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.
In the Fourth Dialogue of Berkeley's Alciphron, Alciphron the "Free-Thinker" challenges Berkeley's spokesman, Euphranor, to present a proof of the existence of God. Alciphron, however, lays down some quite stringent conditions:
First then, let me tell you I am not persuaded by metaphysical arguments; such, for instance, as are drawn from the ideas of an all-perfect being, or the absurdity of an infinite progression of causes. This sort of arguments I have always found dry and jejune; and, as they are not suited to my way of thinking, they may perhaps puzzle, but never will convince me. Secondly, I am not to be persuaded by the authority either of past or present ages, of mankind in general, or of particular wise men, all which passeth for little or nothing with a man of sound argument and free thought. Thirdly, all proofs drawn from utility or convenience are foreign to the purpose. They may prove indeed the usefulness of the notion, but not the existence of the thing. Whatever legislators or statesmen may think, truth and convenience are very different things to the rigorous eyes of a philosopher. (4.2)
Be pleased to recollect the concessions you have made, and then show me, if the arguments for a Deity be not conclusive, by what better arguments you can prove the existence of that thinking thing which in strictness constitutes the free-thinker. (4.6)
Are there other such arguments? Is there an argument for other minds that can't be converted into an argument for God? These are all the arguments (well, some of them aren't really arguments) for belief in other minds that I can think of right off, besides Berkeley's peculiar argument about the correct interpretation of the divine language (which is at least to some degree a species of 1). The conversion seems to me to be pretty successful in most cases, though the language argument requires a lot of support (fortunately, Berkeley gives it a lot of support).
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 machine and traveled to 1920, suddenly he realizes that he is not too late after all. He buys a rifle; he spends long hours in target practice; he shadows Grandfather to learn the route of his daily walk to the munitions works; he rents a room along the route; and there he lurks, one winter day in 1921, rifle loaded, hate in his heart, as Grandfather walks closer, closer,....
- David Lewis, "The Paradoxes of Time Travel," American Philosophical Quarterly, 13
Perhaps the concern is something like this: suppose that Tim goes through the same reasoning we have just gone through, and determines that he didn't and won't kill Grandfather, and therefore doesn't try. Further suppose that we have the correct theory of truth-conditions for counterfactuals (including counterfactuals of freedom - suppose that these have truth-values), and, on this theory, the statement "if Tim had tried to kill Grandfather, he would have succeeded" is true. Then we seem to have at best a case of circular causation, and maybe even worse difficulties. Consider an explanation of why Grandfather didn't die. It might go something like "although Tim could have killed Grandfather had he tried, he did not attempt to kill Grandfather because he knew that he didn't kill Grandfather." Or we could condense it into the even worse sentence "Tim chose not to kill Grandfather because he knew that he didn't kill Grandfather." Let C represent "Tim chose not to kill Grandfather" and D represent "Tim didn't kill Grandfather." It is now the case that (according to libertarians) C is the truth-maker of D, but D is the reason for C. What a headache!
But is this really worse than circular causation? I'm not sure. And, honestly, circular causation doesn't bother me too much anyway. It's not any worse than an infinite chain of causation, both of which are fine if there is a sufficient reason outside the chain or circle for why the chain or circle is. However, in this case, it doesn't seem that God can be invoked as the reason, because then we would no longer have libertarian free will (either God would be the truth-maker for C and not Tim alone or, worse, God would be the truth-maker of D and not Tim's free choice).
Might libertarians escape through their denial of psychological determinism? That is, Tim's knowledge that he didn't and won't kill Grandfather doesn't actually prevent him from trying in any deterministic way, so perhaps he might still have tried, and succeeded, and then it would have been eternally true that Tim killed Grandfather - but then Tim would not have been born, would not have built a time machine, would not have killed Grandfather, etc. Perhaps, however, this is only an argument against (one dimensional) time travel. Perhaps if we remove the causal problem it will work.
However, libertarians don't want to deny that our beliefs, etc., influence our choices, so it seems that we would still have a circularity problem. Perhaps a degree of uncertainty solves the problem. That is, I think it is very unlikely - say, probability .05 - that I will ever audition to be a television actor. I think this based on my plans, decisions, etc., in the present. But suppose I somehow gain additional information that makes it very likely - but not certain - that I will audition as a television actor in the future. It seems to me that whether this help will depend on its source. If someone I believe to be very skilled in such matters tells me, based on extensive psycho-analysis, that I am highly likely to make such a choice, this is not very problematic. But if I get a message from the future, that may be more problematic. We may have the circularity problem again.
But consider Tim once more. Suppose Grandfather is not his grandfather, but my great-grandfather (my grandfather not having been born in 1921). Tim doesn't know that he didn't and won't kill Grandfather, but I do. This doesn't seem to suffer from the same problem of explanatory regress. However, we must then ask the question of whether I am free to tell Tim what I know.
