Double Dutch and Homeopathy

Willem, Canterbury

Like commented before by Dylan Evans from Bath, I too have noticed the bias towards British examples. But as a Dutchman living in England I was pleasantly surprised by the two Dutch examples that are also included. There is of course nothing wrong with the first example on page 55 where the Dutch are referred to as "best-in-class peers". However, the second example on page 135 explains why Dutch small business managers are not switching banks accounts by arguing that it is too much hassle for a too small reward (a 0.25% lower interest rate on their overdraft). Wouldn't the explanation that Dutch small business managers are unlikely to have a $20,000 overdraft make more sense? After all, the legal currency in the Netherlands is euro (or guilder if the example dates from before 2001). Finally allow me a small remark about homeopathy. I always warn people who believe in the memory of water or the power of near infinite dilutions not to swim in the ocean by confessing that as I child I used to urinate in it.

Trinity or Mystery and More

Daniel Hill

One does not have to read much of the otherwise excellent Bad Thoughts to discern that Whyte does not think much of religion. I shall try to defend religion, in particular, Christianity, against Whyte's four attacks. 

Whyte on the Trinity (pp.23ñ24)

Whyte mis-explains the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity comprises two propositions:

(1)   There are three divine persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

(2)   There is one divine substance: God.

The mystery is that we don't know what the exact relationship is between the persons and the substance, and we can't prove (1) and (2) by reason alone. Hence Whyte is wrong to say that ëThe doctrine of the Unity of the Trinity is inconsistent with the fact that three does not equal one' (p. 24). According to Christianity, it's not true that there is only one divine person, and it's not true that there are three divine substancesóthese truths, together with (1) and (2), actually entail that three doesn't equal one. Whyte's mistake is to ignore the difference between ëperson' and ësubstance'.

Secondly, Whyte is wrong to claim that the doctrine of the Trinity is ëinconsistent with the fact that identity is a transitive relation' (p. 24). According to Christianity, it is false that the Son is identical with God (the divine substance). When Christians say ëthe Son is God' they are predicating the property of Godhood, i.e. divinity, of the Son, not giving an identity statement. The confusion arises because ëGod' is used as a predicate-term and a name. In Judaism this ambiguity did not lead to any confusion, but in Christianity it does.

Finally, Whyte is wrong to imply that there is no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity (p. 25). There is evidence in the Bible; the doctrine's being a mystery means that there is no evidence from reason alone for it.

Whyte on Pascal's Wager (pp. 27ñ29)

Most of what Whyte says here is right, but he does not acknowledge that Pascal's Wager is mostly defended today as an argument for Heaven-and-Hell-theism over atheism, not for Christianity over every other religion. For example, George Schlesinger (whom Whyte himself quotes on p. 125) defends it in this way: George Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-Time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Chapter 6, esp. pp. 155ñ156, 162. Since atheism does not offer the prospect of infinite benefits, theism is to be preferred for prudential reasons, but the choice of which theistic religion is to be made on other, non-prudential, grounds.

Whyte on the problem of evil (pp. 84ñ85)

Whyte argues that the following statements are inconsistent:

(1)   Evil exists

(2)   An all-good and all-powerful god exists.

Whyte claims that an ëall-good god would want to avoid any evil he could' (p. 85). This is false. For a start, Whyte needs to add that the god knows about all the evil there is. More importantly (since most religious believers accept that God knows everything), an all-good god might not want to avoid evil because avoiding it would necessitate avoiding a greater good, such as freedom or sympathy, just as a parent will frequently allow a child to hurt him or herself to learn a lesson. Since this is possible, Whyte's statement is not necessarily true, and so (1) and (2) are consistent.

Whyte on the improbability of human life (pp. 124ñ127)

Whyte says that ëif [the design argument] were valid we could conclude, without the aid of any evidence, that all lotteries are rigged' (p. 125). This is not correct. We can conclude that a lottery is rigged when the probability of its outcome's being due to chance is less than the probability of its outcome's being fixed. Suppose Mrs Higgins wins the national lottery. It is very unlikely that the lottery would be fixed for her benefitóshe is no relation to the boss. It is much more likely that she have got the one in 15 million chance of a winning ticket. Suppose the boss's son wins. Then we begin to ask questions, as the probability of its being fixed increases dramatically. (A real-life case of this happened in the UK a few years back when the first few people to ring BA after 9am one day got free air flights. A large number of BT telephonists won, and a statistician calculated the vast odds against this's happening by chance. It seems reasonable to suppose a (perfectly legal) ëfix' here.)

Secondly, Whyte states ëSo, no matter what the laws of nature and hence what kinds of things in the universe, their improbability would always lead to the conclusion that God exists' (p.126). This is incorrect. If the only things in the universe were creatures in everlasting pain the improbability of this would not lead to the conclusion that God exists. The point is that the improbable things must be likely given the existence of God. According to the design argument, it is highly likely that if God exists he would create conscious life, and less likely that he would create just unconscious life, and still less likely that he would create no life at all.

Finally, Whyte says that ëthe statement ë(1) Given God's existence, the existence of humans is probable', does not entail, ë(2) Given the existence of humans, God's existence is probable'' (p.127). The problem with this is that most philosophers of religion, including the one Whyte quotes (George Schlesinger), do not claim that (1) entails (2); they claim that (1) and the existence of humans raise the probability of the second part of (2). By Bayes's theorem, on the assumption that it is likely that if God exists then conscious life will exist, the existence of conscious life raises the probability of God's existence (as long as this isn't 0).

A final mystery: why does Whyte write sentences such as ëWho knows if she was right' (p.148)? It's grammatically a question, even if a rhetorical one, and so needs a question mark.

P.S. Whyte encourages readers seeking a ëreally condensed dose of muddle' to write to the BBC for tapes of The Moral Maze. They needn't bother; the BBC has kindly put some recent programmes on-line at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze/moralmaze.shtml

Reply:

Dear D. Hill, I will reply to your four issues in order.

1. The Trinity

Christianity is normally thought of as a mono-theistic religion. But if you are right, it is a poly-theistic religion. The father, the son and the holy-ghost are distinct entities, and each has the property of being a god. Hence, there are three gods. Of course, there are philosophers who think that properties are universals: i.e. that different instantiations of a property are instantiations of one and the same thing (i.e. the property). But none make the mistake of saying that there is thereby only one thing with the property. For example, if blueness is a universal, then all blue things instantiate this universal. But that doesn't mean there is only one blue thing. So, even if godliness is a universal, that doesn't mean that three things with this property somehow make up a single god. Confusing persons with substances (what ever they are supposed to be) has nothing to do with it. If three things have the property of godliness then there are three gods. Of course, this may to be your position, in which case I have no debate with you, since you do not believe in the Unity of the Trinity. You believe in the trinity of the Trinity, which is an eminently sensible position.

