Philosophy and child-raising

Philosophy Departments often try to attract undergraduates by telling them about instrumental benefits of philosophy classes: learning generalizable reading, writing and reasoning skills, doing better on the LSAT, etc.

But here is a very real and much more direct reason why lots of people should take philosophy classes. Most people end up having children. And children ask lots of questions. These questions include philosophical ones. Moreover, as they grow, especially around the teenage years, philosophical questions come to have special existential import: why should I be virtuous, what is the point of life, is there life after death, is there a God, can I be sure of anything?

For children’s scientific questions, there is always Wikipedia. But that won’t be very helpful with the philosophical ones. In a less diverse society, where parents can count on agreeing philosophically with the schools, parents could outsource children’s philosophical questions to a teacher they agree with. Perhaps religious parents can count on such agreement if they send their children to a religious school, but in a public school this is unlikely. (And in any case, outsourcing to schools is still a way of buying into something like universal philosophical education.) So it seems that vast numbers of parents need philosophical education to raise their children well.

Plato and teaching philosophy to the young

In the Republic, Plato says philosophy education shouldn’t start until age 30. I’ve long worried about Plato’s concern about providing young people with tools that, absent intellectual and moral maturity, can just as well be used for sophistry.

Exegetically, however, I think I was missing an important point: Plato is talking about his utopian society, where one can (supposedly) count on society raising the young person to practice the virtues and live by the truth (except for the noble lie). We do not live in such a society. It could well be the case that in our society, young people need the tools.

We might make a judgment like this. Absent the tools of a philosophical education, an intelligent young person set afloat on the currents of our society maybe is 50% likely to be led astray by these currents. The tools are unreliable especially in the hands of the young: perhaps the tools have a 65% chance of leading to the right and 35% of leading to ill. That’s still better than letting the young person navigate society without the tools. But if our society were better—as Plato thinks is the case in his Republic—then the unreliable tools might be worse than just letting society form one.

What is philosophy?

I just came across this in Shturman and Tiktin’s delightful anthology of Soviet era jokes. (I don't know if it exists in translation.)

Question: What is philosophy?

Answer: It’s a hunt for a black cat in a dark room. Marxist philosophy is distinguished by the fact that there is no cat in the room, and Marxist-Leninist by the fact that one of the hunters in fact yells that he caught the cat.

I wonder what other philosophies it can be applied to.

Is it too risky to do philosophy if there is no God?

If we are created by a loving God, there is good reason to expect that what is good for us to believe—maybe even good for us as moral agents—and what is true tend to go together in the case of the most important beliefs. But if we’re not created by a loving God, then I wouldn’t expect the true and the beneficial to go together, except in the case of straightforward empirical beliefs about the external world, such as that apples are nutritious and that lions eat us. If there is no loving God, it would seem pretty likely to me that—as some non-theist philosophers indeed worry—it is good for us to have various philosophical illusions (say, that God exists).

This means that if one is sure there is no loving God, there is a pretty decent argument against doing philosophy. For either philosophy leads to truth or not. If it doesn’t lead to truth, there is little point to doing it: for then philosophy fails to promote the non-instrumental value of truth and we have no reason to think that it would be any more beneficial instrumentally than our pre-philosophical views. But even if it leads to truth, then unless we think there is a correlation between truth and utility, we are still risking endangering beliefs—such as in moral responsibility—that are crucial for human society’s functioning. Given how much is at stake here, it seems not to be worth the risk. One might hope, of course, that philosophy would lead to beliefs—true or false—that would let society function much better than it has done in the past, and that the hope of this benefit at least cancels out the fear of harm. But I think this is unrealistically optimistic: it seems far easier to undermine society than to build it up. (Think of the sweeping tragedies arising from Marxist and fascist philosophies in the 20th century.)

That said, one doesn’t need to be confident that there is a God to justify doing philosophy. One just needs a sufficiently high probability that once one takes into account the possibility that God exists and hence that truth and utility are correlated, the expected value of doing philosophy is positive.

