultaneous.
- If e precedes f, then f does not precede e. (As a corollary, no event precedes itself.)
- If e precedes f and f precedes g, then e precedes g. (p. 379, emphasis original)
Van Cleve's paper is focused on showing that Borges' arguments, while valid, rely on an interpretation of Leibniz that is actually implausible (that is, a defensible interpretation according to which Leibniz asserts something that is not plausibly true), and an interpretation of Berkeley that is both exegetically and actually implausible. However, he also finds time to report a challenge to axiom 2:
... it must be noted that there are thinkers who do not take the irreflexivity of temporal precedence [i.e. the principle that no event precedes itself] as sacrosanct. Henri Bois objected to Neitzsche's doctrine of eternal return that it was not what it purported to be - that the supposedly infinitely repeating linear sequence of ABCDEA'B'C'D'E', etc. would really be a loop, given the identity of A and A', B and B' ... Bois apparently takes seriously the possibility of an event's preceding itself ... In other words the failure of our irreflexivity axiom is not taken to be a breakdown of time, but is taken instead to be precisely what is involved in looping time. In a similar vein, Goedel [sic] and others have pointed out there are solutions to the field equations of general relativity that involve closed timelike curves, in which an event is preceded by itself ...At any rate, there is arguably nothing iimpossible about an event's preceding itself if it happens as part of a loop in time. Matters are otherwise if it happens as part of a linear series such as ABCDAXYZ, in which the second occurence of A is identified with the first. Here numerically identical events would have different sequels, in volation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. (pp. 388-389)
Reformulating axiom 2 will be challenging if time is continuous. If time were discrete, we could say "if an event A has two immediate predecessors B and C, then B and C are simultaneous, and if A has two immediate successors, D and E, then D and E are simultaneous." However, for continuous time, we cannot define a rigorous notion of immediacy in this context, and relativity only makes things worse.
Nevertheless, Van Cleve does seem to succeed in saving Berkeleian idealism from Borges' charge that it leads to the unreality of time. Another problem remains, however, for the idealism, and that is to get a shared timeline for all minds. Van Cleve rightly notes (p. 382) that God's perceptons can save us a lot of trouble, but it still seems that Berkeley needs to explain how my mental events can exist in the same timeline as yours and how we can know the ordering for those events for which we seem to think we know the ordering.
An observation I want to make here, which I think will lead to a solution, is that an idealist world is an information system, like a computer network. Berkeley's world, in particular, is one in which all information is routed through a central server (namely, God). Other "network architectures" are imaginable, but it is the "central server" architecture that guarantees the coherence of the universe.
Now, Berkeley's world resembles a computer network (or a single multi-processor computer) in one respect that is particularly relevant here: in each computer processor, there is a series of discrete events, called clock cycles. A crystal emits an electrical signal in a sine wave, and one computation takes place in each period of the sine wave. When you have a network of computers, it is often necessary to have them all keep consistent time with one another but, as it turns out, this is quite difficult. Network packets don't always take the same amount of time to arrive and the clocks have to be continually resynchronized, since tiny variations in temperature will change the period of the wave. This means that the problem can't be solved in such a way as to create an ordering of events according to the ticking of some 'absolute' clock, but there are, nevertheless, several algorithms to order all the clock cycles of all the computers such that they satisfy the previously mentioned time order axioms. I'll briefly describe the general approach shared by the major solutions from my notes on Matt Blaze's 2005 operating systems class.
We define a few rules, using the predicate Pxy for "x precedes y", and standard logical notation, with a bit of English mixed in:
This means that some events are simultaneous for one observer and not for another (in particular, if you have network packets n1 and n2 where n1 precedes n2 and no other packets are between n1 and n2, computer c1 will regard all events on computer c2 in between n1 and n2 as simultaneous, but computer c2 will see its own events as having an internal ordering), but we already had that from relativity. Now, this doesn't define an absolute time (which, again, relativity says we can't do anyway), but what's interesting from a Berkeleian perspective is that it does seem (to me) to capture how it is that we have a shared timeline: that is, certain sense events are shared between people, and by applying rules like these we get a shared timeline. Of course, we don't each have exactly the same ordering of events, but there is enough commonality for coherence between one observer's perceptions and another's.
What's going to complicate things even further is that under relativity (as Lauren has just been explaining to me) in certain specific circumstances (namely, circumstances where the spatial separation between event a and event b is such that llight from a cannot reach b or vice versa), some observers may disagree on the order of a and b. In the computer case, that doesn't generally happen. That is, if Sxy is "x and y are simultaneous", we may have one computer saying Sab and another saying Pab, but we will never have one computer saying Pab and another saying Pba. It seems to me that someone should say something interesting about this message passing thing in connection with this relativity and light cone stuff, but since I don't know what this interesting observation is, that someone must not be me.
