10/11/2013 So-Called Objective Reality

by Kyle VanderWerf

     In last week's meeting, Nathan Turowsky presented a controversial idea, which was mostly rejected by the other members of the club. Namely, he proposed that non-scientific epistemologies have some validity. He described the belief system of the Shingō village in Japan, which states of the story in which Jesus travels to Japan after the events of the New Testament and lives there until his death at 106 years old: “The more [the story] was repeated, the truer it became, until the people of the village, frankly, believed it.” Nathan argued that this wasn't any less true or valid than a system of knowledge derived from science.

     This week, I'm going to follow up on that discussion by presenting a more formal defense of this idea. First, I will briefly review last week's discussion and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the latter of which I led a discussion on just over a year ago, to set the groundwork. Then I'll use this groundwork to show that religion and science can happily coexist, while simultaneously proposing a theory of a role that stories and authorities play in societies. I'll show that a lot of the perceived tension between science and religion arises when people misconstrue the former as being tied to an often ridiculous and over-applied concept called “objective reality.” I also aim to show that the Shingō epistemology does not actually necessarily conflict with our own, and in fact all of us make use of that epistemology on a daily basis.

10/4/2013 Welcome to the Satoyama of the Real

by Nathan Turowsky

     Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of how knowledge is acquired, identified, and justified, and hence the branch most closely appertaining to how one identifies what is or is not 'true' or 'real'. For most of us, this question comes up in daily life less frequently than one might expect, and when it does come up it is resolved through the notion that that which is observed or related on reliable authority is true insofar as it fits the manner in which we conduct our lives and solve our problems. Currently popular and dominant epistemologies in the West are for the most part either pragmatic in character or in some way reliant on a scientific episteme--the idea that science and the much-vaunted scientific method is, through some mechanism or other, the area of human inquiry to turn to for definition and delineation of truth and reality. It is of course taken for granted that something is either true or it is not, and it does not get truer or less true without some change in external circumstances equally ponderous and portentous as the change in truth-value.

     There are, however, certain areas of experience in which these kinds of models break down, one of which--the realm of religion and especially of folk religion and popular piety of the kind that has no real internally compelling reason to engage with or gauge itself against abstract philosophical concepts--becomes unusually salient in the Japanese village of Shingō. Shingō, a remote farming community in the mountains of Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Japan's largest island, claims to be the true burial site of Jesus Christ and has a detailed set of local stories and attractions expounding upon this. The Legend of Christ Museum, near the Grave of Christ in Christ Park, makes the arresting claim that 'the more times [the story as presented in the so-called Takenouchi Document] was repeated, the truer the contents became'. Obviously we cannot account for this sort of claim very easily in most epistemological models, mainly because it does not pass even the most cursory smell test--a professor of religion at Kyoto University has referred to the Legend of Christ as a prime example of 'fakelore', defined essentially as folklore that is transparently bullshit, and well may we say that it is transparently bullshit and does not present any real threat to conventional notions of truth. That does not, however, answer the question of why the people in charge of the museum--whose promotional literature seems to go back and forth between denial, scepticism, and belief sometimes within the same sentence--would choose to pursue this line in the first place.

     In this meeting, I hope to demonstrate that because of the somewhat circular nature of defining justification it is not nearly as easy to dismiss notions of truth based on consensus, repetition, belief, expectation, or desire as it may seem at first glance. We will also, to the extent possible, have a general overview of and debate on epistemological concepts, particularly that of the episteme and the idea of different types of institutionalised(as opposed to independent) structures of defining and storing truth and knowledge in different times and places. I hope to open a debate on whether or not independent apprehension of truth or reality is even possible, at least in a way that satisfies a demand for putative rigour and limitation to the natural universe.

Resurrecting Miracles

by Benny Mattis

 In Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, philosopher David Hume presents a famous argument against the rationality of belief in miracles in general, in addition to four additional arguments against the legitimacy of "particular miracle reports" (Garcia). In his "General Argument Against Miracles" (Garcia), Hume begins on the reasonable assumption that "A wise [person] proportions [his/her] belief to the evidence" (X.87); since the evidence for the falsity of miracle accounts will always outweigh that for their verity, says Hume, a wise person will always disbelieve accounts of miraculous events. This argument seems compelling at first, but further inspection of its premises reveals it to be subject to defeat with the help of contemporary Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Among Hume's four objections to the verity of particular miracle reports, three of them are little, if at all, compelling; Hume's last objection, however, succeeds in discrediting a specific type of miracle report.

The General Argument Against Miracles

Hume's General Argument centers on a conflict between the propositions

M: A miracle has occurred.

and

L: The laws of nature always hold.

