Against Plantinga's Anti-Naturalism Argument

I don't really like Plantinga's anti-naturalism argument in Warranted Christian Belief, and I've been meaning to put down my thoughts on it for a while now. I don't have my copy of the book around, or what is much the same it is lost in some pile somewhere, so please correct me if you feel that I am misrepresenting Plantinga.

To begin: Plantinga argues that if both naturalism and evolution are true, then our cognitive faculties may utterly misrepresent the world; therefore, we would not be able to trust our theoretical science which tells us that evolution is true. He give the following thought-argument: a guy sees a sabre-tooth tiger, and thinks that the sight of a sabre-tooth marks the beginning of a foot-race. His thought is not reliable as far as knowledge is concerned, as his cognitive faculties are not fashioned for the purpose of knowledge; they are fashioned for survival, as the evolutionist needs. His running a foot-race will save him from the tiger, ensuring survival. This scenario is either probable or inscrutable for Plantinga, thereby showing that on naturalistic (and so unguided) and evolutionary (and so geared purely toward survival) grounds, it is either (a) probable that we do not have cognitive faculties geared toward accurate knowledge, or (b) we have no idea whether they are geared toward knowledge, which lands us in much the same situation. Of course, there is more to Plantinga's argument, but this is the crux of it it seems to me.

My counter-argument then is this: there is a probable scenario under which, within a materialistic evolutionary account, we have accurate theoretical knowledge of the material world. Plantinga's thought-experiment, and all similar ones, cannot even get off the ground because it cannot account for how the random thought about running foot-races (or any other concept so divorced from reality) could have arisen, other than perhaps as a massively freak mutation of genes (which would be quite improbable on the naturalists account). I do not claim to be building an air-tight argument. For one thing, it is probabilistic like Plantinga's own, and for another, I simply do not understand what the force is behind Plantinga's account. If nothing else, then, hopefully this will help to frame the issues at stake.

First, let us start with what Plantinga's argument is not doing. it is not an argument that either life or self-reflective consciousness in themselves would be improbable for the materialist. Therefore, I can assume that materialism could account for these, and leave it to other arguments to show whether or not this is the case (I'm fine with saying it is not; I have no predilection toward materialism myself). Also, Plantinga does not give sub-arguments in this argument as to things like mind-body dualism, or for the reality of individual organisms as such, and neither do I think that the materialist should grant this.

I set out the following propositions which would seem to be probable for the materialistic evolutionist:

1. Physical Holism: we live in a physical field. Any organism that arises within it is still part of the field. The behavior of that organism is not something completely separate from its environment; simply regarding the physical field, it is the field acting on itself.
2. Pragmatism: just as the rise of life is not a clean break from the regular actions of the physical field, so to concept-formation is not a clean break from behavior. There is a progression of thinking, and it is tied to behavior; there is no purely mental realm unless one wants to be a Platonist, and the materialist does not want this.
3. Mental Holism: Concepts are not single thoughts. Concepts interrelate amongst themselves. If I think about foot-races and sabre-tooths conceptually, this is already tied to other thoughts about foot-races and other thoughts about sabre-tooths.
4. Regularity: Behaviors that arise for survival are regular; maybe not perfectly so, but in tendency. If an animal cannot regularly tell the difference between suitable residences and unsuitable, or between predators and prey, it does not much of a shot at survival. Survival mechanisms must in general be regular; if they were not, they would be random, they would not help survival since they could not respond to the environment appropriately.

I am not going to argue whether all of these are right in themselves, merely that they make sense for the materialist. Regularity follows from survivability, and Physical Holism seems to me to simply follow from saying that (a) all that exists is material, and (b) all material interacts. However consciousness evolves (as a phenomenon, whether or not it entails immaterial properties or substances), it must come from matter and in line with what that matter is doing. The principle of Mental Holism seems to me to simply come from what it is to have a concept; a concept of "foot-race" is meaningless unless it has multiple uses which are related.

