Language

The Practical Argument for Free Will

entirelyuseless Ethics, Metaphysics, Probability, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Richard Chappell discusses a practical argument for free will:

1) If I don’t have free will, then I can’t choose what to believe.
2) If I can choose what to believe, then I have free will [from 1]
3) If I have free will, then I ought to believe it.
4) If I can choose what to believe, then I ought to believe that I have free will. [from 2,3]
5) I ought, if I can, to choose to believe that I have free will. [restatement of 4]

He remarks in the comments:

I’m taking it as analytic (true by definition) that choice requires free will. If we’re not free, then we can’t choose, can we? We might “reach a conclusion”, much like a computer program does, but we couldn’t choose it.

I understand the word “choice” a bit differently, in that I would say that we are obviously choosing in the ordinary sense of the term, if we consider two options which are possible to us as far as we know, and then make up our minds to do one of them, even if it turned out in some metaphysical sense that we were already guaranteed in advance to do that one. Or in other words, Chappell is discussing determinism vs libertarian free will, apparently ruling out compatibilist free will on linguistic grounds. I don’t merely disagree in the sense that I use language differently, but in the sense that I don’t agree that his usage correspond to the normal English usage. [N.B. I misunderstood Richard here. He explains in the comments.] Since people can easily be led astray by such linguistic confusions, given the relationships between thought and language, I prefer to reformulate the argument:

  1. If I don’t have libertarian free will, then I can’t make an ultimate difference in what I believe that was not determined by some initial conditions.
  2. If I can make an ultimate difference in what I believe that was not determined by some initial conditions, then I have libertarian free will [from 1].
  3. If I have libertarian free will, then it is good to believe that I have it.
  4. If I can make an ultimate difference in my beliefs undetermined by initial conditions, then it is good to believe that I have libertarian free will. [from 2, 3]
  5. It is good, if I can, to make a difference in my beliefs undetermined by initial conditions, such that I believe that I have libertarian free will.

We would have to add that the means that can make such a difference, if any means can, would be choosing to believe that I have libertarian free will.

I have reformulated (3) to speak of what is good, rather than of what one ought to believe, for several reasons. First, in order to avoid confusion about the meaning of “ought”. Second, because the resolution of the argument lies here.

The argument is in fact a good argument as far as it goes. It does give a practical reason to hold the voluntary belief that one has libertarian free will. The problem is that it does not establish that it is better overall to hold this belief, because various factors can contribute to whether an action or belief is a good thing.

We can see this with the following thought experiment:

Either people have libertarian free will or they do not. This is unknown. But God has decreed that people who believe that they have libertarian free will go to hell for eternity, while people who believe that they do not, will go to heaven for eternity.

This is basically like the story of the Alien Implant. Having libertarian free will is like the situation where the black box is predicting your choice, and not having it is like the case where the box is causing your choice. The better thing here is to believe that you do not have libertarian free will, and this is true despite whatever theoretical sense you might have that you are “not responsible” for this belief if it is true, just as it is better not to smoke even if you think that your choice is being caused.

But note that if a person believes that he has libertarian free will, and it turns out to be true, he has some benefit from this, namely the truth. But the evil of going to hell presumably outweighs this benefit. And this reveals the fundamental problem with the argument, namely that we need to weigh the consequences overall. We made the consequences heaven and hell for dramatic effect, but even in the original situation, believing that you have libertarian free will when you do not, has an evil effect, namely believing something false, and potentially many evil effects, namely whatever else follows from this falsehood. This means that in order to determine what is better to believe here, it is necessary to consider the consequences of being mistaken, just as it is in general when one formulates beliefs.

Semi-Parmenidean Heresy

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In his book The Big Picture, Sean Carroll describes the view which he calls “poetic naturalism”:

As knowledge generally, and science in particular, have progressed over the centuries, our corresponding ontologies have evolved from quite rich to relatively sparse. To the ancients, it was reasonable to believe that there were all kinds of fundamentally different things in the world; in modern thought, we try to do more with less.

We would now say that Theseus’s ship is made of atoms, all of which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons-exactly the same kinds of particles that make up every other ship, or for that matter make up you and me. There isn’t some primordial “shipness” of which Theseus’s is one particular example; there are simply arrangements of atoms, gradually changing over time.

