The Inadequacy of Traditional Supports For Faith

In my discussion of the problem of reconciling faith with reason and empirical evidence, I set aside the issue of alternate means of support for claims of faith. In what follows I will try to analyze a cluster of related problems regarding other potential supports for faith, problems which give us reason to doubt faith can provide an alternate route to justified beliefs. The three main sources of justification that are often put forward as grounding faith claims are authority, tradition, and revelation. I'll tackle these in turn.

Dortmunder? I hardly know her!

Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold, bottle poured into a pint glass

Appearance: Nice golden color, two fingers of foam. Good lacing down the glass as I drank.

Smell: Very subtle. A little bit of citrus.

Taste: Excellent. A little bit biscuity, but with a nice hop crispness and a smooth, sweetish finish. Very complex for a lager.

Mouthfeel: Light and creamy, not heavy at all.

Overall: This is my favorite beer by Great Lakes. Really very good.

A-

Is Faith a Virtue?

The epistemic status of faith is problematic on the face of it—to believe a proposition on faith is to believe without relying on either empirical evidence or the endorsement of reason. This much seems uncontroversial, for if reason or evidence were available to support the belief faith would be redundant. When someone claims to belief in something "on faith" they are bypassing reason and empirical evidence and asserting that they are justified in doing so. The issue I'd like to address here is twofold. One, can faith be reconciled with the demands of reason and empirical evidence? Two, if it cannot, then is faith a responsible way to form beliefs?

One way to answer this question is to say "No" to the first part and to simply assert that the dictates of faith outweigh the dictates of reason and evidence. This is the stance taken by those who claim that the world is around 6000 years, evidence of geology be damned. I'm not going to address this position here. Let it suffice to say that if you're uninterested in acknowledging that claims of faith need to be reconciled with what we know about the world, the rest of this post is not for you.

Happy birthday, David Hume

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

From An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

What's wrong with the Ontological Argument?

The Ontological Argument is a strange little argument that rears its head periodically in the history of philosophy.

One traditional version goes like this:

P1. God is the maximally perfect being (possesses every perfection).
P2. Existence is a perfection
C. Therefore, God exists

Descartes' version of the Ontological Argument

For Descartes, anything that is perceived clearly and distinctly must be true. Therefore, when we know the essence of some idea, we have a clear and distinct idea of what that idea necessarily contains. In this ability to see as true or real any idea of a property contained in the essence of an idea Descartes sees another avenue for the demonstration of God’s existence.He claims to see clearly and distinctly that it is in the nature of God that he always exists. It is clear, he says, when he pays careful attention to the idea of God that God’s existence cannot be separated from his essence, any more than having three angles is separable from the idea of a triangle (CSM II 45-6). With this simple argument Descartes takes himself to have demonstrated the necessary existence of God.

Descartes anticipates an obvious objection: the fact that a property is part of the essence of an idea and cannot be separated from it doesn’t mean that entity that the idea represents actually exists.  Descartes responds that because the property in question contained in the essence of God is his existence, it does in fact entail his real existence.  It is not the thought or the definition that makes God necessary, rather it is his necessary existence that produces the necessity we clearly perceive in the idea of God. Descartes claims we are simply not free to think of God as not existing, for this would be to think of a supremely perfect being without a perfection (CSM II 46). He adds (without argument) that it is only in the case of God that existence is contained in the essence, so this argument could not be used to demonstrate the existence of anything else (CSM II 47).

One problem with this is the so-called "Cartesian Circle" in which Descartes may have employed a vicious circle in his defense of the veracity of clear and distinct ideas. According to some interpreters, Descartes needed the existence of God to provide the foundation for the reliability of clear and distinct ideas, which he then employed in his proof of the existence of God. Thus a vicious circle. This interpretation is contested, however (see here for more details). But even if we set that problem aside as unresolved there are major problems with this argument.