If this is the case, then regularity exists at the level of the physical organism. It must behave in some regular way within its environment in order to survive. When it starts meeting predators, it starts developing avoidance behaviors. When concepts form, these avoidance behaviors are already present; the evolutionary history makes our foot-runner to have fear long before foot-races. The concepts further are developed insofar as they are related to behavior, since all explanation is material and therefore concepts need recourse to material action for their explanation. The regularity of behavior demands that, as a survival mechanism, concepts are similarly regular in relation to the environment.

If all of this works, and I think that it is a least probable once one starts trying to think like the materialist on their own grounds, then we have a way of preserving theoretical science. Our thoughts are regularly formed in relation to our environment. I make regular distinctions between different colors based on the regularity in the environment; if there were no regular stimuli, my experience would not be regular (or at least, it is much more implausible to posit a cognitive scheme in which that chair is always brown and that futon always blue separate from any difference in the stimuli). Science is aimed at looking for and analyzing these regularities. I don't catch all regularities in the world, but science doesn't need that.

So, maybe I can find real regularities in the world, but maybe my thoughts about the world do not match up with it; my cognitive faculties would be ill-formed. But I'm not sure what this would even mean. The concepts interrelate; every single thought is both based on regularities in the environment and Mental Holism. My concept of "red" is not something separate from my concept of "blue", since they condition each other. If both are regularly formed from the environment, and so are all the rest of my mutually-conditioning thoughts, what is left for my cognitive faculties to be egregiously wrong about?

Maybe I think that something is red, but it is not in itself. I have no idea what color is in something itself, but let's assume this for those with better imaginations than my own. Who cares? As long as I can differentiate the different colors, and I can see the continuity between the colors in the rainbow, what difference does that make? So, then, what about color-blindness? But I would have to counter that color-blindness is no different than the fact that most of us can't see ultraviolet on its own. The color-blind person has less information about the world and so can investigate less regularities, but this is not in and of itself the same as making "false" judgments. And it seems to me that any time one wants to fill our regular concepts with content in this way, one reaches the same conclusion: the content didn't actually matter for either practice or theory. I'll hold to that until someone can give me a genuine alternative.

At this point, someone might say that I have missed Plantinga's point. And certainly my argument has come to a very different place than Plantinga's epistemology. But my point was that he was completely misconstruing the situation in the first place in ways that the materialist would not care for, so whatever point I missed is one that the materialist would ignore anyhow.

History of Early German Idealism

So school's out for summer, and I have on my mind several blog posts that I've been wanting to do. I'll probably burn myself out today and blog again around the time school starts up in the fall. But in the meantime, I'd like to recap some of what I've learned this semester, both to solidify the knowledge in my own mind as well as to hopefully interest other people in the areas I've been studying. First: Early German Idealism.

I'm mainly going to jot down the history between Kant and up to, but not including, Hegel. So, Kant wants to say that we have two sources of representations. On the one hand, we have receptivity: the senses. On the other hand, we have spontaneity: concepts. Kant's system in the Critique of Pure Reason is then a way of showing how there must be necessary (and so therefore objective) connections constituting and combing the appearances, so that we can have mathematical and scientific knowledge; why must we think of the world in terms of cause and effect, or as divided up into quantities, for example.

Kant also has his practical program, in Critique of Practical Reason. Part of his first Critique was that, in order to cognize something, you must both be able to think about it and be given the object in experience. Things like God, freedom, and the soul can never be given in experience, however, so they can never properly be part of our theoretical knowledge. Instead, they are postulated by our practical reason, which tells us how to act. It may be the case that we are not free, but if reason alone can determine the will (the condition under which we can have morality), we would have to be free, and so since we have this sense of morality we must presuppose freedom in order to act according to it. God and the soul are similar cases.