These are serious problems, but I'm not convinced they are unsolvable. We are walking along our epistemic boundaries here, and mind-bending difficulties here and there are to be expected.
The reason I am interested in these problems, is that it seems like detailed knowledge of brain states, etc., might provide the kind of information that runs into these difficulties. Then again, it could simply be that between the Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics and the limits of our ability to gather and process information (we can only know so much about a person's present brain states, and to then figure out what stimulus the person will experience in enough detail to make predictions may be impossible for humans) may make it impossible for us to reach this kind of knowledge. If there are no temporal beings capable of gathering and processing enough information to do this sort of thing, then the theoretical possibility of such a thing is probably unproblematic.
I talk a lot about Berkeley on this blog, and it has probably become clear to most regular readers that I am quite sympathetic to his position. There are a number of reasons for holding to various forms of idealism, and I have already discussed the chain of inferences which leads Berkeley to his theory. Important also is Berkeley's critique of matter, which proceeds by collapsing Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities (this collapse is almost universally viewed as successful by later philosophers), then applying Locke's arguments that secondary qualities are not actually in the objects to all perceived properties, thus refuting representationalism (there is a lot more to Berkeley's critique of matter than just this, but this is a big part of it). I now want to give very briefly my own primary reasons for accepting it. Besides finding many of Berkeley's arguments generally compelling, I think that there are serious problems with the alternative positions, and idealism does not suffer from an equivalent defect. This is what I will try to show in this post.
The only two alternatives to idealism I know of are physicalism (aka materialism) and dualism (if anyone knows of any views that have been proposed besides these three, please say so). Physicalism is the view that matter and/or energy (where those two terms are used in more or less the technical usages of modern physics; from now on I will simply say "the physical") is all that exists on the deepest ontological level. The physical is fundamentally real, and anything that exists which is distinct from it is ontologically dependent on it. Dualism is the view that, there is some mental or spiritual substance which is distinct from and equally ontologically basic with the physical. Idealism is the claim that this mental or spiritual substance is the only ontologically fundamental entity.
The problem with physicalism is that it is singularly bad at accounting for the most obvious and indisputable fact in our experience of the world: that our experience exists. I experience the world, and I experience it subjectively. A huge proportion of the contemporary literature in philosophy of mind is made up of attempts to explain this from the perspective of physicalism. I regard this as essentially a lost cause. It just isn't happening. The best argument to this effect with which I am familiar is David Chalmers' "functional isomorph" (aka "zombie") thought experiment (note: I have not personally read Chalmers' original work on the subject). Chalmers simply points out that there doesn't seem to be anything impossible about a being who looks and acts in a manner indistinguishable from a human being, but does not experience consciousness. If nothing about the human body (including the brain) necessarily entails consciousness, then how could anything physical explain consciousness? It doesn't seem that it can. The physicalist approach is backward and upside down. We need to explain what consciousness and perception are before we start using perception to deduce things about the world. For this reason, we can't use perception to explain consciousness (though we may form and test hypotheses using perception).
The more natural step is to posit dualism. The dualist takes the experience of subjectivity seriously, and posits a mental or spiritual substance which is the subject of this experience. He then makes the allegedly common-sensical supposition of reliabilism. That is, he supposes that our senses provide data about a "real" physical world which corresponds to our perceptions. The problem here is, of course, the infamous mind-body problem, which millenia of philosophers have tried and failed to solve. If the physical and the mental are totally different types of entities, how can they interact? It seems that they probably can't. I only know of two real solutions to the mind-body problem: Leibniz's "pre-established harmony" and Malebranche's "occasionalism" (there may be others which I have missed due to the ancient and early modern bias of my philosophical studies thus far).
According to pre-established harmony, the physical and the mental operate according to totally separate laws and do not interact. God has simply created the relevant laws in such a way that the two separate worlds operate harmoniously. Leibniz uses the analogy of a clock-maker who wants his two clocks to always say the same time. He says that the best way to do this is simply to make the two clocks both accurate and set them to the same time to begin with. (It should be noted that, while there is some controversy regarding Leibniz's later writings, scholars generally do not regard Leibniz as actually being a dualist; but his actual metaphysical understanding is complicated and not relevant here.)
According to occasionalism there is, again, no interaction between the human mind and the material world. Instead, God acts as a go-between. God knows what's going on in the physical and causes appropriate perceptions in us, and he knows what is going on in the mental and causes appropriate movements of our bodies.
Both of these answers have the same problem: they make matter irrelevant to human existence by totally cutting off our epistemic access to it. That is, in the first case, if all matter were suddenly destroyed (on a strict Leibnizian picture of the universe, even if everything except God and myself were destroyed), I would go on having the same perceptions I would have had if matter had continued to exist, so it follows that I have no way of knowing whether matter exists. In the second case, God is really the direct and immediate origin of my perceptions (in Leibniz it is the law of my own monad unfolding over time, which God created), and God doesn't need matter in order to do this. It's not clear why God would even create matter in this case. (Berkeley makes this argument against Malebranche explicitly in several places.) So the mind-body problem may be even more difficult than a physicalist explanation of consciousness.
