Ichthus77

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 3: ‘Fog Over Channel, Continent Isolated’: Epistemology in the ‘Two Traditions’ – Section II.

Part 2: Koyré (Norris does not split the section into parts.)

Alexandre Koyré also transcends the rift between the analytic and continental traditions. “Best known as a philosopher-historian of early modern science,” he was a Russian exile who went from Germany to France and taught in both the U.S. and France after WWII. His “intense speculative bent and vast range of interests (in mathematics, physics, cosmology, philosophy, theology and various traditions of Neo-Platonic and mystical thought) place his work far apart from mainstream approaches to the subject.”
In common with Duhem:
1. “rejected the conventional view that genuine scientific knowledge got started only with the passage from ‘medieval’ to ‘renaissance’ modes of thought, that is, through a decisive enabling break with the legacy of hidebound scholastic doctrine which prevailed in the earlier period.”
2. “shared Duhem’s great aim of reawakening philosophers to the range and vitality of medieval thought, while stressing just the opposite (realist) aspects of what he took to constitute its chief and enduring legacy.”

Koyré was a realist (opposed to instrumentalist thinking like that of Duhem) because:
1. Believed “science could deliver objective knowledge of a mind-independent physical reality…” (as did some medieval thinkers)
2. which consists of “objects, properties and causal powers whose essential nature was such as to determine whether or not scientific enquiry was on the right track,” (as did Aristotle).
3. Espoused “a basically Platonist outlook which aspired to transcend the epistemic contingencies of scientific knowledge at this or that state in its advancement to date.”
Koyré’s work [including Etudes galileennes (1939)] is characterized by:
1. “originality of mind…expansive vision of philosophy of science as a quest for universal yet historically emergent and culturally salient truths.”
2. “detailed and exacting analysis of scientific theories-…theories of movement, stasis and inertial force-while drawing out the kinds of problem and paradox that have preoccupied philosophers from Zeno to the present.”
3. “treats these issues within a larger metaphysical framework that takes them to involve fundamental questions such as those first broached by the conflicting claims of Platonic and Aristotelian ontologies.”
4. Preference for Plato seen “above all in Koyré’s realist philosophy of mathematics; antipathy toward empiricist conception of scientific method.”

He was influenced by Husserl‘s transcendental phenomenology (very often dissenting from it)-and took from Husserl “the idea of philosophy as a rigorous, reflective, self-critical activity of thought which suspended (or bracketed) our commonsense beliefs and thereby sought to reveal the underlying, a priori, and hence universally valid structures of knowledge and experience.” Like Husserl, he went back and forth between this and acknowledging the task’s dependence “on modes of intuitive self-evidence…being-in-the-world as historically and culturally situated agents.” He criticized “the strain of transcendental idealism” in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which he felt fell away from “the vocation of rigorous, scientifically disciplined enquiry.” Had recourse to “the evidence of modern (post-Galilean) scientific thought but also to the Thomist theological tradition which likewise-albeit for different reasons-rejected any notion of human knowledge (even at the limit of idealized rational acceptability) as the ultimate arbiter of truth.” [At the same time he claimed “that modern science had by no means shed its ‘metaphysical’ commitments-as argued by hard-line positivists-but on the contrary continued to enlist such resources so as it render its truth-claims and its theories intelligible.”] “No philosopher in recent times has done more to uphold the claims of scientific rationality and truth while taking on board such a range of arguments from (seemingly) opposed viewpoints. Thus his critique of positivism for its anti-metaphysical prejudice went along with his equally trenchant critique of those idealist-‘metaphysical’-currents of thought which paid insufficient regard to the manifest achievements of physical science.”

This explains his impact “during that period of pre-war French intellectual debate when thinkers like Sartre were attempting a synthesis of Husserlian transcendental with Heideggerian existentialist phenomenology, and these in turn with an understanding of Hegel mediated by Kojeve’s strong-revisionist reading.” Koyré had a good historical grasp of the sources of the debate.

Koyré “made no sharp distinction between the sorts of theological issue (such as realism versus nominalism) that had so preoccupied medieval thinkers and the sorts ofmetaphysical issue that continued to emerge with undiminished force when science took its turn toward a broadly secularized worldview.” This is due to his attraction to Levy-Bruhl’s thought (collective mind-sets) and “nineteenth-century hermeneutic philosophy” [like Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘worldviews’ or Weltanschauungen] both of which gave him the “sense of the problems involved in negotiating differences of cultural outlook or deep-laid metaphysical commitment.” Yet-he didn’t go the way of Michel Foucault‘s skeptical nominalism, treating all knowledge as cultural construct, relative to period of discourse. Nor was he ever a paradigm-relativist like Kuhn. Koyré believed “science is indeed a continuing venture of discovery and that differences of mind-set-however profound-can nonetheless be rendered intelligible from a sufficiently informed historico-philosophical viewpoint.” It was his (realist) conviction that “scientific knowledge was properly aimed toward discovering the essence of things rather than contenting itself with merely nominal definitions.” Totally clashed with anti-metaphysical positivism.

So he went outside the box a bit-“Renaissance hermetic philosophies (Paracelsus), Romantic mysticism (Boehme) and various nineteenth-century Russian proto-existentialist ideas-all of which he sought to bring within the compass of a unified history of thought. …his chief motive was to vindicate the claims of mathematics and the physical sciences as aimed toward a truth which transcended the socio-cultural vicissitudes of time and place.” -one indicator being the diverse thinkers he chose to study under…. “while nonetheless respecting those essential standards-of truth, objectivity and conceptual rigor-that characterized mathematics and the physical sciences.” In the ‘science wars’ or ‘culture wars’ debate, composed of hard-line scientific realism, cultural-relativism/social-constructivism, Koyré “held out…the prospect of achieving a perspective atop these particular kinds of academic or interdisciplinary dispute…points a way forward from some of the more sterile or deadlocked disputes in recent epistemology and philosophy of science.”These things keep popping up (not just in Norris’ book) and I would eventually like to explore them at more depth (hopefully Norris does this)–
Nominalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism
Problem of universals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
Apparently realism is non-nominalism-believes in universals. I’m wondering if the section on descriptivism/naming had anything to do with it? I’m hoping not…I’m thinking not.