That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about ships just because we understand that they are collections of atoms. It would be horrendously inconvenient if, anytime someone asked us a question about something happening in the world, we limited our allowable responses to a listing of a huge set of atoms and how they were arranged. If you listed about one atom per second, it would take more than a trillion times the current age of the universe to describe a ship like Theseus’s. Not really practical.

It just means that the notion of a ship is a derived category in our ontology, not a fundamental one. It is a useful way of talking about certain subsets of the basic stuff of the universe. We invent the concept of a ship because it is useful to us, not because it’s already there at the deepest level of reality. Is it the same ship after we’ve gradually replaced every plank? I don’t know. It’s up to us to decide. The very notion of “ship” is something we created for our own convenience.

That’s okay. The deepest level of reality is very important; but all the different ways we have of talking about that level are important too.

There is something essentially pre-Socratic about this thinking. When Carroll talks about “fundamentally different things,” he means things that differ according to their basic elements. But at the same kind the implication is that only things that differ in this way are “fundamentally” different in the sense of being truly or really different. But this is a quite different sense of “fundamental.”

I suggested in the linked post that even Thales might not really have believed that material causes alone sufficiently explained reality. Nonetheless, there was a focus on the material cause as being the truest explanation. We see the same focus here in Sean Carroll. When he says, “There isn’t some primordial shipness,” he is thinking of shipness as something that would have to be a material cause, if it existed.

Carroll proceeds to contrast his position with eliminativism:

One benefit of a rich ontology is that it’s easy to say what is “real”- every category describes something real. In a sparse ontology, that’s not so clear. Should we count only the underlying stuff of the world as real, and all the different ways we have of dividing it up and talking about it as merely illusions? That’s the most hard-core attitude we could take to reality, sometimes called eliminativism, since its adherents like nothing better than to go around eliminating this or that concept from our list of what is real. For an eliminativist, the question “Which Captian Kirk is the real one?” gets answered by, “Who cares? People are illusions. They’re just fictitious stories we tell about the one true world.”

I’m going to argue for a different view: our fundamental ontology, the best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely sparse. But many concepts that are part of non-fundamental ways we have of talking about the world- useful ideas describing higher-level, macroscopic reality- deserve to be called “real.”

The key word there is “useful.” There are certainly non-useful ways of talking about the world. In scientific contexts, we refer to such non-useful ways as “wrong” or “false.” A way of talking isn’t just a list of concepts; it will generally include a set of rules for using them, and relationships among them. Every scientific theory is a way of talking about the world, according to which we can say things like “There are things called planets, and something called the sun, all of which move through something called space, and planets do something called orbiting the sun, and those orbits describe a particular shape in space called an ellipse.” That’s basically Johannes Kepler’s theory of planetary motion, developed after Copernicus argued for the sun being at the center of the solar system but before Isaac Newton explained it all in terms of the force of gravity. Today, we would say that Kepler’s theory is fairly useful in certain circumstances, but it’s not as useful as Newton’s, which in turn isn’t as broadly useful as Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

…

A poetic naturalist will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. The difference is that an eliminativist will say “and therefore they are just illusions,” while the poetic naturalist says “but they are no less real for all of that.”

There are some good things about what Carroll is doing here. He is right of course to insist that the things of common experience are “real.” He is also right to see some relationship between saying that something is real and saying that talking about it is useful, but this is certainly worth additional consideration, and he does not really do it justice.

The problematic part is that, on account of his pre-Socratic tendencies, he is falling somewhat into the error of Parmenides. The error of Parmenides was to suppose that being can be, and can be thought and said, in only one way. Carroll, on account of confusing the various meanings of “fundamental,” supposes that being can be in only one way, namely as something elemental, but that it can be thought and said in many ways.

The problem with this, apart from the falsity of asserting that being can be in only one way, is that no metaphysical account is given whereby it would be reasonable to say that being can be thought and said in many ways, given that it can be in only one way. Carroll is trying to point in that direction by saying that our common speech is useful, so it must be about real things; but the eliminativist would respond, “Useful to whom? The things that you are saying this is useful for are illusions and do not exist. So even your supposed usefulness does not exist.” And Carroll will have no valid response, because he has already admitted to agreeing with the eliminativist on a metaphysical level.

The correct answer to this is the one given by Aristotle. Material causes do not sufficiently explain reality, but other causes are necessary as well. But this means that the eliminativist is mistaken on a metaphysical level, not merely in his way of speaking.

