The Argument from Religious Experience

The argument for God from religious experience seems ludicrous to the popular atheist or agnostic. The argument lends itself all too easily to ridicule and mockery. “How can somebody claim to know something simply because they feel it to be true?” asks the skeptic. “Truthiness” is the word which Stephen Colbert used to describe it. The believers typical response does not help their case much either, “It’s not just a feeling. It was something more, something in my gut/heart which I can’t really describe.” In this post I will argue that a religious experience is indeed something more than just a mere feeling. I will also argue, however, that this fact does nothing to support the argument from religious experience for God’s existence. Indeed, I will conclude that by taking such religious experiences seriously, by not degrading them, the skeptic has a powerful argument against such an argument for God.

Eliminative and Reductive Materialism as Distinct Paradigms

The radical Kuhn, as I like to call his more extreme side, held that different paradigms are utterly incommensurable since there was no meta-paradigm from which to understand, evaluate and compare one paradigms to another.  Inasmuch as this view entails that the same individual cannot even understand two different paradigms at the same time in his life, it is obviously flawed.  Such a radical view is to see scientific models as encompassing and/or determining far too much of any person’s complete worldview.  Instead, the meta-paradigm, of which any scientific theory is but a relatively small sub-paradigm, is culture, which I will roughly define as the interpretational repertoire which is common to the members of a linguistic community.  Culture allows the scientist to hold scientific paradigms up to each other and compare them.

A Coherent Belief in Santa

Intuition, I suggest, tells us the following: we have at least some justified beliefs and we have at least some unjustified beliefs; therefore all of our beliefs cannot stand or fall together. Additionally, intuition suggests that justification is not an all or nothing dichotomy, but rather allows for degrees. Any theory of epistemic justification which does not allow for both of these possibilities is unacceptable. In this paper I will follow these intuitions in arguing against two approaches to a coherentist theory of justification. I will also show that where these two approaches fail, a third approach can succeed. (As an attributive note, all three approaches are supplied by Richard Feldman in his book, Epistemology.)

The Conjunction-Reduction Test for Semantic Ambiguity

Donnellan argues that there are two different uses of definite descriptions. The first type is the attributive use, which more or less follows the Russellian account of definite descriptions in that the logical structure of the description refers to a variable rather than a particular individual which the speak has in mind. The second type is the referential use of descriptions in which the speaker uses the sentence, which may in fact be a misdescription, as helpful material to pick out the referent which he/she does have in mind.

Against Eliminative Reductionism in the Social Sciences

Constitutive rules for social facts, according to Searle, are of the form “X counts as Y in C“. This formula has four essential components which each play a necessary role in the construction of social reality. The first is X, the brute facts which may be mere bodily motion, or some other physical object which in itself is devoid of all meaning and function. The second component is the “counts as”, by which I mean an interpretive repertoire which is common to an entire community. It is the communal nature of the interpretation of X which gives Y whatever amount of epistemic objectivity which it obtains as well as logically prevents individuals from creating social facts independent of what any other agent thinks of the matter. The third component is the social fact itself, Y. This may be an action, money, a social role which a person plays, etc. It is the brute, physical fact endowed with meaning and function by the community in question. The final component is the C, the external context which greatly constrains or even determines which Y the community will count X as being.

The New Class

The name Marx has become almost synonymous with class struggle and ideology. According to him and his followers, it was only a matter of time before one class, the down-trodden and alienated Working Class, in an act of total desperation with absolutely nothing to lose would rise up in revolt against the other class, the alienating masters of the Ruling Class, in an overthrow of capitalism and thereby create a communist utopia. It never happened. But while it certainly did not happen in the way Marx predicted it would, one would, however, not be altogether inaccurate in suggesting that the alienated did gradually and partially revolt against the unbridled Capitalism which to Marx was so disgusting.

Welcome to the New Blog!

Well I finally decided to switch from blogger to wordpress.  While blogger allows for a good deal more customizability, for the computer illiterate such as myself wordpress is simply the better choice due to its immense user-friendliness.  In the process I also decided to change the name and look of the blog as well, while retaining pretty much the same subject matter.  Hopefully this will serve as a bit of a turning point in the blog, in that I plan to actually proof-read my posts before I publish them.  While I’m sure there will be exceptions to this rule, the difference should be notable.

Anyway, everybody be sure to update their links and bookmarks, for I will no longer be posting over at Stop That Crow! anymore.

Ambiguities and Affairs

In his paper, Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference, Saul Kripke argues that the distinction between the attributive use and referential use of language does not, contra Donnellan, amount to a refutation of Russell’s account of definite descriptions. The purpose of this paper will be to describe the arguments which Kripke provides in favor of such a conclusion as well as various objections which can be raised against him. It will also be shown how Kripke can adequately respond to such criticisms.

Science as a Map of the World

While the constructionist depiction of science as just one among many crafts which man engages in is clearly extreme and absurd, the principles which underlie such a claim cannot simply be swept under the rug and ignored. Science, as well as scientific knowledge is a largely man made construal of nature rather than some mirror of reality which the scientists “unearth.” Where the constructivists went wrong is in not acknowledging the manner in which reality strongly constrains such construals. Yes, we can only begin to reason about reality once a contingent and corrigible classification scheme and fundamental assumptions is in place, but this does not change the fact that there is an objective reality which such schemes are about. While there may be no one, True, God’s-eye conceptual scheme available from which to view this objective reality, the very fact that there is an objective reality to which all conceptual schemes refer entails that some conceptual schemes are better than others.

Bodily Motion and Human Action

In his book The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle asserts that the basic constitutive rule by which social facts are created is of the form “X counts as Y in C” where X is a brute physical fact, Y is the social fact and C is the conditions in which X counts as Y. In this post, I will describe the manner in which this rule functions in order to create various human actions (Y) out of one and the same mere bodily movement (X) within different contexts (C).