Machiavelli rises from the grave

HALLQ SAID:

“This post suffers from a refusal to admit that Christians should have to argue for their position rather than just attack others.”

Is that a fact? Here is some of what I actually said in “this post”:

“True, when it comes to arguing for one’s own position or against a competing position, both sides have their own burden of proof to discharge.”

As well as:

“Even if these beliefs were about the same thing, both sides would bear their respective burden of proof. The onus is on the believer to justify induction on Christian grounds while the onus is on the unbeliever to justify induction on secular grounds.

Apparently, Hallquist was given a social pass all through grade school, junior high, and high school—which is how, as a college student, he can be functionally illiterate.

Another trophy to mount on the wall of our public school system.

Another argument for homeschooling or private schooling.

Continuing:

“That's why the atheistic platonism is a legitimate tactic: if the debate is on the existence of God, then as long as there's a non-theistic account of logic, the existence of logic provides no argument for God.”

i) Atheistic Platonism is a legitimate tactic if you happen to be an atheistic Platonist, and you can also mount a legitimate argument for atheistic Platonism.

But if you don’t believe in atheistic Platonism, then you don’t believe it’s true, in which case it’ illegitimate of you to offer a non-theistic account of logic which you yourself regard as false account of logic.

ii) I’d add that, even on tactical grounds, this is a costly move. For one thing, it commits you to the existence of aspatiotemporal entities.

Moreover, these aspatiotemporal entities are necessary entities.

Furthermore, these necessary, aspatiotemporal entities bear some causal relation to the physical universe, for the universe finitely exemplifies these necessary, aspatiotemporal entities.

Once you open the door that far, it’s going to be very hard for you to keep God out of your godless worldview.

So, by all means, make atheistic Platonism your opening move.

Moving on to Daniel Morgan:

“Steve Hays has weighed in on Prof. Witmer's response to PS. In a recent post entitled Machiavellian Atheology, Steve spends a great deal of time complaining that Prof. Witmer chooses to take a tactical perspective, focusing on debate, rather than addressing more of the substantive philosophical issues (in Steve's opinion).”

No, that wasn’t my “complaint.” Rather, my objection is that Witmer’s advice is evasive and dishonest.

Moreover, my objection was not a complaint. Far from it. If the only way an unbeliever can avoid losing a debate with a presuppositionalist is to dodge the issues, then that is not a cause for complaint, but a reason to break out the bubbly.

It’s not a tactic for winning, but merely a tactic for never losing by never taking the risk of saying anything wrong.

And it’s true that if you’re noncommittal from start to finish, then you can never be proven wrong. But, by the same token, you can never be taken seriously.

Continuing:

“I think he's pointing out that we all hold presuppositions, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded. He's asking why "accounts" have to be given for presuppositions themselves, since your presuppositions cannot be properly "accounted for" either -- definitionally, these are assumed truths which form the basis of our starting points to make arguments.”

No, in Van Tilian apologetics, presuppositions are not like axiomatic assumptions which are simply taken for granted.

While presuppositions are resistant to direct proof, they are indirectly confirmable based on their explanatory power and coherence.

Continuing:

“But this is where things get problematic. If you are only making an ‘internal critique’, then the question of how we establish a ‘burden of proof’ that translates across both my own and your own worldviews, and meets our presuppositional standards, is difficult to answer.”

“No, but if the PS argument is that the unbeliever has failed to meet the unbeliever's own burden of proof, and the PS argument is all about ‘internal critique’, then this gets tricky to claim, doesn't it?”

“Besides, the whole basis of the PS argument is that *internal critiques* are all we can do. How do you inject into my worldview *your* "burden of proof" and the prerequisites for presuppositions? See the problem, here? You claim there is "no neutral ground". But you also claim you can neutrally evaluate my justification for presuppositions? That's where we get into classical foundationalism, or coherentism, etc., which is where theism and atheism will quickly find some issues.”

“But how does an *externalist* critique verify ‘good reason’? Same problem, over and over and over...”

The problem with this characterization is that Witmer is operating with a very provincial definition of presuppositionalism. He quotes something from Frame, but Frame’s overall position is far broader than “internal critiques are all we can do.”

http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/2005Transcendental.htm

http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/2005Presuppositional.htm

http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/2003ReplytoCollett.htm

So even if Witmer’s tactical advice were successful in deflecting a very narrow version of presuppositionalism, it won’t succeed with a Framean model.