*****
a synthesis of Husserlian transcendental with Heideggerian existentialist phenomenology, and these in turn with an understanding of Hegel mediated by Kojeve’s strong-revisionist reading
–would love to know the ins and outs of that

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 3: ‘Fog Over Channel, Continent Isolated’: Epistemology in the ‘Two Traditions’ – Section II.

Part 1: Duhem (this will be followed by Part 2: Koyré, though Norris didn’t split section II into parts).

So, few folks these days think the ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ (Anglophone) traditions are worlds apart. Mostly that attitude was held by positivists like Rudolf Carnap back in the day (1930s)-and then Wittgenstein-influenced empiricists of the linguistic turn (1950s) “that found no room for the overly ‘metaphysical’ tendencies of continental thought.” Carnap saw Heidegger (and others) as offering “inflated rhetoric and … meaningless pseudo-statements” and thought Husserlian phenomenology bore some analytic resemblances but “strayed from the path of empirical method and logical rigour into various ‘psychological’ excesses.” This charge was taken up more by those who “endorsed Frege’s criticisms of Husserl…This despite Husserl’s strenuous insistence that his was a rigorously argued project of transcendental phenomenology which entailed a radical suspension or putting-into-doubt of all merely psychological attitudes, beliefs or modes of thought.” So, though Husserl “bears analytic resemblances” a rift is maintained-why? In a nutshell…

Eventually it became group-reinforcing to say continental epistemology went wayward with Kant, construing “the theory of knowledge as having to do with a priori intuitions, ‘concepts of understanding’, and suchlike dubious appeals to the supposed self-evidence of first-person apodictic warrant.” Analytics thought we should stick with the scientific method, which took the “self” out of the picture and required verification. With a similar attitude, Quine attacked the last two dogmas of empiricism-the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and the idea that “observation-statements or predictions could be checked one-by-one against discrete items of empirical evidence.” That any statement/theory could be saved by adjusting parts of the ‘web of belief’ was thought to be the end of empiricism, but he “came out firmly in support of the empiricist position…by adopting a thoroughly naturalized (behaviourist) approach to epistemological issues and avoiding all forms of ‘metaphysical’ obfuscation.” One example of such obfuscation: “the typically continental idea that epistemology must have to do with intuitions or thoughts ‘in the mind’ of this or that individual knower. Similar objections were later raised by followers of Wittgenstein who took the view that any such appeal must involve some version of the ‘private language’ (or privileged epistemic access) fallacy.” “Most often the quarrel was played out along familiar British-empiricist versus continental-rationalist lines, with Cartesian dualism (and its notion of privileged epistemic access) figuring as the chief source of philosophic error.” The privileged access fallacy is not explained, and I didn’t get it when I read about it elsewhere (can you read my mind?), but I’ll revisit it soon and see if I can figure it out.

The Duhem-Quine thesis (in epistemology and philosophy of science) is a link between the continental and analytic traditions. “In [Pierre Duhem’s] earliest publications…his thought manifested…a disdain for ontological commitments (such as atomism) which went beyond the empirical evidence and-concordant with that-a fixed aversion to any form of ‘metaphysical’ realism which claimed to reveal the ultimate nature of things or the underlying causal powers that explained phenomenal appearances.” He was inclined toward “a Machian (positivist) view.” Quine naturally receptive. Norris’ description of Duhem’s position sounds very much like Quine’s thoughts on “theory-ladenness” and theories being “undetermined”, and the “web of belief” explained in an earlier chapter.

1. Thesis subject to widespread debate/criticism-“it appears to undermine the rationality of theory-choice and to deprive science of any normative standard by which to adjudicate rival truth-claims or hypotheses.
2. “It comes rather sharply into conflict with certain of Duhem’s working principles as a physicist, among them his theory of thermodynamics as providing a unitary framework-or grounding rationale-for the entirety of physics and chemistry.”

So some folks think it shouldn’t be called the “Duhem-Quine” thesis-that Duhem’s name should be left out of it.

However, Duhem does lean that way later on in his politically motivated book German Science (Duhem was French) where “he champions the ‘typically’ French preference for a find-tuned balance of commonsense, intuition and rational procedure as against the ‘typically’ Germanic style of rigorous axiomatic-deductive thought. In support of this claim Duhem calls Pascal to witness on the two supposedly distinct mentalities-‘l’esprit de Wnesse’ and ‘l’esprit geometrique’-which he (Duhem) takes to characterize the French and German approaches to science.” (was that French?-I don’t parlevoo) So there’s a tension between his methods/practice as physicist (“his commitment to the values of rigour, objectivity and truth”), and his thoughts on the history and philosophy of science (“his attraction to an instrumentalist doctrine which has at least something in common with the ruse whereby Galileo was required to affirm not the truth but merely the ’empirical adequacy’ of the heliocentric hypothesis”).

Duhem made an effort to “reconcile the claims of philosophy” (“the long-run scientific ‘context of justification'”) “and history of science” (“conditions obtaining in the original ‘context of discovery'”). He didn’t want to collapse the distinction, or the (‘strong’ sociologist) idea “that scientific truth-claims are subject to assessment by standards quite distinct from those deployed by social or cultural historians.” Even so, his work has been used to support such a collapse because of its association with Quine’s naturalism and hence (though Quine would reject it) Kuhn’s paradigm-relativism.

*****

Here’s some timely input:

Well, I think the ‘private language’ debate is a bit of a red herring or distraction from more important matters, like so much in late Wittgenstein, but there is a kind of plausibility about saying – as he does – that nobody could ever understand a ‘private’ (purely first-person, entirely unshared, hence non-communicable) ‘language’ since even the solitary speaker/listener wouldn’t have command of the various conventions (grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, etc.) by which to make sense of it. Still Wittgenstein typically does more to muddy the waters and bamboozle his numerous commentators than to sort things out in a constructive way.

— Professor Norris

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section IV.

Realism: “the claim that there exists a real-world domain of physical objects, events, structures, properties, causal powers and so forth which decide the truth-value of our various statements or theories and which cannot be treated as in any sense dependent on our current-best or even future-best-attainable state of knowledge concerning them.” This is an alethic, not epistemic, account of knowledge.

