Start with the Aristotelian thought that abstract entities are grounded in concrete ones. Add this principle:
If the concrete entities that ground x are all contingent, then we have a violation of the conjunction of (1)-(3), since then all the actual grounders of x could fail to exist and yet x is necessary. So:
It seems to me that the presentist can only de re refer to past (or future—but that's less of a problem) individuals if there are haecceities or the identity of indiscernibles is true.
I suggest two examples for premise (2).
Life: Life has a meaning. But a meaning of life that derives from our assignments is not a meaning that matters to us. What we have assigned meaning to, we could reassign meaning to. If the meaning of life were merely a matter of human assignment, then humanity's search for meaning would be a mere matter of curiosity, of figuring out how our ancestors have assigned meaning and how those meanings combine. It would be either like searching for the meaning of an ancient inscription (a case where we don't know the meanings of the components) or like parsing a complex sentence in first order logic (a case where we know the meanings of the components but don't know how they go together). There would be no deep existential relevance in such a meaning, since we could just as well assign a meaning ourselves. It would be just a meaning assigned by peers.
This example shows that the meaning of life needs not just to be a meaning assigned by a non-earthly intelligent being, but by a being whose meaning-assignments have deep existential relevance to us. A being with a deep kind of authority. So not just some space alien that seeded life on earth, say.
The sublime: Any case of the sublime—say, the Orion Nebula or Beethoven's 9th—has a meaning that escapes us, all of us. Cases of the sublime can be natural or human-made, but in both cases they have a meaning beyond us. And that meaning-beyond-us isn't just a matter of being better at figuring out how components combine, in the way that the meaning of a sentence of First Order Logic is. In a piece of the sublime we don't know very well, but can only vaguely sense, what the meaningful components are, and we are not responsible for the mysterious meaningfulness of these components. Even in the human-made cases, the creator is a servant to that mysterious meaning of the components.
Moreover, the meaning of the sublime piece is one that we resonate with, one we have a kind of grasp of—or maybe that has a grasp on us—that ever eludes us. We have a resonance to the meaning of the sublime. So whatever story we give about that meaning, we also need to give a story about how it's a meaning we resonate to. There could be aliens that have assigned deep mythological interpretations to various components of the Orion Nebula. But that isn't the meaning we resonate to. So, once again, the argument not only yields a non-earthly intelligence, but one who can make us resonate to his designs.
I've found the notion of a material object very puzzling. Here is something that would render it less puzzling to me:
One might worry that there could be an animal that is as big as space itself, and then it would count as an immaterial object. But even though the animal would be everywhere, it wouldn't be everywhere in every part and respect. Its digestive system would be here but not there, and so on.
Alternately, one might stick to our definition of materiality as limited location, but modalize. Maybe "limited location" is a modal concept, so that a being that could be limited in location is thereby limited in location.
The Adams Thesis for a conditional → says that P(A→B)=P(B|A). There are lots of theorems, most notably due to Lewis, that say that this can't be right, but they all make additional assumptions. On the other hand, van Fraassen has a paper arguing that any countable probability space can be embedded in a probability space that has a conditional → which satisfies the Adams Thesis and a whole bunch of axioms of conditional logic. The proof in the paper appears incomplete to me (it is not shown that all necessary conditions for the choice of [A,B] are met). Anyway, over the last couple of days I've been working on this, and I think I have a proof (written, but needing proofreading) of a generalization of van Fraassen's thesis that drops the countability assumptions (but uses the Axiom of Choice).
The conditional logic one can have along with the Adams Thesis is surprisingly strong. In my construction, for each A, the function CA(B)=(A→B) is a boolean algebra homomorphism. Thus, we have Weakening, Conjunction of Consequents, Would=Might, and the Conditional Law of Excluded Middle. The main plausible axioms that we don't get are Weak Transitivity and Disjunction of Antecedents (can't get in the former case; don't know about the latter).
The proof isn't that hard once one sees just how to do it, but it ends up using the Maharam Classification Theorem, the von Neumann-Maharam Lifting Theorem and oodles of Choice, so it's not elementary.
This is pretty obvious, but I never quite thought of it in those terms: The prisoners' dilemma shows the need for the virtue of trust (or faith, in a non-theological sense). In the absence of contrary evidence, we should assume others to act well, to cooperate.
This assumption perhaps cannot be justified epistemically non-circularly, at least not without adverting to theism, since too much of our knowledge rests on the testimony of others, and hence is justified by trust. Our own observations simply are not sufficient to tell us that others are trustworthy. There is too much of a chance that people are betraying us behind our backs, and it is only by relying on theism, the testimony of others, or directly on trust, that we can conclude that this is not so.
It seems to me that the only way out of the circle of trust would be an argument for the existence of a perfect being (or for some similar thesis, like axiarchism) that does not depend on trust, so that I can then conclude that people created by a perfect being are likely to be trustworthy. But perhaps every argument rests on trust, if only a trust in our own faculties?
Consider this anti-randomness thesis that some compatibilists use to argument against libertarianism:
Thesis (1) is false. Here's a counterexample. Consider the following family of situations, where your character is fixed between them: You choose whether to undergo x hours of torture in order to save me from an hour of torture. If x=0.000001, then I assume you will be likely to choose to save me from the torture—the cost is really low. If x=10, then I would expect you to be very unlikely to save me from the torture—the cost is disproportionate. Presumably as x changes between 0.000001 and 10, the probability of your saving me changes from close to 1 to close to 0. Somewhere in between, at x=x1 (I suppose x1=1, if you're a utilitarian), the probability will be around 1/2. By (1), you wouldn't be responsible for choosing to undergo x1 hours of torture to save me from an hour of torture. But that's absurd.