Does idealism suffer from a similar defect? It might be thought that it does. Idealism still needs to explain perceptions and their source. According to Berkeley's theory (which I accept on this point), that source is God. If there is already independent evidence for the existence of an omnipotent personal God, then problem solved; this is clearly something he can do. But in the absence of independent evidence, positing an omnipotent being to explain whatever can't otherwise be explained is simply unreasonable. However, as was pointed out in the post on Berkeley's argument, there are reasons to think that whatever the source is has some characteristics similar to the known characteristics of a mind, so positing something like my mind but having an additional power might be reasonable. For comparison, imagine you were living in a jungle and there is no reason why there couldn't be hitherto undiscovered animals there (it hasn't been very well explored yet), and there are only a few animals that are already known. Imagine what kind of evidence would be needed for you to justifiably suppose the existence of something like a big wolf, but with opposable thumbs, without actually seeing such a creature. This won't quite get you to God, but to a super-mind at least.
We still have problems like what is substance, how does mental/spiritual substance works (that is, e.g., how am I and how is God able to create new thoughts), but these are equally problematic for physicalists and dualists.
This set of considerations is, I believe, sufficient to justify belief (i.e. render non-belief irrational) in idealism for the already-comitted theist, and at least warrant belief (i.e. render belief not irrational) in idealism (and some weak form of theism - that is, not necessarily belief in the tri-omni God, but belief in something) for the hitherto agnostic. I'm waiting for a refutation better than Moore's.
Gerald has a piece on Augustine and the synergism/monergism distinction up at Iustificare. Gerald believes that the real question is not about synergism vs. monergism, but rather about the resistability of grace. I think he is probably right about this, but I question his definition of synergism, since synergism is working together, but he seems to interpret it as simple concurrence. If I want God to do something, but have no power in myself to make it happen, it's not clear that this is synergism. However, Jesus does say "this is the work of God: that you believe in the One He has sent" (John 6:29). So let's suppose that believing or willing is a "work" (ergon) for the purpose of synergism. I have two points to make:
Since my post on Berkeley's metaphysics generated so much interesting discussion, I thought I would write a post on Berkeley's taxonomy of ideas. A particularly interesting (to me) aspect of this discussion is the way it plays into his critique of John Locke's theory of abstraction. Also of interest is the way this view (may have) influenced Immanuel Kant's epistemology of metaphysics. I'll skip lightly over that last one, because I don't understand Kant very well (who does?), but I re-read the Prolegomena recently and was thinking about this, so I'll float a few ideas by toward the end of this post and perhaps people who understand Kant better than I do will pick up on them.
The first point that must be made here is just what an 'idea' is. Berkeley is a sort of revisionist Lockean (one might say that Berkeley is a Lockean the way Arminius is a Calvinist) and, as such, essentially every one of his views is set up in either agreement or opposition with Locke's views. Berkeley would have had Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a logic textbook when he worked on his B.A. degree at Trinity College, Dublin.[1] The point of this digression is that Berkeley uses words such as 'matter,' 'idea,' and 'abstraction' according to Locke's definitions. This is, in my oppinion, sometimes a problem for him: for instance, he shocks people by claiming that he doesn't believe in matter or the capacity of abstraction, but he actually means that he doesn't believe in John Locke's theories of matter and abstraction. According to modern, everyday usage, Berkeley believes in both.
Returning to the point, Locke defines the word 'idea' at Essay 2.1.1 as "the object of thinking" and goes on to divide ideas into 'simple' and 'complex.' Simple ideas are the basic, fundamental constructs or sensations - for instance, a particular shade of the color red - which cannot be broken down into constituent ideas, and out of which all of our complex ideas are composed (see Essay 2.2). Thus complex ideas are collections of simple ideas which are united with one another in a single "object of thinking," as in the case of the red water bottle on my desk. Locke's principle point here is empiricism: it is his contention that all of our complex ideas are built up from simple ideas, and we get simple ideas from sense perception.
All of this Berkeley accepts. There is much more that Locke says about ideas, and it is certain that all of it heavily influenced Berkeley, and certainly some of what I will now say about Berkeley is only repeat of distinctions made by Locke. Nevertheless, there are important differences, especially, as has been said, with regard to abstraction.
What I am calling 'Berkeley's Taxonomy of Ideas' seems to have acheived its full development in the second edition of his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge.[2] Berkeley divides 'ideas' - that is, direct objects of the mind - into three classes: perceptions, thoughts, and volitions. These types of ideas are distinguished by their source, as well as by their nature. Perceptions are those ideas that are imposed upon us from without (a crucial point in Berkeley's metaphysical argument; see my previous post): as long as my eyes are open, I perceive by sight, and I cannot (directly) control what ideas enter my mind in this way. Thoughts are ideas that are like perceptions except that they are produced by my own volition - I make them up. Volitions are the objects of the will which, among other things, produce thoughts. Like Locke, Berkeley believes that new simple ideas enter the mind only through perception, and our thoughts are created by putting simple ideas which we previously perceived together into different complex ideas.