Events not naturally occurring in nature are still governed by its laws. Cool thought.

Transcendental Realism (TR)-

two senses of “transcendental”–
Sense 1: “pertaining to an order of objective reality and a range of likewise objective truth-values that may always in principle transcend or surpass the limits of human knowledge.”
Sense 2: Kant’s answer to Humean skepticism, a “deduction which accounts for our capacity to acquire such knowledge or to have such experience in terms of certain strictly a priori intuitions or concepts (e.g., those of time, space and causality) that alone make it possible for the mind to impose an intelligible order on the otherwise inchoate flux of sensory impressions.” Kant’s dictum: ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’ while ‘concepts without intuitions are empty’. [Intuitions must be ‘brought under’ concepts.] “Knowledge must confine itself strictly to the limits of phenomenal experience.” The title Critique of Pure Reason epitomizes his point that reason cannot go beyond intuition to the “thing in itself” (to go beyond intuition is to imagine, which is just to reorder previous intuition). We can’t strip the “thing in itself” of our intuitions of it. Norris says Kant does “little to support the alethic realist’s claim that there exists both a mind-independent (objective) reality and also-in consequence of that-a great range of to us unknown (perhaps unknowable) truths.” He also says Kant’s attempt to “explain how the manifold of sensuous intuitions can be somehow ‘brought under’ concepts of understanding” is “problematical”.

“Transcendental Realism breaks the hold of those dilemmas”-see sense 1, and refer to ‘convergent realism’ of last section. “This makes it transcendental in the Kantian sense of deriving from thought about the very possibility of scientific knowledge and progress in general but also in the non-Kantian realist sense of allowing us to know-not merely ‘think’-how such claims can be warranted or justified.”

Critical realism “allows for an adequately complex or ‘stratified’ account of the relationship between subject and object, knower and known.” Avoids dualism and other errors. If the errors were true, “no belief is ‘immune from revision’ since even certain axioms of classical deductive logic-like bivalence and excluded middle-might ultimately have to be abandoned under pressure from conflicting empirical evidence, e.g., quantum phenomena such as superposition or wave/particle dualism. From a TR standpoint these post-logical-empiricist developments should be seen as so many symptoms of the deepening crisis of mainstream analytic philosophy of science rather than as pointing a hopeful way forward from the various problems bequeathed by Kant.” So scrap all that for the “dialectical exchange between theory, observation and experimental practice” of transcendental realism, which rejects the skeptical either/or as a false dilemma, embracing both (1) that every well-formed (truth-apt) statement has its truth-value fixed quite apart from our best knowledge concerning it, and (2) that veridical knowledge is yet within our cognitive grasp-or perhaps ideal limit-through various well-tried methods of enquiry. There is a human role in (2) (manifestation) but not in (1) (reality)-the situation is not a dualism (thing-in-itself/intuitions), but stratified (ontology/epistemology)-pardon if that last part didn’t quite “get it”. [Sort of reminds me of how it is argued that good-evil is not a duality-that, instead, evil is the privation of good.] This “complex, dialectical and stratified version of realism [was] developed by Roy Bhaskar and others.” This involves distinguishing between “the orders of contingent (‘might-have-been-otherwise’) fact, laws of nature which apply (necessarily so) to our own world and all others that physically resemble it, and ‘transworld necessary’ truths-such as those of logic and mathematics-which cannot be conceived as failing to apply in any possible world.”

Norris (an “actualist”) uses the word “actualize” in the sense that we actualize events not occurring in nature (but which are governed by its laws) (as opposed to actualizing one of Lewis’ possible/real worlds). I should mention the thought that keeps popping up about Lewis’ ideas is the phrase “a real possibility”. But that just means “viable option”. Options are merely concepts…abstractions… The “real” world is “actual”-which includes abstractions, but is not itself an abstraction. Mathematics are an abstraction of the mechanics of the real/actual-‘course that’s just a guess. Mathematics that do not explain (refer to) the real/actual-are like options we never “actualized”.

Anyway, to wrap it all up, a realist response to a skeptical confusion of ontology and epistemology is “to be found in a combination of modal realism with inference to the best (causal or counterfactual-supporting) explanation and a transcendental argument from the conditions of possibility for our knowledge of the growth of science.”

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section III.

A lingering question left from the last section-what IS the difference between the reality of David Lewis’ possible worlds, and Thomas Kuhn’s (via Quine) world-webs? Essentially, I think the answer is, that Lewis’ thinks they are real without verification, whereas Kuhn thinks they’re real ‘due to’ verification. That’s why Lewis is a realist, and Kuhn is an anti-realist. In this section, Norris notes Dummett would reject Lewis’ transworld necessary mathematical truths, and stuff like Goldbach’s Conjecture, putting them in the “disputed class” (neither true nor false, as they cannot be verified/falsified)-“as distinct from merely undecidable according to our best, most advanced or sophisticated proof procedures.” To the realist that seems unreasonable, but so does Lewis’ “outlook of intransigent realism with regard to possible worlds and his suggestion that the case for mathematical realism stands or falls with that for the reality (as distinct from the logical conceivability) of any and every such world.” And (if I read Norris correctly) Lewis’ position is inferior to Kripke-Putnam’s distinguishing between contingent and necessary truths, and analytic (transworld) necessity from a posteriori necessity-that such distinguishing is the only way “the realist [can] hope to produce the kind of argument that would challenge the case for anti-realism advanced by thinkers like Dummett…that treats every area of discourse as having no room for truth-apt statements whose objective truth-value transcends the limits of recognition or verification.”

How do we know current “knowledge” is any better than past errors/incompleteness? Lewis’ answer: “1) any talk of past errors presupposes our possession of other, more advanced or adequate truth-standards,” 2) the recommendation that we remain epistemically humble presupposes we might be wrong according to “(what else?) objective criteria of scientific truth and falsehood.” If it’s all in our head, we’re never wrong. If we can be wrong, the truth must be outside our head, waiting to be discovered. Norris mentions “convergent realism” – “science may be taken as converging on truth at the end of enquiry to the extent that its theories are increasingly borne out by the best evidence to hand.” The anti-realist would like to remain humble and not go so far as saying “atoms actually exist”-would rather “treat atoms and such-like as useful posits for the sake of upholding some empirically adequate theory.” Anti-realism, unlike realism, carries no ability to explain scientific progress, and Norris takes some time to speak of mathematics’ importance in that progress, which Wigner acknowledges but considers to be “bordering on the mysterious and…there is no rational explanation for it.” The Kripke-Putnam approach provides an explanation.

