Muchacho Polaco

I started reading Robert Audi’s introductory work to epistemology last week. I’ve had this book for quite some time and have wanted to read it for just as long. Audi did a pretty spectacular job with the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy which I have relied upon for years.

Audi is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame (where Plantinga is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus) and therefore I had rather high expectations. I am a big fan of Plantinga’s (especially his work in epistemology).

But so far I’m not impressed. It’s only intended to be an introductory, but even so his ethical intuitionism seems to permeate much of this survey. That bothers me as I don’t like ethical intuitionism. Perhaps I am misinformed, but it seems incredibly naive and easily refuted (and I’m hardly unique in that claim). In fact, EI has very few subscribers having seemingly long died out in the 20th century (much like logical positivism had, at least in philosophical circles).

Audi believes ethics can be done independently from theology. I don’t find his reasoning even remotely persuasive. And I find it very confusing that an institution such as Notre Dame would hire someone like this (Plantinga was a rather confusing choice as well for a Catholic university).

“Different Bayesians commend different versions of the simplicity postulate (see e.g. Swinburne 1979). But whatever notion of simplicity one thinks fits a simplicity postulate best, assigning priors in accordance with it goes beyond the bounds of Bayesian inference construed as logically sound inference.”

 

It was nice to see that Howson has read Swinburne. He references his 1979 book entitled The Existence of God which was a little surprising given Howson’s philosophical commitments. Earlier Howson had dismissed religious responses to the problem of induction rather flippantly:

Given that unaided reason, as Hume should take the credit for pointing out, could not have led us to this epistemic cornucopia, our achieving it is either an incredible accident, or there is some systematic and reliable guidance at work. The religious explanation quite properly no longer commands wide assent, and Darwinism supplies the explanatory deficit with the only account which it is scientifically respectable to accept.

The religious explanation to which Howson refers is an extraordinary broad-sweeping generalization. The only other theistic contribution to Swinburne Howson references in this book is Hilary Putnam, a Jewish philosopher at Harvard. As much respect as I have for both of those philosophers, Howson certainly could have chosen much better material. My suspicion is that he hasn’t actually read the available works on the subject from more sophisticated Christian philosophers. And if he was going to reference anything of Swinburne’s, I would have much more appreciated him dealing with his 1974 work, The Justification of Induction as it is much more to the point than the 1979 text Howson references.

James Anderson has a helpful and brief summary which I put to audio over a decade ago. Interestingly, I just found someone copied my audio and uploaded it on Vimeo, attributing the audio to James himself. Nice. But I suspect James has a much more refined voice.

Interestingly, Howson also references Ludwig von Mises brother Richard, who I was previously not aware existed. Richard seems to have had a special talent for probability theory, which makes me wonder what the von Mises household must have looked like in the early years.

“To answer these questions we seem first to need an answer to the question ‘What is logic?’

My own belief is that there is no fact of the matter about what entitles a theory of reasoning to logical status, and one has to proceed as one does in extending common law to new cases, by appeal to precedent and common sense. Here again, of course, one must be selective, but with modern deductive logic in mind I propose the following as necessary and sufficient conditions for a discipline to have the status of logic:

( a) It involves statements and relations between them.

( b) It adjudicates some mode of non-domain-specific reasoning.

( c) It is ‘about consistency’. More specifically, it should incorporate a semantic notion of consistency which can be shown to be extensionally equivalent to one characterizable purely syntactically; this equivalence is the content of what are called soundness and completeness theorems for the corresponding system. First-order logic famously has a soundness and completeness theorem.”

The quote above has profound implications for the author (the red highlight is my emphasis). And it is an issue I rarely see addressed by anti-theists such as this author. If there is in fact no mechanism to entitle one theory of reasoning to logical status, then such would be the destruction of all human predication. Obviously Howson is wrong. In order for the paragraph (or the book for that matter) to have any real value, he must assume that there is in fact a way to entitle his preferred manner of reasoning to logical status. If not, what would be the point? Debate would be inevitably stultified in that your opposition need only adopt any other contrary form of reasoning which one has elevated to logical status.

Howson’s proposal of the three conditions above as necessary and sufficient are no more arbitrary than Kant’s proposed necessary conditions for which he grounded his transcendental argument. Howson has already critisized Kant for doing this.

The problem with Kant’s theory is the undeniable fact that we can sensibly and consistently conceive alternatives to the principles Kant held to be ‘necessary’ conditions of cognizing

That of course is true. But it is also true for Howson’s proposed criteria above. The fact that competing paradigms of logic exist demonstrates that Howson is no less arbitrary than Kant and arbitrariness is the opposite of necessity.