Where Berkeley and Locke differ really substantially is in generalization. How is it that we are able to think about 'triangle' in general? Even more problematic for Berkeley is how we can think of spirits (Principles 27, 140) when these are not direct objects of the mind but, rather, are minds themselves and Berkeley has rejected the idea of any kind of resemblance between ideas and non-ideas (Principles 8ff.). Berkeley believes (and I am inclined to agree with him) that Locke's answer to the problem of generalization is virtually incomprehensible. Regarding "the general idea of a triangle," Locke says, "it must be neither oblique, nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once" (Essay 4.7.9). On this section, Berkeley comments,
This is the idea which [Locke] thinks needful for the enlargement of knowledge, which is the subject of mathematical demonstraction, and without which we could never com to know any general proposition concerning triangles. That author acknowledges it doth 'require some pains and skill to form this general idea of a triangle.' ibid. But had he called to mind what he says in another place, to wit, 'That ideas of mixed modes wherein any inconsistent ideas are put together cannot so much as exist in the mind, i.e. be conceived.' [3.10.33] I say, had this occurred to his thoughts, it is not improbable he would have owned it to the above all the pains and skill he was master of to form the above-mentioned idea of a triangle, which is made up of manifest, staring contradictions. (Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision 125)
Nevertheless, there is the point of the phenomenology of the situation: we do, it seems, think about triangles in general, and not only particular triangles. How is this possible? Berkeley came to refer to his account of this phenomenon as 'general notions.' Things like spirits are not properly ideas, but we nevertheless mean something when we speak of them. As he says, "the words will, soul, spirit do not stand for different ideas, or in truth, for any idea at all but for something which ... cannot be like unto, or represented by, any idea whatever. Though it must be owned, at the same time, that we have some notion of soul, spirit, and the operations of the mind ... in as much as we know or understand the meanings of those words." (Principles, second edition, 27)
As he explains at New Theory of Vision 128 and elsewhere, Berkeley believes that these 'general notions' consist of two parts: a word or symbol, and a decision procedure. That is, when we talk about 'triangle' the symbol is the word 'triangle' either read or heard, or a picture of some particular triangle. Then we have some procedure by which, given any particular idea, we can determine whether it falls under this notion. When we reason 'abstractly' about triangles, we reason only from the 'essential characteristics' - that is, the characteristics specified in the decision procedure, namely, being a three-sided polygon. Ultimately, the symbols and decision procedures can be broken into simple ideas.
Of course, this doesn't exactly work for spirits, because there are no particular ideas that are spirits as there are particular ideas that are triangles, but the process is similar. We have certain 'relational notions' that are indeed general notions of how things might be related to one another and by applying these we can define spirits and so forth. In particular, a mind or spirit (Berkeley uses the two words more or less interchangeably) is that in which ideas inhere, and we have other examples of the inherence relation, and thus we can from an exceedingly vague general notion of a mind.
Now, why have I been thinking about this in connection with Kant? Well, Kant's conclusion in the Prolegomena (which I think I understand, even if I understand only pieces of the arguments for it) is that the proper objects of the understanding are "the possible objects of experience" and most metaphysics which has been done so far is based on attempts to go outside this boundary, which can lead to nothing but wild speculation. Instead, Kant believes, metaphysics must be 'reigned in' to it's proper domain: true metaphysics exists on the boundary of human reason, that is, at the point where the possible objects of experience come to meet the things which can never be direct objects of experience. By the nature of the boundary, we can conclude that at least some such things (e.g., the external world, souls, God) do in fact exist, and by examining the boundary closely we can come to conclusions about them. At sect. 57, Kant argues that "we can ... never cognize ... intelligible beings according to what they may be in themselves, i.e., determinately ... [but] we can still at least think this connection by means of such concepts as express the relation of those beings to the sensible world."[3] He proceeds to take God as an example, and concludes that "we ... do not attribute to the supreme being any of the properties in themselves by whcih we think the objects of experience ... but we attribute those properties nonetheless to the relation of this being to the world." In sect. 58, Kant gives an example of such a relation and how it is understood by analogy: (1) as "the promotion of the happiness of the children ... "is to the love of the parents [so] ... the welfare of mankind ... is to the unknown in God ... which we call love." Thus Kant seems to me to say very much the same thing as Berkeley regarding the development of so-called 'abstract' ideas.
