Continuing from the description (read that for context): - I myself disagree with Graham that chains of existential dependence do not turn up in the Five Ways or that they turn up "nowhere in Aquinas". I think Graham is incorrect here. I think that chains of existential dependence are, indeed, present in Aquinas' works (in many areas). - There is scholarly debate about whether Aquinas' second way is indeed the argument from the De Ente from the distinction between essence and existence. Feser thinks it is, for instance. William Lane Craig explicitly rejects this interpretation. Craig and others think that it is an implausible reading of the second way. If Aquinas meant the argument to be the De Ente argument (they reason), we would expect that Aquinas would at least mention the distinction between esse and essentia (being/act of existence and essence). It is very surprising (they continue) that he didn't even mention it in the text of the second way if he did, indeed, mean the argument to be the same as the De Ente argument. Note: I myself do not take a stance on this. - As a non-physicalist, I don't think the hand-stick-stone example terminates at the brain. Though, I agree with Graham that the chain terminates rather quickly. - From around 2:05:00 to 2:06:00, when I talked about how "Aquinas talks about any causal chain", I need to add further clarification on this point: I was explicitly talking *only* about Aquinas' First Way and how -- in this way -- he is talking about *any PER SE causal chain of change*. Aquinas's first way talks about causal chains with respect to motion or change. But Aquinas, in the first way, talks about *any* causal chain of changes that exist per se. So, UNLIKE Feser, Aquinas' first way does NOT restrict itself solely to a causal chain of actualizations of potential WITH RESPECT to existence alone. Rather, Aquinas' first way talks about ANY per se causal chain pertaining to change *as such*, NOT just with respect to existence. So, this would cover per se chains of changes relating to hotness, coldness, electricity, location, quality, quantity, accident, substance, and so on. By contrast, Feser (in his Aristotelian proof) 'zooms in' only on per se actualizations of the very EXISTENCE of something. While Aquinas DOES talk about per se chains relating to the very being or existence of something, my ONLY claim here is that Aquinas does not SOLELY RESTRICT himself to per se chains of the very being or existence of something IN HIS FIRST WAY. He ALSO includes per se chains of changes not relating to the very substantial being of something (such as fire making wood hot -- an example Aquinas himself gives). When I said 'any causal chain', I'm obviously implicitly meaning any PER SE causal chain. I do NOT mean -- and never have meant -- that Aquinas quantifies also over per accidens chains. Oppy and I have a shared understanding in the context of the discussion that we are restricting our domain of quantification to per se chains (since that's all I talk about in the paper to which we refer in the discussion). Indeed, Aquinas himself thought we couldn't prove that per accidens chains must terminate. (I discussed this in my dialogue with RT Mullins on Crusade Against Ignorance's channel).
@Paul Morgan Ahaha I've seen Bergkamp's highlight reels. They're brilliant, to be sure. I do get most premier league games live on TV, but not Bundesliga or BBVA or lower English divisions. I'm not sure how popular it is, though I've read somewhere that it's increasing greatly in popularity. :)
Graham's hypothetical example about a non-philospher who is deeply interested, but not necessarily equipped with all the jargon, directly applies to me. It's a fantastic example of what you're talking about in terms of how useful arguments are. I've always been an atheist and when I first encountered William Lane Craig I didn't feel like I could find "fallacies" in his versions of cosmological and teleological arguments. I had a week or so where I was in a state of significant cognitive dissonance, feeling as if these arguments demanded my assent. I looked for disputations of his arguments that attempt to point out fallacies and felt they fell flat. I landed comfortably back on atheism when I decided I think his arguments appeal too much to intuition, but never really felt there was a good fallacy to point out there. It's funny because, lacking a fallacy to point out, I sort of landed on this view based on intuition and essentially told myself "I don't have to completely rethink my entire worldview just because a very smart philosopher presented an argument I can't find a satisfying fallacy in." Maybe his arguments were "good" because they got me thinking? But that seems a bit of a silver-lining view because in reality I burnt a fair bit of mental effort worrying about "some arguments" when in fact Dr. Craig and I have very different underlying theories and it makes perfect sense that his arguments look valid and sound on his theory, whereas they do not on mine. Dr. Oppy's way of viewing this really resonates with me not only from my amateur-philosopher perspective but also just from a perspective of enjoying colloquial arguments and respecting differences of opinion. When you cash-out amateur philosophy in terms of deductive arguments you come away thinking in terms of winners and losers and that can have a very blinding affect. "Here's an argument and it stands until someone can come along and point out a fallacy." How silly - I obviously got wrapped up in that too.
Majesty of Reason, I think you made a good point, that when someone is presented with a sound argument, for which they accept the premises and reasoning, can then legitimately deny the conclusion - not because they think the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, but because they have independent reason(s) to believe it to be false. I think this is because soundness is often not enough. I think syllogisms often are too simple to handle the complexities of the real world, and, in philosophy, all the nuances of the full argument. A sound logical argument can be rejected on the basis that it is over-simplified, incomplete. Take the modal ontological argument for example. One of the premises is that “it is possible that God exists”. Even if the argument is sound, I can reject the conclusion, by saying that it is incomplete. It is missing the opposing premise, “it is possible that God does not exist”. I think it would help people to understand syllogisms better if they were expressed this way. When philosopher says: Premise 1: If A, then B Premise 2: A Conclusion: C What they really mean is this: If it is true that (If A, then B), And if it is true that (A), And if it is true that (H), Then C must be true. H is the premise hidden in all arguments, which is: "The above premises comprise all of the relevant information about the subject, which in theory is impossible because we humans lack omniscience". I think (H) might be the missing ingredient you’re looking for.