The notion that existence is a property contained in the essence of the idea of God is problematic. If Descartes means existence is a necessary condition (as part of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions) of being God, then the claim is uncontroversial but extremely uninformative. Also, the idea of God doesn't contain existence in any special way on this construal. In this sense existence is also a necessary condition of being a hammer (i.e., if something does not exist, then it isn't a hammer). But we can't infer anything at all about whether there actually are any hammers on the basis of this definition.

Alternatively Descartes could mean that there is a real metaphysical entity that is God's actual essence (like a Platonic form, perhaps), of which existence is a property in a way that existence is not a property of other real essences. Setting aside the profligate multiplication of entities this sort of metaphysics requires, Descartes gives us no reason for thinking that the essence of God is necessarily unique in this regard. Rather he repeatedly simply asserts that it is only the essence of the idea of God that has this necessary connection to existence; all other existences are contingent.

Ultimately, I think the only way to construe Descartes' argument without attributing a non sequitor to him is to read it as an argument for the psychological certainty that God exists. Unfortunately for Descartes, this means that he proves much less than he intended. The psychological version would go roughly like this:

1. We are psychologically unable to doubt the veracity of clear and distinct ideas 
2. We see clearly and distinctly that the essence of the idea of God contains existence as a property
3. We are unable to doubt that God's existence is entailed by the idea of God
4. We unable to doubt God exists

Of course, this argument merely points at a failure of human imagination rather than entailing anything at all about the existence or nonexistence of God.

Descartes' Argument from Personal Existence

Is it possible for me to exist if God does not? For Descartes, given that our existence is indubitable (I think, therefore I am), a negative answer to this question would serve as a demonstration that God's existence follows as a logical certainty from the indubitable proposition that I exist. In the Third Meditation Descartes seeks to establish the existence of God through just such an argument. He places the existence of God among three possible alternative causes for his existence: himself, his parents, or some other confluence of causes less perfect than God (CSM II 32-3).

Descartes surveys the other possible sources of his existence, dismissing each in turn.

First, if it were possible for him to bring himself into existence, then he should have given himself all the perfections he lacks, which would make him God. If he possessed the power of self-creation then he would possess enough power to give himself all other perfections. In addition, the power to create is the same as the power to sustain existence. Therefore, if he were self-created, then he would be responsible for maintaining his own existence. He does not do so, so he must not have been responsible for his own creation (CSM II 33-4). The key component of this portion of the argument is that Descartes is asserting that the power to create something is the same as the power to sustain the existence of something. There seems to be no reason to think that creative acts and sustaining acts--even those by God--are necessarily connected in the way Descartes supposes. Now, it seems fairly clear that I am not the source of my own being, even without Descartes' argument, but Descartes will deploy this notion of the equivalence of sustaining and creating later on in the argument.

Second, his parents cannot be considered to be the source of his being; they do not sustain him, and so insofar as he is a thinking thing, they did not make him, even if there is a sense in which they can be considered to be the source of his being in the world (CSM II 35). The dismissal of his parents as a legitimate explanation for his existence is based on the equivalence of creating and sustaining just mentioned as well as on Descartes' conception of the soul as thinking substance being somehow independent of the physical body. Descartes could accept a limited sense in which his parents brought him as a physical being into existence, but not that they are in any way responsible for the "thinking thing" that he identifies with himself. Cartesian dualism is implicit here, even though Descartes does not attempt to prove the thesis until later on in the Meditations.

Third, he cannot be the effect of a composition of causes because then he would have no source for the idea of God; the idea of God is a unity, and so cannot be a composite of other ideas (CSM II 34). This argument depends on Descartes' argument from conceptual content which I have discussed (and found wanting) previously.

Having dismissed three of the four alternatives in his quadrilemma, Descartes feels justified in taking this line of thought to have demonstrated the existence of God. Whether his argument really accomplishes what he thought it did is, as we've seen, debatable at best. 

What is perhaps more interesting in all this is that Descartes felt that the fact of human existence was so mysterious a feature of the world that it required a special causal story to be told. If we reject dualism, then there is no reason to require any special explanation. If the mind is simply the loose moniker we give to the different capacities we have as the result of having big brains (rather than some extra thing that supervenes on the physical or is mysteriously associated with it somehow) then Descartes' problem dissolves to a large extent.