In conclusion: this is yet another example of how Berkeley doesn't get nearly enough credit, considering two very well known philosophers, Hume and Kant, seem to have received most of their best ideas, directly or indirectly, from him. Not to imply that Hume and Kant are unworthy of the credit they receive, but with regard to the ideas I find most impressive, Berkeley got there first. Kant's formulations are, on the whole, more precise and rigorous (one might even say that Kant brought new meaning to those words in the world of metaphysics), but they are also proportionately more opaque to those of us who have not yet had a chance to devote several years to studying them! Berkeley, on the other hand, is, for me, one of the easiest philosophers to read. So, enough of me - go read Berkeley!
[1] According to Kenneth Winkler's introduction to his abridged version of Locke's Essay, the Essay was required reading for BA students at Trinity beginning in 1692. Berkeley entered Trinity in 1700.
[2] See the editors' note on Principles 140 in Michael Ayers, ed., George Berkeley: Philosophical Works Including the Works on Vision.
[3] tr. Gary Hatfield
Metaphysics (theory of reality) is notoriously difficult to get off the ground. There is very little to start from, because everything else starts from here. However, as Descartes so famously observed, I, the one reasoning about metaphysics, am, in fact, reasoning about metaphysics, and therefore must, in some sense, exist. Descartes has been challenged by Neitszche (in Beyond Good and Evil) and others, for his inference from "there is thinking going on" to "there must be a substance which does the thinking," and, as little sympathy as I have for Neitzsche in general, I think that this may be a just criticism, showing that Descartes had not thrown off the Aristotelian 'substance-accident' picture of the world well enough to make his project truly 'foundationalist' (this mistake is, of course, the least of Descartes' problems - *cough* Pineal gland *cough*). As I have blogged before, I think the best way to get around this is to stop worrying about the whole substance thing, since it's a metaphysical abstraction that doesn't seem relevant to the question of my existence, and identify the self with the event of thinking.
So I exist - as an event at least, if not as a substance. Now, the event that is me has certain characteristics, and it is from these characteristics that we must proceed in our foundational metaphysical reasoning. Analytic metaphysicians really haven't gone this route very much, mostly because there haven't really been a lot of analytic metaphysicians. As an editor observed in the introduction to some work of Leibniz that is still in a box somewhere due to my not yet having a bookshelf (yes, I know that's very helpful for those of you trying to find the reference), 20th century Anglo-American philosophers often studied metaphysics in the way one studies tropical diseases - in order to find a cure! (The situation has gotten somewhat better since the time of writing, which I believe was in the 1980s.) At any rate, I don't think metaphysics, even these fundamental questions of ontology, are diseases to be cured; I think they are legitimate and important questions to answer, and that they way to answer them is to pursue a line of reasoning that begins from the nature of the 'me' event.
From this point on, I don't think we have deductive certainties. We must reason probabilistically to determine what is most likely to be the case. In my paper "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics" (currently being considered for publication by The Dualist) I develop a fairly detailed neo-Berkeleian ontology. I do not propose to do any such thing in this short post (God-willing, the journal will be published in a few months and the paper will be in it - if the paper isn't included I'll make sure it makes it online, either in another journal or on this site). Rather, I simply want to outline the basic chain of reasoning used to establish a Berkeleian metaphysical theory. For Berkeley's actual argument, go read his "Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge" - it's not very long or difficult, though it is rather dry; "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" presents basically the same argument in a much less dry, but also less rigorous, form. Here I will give you my own re-processing of the argument.
This argument is, as has been said, probabilistic in nature, and heavily dependent on Occam's Razor. Berkeley's account seeks to explain the phenomenon of my perceptions, and argues that the existence of God (or, at least, some 'super-mind') is a better explanation of these phenomena than the existence of (ontologically fundamental) material substance. Berkeley's arguments against matter are very interesting, but I'm going to ignore them here. Instead, I'm going to briefly go over (my version of) the positive argument in favor of Berkeley's view.
I am, and what I am is a mind. I have three types of ideas (where the word 'idea' is defined to mean any direct object of a mind): thoughts, perceptions, and volitions. Thoughts are those ideas that I make up myself by acts of my will, and volitions are the acts of will. Perceptions, however, are the problem. I don't create them (because I am a thinking, and am therefore anything I am not conscious of cannot be me). Clearly, however, they must come from somewhere (mustn't they? This may be another ungrounded though highly intuitive assumption, like Descartes' "a thinking presupposes a thing that thinks" assumption). What characteristics must their source have? Well, it must be active (since it is acting upon me), and it must have ideas (otherwise how could it be a source of ideas)? A thing that is active and has ideas is the same as a thing that thinks, i.e. a mind. It could be, of course, that some other totally mysterious something out there causes my perceptions, but this would be a very strange reasoning step to take, and would run afoul of Occam's Razor, because I already know that at least one mind exists, and I know that the existence of another mind could explain the phenomena in question, so it makes far more sense to posit the existence this other mind than to posit the existence of a Lockean "thing, I know not what" existing independent of any mind.