There are some things often not noticed here. First, Oppy suggests that “theory” is prior to argument and he uses the word theory to refer to something like a worked-out worldview. Arguments will always appeal to premises, which will be based on prior judgements about reality, and disagreement about these premises comes down to disagreements over these theories. Second, Oppy suggests the role of arguments is limited because a good argument is one that proceeds validly from premises your opponent accepts to premises he addresses. Because you disagree on fundamental theories, there won't be a prospect of arguments appealing to premises all parties to the dispute accept to premises they reject. Instead, good arguments are really ad hominin (in the technical sense) they involve accepting opponents' premises for the sake of argument and showing they have implications that clash with other things your opponents accept. Third, the discussion has to be conducted at the level of total theory. These points are actually familiar, they are the points that presuppositionalist apologists make. Presuppositionalists argue that theists and atheists have different “pre=suppositions”, which are intellectual commitments one has “prior” to the argument and determine how the argument goes. They often construe these pre-suppositions as “world views” and involve fundamental answers ( hence explanatory theories) to fundamental philosophical questions. Presuppositionalist stresses an indirect apologetic method where you assume your interlocutor's presuppositions for the sake of argument and try and internally critique them. Presuppositionalist also argues that you have to really debate at the level of worldviews and argue that the world view of a theist provides a better overall account of reality. Oppy is really advocating a kind of presuppositionalist method in philosophy of religion
Matthew, those are some interesting points and the comparisons do seem apt. The notion of internal critique is played up as most significant. This sort of reasoning seems to be common among those that emphasize a coherence theory of truth, as opposed to a correspondence theory. The reason seems to be that emphasis is put on the wholistic picture and paradigm as guiding the reading of particular facts (even if one is a realist about matter). If one is an idealist, there is even less reason to think of correspondence as having an object. I’m not sure if those considerations are significantly at play here. Here, the major concern seems to be the psychological difficulty of compelling concessions over different premises. Interestingly, even Aquinas recognized this difficulty, if there are no premises held in common. He says, “the inferior sciences neither prove their principles nor dispute with those who deny them, but leave this to a higher science. But the highest of them, namely, metaphysics, can dispute with one who denies its principles only if the opponent will make some concessions.” (Summa T., Part 1, Q1 Art 8). That is, common arguments require common premises. Arguments when there are none can only be hypothetical, e.g., if we agreed on such and such, x would follow. Thomas Kuhn, in his views on scientific revolutions, put forward the idea that paradigms are more significant than incongruent facts or theories because these only provide areas of research to resolve the anomalous facts within the reigning paradigm of the community of practitioners. He thought that people would not abandon ship, even with lots of flames and on it, unless there was a better ship (paradigm) to jump onto. Better of course, functionally had a lot to do with what the majority perceived. But like the stock market, divergence of speculation from reality, can only last so long, or so is the claim of the realist. For Kuhn, paradigms helped explain sudden revolutions in thinking. Problems in a scientific paradigm would build up, the convincing nature of 3 out of 5 premises would be undermined, but it would hold, until a more satisfactory solution that gave a better account to all the issues at hand came along. Then pop, scientific revolution (crisis and shift). It seems to me that arguments, even, when premises are not shared can be valuable, because premises can very quickly become shared-when the right key comes along, the lock opens. Usually, it’s in a community where different variations of the same key are the majority of the views seriously considered, but that is not always the case. Sometimes someone from within or outside the community presents a different key (paradigm), and boom-bada-bing, revolution. So Feser’s comment in their discussion seems on track, Oppy’s views on the place of arguments are well stated in the main, but maybe pressed too strongly, when he seems to imply that arguments are useless unless one shares the paradigm (where only consistency is sought). Hopefully I have not misunderstood them.
i was JUST coming to the conclusion that all arguments basically boil down to accepted/rejected premises at the end of the day. i think i'm pretty persuaded that argumentation is simply functional for pointing out inconsistencies and validating that you are also consistent. would love to hear if i misunderstood something that makes the above inaccurate, but that was the general feel i got from his discussion
Man, this discussion was amazing!! Some comments/quibbles/questions from me :) 1. Earlier Graham said that an argument is a set of sentences. He then said it does not matter whether we define what an argument is in terms of sentences or in terms of what the sentences express. He then, however, went on to say that we differentiate arguments on the basis of differences in the wording of the sentences. It seems to me that that would be one example where which terms we use to define what an argument is matters. If the terms are whatever sentences express, then, given a plausible thought that the same proposition (or propositional content or whatever it is that sentences can be said to express) can be expressed by different sentences, we get a counter-intuitive conclusion that, say, a translation of the Kalaam argument into French yields a different argument, because it consists of French sentences, or, say, that a change in the order of conjuncts in a premise with a conjunction will give us a different premise. 