And the above line of thought doesn’t apply to the kind of abstruse philosophy which is unlikely to connect with everyday life.

Computer languages

It is valuable, especially for philosophers, to learn languages in order to learn to see things from a different point of view, to think differently.

This is usually promoted with respect to natural languages. But the goal of learning to think differently is also furthered by learning logical languages and computer languages. In regard to computer languages, it seems that what is particularly valuable is learning languages representing opposed paradigms: low-level vs. high-level, imperative vs. functional, procedural vs. object-oriented, data-code-separating vs. not, etc. These make for differences in how one sees things that are if anything greater than the differences in how one sees things across natural human languages.

To be honest, though, I’ve only ever tried to learn one language expressly for the above purpose, and I didn’t persevere: it was Haskell, which I wanted to learn as an example of functional programming. I ended up, however, learning OpenSCAD which is a special-purpose functional language for describing 3D solids, though I didn’t do that to change how I think, but simply to make stuff my 3D printer can print. Still, I guess, I learned a bit about functional programming.

My next computer language task will probably be to learn a bit of Verilog and/or VHDL, which should be fun. I don’t know whether it will lead to thinking differently, but it might, in that thinking of an algorithm as something that is implemented in often concurrent digital logic rather than in a series of sequential instructions might lead to a shift in how I think at least about algorithms. I’ve ordered a cheap Cyclone II FPGA from AliExpress ($17 including the USB Blaster for programming it) to use with the code, which should make the fun even greater.

All that said, I don’t know that I can identify any specific philosophical insights I had as a result of knowing computer languages. Maybe it’s a subtler shift in how I think. Or maybe the goal of thinking philosophically differently just isn’t furthered in these ways. But it’s fun to learn computer languages anyway.

Spiritual but not religious

A lot of people identify as spiritual but not religious. It would be interesting to have statistics on how common this is among professional philosophers. There are lots of naturalists and a significant minority of theists of definite religion, but I just haven’t run across many in between. But shouldn’t one expect that there be a lot of philosophers like that, convinced by argument or just intuition that there is much more to the world than science could possibly get at, but not convinced by the arguments for any particular religion? Maybe it’s because as a profession we prefer definite views? Or maybe there are many philosophers in this category but they just don’t talk about it that much?

I do think it’s important not to downplay the intellectual bona fides of the “spiritual but not religious”. The arguments that there is more to the world and to life than there is room for in naturalism, that there is something “spiritual”, are very strong indeed. (Josh Rasmussen’s and my forthcoming Necessary Existence is relevant here, as are considerations about the meaning of life, the narrow space for normativity and mind on naturalist views, the implausibility of holding that there be a whole category of human experience that is never veridical, etc.) I think there are strong arguments that this something “spiritual” includes God, and there are strong arguments that Catholic Christianity is correct. But it should be very easy to imagine being convinced by the arguments for a spiritual depth to the world but not being convinced by the further arguments (I am not taking a stance in this post on whether it would be rational full stop to be in this position—I do, after all, think the arguments going all the way to Catholicism are strong).

Eternal pleasure

Suppose the minute of the greatest earthly pleasure you’ve ever tasted was repeated, over and over, for eternity, with your memory reset before each repeat. If hedonism were true, this would be a truly wonderful life, much better than your actual life. But it seems to be a pretty rotten life. So hedonism seems quite far from the truth.

But could there, perhaps, be a pleasure such that eternal repetition of it, in and of itself, would be worth having? It would have to be a pleasure that carries its meaningfulness in itself, one whose quale itself is deeply meaningful. It would have to have be an experience of infinite depth. Could we have such an experience? With Aquinas, I think philosophy cannot answer this question, though theology can.

Philosophy as metaphysics: A very biased view

Baylor's PhD program in philosophy

We've just finished a promotional video for our graduate program. Enjoy!