Thus having posited the existence of another mind, I have explained my perceptions. The question still remains of what these perceptions mean, why the mind causes them, what the mind's characteristics are, and whether he/she/it is in fact identical with the conventional idea of God (as Berkeley thinks he is). What we do know about the mind is that it is rational (since my perceptions are connected with one another in a coherent way), it has powers I lack (since I cannot impose ideas on other minds against their will), and it is far more intelligent than I am (since it is able to maintain a consistent physical world in the perceptions it gives me). I think Berkeley is unfairly importing theological ideas when he uses words like 'spirit' and 'God' in his discussion. However, I do think that he has established that minds (person-events) are the only entities whose ontologically fundamental existence we have good reason to believe in. The ideas of said minds (including the perceptions which make up the physical world) are very real, but not ontologically fundamental, since they supervene on the minds. If anything else exists in the universe, it is impossible for us to know anything about it.
I seem to have opened quite the can of worms in my post on Church dogma the other day when I said:
There seem to be some clear (to me) cases of Christian dogma that are not obviously uniquely deriveable from Scripture. For example, consider the formulation of the trinity as three persons (Greek hupostaseis and/or prosopa, Latin personae) in one substance/essence (Greek ousia, Latin essentia and/or substantia). This type of formulation is extremely common in the Christian tradition, and is derived primarily from the Chalcedonian Creed. However, I don't think we can say that it is obviously uniquely deriveable from Scripture; that is, there is no reason to say that someone looking at Scripture by some particular method that did not include granting some authority to tradition would lead many people to come independently to this conclusion. What is in Scripture is this paradox: the Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, the Holy Spirit is fully God, there is only one God. Any number of formulations of the solution could be compatible with the Scripture, but one in particular is generally believed to be part of Christian dogma.
I would posit that the doctrine of the Trinity of three persons and one substance is not a solution for the paradox, but just a restating of what the paradox is from scripture. I don't think Orthodoxy has gone too far from that. Just a restatement that we mostly accept as mystery.I think the danger comes to when we do try to explain that mystery. Like modalism where we say that the Father becomes Jesus and then the Holy Spirit. Or JW answer which is Jesus is not God but something else and the H.S. is just a power. In this particular dogma, when the mystery is tried to be solved, it creates problems.
Now let me be perfectly clear here: I absolutely do believe and am convinced that God exists as three co-equal and co-eternal Persons in a single Substance or Essence. It'sjust that I'm not always sure what I mean when I say that, and I've recently had some doubts about where that doctrine comes from. It seems to me, as I said, to be a clear case of Christian dogma, but what do we mean by it? Is it just a restatement of the paradox from Scripture?
As I see it, there are two ways that we can treat this statement. First, we can say something like "we know from Scripture that God is three in one sense, and yet one in another sense; let's call the concept under which he is three 'person' and the concept under which he is one 'substance.'" If we do this, we are doing nothing but restating the paradox from Scripture, as vangelicmonk says. However, we can't be sure that we are using the words 'person' and 'substance' in this context in the same way we use them in other contexts. This is perfectly ok with a lot of Christian thinkers. For instance, Thomas Aquinas thinks that when we speak about God we are always speaking by analogy. So, a Thomist could say some thing like: "when we say that God is three persons in one substance, we mean that there is some concept roughly analogous to the concept of 'person' as we ordinarily use it, such that if we consider God under that concept we will rightly state that he is three, but there is another concept, one roughly analogous to the concept of 'substance' such that if we consider God under it we will rightly say that God is one." (I'm not a Thomist, nor have I studied a lot of Medieval philosophy, so I'm not saying that a Thomist would say precisely that, but merely someone who agrees with Aquinas on this particular point could say that sort of thing.) Now, this makes a good deal of sense. Furthermore, the part where the threeness is analogous to 'person' can indeed be supported, to some degree, in Scripture: the Father and the Son are pictured talking to each other (e.g. in John 17) not in the way we talk to ourselves, but in the way we talk to others, and Jesus seems to speak of the Holy Spirit as though he were at least "roughly analogous" to a person in these latter chapters of John as well. There are other similar examples throughout Scripture. The concept of 'substance' is a much more difficult one; sometimes I'm not even sure I know what a substance (in the metaphysics sense, as opposed to the chemistry sense) is, but we can just go with it for now. So, perhaps we should say that a statement like the one above is a matter of dogma, but there is room for a great deal of disagreement as to just how good the analogies are. This seems like a very defensible position to me.