Technology and Culture

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The last two posts have effectively answered the question raised about Scott Alexander’s account of cultural decline. What could be meant by calling some aspects of culture “less compatible with modern society?” Society tends to change over time, and some of those changes are humanly irreversible. It is entirely possible, and in fact common, for some of those irreversible changes to stand in tension with various elements of culture. This will necessarily tend to cause cultural decay at least with respect to those elements, and often with respect to other elements of culture as well, since the various aspects of culture are related.

This happens in a particular way with changes in technology, although technology is not the only driver of such irreversible change.

It would be extremely difficult for individuals to opt out of the use of of various technologies. For example, it would be quite difficult for Americans to give up the use of plumbing and heating, and a serious attempt to do so might lead to illness or death in many cases. And it would be still more difficult to give up the use of clothes, money, and language. Attempting to do so, assuming that one managed to preserve one’s physical life, would likely lead to imprisonment or other forms of institutionalization (which would make it that much more difficult to abandon the use of clothes.)

Someone might well respond here, “Wait, why are you bringing up clothes, money, and language as examples of technology?” Clothes and money seem more like cultural institutions than technology in the first place; and language seems to be natural to humans.

I have already spoken of language as a kind of technology. And with regard to clothes and money, it is even more evident that in the concrete forms in which they exist in our world today they are tightly intertwined with various technologies. The cash used in the United States depends on mints and printing presses, actual mechanical technologies. And if one wishes to buy something without cash, this usually depends on still more complex technology. Similar things are true of the clothes that we wear.

I concede, of course, that the use of these things is different from the use of the machines that make them, or as in the case of credit cards, support their use, although there is less distinction in the latter case. But I deliberately brought up things which look like purely cultural institutions in order to note their relationship with technology, because we are discussing the manner in which technological change can result in cultural change. Technology and culture are tightly intertwined, and can never be wholly separated.

Sarah Perry discusses this (the whole post is worth reading):

Almost every technological advance is a de-condensation: it abstracts a particular function away from an object, a person, or an institution, and allows it to grow separately from all the things it used to be connected to. Writing de-condenses communication: communication can now take place abstracted from face-to-face speech. Automobiles abstract transportation from exercise, and allow further de-condensation of useful locations (sometimes called sprawl). Markets de-condense production and consumption.

Why is technology so often at odds with the sacred? In other words, why does everyone get so mad about technological change? We humans are irrational and fearful creatures, but I don’t think it’s just that. Technological advances, by their nature, tear the world apart. They carve a piece away from the existing order – de-condensing, abstracting, unbundling – and all the previous dependencies collapse. The world must then heal itself around this rupture, to form a new order and wholeness. To fear disruption is completely reasonable.

The more powerful the technology, the more unpredictable its effects will be. A technological advance in the sense of a de-condensation is by its nature something that does not fit in the existing order. The world will need to reshape itself to fit. Technology is a bad carver, not in the sense that it is bad, but in the sense of Socrates:

First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about … Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.”

Plato, Phaedrus, 265D, quoted in Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander.

The most powerful technological advances break limbs in half. They cut up the world in an entirely new way, inconceivable in the previous order.

Now someone, arguing much in Chesterton’s vein, might say that this does not have to happen. If a technology is damaging in this way, then just don’t use it. The problem is that often one does not have a realistic choice not to use it, as in my examples above. And much more can one fail to have a choice not to interact with people who use the new technology, and interacting with those people will itself change the way that life works. And as Robin Hanson noted, there is not some human global power that decides whether or not a technology gets to be introduced into human society or not. This happens rather by the uncoordinated and unplanned decisions of individuals.

And this is sufficient to explain the tendency towards cultural decline. The constant progress of technology results, and results of necessity, in constant cultural decline. And thus we fools understand why the former days were better than these.

The Error of Parmenides

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Parmenides entirely identified “what can be” and “what can be thought”:

Come now, I will tell thee—and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away— the only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not, and that it must needs not be,— that, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all. For thou canst not know what is not—that is impossible— nor utter it; . . . . . . for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

As I pointed out here, the error here comes from an excessive identification of the way a thing is known and the way a thing is. But he does this only in a certain respect. We evidently think that some things are not other things, and that there are many things. So it would be easy enough to argue, “It is the same thing that can be thought and that can be. But we can think that one thing is not another, and that there are many things. So one thing can fail to be another, and there can be many things.” And this argument would be valid, and pretty reasonable for that matter. But Parmenides does not draw this conclusion and does not accept this argument. So his claim that what can be thought and what can be are the same must be taken in a more particular sense.