The long and short of it is, it seems that an idealist/phenomenalist can get a timeline out of this that is as intersubjective as anyone can hope for, post-relativity.
The Dualist 13 (2006) is finally available online, including my paper "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics". Unfortunately, the main index site is still badly broken. Hopefully it will soon be fixed. In the meantime, the direct link to my paper works.
There are some typesetting errors in the PDF (most importantly: footnote numbering is messed up, and some logical symbols are boxed out), and I haven't seen the print version to know if it contains these errors as well. I was never shown any proofs and I also found some spelling errors, and at least one place where a sentence is missing a word. Such is life. But the content is, I hope more interesting than the form, so that's what I will focus on and ask readers to focus on.
I wrote this paper over two and a half years ago, and it's now been just over a year since the paper was accepted, so there are definitely things I would do different if I were writing it today. Most of this is simply the sloppiness, unclarity, and general lack of polish that one expects from a Sophomore philosophy student. However, having just re-read the paper, I think that there is only one place in which these flaws touch the core of the argument, and that is in defining just what the argument is supposed to show. I will try to correct this flaw here, by outlining the general flow of argument as it appears in the published paper and explaining how it ought to differ.
The paper deals with the problem of dreams, given a Berkeleian idealist framework. In particular, it is focused on the question of whether "esse is percipi" places dreams on par with waking life, ontologically. Since, for the Berkeleian, perception defines reality, and dream perceptions are bona fide perceptions, it seems that the answer is yes. However, Berkeley claims (Dialogues 235) that "by whatever method you distinguish things from chimeras on your own scheme, the same, it is evident, will hold also upon mine" (emphasis original). The paper argues that this is in fact true: that is, that a particular solution to the epistemological problem of dreams, drawn from Leibniz's "On the Method of Distinguishing Real From Imaginary Phenomena," succeeds in solving Berkeley's ontological problem of dreams.
The descriptions of the nature of this "ontological problem" and its solution are the critical flaw of the paper. On p. 34, I say that the paper will argue that it is possible for a Berkeleian to draw "an ontological distinction" between dreams and waking life (this is the sentence with the missing word - my draft says "between dream worlds and the actual world"). I go on to talk about an ontology with four "levels" and use the word "real" in scare quotes a lot. Later, in sect. 5, I talk about some things being more or less real than others. I'm no longer entirely sure what the things I actually said mean, but, having studied a bit of W.V.O. Quine and David Lewis in the last year, I think I am prepared to say more accurately what it was that I was trying to say before:
In the famous Quinean formula, "to be is to be the value of a variable." That is, the things that are in the domain of quantification for the universal quantifier are the items of our ontology. However, context often causes the domain of quantification to vary, and, although existence is, as a matter of the way the world is, almost certainly an absolute, black and white sort of thing, "relative existence" enters the picture via language and discursive context.
Given this picture of being, I claim that Berkeley's position (that is, the position I believe to be entailed by his system, although he doesn't discuss the issue) with regard to dream worlds is almost exactly analogous to Lewis's position with regard to non-actual possible worlds: Lewis says that while, strictly speaking, all possible worlds exist, most of the time we restrict our quantifiers to the actual world, and the modal realist has as much reason as anyone for doing this.
I divide Berkeley's world into four "ontological levels:" "The level M of minds, the level RP of 'real' perceptions, the level DP of dreamed or hallucinated perceptions, and the level T of thoughts and volitions" (p. 51). These "ontological levels" are in fact domains of quantification, with every level including the level before it, in addition to the entities it specifies (that is, for instance, DP includes M and RP, but not T - it includes minds and all their perceptions). Strictly speaking, the Berkeleian is going to have to either say that ideas are modes of minds and so M is all that, in metaphysical rigor, exists, or that ideas are bona fide entities and so all of it exists. However, what the paper seeks to show, is that the use of these distinct domains of quantification is well justified by Berkeley's system and, especially, there are good reasons which the Berkeleian can admit - reasons having nothing to do with mind-independent entities - for frequently quantifying over only RP, and saying that those things are "real."
With these thoughts in mind, I present for your consideration, "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics". You are encouraged to post your comments and criticisms here.
I was looking on half.com recently to see if I could find an affordable volume containing Berkeley's Siris last week when I came upon this 1965 collection, Berkeley's Philosophical Writings (ISBN 0020641702 according to half.com; it's apparently too old to have an ISBN printed in it) edited and with introduction by none other than D. M. Armstrong. I was unable to find any further information on the book, but, at half.com prices, decided it was worth buying just to get Armstrong's introduction (and on the off-chance that it contained Siris). Since there was no information on this book available online, and there are more copies still available, I thought I should provide some information myself.
First, it contains the following works:
It is of note that this is almost the same collection of works as the 1975 Everyman edition edited by A. J. Ayers under the title Philosophical Works Including the Works on Vision, which was in print at least as recently as 1998 (that's the year my copy was printed). The Ayers edition has a more complete chonology of "Berkeley's Life and Times," as they put it (though the Armstrong edition does have a brief timeline) and contains "The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained" in addition to the works already listed.
Armstrong's introduction shows great respect for Berkeley as a thinker, but is ultimately hostile. It occasionally seemed dismissive to me, but this was only because of the necessary brevity of an introduction (it is 27 pages in length). Armstrong takes Berkeley seriously and generally states his position strongly, but since he is trying to introduce all of the works in the volume in a mere 27 pages is unable to treat the arguments in great depth.
The introduction opens with the paragraph:
One good way to study philosophy is to study the systems of the great philosophers. In an English-speaking country, there is much to be said for beginning with Berkeley. His most important works are superlatively well written. They are simple and clear. They are quite brief. What they say may be wrong, but it is never dull. There is interesting argument for even the most incredible assertion.
This is a fitting opening for the introduction, as it gives us a good idea of Armstrong's attitude toward Berkeley: his views are "wrong" and his claims are "incredible," but he is always "interesting" and never "dull." In short, Armstrong seems to view Berkeley as worth reading because he is obviously wrong but nevertheless difficult to refute. (I, of course, take rather a different view of Berkeley, and might be inclined rather to take this view of Armstrong!)
Armstrong divides his introduction into four principle sections, dealing with esse is percipi ("to be is to be perceived"), the critique of abstraction, the theory of vision, and the philosophy of science. The first section is by far the longest. In each section we have a development of Berkeley's position and his reasoning for it, followed by a sketch of the general direction of a refutation (sometimes a Berkeleian counter-refutation is given, but the anti-Berkeleian nearly always has the last word, and in the few cases where Berkeley has the last word the Berkeleian result is presented as a paradox, rather than a way the world might be). I am tempted to remark on the inadequacy of the refutations, but this would be unfair as, due to length, they are no more than sketches of general directions and all of them have the potential to be developed into important objections.
There is, however, at least one place where Armstrong's objection totally misses the mark, and this is in the claim (p. 16) that "Berkeley never shows any awareness" of the fact that the argument against matter could be turned against Berkeley's argument for the existence of other minds. However, when Berkeley discusses our knowledge of other minds at Principles 145 and 148 he says that we are informed of other minds by certain "effects or concommitant signs" that serve to "mark them out." Berkeley's view is that God, speaking to us through our senses, informs us of the existence of other minds. In their paper "Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley on Whether We Can Dream Marks on the Waking State" (Studia Leibnitia 24 (1992): 177-181) Russell Wahl and Johnathan Westphal point out that in the case of all three of the philosophers they mention dream/hallucination skepticism serves as part of a reductio against an opposing view, but from within the confines of the philosopher's own view we are supposed to be safe from skepticism. In this way, contradiction is avoided. (I deal with this issue from two different directions in my "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics" The Dualist 13 (2006), which has apparently been published on paper, but is not yet online, and "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley," forthcoming in Religious Studies - the former paper argues that the consistency and meaningfulness of our perceptions can be used by Berkeley to draw a distinction between the dreaming/hallucinating and waking states, and the latter paper discusses the use of the language of sense perception to refer to other minds and so rescue us from solipsism.)
I imagine that others who have studied Berkeley will, like me, be puzzled at the ordering of the sections. Indeed, it might make sense to discuss these topics in precisely the reverse order, since the critique of abstraction and the theory of vision form the foundation for the ultimate critique of matter and the establishment of the doctrine that esse is percipi, and this is part of the above problem. Armstrong divorces these issues from each other almost entirely when they are in fact intimately related, and he discusses them in the wrong order. Had he developed the critique of abstraction and the account of a divine language of vision before he had developed the critique of matter, he might have made Berkeley's claims more compelling and not run into this faulty critique of Berkeley on other minds. Similarly, Armstrong does a disservice to serious students by placing the New Theory of Vision at the end of the volume, when it should be at the beginning where Ayer put it, seeing as it was published first and forms an important introductory work before the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Another deficiency of Armstrong's introduction is that, apart from a passing reference to The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (p. 30), it shows no awareness of any of Berkeley's works not included in this particular edition. This may be intentional, as the edition seems to be intended primarily for students who have no prior exposure to Berkeley, but it is nevertheless a weakness of the presentation. Armstrong sometimes by omitting references to other works of Berkeley, especially the Alciphron, Armstrong sometimes fails to do justice to Berkeley's overall position.