Human existence (including the existence of human intelligence) is a contingent fact about the world that is the result of a probably innumerable confluence of causes, any combination of which can be picked out depending on which aspect of human existence we find interesting. Answers to the question "why are we here?" could be explanations about what makes the universe in general or the earth in particular hospitable to life or about genetics and developmental biology or about human evolution or about human history or.... 

You get the point. There isn't any one answer for "why we're here," and Descartes' need to have one answer is derived from his insistence that there is something unnatural about our ability to think.


References:
Cottingham, J. G., Stoothoff, R., and Murdoch, D. (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1985

Species and Essence in Locke’s Essay III.vi

In book three, chapter six of his Essay, Locke discusses the relationship between species and essence in the context of a broader discussion of the names of ideas of substances. In the sixth section of the chapter, Locke appears to claim that real essences are properties of species or sorts, rather than individuals. Interpreting the passage in this way poses two related problems for Locke’s theory. First, if Locke is claiming that the real essence, rather than the nominal essence, is closely related to the species, then this is a direct contradiction of what Locke says about which type of essence is possessed by species elsewhere in the essay. Second, given Locke’s criteria for the demarcation of real from nominal essences earlier in the essay, it is difficult to see how a claim that substantial species have real essences is even comprehensible. I want to consider these problems in more detail and offer an alternative interpretation of the passage in question that attempts to avoid attributing contradictory or unintelligible views to Locke.

The passage at issue is found in III.vi.6. Here Locke is discussing the difference between real and nominal essence in substances, and after defining real essence using his standard definition (the real constitution of a thing which is the foundation of its properties), Locke proceeds with the odd claim that essence “even in this sense, relates to a Sort, and supposes a Species: For being that real Constitution, on which the Properties depend, it necessarily supposes a sort of Things, Properties belonging only to Species, and not to Individuals.” An individual parcel of matter has no essential properties; it is just the arrangement of minute particles and their motion, which can change or be changed by its interactions with other bodies in the world. Therefore, according to Locke, any properties referred to as essential must be so only as part of a species concept, since it is only our general ideas which possess the requisite immutability to have essential properties. A “face value” interpretation of this passage leads us to the conclusion that Locke holds that species, not individuals, possess real essences.

The first problem with the face value interpretation is that the claim that species have real, instead of nominal essences, is in direct contradiction with things Locke says elsewhere in the Essay. For example, in III.iii.11-12 Locke concludes that “General and Universal do not belong to the real existence of Things” but are inventions of the mind for use in organizing perception and “concern signs only”. A general term signifies a class of a sort of thing by “being a sign of an abstract Idea in the mind”; under which particulars are classed which “agree” with the abstract idea. Species are on this account nothing but abstract ideas. Species do not exist in the world. To be a member of a species is nothing more than to have a right to be called the name of that species, a right which is derived from agreement with the abstract idea. This is the type of idea that Locke speaks about a few sections later in III.iii.15-16 when discussing nominal essence, which instead of referring to the real, hidden constitution of things is applied to the “artificial Constitution of Genus and Species.” This is highly suggestive that Locke does not consider species of substances to have real essences (i.e., real constitutions) but rather artificial constitutions and nominal essences.

In addition to these passages suggesting that species have only nominal, and not real, essences, there are passages that indicate that only the nominal essence is used in the formation of species concepts. III.vi.7-8 indicates that the nominal essence is at work in the classification of species. It is impossible to arrange or classify substances by reference to their real essences (which are unknown), so the only means by which to erect species boundaries is by reference to their nominal essences. We class as the same species different particulars whose properties agree with the abstract idea that is signified by the name of the species. Locke also cites as additional evidence that species classifications are based on nominal essences rather than real essences the fact that two objects of the same species can differ from each other in their inessential characters as much as they might differ from another object from another species, without disturbing that classification, even though all properties flow from the same real constitution. A similar point is made by Locke at III.iii.17. So if we are to keep Locke from contradicting himself and also interpret our original passage as indicating that Locke holds that species, not individuals possess real essences, we will owe an explanation as to why species are listed as just the types of things which have nominal essences instead of real essences in the case of substances as well as why only the nominal essence would be useful in species classification.