Thus, anybody who believes in free will, compatibilist or incompatibilist, should deny (1).
Now, let's add two other common theses that get used to attack libertarianism:
There is an independent argument against (1). The intuition behind (1) is that responsibility requires that a choice be more likely than its alternative. But necessarily God is responsible for all his choices. And surely it was possible in at least one of his choices for him to have chosen otherwise (otherwise, how can he be omnipotent?). If the choice he actually made was not more likely than the alternative, then he was not responsible by the intuition. But God is always responsible. Suppose then the choice he actually made was more likely than the alternative. Nonetheless, he could have made the alternative choice, and had he done so, he would have done something less likely than the alternative, and by the intuition he wouldn't have been responsible, which again is impossible. Thus, the theist must reject the intuition.
Kant (on one reading) holds that the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of nature depend on us (noumenally speaking). This reconciles determinism with freedom: sure, our actions are determined by the laws and initial conditions, but the laws and initial conditions are up to us. Kant also thinks that a further merit of this view is that one can blame people whose misdeeds come from a bad upbringing, because noumenally speaking they were responsible for their own upbringing.
Lewis holds that freedom is compatible with determinism, and in a deterministic world had one acted otherwise, the laws would have been different.
Everybody agrees that the view I ascribe to Kant is crazy (though not everybody agrees that the ascription is correct). But Lewis's view is supposed to be much saner than Kant's.
How? The obvious suggestion is that Lewis only makes the laws depend counterfactually on our actions (assuming determinism) while Kant makes the laws depend explanatorily on our actions. But that suggestion doesn't work, since Lewis's best-systems account of laws makes the laws depend on the law-governed events, and so it makes the laws depend not just counterfactually on our actions but also explanatorily: the laws' being as they are is grounded in part in our actions. So both accounts make the laws explanatorily depend on us.
Admittedly, Kant also makes the past, not just the laws, depend on our actions. But that's also true for Lewis, albeit to a smaller degree, because of his doctrine of small miracles...
The summer is a nice time for various non-philosophical projects. My daughter had the idea for this project. We humans really like light, don't we?
Start with this idea:
But there is a problem: how do we identify the epistemic, practical and cardiovascular faculties? We could try to pick them out in some plausible way: the epistemic faculty is our faculty of belief formation, the moral faculty is the will, and the cardiovascular faculties are the heart and blood vessels.
However, I think things aren't that easy. The account of a cardiovascular faculty doesn't work: not every failure of heart function need be a cardiovascular failure, since a heart (if not in us, then in some other species) may have non-cardiovascular function (e.g., of providing an internal clock). On the other hand, a representation is a belief at least in part because it is an output of the epistemic faculties. A faculty is a will because it aims at the production of actions (i.e., one sense of praxeis). The epistemic and practical cases, thus, end up defining epistemic and practical requirement in terms of the proper functioning of the faculties of epistemic and practical production.
But what are epistemic and practical productions? (And by analogy, what's a cardiovascular production?) We could try to identify them by ostension. My believing that I have two legs is an epistemic production, while my writing this post is a practical production.
There are two problems with the ostensive approach. The first is the problem of aliens. Aliens can have epistemic and practical faculties, i.e., intellects and wills, but they might not have exactly productions that fit in the same natural kind as our believings and doings. This problem is similar to the problem of multiple realizability for token identity physicalism in the theory of mind.
The second is the "So what?" problem. If I simply ostend to two of my faculties, whether through their productions or otherwise, that leaves it mysterious why the normativity that they generate is particularly important. There is something deeper and more important about epistemic and practical requirements than about cardiovascular ones. A person who is an epistemic or practical disaster but who has a well-functioning cardiovascular system is much worse off than one who is an epistemic and practical success but has a disaster of a cardiovascular system (maybe is surviving on life support). The obvious natural law solution to the "So what?" problem is to say that our human nature makes epistemic and practical flourishing more non-instrumentally important to us. But that raises the question of whether there couldn't be beings who are very much like us, yet whose natures elevate the cardiovascular over the rational and practical. It seems to be because the epistemic and practical faculties are what they are that they are more non-instrumentally important to our flourishing than our cardiovascular faculties, rather than because of our human nature.
I don't know how serious the two problems are. Maybe one can and should bite the bullet on them.
Consider this argument:
But I think this is too quick. I think a lot of people may have an intuition of (1) that is not simply based on a belief in a Planner. That intuition may be basic or it may be inferred inductively from various events in the person's life having an apparent plot, and more than a plot, a plan made with the person in sight. I remember a student who professed to be an atheist telling me that she feels that her life has a plan, and that she doesn't know if she can fit this with her atheism. (I told her she needed to figure this out.) She may have been exceptional: many atheists probably do not have the intuition of (1). But at least in regard to her, the argument wouldn't have begged the question.
And even if the intuition of (1) were always based on theism, that would not make the argument question begging in every case. For one could use Dan Johnson's brilliant observation on the ontological argument here. Suppose someone is reasonably a theist (e.g., due to a sensus divinitatis), then reasonably infers (1), then for some unreasonable reason (say, the wrong kind of social pressures) becomes an atheist but still maintains the belief in (1). Her belief in (1) remains reasonable—it is her atheism that is unreasonable on this story. (I don't need any claim like that every atheist is unreasonable. But this one I am supposing to be.) Then she would be reasonable in inferring back to theism from (1).