Finally, Armstrong seems to downplay the importance of God in Berkeley's metaphysics, and shows little or no interest in Berkeley's theology. This is something that one simply cannot do while studying Berkeley seriously.
I nevertheless suspect that I will find this introduction very useful on the whole. The reason is that it provides concise, simple, and well-formulated summaries of the most important objections to Berkeley's central doctrines. Pages 8 and 9 even provide what is effectively a presentation of the central point of Moore's "Refutation of Idealism." This brief introduction is, I think, a very good account of the objections a Berkeleian will need to answer, very much as Armstrong's Universals provides very good outlines of the most important objections to each of a variety of theories of properties. Armstrong's introduction could also be useful in this respect to someone who had never read Berkeley before and I think that it is more focused and consequently easier to get through than Ayer's introduction (though I haven't read through Ayer recently). In short, I recommend this introduction (and I even more strongly recommend the works of Berkeley included in this edition), but I advise readers to approach Armstrong at least as critically as Armstrong approaches Berkeley.
While we are talking a bit about intelligent design, I'd like to take the opportunity to post a little paper I wrote last semester on the teleological argument for the existence of God. The assignment was to give the strongest possible version of the teleological argument, discuss the most important objection, and whether the objection succeeds (and why). The catch: it all had to fit on one page. (This sort of thing is, by the way, a very useful exercise for budding philosophers; I recommend it.) So, without further ado:
Teleological arguments for the existence of a divine being attempt to show from the presence of telos, or purposiveness, in nature the existence of a creator – that is, the argument claims that where there is purposiveness, there must be one who purposes, and that one is God. As compared to the other traditional arguments for the existence of a divine being, teleological arguments are particularly promising in that they are particularly intuitive: the world is orderly, and that which brings about order is a rational mind. The famous modern articulation of the argument is William Paley's assertion that we are justified in positing the existence of an 'artificer' in the case of the world for precisely the same reason we are justified in positing an 'artificer' for a watch. The most important objections against teleological arguments are those which assert that, for some reason or another, these cases are not, in fact, analogous.It is undisputed that the world looks like a product of design. The claim of the teleological argument is that we ought to take this appearance at face value and conclude that there is, indeed, a designer of the universe. However, according to many recent scientific thinkers, the theory of evolution is supposed explain the appearance of design in biology without the need to suppose the existence of an actual designer, and similar tactics are tried in other areas of science. Teleological arguments in popular apologetics have often pointed to facts as yet unexplained by evolution as their evidence, and thus been highly vulnerable to “God of the gaps” objections – that is, they have claimed that a designer was needed to explain various things that science had not yet explained. “God of the gaps” arguments, where they truly appear, are indeed uncompelling. These sorts of arguments claim that because some phenomenon is currently unexplained by science, God must be its explanation. These arguments are bad because “gaps” in scientific understanding have a way of getting filled in, and also because it seems that God might be used to explain just about anything with equal justification.
This, however, is not the essence of the teleological argument. To use Paley's example, no matter how detailed your explanation of the mechanical workings of the gears of the watch, this direction of inquiry will never explain why the watch tells time. That is, a mechanistic explanation cannot explain away the telos. An explanation of how the watch came to be which was similarly mechanistic would similarly fail to explain this fact. To give another example, even if someone was able to prove that Hamlet had come into being as a result of a monkey pressing all the right keys on a typewriter in the correct order, one would not have explained the existence of Hamlet. This is because there is much more to Hamlet than merely a sequence of letters: Hamlet contains plot twists, word-play, complexity, and even meditation on the human condition. These types of facts require a deeper explanation than can be provided by a discussion of the mechanism by which the object arose. If the universe is truly analogous to a watch or to Hamlet then science is simply the wrong kind of explanation whereas the theistic hypothesis is the right kind of explanation. Furthermore, Del Ratzsch has argued quite convincingly (“Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and 'Turtles all the Way Down'” in Faith and Philosophy 21: 436-455) that even if evolutionary theory were not only true but also an adequate explanation of the appearance of design in biology, one would need to explain the conditions that made life possible, and a further explanation would be needed for the conditions that made these conditions possible, and so on, so that “design-suggestive and design-explainable pattern[s]” lead to a sort of “Mandelbrot picture” of a world that is designed (p. 449).