2. Joe, I really liked the nuance you introduced when Dr. Oppy used the notion of "innocent" which for him was something like this, an "innocent" is someone who, relative to a given proposition and a given time, has not yet considered it prior to that time. You gently pushed back on that and said that it is possible that a person is not innocent under Oppy's definition because the person did come across the proposition before. Rather what might happen is that a person comes to see the same proposition in a new light. I think that's a great point! I am thinking of how Perry and Kaplan in their theories of demonstratives and indexicals insisted on a distinction between the content of an expression and its "character" (Kaplan) or its "role" (Perry). They argued that different (because different in "character"/"role"!) linguistic expressions can have the same propositional content and yet might have different cognitive significance precisely because of what is "conveyed" (to use the most neutral term I can find) in a context of use by their characters. So, the sentences, "I am being attacked by a bear" when uttered by me in a context, "Dima is being attacked by a bear" when uttered by you, and "He is being attacked by a bear" when uttered by someone in the position to use "he" demonstratively in reference to me at a context, all have the same propositional content, namely a singular proposition with Dima as its constituent. And yet, "apprehending" (thinking) the same proposition via using the sentence "I am being attacked by a bear" sheds a unique light on that proposition that is literally of ultimate significance to the utterer, for his life is on the line! And the same is not (arguably, cannot be) achieved by an expression with a different character but with the same propositional content. Of course, none of this is devastating for Oppy's position since he can qualify his definition of "innocents" to factor in this nuance. So, he could say, an innocent is anyone who, relative to a proposition and a time, has either never come across a given proposition or never apprehended it under a given "character" or from a given perspective (which includes a unique "mode of presentation" or some such). By the way, this is yet another reason not to take sentences themselves as the most basic terms of understanding what an argument is. 3. So, according to Oppy, "the soundness plus" is not the right approach to understanding what makes for a good argument because it's the soundness that's unnecessary? No reductio is sound, thinks Oppy, and yet, according to him, this is the best form of argument we have. But aren't reductio arguments conditional in nature such that the person using this form of argumentation is not herself affirming all of the premises leading to the conclusion that entails a contradiction (or is in some other way "absurd")? In other words, an assumption for indirect derivation is made and used alright but at no point the whole argument is invalid/unsound... Oh, I see, you addressed this with Oppy 🙂 (I am also writing my comments as I am listening to the discussion) 4. This is what I take Oppy's basic point to be. Any argument when it is successful at convincing someone must have premises that the other must accept and revise their beliefs about first before one accepts the argument as a whole with its conclusion. But then the heavy lifting is done by those individual pieces of data or evidence contained in the premises, not the argument as a whole. I think that's right. Of course, the arguments are still very useful for finite and imperfect thinkers like ourselves because they help us see what some piece of data (contained in a premise) logically implies. Seeing what is going on in argumentation this way makes me wonder about which strategy of persuasion should be adopted by apologists on whatever side of the dialectic. Shouldn't they, instead of presenting arguments leading to a controversial conclusion just present the individual propositions themselves in hope to make those "on the other side" change their minds about first, without having to resist a likely cognitive bias against them once the implications of these same propositions when used as premises in arguments are made clear to them by an argument which uses them? Of course, one reason against this strategy is that we simply don't communicate like this normally (nor should we!). We don't normally just state propositions without motivating people to attend to them. Moreover, this strategy can be easily seen as dishonest, as a trickery of sorts, created to later "catch" people and expose an inconsistency in their belief sets. It is not the best way to proceed because we are all liable to be inconsistent in our belief sets and so to expose any particular thinker as inconsistent at some time t is of very little intellectual value given that we are all probably in the same boat. Furthermore, we often acquire additional reasons to reject a premise when they are recognized (together with other premises one accepts) to imply the conclusion one might have independent reasons to think is highly implausible. Like you said, "one's modus ponens is another's modus tollens"... hahaha, I should have waited with writing my comment until I finished watching the video as you go on discussing these very points. Awesome!! 5. As an aside, re the "gratuitous evil" premise you brought up as an example. A theist need not accept the idea that it is apparent that the evil in question is unjustified, what a theist might accept when confronted with an instance of purportedly gratuitous evil is the idea that there is no apparent justification for the evil in question, which is not the same thing. The former implies the latter but the reverse does not necessarily hold. 6. Quote of the day: Dr, Oppy, "You can do many worse things then put things into the form of an argument" 🙂 Delicious! 7. Another precious line for posterity from Dr. Oppy: "I say that because I borrowed it from your [Joe's] article and I have read it". Sick! 🙂 8. I have never heard of Oppy's view that all necessities are primitive. Isn't there some discernible dependence structure to at least some necessities. Why is "(2+2) + 2=6" necessarily true? Partly because "2+2=4" is necessarily true. In a practical domain, assuming moral realism, why is "you ought never to torture a child for fun" true at every possible world? Because it partly depends upon a more fundamental necessary truth that suffering is intrinsically bad, etc. Do you know how Oppy would respond to these lines? All in all, FANTASTIC DISCUSSION!!! Impressive!
Re: 1 I think you're correct here. I wasn't entirely on board with Oppy's individuation between arguments in terms of differences in sentences or terms in sentences. Two points: (a) I don't think this detracts heavily from his conception of arguments; this seems to be a non-major (though, of course, not minor) issue; and (b) I would argue that it's the *propositions expressed* that individuate arguments. So long as the propositions expressed are identical b/n arguments, that seems to be sufficient for identical arguments. ( I'll proceed through your other points in turn :) )
Re: 2 " I am thinking of how Perry and Kaplan in their theories of demonstratives and indexicals insisted on a distinction between the content of an expression and its "character" (Kaplan) or its "role" (Perry)." Hehe, I'll add this distinction to my list of distinctions for my 'Dizzying Distinctions" series! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I like how you complimented my point in the video with this insightful reference. I also like your redefinition of innocent to help facilitate the furthering of the conversation. This is something that's quite beautiful about philosophy: we help refine the positions even of those with whom we disagree. I think that's unique and inspiring.
Re: 4 "hahaha, I should have waited with writing my comment until I finished watching the video as you go on discussing these very points. Awesome!!" Deja Vu!!! Lol. I like what you said about the dialectic and how sometimes seeing a conclusion in advance can taint our evaluation of it. I've certainly experienced this!
Great discussion, although I got a bit lost at certain points. I thought Oppy's comments about the lack of utility of Bayesian arguments was interesting. He said that an ideal Bayesianist would have no need of arguments. But in your recent devil's advocate video you referred to Bayesian argumentation as I recall. So I presume you disagree with Oppy on this point?