His position seems to be that “to be” has one and only one real meaning, in such a way that there is only one way for a thing to be. Either it is, or it isn’t. If it is, it is in the only way a thing can be; and if it is not, it is not in the only way a thing can be. But this means that if it is not, it is not at all, in any way, since there is only one way. And in this case it is not “something” which is not, but nothing. Thus, given this premise, that there is only one way to be, Parmenides’s position would be logical.

In reality, in contrast, there is more than one way to be. Since there is more than one way to be, there can be many things, where one thing is in one way, and another  thing is in another way.

Even granting that there is more than one way to be, Parmenides would object at this point. Suppose there is a first being, existing in a first way, and a second being, existing in a second way. Then the first being does not exist in the second way, and the second being does not exist in the first way. So if we say that “two beings exist,” how do they exist? The two do not exist in the first way, but only the first one does. Nor do the two exist in the second way, but only the second one does. And thus, even if Parmenides grants for the sake of argument that there is more than one way to be, he can still argue that this leads to something impossible.

But this happens only because Parmenides has not sufficiently granted the premise that there is more than one way to be. As I pointed out in the discussion of being and unity, when two things exist, the two are a pair, which is being in some way, and therefore also one in some way; thus the two are “a pair” and not “two pairs.” So the first being is in one way, and the second being is in a second way, but the two exist in still a third way.

The existence of whole and part results from this, along with still more ways of being. “The two” are in a certain respect the first, and in a certain respect the second, since otherwise they would not be the two.

Thus we could summarize the error of Parmenides as the position that being is, and can be thought and said, in only one way, while the truth is that being is, and can be thought and said, in many ways.

Language as Technology

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Genesis tells the story of the Tower of Babel:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The account suggests that language is a cause of technology, as when the Lord says, “this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

But is possible to understand language here as a technology itself, one which gives rise to other technologies. It is a technology by which men communicate with each other. In the story, God weakens the technology, making it harder for people to communicate with one another, and therefore making it harder for them to accomplish other goals.

But language is not just a technology that exists for the sake of communication; it is also a technology that exists for the sake of thought. As I noted in the linked post, our ability to think depends to some extent on our possession of language.

All of this suggests that in principle, the idea of technological progress  is something that could apply to language itself, and that such progress could correspondingly be a cause of progress in truth. The account in Genesis suggests some of the ways that this could happen; to the degree that people develop better means of understanding one another, whether we speak of people speaking different languages, or even people already speaking the same language, they will be better able to work together towards the goal of truth, and thus will be better able to attain that goal.

 

Substance

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Aristotle says in his Categories,  “Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject.” Earlier in the text, he explains these characteristics:

Of things themselves some are predicable of a subject, and are never present in a subject. Thus ‘man’ is predicable of the individual man, and is never present in a subject.

By being ‘present in a subject’ I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject.

Some things, again, are present in a subject, but are never predicable of a subject. For instance, a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in the mind, but is not predicable of any subject; or again, a certain whiteness may be present in the body (for colour requires a material basis), yet it is never predicable of anything.

Other things, again, are both predicable of a subject and present in a subject. Thus while knowledge is present in the human mind, it is predicable of grammar.

There is, lastly, a class of things which are neither present in a subject nor predicable of a subject, such as the individual man or the individual horse. But, to speak more generally, that which is individual and has the character of a unit is never predicable of a subject. Yet in some cases there is nothing to prevent such being present in a subject. Thus a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in a subject.

It is not clear from this how Aristotle would deal with sentences like, “That man is Socrates,” where something individual seems to be predicated of a subject. Nonetheless, we can at least see what he means: things which are “predicable of a subject” refer to common terms and ideas, while individual realities are not said to be predicable of a subject. And something is “present in a subject” when it is a quality, property, or attribute of a thing. So by substance he refers to individual realities which are not qualities or attributes of other things.