Continuing:

“Many people who are pressed by PS debates into commitments ought not overcommit to things they don't understand (and their opponents likely don't either), myself included. His point is that metaphysical defenses of our worldviews are not simple, and that if one commits to physicalism and is shown they don't properly conceive of how to incorporate morality, values or logic or etc., the *best* thing to do is not dismiss values, logic and morality, (obviously) but instead to change their commitment to a particular metaphysic. This isn't dishonest. He's pointing to the relative priority of core presuppositions versus ontological commitment.”

i) It’s dishonest to pretend to change your commitment to a particular metaphysic like atheistic Platonism when you don’t believe in atheistic Platonism, but simply toss that over the back of the sled to keep the presuppositional wolves from overtaking you.

ii) In addition, note that Witmer’s default positions are always secular default positions.

But if the unbeliever really is uncertain about how to ground logic or morally, then shouldn’t he leave all his options open—including the theistic option?

Why is theism not a live option? To exclude theism as a possible fallback is to overcommit to secularism. So the charge of intellectual dishonesty remains.

Continuing:

“Well that's not ‘for granted’ then, is it? Care to tell me what ‘good reason’ you have to believe that other minds exist? How do you show that this is a truthful claim?

This fails to draw a couple of elementary distinctions:

i) I can have a good reason for believing in other minds without having a compelling reason. Even if I can’t prove it, some options are more probable than others.

ii) We can take some things for granted in the sense of prima facie justification. But such beliefs are subject to revision.

Finally, Morgan spends a lot of time trying to explain what Witmer “really” meant. But I have no reason to believe that his interpretation of Witmer’s statements is superior to mine. Witmer doesn’t say what Danny says he meant. What we get, instead, is Danny’s face-saving paraphrase—which is intended to make Witmer look less cynical and duplicitous than what he actually said. But I have no reason not to take Witmer at his word. He’s an astute and articulate man, quite capable of expressing himself.

Continuing:

“I find both his [Cocchiarella’s] forms of conceptual realism (intensional/natural) completely consistent with physicalism as an ontology.”

The fact that it may be completely consistent with physicalism doesn’t make it a good explanation. For that’s only as good as physicalism itself.

Continuing:

“As I was reading them (sections 6 and 7, respectively), I found he had put into words what I tried to describe long ago on this blog, when you brought up "pure" conceptualism, in which these abstractions don't exist apart from our minds at all. Therefore, your accusation is refuted by the evidence that I resorted to conceptualism in the past as an explanation of abstract explananda within physicalism.”

“Refuted” by what evidence? Yours or Cocchiarella’s? At the time, I was responding to your formulation, not his—since his formulation wasn’t on the table back then.

Now that you’re identified your own position with his, we can discuss the new version, but your effort to backdate the current version is a way of scoring additional points after the game is over and everyone went home.

You can score as many touchdowns in a dark, deserted football field as you like, but that doesn’t affect the official score. If you want a rematch, that’s fine. But don’t tinker with the scoreboard after the fact.

Continuing:

“My purpose was to defend my own presupposition that physicalism is not incompatible with logic. Would you concede that conceptual realism is the solution? Do you admit that there is nothing absurd or incoherent in holding to physicalism and to one of Cocchiarella's forumulations for the explanandum of logic?__Presuppositionalism claims that all alternative worldviews are inherently and intrinsically self-defeating. Can you show this for someone who subscribes to physicalism and to conceptual intensional realism?”

No, I wouldn’t concede any such thing.

1.He says that “as a socio-biological theory of the human capacity for language and though, conceptualism must presuppose some form of natural realism as the causal ground of that capacity.”

But this is circular reasoning. He first classifies conceptualism as a “socio-biological” theory, then says it must presuppose some form of natural realism. That may be a valid inference, given the classification, but he does nothing to justify his naturalistic classification in the first place.

2.He then says “As universals that can be realized indifferent places at the same time and that might have no instances at all in the world, natural properties and relations are not in the world the way that concrete objects are, nor can they be considered to have an ‘objectual’ nature in any sense as well…the unsaturated mode of being of natural properties and relations…[is] somehow analogous to the mode of being of concepts. Thus, jut as predicable concepts do not exist independently of the human capacity for language and concept-formation, so too natural properties and relations[s] do not exist independently of the causal structure of the world.

Several basic problems:

a) He admits the existence of unexemplified universals: “might have no instances at all in the world.”

How is that possible if the world is all there is?

b) He then attempts to find a nook for them by claiming that the “unsaturated” mode of being of natural properties an relations is “somehow analogous” to the mode of being of concepts.

