Re: How does God(s)'s existence give life meaning?
Adagio said:
Infinite regress isn't solved through foundationalism. It IS the problem with foundationalism.
1) I did not say that foundationalism solves the infinite regress problem. I said it was supposed (i.e. by its proponents) to solve the infinite regress problem.
2) I'm not sure I see your point. If a principle or set of principles or entity sufficient to ground an adequate epistemology is/are truly foundational, they would stop the regress problem. It wouldn't make sense to ask what justifies them; justification just means to be in accord with those principles. That's just what it means for them to be foundational in this case. And if this is so, it stops the regress, making it finite.
Adagio said:
But you used Wittgenstein as an example to support your idea. He was a foundationalist.
He was also a logical atomist, an ethical and aesthetic relativist, a fan of spaghetti westerns, and a bit of a nervous fellow. Are these also relevant? I was drawing upon his point about meaning and publicity, which is generally taken to be correct.
Anyway, you keep calling W a foundationalist. I'm not sure this is correct, unless by that you mean the T-Wittgenstein thought there are certain logical axioms which are basic to formal logic.
Adagio said:
Well... it did not quite shatter the hopes of foundationalists, who, forgetting about Hume’s irrationalism, once again tried to explain the rationality of science as a byproduct of its justification by sense experience....(snip)... And while this may be well and good for an empiricist, or for a materialist, or for anyone else who wants to treat empiricism and materialism as infallible dogmas, it is not so well and good for someone who wants to know how objective knowledge is possible.
OK--so, by "collapse of foundationalism" you meant "there are potent criticisms of foundationalism"?
There are potent criticisms of practically every philosophical position ever invented. Now, there are surely some of those positions that have genuinely collapsed (like the idea-theory of reference) in that they have no living proponents who are professional philosophers at all. That situation is pretty rare. Foundationalists today would have some replies, some of them fairly convincing, to what you post, above.
Also, what you've posted above seems to have to do with objective knowledge (a term which stands in need of clarification), not the foundations of knowledge. Foundationalists need not suppose that there are objective foundations. Indeed, the feat Kant pulled off was to show how objective knowledge could coherently proceed from subjective foundations...though I suspect he might object to this sort of terminology.
Adagio said:
It would appear that way, unless we considered another approach. This, in a nutshell, was Popper’s problem. (snip)
But where Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the positivists all agreed that our knowledge must be justified in order to be rational, Popper thought outside the box, and cut the Gordian knot by arguing that scientific knowledge cannot, and need not, be justified at all—and by saying that it is rational not because we have justified it, but because we can criticize it.
Again, I'm not entirely sure that's how I would characterize Popper. It seems to me that Popper thought that scientific statements could receive justification. He would hardly have been so concerned with the demarcation problem were this not the case. You may note that the summary you've written above looks like an attempt at justification, though with the added verbiage that it's not
really an attempt at justification.
With Popper, you have to be careful in thinking that when he's talking about science, he's talking about knowlege in general. He thought properly scientific theories are falsifiable. But he did not think that one couldn't be justified in accepting certain kinds of statements as true. For instance, if I note that it feels cold outside, and also that my right knee aches, I am justified in accepting the conjunction of those two propositions. Popper would not have said otherwise.
Adagio said:
Popper argued that any attempt to justify our knowledge must, in order to avoid infinite regress, ultimately accept the truth (or reliability) of some statement (or faculty, or person) without justification.
Yes, he thought that. This is sufficient to show that he, too, was a foundationalist. His move to do this was specifically to avoid the infinite regress problem.
Adagio said:
But the fact that the truth (or reliability) of this statement (or faculty, or person) is accepted without justification means that we attribute to it an authority that we deny to others. Thus, where Wittgenstein and the positivists appealed to experience to justify our knowledge, Popper argued that ‘the main problem of philosophy is the critical analysis of the appeal to the authority of ‘experience’—precisely that ‘experience’ which every latest discoverer of positivism is, as ever, artlessly taking for granted. The observation statements that report our experience never entail the truth of a strictly universal statement (or theory). So universal statements (or theories) cannot be justified (or verified) by experience. But it takes only one genuine counter-example to show that a universal statement is false. So some universal statements (or theories) can be criticized (or falsified) by experience—or, at least, by the acceptance of observation statements that contradict them. Popper concluded that it is falsifiability, and not verifiability, that distinguishes empirical science from metaphysics. And then, by successfully pointing out that there is a logical asymmetry between universal and singular statements—so that universal statements can be falsified, but not verified; and singular statements can be verified, but not falsified—he showed that the distinction between science and metaphysics cannot coincide with the distinction between meaningful and meaningless statements, because if a statement is meaningful then its negation must be meaningful as well.