I have enjoyed Oppy's take on arguments when he mentioned it in other debates, but in this conversation I was actually a bit disillusioned. It somehow feels a bit more shallow now. I don't understand how his example about getting late is not an argument. He says that putting things into a form of argument is unnecessary work. Why? I don't understand this at all. My understanding is that formalizing arguments might be a waste of time in a casual conversation, but that it is a way to structure what we are saying in a systemic way. How is that unnecessary?
@@BiblicalStudiesandReviews Well, Slave, we all have our own particular BELIEFS, but ultimately, there exists objective truth, which is not subject to our misconceptions and misunderstandings. One who has transcended mundane relative truth is said to be an ENLIGHTENED soul. 😇
I loved this! I have a quick question for you. At the very end you asked Oppy a question about presentism and necessity on naturalism. I have a similar one but it's slightly different. If x is necessary and x is the initial natural item(s), and if the A theory of time is true, then wouldn't Craig say that this is problematic for the naturalist since on the A theory temporal becoming is an objective feature of the world? He would probably say that a naturalist who is committed to a tensed theory of time would by implication be committed to a universe (or initial natural item) that "came into being" uncaused from nothing. Is that true? And if so, isn't it problematic to say some thing like "a necessary thing came into being"? Or would a naturalist who embraces the A theory say that the universe had a first moment of time but didn't "come into being" from nothing? Cheers :)
Good question. Oppy might say: only contingent things require causes or explanations. Or he might say: I reject A-theory, so that isn't much of a worry. Or he might say: a necessary thing can come into being, so long as it does so in every possible world. Or he might say: this would only be true if the initial singularity is temporal. But the initial physical state of the universe could easily have existed in a timeless state and gave rise to time through an indeterministic physical event which kickstarted the timeline. (There are models of the Big Bang according to which the Big Bang was preceded -- not temporally, but ontologically -- by a kind of timeless physical state).
@@MajestyofReason "There are models of the Big Bang according to which the Big Bang was preceded -- not temporally, but ontologically -- by a kind of timeless physical state" Which ones? I'm interested in looking into those ones. Thanks! Great content once again.
@@phiosopher8712 Thanks! Check out the work of my friend Dan Linford (Purdue graduate student) on the Kalam and the scientific argument for the beginning of the universe. (He has an academia.edu page. Some of his papers are currently under review, though, so we may have to wait a few months for his most recent stuff to show up there. But there's still a lot of excellent stuff already there). Also check out the Felipe Leon dialogue on my channel; we talk a bit about timeless physical states.
(1) Listening to this kept reminding me of the argument sketch by Monty Python because part of their argument is about the definition of an argument (I won't put the full url, but it's ohDB5gbtaEQ on youtube. I hope you can sort how to get to the video from that) ('m a little sad that it clipped the part where he accidentally walks into 'abuse' first, since that more closely resembles many youtube arguments (in the everyday sense) (2) I earned a BA in Maths and worked as a programmer for 27 years so I have a different idea of "the technical sense of an argument" (see lambda calculus). I thought of this every time the video referred to "the technical sense of an argument" or "argument in the technical sense". (3) One of my favorite YT channels is "Give Them An Argument" by Dr. Ben Burgis, who wrote a book by the same name. I found that contrast amusing when Dr. Oppy was making a case for the uselessness of arguments (in the technical sense). Dr. Burgis was talking about political discourse thus arguments in the everyday sense, which Dr. Oppy does not say are useless. Nevertheless, I'm obliged to recommend this video to Dr. Burgis now :)
If you reject existential inertia, then it follows that God sustains every specific thing in every specific moment. You lose the ability to claim that God allows things but does not cause them. That's a big blow to the defense to the problem of evil.
@@goldenalt3166 If I'm understanding it correctly, something with existential inertia doesn't need any sort of metaphysical sustenance through time. But a theist might say that God non-causally sustains something through time that would not exist without such sustenance. In the first case, no God is needed, whereas in the second case, God is needed.
Why does Oppy think third parties aren't useful in arguments? I mean you can make a good argument and a truly stubborn adversarial person won't capitulate. Third parties are unbiased, or at least aren't strongly biased.
So, I believe he is thinking in the context of philosophical disagreement between philosophers, especially well-informed, well-intentioned experts in their field -- so he is thinking about a situation wherein there isn't stubbornness or adversarial stuff.
Continuing from the description (read that for context):
- I myself disagree with Graham that chains of existential dependence do not turn up in the Five Ways or that they turn up "nowhere in Aquinas". I think Graham is incorrect here. I think that chains of existential dependence are, indeed, present in Aquinas' works (in many areas).
- There is scholarly debate about whether Aquinas' second way is indeed the argument from the De Ente from the distinction between essence and existence. Feser thinks it is, for instance. William Lane Craig explicitly rejects this interpretation. Craig and others think that it is an implausible reading of the second way. If Aquinas meant the argument to be the De Ente argument (they reason), we would expect that Aquinas would at least mention the distinction between esse and essentia (being/act of existence and essence). It is very surprising (they continue) that he didn't even mention it in the text of the second way if he did, indeed, mean the argument to be the same as the De Ente argument. Note: I myself do not take a stance on this.
- As a non-physicalist, I don't think the hand-stick-stone example terminates at the brain. Though, I agree with Graham that the chain terminates rather quickly.