The opponent of the teleological argument might respond instead that the universe is not really analogous to either of these examples in the relevant way. One way of doing this might be to argue that watches have never been observed to reproduce themselves, whereas plants and animals have been observed to do so, and the production even of stars and planets by natural causes has been observed, and in biological reproduction, changes often result so that natural selection and survival of the fittest seem able to produce the illusion of telos; animals seem to have the survival of the species as their purpose even though, in the absence of a designer, there is no actual purpose. This objection is not particularly successful. Imagine, by way of analogy, that watches were seen to reproduce themselves naturally and to improve over time: sundials collected parts form their environment which were used to construct pendulum clocks, which collected parts from their environment which were used to build main-spring clocks, etc., until, over time, we arrived at quartz wristwatches and, ultimately, atomic clocks. Would not this cry for explanation in terms of intelligence even more than a single watch found on its own? Doesn't this make the case for design better rather than worse? Alternatively, it might be argued that watches have been previously observed to be the product of intelligence, and we would not infer an intelligence were this not the case. This does not seem successful either, since archaeologists do, in fact, quite regularly infer intelligence in observing artifacts they have never seen before. In short, the appearance of order and purpose in the world and the observation that in all of our experience intelligence is the source of order and purpose provide quite strong justifications for belief in an intelligence beyond our own which is the creator of the universe, “and this all men call God.”
While we are talking a bit about intelligent design, I'd like to take the opportunity to post a little paper I wrote last semester on the teleological argument for the existence of God. The assignment was to give the strongest possible version of the teleological argument, discuss the most important objection, and whether the objection succeeds (and why). The catch: it all had to fit on one page. (This sort of thing is, by the way, a very useful exercise for budding philosophers; I recommend it.) So, without further ado:
Teleological arguments for the existence of a divine being attempt to show from the presence of telos, or purposiveness, in nature the existence of a creator – that is, the argument claims that where there is purposiveness, there must be one who purposes, and that one is God. As compared to the other traditional arguments for the existence of a divine being, teleological arguments are particularly promising in that they are particularly intuitive: the world is orderly, and that which brings about order is a rational mind. The famous modern articulation of the argument is William Paley's assertion that we are justified in positing the existence of an 'artificer' in the case of the world for precisely the same reason we are justified in positing an 'artificer' for a watch. The most important objections against teleological arguments are those which assert that, for some reason or another, these cases are not, in fact, analogous.It is undisputed that the world looks like a product of design. The claim of the teleological argument is that we ought to take this appearance at face value and conclude that there is, indeed, a designer of the universe. However, according to many recent scientific thinkers, the theory of evolution is supposed explain the appearance of design in biology without the need to suppose the existence of an actual designer, and similar tactics are tried in other areas of science. Teleological arguments in popular apologetics have often pointed to facts as yet unexplained by evolution as their evidence, and thus been highly vulnerable to “God of the gaps” objections – that is, they have claimed that a designer was needed to explain various things that science had not yet explained. “God of the gaps” arguments, where they truly appear, are indeed uncompelling. These sorts of arguments claim that because some phenomenon is currently unexplained by science, God must be its explanation. These arguments are bad because “gaps” in scientific understanding have a way of getting filled in, and also because it seems that God might be used to explain just about anything with equal justification.
This, however, is not the essence of the teleological argument. To use Paley's example, no matter how detailed your explanation of the mechanical workings of the gears of the watch, this direction of inquiry will never explain why the watch tells time. That is, a mechanistic explanation cannot explain away the telos. An explanation of how the watch came to be which was similarly mechanistic would similarly fail to explain this fact. To give another example, even if someone was able to prove that Hamlet had come into being as a result of a monkey pressing all the right keys on a typewriter in the correct order, one would not have explained the existence of Hamlet. This is because there is much more to Hamlet than merely a sequence of letters: Hamlet contains plot twists, word-play, complexity, and even meditation on the human condition. These types of facts require a deeper explanation than can be provided by a discussion of the mechanism by which the object arose. If the universe is truly analogous to a watch or to Hamlet then science is simply the wrong kind of explanation whereas the theistic hypothesis is the right kind of explanation. Furthermore, Del Ratzsch has argued quite convincingly (“Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and 'Turtles all the Way Down'” in Faith and Philosophy 21: 436-455) that even if evolutionary theory were not only true but also an adequate explanation of the appearance of design in biology, one would need to explain the conditions that made life possible, and a further explanation would be needed for the conditions that made these conditions possible, and so on, so that “design-suggestive and design-explainable pattern[s]” lead to a sort of “Mandelbrot picture” of a world that is designed (p. 449).