Alternatively, we could say that when we say that God exists as three Persons in one Substance we mean these words in the same way we mean them whenever we use them rigorously in this kind of metaphysical context (and statements about God are metaphysical statements). This needn't make any particular metaphysical system a matter of dogma (in fact, it had better not), it would simply say that if you are an orthodox Christian and you have a metaphysical system, your metaphysical system had better be able to account for this in its definitions of persons and substance. Now, the Bible doesn't use this kind of language (in fact, it doesn't even use English), so this couldn't possibly come from the Bible, and therefore can't be dogma under the Protestant idea, unless we think that Protestantism has room for saying that a disputable interpretation of Scripture can become dogma due to the authoritative status of the Church (that is, the true spiritual Church, not any particular hierarchy) as an interpreter, provided we realize that the Church continues to be less authoritative than the Bible itself. In this case, we might say that the formulation in English "three Persons, one Substance" was a matter of dogma, since all legitimate Christian communities that speak English affirm this (if, in fact, the broad, sweeping statement I've just made is true). Alternatively, of course, it could be that the Council of Chalcedon is an authoritative interpretation of Scripture, which might make its formulation, in the original Greek, a matter of dogma. I am of the belief that the word choice in the Chalcedonian Creed comes from Aristotle, so I hope eventually to go through Aristotle's Metaphysics and look at how each of the terms is used and see what meaning I can derive from Chalcedon on that basis, but I have no time right now, so let's assume for the sake of argument that the English formulation "three Persons in one Substance," where Person and Substance are used in precisely the same sense as in other metaphysical assertions, is a matter of dogma.
If this is the case, what we will do is proceed with an inquiry into the meaning of these terms by the methodology of analytic metaphysics (or some such) and then apply the results to doctrine. Note that, in this case, what the results have to be is not proscribed by dogma, but merely that if we get our metaphysics right with regard to other persons and substances, then we can apply the same definitions to God. It doesn't say under what circumstances our metaphysics is 'right.'
Now, I have argued previously that persons are in fact events, or, more specifically, connected series of mental states. A common definition of substance in metaphysics is "a center of causal power." Furthermore, I believe that God is atemporal, rather than merely everlasting. If we combine all three of these claims, we can get a very clear picture of God as Trinity: God, we will say, is a single center of causal power, existing in three separate eternal complex mental states. This is roughly analogous (here we go back to analogy) to three minds controlling a single body, but always agreeing on how to move it. God is only one set of causal powers, so it is a metaphysical impossibility that any Person of the Trinity should will anything by himself, without the other two. They must all will in unison. Since they cannot, metaphysically, act other than in unison, only having one set of causal powers, they are a single Being or Substance, but since there are three mental states, there are three Persons.
Now, even this detailed explanation doesn't really solve the mystery, it merely speculates on the meaning of three Persons in one Substance. I hope that it falls within the realm of orthodoxy, because I sort of tentatively accept it, and I would like to think that I am not a heretic, but it is certainly closer to wild speculation than to dogma.
The point that I'm trying to make is this: if God has in fact revealed that he exists as three Persons in one Substance, then he must expect us to understand something by the words 'person' and 'substance' in this context, and we should try to figure out what that is, as I did briefly above. If, on the other hand, God has revealed to us only that he is three in one, and we have simply plugged in the words 'person' and 'substance' as ciphers having no meaning external to the formulation in order to help us talk about it, then we should totally abandon this line of inquiry, because there is no way we can no anything about the internal nature of God apart from revelation. So this gives us basically three possible understandings of the formulation: (1) 'person' and 'substance' carry no external meaning into the formulat and are merely plugged in as a matter of convenience, (2) 'person' and 'substance' carry external meaning only by analogy to their ordinary usage, or (3) 'person' and 'substance' are used within the formulation in the same way they are ordinarily used outside of it. For each of these it is fair to ask whether the formulation is true under it, and also whether it is a matter of dogma under it. Each has problems.
Interpretation (1) can certainly be proven from Scripture, and is therefore certainly true and a matter of Christian dogma. However, if (1) is dogma and neither of the others are, then someone might refuse to say that God was "three Persons in one Substance," on account of the fact that it was misleading since these words had outside usages and we were here using them in ways unrelated to those outside usages. This person might wish instead to say that God was "three Wizboons in one Poobam" or some such, and we could not then consider this person a heretic. Does anyone else think this is a problem?
Interpretation (2) can be supported from Scripture, and I think the 'person' part can probably even be proven. However, I'm not sure the substance part can, but maybe I should ask someone who has a better idea what the heck a metaphysical substance is to figure that out. Besides this, you could still have someone insisting on saying that God was "three Wizboons in one Poobam" be orthodox, he would just have to acknowledge that a wizboon is sort of like a person, and a poobam is sort of like a substance. That actually doesn't seem that problematic to me, on the whole. I think interpretation (2) may be the best alternative.
I don't think interpretation (3) can be proven from Scripture, and the Scriptural support for it is very limited. However, it certainly doesn't contradict Scripture, and it may have the authority of the true Church behind it (though my Protestant ecclesiology makes that very difficult to determine).
So, to all of you who commented on the Church dogma post, and to all of you who didn't, which alternative do you take? Can the problems I've listed be solved, or are they not really problems? Or is there another alternative I'm not seeing?