- From around 2:05:00 to 2:06:00, when I talked about how "Aquinas talks about any causal chain", I need to add further clarification on this point:
I was explicitly talking *only* about Aquinas' First Way and how -- in this way -- he is talking about *any PER SE causal chain of change*. Aquinas's first way talks about causal chains with respect to motion or change. But Aquinas, in the first way, talks about *any* causal chain of changes that exist per se. So, UNLIKE Feser, Aquinas' first way does NOT restrict itself solely to a causal chain of actualizations of potential WITH RESPECT to existence alone. Rather, Aquinas' first way talks about ANY per se causal chain pertaining to change *as such*, NOT just with respect to existence. So, this would cover per se chains of changes relating to hotness, coldness, electricity, location, quality, quantity, accident, substance, and so on. By contrast, Feser (in his Aristotelian proof) 'zooms in' only on per se actualizations of the very EXISTENCE of something. While Aquinas DOES talk about per se chains relating to the very being or existence of something, my ONLY claim here is that Aquinas does not SOLELY RESTRICT himself to per se chains of the very being or existence of something IN HIS FIRST WAY. He ALSO includes per se chains of changes not relating to the very substantial being of something (such as fire making wood hot -- an example Aquinas himself gives).
When I said 'any causal chain', I'm obviously implicitly meaning any PER SE causal chain. I do NOT mean -- and never have meant -- that Aquinas quantifies also over per accidens chains. Oppy and I have a shared understanding in the context of the discussion that we are restricting our domain of quantification to per se chains (since that's all I talk about in the paper to which we refer in the discussion). Indeed, Aquinas himself thought we couldn't prove that per accidens chains must terminate. (I discussed this in my dialogue with RT Mullins on Crusade Against Ignorance's channel).
@Paul Morgan It's a rough life...
@Paul Morgan OH, also, Graham is an arsenal fan too!!! lolol
@Paul Morgan I fell in love with Cesc Fabregas back in like 2009/2010, and that led me to love Arsenal :)
@Paul Morgan hahaha yessss! Sadly, I was too young to catch the Dutchman and his goal-scoring prowess.
@Paul Morgan Ahaha I've seen Bergkamp's highlight reels. They're brilliant, to be sure.
I do get most premier league games live on TV, but not Bundesliga or BBVA or lower English divisions.
I'm not sure how popular it is, though I've read somewhere that it's increasing greatly in popularity. :)
Graham's hypothetical example about a non-philospher who is deeply interested, but not necessarily equipped with all the jargon, directly applies to me. It's a fantastic example of what you're talking about in terms of how useful arguments are. I've always been an atheist and when I first encountered William Lane Craig I didn't feel like I could find "fallacies" in his versions of cosmological and teleological arguments. I had a week or so where I was in a state of significant cognitive dissonance, feeling as if these arguments demanded my assent. I looked for disputations of his arguments that attempt to point out fallacies and felt they fell flat. I landed comfortably back on atheism when I decided I think his arguments appeal too much to intuition, but never really felt there was a good fallacy to point out there. It's funny because, lacking a fallacy to point out, I sort of landed on this view based on intuition and essentially told myself "I don't have to completely rethink my entire worldview just because a very smart philosopher presented an argument I can't find a satisfying fallacy in."
Maybe his arguments were "good" because they got me thinking? But that seems a bit of a silver-lining view because in reality I burnt a fair bit of mental effort worrying about "some arguments" when in fact Dr. Craig and I have very different underlying theories and it makes perfect sense that his arguments look valid and sound on his theory, whereas they do not on mine. Dr. Oppy's way of viewing this really resonates with me not only from my amateur-philosopher perspective but also just from a perspective of enjoying colloquial arguments and respecting differences of opinion. When you cash-out amateur philosophy in terms of deductive arguments you come away thinking in terms of winners and losers and that can have a very blinding affect. "Here's an argument and it stands until someone can come along and point out a fallacy." How silly - I obviously got wrapped up in that too.
Majesty of Reason, I think you made a good point, that when someone is presented with a sound argument, for which they accept the premises and reasoning, can then legitimately deny the conclusion - not because they think the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, but because they have independent reason(s) to believe it to be false.
I think this is because soundness is often not enough. I think syllogisms often are too simple to handle the complexities of the real world, and, in philosophy, all the nuances of the full argument. A sound logical argument can be rejected on the basis that it is over-simplified, incomplete.
Take the modal ontological argument for example. One of the premises is that “it is possible that God exists”. Even if the argument is sound, I can reject the conclusion, by saying that it is incomplete. It is missing the opposing premise, “it is possible that God does not exist”.
I think it would help people to understand syllogisms better if they were expressed this way.
When philosopher says:
Premise 1: If A, then B
Premise 2: A
Conclusion: C
What they really mean is this:
If it is true that (If A, then B),
And if it is true that (A),
And if it is true that (H),
Then C must be true.
H is the premise hidden in all arguments, which is: "The above premises comprise all of the relevant information about the subject, which in theory is impossible because we humans lack omniscience".
I think (H) might be the missing ingredient you’re looking for.
Thanks to both for an excellent discussion!
There are some things often not noticed here.
First, Oppy suggests that “theory” is prior to argument and he uses the word theory to refer to something like a worked-out worldview. Arguments will always appeal to premises, which will be based on prior judgements about reality, and disagreement about these premises comes down to disagreements over these theories.
Second, Oppy suggests the role of arguments is limited because a good argument is one that proceeds validly from premises your opponent accepts to premises he addresses. Because you disagree on fundamental theories, there won't be a prospect of arguments appealing to premises all parties to the dispute accept to premises they reject. Instead, good arguments are really ad hominin (in the technical sense) they involve accepting opponents' premises for the sake of argument and showing they have implications that clash with other things your opponents accept.
Third, the discussion has to be conducted at the level of total theory.
These points are actually familiar, they are the points that presuppositionalist apologists make.
Presuppositionalists argue that theists and atheists have different “pre=suppositions”, which are intellectual commitments one has “prior” to the argument and determine how the argument goes.