The opponent of the teleological argument might respond instead that the universe is not really analogous to either of these examples in the relevant way. One way of doing this might be to argue that watches have never been observed to reproduce themselves, whereas plants and animals have been observed to do so, and the production even of stars and planets by natural causes has been observed, and in biological reproduction, changes often result so that natural selection and survival of the fittest seem able to produce the illusion of telos; animals seem to have the survival of the species as their purpose even though, in the absence of a designer, there is no actual purpose. This objection is not particularly successful. Imagine, by way of analogy, that watches were seen to reproduce themselves naturally and to improve over time: sundials collected parts form their environment which were used to construct pendulum clocks, which collected parts from their environment which were used to build main-spring clocks, etc., until, over time, we arrived at quartz wristwatches and, ultimately, atomic clocks. Would not this cry for explanation in terms of intelligence even more than a single watch found on its own? Doesn't this make the case for design better rather than worse? Alternatively, it might be argued that watches have been previously observed to be the product of intelligence, and we would not infer an intelligence were this not the case. This does not seem successful either, since archaeologists do, in fact, quite regularly infer intelligence in observing artifacts they have never seen before. In short, the appearance of order and purpose in the world and the observation that in all of our experience intelligence is the source of order and purpose provide quite strong justifications for belief in an intelligence beyond our own which is the creator of the universe, “and this all men call God.”
I am presently reading Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings (I'm not sure if it's going to actually help with my very strange philosophy of religion term paper wherein I argue that idealism is compatible with a belief in the bodily resurrection of the dead, or if I'm just procrastinating). In section 10, after denying that there are, in metaphysical rigor, any artifacts (i.e. inanimate macrophysical objects, such as chairs), van Inwagen makes the following remark:
Does my position not fly in the face of common sense? I do not think so. This is not because I think that my position is in accord with "common sense," but rather because I do not think that there is any such thing as the body of doctrine the philosophers call common sense. There is common sense: Common sense tells us to taste our food before we salt it and to cut the cards. It does not tell us there are chairs. (p. 103)
I am content ... to appeal to the common sense of the world for the truth of my notion. Ask the gardener, why he thinks yon cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in short, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real being, and saith it is, or exists; but that which is not perceivable, the same, he saith, hath no being. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 3.234)
Our "common sense" ideas are sometimes called "pre-theoretical intuitions" and the use is not limited to material objects. In the context of a debate on whether laws govern, Susan Schneider presents a reasoning principle she calls (C): "Ceteris paribus, choose the philosophical theory of F that best accomodates our (relevant) pretheoretic intuitions about F." ("What is the Significance of the Inuition that Laws of Nature Govern?", forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy) This principle, she thinks, militates against "Humean supervenience" (regularity) accounts of lawhood. I actually think that this principle is probably correct. However, I think it is almost entirely irrelevant. We almost never have intuitions about matters of philosophical interest which are both relevant and pretheoretic. For instance, in the lawhood debate, our inuitions come from a long tradition of science and philosophy. In the debate about material beings, Berkeley thinks that our 'intuitions' come from indoctrination with Aristotelian metaphysics, from which even the moderns have not escaped. People who have never studied philosophy or science don't have intuitions about this sort of thing.
Now, I do think there is one intuition that is relevant to the lawhood debate, and I think it is the intuition that those who hold the governing conception of laws are really getting at. This is what I was refering to when I was making inflammatory remarks about Armstrong-laws (I didn't intend them to be too terribly inflammatory, but commenter "Marc" was apparently rather upset, prompting me to clarify my actual position). It is, in fact, the intuition behind teleological arguments for the existence of God: to state it at its most general, this intuition says "where there is a rational order, there must be a rational ordering principle." This needn't be the traditional God, but may instead be something like (as I said in the previous post) the Heraclitean logos. This intuition is relevant while the others are not because it is actually within the realm of common sense: we distinguish between objects formed by random undirected processes and objects formed by processes with a rational ordering principle behind them all the time. Common sense is well adapted only for dealing with things we ordinarily encounter in everday life. Similarly, we have pretheoretical intuitions only about things we have reason to "intuit" about before we begin theorizing. Thus common sense and intuition are relevant to philosophy only rarely.
For the record, in those cases where it is relevant, I think that the reason it works is that we often go through rational deductive processes of which we are not even conscious. That is, we draw valid inferences, but a philosopher is at great pains to formalize and bring to light those inferences. This, I think, is the case with these "teleological" intuitions.
