theophilus

Another blurt.

Please learn the basics of argumentation an start providing something other than you vacuous remarks.

theophilus

I'm not trying to make a distinction. I'm trying to respond to specific atheist arguments.
I'm not able to discern whether a particular atheist is a supernaturalist or not. If they want to qualify their arguements, that's their responsibility.
Then they'll need to explain their particular brand of supernaturalism so we can judge it's relevance to the argument at hand.
Besides, the fact that there may be some supernatural atheists is a fact which I'm sure doesn't apply to most posting here and is, therefore, irrelevant to most arguments.

Clutch

Sorry. My post was already quite long, I thought, having made the remarks to which your Eval claims inspired me. A polite note asking for my remarks on the conclusion of your post would certainly have worked.
This was a friendly suggestion to help you fix a serious defect in your idea: the defect being that problems with Eval will simply end up being problems with your unmotivated way of framing it. Even supposing your reasoning about Eval to be cogent, your opponent may simply reply: Good point -- that's why Eval isn't an independent principle, on my view.

Your own attempt to fix the problem, above, is fraught -- since on your proposal Eval itself will require the appropriate prefix (by whatever reasoning motivates your use of such prefixes for its conjuncts). So in effect you've got a conditional -- If application conditions X hold, then use norm N -- whose consequent, in the case of Eval itself, is a conjunction of such conditionals.

Eval: Application Conditions A --> ((a.c. B --> norm1) & (a.c. C --> norm2) &...)

What will the antecedent of Eval look like? How will your prior reasoning adapt to the case of testing a conditional statement, given the content of the antecedent (whatever that turns out to be?) Maybe you have answers here, but you certainly owe some.It's unclear to me what you think the problem is. But in any case, the conjunctive nature of Eval makes what you say here an error, I think.

Whether you'd have to appeal to Eval in justifying it depends entirely on what the antecedent of Eval says. If it doesn't include, "When evaluating Eval itself..." in its application conditions, there will be no circularity. That is, if Eval itself is to be evaluated by only a proper subset of the conjuncts of its consequent, there is no circularity. After all, such an evaluation leaves open the possibility that some other conjunct of Eval will fail by the lights of the evaluating conjuncts -- thus making Eval fail altogether without impugning the conjuncts used in the evaluation.

That's how a conjunction works. One conjunct false, the whole thing is false -- even were all other conjuncts true. Eval is testable, as you describe it. It could fail by including even one false conjunct, when tested by the lights of one of its true ones.
But I, like virtually everyone since around 1960, do not adopt this positivistic sort of empiricism.
This looks like a conclusion you want to extract from your positivistic empiricism. Chalk up still one more reason for not basing epistemology on a "pitifully inadequate pool of... perceptions". And how do I know I'm not a brain in a vat?!

Look, most of these are matters of pragmatics, as the practice of science makes clear. What counts as "enough" evidence varies from context to context, with notions like confirmation and disconfirmation doing double duty as concepts of degree and threshhold concepts -- the threshholds being variable according to many factors -- including, what the consequences of error might be. Which is certainly what we should expect, if the norms are hypothetical in form, with antecedents reflecting one's predictive and explanatory interests in a given case. That's what I argued in the part you didn't read.
I wouldn't appeal to Eval, since I wouldn't bother formulating it in the first place. But if you did appeal to it, it certainly seems testable, as I showed above.
I don't know why you say this.

Remember the original complaint: Sagan's dictum fails to meet its own standards.

That's what I'm addressing.

Now, it's true that meeting its own standards is not the only thing a norm or principle has to do. It should, for instance, also be consistent with Fermat's Last Theorem. But that is just one of the details that I'm not going to pursue here -- forgivably, I think. The question I was considering is whether holding a principle to its own standard is circular.
You seem to think that "conclusions" being justified by evidence (meaning, it seems, something like sense-data) is the sole description of scientific norms. This is a clear mistake, I think, given the existence of norms about transparency, honesty, reproducibility, or, heck, testability more generally. But you are certainly correct that "Science should work" is a value judgement, and a categorical one at that.

Which is why I tried (carefully, though, sadly, unreadably!) to distinguish categorical value judgements like that one from hypothetical ones, like, "If you want your science to work, you should...". I don't see why science should be thought to rest on the former; and the latter seem testable. I'm sorry if it was hard to follow. Still, I expected better than the tone you've adopted throughout your reply. Glass houses and all that, after all.

Clutch

theophilus,Okay, brazen it out if you wish. But I really don't see the attraction of embarrassing yourself, compared to learning something about a topic that you are obviously interested in. Good luck!

Clutch

bd,

I had another look at the final section of your first reply -- the ingenious bit you wanted a response to.Why should we do such a thing? My point was about untestable claims; yours is about claims currently lacking evidence for or against. The difference is enormous, and obvious.

