Nagel and his critics, Part VIII

Resuming our series on the serious critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s turn to Simon Blackburn’s review in New Statesman from a few months back.  Blackburn’s review is negative, but it is not polemical; on the contrary, he allows that the book is “beautifully lucid, civilised, modest in tone and courageous in its scope” and even that there is “charm” to it.  Despite the review’s now somewhat notorious closing paragraph (more on which below) I think Blackburn is trying to be fair to Nagel.

 
This post will be briefer than the earlier installments, since for the most part, Blackburn’s remarks are variations on points raised by other reviewers, to which I’ve already responded.  However, there is a passage in Blackburn’s review that I think merits special comment.  He writes:

In the case of consciousness and mind, [Nagel] has bought heavily into the so-called “hard problem”: first envisaging consciousness as a kind of purple haze or glassy add-on to our animal lives, he then finds its arrival, and its way of interacting with physical things, inexplicable. This was Descartes’s problem, but since Wittgenstein and Ryle we have tried to put it behind us. If consciousness is a purple haze over and above, and irreducible to, my animal nature, then perhaps you don’t have it, and perhaps I didn’t have it yesterday; for who is to say whether my apparent memory of “it” is reliable? Part of the problem here is the abstract noun. If we follow Ryle’s advice and replace it with an adverb (people doing things more or less consciously), Descartes’s problem begins to deflate.

End quote.  Now, the “purple haze” stuff is an allusion not so much to Jimi Hendrix as to Joseph Levine’s (excellent) overview of the debate about consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind, Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness.  I’ve got no beef with the expression itself -- in fact I agree with Blackburn that it’s an appropriate metaphor giventhe way the notion of consciousness is typically understood in post-Cartesian philosophy. 

The question is why it is understood the way it is -- as a kind of ethereal “add-on” to our corporeal attributes.  Blackburn implies that it has something to do with a fallacy of reification.  We say things like “I was not conscious of having done that,” “I was barely able to remain conscious while reading Feser’s book,” “That martini knocked me unconscious,” and so forth.  Then (so Blackburn’s argument seems to go) we fallaciously infer that “consciousness” must be a kind of stuff that is present in some of these cases and absent in others; only, since it is not an observable kind of stuff, it must be some unobservable kind of stuff.

Of course, that is a tendentious account of the issue, as Blackburn knows.  Nothing per se wrong with that -- he can’t be expected to consider, much less respond to, every alternative view in a short review.  I even agree with Blackburn that the problem of consciousness arises from a kind of reification fallacy.  However, I think the specific kind of reification involved is not the one Blackburn’s remarks imply that it is.  It isn’t a matter of jumping from adverbial phrases to an abstract noun.  Nor is it only the post-Cartesian notion of mindthat involves a questionable reification; the post-Cartesian notion of matter is equally suspect. 

More to the present point, the reifications in question are ones whose origins are described by Nagel, and they are of a kind that poses a serious problem, not for dualism so much as for the materialism that is Nagel’s target in the book.  Blackburn completely ignores this aspect of Nagel’s position, even though it is not only a key point in the new book, but has been central to Nagel’s work for nearly forty years, since his famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”  I am referring, of course, to the point -- emphasized in several previous posts in this series -- that modern science works with a conception of the “physical” that redefines it in entirely quantitative terms, and therefore strips from the physical whatever smacks of the irreducibly qualitative and relocates it in the “mental” realm.  Hence color, odor, sound, taste, heat, cold, and the like (as common sense understands them) are treated as mere projections of the mind, existing not in matter itself but only in our conscious experience of matter.  As Nagel writes in Mind and Cosmos:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution.  Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them.  Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers.  It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.(pp. 35-36)

This is the origin of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” otherwise known as the “qualia problem.”  From the concrete material objects of everyday life, Descartes and the moderns who have followed him derived two abstractions (as I discussed in an earlier post).  First, they abstracted out those features that could be captured in exclusively quantitative terms, reified this abstraction, and called that reified abstraction “matter,” or “the physical,” or that which is “objective.”  Second, they abstracted those qualitative features that would not fit the first, quantitative picture, reified that abstraction, and called it “the mental,” or that which is “subjective.”  Once this move was made, there was never in principle going to be a way to get mind and matter together again, since they were in effect defined by contrast with one another.