In metaphysics, libertarianism is the view that human beings (and other free beings) are free because they can do otherwise. Determinism is the view that the conjunction of the laws of nature with all the facts about the configuration of the world at some time t entail all the facts about the configuration of the world at all times. Compatibilism is the view that free will and determinism are logically compatible, and incompatibilism is the view that they are not. Libertarianism is generally taken to entail incompatibilism, and is contrasted with compatibilist theories of free will. However, in her recent paper "The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature" (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61), Helen Beebee points out that Humean supervenience theories of the laws of nature seem able to be deterministic without contradicting libertarianism: according to Humean supervenience theories, laws are purely descriptive, they don't actually make anything happen. The laws of nature will include future facts, since they are summaries of everything that happens in the world, but they won't make things happen that way. This seems to make it metaphysically possible for me to do otherwise, even if the laws are in fact deterministic. It still won't be physically possible for me to do otherwise, but this isn't because the laws of physics prevent me from acting - the laws of physics don't do anything, other than describe - rather, it's because if I had done otherwise, the laws would have been different.
Note that if God exists and has middle knowledge, he will still be able to ensure, among other things, that the fundamental laws of physics are simple, mathematically formulable, finitely axiomizable, etc. Alternatively, if Lewis's plurality of worlds exists, there will still be some "well-behaved" worlds where the laws have these properties.
Of course, Humean supervenience theorists can't explain why the universe exhibits regularity, but nomic realists can't explain why there are laws and why the laws are as they are, so they aren't doing much better. Besides, theists can explain why the universe exhibits regularity, regardless of their theory of lawhood.
Another interesting point here is that Humean supervenience will require that there be facts (in the present) about what human beings will do in the future (otherwise laws that quantified over all time would lack truth values). This has its own problems for free will. On the whole, however, a very interesting (and, in my view, quite possible correct) idea.
D. M. Armstrong is the best known proponent of a currently quite popular understanding of natural laws. Laws so understood are, as a result, called Armstrong-Laws, or A-Laws for short. These are distinguished from L-Laws, named for David Lewis. L-laws are identical to regularities in events (but not all regularities are laws). Unlike L-Laws, A-Laws are actual metaphysical entities, which exist independently of their instances. That is, according to this theory, the Law of Universal Gravitation is a thing out there in the universe (not in the mind) which actually makes massive objects move toward one another. The attraction (no pun intended) of A-Laws is that they seem to explain why there should be regularity in the world at all, whereas L-Laws simply state the regularities. Armstrong-type theories posit that there is actually something out there which makes the regularities occur. Now, despite Armstrong's naturalist/physicalist claims, this thing must be transcendent and non-physical (not any more so than Armstrong's "states of affairs," but that's another story).
Philosophers usually talk for simplicity about laws of the form "all Fs are Gs" or "all Fs are followed by Gs," but, of course, the real laws that physicists talk about are not like this at all. The real laws are things like F=ma or K=(1/2)mv^2. (Note that I say the real laws are like this - we don't actually live in a Newtonian universe, so these are not examples of actual natural laws, or at least not fundamental ones - macrophysics is usually considered by philosophers to be one of the "special sciences" like geology or psychology, and these are supposed to follow from the true theory of microphysics, whatever that might be.) It is not clear to me (perhaps because I haven't read the positive part of Armstrong's book What is a Law of Nature? - I've only read the critique of "naive regularity theory" so far) how Armstrong's specific claim (not held by all Armstrong-type theories) that laws are relations between universals is supposed to deal with these sorts of laws, which aren't actually about Fs being Gs. As a result, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should posit multiple laws of nature: why not just conjoin them?
If we do this, we've got a transcendent, non-physical entity responsible for the orderliness and regularity of the world, "and this all men call God." Hmm...
Of course, if you are concerned about confusing this entity which, for all we know, is impersonal with personal conceptions of God or with some religious theory, you might not want to give it that name, but at the very least you've got the Heraclitean logos (not to be confused with the Johannine logos), a fundamental ordering principle of the universe, and this certainly seems to be a god-like thing. Of course, if we were actually positing God in a more traditional sense, he is supposed to be a necessary being and to create freely, so this would explain why the laws are as they are, but, whatever the case, we seem to have here at the very least something that might be reasonably described as an impersonal, disinterested (small-g) god, and maybe we've got a good deal more than that.
(For the record, I believe in a sort of regularity theory instead, despite believing that God wills at every moment that the laws hold; this is because I believe that laws are strictly identical with true law statements, where these statements are purely descriptive in nature, or something like that.)
