Blogging the APA Central: Day 3

I was late getting into Chicago due to a crazy snowstorm, so I only managed to catch the last bit of a morning session on experimental philosophy and naturalism, mostly filled with a talk that was at great pains to establish the following two uncontroversial claims: (i) occasionally, philosophical naturalists speak loosely, which might lead one to believe that they thought that ID and its ilk ('God Hypotheses') were actually scientific, and (ii) if one actually does think that such God Hypotheses are scientific, then one is being self-contradictory in espousing philosophical naturalism. In point of fact, I agree with both. Of course, there hasn't yet been presented a God Hypothesis that actually is scientific, so as of yet the argument is moot.


Over lunch there was a meeting of the North American Nietzsche Society, which featured arguments for (Richard Schacht) and against (Maudemarie Clark) the claim that Nietzsche was a Lamarckian. [Note: for any historians or philosophers of biology, they don't really mean Lamarckian -- they only mean belief in the inheritance of acquired characters. Nietzsche would have been nothing less than an actual Lamarckian, as the inherent notion of progress built into Lamarck's notion of evolution would have driven Nietzsche batty.] A good exchange, one that I regard as rather inconclusive. Perhaps yet another point where Nietzsche couldn't quite make up his own mind.

The highlight of the day was the debate between Plantinga and Dennett on the relationship between science and religion. Plantinga's argument is, of course, bad, but it was presented particularly poorly (and rebutted fairly poorly as a consequence) on this occasion.

Plantinga's main points, with my editorial commentary:

1. The claims that the earth is ancient and that descent with modification are the mechanisms of the evolution of life are compatible with theistic belief. [I agree.]
2. The claim that the mutations which underly evolution are completely unplanned and unguided is incompatible with, at least, Christian theistic belief. [I'm not sure if I agree or not. I probably don't. But I don't have a horse in that race, so I'm not very concerned with this claim. At least in part, Plantinga's argument here seems to rely on the claim that a mutation-directing God is not part of an organism's environment, which seems absolutely preposterous.]
3. Further, evolutionary theory doesn't require such completely random mutations. [Indeed, in some sense. See Dennett's reply below.]
   
4. The claim that evolution undermines the argument from design, and thus the only really tenable reason for believing in God, is false, due to the work of people like Michael Behe. [Oh jeez. Yeah, he really did refer to Michael Behe. Dennett will tear this to shreds in a little while.]
5. The claim that evolution is a particularly bad case of the problem of evil isn't valid, because it's no worse an example of the problem of evil than anything else. [This is probably true.]
6. The claim that positing a theistic designer is unnecessary, in the Ockhamist sense, is false. [Plantinga's defense of this seems to hinge on the claim that there's no "further Ockamistic cost" for someone who already believes in God to posit a designer. That's true, but that's also completely evasive of the point.]
7. Even if evolution were contrary to theistic belief, theistic belief wouldn't automatically become irrational or unwarranted. [If by this he means it wouldn't become any more irrational or unwarranted than it already is, then I agree with that. Its warrant seems to have little to do with empirical fact.]
8. Conclusion of this first part of the talk: the supposed conflict between theistic religion and evolution is, in fact, a chimera.

So much for Part I. Now for Part II.

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable (i.e., that the content of most of our well-formed beliefs is true), given that naturalism and evolution are both true, is quite low. [This seems to me to be a really problematic claim, for lots of reasons. First of all, Plantinga said nothing in his talk about what the content of a belief is, how that content can be true or false, and so forth. I'll come back to this claim with the help of Dennett, below.]
2. If you accept that the probability is low, you have a defeater for every belief. [I don't see how this is true whatsoever. I accept that the probability of my own existence is low. I was born premature, and required quite a bit of medical intervention to reach adulthood. In this sense, the probability that I have reliable cognitive faculties is pretty small. I don't thereby have a defeater for my beliefs. Plantinga seems to think this follows straightforwardly.]
3. This defeater can't be defeated. [Because, I take it, any such defeat would be an argument, which would rely on other premises, which would be defeasible by the defeater already proposed. In other words, if you accept the position I'm trying to attack, you automatically become ineligible to do any philosophy in your own defense. Honestly...]
4. If you have a defeater for R, you have a defeater for every belief you have, including naturalism and evolution. [Fine, probably true.]
5. Therefore, the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is self-defeating and can't be accepted.
6. Plantinga backs up the first claim with some really hasty philosophy of mind, all reliant on the premise that adaptiveness -- in the sense in which our cognitive faculties would have had to be adaptive in order for them to evolve in our ancestors -- doesn't entail truth. [As far as I'm concerned, this claim is transparently false. If it isn't, Plantinga's going to have to give me a very careful account of beliefs, belief content, truth ascription, natural selection, and adaptiveness that makes the point. For my money, here's a good counterargument: (1) on most accounts, the content of our beliefs is fixed by repeatable, causal, physically law-based processes; (2) these processes create correlations between our mental states and the contents of the environment; (3) insofar as these correlations are established by these processes, they reflect the contents of the environment accurately. Now if Plantinga means something else by truth than accurate correlation with environmental stimuli, he'd better tell me what it is.]

Now, Dennett moves in. Three of Plantinga's premises, he says, are accurate, but not in the way Plantinga needs them to be for his argument.

1. Evolution is compatible with theistic belief. This is true, Dennett argues. Theism is one of a class of reasonably silly beliefs that are nevertheless compatible with evolution. Thus, as supporters of evolution, we have no contradiction upon which to base a rejection of theism. (After all, Dennett argues, finding actual evidence of intelligent design is really, really hard -- compare the "design" of a greyhound with the "design" of a cheetah -- and it's equally really hard to conceptualize natural selection.) On the other hand, with respect to evolution, we can see that theistic design hypotheses are entirely gratuitous. Thus, we have no real reason to accept them.
2. Evolutionary theory doesn't imply that mutations are random, in the sense of being uncaused. This point of Plantinga's is just flatly correct, despite what some very good evolutionary biologists (like Monod) thought.
3. Evolutionary theory, by itself, doesn't deny divine design.
   