They often construe these pre-suppositions as “world views” and involve fundamental answers ( hence explanatory theories) to fundamental philosophical questions. Presuppositionalist stresses an indirect apologetic method where you assume your interlocutor's presuppositions for the sake of argument and try and internally critique them. Presuppositionalist also argues that you have to really debate at the level of worldviews and argue that the world view of a theist provides a better overall account of reality.
Oppy is really advocating a kind of presuppositionalist method in philosophy of religion
Matthew, those are some interesting points and the comparisons do seem apt. The notion of internal critique is played up as most significant.
This sort of reasoning seems to be common among those that emphasize a coherence theory of truth, as opposed to a correspondence theory. The reason seems to be that emphasis is put on the wholistic picture and paradigm as guiding the reading of particular facts (even if one is a realist about matter). If one is an idealist, there is even less reason to think of correspondence as having an object.
I’m not sure if those considerations are significantly at play here. Here, the major concern seems to be the psychological difficulty of compelling concessions over different premises.
Interestingly, even Aquinas recognized this difficulty, if there are no premises held in common. He says, “the inferior sciences neither prove their principles nor dispute with those who deny them, but leave this to a higher science. But the highest of them, namely, metaphysics, can dispute with one who denies its principles only if the opponent will make some concessions.” (Summa T., Part 1, Q1 Art 8).
That is, common arguments require common premises. Arguments when there are none can only be hypothetical, e.g., if we agreed on such and such, x would follow.
Thomas Kuhn, in his views on scientific revolutions, put forward the idea that paradigms are more significant than incongruent facts or theories because these only provide areas of research to resolve the anomalous facts within the reigning paradigm of the community of practitioners. He thought that people would not abandon ship, even with lots of flames and on it, unless there was a better ship (paradigm) to jump onto. Better of course, functionally had a lot to do with what the majority perceived. But like the stock market, divergence of speculation from reality, can only last so long, or so is the claim of the realist. For Kuhn, paradigms helped explain sudden revolutions in thinking. Problems in a scientific paradigm would build up, the convincing nature of 3 out of 5 premises would be undermined, but it would hold, until a more satisfactory solution that gave a better account to all the issues at hand came along. Then pop, scientific revolution (crisis and shift).
It seems to me that arguments, even, when premises are not shared can be valuable, because premises can very quickly become shared-when the right key comes along, the lock opens. Usually, it’s in a community where different variations of the same key are the majority of the views seriously considered, but that is not always the case. Sometimes someone from within or outside the community presents a different key (paradigm), and boom-bada-bing, revolution. So Feser’s comment in their discussion seems on track, Oppy’s views on the place of arguments are well stated in the main, but maybe pressed too strongly, when he seems to imply that arguments are useless unless one shares the paradigm (where only consistency is sought).
Hopefully I have not misunderstood them.
i was JUST coming to the conclusion that all arguments basically boil down to accepted/rejected premises at the end of the day. i think i'm pretty persuaded that argumentation is simply functional for pointing out inconsistencies and validating that you are also consistent. would love to hear if i misunderstood something that makes the above inaccurate, but that was the general feel i got from his discussion
How am I supposed to be time-efficient during the confinement with such content, Joe?
Jk, thank you for this interview that's awesome!
Just two chads doing chad things
Indeed
King
And by "Chad", it is meant "Dork". ;)
No, Oppy is beyond Chad and Lad, he is a THAD.
It’s nice to realize that I’m not the only one that starstrucked by the sight of Graham Oppy
@43:43 "suppose I am not a philosopher ...." I really expected the next utterance to be
"but I play one on TV, like William Lane Craig"
:D
as a theist I respect many atheists like Oppy.
Are you still a theist? Hope you dont mine me asking
Man, this discussion was amazing!! Some comments/quibbles/questions from me :)
1. Earlier Graham said that an argument is a set of sentences. He then said it does not matter whether we define what an argument is in terms of sentences or in terms of what the sentences express. He then, however, went on to say that we differentiate arguments on the basis of differences in the wording of the sentences. It seems to me that that would be one example where which terms we use to define what an argument is matters. If the terms are whatever sentences express, then, given a plausible thought that the same proposition (or propositional content or whatever it is that sentences can be said to express) can be expressed by different sentences, we get a counter-intuitive conclusion that, say, a translation of the Kalaam argument into French yields a different argument, because it consists of French sentences, or, say, that a change in the order of conjuncts in a premise with a conjunction will give us a different premise.
2. Joe, I really liked the nuance you introduced when Dr. Oppy used the notion of "innocent" which for him was something like this, an "innocent" is someone who, relative to a given proposition and a given time, has not yet considered it prior to that time. You gently pushed back on that and said that it is possible that a person is not innocent under Oppy's definition because the person did come across the proposition before. Rather what might happen is that a person comes to see the same proposition in a new light. I think that's a great point! I am thinking of how Perry and Kaplan in their theories of demonstratives and indexicals insisted on a distinction between the content of an expression and its "character" (Kaplan) or its "role" (Perry). They argued that different (because different in "character"/"role"!) linguistic expressions can have the same propositional content and yet might have different cognitive significance precisely because of what is "conveyed" (to use the most neutral term I can find) in a context of use by their characters. So, the sentences, "I am being attacked by a bear" when uttered by me in a context, "Dima is being attacked by a bear" when uttered by you, and "He is being attacked by a bear" when uttered by someone in the position to use "he" demonstratively in reference to me at a context, all have the same propositional content, namely a singular proposition with Dima as its constituent. And yet, "apprehending" (thinking) the same proposition via using the sentence "I am being attacked by a bear" sheds a unique light on that proposition that is literally of ultimate significance to the utterer, for his life is on the line! And the same is not (arguably, cannot be) achieved by an expression with a different character but with the same propositional content. Of course, none of this is devastating for Oppy's position since he can qualify his definition of "innocents" to factor in this nuance. So, he could say, an innocent is anyone who, relative to a proposition and a time, has either never come across a given proposition or never apprehended it under a given "character" or from a given perspective (which includes a unique "mode of presentation" or some such). By the way, this is yet another reason not to take sentences themselves as the most basic terms of understanding what an argument is.
