Argumentation and Apologetics

In the last post we discussed the problematic nature of religious beliefs in public debate. To illustrate the point, we took the example of the IDer who didn’t accept Neo-Darwinian evolution, not really because of any scientific evidence, but because he believed himself to be privy to God’s infallible truth. What this IDer is engaging in is not debate or legitimate argumentation (not about evolution anyway), but is instead engaged in apologetics. It will be the purpose of this post to explore the difference which exists between apologetics and legitimate debate.

Religious Beliefs in Science and Politics

Have you ever been engaged in a debate with somebody online, probably concerning evolution, and you come to realize that something fishy is going on? You present evolution as fact, and an IDer shows up with some criticisms. You response to all of the criticisms and yet the IDer stands firm in their conviction that evolution must be wrong for some undetermined reason. While I understand that not all IDers are like this, the picture which I have painted probably isn’t all that unfamiliar.

What Others Believe…

We’ve all heard the famous saying that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. In this post I will briefly mention some of the problems which Plato brings against democracy, primarily in the Republic. I will then attempt to provide an account of the potential problems which religious beliefs bring to a democratic society.

The Nature of the Designer

Over at the Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has put up a post which is well worth reading regarding the intimate relationship which exists between creationism and intelligent design. While the entire post is certainly worth looking into, in this post I want to focus on the nature of the Intelligent Designer. I want to briefly review Ed’s thoughts, and then elaborate on them in a comparison with some thoughts from both Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.

The Evolution of Commitment

In the last post we considered a model of the evolution of justice according to evolutionary game theory. We saw that according to such (overly) idealized models, the emergence of social equality is relatively likely in accordance with a comparatively a-rational process. In this post we will consider the evolution of commitment, especially the commitment to follow through with threats that are not in one’s best interest to follow through with.

The Evolution of Justice

In a manner similar to my treatment of both Searle and Deacon’s books, I now plan to consider, over the next few posts, Brian Skyrms’ books “Evolution of the Social Contract” and “The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure.” These accounts will serve as a prelude to a consideration of Rawls’ “Theory of Social Justice”, Wright’s “Non-Zero” and perhaps a constructivist account of meta-ethics which parallels Rawls’ in its ontology but matches W. D. Ross’s in terms of content.

The Evolution of Language and Culture

We have recently considered Terrence Deacon’s account of the relationship between symbolic signs and the objects which they represent in language use. Deacon summarized this relationship by calling it an iconic relationship between an indexical relationship among signs and an indexical relationship among the objects which they represent. In this post I wish to put forth some rather speculative thoughts concerning the nature of these two indexical systems.

Icons, Indices and Symbols pt. 2

In the last post we explored the nature of iconic and indexical representations as Deacon describes them. We saw that iconic representations basically amount to a recognition of an object. Indexical representations, however, are the recognition of a correlation between two objects, or better yet a sign and an object which is indicated by the sign. In this post we will explore the nature of symbolic representations and discuss how they are different from the other two kinds of representations.

Icons, Indices and Symbols pt. 1

In the past few posts regarding Deacon’s interpretation of the Chinese Room argument I have roughly been equating symbolic representations with token-token relations and indexical representations with token-object relations. While this is not entirely incorrect, it certainly fails to do justice to the complex nature of these kinds of representation. In this post I will review the distinction which Deacon draws, following C. S. Peirce, between iconic, indexical and symbolic representations.

The Chinese Room Argument pt. 3

In the last post we saw that Deacon agrees with Searle in that any computer which the Chinese Room thought experiment is meant to be a model of is not intelligent in the same way we are, nor is it conscious. The main point is that for an entity to be conscious, it must be conscious of something. The Chinese Room, however, is sealed off from any objects of which it could be conscious due to its lack of any token-object relations. Instead, the references of all the tokens within such a device, according to Deacon, are other tokens which are also in the machine.