A Metaphysicality Index

A grad student was thinking that Platonism isn't dominant in philosophy, so I looked at the PhilPapers survey and indeed a plurality of the target faculty (39%) accepts or leans towards Platonism. Then I got to looking at how this works across various specializations: General Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, Normative Ethics, Metaethics, Philosophy of Religion, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic / Philosophy of Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. And I looked at some other views: libertarianism (about free will), theism, non-physicalism about mind, and the A-theory of time.

Loosely, the five views I looked at are "metaphysical" in nature and their denials tend to be deflationary of metaphysics. I will say that someone is "metaphysical" to the extent that she answers all five questions in the positive (either outright or leaning). We can then compute a Metaphysicality Index for an individual, as the percentage of "metaphysical" answers, and then an average Metaphysicality Index per discipline.

Here's what I found. (The spreadsheet is here.) I sorted my selected M&E specialities from least to most metaphysical in the graph.

On each of the five questions, the Philosophers of Science were the least metaphysical. This is quite a remarkably un-metaphysical approach.

With the exception of Platonism, the Philosophers of Religion were the most metaphysical. (A lot of Philosophers of Religion are theists and may worry about the fit between theism and Platonism, and may think that God's ideas can do the work that Platonism is meant to do.)

Unsurprisingly, the Metaphysicians came out pretty metaphysical, though not as metaphysical as the Philosophers of Religion. (And this isn't just because the Philosophers of Religion believe in God by a large majority: even if one drops theism from the Metaphysicality Index, the Philosophers of Religion are at the top.

Interestingly, the Philosophers of Mathematics were almost as metaphysical as the Metaphysicians (average Metaphysicality Index 29.2 vs. 29.8). They were far more Platonic than anybody else. I wonder if Platonism is to Philosophy of Mathematics like Theism is to Philosophy of Religion. The Philosophers of Mathematics were also more theistic and more non-physicalistic than any group other than the Philosophers of Religion.

It's looking to me like the two fields where Platonism is most prevalent are Logic (and Philosophy of Logic) and Philosophy of Mathematics. This is interesting and significant. It suggests that on the whole people do not think one can do mathematics and logic in a nominalist setting.

For the record, here's where I stand: Platonism: no; Libertarianism: yes; God: yes; Non-physicalism: yes; A-theory: no. So my Metaphysicality Index is 60%.

Necessary and sufficient conditions

Both philosophers and mathematicians attempt to give nontrivial necessary and sufficient conditions for various properties. But philosophers almost always fail—the Gettier-inspired literature on knowledge is a paradigm case. On the other hand, mathematicians often succeed by the simple strategy of listing one or two necessary conditions and lucking out by finding the conditions are sufficient. And they do this, despite the fact that showing that the conditions are sufficient is often highly nontrivial.

Why do mathematicians luck out so often, while philosophers almost never do? Think how surprising it would be if you wrote down two obvious necessary conditions for an action to be morally wrong, and they turn out to be sufficient. And can philosophers learn from the mathematicians to do better?

1. Subsidiary conditions: Mathematicians sometimes "cheat" by only getting an equivalence given some additional assumption. A polygon has angles add up to 180 degrees if and only if it's a triangle, in a Euclidean setting. And such limited equivalences can still be interesting. While some philosophers accept such limited accounts, I know I often turn up my nose at them. I don't just want an account of knowledge or virtue that works for humans: I want one that works for all possible agents. Perhaps we philosophers should learn to humbly accept such incremental progress.

2. Different tasks: Philosophers often don't just ask for necessary and sufficient conditions. We want conditions that are prior, more fundamental, more explanatory. It may be true that a necessary and sufficient condition for an action to be wrong is that it is disapproved of by God, but that doesn't explain what makes the action wrong (assuming that the Divine Command theory is false). Moreover, sometimes we even want our necessary and sufficient conditions to work in impossible scenarios: we admit that God has to disapprove of cruelty, but we argue that if per impossibile he didn't disapprove of it, it would still be wrong (I criticize an argument like that here). This would be an absurd requirement in mathematics. "Granted, being a Euclidean polygon whose angles add up to 180 degrees is a necessary and sufficient for being a Euclidean triangle, but what if the Euclidean plane figure were a triangular circle?" The mathematician isn't looking to explain what a triangle is, but just to give necessary and sufficient conditions.