Thus, Cartesian dualism was not a reactionary resistanceto this central move of modern science and philosophy; it was a natural consequence of it.  And the problem derives as much from the post-Cartesian notion of matter as it does from the post-Cartesian notion of mind.  To follow Blackburn’s lead in citing Ryle, it isn’t just the ghost that is the problem, but the machine too.  And that is why Mind and Cosmos speculates about possible alternative conceptions of matter -- neutral monism, panpsychism, neo-Aristotelian teleologism -- in passages that (contrary to what one would guess from some of the reviews) are much more crucial to understanding Nagel’s overall position than anything he says about Darwinian biology.

Hence, at least if Nagel’s critic is committed to the modern, materialist conception of matter -- which essentially keeps Descartes’ machine while chucking out the ghost -- it is no good to accuse him, as Blackburn does, of reifying abstractions.  For Nagel’s point (though he doesn’t put it this way) is essentially that the materialist is reifying an abstraction, or at least that the materialist’s conception of matter is just as much a part of what generates the mind-body problem as the Cartesian dualist’s conception of mind.  Purple haze?  Sure.  But purple haze conjoined to another bizarre invention, one the materialist uncritically accepts -- the body reconceived as insensate clockwork.

An analogy: Suppose you squeeze every last drop of juice out of an orange, and then, deciding you want to put it back in while at the same time keeping the dried-out husk you’ve created, puzzle over how to go about doing it.  A Blackburn-like critic assures you that the problem is a pseudo-problem of your own making: “You’re illicitly moving from an adjective to an abstract noun.  We say things like ‘This orange is juicy’ and ‘That orange is not so juicy.’  You fallaciously infer from that that there’s this stuff called ‘juice’ that exists over and above the husk of the orange.  Resist the urge to do that and the problem begins to deflate.” 

Well, the critic in this case is partly right; the problem is of your own making.  But he does not see how deep the problem goes, and indeed seems deeply implicated in it himself.  For the source of the difficulty is not a mere tendency to shift from adjective to noun.  The source of the difficulty is that you have made of the juice a separate stuff precisely by squeezing it out of the orange, and you have created an insoluble problem of how to get it back into the orange precisely because you insist on doing so while at the same time keeping the orange a dry husk.  You are stuck with a dualism of dry husk and juice, and will remain stuck with it unless you give up not only the aim of keeping the juice as a stuff separate from the orange, but also the aim of keeping the orange as a dry husk devoid of juice.  The Blackburn-like critic, meanwhile, is in if anything an even odder position insofar as he regards the dried-out husk as somehow more real than the juice.  The solution is to get the orange back -- juice and husk in their organic unity, as a single entity.  The juice/husk dualist wants to make of an orange an aggregate of two stuffs; the Blackburn-like critic wants to chuck out the juice, keep the husk, and call that alone an “orange.”  The second position is hardly better than the first.

The parallel with the mind-body problem is, I trust, obvious.  The Cartesian dualist treats a human being as a slapped-together aggregate of Descartes’ desiccated “husk”-like quantitative conception of matter and his “juice”-like conception of mind as the repository of the qualitative features that don’t fit the quantitative description.  The materialist regards a human being as the mere “husk” all by itself.  What we need is to get the “orange” back -- that is to say, human beings (and other material substances too for that matter) in all their quantitative and qualitative richness.  And that is precisely what Nagel is trying to accomplish in toying with various non-materialist conceptions of matter (neutral monist, panpsychist, Aristotelian).

Finally, about that closing paragraph.  The now somewhat notorious bit reads as follows:

I regret the appearance of this book.  It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence.  It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off.  If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.

End quote.  Taken in isolation, that sounds pretty bad -- like the ranting of a humorless ideologue.  But in context it has a different feel, or so it seems to me.  It is in the immediately preceding sentence that Blackburn says: “There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering.”  And the passage comes at the end of a review that is not only substantive, but begins with the very kind words about the book quoted above.  So, it seems to me that Blackburn’s final sentence is clearly just meant as a joke rather than a suggestion that Nagel’s book should be shunned -- and a joke justifiable from the point of view of someone who seriously thinks that the “Intelligent Design” movement is a threat to science. 