In this way, Popper argued that the growth of science is both empirical and rational. It is empirical because we test our solutions to scientific problems against our observations and experience. And it is rational, because we make use of the valid argument forms of deductive logic, (Not inductive verification) especially the modus tollens, to criticize theories that contradict the observation statements that we think are true—and because we never conclude from the fact that a theory has survived our tests that it has been shown to be true. It's always conditional. Our theories are rational, not because they can be justified. They're rational because they can be criticized. They can be tested. Metaphysical theories can't be tested. That's what makes them metaphysical.
The well known objections to Popper's suggestion are that a) this doesn't comport well with how science actually proceeds, b) it relies on empiricism anyway (he never explained how our observations could falsify a theory without there being some concept of justification through observation snuck in), and c) it's too strong by half, in that if we take it seriously, it limits the sorts of things science can talk about.
But that said, nothing you've written above actually avoids the problem of justification.
Adagio said:
But I also know that he pointed to the foundationalism I cited above looking toward Euclidian Geometry and Newtonian Physics as the basis for his ideas. Einstein proved that a priori foundations couldn't be relied upon.
1) Again, that's not exactly what Kant said. He did not say that the universe is either Euclidean or Newtonian. He said, rather, that those were examples of systems built with synthetic a priori reasoning. In other words, what he said is that human beings can't help but see the world as Euclidean and Newtonian.
2) I find your statements about Einstein rather odd. Einstein applied Euclidean Geometry and Newtonian physics to a single data point--that light travels at the same speed in all reference frames--to generate relativity theory. You get the equations for Special relativity by just manipulating the Pythagorean Theorem and assuming that C is a constant.
Adagio said:
What Einstein proved is that we cannot rationally ground science upon a priori cognition because a priori cognition is unreliable, and we cannot rationally ground science upon sense experience because inductive inference is invalid.
I wasn't aware he'd proven either of those propositions. Can you elaborate?
Adagio said:
Simply because demonstrating that a priori cognition and inductive inference was demonstrably false in the case of Kant
Wait a minute...again, when was this done?
Adagio said:
doesn't mean to imply that it doesn't hold the same application for Einstein. He was claimed to have said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong". No theory is ever proven true. It just means that we haven't found a way of disproving them as false. Until we do, they stand.
He may have said that. Whether he should have said that is another question. In any event, it's certainly not the case that any theory at all stands until falsified. We'd have an uber-proliferation of theories under that scenario.
Adagio said:
I meant contradictory. A logical fallacy. Appeals to authority are always logically false. Argumentum ad Vericundiam.
So, appeal to authority is a fallacy that occurs when we take the pronouncements of someone with political authority of some kind, or some sort of social prestige, to be authoritative in some non-concerned area. For example, if President Obama said "Picasso was an unimportant artist," and I used that to support an argument that Picasso was an unimportant artist, that would be a fallacious appeal to authority.
Can you show me how the proposition "Obama said Picasso was an unimportant artist" is false on every line of the applicable standard truth table? It looks to me like one easy way to symboliize this would just be:
(x)(Sa & (Px --> ~Ix)
Which is clearly not false on every line of the standard truth table for conjunction.
Adagio said:
Even an expert can be wrong. Your example bears this out. "It's not fallacious, for instance, to consult a medical doctor about an illness and accept her advice."
The doctor could be wrong in her diagnosis. We often get second or third opinions rather than rely on the "expert" advice of just one. Why? If the Doctor is an expert, then why would we bother with another opinion?
You have a strange understanding of this fallacy. Of course, the doctor could be wrong. The point is that experts are experts by virtue of the fact that they're wrong less often than non-experts. We consult them to increase our odds of holding true beliefs and eschewing false ones.
In the Obama/Picasso example, Obama is presumably not an expert in art history, and so his pronouncement about the importance of Picasso to the history of art is as likely to be wrong as if anyone else who isn't an expert in art history said it. That he is President of the U.S. does not increase his odds to make true pronouncements in unrelated fields. That's why appeal to authority is a fallacy.
Adagio said:
"Nor is it fallacious to consult a Bishop about church doctrine. It's only fallacious when the domain of authority is taken to extend beyond its reasonable borders." But that as you point out is a very narrow world that steps outside of the physical world that we all deal with. The expertise of a Bishop regarding Church Doctrine deals with a metaphysical subject to begin with and only applies to the narrow field of his church.
Wait a minute...this doesn't make sense. I did not say, and did not mean to claim, that a Bishop would be an expert over whether a particular dogma of his or her church is true. I said it's not fallacious to consult a Bishop about church dogma--i.e. a Bishop is more likely to know what church dogma says than other people.
Adagio said:
Another church with another doctrine would disagree.
Well, not about what the first church's doctrine says.
Adagio said:
What is another meaning of the word "canon"? If canon isn't Law, then what is it?
According to the OED, it can also mean criterion, standard, accepted calendar, or influential body of literature. I used it in the last sense--the argument I posted is the canonical argument for why we need God for meaning because it's the most influential and accepted such argument.
Anyway, as fascinating as all of this is, what does this have to do with the regress argument for meaning?
