The QOTD, on the limits of reason:

“The third problem, that of conflict between knowledge and rationality… is often called the dilemma of ultimate commitment and the problem of presuppositions.

The problem is crucial, not only because no one has seemed able to solve it but because the Christian commitment of many Protestants depends upon the assumption that it cannot be solved. For the argument provides a rational excuse for irrational commitment… It argues that (1) for certain logical reasons, rationality is so limited that everyone must make a dogmatic irrational commitment; (2) therefore, the Christian has a right to make whatever commitment he pleases; and (3) therefore, no one has a right to criticize him (or anyone else) for making such a commitment…

No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: ‘How do you now?’, ‘Give me a reason’, or ‘Prove it!’ When such challenges are accepted by citing further reasons which entail those under challenge, these may be questioned in turn. And so on forever. If the burden of proof or rational justification is perpetually shifted to a higher-order premise or reason, the contention originally questioned is never effectively defended… An infinite regress is created.

To justify the original contention, one would eventually have to stop at something not open to question for which one does not and need not provide justificatory reasons. These would be the halting points for rational discussion… However, if all men do not cease their questioning at the same point - if ultimate standards are perceived not to be certain or if different people deem conflicting ‘ultimate’ standards to be certain - then ‘ultimate relativism’ results. Some way of arbitrating rationally among competing ultimate stopping points by appeal to a common standard is now excluded in principle. If these ultimate statements are matters of contention, then there will be no Archimedes’ lever with which to decide among competing sets of ultimate standards. Indeed, even if everyone did subjectively happen to stop at the same place or accept the same standard, there still would be no way to prove rationally that this universal subjective standard led to objectively true statements about the world…

Obviously, one cannot, without arguing in a circle, justify the rationality of a standard of rationality by appealing to that standard… The limits of rational argument within any particular way of life seem, then, to be defined by reference to that object or belief in respect to which commitment is made or imposed, in respect to which argument is brought to a close. Thus reason is relativized to one’s halting place or standards, and cannot arbitrate among different standards. Different halting places - i.e., standards, criteria, presuppositions, conventions, dogmas, articles of faith - are taken by different individuals and define irreconcilable communities. Whatever may explain how such differences arise, reason can never dissipate them.

– W.W. Bartley, III, The Retreat to Comitment, pg. 72-74.

The QOTD, echoing Quine, on the impossibility of bare empiricist epistemology:

Indeed, there is a connection between belief and perception of beauty (and similar qualities) that goes much deeper than Weinberg suggests. As Leibniz and many since have noted, there are ordinarily many different theories or beliefs compatible with our evidence. If we plot our data on Cartesian coordinates, we will be able to draw as many lines as we please through the points we plot, and we could project any of the appropriately related hypotheses. All emeralds so far examined have been green; if so, however, they have also all been grue, where an emerald is grue if either it is examined before 2050 a.d. (bringing Goodman up to date) and is found to be green, or is not so examined and is blue. [390] So (instead of projecting that all emeralds are green) we could project that all emeralds are grue, thus concluding that emeralds not observed before 2050 are blue. The sun has come up every morning so far; we form the belief that it comes up every day and will also come up tomorrow. We could have formed quite a different belief, however: where T is today, we could have formed the belief that the sun comes up every day prior to T and never after T. Why do we accept the hypotheses we do; why do we project green rather than grue, and the hypothesis that the sun will continue to come up rather than the one according to which it won’t? Why do we project simple hypotheses rather than complex ones? Not because we have evidence that simpler hypotheses are more likely to be correct than complex ones; for, for any alleged evidence for this conclusion, there will be a more complex inference from the same data for the denial of this conclusion. So why do we do it?