But you don’t have to be a fan of ID (and I am not) to think much of the secularist reaction to it absurdly shrill, paranoid, and dogmatic.  So I don’t think the joke is a very good one.  And of course, were a non-materialist to make such a joke about a materialist book, you can be sure most secularists would not treat it as such.

Read More

Rosenhouse keeps digging

Here’s a conversation that might occur between grown-ups:

Grown-up #1: I haven’t read Nagel’s book or much of the positive commentary on it, but based on what I’ve seen in the popular press it all seems like a lot of absurd intellectual silliness based on caricature and sheer assertion.

Grown-up #2: Jeez, don’t you think you ought to read it before making such sweeping remarks?  You’re hardly going to get a good sense of the content of a set of complex philosophical arguments from a couple of journalistic pieces!

Grown-up #1: Yeah, I guess so.  Fair enough.

And here’s a conversation between a grown-up and Jason Rosenhouse:

Rosenhouse: I haven’t read Nagel’s book or much of the positive commentary on it, but based on what I’ve seen in the popular press it all seems like a lot of absurd intellectual silliness based on caricature and sheer assertion.

Grown-up: Jeez, don’t you think you ought to read it before making such sweeping remarks?  You’re hardly going to get a good sense of the content of a set of complex philosophical arguments from a couple of journalistic pieces!

Rosenhouse: You know, that’s just the kind of stunningly stupid, screeching, petty tantrum that is typical of you! You and your asinine armchair cogitation!  The dogmatism!  The arrogance!  Etc. etc.

That’s the short version, anyway.  For the long version, see Rosenhouse’s original post on Nagel, my reply to it, and the response to my reply he posted today. 

As you’ll see from the latter, Rosenhouse’s way of dealing with the hole he’s dug for himself is to down a Red Bull or three, sew himself into the seat of a backhoe, fire it up and break off the key.  To his thinking, it is not “arrogant,” “dogmatic,” “stupid,” or “petty” -- to use the language of his latest post -- to make sweeping claims about Nagel and his defenders without having bothered to read what they’ve actually written.  But it is“arrogant,” “dogmatic,” “stupid” and “petty” to object to someone who makes such uninformed sweeping claims.  (At this point it occurs to me that Jimmy Olsen was perhaps not the best choice of illustrations for this post; Bizarro would have been more appropriate.)

For Rosenhouse it was also “arrogant,” “dogmatic,” “stupid” and “petty” of me to respond to what he actually wrote, rather than to what he now wishes he had written.  For example, he now tells his readers that when he said that “It seems that all the immaterialists do is make assertions!” what he was really doing ”was just expressing my frustration with [Andrew] Ferguson’s relentless, unsupported assertions” (emphasis added).  Of course, if that is really all he meant, he could have made that clearer, e.g. by saying something like this: “It seems that all Ferguson does is make assertions!”  Rosenhouse might want to consider such a locution in future, since if you say “the immaterialists,” then us stupid, arrogant, dogmatic, petty English speakers are likely to get it into our heads that the people you really meant to refer to are the immaterialists. 

Rosenhouse, furthermore, assures us that:

I certainly never suggested that I did not have to read the book to fully understand its argument. In fact I specifically said this:

I have not read Nagel’s book, so I don’t have a strong opinion about it. Based on what I’ve read about it, however, I suspect I wouldn’t like it.

Feser didn’t quote that part, for obvious reasons, since then he would not have been able to pretend that I was simply dismissing the book or judging it based on one paragraph.

End quote.  So, the sober, fair-minded, scholarly, measure-twice-cut-once Rosenhouse would neverdraw a sweeping conclusion about Nagel without having actually read his book, right?  Except that this is what else he says about Nagel in this new post:

If you want arrogance and dogmatism you have to look to the Feser’s and Nagel’s of the world. They’re the ones claiming, on the basis of some asinine armchair cogitation, that they have refuted an enormously successful scientific paradigm.