3. So, according to Oppy, "the soundness plus" is not the right approach to understanding what makes for a good argument because it's the soundness that's unnecessary? No reductio is sound, thinks Oppy, and yet, according to him, this is the best form of argument we have. But aren't reductio arguments conditional in nature such that the person using this form of argumentation is not herself affirming all of the premises leading to the conclusion that entails a contradiction (or is in some other way "absurd")? In other words, an assumption for indirect derivation is made and used alright but at no point the whole argument is invalid/unsound... Oh, I see, you addressed this with Oppy 🙂 (I am also writing my comments as I am listening to the discussion)
4. This is what I take Oppy's basic point to be. Any argument when it is successful at convincing someone must have premises that the other must accept and revise their beliefs about first before one accepts the argument as a whole with its conclusion. But then the heavy lifting is done by those individual pieces of data or evidence contained in the premises, not the argument as a whole. I think that's right. Of course, the arguments are still very useful for finite and imperfect thinkers like ourselves because they help us see what some piece of data (contained in a premise) logically implies. Seeing what is going on in argumentation this way makes me wonder about which strategy of persuasion should be adopted by apologists on whatever side of the dialectic. Shouldn't they, instead of presenting arguments leading to a controversial conclusion just present the individual propositions themselves in hope to make those "on the other side" change their minds about first, without having to resist a likely cognitive bias against them once the implications of these same propositions when used as premises in arguments are made clear to them by an argument which uses them? Of course, one reason against this strategy is that we simply don't communicate like this normally (nor should we!). We don't normally just state propositions without motivating people to attend to them. Moreover, this strategy can be easily seen as dishonest, as a trickery of sorts, created to later "catch" people and expose an inconsistency in their belief sets. It is not the best way to proceed because we are all liable to be inconsistent in our belief sets and so to expose any particular thinker as inconsistent at some time t is of very little intellectual value given that we are all probably in the same boat. Furthermore, we often acquire additional reasons to reject a premise when they are recognized (together with other premises one accepts) to imply the conclusion one might have independent reasons to think is highly implausible. Like you said, "one's modus ponens is another's modus tollens"... hahaha, I should have waited with writing my comment until I finished watching the video as you go on discussing these very points. Awesome!!
5. As an aside, re the "gratuitous evil" premise you brought up as an example. A theist need not accept the idea that it is apparent that the evil in question is unjustified, what a theist might accept when confronted with an instance of purportedly gratuitous evil is the idea that there is no apparent justification for the evil in question, which is not the same thing. The former implies the latter but the reverse does not necessarily hold.
6. Quote of the day: Dr, Oppy, "You can do many worse things then put things into the form of an argument" 🙂 Delicious!
7. Another precious line for posterity from Dr. Oppy: "I say that because I borrowed it from your [Joe's] article and I have read it". Sick! 🙂
8. I have never heard of Oppy's view that all necessities are primitive. Isn't there some discernible dependence structure to at least some necessities. Why is "(2+2) + 2=6" necessarily true? Partly because "2+2=4" is necessarily true. In a practical domain, assuming moral realism, why is "you ought never to torture a child for fun" true at every possible world? Because it partly depends upon a more fundamental necessary truth that suffering is intrinsically bad, etc. Do you know how Oppy would respond to these lines?
All in all, FANTASTIC DISCUSSION!!! Impressive!
Thank you! I'll be able to read and respond hopefully tonight!
Re: 1
I think you're correct here. I wasn't entirely on board with Oppy's individuation between arguments in terms of differences in sentences or terms in sentences. Two points: (a) I don't think this detracts heavily from his conception of arguments; this seems to be a non-major (though, of course, not minor) issue; and (b) I would argue that it's the *propositions expressed* that individuate arguments. So long as the propositions expressed are identical b/n arguments, that seems to be sufficient for identical arguments.
( I'll proceed through your other points in turn :) )
Re: 2
" I am thinking of how Perry and Kaplan in their theories of demonstratives and indexicals insisted on a distinction between the content of an expression and its "character" (Kaplan) or its "role" (Perry)."
Hehe, I'll add this distinction to my list of distinctions for my 'Dizzying Distinctions" series! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I like how you complimented my point in the video with this insightful reference. I also like your redefinition of innocent to help facilitate the furthering of the conversation. This is something that's quite beautiful about philosophy: we help refine the positions even of those with whom we disagree. I think that's unique and inspiring.
Re: 3
"Oh, I see, you addressed this with Oppy"
Ahaha! Yes. Similar to our conversation on my other video! :)
Re: 4
"hahaha, I should have waited with writing my comment until I finished watching the video as you go on discussing these very points. Awesome!!"
Deja Vu!!! Lol. I like what you said about the dialectic and how sometimes seeing a conclusion in advance can taint our evaluation of it. I've certainly experienced this!
I happened to hit 2x speed right after you said "okay...breathe in, breathe out..."
"Truth of theory is prior to soundness"
amen, lamf
Great discussion, although I got a bit lost at certain points. I thought Oppy's comments about the lack of utility of Bayesian arguments was interesting. He said that an ideal Bayesianist would have no need of arguments. But in your recent devil's advocate video you referred to Bayesian argumentation as I recall. So I presume you disagree with Oppy on this point?
I have enjoyed Oppy's take on arguments when he mentioned it in other debates, but in this conversation I was actually a bit disillusioned. It somehow feels a bit more shallow now.