It seems, by the way, plain wrong to say that the Christian statement that ëThe Son is God' should be interpreted as involving the ëis' of predication rather than the ëis' of identity. If this is what Christians mean, why do they not say ëthe Son is a god'? And why do they use ëGod' with a capital ëG', which shows we mean to use the word as a name, instead of ëgod' with a small ëg', which shows that we are using the word as a predicate?

2. Pascal's wager

I have nothing to add. The most important point is that it provides no evidence as to the truth of Heaven and Hell religions and so should be of no interest to people who want to understand the universe.

3. The problem of Evil

There are, as I said in the book, many attempts to get around the apparent inconsistency of the statements:

1. Evil exists and
2. An all-powerful and all-good god exists.

In my opinion, none of them works, but I can't go into it here ñ a decent treatment requires at least a book chapter. Fortunately, the book exists: J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism.

4. Teleological arguments and the improbability of humans

You seem to think that Bayes' theorem about the confidence we should have in an hypothesis in the light of evidence provides a framework within which the ëanthropic principle' version of the teleological argument for god's existence works. If so you have several problems, which your response fails to address.

First, what is the ëprior probability' that God exists? Prior probabilities are extremely hard to understand in general, but it seems to me especially difficult to make sense of the idea that the hypothesis that God exists has a prior probability (there is, for example, no more general theory from which we may assign a prior probability to this hypothesis). The probability might not be zero, but if you can't say even roughly what it is, you can't know what the probability of the hypothesis is after the evidence of human existence, and so you can't know if you should believe it.

Second, why is it highly likely that God would create conscious life, as you claim, and as is required for Bayes' theorem to help you? What is so good about conscious life? And what, more to the point, is so good about human life. We may not live in ever-lasting pain, but we live in enough of it to make me think this universe is extremely unlikely given God's existence (or, at least, the existence of the kind of god one would be inclined to worship).

Finally, I can answer your question about why I write sentences such as 'Who knows if she was right' (p.148) which lack the required question-mark. I make mistakes.

A Reply from Daniel Hill

Religion:

1. Christianity is indeed monotheistic. Monotheism is belief in one god (=divine substance). When Christians say that the Son is God they do not mean that the Son is a god (=divine substance), but just that the Son is divine. ëGod' is used with a capital ëG' not because it's a name, but because it is a title indicating divinity; compare (for a different title!) ëTony Blair is Prime Minister'.
2. The whole point of Pascal's wager is that there are other, prudential, reasons for belief as well as understanding the universe.
3. Mackie's book has, I think, been decisively refuted in the works of Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen.

The major determinant of prior probabilities is simplicity. The God hypothesis is very simple: it postulates just one substance with no limits to power, knowledge, goodness, etc. It is likely that God would create conscious life because it is a good thing that there should exist beings apart from God that are capable of worshipping God. 

Mr Betts' Opinion and Small Thoughts

Caroline Thomson

(p20): You come very close to suggesting that Mr.Betts' opinions on the freeing up of drug legislation are of no interest. If we take for granted that there is a place for public debate about draft legislation (hence the existence of 'green' and 'white' papers) and we also assume that in general this debate can be helpfully informed by the views of people who have relevant experience, then I think it follows that his opinions are worth attending to: A certain consequence of more liberal drug legislation is greater accessibility to drugs. There is therefore a possibility of further tragedies such as Leah's, a possibility even that these might increase. It would be hard to argue that the views of bereaved parents are of no relevance in this discussion. 

Should they be of interest? I think they should, even to you! The opinions of someone such as Mr. Betts can assist the better-qualified views (which you clearly, and perhaps also rightly, prefer) to prevail. First, sometimes people in his position surprise us: the bereaved parent who equally publicly forgives the terrorist who murdered his child. Or the parent who replies to the interviewer that of course she wants the blood of her child's murderer but that precisely because she's in this state of mind, her views on capital punishment are not worth very much. The importance of these instances - however rare - is to illustrate just what you would want to argue, that there is neither a necessary connection between the horror of the deed and the severity of the response, nor that the views of an injured party have authority, since similarly injured people can hold opposite, conflicting views.

Secondly, where an injured party does feel they are thereby conferred authority and asserts that 'stringing them up is too good for them' or 'the only language they understand', we are in a stronger position to make up our own minds: we have heard how injury speaks - rather than remaining ignorant of it - have seen the lapses in rationality and are thereby the more confident in preferring more considered views. 

I think this approach is a better way of making your point because it steers clear of suggesting that certain people should be disqualified from expressing their views or, conversely, that only experts 'on the effects of drug laws on public health, crime, individual liberty and so on' are worth attending to. We need, surely, to hear from everyone and cultivate enough philosophy to distinguish the best in what we hear.

(p141): 'Usually 0.4% is quite a small number'. What meaning does the word 'usually' have in a question of pure maths? 0.4% means 0.4%. It means it always, not usually, and that is all it ever means! What you mean, I think, is that since 0.4% means a fraction of four hundredths of anything it is multiplied with, it has the property of making quantities smaller not larger. But everything depends on the size of the quantity to which it is applied - as elsewhere you make clear in the chapter!

Reply:

Dear Ms. Thomson, You give three reasons for listening to victims' opinions on public policy. The first is that we may learn that victims do not all agree with each other. In particular, we may discover that some victims advocate leniency. But this ëbalancing' justification only makes sense if you think that victims have some special authority in the first place. If the opinions of victims have no special authority, then I wouldn't care even if they did all agree with each other.

Your second reason is that it is good for us to see how irrational victims can be. We can thereby be ëmore confident in preferring more considered views'. This is a strange new view of how much confidence we should have in our opinions. Suppose you believe something ñ that Bush invaded Iraq to steal its oil, let's say ñ on the basis of certain evidence, and that this evidence gives you a certain level of confidence in the proposition (you aren't certain that it's true, but you think it's a better than 50% chance, let's say). Now, suppose I show you a clearly irrational person, ranting and raving, who gives a preposterous argument for the proposition that Bush did not invade Iraq to steal its oil. Should you now be more confident than you were in your view that Bush invaded Iraq to steal its oil? Surely not. You have no new evidence. The stupidity of people who disagree with you is not evidence in favour of your opinion. Seeing how silly victims can be is not really helpful when trying to form a sensible opinion on policy issues.