Hume begins with an acknowledgement that "In our reasoning concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise [person], therefore, proportions [his/her] belief to the evidence...the evidence exceeds not what we properly call probability" (87). This is the foundation of his argument, and might be put more formally as such:

1) For any proposition p, any wise person w will believe p if and only if the evidence for the verity of p outweighs the evidence for its falsity.

Hume continues by asserting that "A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature" (X.90); if a miracle report is true, it means that the laws of nature are not fully accurate representations of reality. Since wise people presumably do not believe contradictions, it follows that

2) Any wise person will either not believe M or not believe L.

However, as Hume notes, the evidence for the verity of the laws of nature, by definition, is "uniform experience," which itself "amounts to proof" (X.90). Thus,

3) The evidence for the verity of L outweighs the evidence for its falsity.

According to the bi-conditional in (1), it follows that

4) Any wise person will believe L.

A disjunctive syllogism formed with (2) and (4) leads to Hume's conclusion that

5) No wise person will believe M.

According to Hume, no wise people believe in miracles, because by virtue of their own definition they have already been disproven; the evidence for the verity of reports of them is always outweighed by the evidence for that of their falsity. I, however, do believe that there are wise people who happen to believe in miracles, and that Hume's argument, while valid (as the truth of the conclusion would follow from that of the premises), is unsound (as the premises are not entirely true).

The flaw in Hume's argument lies in premise (2); Hume may have thought that M and L are analytically contradictory, but they are not actually irreconcilably opposed. Alvin Plantinga offers possible reconciliation in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, wherein he argues that "classical science is perfectly consistent with special divine action, including miracles" (90). He shows this by suggesting that the laws of nature are better defined in such a way that they are not, in fact, violated by any occurrence of miraculous events; the laws of nature are more like conditional statements of the form

LN: When the universe is causally closed (when God is not acting specially in the world), P." (88, emphasis added.)

where P is one of the propositions Hume would mistake for an actual law in itself, such as "all men die" (X.90) or "every action has an equal and opposite reaction," allegedly contradicted by a given miracle report. The laws of nature, Plantinga explains,

Apply to closed or isolated systems. If so, however, there is nothing in them to prevent God from changing the velocity or direction of a particle. If he did so, obviously, energy would not be conserved in the system in question; but equally obviously, that system would not be closed, in which case the principle of conservation of energy would not apply to it. (78)

If L only implies of the truth of LN-like conditionals, compatible with miracles, as the body of beliefs supported by uniform experience, then premise (2) of Hume's General Argument, on which its conclusion rests, is undercut.

A reply from Hume to Plantinga, then, would need to show why L should be construed as a collection of simple propositions like P, rather than conditionals in the form of LN. It would be a titanic task to prove that we have uniformity of experience in favor of any P, whereas we do not have uniform experience in favor of the corresponding conditional LN; after all, it is questionable whether empirical inquiry would even be capable of determining whether God were acting specially in the world at any time, since God would be, after all, a supernatural being. Plantinga's interpretation of the results of the scientific tradition, then, is likely un-falsifiable, but this does not change the fact that Hume's interpretation is un-verifiable, and thus un-verified, and thus that his General Argument against Miracles ultimately fails.

Against Miracle Reports

In the second part of his attack on miracles, Hume presents four attempts to show that it is never the case that the evidence for the verity of a miracle claim outweighs the evidence for that claim's falsity; "there never was a miraculous event established on so full an evidence" (X.92). First is his assertion that "there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good-sense...as to secure us against all delusions in themselves" (X.92). Because we do not have "full assurance in the testimony of men" (X.92) that report the occurrence of miracles, then, we do not have a reason to believe in the truth of such marvelous claims.

Hume continues in bringing attention to the fact that "if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority" (X.93). As Ernesto Garcia paraphrases Hume, "it's a universal weakness of human nature that we sensationalize/want to believe in extraordinary things," and this fact serves as a "psychological undercutting defeater for miracle beliefs." The popularity of miracle beliefs, says Hume, is not strong evidence for their verity, because it can be explained just as well by psychological mechanisms that are not truth-oriented.