The rest of the section is spent prepping for the next section, which will avoid the problem of Lewis considering possible worlds to have the same ontology as our own (just not “actual”), and will introduce some ideas that are pertinent to “critical realism“-like the distinction between ontology (truth is outside head) and epistemology (knowledge requires verification).

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section II.

So, “the Kripkean treatment of issues in modal logic” is a main source for a revival of causal realism: “the claim that certain kinds of object necessarily and of their very nature possess certain properties, dispositions or causal powers”. Hilary Putnampushes even further toward causal realism with his “thought-experiments designed to drive home the realist point that meanings ‘just ain’t in the head‘. That is to say, what fixes the truth-conditions for our various statements concerning the physical world is not the range of descriptive criteria by which we pick out objects of this or that kind, but rather the existence of just such objects with just such uniquely identifying structures and properties.” So now we’re getting into internalism vs. externalism, with Putnam holding an externalist position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalism_and_Externalism

Norris goes into Putnam’s best-known thought-experiment (designed to show how “meanings just ain’t in the head”-in other words, the true properties of an object depend on that object’s existence, and are true independent of our sensing/describing them), called the Twin Earth thought experiment on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Earth_thought_experiment. Basically, an Earthian and Twin-Earthian end up accidentally naming two different objects “water” because they have the same descriptions (sense) of them-so the description does notnecessarily “refer” to the object H-2-O (as it can also ‘refer’ to XYZ). When Twin-Earthian says “Give me some water” you don’t automatically know what he is referring to (XYZ), even if he describes it to you. This experiment would work with any hetero/homonyms that share similar descriptions, but are not the same thing-though, I can’t think of any off the top of my head (that aren’t artificial, like Twin-Earthian water). Maybe I’ll come back and fool around with this and try to find a good example: http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_homonyms.html Apparently Putnam restricted the thought-experiments to “natural kinds” (tigers, electrons), but Tyler Burge would think my hetero/homonym idea is cool, ’cause he extended it to other “artefacts or objects that don’t occur naturally but which, nonetheless, have their reference fixed through an inaugural act of naming and thereafter passed down through a communal ‘chain’ of transmission that ensures a sufficient degree of continuity despite any shifts in their range of descriptive criteria.” Here’s what I don’t get-if “descriptions” do not necessarily refer-why do names necessarily refer-since obviously the Earthian and Twin-Earthian incorrectly referred to the other’s wet stuff as water (the description was correct-the ‘name’ was not)? And where does “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?” enter into this discussion? A name tells us nothing about the object, unless the description is part of the name (like the fruit we call “Orange”)-why is a name said to “refer” (is “refer” a synonym of “correspond”-as in the “correspond” of correspondence theory?-how can a “name” correspond to…correctly describe…reality?)(the “name” ‘meanie’ comes to mind)? Maybe names and descriptions are just two ways we smack a label on an object (maybe descriptions are just reeeeally long names, and names are just short-hand for descriptions?), and some descriptions/names “correspond” to the best of our knowledge-and some descriptions/names do not correspond (do not refer) (like the name/description of a unicorn)-even if they “have sense”. Maybe sometimes names survive paradigm-shifts, and maybe sometimes the shift is so huge that a new name is required to replace the old one, even though the new/old names both refer to the same object? But-that would mean the “referential chain of transmission” is still in tact-right? It seems that descriptions do refer, the same way names refer (when they refer)-it’s just harder to say “You know that thing we used to describe this way? Well, we’ve added this description to it,” -it’s easier to say, “Water has taken on a new description.” Both descriptions referred to the same object, but new descriptions give more of the picture-that is the way most scientific advancement works-the old theories are usually not totally wrong, just updated. Names are short-hand-descriptions are the real deal and tell us more about the object-but both names and descriptions are “place-holders” for the object being named/described. That’s my story and we’ll see if I stick to it throughout the book.

That talk of experts (Putnam’s “linguistic division of labor”) confused me and reminded me of John Stuart Mills letting the educated determine the higher pleasures. Right until proven wrong by experts? Kill all the experts and you’ll be right all the time. Seems like anti-realism to me. You’ve simply moved the mind-dependence out of your mind into someone else’s.

“Possible worlds” talk (modal logic) is rejected by Quine (physicalist) as ‘metaphysical indulgence’-whereas possible worlds are taken by David Lewis as being “as ‘real’ as our own but non-actual”. For more on that, wiki it. Goes back to Leibniz. Such a leap is not necessary, but apparently cannot be refuted. If there are truths we have yet to discover, they are not “possible” truths, they are actual truths-so I don’t think it is necessary to say all possibilities are “real” but non-actual. They don’t become actual just because we apprehend them-that would be anti-realism. Lewis’ position cannot be said to be realism, because all the possible worlds, even if they be counterfactual, share the same ontology, like Quine’s ontological relativity (consider simultaneously Thomas Kuhn’s related “world-web” from the last section). At any rate, Norris likes Lewis’ talk of certain transworld necessary mathematical truths, and the Kripke-Putnam modal realist distinction between transworld necessity (applying to math/logic) and a posteriori necessity (applying to our actual world)-answering Quine’s objection that ‘modal locutions run into trouble when it comes to distinguishing necessary from contingent truths’ (awkwardly depending on modal distinctions to enforce the point-suggesting modal logic is more basic than “first-order predicate calculus on which Quine supposedly builds his case”).

Every time I set out to do this I think “there’s no way” and before I know it, it’s done. I pray I finish this before I go back to work.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section I.

I gotta say it straight out-Professor Norris’ style is not accessible to the undergrad. This is not a fun type of learning-it becomes fun when I finally figure it out-but it would’ve been way funner, and from the start, if it had been written at my reading level. Here’s what I “could” grasp (or think I did grasp, anyway) from the first section–

This section was mostly about Saul Kripke‘s reference-fixing (naming), in comparison with Frege and Russell’s descriptivist theory (emphasis on Frege). There’s background involving “problems bequeathed by Kant’s great attempt-in the Critique of Pure Reason-to delimit the sphere of cognitive understanding (where sensuous intuitions must be ‘brought under’ adequate concepts) from that of metaphysics where reason has a license to raise such speculative issues but only on condition that it not lay claim to any kind of determinate knowledge.” Whatever THAT means. There is talk of “redrawing the Kantian line” … of taking “full stock of the ‘linguistic turn'” -whatever that means-of Kripke and Putnam (apparently a guy named Hilary-sorry, man) putting the case “for a strong causal-realist and objectivist approach to epistemological issues”. Causal-realism is defined in section II. Here’s what comes up in section I–

So basically the two theories compared are descriptivism (Frege) and naming (Kripke). You’ve got the name of something (gold), and then you’ve got a description of something (formerly: “yellow, ductile metal that dissolves in weak nitric acid”; now: “metallic element with atomic number 79”). The name, and the description, are called “referents“.

Descriptivism (Frege) says that names do not always refer to the same thing if we attach conflicting descriptions to the same name, and that descriptions are more important (the “former” description of “gold” is not the same “gold” as the “now” description of “gold”-it’s like they should be given different names…but consider the underlying reasoning of that). It gets weirder. “Strong descriptivists or paradigm-relativists like Thomas Kuhn [conclude] that shifts in the range of identifying criteria from one theory or classificatory system to the next can at times be so drastic as to break the referential chain of transmission.” This is called “radical ‘incommensurability’ between paradigms”. This ‘desperate position’ is adopted because of Frege’s “sense determines reference” and an idea Frege rejected: “the sense of any given term can only be specified in relation to the entire language, discourse or received body of knowledge within which it plays a role.” So, according to this position, the two things don’t just need different names now-they inhabit different worlds (harkens back to Quine’s “web of belief”). There is therefore no accounting for scientific progress, since you’re stuck in the world-web of your preferred description.

Naming (Kripke) would say that descriptions of a thing may change and so do not always refer to what they are describing-which has a name which stays the same and refers to what is being described even if the description changes (the two descriptions of gold are describing one thing named “gold”). Kripke is saying (1) the reference of the name “gold” (to that thing to which the name “gold” refers) is “necessarily” fixed at its conception (in the mind) and (2) is preserved throughout “every shift in its associated range of descriptive criteria”. If that word “necessarily” trips you up-that is explained next:

The explanation of “necessarily” has to do with modal logic – “the branch of logic having to do with possibility and necessity”. Kripke “makes a case for the existence of a posteriori necessary truths…which are neither analytic, i.e., true-by-definition, nor a priori, that is to say, self-evident to reason, but which nonetheless hold necessarily in any world where their referents exist or once existed.” Did that clear it up for you? Me, neither. Not even when Norris used examples. [See link in reply below on a priori / a posteriori, the water example.] Anyway, somehow that means thatnames are “truth-tracking”-they stick even when descriptions change (“sensitive to future discovery”)-name-reference transcends the ‘paradigm-shift’. This is called reference-fixing.

The rest of the section I couldn’t quite make out, unless the example I’m about to provide (not provided by Norris) explains it well: when it comes to language translation, different languages all have different names (at least one per language) for the same thing (assuming they all have a name for that thing), so all those names refer to that one thing. How else do we know all the names refer to that one thing, but that the names all have similar descriptions? Somehow, according to some philosophers, the Kripkean approach “allows-indeed requires-some additional descriptivist component.”

And I wanted to re-paste what I wrote in section IV of the Introduction:
“I think a descriptivist account says that features are not essential, that they fail to refer, that imputed properties before discovery (about some object), and imputed properties after discovery (about that object), will not be referring to the same object (if so-then how do you know what object you made a discovery about?).”
[Side-question, prob’ly stupid: Does all this discussion about referents assume all names (or even descriptions, for the descriptivist) refer to something that actually exists? For example-what about names like “unicorn” (or descriptions of them)? Probably it would only count as referring to an idea (based on lack of evidence for their corresponding to reality)?]

*****
A helpful reply from Professor Norris to my side-question, which also explains Frege’s “sense determines reference” which I didn’t really get until now:

Yes, the normal assumption is that the objects or events referred to (described, specified, picked out, etc.) really do or did once exist – as per Frege’s distinction between ‘sense’ and ‘reference’, where ‘sense’ is the range of properties or attributes that people have in mind when they talk about something and ‘reference’ is what the description picks out when and if it ‘goes through’ in the normal way. So allusions to fictive characters and events (or to imaginary objects like unicorns) have sense but not reference.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn There’s other turns, too.

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I thank Professor Norris for the above explanation, as it was absolutely essential that I understand Frege’s “sense determines essence” in order to go forward.This is cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori#Relation_to_the_necessary.2Fcontingent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics … think it might have something to do with this. Fascinating.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 1: Staying for an Answer: Truth, Knowledge, and the Rumsfeld Creed –
Sections II-III.

These sections deal with Michael Dummett and what has come to be called Dummettian anti-realism. The Verification Principle gets a new twist with Dummett’s three arguments: acquisition, manifestation, and recognition, but also TIME (knowledge of the past; history) and backwards causality of answered prayer is brought up-so this is going to be a fascinating discussion (which will hopefully not get too off-track) even if I’m only talking to myself. Also discussed are ‘testimony’ and Mill’s defense of the validity of induction. Norris brings Rumsfeld’s comments back up again, but I think we can look at this topic w/o referring to them.

II

Disputed class: hypotheses, conjectures, speculative statements, unproven theorems, etc. … “statements for which we lack any means of formal proof (in mathematics or logic) or empirical verification (in history or the natural sciences).”

Realists: statements in the “disputed class” can and do possess objective truth-value “just so long as the sentence in question is well-formed and truth-apt.” Statements can be “truth bearers” (if they “refer”) and the portions of reality to which the statements refer are “truth-makers” (they make the statements true). This means reality is a truth-maker even if no statement is made (truth is knowledge-independent, verification-transcendent, epistemically unconstrained). Reminds me of Russell-I like Russell. “A well-formed statement…will have its truth-value fixed by the way things once stood in reality quite aside from our lack of certainty.”

Anti-realists: Dummett: “truth” should be replaced with “warranted assertibility” and “restricted to just those statements for which we possess some bona fide means of proof or verification.” The word “truth” keeps being used, though. Again, the anti-realist position is that we shouldn’t be able to say “this is true” (or false) if we cannot also say “this is verified” (or falsified). “Statements [in the disputed class] cannot have a truth-value since it is strictly inconceivable that truth should exceed the limits of assertoric warrant.” He has three arguments to support this:

1. Acquisition-argument. I’m just gonna quote: “we could not possibly acquire a working knowledge of language except via a grasp of the truth-conditions (more precisely: the conditions for warranted assertibility) which apply to the various sentences endorsed by members of our speech community.”

2. Manifestation-argument. “such knowledge must be manifestable in our own speech-behavior and thereby exhibit that working grasp-our understanding of the relevant conditions-in a way that enables other people to correctly interpret our meanings and beliefs.”

3. Recognition-argument. “no sentence can legitimately count as true or false unless we are able to recognize those same conditions and hence interpret as falling within the scope of our best available knowledge concerning what would qualify as adequate grounds for asserting or denying its validity.”

So (per Dummett) when we “assert the existence of objective truth-values for statements belonging to the ‘disputed class’…[it] would amount to the self-refuting claim that we know something to be the case despite our not having acquired the capacity torecognize the conditions under which such a statement is warranted or to manifest our knowledge of those same conditions in a manner acceptable to others in possession of the relevant standards and criteria.”

Norris notes Dummett’s three arguments amount “to a more sophisticated, logico-semantic version of the Verification Principle.” The chief problem with the Verification Principle was that “it met neither of its own criteria for meaningful statements, i.e., that such statements should be either empirically verifiable or self-evidently valid in virtue of their logical form.” So Dummett attempts to shift the debate by raising it “as a topic within the philosophy of language and one that has to do with our warrant (or lack of it) for adopting a realist view of some particular area of discourse. … For the Dummettian anti-realist…there is no making sense of such claims [in the disputed class] since they involve the appeal to an order of verification-transcendent truth which ex hypothesi exceeds the furthest bounds of epistemic warrant.”

Where this gets really interesting is that Dummett claims that any gaps in knowledge must also be gaps in reality. “…there cannot be a past fact no evidence of which exists to be discovered, because it is the existence of such evidence that would make it a fact, if it were one.” “Equally strange-from any but a hard-line anti-realist viewpoint-is the claim that our evidence (or lack of it) is ‘constitutive’ not only of our state of knowledge with respect to those events at any given time but also of their very reality, i.e., their having actually occurred or not. In which case, quite simply, the historical past must be thought of as a highly selectively backward projection from whatever we are currently able to find out and hence as including lacunae-‘gaps in reality’, as Dummett says-corresponding to our areas of ignorance.”

III.
So, one example Norris uses of Dummett thinking we can bring about the past by a change in our present knowledge, is retroactively granted prayer request. To Norris, this is Dummett agreeing that “wishing (praying) makes it so”. I used to use this example (not Dummett’s-didn’t know about Dummett) when I would think about time and God’s sovereignty over it. I think differently about it now, because, unlike Dummett, I think everything in the past, present, and future is fixed/complete from God’s perspective (according to Einstein’s relativity, they ‘are’ fixed)-all affirmatively answered prayers were answered (in our past, present, future) before it all began (from His perspective). So the guy’s prayer about what already happened-isn’t “retroactively” granted (nothing changes in the past from God’s perspective-the past, present, and future are fixed/complete)-but “eternally” granted (from beyond time). And this is not a case of the guy changing the past with his knowledge, because nothing changes, and even if it does, it isn’t his “knowing it” that changes it (he does not know how it turns out when he is praying about it), but God Himself that changes it (if that were possible, and it isn’t-it’s all fixed). So “praying makes it so” is not equivalent to “wishing makes it so”.

At any rate, when you’re talking about knowledge that makes the past real, you bring up the time travel paradox of the closed causal loop. Now that I’ve said that, I’m wondering if it has anything to do with causal realism. If you (the reader) don’t know what a closed causal loop is, here’s an example based off the TV series LOST (I won’t get the details exactly correct, so it is only “based off” of it-it isn’t the exact situation). In 2007 Richard gives John a compass and tells John “The next time you see me, give this back.” John goes back in time and meets Richard again sometime in the 1950s, and gives Richard the compass, saying, “The next time you see me, give this back.” Richard gives it back to John in 2007-the event we started with. So–who is the original owner of the compass? Who even manufactured it? Applying that to Dummett’s reverse-causality powers of knowledge: If I make the past real with my knowledge-what made my knowledge happen? Shiver me timbers!

On to math. “Dummett’s intuitionist conception of truth in mathematics…whatever we are able to prove or ascertain by the best formal methods at our present or perhaps (on his more liberal account) our rationally optimized or future-best disposal. However, this leaves it a mystery how mathematical discoveries could ever have occurred unless through the proven capacity of thought to find out truths that went against currently accepted standards of proof or verification. What counts as epistemic, probative or assertoric warrant in such matters is always and in principle subject to disconfirmation by that which lies beyond our present-best powers of proof or epistemic warrant.”

Skepticism’s false dilemma: either truths that cannot be known (verified) (leading to “the skeptical impasse-the unbridgeable gulf between truth and knowledge”), or a redefinition of truth putting it in the bounds of knowability. This is a version of anti-realism’s false dilemma, which results from confusing ontological with epistemological issues. [not sure how the two differ]

There are viable realist alternatives (paragraphs are numbered for convenience, not to denote different alternatives):

1. Gödelian realism-

From discussion w/ hughw (thankyou) in Philosophy Chat Forum‘s chatroom:
Godel’s incompleteness theorem is simply that each system has its own axioms that cannot be challenged from within that system– since that system is based upon those axioms

Strictly speaking, it holds that for any mathematical, logical or other such formal system beyond a certain (fairly basic) level of complexity – e.g., first-order logic or basic arithmetic, there will always be one or more axioms within the system that cannot be proved using the logical resources of the system itself. But of course Goedel claims (and is generally agreed) to have formally proved this unprovability-theorem, which is a bit of a puzzle (to say the least). Hence the claim of some – Goedel himself, along with people like Penrose – that this demonstrates that human knowers have access to truths or ways of knowing (or proving) certain things that go beyond anything provable by purely formal means, such as the procedures instantiated by digital computers. This is what is usually meant by ‘Goedelian realism’, and – as Goedel was happy to accept – it amounts to a form of platonism about mathematics & the formal sciences.