Of course you are free to construct, consider and reject whatever proposal you wish -- but why should I regard the success or failure of a different proposal for testing Sagan's dictum as relevant to my own?

On the other hand, from the balance of your remarks I can extract one nice observation that is (or can be made) relevant to my actual proposal: If a research programme "works", that in itself serves as a higher-order test (and validation) of its elements, including any that had previously been considered untestable. I think that's the essence of your rather more extended comments, minus the unnecessary apparati of possible worlds and so forth.

Here it's crucial to note that the details matter, and especially the details as to why that element of the theory would have been considered untestable in the first place. That is, we might find that experiments only produce coherent, patterned results if we pray first, and a theory might characterize this by including something like U: "The unimaginable, immeasurable and undetectable One clarifies the world when supplicated."

Now, everyone may agree that this is untestable, including its staunchest supporters. Everyone may agree that the only thing immediately supported by the outcomes is that the act of prayer seems related to the outcomes of the experiment; the staunch supporters hold that this immediate conclusion is explained by U, but accept that this is unprovable, by the very nature of the content of U.

We could, of course, modify the theory to eliminate U in favour of the more immediate conclusion. This would entail that U was not "crucial", in some pretty clear sense. But as a test of Sagan's dictum this is still perfectly acceptable: If we found that many or most of our successful theories were in the first instance based upon such untestable claims, then, whether we subsequently eliminated them or not, their worth would be confirmed in some substantial measure. That is, we would have higher-order evidence, not for any of the untestable claims specifically, but for the claim: "Science does well by proceeding via untestable claims". And this would count against the idea that untestable claims are "veridically worthless" -- at least, as I've been understanding the phrase.

Thanks again for your comments; the first set, at least, were very helpful.

theophilus

and the saga continues.

Talk about embarrasing yourself.

CX

You said, "Assuming you are an atheist, with means you are a materrialist/naturalist..."

I was simply pointing out that that is not necessarily true. You just reiterated the point I was making.

Jobar

Hmmm. This thread has become mostly a matter of philosophy, and only indirectly a discussion of god(s) existence; I'm going to move it upstairs.

Theophilus, I would say that there are no 'supernaturalist atheists'. The term you want, IMO, is 'idealist atheists'; ones who believe that the observable universe is more like idea than like matter. I am an example. It is my long-considered opinion that matter-energy-space-time may all be unified by considering these things as information. But to avoid derailing this thread (which would be a tragedy, the interchange between bd and Clutch is quite fascinating) I will not expound on this any further. Perhaps one day I will start a thread (in Philosophy) on materialism/idealism.

Clutch

Yep.

Moreover theophilus' mangling of the concepts was three-fold: Atheist entails Materialist entails Radical Empiricist. The first step is a gross error, given the sheer number of atheists who are not materialists. (As theo patiently explains to CX, blissfully unaware that he has stumbled onto CX's very point.)

The second step is still more absurd. For even were it the case that most atheists hereabouts are materialists (I don't know whether this is true or not) there is exactly zero reason to suppose that most are radical empiricists in the sense theo is desperate to foist on them -- that is, holding that every belief must be supported by a set of "sensory perceptions". Very few contemporary philosophers defend such a view (for reasons that would be explained in a first-year epistemology class) even though very many are atheists.

Wyrdsmyth

A warning against what? Recognizing irony? Or being a smart-ass about it? Hey, if we can't let the theophiluses of the world get a little smart-assed now and then, what does that say about the Secular Web?



Au contraire, friend theophilus. It is not being used to argue against supernaturalism, but only against untestable claims. One could make claims about the natural world that are untestable, also, and Sagan's dictum equally applies to them. It is only if you are willing to concede that supernaturalism is entirely based upon untestable claims that you would say Sagan's axiom would nix out the supernatural.



Sagan never said "there is no immaterial aspect to existence," to my knowledge. Can you cite a source, here?



I don't assume science is the only method of arriving at truth, but the best method we have, as a human species, for gathering and testing our knowledge. Science attracts its own share of B.S., to be sure, but it seems the best suited for weeding out its own crackpots.



But that is entirely the point at question. What is our criteria to distinguish between the imaginary and the supernatural?



Because, otherwise, we'd have to give the same credence to all claims, all science, psuedoscience, superstitions and so on would have to be considered equally valid. But testable claims are naturally going to garner more respect than untestable claims, because any of us can conduct the tests, if we want to, regardless of what we believe or want to believe. But when the claims of the supernatural are always kept behind the curtain, out of reach, and untestable, shouldn't that make us skeptical of them? How can we give them the same footing as science?

No, that was just me imploring you to face the point at hand, instead of going off on a tangent.