   • This is true, but only in a very qualified way. Consider two different explanations of a scenario, where one describes a very plausible naturalistic hypothesis, and one ascribes a very simple divine hypothesis. There's just no reason to accept the design explanation.
4. Naturalism and Plantinga:
   
   • First, if we deny naturalism, Plantinga's doing an injustice (!) to Behe, by placing him among theologians or philosophers, and not scientists.
   • Further, Behe's work is a crock. Here's a selection of quotes from Dennett:
     
     • Behe's work is "neither serious nor quantitative"
     • It is a "transparent concoction of bad science and bad rhetoric"
     • It is "hugely disingenuous propaganda"
   • And Dennett already refuted Behe once, with the help of Haig (from Harvard) at a Notre Dame conference. He's not going to do it again.
   • No matter how hard the Discovery Institute looks for intelligent design, they aren't going to find any skyhooks.
5. Naturalism and evolution
   
   • The claim that the probability of reliable cognition given naturalism and evolution is low is simply false.
     
     • First of all, we can measure the reliability of sense organs and correct when they become unreliable. (Wear glasses much?)
     • Our brains are syntactic, not semantic engines. We clearly track truth syntactically, and such truth-tracking is adaptive. What more do you want? [Parallels my objection above.]
     • After a question by Michael Tooley, challenging Plantinga on this premise: all of the most plausible accounts of brain states have them causally correlated to the environment. Where's the problem here if there's laws of nature doing causal work for us?
6. Finally, after Murray Gell-Mann told Dennett that the Christian fish was an acronym, he pressed Dennett to come up with an acronym for his Darwin-fish pin. Dennett came up with: "Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas": Destroy the author of things in order to understand the infinite universe.

Plantinga replied and a short Q&A session followed, in which nothing really substantive took place. Among the humor was Plantinga's claim that Behe hasn't been refuted (?!!?).

And thus ended the APA. A good time was had by all.

Blogging the APA Central: Days 1 & 2

After the first two days of this year's Central APA, I should probably jot a little note here about the proceedings.


Thursday afternoon I sat in on Michael Tooley's John Dewey Lecture, which, after a brief bit of biographical detail, wound up being on one of my favorite philosophical problems. Tooley offered the conclusions, at least, of proofs of the following two premises: (i) if we have a reductive (e.g., Humean) conception of natural law, there's good reason to think we'll never be able to justify induction, and (ii) if we have a strong (i.e., Armstrong/Tooley) conception of natural law, we get a reasonably straightforward justification of induction -- probabilities climb fairly simply with observed instances. I'm looking forward to going through these proofs in fuller mathematical detail.

After the talk, I got a chance to meet Prof. Tooley, as well as famed Spinoza scholar Edwin Curley and Iowa's Evan Fales. I also got the chance to talk with Stephanie Lewis, wife of the late David Lewis, who is both an astute philosopher (far moreso than her self-description as "amateur metaphysician" would imply), and, perhaps more importantly, an incredibly kind and genial woman whom it was a joy to chat with.

After a set of quick talks on reduction, multiple realizability, and complex systems, it was back to South Bend for the night.

Today started with a nice set of talks on causation; my personal favorite being Luke Glynn's discussion of how we might salvage orthodox theories of probabilistic causation (by accepting conditional probabilities as primitive and being careful about our synthesis of objective chance and determinism). After lunch there was an interesting session on the relationship between human freedom and brain and behavioral science, which, for me, mostly served as a primer on the current state of compatibilism, since the free will literature is somewhere I have close to zero experience.

Finally, I attended Peter van Inwagen's Presidental Address. It was mostly combinations of various arguments of Peter's that I'd heard before -- in particular, his claim that the existential quantifier is univocal due to its relationship with counting, combined with his insistence that metaphysical claims, like the truth or falsity of mereological fusions, are valid, non-trivial philosophical problems worth being solved. In this instance, he was defending himself against arguments of van Fraassen -- that many metaphysical problems turn on vagueness in language -- and Putnam -- that the way we count (i.e., whether or not to include fusions in our counts of what there is) is a convention that determines (changes) our use of the existential quantifier. A good paper, very much in van Inwagen's style.

Watch this space tomorrow evening for a report on the Dennett-Plantinga debate on science and religion!

Happy Darwin Day!

So, I clearly couldn't let Darwin's 200th birthday go by without writing a post. But, as it turns out, neither can the rest of the internet. So let me mention the few articles that, if I were you, I would read in honor of today.

First, a great article from Science News on the man himself, giving a good idea of the breadth of Darwin's work. Next, we have a piece at the NYT that does an incredible job discussing, in broad strokes, the history of the reception of Darwin's work. The latest issue of BBC Focus Magazine, available in a really cool Flash format, has quite a few neat articles (MINI Coopers are referenced on p. 7; my heart sings).

On the cultural front, while Texas manages to score a minor victory, this piece at the Christian Science Monitor talks about the new form we can expect the ID debate to take in the future.

Finally, the singing Darwin scholar.

And, what piece on Darwin could close without the last few paragraphs of the Origin:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of different kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

[...]

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

That word "evolved" -- the last word of the Origin -- is the only time Darwin uses any variety of the word "evolution." And as the work closes, we feel that the door has been opened -- opened to the entire future of biological science.

Watch this space on Nov. 24, which, in addition to being my birthday, will be the next Darwin holiday -- the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin!