A Critique of BonJour's A Priori Justification of Induction

In this paper I respond to epistemologist Laurence BonJour's a priori justification of induction. There should be enough info for those unfamiliar with both the problem of induction and BonJour's particular response to understand the interchange of ideas that is going on. Some familiarity with philosophical concepts is required, however, so go here if you need some terminology explained: http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/index.htm

On a side-note, BonJour teaches at the University of Washington, which is where I attend school.

Here is the paper, it's about 6 1/2 pages long: http://students.washington.edu/mainwt/BonJourPaper.htm

A Semi-Full Critique of Feinberg

In one of the posts below is a short-hand critique of Joel Feinberg's article "The Nature and Value of Rights" from the Patrick Hayden text on the Philosophy of Human Rights. In the link provided here, I develop the critique into a 12-page paper. Basically I say that there is no way to make sense of Nowheresville and have it be a useful thought experiment, therefore we should pitch it. While I think that I make a good point or two, overall I wouldn't rate the paper that highly. Part of the problem is that I had to apply the critique to an actual case example, so it made moving from the purely conceptual realm to the real world a bit choppy. I certainly did not have the space to give a step-by-step argument for how I would transition from the conceptual to the actual, and I think the paper suffers for that reason. Plus I had to drop what I thought was a pretty good critique in order to make the paper a reasonable length, so that was too bad. Nonetheless, it is not without its merit and potential to generate comments.

http://students.washington.edu/mainwt/A%20Critique%20of%20Feinberg.htm

The Kalam Argument and First Cause Coherence

At my school there is a monthly undergraduate philosophy journal that is published by students specifically for the purpose of allowing their fellow undergrads to develop and write philosophical works. In this journal, there was an article questioning the coherence of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Rather than detailing all of the critiques of the argument that were offered (as I am trying to be very brief with this particular blog posting), I wish to address one claim in particular.

The person writing the article (whose name I will not mention because it is not relevant) said that if there is such a thing as a first cause to the Universe, and it itself is uncaused, then this goes against all of our previous conceptions of what cause and effect entail, and for that reason the claim of an uncaused first cause incoherent. That is, how can this “first cause” create the Universe without being caused to do so? If this is the case, then our first cause somehow acts without being caused to act (which makes no sense), or we must concede , on the other hand, that the Universe is the result of an infinite number of causes.

Of course, I address this idea in the article I wrote (see below) on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, but here I want to address more directly the notion that an uncaused Cause could produce the Universe (something itself which is the first cause in the string of causes which constitutes our Universe), and how this idea is neither incoherent nor mysterious.

I will first say that the idea is not mysterious because I propose that the first cause of the Universe is a personal being. From what we know of entities that are personal, they seem to have this notion we call free will, Libertarian Freedom, or the power of agent causation (these three being the same thing). Human beings are typically considered to have free will, as most people would stipulate that such is necessary if we are to be morally responsible beings - which most people will maintain that we are. Hence, human beings are persons, and persons by nature are said to have free will. Specific formulations of what it means for a being to have free will, or the power of agent causation, are a bit tricky. We could say, roughly, that if a being is free with respect to choosing to do "X", then no antecedent conditions are necessary for them to make the decision to do "X," or, to not do "X." In other words, they are not determined to act a particular way because of the antecedent conditions in which they exist (be they internal, or external conditions, such as our states of mind or the atmospheric pressure).

I gave the above explanation for informative purposes only, because a precise formula of what it means for a being to have free will is not necessary to the defense that I wish to make. The point that I will be arguing for is that the idea of an Uncaused cause acting without being caused to act is not an incoherent idea, if such a cause exists. I will not henceforth be arguing that such a cause exists, nor that it is reasonable to believe something can exist which has no cause for its existence, but only that if such an Uncaused cause exists then there is not an insurmountable conceptual difficulty in understanding how it might act without being acted upon.