Because we find simple beliefs (whatever precisely simplicity is) more natural and more attractive than complex beliefs. Only a madman would project grue or its partner in crime, bleen. [391] Messy, complex beliefs are ugly, disgusting, weird, repellent: we dislike them and therefore reject them. We may hope that the world is in fact such that simplicity (at least simplicity of a certain sort and in certain areas) is a mark of truth; but we have no hope whatever of establishing that in a way that doesn’t already rely upon simplicity. For suppose we note that in the last one thousand cases the simplest hypothesis has turned out to be true. Where t is the present, say that a belief is simplex’ if it is formed before t and simple, or after t and complex; what we will have observed, so far, is that simplex beliefs tend to be true. But that means that from now on we should go for complex beliefs.

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 309-10.

The QOTD, on Christian apologetics:

Still (comes the reply), can’t we discover for ourselves, without any special divine aid or assistance, that the Bible (the New Testament, say) is in fact ‘from God’; divinely inspired in such a way that God speaks to us in it and through it, and hence wholly reliable? Can’t we come to see this in the same way that we can learn that Herodotus and Xenophon are reasonably reliable reporters of what they hear and see? And once we see that, couldn’t we then infer that the Bible’s central message of incarnation and atonement is true? Can’t we see and appreciate the historical case for the truth of the main lines of Christian belief without any special work of the Holy Spirit? ‘You must be born again’ all right - your affections, aims, and intentions must be re calibrated, redirected, reversed - and that requires special divine help. But given that recalibration, couldn’t you then see and appreciate the historical case for the truth of the main lines of Christianity without any special work of the Holy Spirit?

I don’t think so. Even discounting the effects of sin on our apprehension of the historical case, that case isn’t strong enough to produce warranted belief that the main lines of Christian teaching are true - at most, it could produce the warranted belief that the main lines of Christian teaching aren’t particularly improbable.”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 244-45.

The QOTD, on the epistemology of faith:

“Compare belief of this sort [i.e., faith] with the a priori and memory beliefs I spoke of above. In a certain sense, there isn’t anything to go on in any of the three cases. You don’t accept memory and obvious a priori beliefs on the basis of other beliefs; but you also lack the detailed phenomenological basis, the rich and highly articulated sensuous imagery that is involved in perception. What you do have in all three cases is another kind of phenomenal evidence, what I have been calling doxastic evidence… There is a certain kind of phenomenology that distinguishes entertaining a proposition you believe from one you do not: the former simply seems right, correct, natural, approved - the experience isn’t easy to describe. You have this doxastic evidence in all three sorts of cases (as, indeed, in any case of belief), and you have nothing else to go on. But you don’t need anything else to go on…”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 264.

The QOTD, on religious fundamentalism:

But isn’t all this just endorsing a wholly outmoded and discredited fundamentalism, that condition than which, according to many academics, none lesser can be conceived? I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’.

It is therefore hard to take seriously the charge that the views I’m suggesting are fundamentalist; more exactly, it is hard to take it seriously as a charge. The alleged charge means only that these views are rather more conservative than those of the objector, together with the expression of a certain distaste for the views or those who hold them. But how is that an objection to anything, and why should it warrant the contempt and contumely that goes with the term? An argument of some kind against those conservative views would be of interest, but merely pointing out that they differ from the objector’s (even with the addition of that abusive emotive force) is not.

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 244-45.

The QOTD, on the epistemology of religion:

“And here we see the ontological or metaphysical or ultimately religious roots of the question as to the rationality or warrant or lack thereof for belief in God. What you properly take to be rational, at least in the sense of warranted, depends on what sort of metaphysical and religious stance you adopt. It depends on what kind of beings you think human beings are, what sorts of beliefs you think their noetic faculties will produce when they are functioning properly, and which of their faculties or cognitive mechanisms are aimed at the truth. Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will determine or at any rate heavily influence your views as to whether theistic belief is warranted or not warranted, rational or irrational for human beings. And so the dispute as to whether theistic belief is rational (warranted) can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is at bottom not merely an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute.”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pg. 190.

One of the hardest, most profound, and most illuminating lessons that I’ve learned is that truth is hard to find. It is hard to be right about anything. It’s much harder than people think.

“One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller’s Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn’t stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it’s a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you’re shown that it is not.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. ‘People take reality for granted,’ Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. ‘Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.’

For Teller (that’s his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don’t see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like… This may be why exposing the ’secret’ of a magic trick is so often deflating. Most of the time, the secret is that we’re gullible and our brains are riddled with blind spots.”

- Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion, Wired Magazine, April 20, 2009.

In a strange way, I believe that this is what the techniques of the meditative traditions (e.g., mindfulness based-stress reduction, zazen, etc.) may really be about: our normal consciousness is cluttered by concepts of the world around us. We create conceptual categories so that we can analyze and understand the world and then predict what it will do. These concepts are necessary because our minds aren’t capable of seeing all of reality. Consequently, as Teller points out in the article, our attention functions as a spotlight in the dark which reveals its subject but which necessarily conceals everything else. Our concepts, while necessary at times, leave us open to biases, distorted thinking, and unexamined assumptions.

In meditation, by clearing your mind of distractions and focusing on the present moment, you are, with practice, hopefully, able to perceive the world with more immediacy.

“We each have three lives: the untouchable past, where our mistakes are stored; the immeasurable present, where we make them; and the impenetrable future, where they group and marshal. The present is the bottleneck: and the only reason most human pasts are not more untidy than they are is that we can only manage one mistake at a time. That bottleneck is the pinch in the hourglass, the restrictor which means events must pass us by one single grain at a time. We could take this as an opportunity to see things clearly, but it seems we’d rather not — most of us prefer to speculate hopelessly in the unfathomable scale of the future, or flounder hopelessly in the massive scale of the past. It’s an unfortunate distraction because, as we often tell each other, once the moment has passed we don’t get it back.

What this means is that those who can see the present clearly, and who do view the past and the future with the precision of good perspective, have a tremendous advantage over everybody else. They have a different relationship with fortune than the usual fumbling that the rest of us can muster. They can slip through the gaps between events that others do not even notice. They can make coins disappear.”

- Dave Whiteland, Planetarium, September 9, 1999.

The QOTD, on doubt:

All philosophy begins in wonder, said the ancients. With exceptions, contemporary philosophy stops at wonder. We are told: don’t ask, don’t wonder, about what you cannot know for sure. But the most important things of everyday life we cannot know for sure. We cannot know them beyond all possibility of their turning out to be false. We order our loves and loyalties, we invest our years with meaning and our death with hope, not knowing for sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether we might not have gotten it wrong. What we need is a philosophy that enables us to speak truly, if not clearly, a wisdom that does not eliminate but comprehends our doubt.

- Richard John Neuhaus, Born Towards Dying.

The QOTD, echoing Stanley Fish:

“It is no good falling back on ’science’ as having disproved the possibility of resurrection. Any real scientist will tell you that science observes what normally happens; the Christian case is precisely that what happened to Jesus is not what normally happens.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, pg. 124.

The QOTD:

“Grasping the nettle — proposing, as a historical statement, that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty because his body had been transformed into a new mode of physicality — will of course evoke howls of protest from those for whom the closed world of Enlightenment theory renders any such thing impossible from the start. But if Christianity is only going to be allowed to rent an apartment in the Enlightenment’s housing scheme, and on its terms, we are, to borrow Paul’s phrase, of all people the most to be pitied — especially as the Enlightenment itself is rumored to be bankrupt and to be facing serious charges of fraud.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 121-22.

The QOTD, on evidence:

“Turning to the gospels, we find all the puzzles of which readers have been aware for centuries (not simply with the rise of modern scholarship). The stories of Easter morning in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20 are notoriously difficult to harmonize. We shall never be sure how many women went in what order to the tomb, at what point two or more male disciples went as well, how many angels they all saw, where or in what order the appearances of Jesus took place. But, as many have pointed out, it is precisely this imprecision, coupled with the breathless quality of the narratives, that gives them not only their unique flavor but also their particular value. Despite the scorn of some, lawyers and judges have regularly declared that this is precisely the state of the evidence they find in a great many cases: this is what eyewitness looks and sounds like. And in such cases the surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened; rather, they mean that the witnesses have not been in collusion.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 121-22.