But this is an argument from analogy minus the argument? How does he unpack the “somehow”? He doesn’t. Just his sheer dictum.

c) Moreover, even if there were an analogy, it’s only as good as the analogue which supplies the point of reference. He claims that predicable concepts don’t exist independently of human concept-formation.

But that, again, is a raw assertion rather than a reasoned argument. Why should I accept the claim which undergirds the analogy?

So he fails on both counts. He (i) gives us an argument from analogy minus the argument. And he also (ii) fails to argue for the underlying analogue.

3. He then says: “abstract objects…according to conceptual Platonism, ‘exist’ in a realm that transcends space, time and causality, and therefore that ‘preexist’ the evolution of consciousness…In conceptual intensional realism, on the other hand, the dependence is not merely epistemological but ontological as well.”

But if abstract universals are causally dependent on the evolution of consciousness, then this will collapse back into the “ontology of conceptual idealism,” which is what he was trying to avoid—and for good reason.

a) If abstract universals like the laws of logic are causally dependent on the evolution of consciousness, then they lose their necessity and universality. They become descriptive rather than prescriptive or proscriptive. They can no longer distinguish logical reasoning from illogical reasoning, for they take human consciousness as their point of reference and point of departure.

b) Likewise, if abstract universals such as mathematical truths are causally dependent on the evolution of consciousness, then the universe did not exemplify any mathematical properties or relations prior to the evolution of consciousness.

In that case, the universe is evolving in relation to human evolution. The existence and structure of physical universe is, to that degree, causally dependent on human evolution.

c) Likewise, if mathematical abstracta are causally dependent on the evolution of human consciousness, then there can be no such thing as an actual infinite in math. You are thereby committed to finitism in math. But that is prey to a number of familiar criticisms.

Continuing with Morgan:

“One could argue against this necessity in a few different ways, since as Walker points out, these transcendentals are "objective, prescriptive and metaphysically ultimate". I am thinking that Scripture cannot meet this requirement, nor special revelation generally…When Xians argue that the Scriptures provide for us an OPMU for morality, how does this fare through Walker's filter?… I would argue that this consideration presents a substantial challenge to the claim that OPMU morality can be based upon divine revelation via Scripture. It seems that the criteria cannot be met in an attitude-independent fashion, given the errant supposed copies we have of an OPMU moral law.”

Morgan simply confuses the order of knowing with the order of being. Moral “transcendentals” can be objective, prescriptive and metaphysically ultimate” even though our mode of epistemic access is not ontological objective or metaphysically ultimate.

To end on a higher note:

JAMES A. GIBSON SAID:

“Once you treat TAG as an *argument* as opposed to a method of arguing, you get peppered with questions about what the argument is that is supposed to exclude the (epistemic) possibility of innumerable imaginative cases. What often happens in the process is that TAG, when treated as a single argument, appears to have too little content by way of convincing power since the key premise in question (under Paul Franks' construal of TA's, ~(~x)), has difficulty being argued for, namely, the sufficiency of the view and nothing more to be accepted, or it turns out to not be a single argument at all. But maybe by ‘epistemological argument’ you meant a cluster of combined arguments, making it a sort of ‘inference to the best explanation,’ or something like that. But in that case, I'm not sure how it is a transcendental argument at work, at least under their historic usage. (Of course, I may turn out to know a lot less about the role of transcendental arguments and you can tell me otherwise).”

What’s a transcendental argument? How do you mount such an argument? Good questions.

1. Stephen Evans defines a transcendental argument as “an argument that takes some phenomena as undeniable and makes claims about what must be true a prior for this to be the case.

If we define it in those terms, and transpose it to the key of TAG (the theistic version) then we have a two-step argument:

i) We must isolate and identify the undeniable phenomena. That, of itself, will require a detailed argument.

ii) Given (i), we must then show how these undeniable phenomena are ontologically dependent on the nature and/or will of God. That will require another argument.

Indeed, it may require several arguments--as many argument as there are conditions.

2. And how do we going about arguing for (i)-(ii)?

Well, I don't think we can avoid coming up with a series of direct arguments for (i)-(ii), or a number of subarguments for each.

In other words, you have to argue for the transcendental argument.

Although TAG is an indirect argument inasmuch as you are arguing for the existence of God by arguing from certain undeniable phenomena, the argument(s) for the identity of these phenomena as well as their theistic dependence will take the form of direct argumentation.

James Anderson has also disassembled the Van Tilian version of TAG into several subarguments.

http://www.proginosko.com/docs/IfKnowledgeThenGod.pdf

And these could be developed in more detail.