Why does he say, “By being ‘present in a subject’ I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject”? Later in the text he explains this:

The fact that the parts of substances appear to be present in the whole, as in a subject, should not make us apprehensive lest we should have to admit that such parts are not substances: for in explaining the phrase ‘being present in a subject’, we stated’ that we meant ‘otherwise than as parts in a whole’.

In other words, he does not want to say that my arms and legs are “not substances.” Not because they are individual things in the way that I myself am an individual thing, but because neither do they seem to be merely qualities that I happen to have. The word “substance” itself is taken from the idea of “standing under,” and this is related to his general definition. Substances are the things that have everything else predicated of them or present in them, and in this sense they “stand under” those other things. And my arm seems to be a part of what stands under on an approximately equal level: my arm can be colored just as I can be colored, and so on.

Someone could object: if Socrates is a white man, then isn’t “white” a part of the whole, namely the “white man”? If this is the case, the Aristotle has no basis for his distinction between substantial parts and other things which are present in a subject.

But it is not difficult to respond to this. I tried to give a formal explanation of the idea of whole and part earlier. And as I said there, the whole must be distinct from each of the parts. I am not my legs, my arms, my torso, or my head. But in the case of Socrates, he is both the man and the white man. So “man” cannot be a part of the whole “white man”, since the man actually is the white man.

Nonetheless, it is possible to reformulate the objection to make it more problematic. Instead of suggesting that “white” and “man” are two parts of a whole, we could say that “whiteness” and “individual humanity” (or possibly “individuality” and “humanity”) are parts of Socrates. Socrates is not any of these things as such, and consequently we cannot refute the idea that they are parts as we did in the previous case.

I doubt that there can be any formal refutation of this idea, because if we could, we could refute the definition, “man is a rational animal,” in a similar way. In fact, if we add nothing to the idea of part and whole as we have defined them, it is not even false that “whiteness” and “humanity” can be parts of a whole. They can in fact be parts of a whole. It is just not the kind of whole that we are interested in when we ask the question, “what is that thing?” And this is the question that Aristotle is interested in when he speaks of substance, and consequently that kind of whole and part is not the kind he spoke about when he said that being “present in” a subject means “otherwise than as a part.”

 

More on Knowing and Being

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I promised some examples of the point made in the previous post. I will give just a few here, although the point could easily be extended to many more.

Parmenides argues that nothing can come to be, since “what is not” cannot be or become. He also claims that “it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be,” and apparently this is intended to cover not only what is, but also the way that it is. Consequently, his position seems to imply a perfect identity between thought and being, even if it is ultimately inconsistent, since he says that human beings are wrong about change and the like, and this implies a discrepancy between thought and being.

Alexander Pruss argues that all words are sharply defined, at least in the mind of God.  He makes the argument, “Words are part of the world, so if there is vagueness in words, there is vagueness in the world.” This is no different, of course, from arguing that since words are part of reality, and some words are universal, there are universal things. There are universal things, if we mean by that universal terms or concepts, and there are vague things, if we mean by that vague words or concepts. But there are no universal cats or dogs, nor are there vague cats or dogs, despite the words “cat” and “dog” being vague.

C.S. Lewis argues, “Either we can know nothing or thought has reasons only, and no causes.” As I argued in the linked post, reasons in fact are a kind of final cause relative to their consequences, and they do not exclude efficient causes. This case might be somewhat less evident than the two previous cases, but I would argue that the cause of Lewis’s error here is the fact that, as St. Thomas says, the human mind can understand many things at once only by understanding them as one. Consequently, we can understand that an efficient cause can be for the sake of an end, but if the efficient cause and the final cause are presented as simply two causes, without the order that they actually have, they are not intelligible in this way.

These are examples of speculative errors resulting from confusing the mind’s way of knowing with the way that things are. I asserted in the last post, however, that practical errors can also result from this confusion. There is a very fundamental way this can happen: by nature we know things only if they have some relation to ourselves. The corresponding practical error would be to suppose that those things are real and important only in relation to ourselves. Look around you, and it appears that the world is centered on you. If you take this appearance and attribute an absolute truth to it, you will conclude that everything else has its being and importance in relation to you. Consider that you exist, and that all of the past has past out of existence. It might seem that the past only existed to bring you about.

St. Therese says about humility, “To me it seems that humility is truth. I do not know whether I am humble, but I do know that I see the truth in all things.” This is related to the examples I gave above. Since we know things in relation to ourselves, there is the temptation to suppose that things exist in the very same way. This leads to a false idea about our place in reality. Humility consists, on the contrary, in the truth about our place in reality, as I noted here.

Making Arguments vs. Manipulating Symbols

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There is still another problem with Spinoza’s manner of argumentation. Spinoza is trying to get geometrical certainty about metaphysics by a logical arrangement of his claims. But this cannot work even in principle. If you take the rules of logic and the forms of the syllogisms, and fit sentences into them using their mere verbal patterns, without thinking about what you are saying, what it means and in what sense it is true or untrue, then you are manipulating symbols, not actually making arguments, and it may well mean that your conclusion is false, whether or not each of your premises is true in some way.

Alexander Pruss, in a recent blog post, argues for the existence of God from certain facts about language:

This argument is valid:

  1. All semantic truths are knowable to members of the community of language users.
  2. There are semantic truths that are not knowable to human language users.
  3. Therefore, there is at least one non-human language user.

There is some reason to accept (1) in light of the conventionality of language. Premise (2) is going to be quite controversial. I justify it by means of a standard argument for epistemicism. Consider Queen Elizabeth II. There are 88 statements of the form:

  • Elizabeth was not old at age n but she was old at age n+1

where n ranges from 1 to 88. It’s a straightforward matter of classical logic to show that if all 88 statements are false, then:

  1. Elizabeth was old at age 1 or Elizabeth is not old at age 89.

But (4) is clearly false: Her Majesty is old now at age 89, and she surely wasn’t old at age one. So, at least one of the 88 statements is false. This means that there is a sharp transition from being not old to being old. But it is clear that no matter what we find out about our behavior, biology and other relevant things, we can’t know exactly where that transition lies. It seems very plausible that the relevant unknowable fact about the transition is a semantic fact. Hence, (2) is true.

The most plausible candidate for the non-human language user who is capable of knowing such semantic facts is God. God could institute the fundamental semantic facts of human language and thereby know them.

(“So, at least one of the 88 statements is false” should be “So, at least one of the 88 statements is true.”) I would consider this to be more a case of manipulating symbols than of making a serious argument.

An atheist is likely to say about this argument, “Wait a minute. Maybe it’s not obvious to me what is wrong with your argument. But there’s just no way you can prove the existence of God from simple facts about how words are used. So there must be something wrong with the argument.”

I agree with the hypothetical atheist that reasonable intuitions would say that you cannot prove the existence of God in such a way, and that this is a reason for doubting the argument even if you cannot formally point out what is wrong with it.

But in fact I think there are two basic problems with it. In the first place, Pruss seems to be failing to consider the actual meaning of his premises. He says, “There is some reason to accept (1) in light of the conventionality of language.” What does this mean? A semantic fact is a fact about the meaning of words or sentences. Pruss is arguing that all facts about the meanings of words or sentences should be knowable to members of the community of language users, and that we should accept this because language is conventional. In other words, human beings make up the meanings of words and sentences. So they can know these meanings; whatever they cannot know about the meaning is not a part of the meaning, since they have not invented it.

But later Pruss says:

This means that there is a sharp transition from being not old to being old. But it is clear that no matter what we find out about our behavior, biology and other relevant things, we can’t know exactly where that transition lies. It seems very plausible that the relevant unknowable fact about the transition is a semantic fact. Hence, (2) is true.

But if this is right, it undercuts the justification for believing the first premise. For the only reason we had to believe that all of the semantic facts are knowable to the community of language users, was a reason to believe that they were knowable to human beings. If they are not knowable to human beings, we no longer have a reason to believe that they are knowable to anyone, or at any rate not a reason that Pruss has given.

This illustrates my point about the necessity of considering the meaning of what you are saying. The argument for the first premise is in fact an argument that human beings can know all of the semantic facts; thus if they cannot, we no longer have a good reason to accept the first premise. We cannot simply say, “This argument is logically valid, we’ve given a reason for the first and a reason for the second, that gives us reason to accept the conclusion.” We need to think about what those reasons are and how they fit together.

The second problem with this argument is that the “standard argument for epistemicism” is just wrong. And likewise, the argument consists of precisely nothing but manipulating words, without thinking about the meaning behind them. It is a “a straightforward matter of classical logic” in the sense that we can fit these words into the logical forms, but this does not mean that this process is telling us anything about reality.

To see this, consider this new word that we can construct by convention, namely “zold.” A person who is between 80 and 90 years old is said to be zold; a person who is between 1 and 10 years old is said not to be zold.

Now consider the 88 statements of the form, “Elizabeth was not zold at age n but she was zold at age n+1.” It’s a straightforward matter of classical logic to show that if all 88 statements are false, then either Elizabeth was zold at age 1, or she was not zold at age 89. But this is clearly false according to the conventions already defined. So at least one of the statements must be true, and there is a sharp transition from being not zold to being zold. It is obvious that no matter what we find out about human beings, that will not tell us where the transition is; the transition must be a semantic fact, a fact about the meaning of the word “zold.”

Obviously, in reality there is no such semantic fact. The convention that we used to define the word simply does not suffice to generate a sharp transition. The problem with the argument for the sharp transition is that the rules of logic presuppose perfectly well defined terms, and this term is not perfectly well defined.

And it is not difficult to see that the word “old” does not differ in a meaningful way from the word “zold.” In reality the two come to have meaning in very similar ways, and in a such a way that there cannot be a sharply defined transition, nor can classical logic force there to be such a sharp transition.

It is not enough to fit your sentences into a logical form. If you want the truth, the hard work of thinking about reality cannot be avoided.

Lying

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St. Thomas speaks of truth as a part of justice:

Since man is a social animal, one man naturally owes another whatever is necessary for the preservation of human society. Now it would be impossible for men to live together, unless they believed one another, as declaring the truth one to another. Hence the virtue of truth does, in a manner, regard something as being due.

It is not clear whether St. Thomas intends to say precisely this, but in fact it would be impossible for men to live together without believing one another in a particular sense, namely it would be impossible for them to speak a common language, or in other words for them to communicate with one another by language at all.

Consider what would happen if people only said “this is red” about things that are blue. If this happened, “red” would simply acquire the meaning that “blue” presently has. The resulting situation would be entirely normal, except that the word “red” would have a different meaning.

Likewise, consider what would happen if people said “this is red” about random things in random situations. The phrase would cease to have any concrete meaning, and if the situations were randomized enough, the phrase would cease to have any meaning at all.

Again, supposing that one man had the intention of deceiving another as much as possible, as soon as both men are aware of this intention, the one who wishes to deceive can no longer do so. But he also cannot communicate anything; if he says, “there will be a concert tomorrow,” the other man will not believe that there will be a concert tomorrow. But neither will he conclude that there will not be a concert, because the deceiving one might have hoped for this result. Consequently he will cease to pay any attention whatsoever to what he says.

Similarly, if all men had the intention of deceiving all others as much as possible, language would simply cease to have meaning, and people would simply stop listening to one another.

Saying all of this in another way, we cannot understand the meaning of words unless they actually have some correlation with reality. This implies that it is basically necessary for truth telling to be more common than lying in order for language to exist at all; and this necessity is a necessity of fact, not merely of precept.

It follows that one harmful effect of lying is that it damages language, namely by tending to make it less meaningful. In some cases, we can see that the harm has already been done: for example, when someone asks, “How are you doing?” and the other responds, “Fine,” his response is meaningless, and it has become so on account of many past lies. And insofar as language is a common good, since it is a tool that benefits the whole community by having meaning, lying is always harmful to the common good by tending to take away meaning from the language in this way.

 

More on Thought and Language

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In the previous post we were considering the relationship of thought and language. There are other ways to notice the close connection. From time to time I have the experience (which I think is not uncommon for others as well) of thinking something, or perhaps being about to think something, but then being distracted before being able to internally verbalize the thought. Afterwards there is no easy way to recover the thought without going through the chain of imagination and thought that led up to that point. And if this is not done at the time, it may be impossible to ever recover the thought. This is perhaps most directly because memory depends on the imagination, and consequently we do not remember our thoughts without either some associated verbalization or the equivalent.

This can have various consequences. For one thing, thinking a thought is rather like speaking to oneself, and needs interpretation just as we need to interpret the speech of others. You might assume that you automatically understand yourself, since you are the one thinking the thought, but this is not necessarily the case. Each time you remember a thought, you are doing it through a verbalization, which is itself a vague expression which could be understood in more than one way. This implies that you may not even be thinking exactly the same thought each time.