What I want to suggest , then, are the similarities between human beings and this first cause, given that human beings are personal, and that the first cause (on my view) is personal. If we can be said to have a grasp of what it is for human beings to have free will without a definition of what such a concept would entail, then I think that we can understand what it would be for a being which is personal (but not a human) to have free will. That is, the degree to which human free will is mysterious is also the degree to which the free will of a personal cause of the Universe is mysterious, considering that both have this ability in virtue of being persons. And, it does not seem all that mysterious to say that human beings have free will. Now, if we do not consider the idea of human free will to be so completely mysterious and incoherent such as to suggest that humans do not have free will, then there is no reason to think that the free will of an uncaused, personal being who created the Universe is, by contrast, so mysterious as to be incomprehensible. So, ruling out the idea that a cause of the Universe could have free will cannot be done on the basis of the fact that it is incoherent and therefore untrue.

Next, we would say that if this uncaused Cause has free will, then it can act to create the Universe simply in virtue of having a free will. That is, nothing causes it to act, it simply has the ability to act uncaused – as this is what we mean by agent causation.

Hence, a simple response to this problem is just to say that the cause of the Universe is personal, and therefore it does not require a cause to act. However, if someone still wishes to maintain that this notion is incoherent, I have given them the grounds for doing so. What they need to do is show that human free will is incoherent and mysterious, therefore the free will of a first cause suffers the same difficulty. The problem with this response, however, is that it then denies that humans beings have free will. Now, the natural reaction of most people is to object at this point and maintain that human beings have free will, typically citing the moral implications of denying such a view. I, however, will not even go that far, and can grant for the sake of argument that human beings do not have free will. I think that the result, however, will be less than thrilling for the person who still wishes to maintain the incoherence of the first cause.

So, to recap quickly, we have said (hypothetically) that human beings do not have free will because such a concept is too mysterious and incoherent to be true. Fine, I can grant that. The difficulty, however, is in then seeing what force this argument has against the coherence of the Kalam Argument. That is, if we human beings are not free with respect to our will so that all of our thoughts and decisions are caused, then how can we claim that because something is incoherent, therefore it is untrue? Our very notion of coherence is the result of causal processes, and so may not be coherent for all we know! Furthermore, if we deny human free will, then we deny our ability to rationally assent to truths that deserve rational assent, such that we might be assenting to the idea that the first cause argument is incoherent when it is actually perfectly coherent! The point is that because all of our decisions about what we will believe are caused, we have no way of knowing if they are rational or not. We might think that they are rational, but this is only because we are caused to think so. And if we think that the first cause argument is incoherent, then it is because we are caused to think this, not because it actually is incoherent.

Hence, what I see following from my response to this objection is one of two conclusions. We either give up the objection by maintaining that human free will is not mysterious, therefore the free will of a personal cause for the Universe is not a mysterious concept either. Or, we maintain that human free will is too incoherent to be true, and then admit that our arriving at this conclusion was not the result of reason, but causal processes, suggesting that the argument itself has no rational force.

The Humean Problem of Induction and Peter F. Strawson

In keeping with my desire to post on this blog more frequently than I actually do, I have decided to link to a paper that I wrote for school on David Hume's problem of induction and Peter F. Strawson's response. I am not all that proud of the paper, as I have written better ones, but it does the job. Here is the link for direct access, and below follows a summary for those unfamiliar with anything I have just mentioned: http://www.freegoodnews.com/logos/humeandstrawson.htm

To put it briefly, the Humean problem of induction is essentially a philosophical observation that Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote about in the 18th century. Hume is famous for being a skeptic, and in this problem he creates for inductive reasoning he is true to that title. Basically what Hume does is ask our reason for thinking that the future will be like the past. In so doing his point is, ultimately, to show that we have no reason for believing that the future will be like the past. The way he accomplishes this task is to examine the potential arguments we could give for such a belief - a deductive one and an inductive one - and to rule both out.

Against a deductive argument that the future will resemble the past, Hume says that such a proposition as "the future will resemble the past" is not entailed by any known propositions that we have, therefore we cannot validily deduce it as true. Hence we must turn to induction to justify this belief, yet here we run into a problem. If we try to argue to the idea that the future will probably resemble the past, what shall we admit as evidence for this being true? One good candidate (and perhaps the only) is past experience. Thus, from past experience we observe a regularity of nature, therefore we can expect that it will continue on into the future. What Hume shows is that this statement, "The past has been regular" does not entail the statement we wish to arrive at, specifically, "The future will be like the past." Hence, we must find some intervening proposition that connects these two, otherwise we cannot reasonably hold the second statement to be true. Hume posits - or rather, other philosophers have taken Hume to posit - that we need something like a principle of the uniformity of nature that we can use as an intermediate premise that will take us from "the past has been regular" to "nature is uniform" and all the way to "therefore, the future will be like the past." The problem is that such a principle is not a necessary truth - i.e. it is possible that it is false - and we cannot justify it through induction - i.e. by observing what the past is like and inferring that the future will be similar.

Thus, we can see that there is a problem. To inductively conclude that the future will be like the past is ciricular because it assumes that the past gives us evidence of what the future will be like without explaining how we can know this. And, as well any attempts to deductively justify a belief in the uniformity of nature will immediately be met with shouts of illegitimacy because none of our justified beliefs entail that the future will be like the past. Hence, if we believe that the future will resemble the past, we seem to do so without having a reason for this belief.

So what can we say in response? You'll just have to read the paper...

Maintaining Appearances

When I first started this blog I was fairly ambivalent as to what its focus/title should be. I could have gone the route of purely philosophical reflection, or I could have focused entirely on apologetics (which, in reality, would simply have been a different kind of purely philosophical reflection with an emphasis on the phil. of religion), or I could have complained about my day/deep personal problems as so many bloggers seem content to do. In fact, this is the most personal blog I have posted so far, and therefore it is time to stop talking about me. Instead I will finally be posting something which actually lives up to the name that the blog has, that is, posts which are related to Christianity as Truth, and not perhaps some of the other popular conceptions which people are now and again given to mischaracterize it as. Towards this end, here is an article I wrote (for Christians) on the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, posted at a church website where the moderators were kind enough to tolerate my verbosity (which can be quite staggering when I am not writing papers for academia): http://www.dyingtolive.org/artman/publish/article_46.shtml

In the future, however, I will continue to post as I have done. Since my goal is to learn as much from my classes as possible, I will still reflect upon the things that I read by posting short articles to this blog.

Joel Feinberg's Nature and Value of Human Rights summarized

One of the recent readings in my Philosophy of Human Rights class has been a piece written by Joel Feinberg, formerly at the University of Arizona as he passed away not long ago, entitled "The Nature and Value of Human Rights" (the reader it is from is The Philosophy of Human Rights, edited by Patrick Hayden, published in 2001). In the space provided below I will limit myself to summarizing and articulating Feinberg’s position, as any criticisms I have will be forthcoming and related to a future paper due in the class.

To begin, I will do so where Feinberg begins, and that is with a thought experiment. He begins his article by conceiving of a make-believe world called “Nowheresville.” “Nowheresville [is a] world very much like our own, except that no one, or hardly any one (the qualification is not important), has rights,” (emphasis original, pp. 174 of Hayden text). We are asked to imagine this place is in fact quite morally superfluous, that is, acts of generosity are in abundance and empathy is practically given away at the corner store. Hence, normal social interactions within Nowheresville are at an elevated level of eloquence, courtesy, and chivalry in both public and private discourse.

Beginning here, Feinberg then takes us on a journey of examining what the consequences would be if slight changes were made to the nature of Nowheresville. He first says, “Let us…introduce duties into Nowheresville, but only in the sense of actions that are, or believed to be, morally mandatory, but not in the older sense of actions that are due others and can be claimed by others as their right,” (pp. 176). The distinction is that we now have the kinds of “duties” that are “required” by the law, “under pain of penalty,” but that we do not have the kind of duties to others that entail their rights. By “duties” is meant the idea of something due to someone, and thus paying our dues becomes paying that which we owe others and they can make a claim to. Keep in mind that this does not have to be any kind of monetary debt, but something that naturally arises either from (a) the inherent worth of an individual such that the realization of his needs are someone’s debt, or (b) the establishing of a contract which binds two or more people together as to what each owes the other, given the obtaining of certain circumstances.

Hence, because Nowheresville lacks such duties, when someone else is at fault for hurting us, such as breaking our window by playing baseball in our backyard, we can complain and say that they were wrong and should fix our window, but because we have no right and they no duty, we have no moral justification for making the claim that it is their duty. In fact, the thought does not even cross our mind – according to Feinberg – to make such a claim because the other person has no moral duty to us, therefore they have no responsibility to fix the window – and we certainly have no right to claim that they do. Surely we can state a moral ought, but this does not equal a right or the assertion of a duty – according to Feinberg.

Feinberg then goes on to make other changes to Nowheresville that I will not explore. The important conclusion yielded from his thought experiment – or what he is claiming as important – is that no matter what else Nowheresville has, if it does not have the idea of rights then something “morally important” is missing. So what does Feinberg have to say about the nature of rights that is so morally significant? On this matter his statements are – I believe – somewhat imprecise, mainly because he thinks that a philosophically rigorous definition of rights is impossible, and as such he is likely entirely correct. Thus, his approach is to characterize not necessarily rights themselves, nor duties, nor claims, but instead he gives a statement of the relationship of rights to claims and also morality. First, I should begin by giving a bit more insight into the nature of rights from Feinberg’s perspective with this quote: “Even if there are conceivable circumstances in which one would admit rights diffidently, there is no doubt that their characteristic use and that for which they are distinctively well suited, is to be claimed, demanded, affirmed, and insisted upon…Having rights, of course, makes claiming possible; but it is claiming that gives rights their special moral significance.” This quote comes after he has attempted to sort out the difficulty in distinguishing the difference between a right and a claim, because the existence of one seems to first necessitate the other and the effect is a very circular juggling of terms. As Feinberg sees it, rights and claims cannot exist separately, almost like relational properties (Two examples of relational properties are “taller than” and “shorter than.” If Tree A has the property of being “taller than” Tree B, then we necessarily infer that Tree B is “shorter than” Tree A. Thus one property cannot exist without the other necessarily existing.”). He thinks that to make sense of one you must have the other, like to understand “up” you must have “down,” but he notes that claims and rights are distinct, just like up and down are distinct (though one requires the other).

All this having been said, here is part of Feinberg’s concluding paragraph: “To have a right is to have a claim against someone whose recognition as valid is called for by some set of governing rules or moral principles.” (text, pp. 185). In this sentence we see as close as Feinberg comes to giving a definition of a right, though by shorthand he says that a right is a “valid claim” (c.f. text pp. 182-183).

To summarize one might say that Feinberg has attempted to give an account of the interrelated nature of rights, duties, and their moral justification. A moral imperative directed at someone (e.g. “you ought to fix my window because you broke it”) that does not inherently carry with it a morally justified (meaning, that I can appeal to morality to justify it) duty, is not the assertion of a “right” in Feinberg’s sense. Rather, a duty that is to someone, and which is morally justified, naturally creates a “right” for that person to that which the duty specifies (i.e. mowing the law, paying your taxes, etc.)

As I said earlier, I will not in this piece be criticizing what Feinberg appears to be saying (if my analysis is correct), therefore I will avoid going into what I believe are the problematic areas of his article. Instead I will simply comment that it seems as though a complete theory (or a reasonable one, we might say) of morality and moral justification seem necessary to properly understand when a person has a duty to another, as this understanding is appropriate so that we are not arbitrarily assigning rights and duties. Hence, I believe that much work must be done before Feinberg’s case can be made, and the purpose of this article by itself was not to facilitate this broad of a point.