End quote.  He also assures us that Nagel offers a “caricature of the evidence for evolution” and that his characterization of evolution itself is “absurd.” 

So, on the basis of reading exactly three short out-of-context sentences from the Introduction of Nagel’s 128-page book, Rosenhouse is able to conclude that Nagel (1) is arrogant, (2) is dogmatic, (3) grounds his position in “asinine armchair cogitation,” (4) caricatures the evidence for evolution, and (5) provides an absurd characterization of evolution itself.  And yet none of this counts as Rosenhouse having any “strong opinion” about Nagel’s book, or having “dismissed” or “judged” it.  And it is Nagel and I who are “arrogant” and “dogmatic.”  And when I characterized Rosenhouse as having rushed to judgment, I was egregiously misrepresenting him.

Got it.  Glad that’s all been cleared up.

Rosenhouse also can’t understand why I would object to his objecting to Nagel’s claims about what is prima facie true vis-à-vis evolution.  Writes Rosenhouse:

To assert that something is true “prima facie” is to assert it full stop. It is to say that the facts speak so clearly in favor of the conclusion in question that it is the skeptics who are immediately on the defensive. And that was precisely what I was challenging. The claim that human beings are the result of a series of physical accidents coupled with natural selection is not prima facie implausible. Nor is it prima facie plausible. It is not prima facie anything, because we have no intuition about or experience with anything related to the grand sprawl of natural history. It is simply not the kind of thing to which you can reasonably apply the notion of common sense.

End quote.  Well, if Rosenhouse would just read the damn book already before opening his mouth, he’d not only be less likely to keep putting his foot in it, but would also understand why Nagel says what he does.  And if he actually thought about what I wrote instead of reacting to it, he would also see that to say that something is true prima facie is not to assert it full stop.  Prima facie judgments are always made within a context, and have to be evaluated within that context.

Hence, suppose (to borrow an example from W. V. Quine) I said: “Consider the claim that Bernard J. Ortcutt is a spy.  Is that prima facie plausible or not?”  No doubt you’d say: “Neither.  After all, who the hell is Bernard J. Ortcutt?  Why would anyone think he’s a spy in the first place?  What evidence might tell against the claim that he is?  Until I know all that, I have no prima facie judgment to make one way or the other!”  And that would, of course, be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

But suppose instead that you knew who Ortcutt was, knew that he often traveled abroad, kept odd hours and strange company, was being kept under surveillance by the FBI, is known to sympathize with radical Islamist movements, etc.  Then you might reasonably say “Prima facie it is plausible that he is a spy.”  Or suppose instead that you knew that Ortcutt was a fan of James Bond movies and liked to call himself “007,” but otherwise was very timid and to all appearances lived a perfectly humdrum life.  Then you might reasonably say “Prima facie it is not plausible that he is a spy.”

Similarly, if what Nagel was saying was that in the abstract, with no further qualification, “evolution is prima facie implausible!”, then Rosenhouse might have a point.  But in fact Nagel does not do this -- as anyone who’s actually read the @#$% book would know.  What he is claiming instead is that given such-and-such features of consciousness, rationality, etc. (spelled out in the book) and given such-and-such features of how  a purely materialistic construal of evolution works (also spelled out the book) -- given all that, it is prima facie implausible that the former can be explained in terms of the latter.  (Contrary to what Rosenhouse’s readers might suppose, by the way, Nagel does not ignore what Rosenhouse calls the “mountain of confirmed predictions and retrodictions, along with numerous experimental successes” in favor of evolution, for the simple reason that he is not challenging evolution per se in the first place.  What he is challenging is the idea that evolution construed in terms of a materialist metaphysics can account for certain specific biological phenomena such as consciousness, rationality, etc.  Rosenhouse gives the impression that Nagel is challenging the evolutionary story as a whole, and that is simply nowhere close to the case -- as, it cannot be emphasized too often, anyone who would just read the book would find out.)

Again, a grown-up might say: “OK, fine, fair enough, maybe there’s something elsewhere in the book that would change my judgment about how I read those three out-of-context sentences from the Introduction.”  Rosenhouse, however, is the kind of guy who would rather devote a day or two to rationalizinghis snap judgment than an hour or two to finding out whether it was correct. 