In addition to the problem of keeping Locke from contradicting himself, there is the problem of making sense of what a real essence of species could possibly be, given Locke’s discussion of the differences between real and nominal essences. For Locke, real essences are related to the real constitutions of things, which are unknown in substances (III.iii.15). In substances, those essences are material; they are the physical arrangements of the parts of substances, from which their properties flow. The conjunction of properties which makes up our idea of a species (i.e., its nominal essence) is distinct from the real essence in substances. Locke claims that the essence of a species is nothing but the abstract idea to which its name is annexed (III.iii.12; III.vi.2) and that no one would assert that the abstract, complex idea of a species is the real essence and source of the properties we observe (III.vi.3).

But if a species is an abstract idea and possesses a nominal essence, what would it mean for the species to have a real essence? In other words, how can an abstract idea have a hidden internal constitution from which the properties of an object flow? Since our complex, abstract ideas are constructs of the mind, Locke believes that we have full access to them—nothing is hidden from us. Also, nothing in Locke indicates he believes species to be material things, and his discussion of the real essences of substances indicates they are material in nature. To attribute real essence to species we would need to resolve this difficulty. In addition, in his discussion of real essences, Locke makes use of causal language to indicate that the real essence is the source of the properties by which our species concepts are formed. Since the species concept (the abstract idea we have of a species) is the nominal essence of a species, by making the species the seat of the real essence Locke would then ensure that the nominal essence would be identical to the real essence in substances, something which Locke explicitly denies (III.iii.18). These considerations ought to make us consider that perhaps reading our original passage as attributing real essences to species is incorrect.

But if Locke is not claiming that species have real essences, what is going on in our original passage? I believe it is possible to interpret III.vi.6 in such a way as to minimize the complications sketched above and still remain faithful to the text and its context. The sections immediately preceding and following the passage in question are occupied with Locke’s attempt to demonstrate that individual parcels of matter do not have essential properties. For example, a piece of iron must possess the ability to be pulled by a magnet if it is to be iron, but there is no necessity for any parcel of matter to be magnetic; in other words, Locke is claiming that it is possible for bodies to have properties other than the ones they have (III.vi.4-5). The properties that individual objects have are then used by the mind to classify objects into kinds and assign nominal essences. The real essences of objects are not made use of in the assignment of species designations to individuals (III.vi.7-8). Essentially, the context in which Locke links species with real essences is an epistemic, rather than a metaphysical one. He is not here claiming that there are real species which exist independently of things that fall under them or of the minds which construct them, but rather that the properties which are referred to as essential to a particular thing are only intelligibly called essences in terms of the sort or species of thing they are taken to be an instance of. He is claiming that the only intelligible way to speak of properties as essential is to do so in the context of species concepts.

I do still want to affirm, however, that Locke intends to tie real essences to our species concepts in this passage. Locke believes that properties which manifest themselves when we observe a substance are caused by the real essence of the substance. The ideas we have of these properties are then combined into the complex idea that forms the nominal essence of the species of the substance; this is the link whereby the real essence is connected to the species. Locke says as much at the end of the section: “as to the real Essences of Substances, we only suppose their Being, without precisely knowing what they are: But that which annexes them still to the Species, is the nominal Essence, of which they are the supposed foundation and cause” (III.vi.6). Basically, species have real essences, but only mediately, through their possession of the nominal essence which is composed of ideas which are caused by the real essences.

This reading of Locke in III.vi.6 allows us to affirm that Locke does tie real essence to species in a deliberate way, as a face value reading indicates. However, by interpreting the claim as one which ties real essence to species through our epistemic or classification practices rather than as positing a real essence directly possessed by a species, we can read Locke without making him contradict himself or claim something incomprehensible.