2. “You can’t prove there are no WMDs” is like “You can’t prove there is no God”. “…although it is the case…that absence of proof is not proof of absence, still we are entitled (on probabilistic but nonetheless rational grounds) to draw a negative conclusion [when] non-existence can justifiably be maintained as a matter of inference to the best, most rational, or least credibility-stretching explanation.” “…it is a necessary presupposition…that there are truths which may or may not be discovered in the course of diligent enquiry and, moreover, that their standing is in no way affected by the extent of our knowledge, ignorance or uncertainty about them. Such is the starting-point or default assumption of any dispute-outside the realms of metaphysics or philosophy of language–…Beyond that, it is a matter of rationally weighing the evidence and attempting to reach an informed estimate which takes in as much of that evidence as possible, along with due allowance for the motivating interests of those whose judgements (or overt professions of belief) may always be subject in varying degrees to the pressure of ideological commitment or political self-interest.”

3. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid (commonsense realism): “…testimony of various sorts plays a large and philosophically underestimated role in a great many aspects of human knowledge and experience.” … “can and should place trust in its various sources and means of transmission just so long as they stand up well to critical and methodological scrutiny.”

4. “…wide range of reliably knowledge-conducive procedures which no doubt fall short of absolute, indubitable truth yet which nonetheless offer sufficient grounds for rejecting the kind of anti-realist ‘solution’ currently on offer.” The skeptical/anti-realist false-dilemma is “another version of the fallacy that John Stuart Mill detected in Humean and other skeptical arguments against the validity of induction, that is to say, the mistake of imposing inappropriate (deductive) standards of truth on modes of reasoning-such as inference to the best explanation-that involved much wider, more practically accountable, sources of knowledge and evidence.”

Chapter two “shall unpack some of the arguments and concepts that philosophers have lately developed by way of providing those additional resources.” Nice segue.

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Dummett, nor his arguments, nor the term ‘disputed class’, nor anti-realism, are mentioned in my “Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective” (Geisler/Feinberg)–at least not in the index. In the chapter “How Do We Perceive the External World?” — Dualism (Representative Perception, Phenomenalism) and Idealism (weak, strong) are mentioned as alternatives to Realism (extreme/primitive, common-sense). Skepticism is also discussed. I’ve heard Norris say “representative perception” I think…but, if I did, I failed to mention it in my threads. Too bad his book has no subject index.

Mill is mentioned as relating to induction, but not directly as ‘the’ dude who defended induction against skepticism (instead, Frederick Will and Antony Flew are mentioned, as being only two of a group of philosophers…love this sentence: “The skeptic, then…is unhappy simply because induction is not deduction!”)–oddly his thoughts on logical and mathematical knowledge are also mentioned in such a way as to cast an interesting light on this discussion–“John Stuart Mill made it quite clear that he was not sure of the truth of the laws of logic. He wrote that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations, and, as such, are open to correction. He argued that just because we cannot conceive of another set of logical laws, it does not follow that another set of logical laws is impossible.” Reminds me of this from my Intro/SectionII thread on Quine: “So there is no ‘crucial experiment’ which can decide one of rival theories or hypotheses. In short, we can always make excuses for the results…even revise ‘laws’ of logic.”

Go here for some more info. on the Verification Principle: http://ichthus.yuku.com/topic/82. It’s a paragraph in one of my replies.

Geisler/Feinberg discuss a lot of stuff I wonder if Norris will discuss.

I’m not going to post induction stuff yet ’cause I just have this weird feeling I should save it for later.

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Strictly speaking, it holds that for any mathematical, logical or other such formal system beyond a certain (fairly basic) level of complexity – e.g., first-order logic or basic arithmetic, there will always be one or more axioms within the system that cannot be proved using the logical resources of the system itself. But of course Goedel claims (and is generally agreed) to have formally proved this unprovability-theorem, which is a bit of a puzzle (to say the least). Hence the claim of some – Goedel himself, along with people like Penrose – that this demonstrates that human knowers have access to truths or ways of knowing (or proving) certain things that go beyond anything provable by purely formal means, such as the procedures instantiated by digital computers. This is what is usually meant by ‘Goedelian realism’, and – as Goedel was happy to accept – it amounts to a form of platonism about mathematics & the formal sciences.

Also–one should wiki Dummett.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 1: Staying for an Answer: Truth, Knowledge, and the Rumsfeld Creed –
Section I.

This section is pretty interesting and examines this quote from former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, spoken during a press conference on February 12, 2003 (section written December 23, 2004): “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don’t know we know.” I vaguely remember hearing that press conference, can hear Rumsfeld’s manner of speaking, but I don’t remember what the context is surrounding that statement. Norris makes reference many times to the questionable existence of the WMDs that sold the invasion of Iraq to the U.S. public and the world. Norris’ language makes it obvious he thinks poorly of Rumsfeld’s creed-that it did not reflect a realist position, rather that Rumsfeld weaseled out of answering a question straightforwardly, of admitting there might not have been the WMDs that justified the invasion (and so no longer any justification), of the implication that the ‘evidence’ of them was perhaps a misinformation campaign, by masking “it is impossible to know (if there were or were not WMDs)” (iow, “you will never be able to know if there was/is no justification for the invasion of Iraq”) (blatant skepticism) in seemingly realist language.