This influences the way we learn or change our minds. Thus for example Thomas Talbott criticizes John Loftus’s book The Outsider Test for Faith:

By way of a partial answer to such questions, Loftus suggests that most religious people, even among the most intelligent and reflective, never (formally) convert to another religion or de-convert from their initially acquired religion viewed as a cultural phenomenon: “In most cases,” he says, “we rarely stray from what we were raised in but merely move around among versions of the same general religion…” (p. 83). My own informal impression, however, is that, depending upon how one might measure such things, many people travel a huge distance (in a host of different directions) over the course of a normal lifespan; and many observers, such as hospice workers who work with end of life issues, sometimes report great spiritual growth, as they interpret it, in the final days and weeks of a person’s earthly life. Beyond that, I see no reason to deny that even very small movements, as judged from the outside, can sometimes signify profound spiritual progress. Do I rest any argument of substance on such subjective matters, or expect to achieve universal agreement on them? Not at all. But I do suggest that one should not trivialize, as Loftus appears to do above, what it might mean to “move around among versions of the same general religion.”

Here is why. The Christian tradition, which is the religious tradition I know best, is so rich and includes so much diversity within it that the question of diversity between the Christian tradition as a whole and some other religious tradition, such as Islam, may have little or no coherent meaning. Put it this way: A cultural Christian has no need to embrace another religious or cultural tradition, at least not formally, in order to embrace religious views typically associated with some other tradition. Take, for example, the great Christian poet John Milton, who emphatically rejected the one substance theory of the Trinity, adopted the Arian view that Jesus Christ was on a lower ontological level than God the Father, and even set forth an elaborate biblical argument in defense of polygamy. He had no need, in other words, to embrace the Muslim religion as a cultural phenomenon in order to embrace a concept of God that was virtually identical with the Muslim concept; yet, C. S. Lewis and others (including myself) still consider him a great Christian poet. Similarly, those Christians who come to believe in reincarnation, as more than a few do despite their upbringing, have no need to embrace all the nuances of the typical Hindu understanding and certainly have no need to embrace all of the cultural trappings and conventions of some particular sect in the Hindu religion. My point is that moving “around among versions of the same general religion” may involve profound (and easy to overlook) changes in one’s religious outlook, changes that may be at least as momentous as converting to another religion (or even as adopting a kind of practical atheism). For as Loftus himself points out, “Worldviews are dynamic rather than static things, anyway. They are constantly changing with additional education and experience” (p. 97). So again I ask: Given such dynamism and so many dynamic opportunities for spiritual growth (however that should be construed) within any one of the great religious traditions, why should it even matter where one’s spiritual journey begins?

There are several reasons why things work this way. In the first place, belonging to a religion does not in itself signify a certain belief, but membership in a religious community. This implies that changing your mind about religious matters does not necessarily imply changing your religion, and it may be more reasonable not to change it, depending on various circumstances. But there is another reason. Due to the vice of pride and various other causes, we do not like to say, “I was wrong.”

Not only in religion but in almost every other matter, changes of opinion are significantly more frequent than the actual admission of having been wrong about something. One can avoid admitting this in various ways, some deliberate, some usually subconscious. Sometimes a person will say nothing for a while, then begin to voice the new opinion, hoping that no one notices that he has changed his mind, since this would be to admit that he was wrong. Occasionally a person may even assert that he always held the new opinion, and he may even believe this, perhaps since he now finds it difficult to imagine holding another position, and consequently difficult to remember doing so, since memory depends on the imagination. Or a person may wait until he leaves one social circle and joins another, before starting to say something new, so that no one notices the change of mind. Or again, one can voice the new opinion using the same words that were used to express the old opinion. In this case one may or may not even notice that one has changed one’s mind. Or one can change one’s mind gradually, in such a way that at each stage the same words are used, and it is actually reasonable to call it the same opinion, perhaps with a variation of degree or emphasis. But at the end it may no longer be reasonable to call it the same opinion, just as a color may be changed by imperceptible stages until a new color is present. The person himself, however, may still not recognize that he has ever changed his opinion at all.

The vagueness discussed in the previous post is closely related to all of this. The boundaries of a word are vague; thus there is a region where it is vague whether a person is bald or not. And likewise the boundaries of the vague region are themselves vague; at no level will complete precision be found. This makes it all the easier for an opinion to drift gradually and in an almost unnoticeable way over time.