Your third reason for listening to victims is that ëwe need, surely, to hear from everyone and cultivate enough philosophy to distinguish the best in what we hear'. If this were true then of course we should hear from victims. If we hear from everyone, that will include victims. But I don't agree with you that we should hear from everyone. There are too many people with opinions to hear from them all. When newspapers seek opinions on policy issues, they do not seek everyone's opinion, for the obvious reason that no newspaper could be big enough to print all those opinions. So they must select people whose opinions are of special interest. What makes an expert's opinion especially interesting is that his unusual knowledge of the subject makes him more likely to be right than non-experts and, even if wrong, more likely to have something relevant or informative to say. What special expertise does victim-hood bestow? We already know that it is dreadful to lose your child to a drugs overdose, or to go through years of re-constructive surgery after a train accident. And that, in any case, is not what they are asked to opine upon. They are asked for their opinion about whether or not a policy is a good one. And on that they are in no better a position to answer than any other non-expert. It is voyeurism and sentimentalism that makes newspapers consult victims, not any genuine desire to cast light on the issues.

1+1+1=1

Richard Slade

You say I think that the doctrine of the Trinity is inconsistent with the fact the 1+1+1=3, that belief in the Trinity is intellectually dishonest and that calling it a mystery is, in effect, a cop out disguising a contradiction. My question is - will you ever allow Christians to ever say that anything about God is mysterious, that is to say is above full human comprehension or explanation? For there are many attributes of God, the Trinity among them, that the Christian would describe as mysterious; omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and immutability all beg as many questions about God as they answer. Is not the Trinity merely one of the Christian's inevitably flawed attempts to describe the indescribable for if God is God, then there is nothing like Him. If you were to press me, as a Christian, to explain the Trinity in simple mathematics I would have to say it is like 1X1X1=1; there are three separate but identical elements each of which is the whole of the answer. But I do not say that the Trinity is 1X1X1=1 but only that it is "like" (i.e. it is explained in part by) this equation. I would certainly not describe it, as you do, in terms of simple arithmetic so I do not see that I am contradicting myself in my belief. And finally, tongue partly I cheek, I also point out that 1+1+1=3 is not an absolute fact, but is conditional upon the assumption that you are counting in base 10. In the binary system, 1+1+1=11; in the Trinity system 1+1+1=1 ! 

"One in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance........"

Reply:

Dear Mr Slade, Your suggestion that the relationship between the father, the son and the holy ghost is more like 1x1x1=1 than 1+1+1=1 is certainly an improvement mathematically, since 1x1x1=1 is true whereas 1+1+1=1 is not.

However, it is strange to think that when you want to know how many objects you have you should use multiplication rather than addition. This would mean, for example, that a school with two classes of 10 students each has a total not of 20 students (=10+10) but of 100 (=10x10). Or perhaps it has only one student. For how could any class have 10 students? After all, each student is an individual, so the number of students in each class, by your logic, is 1x1x1x1x1x1x1x1x1x1=1. Indeed, on your logic, it is easily shown that there can be only one thing in the universe. I suspect that you have adopted this multiplicative rather than additive approach to counting only because it helps you with the problem posed by the doctrine of the Unity of the Trinity. It may give the desired result there, but by committing yourself to the view that it is impossible for more than one thing to exist, you pay a heavy price.

As for your main question of whether I will allow a Christian to believe that something is mysterious, I can only reply that of course I will. I always allow what I cannot prevent, and I can't stop people believing that things are mysterious. Nor would I want to, especially where the thing in question really is mysterious. But the Unity of the Trinity isn't mysterious, it's impossible. It is impossible for three things to be one thing. I ask only that Christians admit this and stop saying something they know can't be true. Is honesty not one of the Christian virtues?

Always

Patrick Hort

The final sentence of paragraph three on page 65 reads "Words that imply some kind of intellectual achievement or failure always get put into sneer quotes." Now whilst this might be 100% accurate, I have my doubts about the "always" in the sentence - have you really checked every occurrence of the words you describe in Lakatos' work? If not, the perhaps "frequently" would be a safer bet. 

Reply:

Dear Patrick, Yes, you are right, it probably isn't always, and I didn't check that it is (reading all of Lakatos would be a pretty painful business!). I should have said 'usually' or 'often' but I suppose I was just writing in the sloppy, colloquial way where people often use 'always' when all they really mean is often, as in 'you always point out my little mistakes!'

A Reader's Thoughts on Various Themes

Roger Jones

Evidence

Propositions for which there is no evidence may, of course, be true though their truth cannot be proved. Put another way: My inability to back an assertion with evidence is unrelated to its truth or otherwise. But if challenged to prove my assertion that Greenland is covered with ice, how would I proceed? JW might, therefore, have made more allowance for the fact that much of what we accept as true about the world (e.g. that light travels faster than sound ñ or that Greenland is covered with ice) is really based on no more than hearsay, on our willingness to believe what we are told because other presumably better-informed people believe it. On submission to authority, in fact. And if there is a fuzzy boundary between on the one hand theoretically testable propositions not backed by personal knowledge or experience (testable by a trip to Greenland, for example) and on the other hand untestable but widely accepted propositions such as belief in an after-life or in the existence of God, perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on people who fail to make the distinction. Regarding belief in a deity, Huxley's seems to me to be the only tenable position. God's existence or non-existence, like the state of health of Schrödinger's cat, is something we can't say anything useful about until we open the box.

Grow up and shut up

The truth or relevance of left-wing ideas/policies surely doesn't depend on the age of the person holding them. And for JW to condemn a middle-aged person for holding the same beliefs he held when he was a student doesn't chime with "consistent advocacy" approved of ñ at least by implication ñ a couple of pages earlier. Of course, a person not acting his age can be intensely annoying ñ as with baseball caps worn backwards, or middle-aged intellectuals who shave their heads in the hope, apparently, of being mistaken for neo-Nazi football hooligans, cancer victims, or the inmates of concentration camps. I espoused the cause of CND 45 years ago as a student and nothing I have done or learned since (including an MA course in strategic studies at King's College, London) has caused me to change my opinion that unilateral nuclear disarmament is the proper course for this country. Does this mean there's something wrong with me? My father used to say that anyone who wasn't a communist at age 19 had something wrong with his heart and anyone who was still a communist at age 49 had something wrong with his head.

False assumptions

False premises may give right answers under certain circumstances. It is an axiom of astro-navigation, for example, that the heavenly bodies (sun, moon, stars, planets) are all located on the surface of an imaginary Celestial Sphere which is concentric with the Terrestrial Sphere. Strictly contra-factual. But the procedures based on these assumptions yield impeccable practical results. There is a science fiction story, I forget who by, set in a society where science and technology are the business of the clergy. Long-distance radio communication is well-developed. The monks operating the radios believe that the effect is produced by flocks of tiny invisible angels holding hands to form a chain connecting sender to receiver. It behoves scientists to be humble in their certainties. Especially regarding what is and is not "possible". Every scientist is, or should be, aware of how often yesterday's dogma has become today's old wives' tale. Scientific truth has to be approached by the method of successive approximations. Our conclusions are, or should be, in Bronowski's words "partial and tentative". Final truth may finally be beyond our reach. (None of which means that truth is "relative".)

Inconsistency

The ability to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously may be impossible to defend on logical grounds but it is a fact of human nature and as such has to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as mere intellectual incompetence. And rationality should not be used to disguise or excuse a lack of humanity. The case against irrationality is by no means open-and-shut. Our ability to reason sets us apart from other organisms such as turnips or trilobites. But one might argue, and argue convincingly, that it is our capacity for irrational behaviour which sets us apart from other intelligent species and from thinking machines. And it is a rare and special kind of rationalist who can condemn, for example, the irrationality of a person who risks his life to save that of an animal or of one who voluntarily dies defending what he knows to be a hopeless cause.

The limits of reason

Is it possible for a person to be at once completely rational and completely human? I suspect not. And the Church, interestingly, agrees with me. In James Blish's story "A Case of Conscience" a Jesuit biologist is part of a team sent to explore and report on a newly discovered planet. He demands that the planet be placed permanently off limits, giving as his reason that the inhabitants are completely rational. He has come to believe that the entire planet is trap set by the Devil. The point being, of course, that perfectly rational beings would have no need of God (a point Swift, the Anglican cleric, overlooked in his story of the Houyhnyms). But in forming his conclusion, the Jesuit has knowingly fallen into another heresy, the heresy of attributing creativity to Satan (the same heresy that got the Albigensians burnt at the stake).

Entitlement

Entitlement to an opinion is more often used as a mechanism for belittling one's opponent's beliefs than as a way of buttressing one's own. "You're entitled to your opinion" usually means, "Your opinion is crap and I'm not even going to bother to contradict it."

Rights

For practical purposes we should consider that rights are of two kinds: legal rights, and imaginary rights. There is, of course, a shadowy third class ñ natural rights (such as the supposedly self-evident rights set out in the Declaration of Independence) and it is this group which causes most of the trouble because most of the rights claimed under this rubric are open to challenge. Utterances beginning "I've a right to...." should always be regarded with healthy scepticism if not downright suspicion. And sometimes, with the best will in the world, it's hard to know which class a particular "right" belongs to. For example, I believe I have the right publicly to express my vehement opposition to Mr Blair's involving my country in the mad, wicked and illegal assault on Iraq. But I don't actually know whether or not this "right" is enshrined in statute or case law, and if I were challenged on the point I might find myself in difficulty.

Rights/duties

Some rights don't merely imply duties: they are themselves duties. The right to vote, for example.

Inconsistency again

"Evil exists.." etc. This is very thin stuff. To dismiss what Christians call the Problem of Pain and the Problem of Evil (two separate issues, incidentally) as mere sloppy thinking simply won't do. JW is attempting to imply that Christians are too stupid to realise that, given the reality of wickedness and suffering, belief in a benevolent and omnipotent deity poses a logical and epistemological difficulty. This is unworthy, as well as being nice example of dishonest argument (the whiskery old ploy of presenting a distorted version of your opponent's case in order the more easily to demolish it). Conclusion: JW should probably steer clear of moral philosophy ñ not his strong suit.

"...bogus theological attempts..." What's the word "bogus" doing here? Are we to suppose that these are not real attempts?

Christian theology is actually a logical structure built on a small number of unproven postulates. In this it may be said to resemble Euclidian geometry.

The case of Professor Joad is worth a few moments' consideration. Joad was naturally inclined to atheism but found he was unable to deny the very visible existence of objective evil. And, reasoning that evil must be the opposite of something, he assumed that that something must be what people call God, and started going to church, although he still regarded most of what went on there as mere mummery. I think this shows remarkable intellectual honesty.

Taxation

I've never met anyone idiotic enough to believe that the government should both spend more and cut taxes. Except possibly "President" Bush who has just blown away a huge and unprecedented budget surplus in tax breaks to large corporations and rich individuals. It is true that taxation is generally unpopular since nobody feels good about giving away hard-earned lolly to an organisation ñ the government ñ which is generally and rightly despised. But much of that bad feeling could be dissipated by giving the individual taxpayer more control over not over how much tax he pays but on how that tax is spent.

Begging the question

Why has the phrase "to beg the question" suddenly become popular among people who don't know what it means, who evidently think that "to beg" in this context means "pose"? The same thing happened a few years ago with the word "epicentre" and millions of people who didn't know what an epicentre is suddenly started preferring it to "centre". Occasionally these weird linguistic fads can be traced to a point source. For example, Mr Kissinger's deluded belief that "hopefully" is the English for "hoffentlich", or Mr Blair's not knowing what a "stakeholder" is or does. It would be interesting to know what proportion of semantic shifts start with a mistake. High, would be my guess.

Tolerance

Tolerance is an over-rated virtue on the whole. But when extended to cover tolerance of intolerance it verges on the heroic.

Belief

In the well-known anecdote of Bohr and the horseshoe, Bohr was perhaps being a little whimsical but he was not being inconsistent. He was being logical. Whether or not he believed that horseshoes bring luck has nothing to do with whether or not they actually do bring luck.

Statistics

Smokers are told, correctly I imagine, that they risk dying of lung cancer or heart disease (a 50% chance of being taken out by "smoking-related illnesses" is the latest figure being bandied about). But why are they never told what they will die of if they don't smoke? And why are they never told what proportion of non-smokers die of lung cancer or heart disease? And, while we're at it, what does "smoking-related" mean anyhow? If two people, one a smoker and one a non-smoker, die of heart disease, does that count as one "smoking-related" death or two?

Cost of hurricane damage

Like JW I have often wondered how these figures are arrived at, and arrived at so quickly. I also wonder why, since the cost of repairs represents money in the pockets of builders, plumbers, electricians, and so forth, it should not be looked on as an economic windfall rather than a financial burden?

"Silly policies"

Joining or not joining the euro is a political before it is an economic decision. There might be reasons other than financial ñ and good reasons, too ñ for joining the euro. As JW well knows. Or ought to.

"It depends what you mean by"

Prof. Joad, mentioned above, became somewhat a figure of fun thanks to his constant employment of what became his catch-phrase: "It depends what you mean by..." But if politicians, journalists, and other opinion-formers were obliged (if necessary at gunpoint|) to define their terms, would not the overall effect on the standard of public debate be entirely beneficial? If, for example, little Mr Bush and his cohorts were made to say exactly what they mean by terms like "war" (in "war on terrorism"), "terrorist", "weapon of mass destruction" (a term which apparently can be stretched to include explosive footwear), "rogue state", "unlawful combatant", and so forth, would it have been possible to sell the current American administration's foreign policies to the voters? (I'm afraid the answer is probably "Yes" but I'd still like to hear those definitions.)

Peano's Axioms

Daniel Hill  

 ëFrom just a few simple statements easily understood by us all (Peano's axioms), every truth of natural number arithmetic can be derived' (p. 85). Kurt Gödel proved this wrong in his incompleteness theorems of 1931.

Reply:

Dear D. Hill, Mathematical logic isn't my thing, so I well may have got this wrong, but my understanding is that Goedel showed that first-order Peano arithmetic is incomplete: i.e. that not all the truths of Peano arithmetic are derivable from its axioms alone (which include Peano's axioms and the axioms of first-order predicate calculus).

That is not the same as proving that all the truths of natural number arithmetic cannot be derived from Peano's axioms. For, first-order Peano arithmetic uses a first-order version of Peano's axioms: i.e. a version in which there is no quantification over sets or properties. But Peano's axioms are typically stated using the resources of second-order logic, in which quantification over sets is allowed (see axiom 5 in my footnote on page 85). Given the additional resources of second-order logic, all the truths of natural number arithmetic can be derived from Peano's axioms. This is what it means to say that first-order Peano arithmetic is incomplete; proving some of the truths within its domain requires resources, such as set theory, which lie outside it.

In any event, whether or not all the truths of natural number arithmetic are derivable from Peano's axioms is immaterial to the point I was illustrating, which is only that people cannot see all the logical consequences of a proposition or set of propositions. 2+2=4 is entailed by Peano's axioms, yet not everyone can see how.

A Reply from Daniel Hill

Peano's Axioms: One cannot formally derive all the truths of natural number arithmetic from any finitely specifiable consistent set of axioms, first-order or second-order. As you say, your point that one cannot see all the logical consequences of a proposition stands anywayóso why bother with the (faulty) example?

Speed of Light

Guy Kingston

You use the example of light travelling faster than sound to demonstrate truths are absolute and there are no partial truths. The ëspeed of light' (non-sneer quotes) is usually an abbreviation for the speed of light through a vacuum. Sound, of course, will not travel through a vacuum. But, sound will travel through a steel rod whereas visible light will not. In this case, cannot it not be said that the speed of sound through a steel rod is faster than the speed of light? I appreciate that other electromagnetic waves, such as radio waves, will travel through steel but the example in the book did refer to light and in the absence of a more specific definition of light most lay readers will default to visible light. Personally, I cannot think of any medium through which both light and sound travel where sound is the faster. But, I am not sure science has established as a fact that light does always travel faster than sound through all possible media which both can travel. Is there not an infinite, or at least an immeasurably high number, of all possible media? If so, it remains possible that there are circumstances when sound might in fact travel faster than light. I find it hard to escape from the conclusion that light travels faster than sound might possibly be partially true. It is (absolutely) true to say that light travels faster than sound through the earth's atmosphere at, say, 10 meters above sea level. It is not (absolutely) true, for example, in the case of a steel bar. It is true generally but not in every circumstance and that seems to me to qualify as partially true.

Equivocating About the Chaplain

Mike Sayers

I have read and re-read your account of 'The Egyptian Chaplain's Chat' and still can't see that it is an example of begging the question. In fact I wondered whether you were guilty of equivocation. My reasoning is as below. It seems to me that, as you describe it, the Christian students' complaint was that they found the views expressed upsetting and so wanted the column banned. The editor's response was that their finding it upsetting was not sufficient reason for banning it, because we should be tolerant of other people's views and part of that involves (although this was not explicitly stated) allowing them to express them. This seems to me to be a rational and relevant response to the issue raised by the students. The issue in dispute is should we ban upsetting views? The editor responds that he thinks we should not, because we should have the tolerance to allow them to express them. Where I thought you might be guilty of equivocation was in the way you used the word 'believe' in 'when you believe that someone else's beliefs are intolerable'. This is not the conventional use of the word, is it? The normal usage entails our having a view as to the truth or falsity of something. Here you seem to be using the word to mean an emotional reaction to someone else's beliefs; it would have been more accurate for you to have said something like 'when you find you can't tolerate someone else's beliefs'. This wording seems to bring out the legitimacy of the editor's response, ie the editor is saying that he believes the right response in such situations is to tolerate the other person's views rather than to insist that they be censored. 

Beautiful People Again

Richard Russell

Further to Mr Lythgoe's comment on the motive fallacy, even if we accept your original assumption that the self-critical 10% are correct in their belief that they are uglier than average, the figure of 55% is still not accurate.  If 50% of people are of above average looks (not necessarily so, as you have stated that "it seems to me that the most beautiful people are further from the median than the least attractive people", in which case the median of attractiveness is below average), then the percentage of the 90% who correctly believe themselves to be better than average looking is 55.5555 (recurring).  This may seem petty, but I'm merely seeking the truth on behalf of over 35 million people wronged by your error (shocking!).  I'm sure you already knew this, and were rounding the number for clarity, however you appear to have rounded down rather than to the closest integer, in this case 56%. Perhaps the 0.5% of the population represented by the difference between your figure and mine can be assigned to Mr Lythgoe's group of self-critical people who are actually better than average looking, in which case your figure of 55% is exactly right.  Given the many implicit assumptions required to arrive at this figure, perhaps it would be safer to say "about 55%", or "over half".

Who is Mary Robinson?

Lance Knobel

Mary Robinson is not and never was head of the World Health Organisation (that was Gro Harlem Brundtland). Robinson was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. A very different post which perhaps explains her unclear thinking on health. 

Falsity Again

Paul Moorhead

On page 31 you assert that there are degrees of "falsity". This is false (exactly 100% so in fact).   In the same way that truth is absolute, so is its logical negation, falsehood.  It's easy to demonstrate this by constructing the logical inversion to any statement claimed to be more or less than 100% false: you don't end up with a statement which is true to some degree. Take your example regarding dogs. If I state that you have 2 dogs when you have only 1, the statement is false. If I state you have 10000 dogs, the statement is just as false as the previous statement. To claim otherwise would imply that the first statement was slightly more true than the second, which is not the case.  If your point is to observe that falsehoods, or lies, can range from trivial to outrageous, then I agree, but that's an altogether different matter.  2 does not equal 1, any more or less than 10000 equals 1. On page 67 you state that 55% of 90% of people who believe themselves to be of above average beauty are correct. This is true only if beauty follows a normal distribution - not something for which I think either of us have any supporting data; so in fact it's only true to say that 55% of 90% of people who believe themselves to have above median beauty are correct. It's my guess that the distribution curve for beauty would be heavily loaded at the bottom end, and skewed out at the top end where a relatively small number of models, film stars and the surgically enhanced exist. This distribution would have an average (a mean) above the median and push more people into the less than average beauty category.

More Homeopathy

Tim, Manchester

In your attack on homeopathy, you claim that homeopaths implicitly deny something that 'even a homeopath' would not deny, namely, 'that objects with the same properties have the same causal powers, regardless of how they came to have those properties'. You provide an example, that if Jack and Jill both weigh 70kg, they will register 70kg on a set of scales no matter how they arrived at this weight. But this is a misleading example, because it tells us little about their causal powers. Of course, if they both weigh 70kg they will both register that weight, but ask them to pump iron, or go for a run, and it very much matters how they got to 70kg. If Jack got there by following a protein filled diet and lifting weights, and Jill got there by not eating for a week, then their causal powers will be very different. This is because their causal powers (excepting their causal impact on a set of a set of scales) depend on something other than their weight. Now let's apply this to your argument about homeopathy. If homeopathic medicine is 20x dilution, and has the same molecular structure as water from a tap, then clearly it will register the same molecular structure as water when you measure it. But it doesn't follow from this that it has the same causal powers. This is because it is possible that the causal powers of a substance can inhere in something other than in its molecular structure; in its 'memory', for example, as a homeopath would probably put it. It is quite conceivable that in the future, developments or revolutions in bio-chemistry will be able to measure these non-molecular properties, and that a 'scientific' explanation for homeopathic efficacy could then be found. All you have succeeded in doing, is showing that given the state of current scientific knowledge, belief in homeopathy is unscientific. This is not the same as showing that it is false, or that it does not or cannot work. Of course its efficacy can be tested, but the gist of your note on p122 seems to be that the scientific evidence is as yet inconclusive.

Poker

Nick Barker

On page 126, you say ìIf Jack had a Royal Flush, then he was certain to win.î  I am afraid that this is not so.  Jack might, for example, have folded in response to a bluff.  Likely to win, yes; certain, no.

Incidentally, I argue quite a bit on the internet on a site at http://talk.consimworld.com which is primarily for wargamers (I am one, with a degree in history from Oxford) but which also has quite a bit of discussion about politics, religion, history, etc, all carried out at a reasonably adequate level, at least by internet standards.  Doing so has made me increasingly interested in the logical basis for arguments, since I am always interested to see why intelligent, educated people hold such odd opinions and are often incapable of supporting them with reasoning.  I have found a very handy quick summary site at http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html - I expect that you are aware of this but, if not, you might find it amusing.

Relativism   and Inverted Commas

Tim Kelsall

I would take you up on a couple of points:

1. The first concerns your characterisation of 'cultural' relativism (p45). To begin with, I'm not sure what you understand by cultural relativism, since you don't define this term (though it is clearly a 'boo' word for you). Perhaps you are treating it as a (con)fusion of moral relativism and epistemological relativism. Whatever, I think your statement 'most Relativists reply...' is unconvincing. Has a scientific study been conducted among relativists to determine their stance on the historical relativity of ideas about the earth orbiting the sun? If so, it would be nice to see the evidence. Or is this just a summary of your own experience with Relativists? If so, say so. Even then, I find it rather incredible. I have never met a relativist who thought this, or anything like this. Moral relativists, in my experience, hold analogous positions to the one you represent, but in the sphere of ethics. To give an example: they think that human sacrifice today, in Western societies, is wrong; but thousands of years ago it might not have been. Epistemological relativists, meanwhile, tend to take a position such as this: 'Although current scientific theory presents evidence to suggest that the earth orbits the sun, the scientific theory of 900AD suggested otherwise. There is no theory-neutral position from which we can determine which of these positions is true.' Which is quite different from thinking that in 900 Ad the earth didn't orbit the sun. I'm sure you're aware of this, but by caricaturing relativism and making facetious remarks, I think you risk falling into the kind of sloppy thinking for which your book in other respects represents an antidote.

2. My next gripe relates to page 64. Now, in my reading, Lakatos is using inverted commas because experimental results based on false theorising cannot show or prove anything; even when they generate results consistent with reality, the best they can do is 'show' something.  Let me give you a crude example. I think that there exists, in another dimension, a raingod. Based on a set of assumptions about the behaviour of the raingod and the means of communicating with him, I devise an experiment, which involves making sacrifices to the raingod, imploring him to send rain. I interpret rain following a sacrifice as evidence for the raingod's existence. Suppose I conduct the experiment every day for a year. On half the days of the year it rains - the 'facts' are consistent with the existence of a raingod, but on the others days of the year, the non-appearance of rain 'shows' that the raingod does not exist.  The inverted commas show that these are to be regarded as facts, evidence and proof, only in terms that are relative to my theory. Even the fact of rain is best regarded as a 'fact': it is not a brute datum, it is theory laden; it is already interpreted as a sign of the existence of a raingod.  I don't think there is anything confusing in this, nor in Lakatos's use of inverted commas.