Here’s an interesting claim:

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

My initial inclination is to point out that to reduce “knowledge” to probability judgments, without anything more, is to remove all meaning from the content of the word “knowledge.” But this may warrant more thought.

The QOTD, on utilitarianism:

“To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use. To say this is not of course to deny that many of its uses have been in the service of socially beneficial ideals… But the use of a conceptual fiction in a good cause does not make it any less of a fiction.”

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 64.

The QOTD, on protest movements:

It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. ‘To protest’ and its Latin predecessors and French cognates are originally as often or more often positive as negative; to protest was once to bear witness to something and only as a consequence of that allegiance to bear witness against something else.

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability [e.g., the fact that both rights and utility are a matching pair of incommensurate fictions] ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestor can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that the protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 71.

The QOTD: C.S. Lewis on the truth of Christianity:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths; i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of the poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’ Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.

Walter Hooper, ed., They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914 to 1963) (London: Collins, 1979), 427.

The QOTD, on empiricism:

“Aubrey’s error was… to suppose that the observer can confront a fact face-to-face without any theoretical interpretation interposing itself. That this was an error, although a pertinacious and long-lived one, is now largely agreed upon by philosophers of science. The twentieth-century observer looks into the night sky and sees stars and planets; some earlier observers saw instead chinks in a sphere through which the light beyond could be observed. What each observer takes himself or herself to perceive is identified and has to be identified by theory-laden concepts. Perceivers without concepts, as Kant almost said, are blind. Empiricist philosophers have contended that common to the modern and the medieval observer is that which each really sees or saw, prior to all theory and interpretation, namely many small light patches against a dark surface; and it is at the very least clear that what both saw can be so described. But if all our experience were to be characterized exclusively in terms of this bare sensory type of description — a type of description which it is certainly useful for a variety of special purposes to resort to from time to time — we would be confronted with not only an uninterpreted, but an uninterpretable world, with not merely a world not yet comprehended by theory but with a world that never could be comprehended by theory. A world of textures, shapes, smells, sensations, sounds and nothing more invites no questions and gives no grounds for furnishing any answers.

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 79-80.

The QOTD, on moral reasoning:

“It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth’s argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: The concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this is does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that one could not have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them for the truth is plain: There are no such things as rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such things as rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: Every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed. The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertion whatsoever is followed with great rigor. And the latest defender of such rights, Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, 1976) concedes that the existence of such rights cannot be demonstrated, but remarks on this point simply that it does not follow from the fact that a statement cannot be demonstrated that it is not true (p. 81). Which is true, but could equally be used to defend claims about unicorns and witches.

Natural or human rights then are fictions - just as is utility… But if the concept of rights and that of utility are a matching pair of incommensurable fictions, it will be the case that the moral idiom employed can at best provide a semblance of rationality for the modern political process, but not its reality. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution.”

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 69-71.

The QOTD, on moral reasoning:

[T]he most influential account of moral reasoning that emerged in response to this critique of emotivism was one according to which an agent can only justify a particular judgment by referring to some universal rule from which it may be logically derived, and can only justify that rule in turn by deriving it from some more general rule or principle; but on this view since every chain of reasoning must be finite, such a process of justificatory reasoning must always terminate with the assertion of some rule or principle for which no further reason can be given. ‘Thus a complete justification of a decision would consist of a complete account of its effects together with a complete account of the principles which it observed, and the effect of observing those principles… If the enquirer still goes on asking ‘But why should I live like that?’ then there is no further answer to give him, because we have already, ex hypothesi, said everything that could be included in the further answer.’ (Hare 1952, p. 69).

The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such a choice. The utterance of any universal principle is in the end an expression of the preferences of an individual will and for that will its principles have and can have only such authority as it chooses to confer upon them by adopting them.

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 20-21.

Rising bass star Esperanza Spalding describes her experience at Berklee:

“You get these knots inside you. And you find all these places that you’re vulnerable where you weren’t vulnerable before. And it’s all because you can’t play a line as nice as somebody else. Who cares anyway?”

Sounds just like law school to me.