I don't understand how his example about getting late is not an argument. He says that putting things into a form of argument is unnecessary work. Why? I don't understand this at all.
My understanding is that formalizing arguments might be a waste of time in a casual conversation, but that it is a way to structure what we are saying in a systemic way. How is that unnecessary?
Given modern physics explains all the traditional per se causation as per accidens. Is there any examples of per se remaining?
Does Hoppies naturalistic and necessary first cause begin to exist? Or is it beginningless?
7:22 Joe looks thrilled to be taking a train ride with Graham 😂
lolol
Why do you study the Judeo-Christian Bible, Stephen?
@@TheWorldTeacher because I believe it to be true.
@@BiblicalStudiesandReviews
Well, Slave, we all have our own particular BELIEFS, but ultimately, there exists objective truth, which is not subject to our misconceptions and misunderstandings.
One who has transcended mundane relative truth is said to be an ENLIGHTENED soul. 😇
@@TheWorldTeacher do you have any interest in the Christian Bible?
Interesting discussion.
Have you considered uploading these discussions as audio only podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other platforms?
Good question! I have considered it; it's just that I have so many balls I'm juggling that I'm hesitant to add in more balls... lol
I loved this! I have a quick question for you. At the very end you asked Oppy a question about presentism and necessity on naturalism. I have a similar one but it's slightly different. If x is necessary and x is the initial natural item(s), and if the A theory of time is true, then wouldn't Craig say that this is problematic for the naturalist since on the A theory temporal becoming is an objective feature of the world? He would probably say that a naturalist who is committed to a tensed theory of time would by implication be committed to a universe (or initial natural item) that "came into being" uncaused from nothing. Is that true? And if so, isn't it problematic to say some thing like "a necessary thing came into being"? Or would a naturalist who embraces the A theory say that the universe had a first moment of time but didn't "come into being" from nothing?
Cheers :)
Good question. Oppy might say: only contingent things require causes or explanations. Or he might say: I reject A-theory, so that isn't much of a worry. Or he might say: a necessary thing can come into being, so long as it does so in every possible world. Or he might say: this would only be true if the initial singularity is temporal. But the initial physical state of the universe could easily have existed in a timeless state and gave rise to time through an indeterministic physical event which kickstarted the timeline. (There are models of the Big Bang according to which the Big Bang was preceded -- not temporally, but ontologically -- by a kind of timeless physical state).
@@MajestyofReason "There are models of the Big Bang according to which the Big Bang was preceded -- not temporally, but ontologically -- by a kind of timeless physical state"
Which ones? I'm interested in looking into those ones. Thanks! Great content once again.
@@phiosopher8712 Thanks! Check out the work of my friend Dan Linford (Purdue graduate student) on the Kalam and the scientific argument for the beginning of the universe. (He has an academia.edu page. Some of his papers are currently under review, though, so we may have to wait a few months for his most recent stuff to show up there. But there's still a lot of excellent stuff already there).
Also check out the Felipe Leon dialogue on my channel; we talk a bit about timeless physical states.
(1) Listening to this kept reminding me of the argument sketch by Monty Python because part of their argument is about the definition of an argument (I won't put the full url, but it's ohDB5gbtaEQ on youtube. I hope you can sort how to get to the video from that)
('m a little sad that it clipped the part where he accidentally walks into 'abuse' first, since that more closely resembles many youtube arguments (in the everyday sense)
(2) I earned a BA in Maths and worked as a programmer for 27 years so I have a different idea of "the technical sense of an argument" (see lambda calculus). I thought of this every time the video referred to "the technical sense of an argument" or "argument in the technical sense".
(3) One of my favorite YT channels is "Give Them An Argument" by Dr. Ben Burgis, who wrote a book by the same name. I found that contrast amusing when Dr. Oppy was making a case for the uselessness of arguments (in the technical sense). Dr. Burgis was talking about political discourse thus arguments in the everyday sense, which Dr. Oppy does not say are useless. Nevertheless, I'm obliged to recommend this video to Dr. Burgis now :)
I just watched the entire thing. Just in case something stays.
Much love
from the thumb I thought that was ninja lol
If you reject existential inertia, then it follows that God sustains every specific thing in every specific moment. You lose the ability to claim that God allows things but does not cause them. That's a big blow to the defense to the problem of evil.
God’s sustenance could be non-causal
@@ChrisBandyJazz How's that different from existential inertia?
@@goldenalt3166 If I'm understanding it correctly, something with existential inertia doesn't need any sort of metaphysical sustenance through time. But a theist might say that God non-causally sustains something through time that would not exist without such sustenance. In the first case, no God is needed, whereas in the second case, God is needed.
@@ChrisBandyJazz if God is incapable of not sustaining then it sounds like it's indistinguishable from creating with existential inertia.
@@goldenalt3166 Oh I wasn't thinking that the non-causal sustenance had to be necessitating. I was thinking of a free non-causal sustenance.
Nice topic
Are you an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist?
Why does Oppy think third parties aren't useful in arguments? I mean you can make a good argument and a truly stubborn adversarial person won't capitulate. Third parties are unbiased, or at least aren't strongly biased.
So, I believe he is thinking in the context of philosophical disagreement between philosophers, especially well-informed, well-intentioned experts in their field -- so he is thinking about a situation wherein there isn't stubbornness or adversarial stuff.
I think if you didnt have to pay a great like oppy to show up on your channel; its proof that you had to sell your soul ;-)
Podcast please. Ain't nobody got time to sit for 2 hours watching UA-cam.
You'd be surprised ;)
I watched this whole thing and learned absolutely nothing from Oppy.
You are already knowledgeable