In the last half of his post Rosenhouse responds to the metal detector analogy from my response to Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg’s review of Nagel, which Ferguson had cited.  Just as the success of metal detectors in finding metal does not entail that there are no other, non-metallic aspects of reality, so too does the success of science in capturing those aspects of nature susceptible of prediction and control give us no reason to think that there are not other aspects that are not susceptible of prediction and control -- aspects we should not expect to find by the methods of science, but for knowledge of which we have to turn to philosophical analysis.  Rosenhouse responds:

It is tautological to say that if there are aspects of reality that are not amenable to scientific investigation, then scientific investigation will not reveal them. That, however, is nonresponsive to Leiter and Weisberg’s point.  As I see it, Leiter and Weisberg were making an argument about the burden of proof.  When a particular point of view has been proven wrong in case after case; the centrality of teleology and the supernatural in our understanding of the natural world, for example; the burden shifts to the people defending that point of view.  

End quote.  But this simply misses the entire point.  What was in question in my response to Leiter and Weisberg is precisely what we should count as “proving” or “defending” claims about the natural world in the first place.  Should we regard as “proved” or “defended” only those aspects of nature susceptible of prediction and control?  Why should we regard this sort of method as giving us the only avenue to knowledge of the world (as opposed to an avenue of knowledge, which of course it is)?  As the metal detector analogy was intended to illustrate, merelyto appeal to the “success” or “fruitfulness” of the predict-and-control method -- where “success” and “fruitfulness” are definedin terms of that method -- is no answer at all.  There is a tautology here all right, but it is precisely those beholden to scientism who are guilty of putting it forward.  Rosenhouse is like that slow-on-the-uptake kid in philosophy class who says “A is true because B is, and B is true because A is,” and when you point out to him that he’s begged the question, replies: “But that’s a fallacy!”  Well, duh.  Yes, that’s the point.  And you’re the one committing it.

Speaking of begging the question, consider Rosenhouse’s proposed alternative to my metal detector analogy:

A better analogy than Feser’s metal detector would be to the boy who cried wolf.  Every time previously that the boy had cried wolf there was no wolf.  So the people concluded that when he cried wolf this time there also was no wolf.  Does anyone think the people’s reasoning was utterly fallacious?  Were they wrong to think that the boy’s consistent track record of lying gave them a good reason for thinking he was lying this time?

The problem with this, of course, is that whether the philosophical arguments for teleology, theism, etc. put forward by Aristotelians and other metaphysicians in fact “cried wolf” is precisely part of what is at issue.  Nor is it any good to say that they “cried wolf” insofar as they were not arguments of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., because whether the methods of natural science are the only rational methods is also what is at issue.  We old-fashioned Aristotelians and Thomists would argue that it is not in natural science as that is understood today, but rather in those branches of philosophy known as metaphysics and the philosophy of nature, which deal with those aspects of the world that any possible natural science must presuppose, that the foundations of a teleological conception of nature and of natural theology are to be found.  (I have written about the difference between these fields of inquiry in many places, such as here.)

No doubt thinking to preempt such a point, Rosenhouse writes:

Surely it is obvious that philosophical argument alone cannot possibly get you to dramatic conclusions about what matter can and cannot do…  The trouble is that science is constantly changing our view of what matter is. The “material” out of which the world is made looks very different today than it did a century ago.  It wasn’t that long ago that atoms were thought to be solid balls. Today they are vastly more complicated, to the point where even physicists have trouble wrapping their heads around what they do.

But no Aristotelian would disagree with this.  What is at issue is not whether physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are necessary to a complete understanding of the material world.  Of course they are.  What is at issue is whether they are sufficient.  And anyone who actually knows something about intellectual history beyond the potted World Book Encyclopedia version knows that the question of what matter ishas, from the Pre-Socratics down to the present, always been as much a philosophical question as a scientific question.  Mach, Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Russell, Whitehead, and many other thinkers of generations not too distant all knew it; contemporary secular philosophers of physics and philosophers of chemistry know it.  The only people with an opinion on the matter who don’tknow it are the sort of people laboring under the delusion that there is some really serious intellectual action to be found at outlets like EvolutionBlog. 