Hume's first two objections to miracle reports may all succeed in undercutting those reports, but it is a different question entirely as to whether they show that the reports in question are not more likely true than false; if these problems for belief in miracle reports are also problems for disbelief in those same reports, then they do not serve well in achieving Hume's goal of proportioning belief to evidence. Indeed, we may not have "full assurance in the testimony of men" (X.92) who report miracles, but we have "full assurance" in the testimony of very few people, if any. For his first objection to work actively against miracle reports, Hume must show that, for any given miracle report, we do have full assurance in the testimony of men who assent to its negation. Hume's psychological explanation of miracle beliefs faces the same problem: while miracle beliefs may be formed by mechanisms other than truth-oriented rational investigation, so might the belief that miracles do not occur; people can, after all, ascribe religious wonder to scientific theories and the order of the universe in the same way that they might to miracle reports and the possibility of the suspension of physical laws, and so it seems the negations of particular miracle claims also could have arisen from similar non-truth-oriented belief-formation mechanisms. Hume's first two objections to particular miracle reports also diminish the evidence of negations of those reports, so they do not support his claim that the former will always have less evidence than the latter. Hume might respond by showing that his objections apply more to miracle reports than their negations, but it is not clear that this is the case.

Thirdly, Hume believes that "it forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given any admission of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors" (X.94). Hume thinks that all miracle reports originally come from ignorant people, and, since ignorant people are not trustworthy, miracle reports are not to be taken seriously. This is an ad hominem attack on those who report miracles, and the weakest of Hume's arguments against miracle reports. To weigh the evidential scales against miracle reports, Hume would have to show that most or all such reporters are ignorant in a relevant respect, such that they would tend to provide false reports, and ignorant in such a way that the deniers of those reports are not.

The Humean Argument From Inconsistent Revelations

Hume's final argument against miracle claims is also his strongest, and focuses on "the support that a miracle report offers for any one specific religion as opposed to another" (Garcia). Hume begins with the initial (reasonable) assumption that "in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary; and that it is impossible the religions of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of ancient Siam, and of China should, all of them, be established on any solid foundation" (X.95). He then notes that the miracle reports on which various religions are founded (or "foundational religious miracle reports," as I will refer to them) "are to be regarded as contrary facts, and the evidences of these prodigies, whether weak or strong, as opposite to each other" (X.95). Foundational miracle accounts counting as evidence against each other's respective religions, then, Hume concludes that "in destroying a rival system," any given religion or group of religions "likewise destroys the credit of those miracles, on which that system was established," and so consistency in our epistemic standards for belief would lead foundational religious miracle reports to amount to irrationality (X.95). Hume's argument can be formalized as follows, for any two distinct religions x and y with respective foundational miracle claims m₁ and m₂ (for the purposes of this argument, we can stipulate that "compatible" religious world views are not "distinct" in this sense, as indicated in the opening premise):

1) It is not the case that both belief in x is rational and belief in y is rational.

3) If belief in miracle report m₁ is rational, then belief in x is rational.

4) If belief in miracle report m₂ is rational, then belief in y is rational.

5) If consistent belief in foundational religious miracle reports is justified, then belief in miracle report m₁ is rational and belief in miracle report m₂ is rational.

6) If belief in miracle report m₁ is rational and belief in miracle report m₂ is rational, then belief in x is rational and belief in y is rational. (3, 4)

7) Therefore, it is not the case that consistent belief in foundational religious miracle reports is justified. (Multiple Modus Tollens 1, 5, 6)

The super-naturalist will likely respond that there is ambiguity in (7), and, thus, in its negation, which can be construed as either

~7A) Consistent belief in all foundational religious miracle reports is justified.

or

~7E) Consistent belief in some foundational religious miracle report is justified.

They may claim to accept (~7E), but deny (~7A). Hume would likely reply that such epistemic preference to particular reports is not really consistent; after all, he is aiming to be like an objective arbiter (X.95), treating witnesses with impartiality.

A final objection that may be brought against Hume is that the mere fact that a miracle is ascribed to a religion, and the religion is falsified by the same maxim that led to belief in that miracle, does not imply that the miracle report itself is falsified, as the miraculous event in question could have occurred due to other causes. There could be an explanation for all of the miracles in question, which is itself not self-defeating; one might posit, for example, a dystheistic trickster god misleading humans to false religions with dissonant miracle messages.

Such an explanation would simply show the miracle in question not to be properly foundational. Read charitably, Hume is not talking about all beliefs that have been ascribed religious significance, but specifically those "on which [a religious] system was established" (X.95); thus, their respective religions must have been the best explanation for such occurrences in the first place, all things (including dystheism) considered. Hume is talking about competing foundational miracle reports for distinct religions; miracles unified under a single theory of the supernatural are not his target here.

Conclusion

The majority of Hume's attacks on miracles may have been weak, but his last argument is quite strong. Unless the super-naturalist is willing to grant subjective preference to certain miracle reports over others, they are left with the epistemic possibility of miracles only on the condition that such miracles do not constitute evidence for a specific, exclusive religious sect. Miracle reports as such survived Hume's onslaught intact, but foundational religious miracle reports appear to be refuted for good.