It is no surprise that if philosophers require more of their conditions, these conditions are harder to find. Again, I think we philosophers should be willing to accept as useful intellectual progress cases where we have necessary and sufficient conditions even when these do not satisfy the stronger conditions we may wish to impose on them, though I also think these stronger conditions are important.

3. Ordinary language is rich and poor: There are very few perfect synonyms within an ordinary language. There are subtle variations between the properties being picked out. Terms vary slightly in their meaning over time. But now necessary and sufficient conditions are very sensitive to this. Suppose that it were in fact true that x knows p if and only if x has a justified true belief that p. But now reflect on how many concepts there are in the vicinity of justification and in the vicinity of belief. Most of these concepts we have no vocabulary for. Some of these concepts were indicated by the words "justification" and "belief" in other centuries, or are indicated by near-synonyms in other other languages. If the English word "belief" were slightly shifted in meaning, we would most likely have no way of expressing the concept we now express with that word, and we would be unlikely to be able to give an account of knowledge. It can take great linguistic luck for us to have necessary and sufficient conditions statable in our natural language. Only a small minority of possible concepts can be described in English. (There are uncountably many possible concepts, but only countably many phrases in English.) What amazing luck if a concept can be described twice in different words!

I may be overstating the difficulty here. For sometimes the meanings of terms are correlated, in the way that vaguenesses can be correlated. Thus, "know" and "belief" may be vague, but the vaguenesses may neatly covary. And likewise, perhaps, "know" and "belief" can shift in meaning, but their shifts might be correlated.

Final remarks: The point here isn't that giving explanatory necessary and sufficient conditions won't happen, but just that it is not something we should expect to be able to do. And I should be more willing to accept as intellectual progress when we can do partial things:

1. give conditions that are necessary and sufficient but not explanatory
2. give conditions that are necessary and sufficient in some limited setting
3. give necessary but not sufficient conditions, or vice versa.

A quick way to question conjunctive accounts

Suppose someone proposes a philosophical account of the form:

• x is F if and only if x is G₁ and x is G₂ and x is G₃.

There is a quick way to question this that I think works most of the time. Just query the proponent: "What if the three conditions on the right hand side are satisfied merely coincidentally?"

The proponent can only give one of two answers while maintaining the biconditional: "Yes, x is still F when the conditions are satisfied merely coincidentally" or "The conditions are of such a nature that they cannot be satisfied merely coincidentally."

But it is implausible that that a coincidental satisfaction of conditions should suffice for a natural concept. Thus, if coincidental satisfaction of the conditions is sufficient for x to be F, pretty likely Fness is a stipulative rather than natural concept.

On the other hand, if the proponent insists that the conditions were so crafted that they cannot be satisfied coincidentally, it is likely that one of two possibilities is the case. The first is that the proponent lacks philosophical imagination, and you just need to think a little bit about how to make the conditions be satisfied coincidentally, and then you'll have a counterexample on hand. Just reflect a bit on Gettier-type cases, and if you're clever you should be able to find something. The second possibility is that the conditions are weaselly by including something like "relevantly" or "non-aberrantly". Here is an example of weaselly conditions:

• x knows p if and only if p is true and x believes p and x is justified in believing p and the anti-Gettier condition is met for x with respect to p.

These conditions cannot be satisfied coincidentally because the anti-Gettier condition is telling us that the first three conditions are satisfied non-coincidentally. But of course this is weaselly, since we aren't told at all about the kind of non-coincidentally that's required. Every coincidence is a non-coincidence from some point of view. So, really, such weaselly conditions need to tell us not just that the conditions are satisfied non-coincidentally, but that they are satisfied relevantly non-coincidentally.

Moreover, in the above example there is a pretty good chance that the weaselly final condition entails the other three. For what it says is basically that the other three conditions are satisfied in an un-Gettiered way! I think this isn't uncommon with weaselly conditions.

Note: In the example, one could try to formulate the weaselly condition as the denial of Gettiering: "and x is not Gettiered with respect to p". Then the weaselly condition wouldn't entail the other three. But then the resulting conditions would be too strict. For suppose that x has two sources of data on p. One source gives knowledge. The other gives Gettiered knowledge. Then x knows p but x is Gettiered with respect to p.

Philosophical accounts whose right hand sides are of the form

• x is F if and only if ∃y(G₁(x,y) and G₂(x,y) and G₃(x,y))

can use the quantification to avoid coincidentality sometimes, but often are subject to a similar criticism.

How little we know

At times I am struck by just how little we know (and I don't even put much emphasis on the "know"). I work, inter alia, in philosophy of time and I can't answer my six-year-old's questions about the nature of time. We humans really aren't very smart at all, except at asking questions.

It is not surprising that our ability to ask questions would outpace our ability to find answers. But it is, I think, surprising just how far it outpaces it.

And yet we can know the important thing: that we are made to know and love God.

A method for testing definitions

I have a new method for testing definitions. Read a definiens to someone, out of context, and ask her what she thinks the definiendum is. If she doesn't come up with something pretty close to the definiendum, you've got reason to think the definition is bad.

One can also do this as a thought experiment, though it's probably less effective that way. What does "justified true belief with no false lemmas" define? Answer: nothing other than justified true belief with no false lemmas. (Maybe you were trying to define knowledge?) What does "Sex between two people at least one of whom is married and who are not married to each other" define? Answer: adultery. (Right!)

Philosophy and literature

Different genres of literature are apt to give insights in different areas of philosophy:

• science fiction: metaphysics and mind
• mystery: epistemology
• fantasy: philosophy of religion
• non-genre fiction: ethics

Of course there are many exceptions.

Epistemic self-sacrifice and prisoner's dilemma

In the fall, I attended a really neat talk by Patrick Grim which reported on several computer simulation experiments by Grim. Suppose you have a bunch of investigators who are each trying to find the maximum ("the solution to the problem") of some function. They search, but they also talk to one other. When someone they are in communication with finds a better option than their own, they have a certain probability of switching to that. The question is: How much communication should there be between investigators if we want the community as a whole to do well vis-a-vis the maximization problem?

Consider two models. On the Local Model (my terminology), the investigators are arranged around the circumference of a circle, and each talks only to her immediate neighbors. On the Internet Model (also my tendentious terminology), every investigator is in communication with every investigator. So, here's what you get. On both models, the investigators eventually communally converge on a solution. On the Internet Model, community opinion converges much faster than on the Local Model. But on the Internet Model the solution converged on is much more likely to be wrong (to be a local maximum rather than the global maximum).

So, here is a conclusion one might draw (which may not be the same as Grim's conclusion): If the task is satisficing or time is of the essence, the Internet Model may be better—we may need to get a decent working answer quickly for practical purposes, even if it's not the true one. But if the task is getting the true solution, it seems the Local Model is a better model for the community to adopt.

Suppose we're dealing with a problem where we really want the true solution, not solutions that are "good enough". This is more likely in more theoretical intellectual enterprises. Then the Local Model is epistemically better for the community. But what is epistemically better for the individual investigator?

Suppose that we have a certain hybrid of the Internet and Local Models. As in the Local Model, the investigators are arranged on a circle. Each investigator knows what every other investigator is up to. But the investigator has a bias in favor of her two neighbors over other investigators. Thus, she is more likely to switch her opinion to match that of her neighbors than to match that of the distant ones. There are two limiting cases: in one limiting case, the bias goes to zero, and we have the Internet Model. In the other limiting case, although she knows of the opinions of investigators who aren't her neighbors, she ignores it, and will never switch to it. This is the Parochial Model. The Parochial Model gives exactly the same predictions as the Local Model.

Thus, investigators' having an epistemic bias in favor of their neighbors can be good for the community. But such a bias can be bad for the individual investigator. Jane would be better off epistemically if she adopted the best solution currently available in the community. But if everybody always did that, then the community would be worse off epistemically with respect to eventually getting at the truth, since then we would have the Internet Model.

This suggests that we might well have the structure of a Prisoner's Dilemma. Everybody is better off epistemically if everybody has biases in favor of the local (and it need not be spatially local), but any individual would be better off defecting in favor of the best solution currently available. This suggests that epistemic self-sacrifice is called for by communal investigation: people ought not all adopt the best available solution—we need eccentrics investigating odd corners of the solution space, because the true solution may be there.

Of course, one could solve the problem like this. One keeps track of two solutions. One solution is the one that one comes to using the biased method and the other is the best one the community has so far. The one that one comes to using the biased method is the one that one's publications are based on. The best one the community has so far is the one that one's own personal opinion is tied to. The problem with this is that this kind of "double think" may be psychologically unworkable. It may be that investigation only works well when one is committed to one's solution.

If this double think doesn't work, this suggests that in some cases individual and group rationality could come apart. It is individually irrational to be intellectually eccentric, but good for the community that there be intellectual eccentrics.

My own pull is different in this case than in the classic non-epistemic Prisoner's Dilemma. In this case, I think one should individually go for individual rationality. One should not sacrifice oneself epistemically here by adopting biases. But in the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, one has very good reason to sacrifice oneself.

"Serious" intellectual work

This morning, I had a look at a recent mathematics paper that I am a coauthor of. I was struck by how complex it is. The reasoning in a mathematics paper is extremely elaborate and complex. In philosophy, we tend to think that an argument with, say, twenty steps is very elaborate. But here the proof involves eleven lemmas, each of which has a proof consisting of several, and at times quite a large number of, steps, many of which are quite elaborate. I can see how one can look at a philosophy paper and a mathematics paper, and think: "The mathematics paper, that's really serious intellectual work. The simplicity of even the most complex philosophical arguments, with the exception of ones in philosophical logic, shows the lack of intellectual seriousness of the philosophical enterprise." I think it is not uncommon for scientists and mathematicians to have this attitude towards philosophy.

I think this attitude is mistaken. Anecdotally, writing good mathematics papers is not harder for me than writing good philosophy papers. Writing a mathematics paper takes me significantly longer than writing a philosophy paper. There is a lot more detail. But how long it takes to write a paper is not a good measure of intellectual difficulty or seriousness. Typically (though not always—I think the paper I was looking at is a counterexample) the main difficulty is coming up with the basic idea for the paper. The difficulty in coming up with the basic idea for a good mathematics paper is not very different from that of coming up with the basic idea for a philosophy paper. In both cases, one may spend years thinking about a problem, trying out solutions that fail, and finally the idea may just come—or it may be a series of progressive refinements. Once the idea comes, wrapping it up can be challenging, and in the mathematics case it may involve more tedium (or not—the tedium is different, in the one case there is tedium in getting all the details of the proof right, while in the other case there is a tedium in relating one's result to a vast literature). Of course, one might find that the details aren't as simple as they seemed once one works through them—but this can happen equally in a mathematics and a philosophy case.

Moreover, even in the mathematics case, the length and complexity of a proof is not the mark of intellectual quality. If one could find an elegant, quick proof—that would be all the more appreciated by the community.

Practical moral philosophy

This is a follow-up on an earlier post.

There should be a practical branch of human knowledge about how in fact to attain moral excellence and act well. This discipline would be related to theoretical moral philosophy in, very roughly, the way engineering is related to physics. We might call this practical moral philosophy. This is distinguished from applied ethics. For instance, the military sub-branch of applied ethics may tell us, for instance, what it is permissible for us to tell the enemy when we are tortured, but applied ethics is itself primarily a theoretical discipline, and does not give us much help in knowing just how to withstand torture.

Practical moral philosophy subdivides into two studies: (1) how to attain moral excellence and act well oneself, and (2) how to lead others to moral excellence and good action. The study of the second is a recognized part of contemporary philosophy: it is the study of moral education. But the first has not, I think, been sufficiently developed, at least by analytic philosophers. It has, however, been deeply developed within religious traditions, again with a subdivision into the helping oneself (I do not know the name for this discipline, but within the Christian tradition, many of the practitioners of the discipline are called "spiritual writers") and helping others ("pastoral theology"). (A difference is that in the religious traditions the goal can go beyond natural moral excellence.)

It is not completely clear that this is really a branch of philosophy. Perhaps it is a branch of psychology? It is, indeed, related to "positive psychology". Still, it is not just a branch of psychology in that it depends crucially on the ethical judgment of what moral qualities are in fact excellent and what actions are in fact right.

Bringing theology into metaphysical discussions

As readers of this blog know, I am not a big fan of the compartmentalization of knowledge, and specifically of a compertmentalization on which theological knowlege does not affect one's philosophical beliefs. Here I just want to note one thing. A lot of contemporary metaphysical arguments have some form rather like this:

Here's a phenomenon F. Look, it's puzzling. Here are three accounts of F. Look, they all fail. Here's a fourth account of F. Look, it doesn't fail for the reasons for which the three fail.

We're then supposed to accept the fourth account.

But of course such arguments are weak (there is nothing wrong with weak arguments, except that strong ones are preferable). Unless there is a further argument that any account must be one of the four, while such argument provides evidence for the fourth account, it should not give one very strong confidence in the fourth account. And at least in such a case, if the theology has a rational basis (e.g., in apologetic arguments), it seems clearly unproblematic to say, e.g., "Ah, but the fourth account fails, too, because it contradicts transubstantiation."

After all, if the fourth account of F contradicts transubstantiation, then the philosopher who accepts the fourth account and accepts transubstantiation needs to revise her beliefs. She could do so by rejecting transubstantiation. But assuming there is the kind of rational basis for her acceptance of transubstantiation that we might expect an intelligent Catholic to have (e.g., she is appropriately convinced by the apologetic arguments that show that Christ founded a Church whose basic beliefs would always be true and by the historical evidence that transubstantiation was, at least at one point in history, one of the basic beliefs of the Church), wouldn't it be silly for her to reject transubstantiation merely on the grounds of the fact that we have not yet found a satisfactory account of F that coheres with transubstantiation, but we have so far found an otherwise satisfactory account of F that does not cohere with transubstantiation? The confidence engendered by arguments of the form that was given for the fourth account of F is just too low to make it rational to reject transubstantiation.

Consider, too, that the revision to her web of beliefs in rejecting the fourth account of F is likely to be much smaller than the revision in rejecting transubstantiation if she is Catholic. (If she rejects transubstantiation, she will need to reject conciliar infallibility or else go Orthodox and deny that Trent was an ecumenical council. In either case, a lot of other beliefs would likely have to change.) It would be strange indeed if such significant transformation of one's belief system were to be made rational merely by the fact that three accounts of F are unsatisfactory and the only one we know of that doesn't fail in this way contradicts transubstantiation.

What is further typically true of these kinds of metaphysical arguments is that the fourth account, while not subject to the deficiencies of the first three, has some implausible consequences, too, which the author finesses. Even if in fact the author of the argument is right that these implausible consequences are less problematic than those of the first three accounts of F, it seems really clear that at least in such a case bringing in the theological consequences is entirely appropriate.

(I sometimes argue for a significantly weaker conclusion than the one I hold. This is certainly true in this post.)

Philosophia Perennis

There is a new, and promising, Catholic philosophy blog out there--Philosophia Perennis. So far only one post, but they have multiple contributors, so more should be there soon.