bd, your new argument is this, it seems:
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The key premises in the actual argument are:
[1] (**) is a fundamental intuition.
[2] Some fundamental intuitions are of such a nature that they are indefeasible – i.e., they cannot be defeated by empirical evidence.
[3] If (**) is a fundamental intuition, by its very nature it must be indefeasible.
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If these are the key premises, then the argument is still worse. For (3) does not follow from (1) and (2); the argument is of the form "F is G; some G are H; therefore all F are H." But that is transparently fallacious.
Moreover, I have yet to see anything in the way of an argument for (2) that is not
ad ignorantium. No "indefeasible" intuition appears defeasible until the countervailing evidence arrives. But such intuitions have indeed been defeated. That space is Euclidean is not an intuition of mine in any useful sense, since I warrantedly believe that "Space is Euclidean" is false.
Perhaps if I'd lived in 1100 CE it would have been otherwise. I guess this sticks me with the idea that one's intuitions are partially a function of what is known. Darn. Oh well -- I can live with this, since it seems to have the virtue of being true.
Similarly, if I'd never known any of the evidence for common ancestry and the incremental development of properties of biological systems, I might have been inclined to draw the fallacious inference underwriting the non-intuition (**). But I do know that evidence, so I don't draw that inference. It says a lot that this is "one of the strongest reasons" for your insisting that (**) is a "deep intuition" that I must hold.
Just look at your story about these "deep intuitions":
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the way that we discover that we have a fundamental intuition is by analyzing our own thought processes and figuring out what the “unstated premises” are. These unstated premises are our real fundamental intuitions, whether we’re aware of them or not.
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Of course I think that I can often discover what I
believe by the process you mention. How, again, did you get from
implicit belief to "deep and empirically indefeasible intuition"? Your mere assertion cuts no ice here.
We make assumptions, we have implicit beliefs, and we can discover these by analyzing the sorts of things we do, and the arguments we give. But having identified an implicit belief and made it explicit, we can ask: Is there an argument for holding this belief? Is there an argument against holding this belief? If neither, can the belief be jettisoned, perhaps in favour of a weaker version, without badly disrupting our intellectual practices?
Take your own example of Euclideanism seriously. Is it always irrational to suppose that a triangle has other than 180 degrees internally? Hell, no! All you need's a big enough triangle on the surface of the Earth! That's one of the points of learning stuff -- so you can drop things you thought were
a priori necessities when you recognize that they're false in light of what you've learned.
You seem to believe that there's a very serious problem of how we can come to accept what we learn, since if it overturns a previously held belief, our previously holding that belief should force us to regard the new evidence as mistaken:
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You have to show that... you are justified in rejecting (**), at least as it applies to evolution - before you can assert that you have good reason to believe (E). So you cannot argue that you are justified in rejecting (**) because you have good reason to believe (E).
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This is so obviously confused that it's hard to know what to say about it. The fact is, making an implicit belief explicit is often exactly what enables one to take seriously the prospect of its being overturned. It's a datum that it can be rational to recognize the force of evidence implying the falsity of one's beliefs. Having asserted that there is a problem, you are going to very strange lengths to manufacture one: if what you say is right, it is never rational to recognize countervailing evidence. So the crux is your claim that (**) is literally immune to empirical refutation. But many posts along now, no reason to believe this has yet been advanced, except for your insistence that it's so. The Euclidean example you have offered seems to support exactly the opposite conclusion.
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The fact that we believe that some or most non-rational processes do not produce “rational” results can hardly justify our certainty that the “Welcome to Wales” sign is not evidence that one is entering Wales if it was produced by a blind, undirected natural process like an earthquake. We feel certain that such things are never evidence, not merely that they usually aren’t evidence.
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What "such things"? This is the whole question. Earthquakes? No, never. Long processes of mutation and selection? Yes, sometimes. You are contributing to the mounting evidence that earthquakes do not explain the evolution of biological systems.
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Lewis’s argument is against MN. MN entails immediately, without any evidence whatsoever, that human belief-forming capacities were produced by blind natural processes, because it presupposes that everything that exists was produced by blind natural processes. So before we can even start considering the evidence for evolution we have a crisis: our own cognitive faculties are presupposed to be produced by blind processes, but we have a deep intuition that there is no rational justification for trusting beliefs that can be traced entirely to blind processes. The problem, then, is how all this evidence for evolution is to be made “admissible”; how do we justify accepting the outputs of these presumptively untrustworthy cognitive processes which say that those cognitive processes are trustworthy after all?
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This is the same elementary confusion that I pointed out in my first post. Scepticism about reasoning about evidence is just a different matter, and is a self-reductio in any case. (If sound, the argument shows that it can't be taken as evidence for its conclusion.) And since rationality is a natural phenomenon, on MN, your claim that MN cannot appeal to rationality is baffling. As for running through this reasoning "before" thinking of evolution: this is absurd. Is the claim that, by ignoring some things that we know, we can leave ourselves with a puzzle? Your stipulations about "deep intuitions" remain as unconvincing as ever.
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Finally, there’s a serious question of whether we have good reason to believe (E). Clearly we have very good evidence (if we can get around the problem I just described) that human belief-forming capacities and human reasoning capacities evolved via natural processes. But what evidence do we have that these processes were “undirected”? It won’t do to simply presume that they were, because then you’d be arguing in a circle: “(**) isn’t true as it applies to human cognitive faculties because I presume that the process that produced them was undirected – i.e., that (**) isn’t true as it applies to human cognitive faculties.”
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Our evidence that they were undirected is substantial. Not just the complete lack of evidence to the contrary -- eg, the absence of an agent able to do the job -- but the general kludge-like organization of our cognitive capacities.
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Certainly the hypothesis that the process of evolution was directed is completely out of court in a scientific theory.
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This is just false. That the evolutionary process was directed -- eg, by space aliens -- would be surprising, but perfectly scientifically respectable under very many empirically possible states of information.
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In fact, since the methodology of science excludes any hypotheses incompatible with MN a priori it’s disingenuous to argue that the fact that they don’t appear in the best scientific hypothesis shows that they must be false. The fact that they wouldn’t appear was built in to the methodology at the outset; it was a given.
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Again you seem not to understand the issues here. Naturalism in no way rules out that evolution was directed. There's just no evidence to think it was, and massive evidence to suggest the contrary. This is evidence that (**) is false.
02-28-2003, 11:43 AM