Sources

Garcia, Ernesto. "Class Lecture 11/15." University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bartlett

Hall, Amherst, MA. 15 November 2012. Lecture.

Plantinga, Alvin. Where the Conflict Really Lies. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011. Print.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Public Domain. Kindle

file.

10/5/2012 Cognitive Biases

gathered from Wikipedia by Brandon Taylor

A cognitive bias describes a replicable pattern in perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Cognitive biases are the result of distortions in the human mind that always lead to the same pattern of poor judgment, often triggered by a particular situation.

Broader Concepts
Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.

Cognitive dissonance is the term used in modern psychology to describe the state of holding two or more conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may sometimes feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment.[1] The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements.

Adaptive bias is the idea that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty.

The salience (also called saliency) of an item – be it an object, a person, a pixel, etc. – is the state or quality by which it stands out relative to its neighbors. Saliency detection is considered to be a key attentional mechanism that facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of the available sensory data.

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that uses the ease with which examples come to mind to make judgments about the probability of events. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that "if you can think of it, it must be important."

In sociology and social psychology, impression management is a goal-directed conscious or unconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event; they do so by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.

Specific Cognitive Biases
Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Fundamental attribution error – the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.

Dunning–Kruger effect—an effect in which incompetent people fail to realize they are incompetent because they lack the skill to distinguish between competence and incompetence.

Status quo bias is a cognitive bias; an irrational preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.

Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.

Anchoring – the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (also called "insufficient adjustment").

Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Ultimate attribution error – similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.

Halo effect – the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[59]

Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes

Conservatism (Bayesian) – the tendency to belief update insufficiently but predictably as a result of new evidence (estimates of conditional probabilities are conservative)

Loss aversion – "the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it".

Questions

Do you agree that with the suggested cognitive biases above?

Are cognitive biases nature or nurture?

Can you match broader concepts with specific cognitive biases?

To what extent do cognitive biases and logical fallacies overlap?

Can you find specific examples of how one of the cognitive biases or general concepts above relates to your everyday life?

Does the existence of cognitive biases have any epistemological implications?

9/21/2012 Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

by Kyle VanderWerf

This week's Philosophy Club topic is Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories, specifically those found in Philosophical Investigations. In this book, he tries to answer various philosophical questions by examining how human language works. He focuses on language because he believes it's the only tool we currently have to answer philosophical questions, so looking at how it functions can lead to all kinds of insights. At philosophy club, we'll discuss, evaluate, and criticize how he uses his philosophy of language to consider the question, “Is the color red that I see the same as the color red that you see?”

First, consider two construction workers, A and B, who have a very simple language. When A says “slab!” B hands a slab over to A, when A says “brick!” B hands over a brick, and so on. The combination of the words of the language that are used, and the actions that accompany them, are what Wittgenstein terms a “language-game.”

Wittgenstein argues that all languages are fundamentally similar to the construction worker language. That is, the purpose of a language is to influence how people act. All languages serve an accompanying “language-game.” A word doesn't have any meaning outside of the context of the rules of action that are associated with it in a given language-game. So how do you learn what words mean? Other people teach you using whatever methods work to get you to act correctly according to the rules of the language-game.

So for a word or phrase to have any meaning in a language, it must correspond to rules for action that people can empirically evaluate. In other words, people have to be able to tell you if you're using a word incorrectly. For example, if I took my cat out for a walk, and told my friends I was walking my dog, they could observe my pet to determine that it's a cat and not a dog, giving them justification to tell me I'm using the word “dog” incorrectly.

Let us now look at the word “qualia.” According to many philosophers, this word refers to raw feelings or sensations, aka subjective experiences. For example, the sensation of pain, and the experience of seeing the color red, are both qualia. Let's just examine pain for a moment. Most people in pain exhibit outward symptoms, such as crying or yelling. However, if the inner sensation of pain always corresponds to these symptoms, then the word may as well just refer to the symptoms themselves, since the rules for action are the same in either case. The sensation of pain itself is irrelevant to the language-game, so you can't refer to it directly with words. Furthermore, if someone in pain exhibits no symptoms, and acts the same as they would without being in pain, a word for their feeling would be meaningless, as it would have no rules for action; it would be impossible for someone else to tell if they were using the word correctly.

Thus, the word “qualia” in the English language is either meaningless, or it simply refers to the effects of raw feelings/sensations, and not the feelings/sensations themselves. In fact, Wittgenstein argues that constructing words in a language that actually refer to subjective experiences is impossible. It is therefore impossible to answer the question, “Is the color red that I see the same as the color red that you see?” with the tools we currently have, namely language-games.