Next enters Reinhold. He was first training to be a Catholic priest, then part of the radical Englightenment, became a Mason and part of the Illuminati, and became a Protestant pastor. Philosophically at this time, he started as a critic of Kant, then one of Kant's boldest supporters, started his own project, became a Fichtean, left Fichte for a "rational realism", and finally worked through his own liguistic philosophy (source: SEP). I can understand someone like this. I will talk about his support of Kant for the moment.

Reinhold thought that Kant's philosophy was the perfect solution to the problems of skepticism and religious enthusiasm of the day (between Aberglaubt and Ueberglaubt). Kant agrees with the enthusiasts that one cannot give a purely rational argument for God's existence, while at the same time agreeing with the skeptics on the importance of reason. To this end, Kant had the notion of a "rational faith" in his practical philosophy, which unites both head and heart. This is how Reinhold popularized Kant, going so far as to liken Kant's program with that of Christ in bringing together religion and reason.

However, Reinhold started believing that something was missing in Kant's system. Kant had kept his system full of all these dualisms, such as that between theory and practice and between (passive) appearances and (active) concepts. But the only way to know whether it is consistent is to make it properly scientific and ground it on a single principle. Reinhold took from Kant that we have things which are represented (i.e. the object), while we represent (as the subject). There must be some faculty of representation which underlies the two, even though we can never experience it. Representation, or Vorstellung, is most likely an infelicitous term; "intention" might be better, and our professor wanted to make the case that Reinhold was even a proto-phenomenologist.

Reinhold together with Kant were attacked in a work entitled Aenesidemus, at the time anonymous but revealed to be by G. E. Schulze, later the teacher of Schopenhauer. This review charged the Kantian philosophy with illegitimately assuming things about both the object and subject of cognition, defeating its own transcendental standpoint. Whatever the merits of Schulze's work itself, it prompted Fichte to respond.

Fichte thought that Reinhold was right in giving a single starting point to Kant's philosophy, but that problems arise by making it a separate fact, or Tatsache, which would involve one in making Schulzian errors. Instead, this "faculty" of representation must be an action, or Tathandlung: the Absolute Ego posits itself as an activity. In so doing, a non-ego against the ego is posited, and this is the start of the subject-object or representing-represented dichotomy.

Various other options come up after this; the usual history goes from Fichte to Schelling to Hegel, where Hegel went through the Subjective Idealism of Fichte to the Objective Idealism of Schelling to get to his own Absolute Idealism. The picture is not quite so simple. Schelling did give a higher priority to nature than did Fichte. Fichte had to explain why one must start with the subject instead of with the object. Fichte then proceeded to claim that one could start with the object instead and proceed to dogmatic metaphysics, but that one could never explain freedom. One would have to choose what philosophy one works in based on one's own character: the person who is overly concerned with things would start with the object, and the person who actually cares about freedom and hence morality would start with the subject.

Schelling gives a more positive account of the object. One can start with the object and proceed to natural philosophy, or one could start with the subject and proceed to transcendental idealism. Eventually, Schelling would say that there must be an identity between the subject and the object, and starting with either could not get you to this identity. The Absolute in a way must remain unknown; this became his critique of Hegel (I don't really know Hegel; I think Schelling's critique is more or less that Hegel can explain what happens when you start thinking just fine, but that Hegel cannot explain the existence of thinking in the first place). In addition, the unknowable Absolute behind thought became influential (so I hear) for people like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

Finally, the last figure we studied: Hoederlin. Hoederlin was friends with Schelling and Hegel, and most likely highly influential on their systems. Unfortunately, Hoederlin did not publish any of his philosophical work, and not even all of his poetry. He went crazy at a relatively young age as well, which didn't help matters, though it did give Hegel an excuse to drink an extra bottle of wine on his friend's birthday in memoriam.