Grammar II

Dr Arthur Thornton, Surrey

I did spot a correction. It's in the "Dope with Dad?" section. The correction: Page 136 para 2 line 4 last word: relied has been written as replied. The force of reason: the sentence as written does not make sense. Hopefully not too many readers will spot it or else it will not be worth revising the issue. Mind you could always change the title: "Good Thoughts: The Art of Bamboozling".

Reply:

Publisher's error.

Pascal's Wager

On page 27 after you describe 'Pascal's Wager' you go on to say, 'There is nothing sanctimonious about this. On the contrary, it is rather tawdry'. I found this statement confusing, surely it is sanctimonious as well as rather tawdry to believe in Christianity on the basis of Pascal's Wager.

Paul, Leicester

A Cure for Jamie

Nick

As a career homeopath I am wondering if indeed you can be cured? Homeopathy seems to come in for quite a kicking under the headings of Weirdness and Coincidental Healing in particular. You offer no new insights to me, nothing I have not already considered statistically anyway. Now as a serious minded Philosopher I know you keep an open mind, so lets assume homeopathy does work. (For the moment at least, I am going to be generous and give you a chance). How do you propose we explain that homeopathy does work? To help you, I will give you a clue. Remember, when logical deduction doesn't take you to a sensible conclusion, whatever you end up with, however illogical must be pointing to the truth.

Reply:

Dear Nick, You ask me to keep an open mind and assume that homeopathy works. Then you challenge me to explain how it works. Well, there’s the problem. I can’t. I don’t know how water that used to have stuff in it but no longer does can have curative powers lacked by water straight from the tap or Perrier bottle. And though, for the sake of argument, I can assume anything, I cannot believe that homeopathy really does work, since its efficacy has never been established. 
But it is odd, in any event, that you expect me to explain how homeopathy works to you, a seasoned practitioner. I should have thought you would respond to my criticisms of homeopathy by providing evidence that it really does work and explaining the mysterious curative power of water. Instead, you merely claim that my criticisms are not news to you and then ask me to provide the answer to them. I am afraid you will have to do your own dirty work.

The Relativists Awake

Chris, Hertfordshire

Your argument (p.67): My 15 year old sister asks her parents if her thighs are fat. When they say that they are not, she responds that 'they're just saying that'. She has committed the motive fallacy because it is possible for someone to have an interest in holding an opinion and for that opinion to be true.

Refutation : In her second question, your sister is trying to evaluate what weight she should put upon the evidence of her parents expressed opinion, rather than, as in her first question, the truth or falsity of whether her thighs are fat. It is possible that their opinion is true but it is also possible that it is not, and the probabilities as between these two possibilities is affected by a consideration of their motives. This is no more a fallacy than if she were to consider a photo of her thighs and ask whether any special lens had been used on the camera. It might be said that if she believes that her parents are unlikely to produce a truthful opinion then she is foolish to ask them in the first place. However, consider the possibility that they had replied that her thighs were indeed fat. Then she might attach weight to this opinion precisely because of her assumptions about the interests they might have in denying it. As the mathematician G.H. Hardy observed: if the Archbishop of Canterbury states that God exists then it is all in the way of business; if he states that God does not exist we may assume that he means it. Your sister's first question was therefore rational as had your parents said that her thighs were fat then it would have yielded relevant information.

In any case, the fatness of otherwise of your sister's thighs is not a matter of truth or falsity but one of opinion since there is no objective standard of fatness (notwithstanding your argument on p18 about facts/opinions, which I will come back to later). The nearest thing to a true answer would be whether her thighs were generally agreed to be fat judged by prevailing standards of fatness. Thus your sister is entitled to wonder whether the opinion held by your parents is the same as the opinion which would be held by someone to whom she had no relation, that is, whether your parents' opinion is representative of opinions in general.

You might object that there are objective standards of fatness - one might measure the mass of her thigh compared with that of the average thigh, or the muscle to fat ratio of the average thigh or some such; and define fatness as that which exceeded the average. Even here there would be many judgments as to what was the appropriate comparison e.g. the average thigh, the average female thigh, the average 15 year old female thigh, the average in certain types of country. But if we suppose that this is what your sister is asking, then her second (implicit) question ('you would say that') is still valid, assuming that your parents have no special expertise in these matters. If she were to accept your parents claim that she does not have fat thighs then she would commit the authority fallacy you correctly identify in the earlier chapter on 'authority', for she would be treating her parents as if they had the authority of expertise. In fact, her second question is exactly consistent with your argument in the authority chapter, for she is identifying the limits of the weight she should give to the pronouncements of those who do not have the authority to make them. One might then argue that she is being inconsistent, since her first question ('are my thighs fat?') seems to appeal to her parents as if they did have the authority of expertise. However, since we are only assuming this as a way of putting the best possible gloss upon your own argument then this would be an unreasonable criticism, and even if it were not then it would not be to criticise her for motive fallacy but for inconsistency.

Your argument then extends (p.72): The Foggian thinktank states that joining the Euro will cost 3M jobs in the UK. This announcement is followed by the statement that the think-tank is right-leaning. This is irrelevant because the thinktank doesn't invite us to believe it on the basis of their say so but on the basis of evidence and argument.

Refutation : There is no true or false answer knowable in advance as to the effect of Euro membership on jobs (and, even in retrospect, there will be difficulties in making that determination). The answer given will depend upon the assumptions made and the evidence selected. It is true that this is best assessed by a consideration of the assumptions, argument and evidence of the thinktank report, but it does not follow that knowledge of the previous biases of the thinktank in its assumptions, arguments and evidence selection are irrelevant to an assessment of the probability that these biases will be present in the current report. It is true that these biases do not allow us to infer that the conclusion about the job effects of Euro entry are false, but they do allow us to infer that these biases will lead to a greater probability that the assumptions, arguments and evidence selected will be of a sort likely to support a right-wing case which, contextually, will mean that the figure for job losses is higher than would be the case for a report prepared by a left-leaning thinktank. Whilst it is right to say that the mere fact that a thinktank has thus far exhibited particular sorts of biases does not constitute a case for ignoring (or embracing) its findings on this particular occasion, it is wrong to say that knowledge of these biases is irrelevant to a consideration of their findings.

This is parallel to the case of your sister's thighs in as much as the second part of the announcement is parallel to her second question. That is, it relates to the question of what weight we should put upon the evidence presented by the thinktank when compared to that offered by observers in general. It differs in that the thinktank may be assumed to have an authoritative expertise in the matter of the Euro which your parents lack in the matter of obesity. However, the nature and limits of expertise in relation to political and economic questions are much less straightforward than your account recognizes - as discussed below.