Norris brings this example to examine, because it clearly shows how the central issues of epistemological debate “can often have a close bearing on the conduct…of our moral and political lives as persons whose considered judgement in matters such as the supposed justification for invading Iraq must always involve the attempt to sift truth from falsehood, or knowledge from ignorance.”

known knowns – things that we know we know

Most people would accept this, perhaps with caveats, because we all have experienced the reality of coming to find out that what we “thought” we knew-wasn’t the way things really are (we didn’t “actually” know it-we only “thought” we knew it). Observation-based beliefs and supposedly a priori truths (“thought to obtain as a matter of jointly intuitive and logical necessity quite apart from any such putative evidence for or against”) can later be proved either false, or “only true relative to a certain (e.g., Euclidean) frame of reference.” … “Hence the wide-spread debate as to whether there exist any statements that can rightly be considered ‘synthetic a priori’ in Kant’s sense of the term, i.e., statements which are self-evident to reason yet which also articulate an item of knowledge concerning the physical world or our experience of it. Some would even extend this doubt to a priori truth-claims of whatever sort, or whittle them down to a point of purely logical (and trivial) self-confirmation where only one candidate survives, namely the sentence ‘Not every statement is both true and false’. …extreme forms of skepticism.”

Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” isn’t clear enough. We need to make clear the (“cardinal”) distinction between (if we don’t, we cannot make sense of scientific progress, and the WMD discussion would be pointless)…

1. Know: “believe without question to the best of our knowledge or powers of rational comprehension” – “first-person [I: internalist], ‘psychological’ state of mind (‘I simply know this or that to be the case’)” Knowledge about WMDs “has its truth-value fixed…by the strength of conviction (genuine or otherwise) expressed by partisans of either view.” William James. “‘Truth’ can appear only under this or that currently accepted or preferred description.” (descriptivist?) “Truth-values cannot (or should not) be thought of as exceeding the bounds of warranted assertibility.” “Justification is principally a matter of ‘what works’ in the sense of promoting our best psychological, social and ethico-political interests.” “truth just is whatever has gained credence”
2. Know: “correctly and justifiably believe on the best, most reliable or truth-conducive grounds” – “properly applies only to that subset of beliefs which meet the twofold requirement of truth and epistemic or justificatory warrant.” Knowledge about WMDs “has its truth-value fixed by the fact of their existence or non-existence.” Bertrand Russell. “Truth must be conceived (in realist terms) as always potentially transcending the limits of present-best, communally warranted, or socially desirable belief.” “[I: pragmatic justification] ‘works’ only in so far as it encourages an attitude of placid and unthinking acquiescence in taken-for-granted (hence reassuring) habits of thought and belief.” “wishing cannot make it so”

This of course perks up my ears because it is relevant to my paper-where I talk about living as if we “know” there is moral truth, when we are offended when others violate our expectations, etcetera. Will keep it in mind.

known unknowns – things we do not know

At face value, says Norris, a realist, a defender of objective-truth values, would accept this. It seems to say “truth cannot ever in principle be reduced to the limits of present-best belief or officially authorized opinion.” The WMDs exist or they don’t-we know that we don’t know whether or not they exist. Norris thinks Rumsfeld actually means we will never be able to know (even when the search is concluded without finding WMDs, even if there is evidence of a misinformation campaign)-which is a skeptical, not a realist, position.

unknown unknowns – things we don’t know we don’t know

At this point I am reminded of the Venn diagram of self-knowledge. There are things we know about ourselves that others don’t know, there are things others know about us, that we don’t know about ourselves, there are things that others know about us that we also know, and there are things about ourselves that we don’t know and nobody else knows, either. The things we or others don’t know could either be known unknowns, or unknown unknowns. They are known unknowns if we can conceive of the question, but don’t know the answer. They are unknown unknowns if the question has never even occurred to us. Norris thinks Rumsfeld is not saying “There are perhaps objective answers that we haven’t even asked questions about,” – he thinks Rumsfeld is saying “you can’t prove a negative, so remain epistemically humble” so as to avoid “accusations of fraudulence, mendacity, faked ‘evidence’ and so forth”.

Brutal! Still no WMDs, though. Iraq is without a dictator, the U.S. is turning things over to the Iraqi people–steps in the right direction, methinks, unless it leaves Iraq vulnerable, of course, and a worse power than Hussein gains control over them.

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I am discussing my poll with RaspK over at Dawkins’ forum, and it occurred to me that without minds, there is no morality, so without an eternal mind, there is no moral truth, so–moral truth is not independent of minds (and, yet, it is). That sounds like anti-realism (except not). Ack?
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Professor Norris’ position:

Well, there is no ‘eternal mind’ (or nothing we can make any sense of under that name), so we’ll have to make do with human minds (collectively) as the source of whatever ethical truths we can come up with. Those truths will have to do with human (and I think non-human animal or other sentient) life-forms, and had better be based on some version of the consequentialist argument, i.e., maximizing welfare/flourishing and minimizing pain/misery. You can be a realist about those things without going platonist about moral values or landing yourself with all the classic problems about our (somehow, inexplicably) having epistemic/intuitive access to recognition-transcendent, hence inherently unknowable truths. Anyway that’s my best shot at an answer.

I was thinkin’ about it and–of course we can’t expect (moral) truth to “transcend” an omniscient mind. Sort of parallel to the idea that only an omniscient mind is capable of certainty, and all other knowledge is varying degrees of faith. But would you call that sort of truth (which does not transcend divine mind) mind-dependent? I don’t really think so…it sounds an awful lot like divine voluntarism. God does not create good/truth–He “is” good/truth. He creates what passes away–but all things eternal are what He is. But I will keep Professor Norris’ thoughts in mind.

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On the other hand, some of us know certainty is impossible for all but the omniscient and are satisfied with certitude. Also, if we know that we are attracted to some beliefs because we need a “feeling” of certitude, and if we value “truth” rather than that “feeling”–we can stop ourselves from believing on the basis of “feeling”. I think that feeling is maybe the initial spark that attracts us to the truth (route reconnaissance, as they say in the military)–and that reason can take the wheel from there. The underlying feeling can either be one of fear (to avoid existential nightmare) or curiosity (to go where no man has gone before)–or both. The “Why?!” is in us like webs are in spiders and nests are in birds.

I’ve been so busy and haven’t had time to progress through the book, but did review some epistemology/truth stuff out of Geisler and Feinberg’s “Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective” while waiting for jury selection to start yesterday (had jury duty). Hope to get back into this soon, but right now life is just zippin’ past.

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To me, (based on his reply about moral truth), Professor Norris sounds ontologically realist, epistemologically anti-realist–but I’ll wait until I make up my mind about that.