Hoederlin wanted a poetology which would blur the distinction between philosophy and poetry, and for this reason some of his philosophical thought is found in his poems. I'm still not quite sure what he was saying; On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit is easily the most difficult piece I've ever read, and that's in a semester where I read most of the Critique of Pure Reason. One point he makes, I think, is that language is not a product of us, but we are a product of language; write anything and you are the spokesperson for language. The "I" in a piece of poetry is not you or any other person, but reflects this poetological underpinning to the subject and the object. Also, poetry can balance dichotomies and so bring them to their original state which philosophy in its analytic mode must take apart.

Magic and Knowledge

A couple months ago, I was reading through the book Persuasions of the Witch's Craft by T. M. Luhrmann. I haven't yet finished it, but what I read I think does bring up interesting problems for epistemology.

Luhrmann was an anthropology student at Cambridge at the time, doing her dissertation on the practice of ritual magic in contemporary England. One of the key points which she brought up was that what she encountered was not limited to these groups; it applies to any time in which a person specializes and learns to look at the world through new lenses. It just so happens that magic makes a good test case; it is not as though magic were widely believed in our society, so everyone who enters one of these groups must undergo a pretty significant change of mind.

And most of these people entering these groups do go in with a skeptical frame of mind. This is in fact encouraged by the community, which is often made up of intellectuals and prides freedom and rigor of thought. The people who do come to believe in the efficacy of magic believe that they have rationally tested the data and that the evidence is overwhelming.

However, it is not as though these people are conducting scientific experiments. What they are doing is probably too complicated and fuzzy for such experiments, any how; magic for them is not just about, saying, making a quick buck or casting "magic missile". The results are often supposed to be influences on various matters, and sometimes large-scale influences, say on the well-being of the country as a whole. In addition, much of what goes on is about self-transformation as much as anything else; I was struck by the similarity of some of these rituals to, say, Tibetan tantrism in its imagery and use thereof.

So how do these people think that they have rationally assessed magic and found it to be defensible?

• We remember when things go really well. That one spell that had miraculous results sticks out in our minds, rather than the few that were so-so or those that had no visible results. The author talks about her experience in reading a detailed horoscope; inevitably some sections would be dead-on, and these made her want to believe the rest even though she logically knew that as a whole the horoscope did not perfectly fit her.
• There are ways in which we can fail. This may sound counterintuitive, but if things can go right, they must be able to go wrong as well. If you can't muck up a magic spell, then under what conditions does it work? Instead, people start looking for alternative ways in which the power of the spell had released itself. Luhrmann gives the example of some people who were inviting a potential business investor over, and so made everything in their house correspond to certain symbols of Jupiter (itself associated with business and worldly success), such as colors and the numbers of things around the house. Nothing happened with business, but a couple days later the person mentioned (for pretty much the only time in his life) that he was thinking about going into the priesthood. Turn out that Jupiter also symbolizes religion. Other examples were using magic for something water related, or something with watery associations, and then having the pipes burst. We can then pick out the associations and know that something was going on.
• Tied to this, the magicians start learning to look at their world by picking out different aspects, focusing on things which they never before would have noticed. If you are looking for certain things, you will start finding them; start reading your horoscope while looking for ways in which it applies to your life, and it will start applying to your life more.
• Finally, magic is hard. It's complicated and demanding. People who have been in it for a couple decades remark that they are still beginners. So, if one's first attempts do not succeed, is that any surprise? There are reasons why one does not see the results, and reasons to press on.

The issue that comes up is, are any of these ways in which people come to believe in magic any different from how we conduct ourselves in our everyday lives, where we want to believe that we rationally look at the world and assess it properly. It also comes to bear in joining up with any group, such as a religious one (or an academic one), that claims to let one rationally come to that group's conclusions.

So, what exactly is the problem here? Maybe magic works, and society at large simply doesn't realize this. I don't really see enough evidence either for or against it to make a firm decision; the problem is that competing worldviews all claim to be rational, while our ability to be rational in contingent or complex matters is (maybe totally?) conditioned by our own worldview. So, how do we really get to the truth?