Read More

EvolutionBlog needs better Nagel critics

EvolutionBlog’s Jason Rosenhouse tells us in a recent post that he hasn’t read philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  And it seems obvious enough from his remarks that he also hasn’t read the commentary of any of the professional philosophers and theologians who have written about Nagel sympathetically -- such as my own series of posts on Nagel and his critics, or Bill Vallicella’s, or Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel, or Alva Noë’s, or John Haldane’s, or William Carroll’s, or J. P. Moreland’s.  What he has read is a critical review of Nagel’s book written by a non-philosopher, and a couple of sympathetic journalistic pieces about Nagel and some of his defenders.  And on thatbasis he concludes that “Nagel needs better defenders.”

This is like failing to read serious, detailed defenses of Darwinism like Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, or Kitcher’s Abusing Science -- and then, on the sole basis of what some non-biologist has said in criticism of Darwinism, together with a journalistic article summarizing the views of some Darwinians, concluding that “Darwinism needs better defenders.” 

But never mind Nagel’s defenders.  Not having read Mind and Cosmos doesn’t stop Rosenhouse from criticizing it too.  He writes:

[H]ere is part of a quote from Nagel, as presented by [reviewer H. Allen] Orr:

I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life.  It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.  We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples.

From what I understand, the level of argument in the book never gets much beyond this. But these sentences are absurd.  On what possible basis does Nagel decide that it is “prima facie” highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents?

End quote.  Now Rosenhouse says that “from what [he] understand[s], the level of argument in the book never gets much beyond this.”  But Nagel isn’t giving any argument in the passage in question in the first place; he’s just telling the reader, in the book’s Introduction, what he will argue for in the book.  (That’s what book Introductions are for.)  Nor does Nagel simply assert in the book that the materialist neo-Darwinian account of the world is prima facie implausible, full stop.  He holds that it is implausible as an explanation of certain specific aspects of the world, such as consciousness, rationality, and moral value; and he gives reasonsfor thinking it cannot account for these phenomena.  Nor does Nagel claim that the materialist neo-Darwinian account of the world is false merely because it seems prima facie implausible as an explanation of these phenomena.  He isn’t using the claim about what is prima facie implausible as a premise.  He isn’t saying: “It’s prima facie implausible, therefore it is wrong.”  Rather, he’s saying: “It’s wrong for these independent reasons that I will spell out in the book; and it turns out that these independent reasons vindicate the judgment of common sense about what is prima facie plausible.”  What are these independent reasons?  What is the “possible basis” Rosenhouse demands to know?  Well, you need to, you know, actually read the bookto find out, which is why Nagel wrote it.  Awful luck for guys like Rosenhouse, who apparently thinks you should be able to say everything in a single short paragraph in the Introduction to a book, but there it is.

Rosenhouse goes on to cite Andrew Ferguson’s citation of me in Ferguson’s Weekly Standard article on Nagel.  Here is how he responds:

Almost all of that is wrong, starting with Feser’s caricature of materialist thinking. What materialists actually say is that if you are going to hypothesize into existence something immaterial, it is on you to provide evidence for your hypothesis.  Of course it’s possible that there are immaterial entities that influence matter in ways that are undetectable by science, but can you do anything more that [sic] just assert their possible existence?  Given some phenomenon you assert to be incomprehensible under materialism, can you show how it becomes comprehensible under immaterialism?  Ferguson tells us that science just ignores “everything else” beyond the material aspects of reality, but the very point at issue is whether there is anything else to ignore.

It seems like all the immaterialists ever do is make assertions!

End quote.  Well, yes, I suppose it could well “seem” that way if you don’t bother to read what they actually wrote.  For starters, what Rosenhouse dismisses as a “caricature of materialist thinking” was not directed at materialists in general in the first place, but rather at a certain specific line of argument put forward by Nagel critics Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg -- as Rosenhouse would have known had he bothered to read the post of mine that Ferguson was citing.