Over the semester break, I took some time to look at Peter van Inwagen's paper "Materialism and the Psychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity" (Philosophical Perspectives 11 (1997): 305-319) and, as I realized that I don't have a good candidate for submission to Monday's Philosopher's Carnival, I thought this would be a good time to write down some thoughts that I had in connection with this paper and (very) broadly Lockean "psychological continuity" accounts of personal identity in general.
The aim of van Inwagen's paper is to show that these kind of psychological continuity accounts require the existence of immaterial substances, and so are incompatible materialism. He takes aim at what I see as the primary flaw of contemporary analytic philosophy: the attempt to isolate from one another philosophical issues that are in fact inextricably connected. In this case, this is primarily the attempt separate personal identity from the rest of ontology, which, I agree with van Inwagen, is not a good idea, and is probably nearly impossible.
However, I do think there is a version of the psychological continuity account that IS very nearly ontologically agnostic, and is at least agnostic as to the existence of material and immaterial substance, which is precisely what Locke claims about his theory. I will not spend time here making any arguments that the theory I'm presenting is Locke's (although I think it probably is), but I do want to show that there is a broadly Lockean account here that avoids van Inwagen's argument. This account makes a highly unusual assertion: according to it, persons are not in fact substances but events.
According to any psychological continuity account of personal identity, persons remain the same over time because their mental states bear a certain relationship to one another. In Locke's case, memory is emphasized, but I do not think this is necessary. It would be just as easy to say that a person A existing at time T1 is the same as a person B existing at a later time T2 if and only if B's mental state can be explained by a series of previous mental states leading back to A. This is of course not a rigorous formulation, and cannot handle all objections, but you get the idea. At any rate, the mental state of person B is connected to the mental state of person A in some relevant way, which leads us to assert that they are the same person.
Now, Locke is committed to a theory of what is called relative identity (see van Inwagen's brilliant paper "And Yet There are Not Three Gods, But One" in the collection Philosophy and the Christian Faith, ed. Thomas V. Morris for a rigorous account of relative identity). Relative identity is the claim that in at least some cases we cannot answer the question of whether A is the same as B without first asking, "The same what?" In particular, Locke thinks that although one being might be simultaneously a material object, a human, and a person, the question of whether it is the same material object, the same human, and the same person may in some conceivable cases have different answers. In the everyday case, it will not be the same material object over time because of the constant intake of food, elimination of waste, sloughing of dead skin cells, etc., that cause it not to be made up of the same matter. It will be the same human over time because it has continuity of organization as a living organism. It will be the same person over time because is has psychological continuity in the form of memory. What is curious about Locke's account is he envisions the case where two entities are compared and turn out to be the same person while NOT being the same substance. This would occur, for instance, if two souls (assuming, for the moment, that souls exist) were to swap memories.
The core of the strangeness of this account comes, I believe, from the fact that we are comparing things that we think of as being substances (persons) based on events that occur within them (mental states). We wouldn't normally do this. Now, perhaps we want to say that the mental state is the collection of properties of the person, and the person's having those properties is an event. This is where van Inwagen's attack comes in, since the materialist (allegedly) cannot say that the person is distinct from his body. Now, I'm not familiar with the particular accounts of materialism van Inwagen attacks here, but it seems to me that the materialist is only committed to saying that the person does not exist as a substance independent of the body. Van Inwagen presents a further attack by pointing out that if the person is identical with the physical body, then whatever is predicated of the person can be predicated of the body. However, if it is possible for persons to switch bodies, this will lead to the breakdown of the transitivity of the (absolute) equality relation. By way of illustration (an illustration different than van Inwagen's) let NBx (where x is a numeric subscript) be the new body at time x, and Px be the person at time x. The transfer occurs at time 2. We have:
NB1 != P1
NB3 = P3
P3 = P1
NB3 = NB1
I believe that both of these objections can be escaped, on a reasonable definition of materialism. That is, it may be reasonable to define materialism as the view that only material substances exist, but it is also reasonable to define it as the view that there are no substances other than material ones. This difference is significant, because many ontologies posit that substances are not all that are "real" - events are also real in an important sense. If persons are viewed as complex events consisting of series of psychological states, then they can exist without being identical with any physical objects; they simply need physical objects to "inhere" in. We would say, then, that each mental state is a "time-slice" of a person, a simple event consisting in (according to the materialist) some brain having certain properties. The person is a complex event consisting of a collection of such simple events which are related to each other in some relevant way, such that we say that any one mental event in the collection is "continuous" with all the others. These events need not inhere in the same material object. This could be defined rigorously by making explicit what types of properties are relevant to psychological continuity.
For the record, I do believe this theory of persons and events, although I am not a materialist. I think that it is the best account of what it is we mean by the word person; for the mental states that we speak of in terms of personhood are clearly events and, as Locke's arguments show, what substance they happen in doesn't seem to be relevant. This possibility is completely absent from van Inwagen's paper, and I'm really not entirely sure why.