A thought occurred to me just now as I was reading the end of Sydney Shoemaker's "Causality and Properties" and thinking, as usual, of a Berkeleian response. What, we ask, are the truth-conditions or truth-makers for statements about natural laws and causality? Shoemaker has a story about properties being defined in terms of dispositions to act a certain way in the presence of certain other properties, and he thinks we can flesh out these statements in this way. For Berkeley, of course, the properties of physical objects can have no causal efficacy. Instead, Berkeley takes these statements to be simple counter-factuals: because of a constant conjunction between perceptions of pens being dropped and perceptions of pens falling, we conclude that when pens are dropped they fall, and therefore make statements like "if I dropped this pen it would fall." Simple, right? Wrong...
According to Berkeley, let it be remembered, our perceptions are implanted directly in our minds by God, and are a language by which he speaks to us. This means that the statement above should be equivalent to the statement "if I were to form the volition to drop this pen, God would respond by implanting in my mind perceptions of the pen falling." This is a counterfactual of freedom! This seems to mean that, in order for us to have knowledge of causal statements and natural laws, we need to have middle knowledge about God, which is certainly even more problematic than God having middle knowledge about us!
Can this problem be avoided? I think it can. Recall that Berkeley thinks that our perceptions form a language and, in addition to his many statments (in, for instance, the Third Dialogue) to the effect that natural laws are to be interpreted counterfactually, he also refers in the Principles to Newton's Principia as the best grammar manual of the perceptual language. If this is correct, then we ought to suppose instead that statements about causation and natural laws are statements about grammar.
Will this save us? It seems so. Consider the statement "transitive verbs in English are followed by their direct objects." This is a true statement about grammar. But one might think that this translated into some statement like "if Kenny, a native speaker of English, were to utter a syllable pattern corresponding to an English transitive verb (while speaking English), he would soon after utter a syllable pattern corresponding to an English noun, which he would intend as the direct object of said verb." This is a counterfactual of freedom. However, it seems that the latter sentence might actually be false. That is, from the perspective of free will, etc., there is no reason why I can't utter nonsense instead of following the rules of English grammar. This does not undermine the truth of the grammatical statement above. The same should hold with regard to natural laws and God's freedom. God is perfectly free to utter nonsense, but there are nevertheless rules of the grammar of the perceptual language, and true statements about these rules are true statements about natural laws.
Disaster averted.
Compatibilism is belief in actions that are both free and determined. Usually, one hears such phrases as "what I will to do, I must do" (I think Hume phrases it something like this) or "I am free to act according to my nature." The idea is that human beings have determinate natures and they act as their natures determine. They are free because nothing outside determines their actions.
Theories that posit a more robust freedom of the will are called "libertarian" (no relation to the political theory referred to in my tagline). Usually one hears phrases like "I am free because I might have done otherwise." (Of course, if actions were completely random, that wouldn't be freedom either, so I believe that libertarians must posit a type of action that is neither free nor determined.)
Foreknowledge is often considered to be a problem for the latter type of free will. In order for it to be possible for there to be knowledge of something, there must be a fact of the matter about it, and even the existence of such a fact (a fact about what I will choose which is already the case before I choose it) has often been thought problematic. This is often solved by simply saying something about how it is my future choice that is the truth-maker for this fact. In an eternalist framework (one that views all times as existing equally, and does not give a priveleged position to the present), it seems unproblematic that my future choice should make something true now. In fact, if we take relativity seriously enough, then it isn't really that different from, for instance, a choice I made while in Greece making some fact true here in the U.S. Certainly that is unproblematic!
A further objection arises in terms of someone actually knowing the truth-value of the fact (especially me knowing what choice I will make before I will make it, through some other means than deciding). It is thought that this will interfere with free will since someone knowing the fact "pins it down" as it were. However, if eternalism is true, the fact is already "pinned down" - that future time exists, and in that future time, I make the choice. Still, it seems that my knowledge could interfere with my freedom in this sort of case.
The foreknowledge of God is considered to be a special case which is somewhat easier to get out of: since God exists atemporally, he witnesses all moments simultaneously, and so he simply observes me making my future choices. But why should foreknowledge had by an agent within time be any more problematic than this?
Consider the "Grandfather Paradox" as a famous example. Here is David Lewis's formulation of the problem:
Consider Tim. He detests his grandfather, whose success in the munitions trade built the family fortuen that paid for Tim's time machine. Tim would like ntohing so much as to kill Grandfather, but alas he is too late. Grandfather died in his bed in 1957, while Tim was a young boy. But when Tim has built his time