For another thing, the suggestion that the difference between materialists and their critics is that the former give arguments and the latter merely make assertions is, well, simply too preposterous for words, and cannot possibly have been made by someone who both (a) has a shred of intellectual honesty, and (b) knows what the hell he is talking about.  Say what you will about books like John Foster’s The Immaterial Self, W. D. Hart’s The Engines of the Soul, David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, William Hasker’s The Emergent Self, Robert Koons’ and George Bealer’s The Waning of Materialism, or Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul, to name only the first few things that happen to pop into my mind -- not to mention my own books, articles, and blog posts -- they are absolutely brimming with arguments.  You may or may not agree with those arguments, but they are there. 

Some of Nagel’s critics have criticized him without reading him charitably.  Rosenhouse goes them one better: He’s happy to criticize Nagel and his defenders without reading them.  And he has the brass to go on to accuse others of “intellectual silliness”!

But Rosenhouse is a paragon of scholarship compared to Prof. Jeffrey Shallit, who makes the following remark in Rosenhouse’s combox:

The funniest part [of Ferguson’s article] was the bit about Feser’s “dazzling six-part tour de force”.  I almost spit out my coffee when I read that part.

And what, exactly, is the reason for Shallit’s nearly self-soiling merriment?  We are not told, but we can be morally certain that it had nothing to do with his having actually read the six-part series of posts in question, at least if history is any guide.  Consider some previous remarks Shallit made about me not too long ago at his blog Recursivity.  Commenting on a colloquium to which he was calling his readers’ attention, Shallit says:

One thing I can guarantee you won't hear [at the colloquium] is nonsense like this, from Ed Feser:

"Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes."

Only a creationist could be so utterly moronic.  While Feser and his friends are declaring it impossible, real neuroscientists and neurophilosophers are busy figuring it out.

End quote.  Now I know what my longtime readers are thinking: “Creationist?  What the hellis Shallit talking about?”  But you haven’t plumbed the subtleties of Shallit’s reasoning.  For you see, Shallit was quoting from a website devoted to Intelligent Design, which had in turn quoted something I had written in a blog post.  “Hence,” Shallit seems to have inferred, “since Feser was quoted favorably by an ID website, therefore he is an ID proponent, and therefore he is a Creationist!”

Never mind that I am in fact not only not a Creationist, but have been (rather famously, for anyone who’s read this blog for ten minutes) extremely critical of ID.  And never mind that Shallit has provided a textbook example of the fallacy of guilt by association.

And what exactly was “moronic” or “nonsensical” about what I had written, anyway?  It was, after all, part of an argument -- to which Shallit offers no response at all.  But here again we see Prof. Shallit’s unique intellect in action.  His implicit counter-argument seems to be:

1. Here is a sentence quoted, without any context whatsoever, from a blog post, which quoted it from a blog post written by someone else, which blog post summarized an actual line of argument, which line of argument was in turn defended at greater length elsewhere -- almost none of which I have bothered to read.

2. I disagree with that sentence and I know all three of my readers can be relied upon to disagree with it too.

3. Therefore it is moronic.  Q.E.D.

Shallit, as you’ll see from his post, is the sort of guy who likes to accuse others of ignorance.  Well, there’s ignorance -- you know, the sort of thing you exhibit when you don’t know what someone has actually written.  Then there’s meta-ignorance -- ignorance of your ignorance.  And then there’s what we might call, in Prof. Shallit’s honor, recursive meta-ignorance -- the sort of thing on regular display in the posts and comboxes at sites like Coyne’s blog, EvolutionBlog, Recursivity, Dawkins Foundation discussion boards, etc.  The argumentational thrust of every “criticism” of non-materialist writers that you’ll find at these intellectual slums goes something like this:

I know it’s not worth reading because its conclusions are so moronic; and I know it’s moronic because the arguments for it are too silly to be worth reading; and I know the arguments for it are too silly to be worth reading because the conclusion itself is so moronic; and I know it’s moronic because the arguments for it are, of course, too silly to be worth reading…

Repeat as desired, click “Publish,” and begin a round of combox mutual self-congratulation!

Read More