More generally: Your treatment of this question reveals a basic inadequacy in your general position as articulated in the book. You assume that questions such as 'are my thighs fat?'or 'what will the employment effects of joining the Euro be?' are matters susceptible to true or false answers. In both cases, the answer - and, in fact, the posing of the question - depends upon 'how you look at it'. In other words, both answers are relative; the first to prevailing standards of fatness (since what is fat in 2003 might be thin in 1903 or 3003) and the second according to assumptions about highly complex systems in which causalities are unclear. Thus some thinktanks argued on the basis of evidence that the introduction of the minimum wage would lead to 1 million job losses: it did not. Evidence in such matters often, if not always, points in different directions. You might say that the latter example is just one of a false statement: it was claimed that the job losses would result, it was wrong, the statement was false. However, the statement that there were not a million job losses is itself of a contestable sort: it could be argued that these losses were compensated for by other factors and that there were indeed a million job losses from the minimum wage. There is no ultimate court of appeal on these and many similar questions. It depends on how you look at it. This is presumably a version of relativism, since to say that it depends on how you look at it is to say that truth is relative to perspective.

Now, your refutation of relativism (p45) doesn't begin to capture the issues involved. You argue that what you call 'cultural relativism' supports the view that in 900 AD the sun went round the Earth because this is what people at that time believed. Perhaps there are some who claim this; if so they are wrong. The fact that the Earth goes round the sun is, so far as anything is knowable at all, true regardless of belief: it is an objective truth. But this is a very limited kind of example, which reveals very little about the kinds of examples discussed in most of the book. Questions like what is fatness clearly exhibit cultural variation in their answer. Questions about the Euro exhibit not just variations in answer but also that the question itself is inseparable from a particular time and place (Europe, turn of 20th/21st centuries and, in terms of a UK thinktank report, the context of British political debates about Europe). In this respect your arguments about the nature of opinion (p18) are flawed because they do not differentiate between those things which are true irrespective of the opinions held about them and those things which are only true or false on the basis of opinion. Your example (if greatness were defined in terms of beauty then it is not a matter of opinion who is the greatest Briton) illustrates this, for there is clearly no such thing as beauty independently of that which is opined to be beautiful (indeed, in the absence of any opinions on the matter there would be no such thing as beauty). This is not the case in relation to the orbit of the Earth, which would be the same regardless of opinions about that orbit and which would persist even if no one held any opinions at all upon the matter. Unfortunately for your argument, a great many public and political issues are of the first sort and not the second.

The importance of relativism is precisely that it allows us to differentiate between truths such as that the Earth orbits the sun and truth-claims which purport to be of that type. Your test is plainly inadequate. You say (p. 45) that contradicting something well-known (earth orbits sun) is a serious problem for relativism, but of course your argument is precisely as weak as the weakest form of relativism. For you are saying that if something is well-known to be true then that which contradicts it has difficulties as a truth-claim. But this is to say that what is well-known (i.e. agreed upon) has a good claim to truth, precisely what you denied when you said that the fact that it was well-known in 900 AD that the sun orbited the Earth was irrelevant to the truth that it is the other way around. You cannot, therefore, claim 'well-knowness' (that is not a sneer-quote, it is a so-to-speak quote) as a test of truth.

In making this flawed 'well-knowness' argument, however, you unwittingly point to the importance of (some kinds of) relativist arguments. For what relativism tells us is that things which are generally claimed as truth are in many - though not all - cases ways of, as you put it in your book, telling people who disagree to 'shut up'. For example: "it is well known that men are superior to women - so shut up". But apprehensions of this (men/women) question do vary culturally and they shift over time because of successfully made arguments that what is true is not captured by what is well-known at a particular time. In a similar way, answers to just about every important social or political question entail contestations over what are common sense assumptions e.g. about human nature or markets, to take some primary political cleavages. It is precisely because there is no agreement about these assumptions that the questions are, in fact, political and social. These assumptions are not, in principle, susceptible to true or false answers (e.g. human nature is intrinsically altruistic or greedy)  because although evidence can be brought to bear upon them they are like the question of what is beauty but unlike the question of the earth's orbit.

So politics (and the same could be said for business and other public issues) is not only, and perhaps not even primarily, a debate between that which is true and that which is false but about the assumptions which lead to this or that proposition being taken as so. These assumptions are in part cultural, in the strict, anthropological, sense of the word, in part ideological, in the generic senses of the word. To insist on a public discourse which acts as if truth and falsity were given independently of these cultures and ideologies is quite flawed, and flawed in ways which cannot be remedied by any number of examples of facticity in the physical world. More than this, an insistence upon such a demarcation of truth and falsity is actually to pander to an immature political culture in which truth, rather than interpretation, is elevated to an iconic status (as, in its most vulgar form, when politicians pronounce that 'the fact of the matter is ....' as a prelude to giving some interpretation of the situation).

Your brief attack on relativism is all the more unfortunate because a better appreciation of it would bolster the many worthwhile arguments you make in the book. You are certainly right to criticise the plainly silly (and wilfully obscurantist) extremes of much academic writing over recent years, but there are some more serious variants. One in particular comes from David Barnes and David Bloor's book on the Sociology of Knowledge (1974). They say that there are three kinds of relativism:

• relativism that says that all beliefs are equally true. An absurd view, since it offers no way of adjudicating between conflicting beliefs
• all beliefs are equally false. An absurd view, since it means that this statement itself has no more validity than any other
• all beliefs are equally susceptible to examination as the causes of their credibility

This last version of relativism is one which seems worth defending (& it was Barnes & Bloor's preferred position). Much of your book could be read in that spirit and certainly it would allow a more mature kind of public discourse than that which we presently have. It would give licence to your sister's second question to her parents, which might be re-formulated as 'what is the credibility of your claim that my thighs are not fat'? It would give licence to the journalist's comment on the thinktank, which might be re-formulated as 'what is the credibility of the claim that the Euro will lead to 3M job losses'? It is compatible with your complaint about cultural relativism which might be re-formulated as 'what is the credibility of the claim that the Earth goes round the sun or vice versa'? Overall, it is gives licence to what I think is the most important question your book raises which is 'what is the credibility of what I and others believe to be true'?

Reply:

Dear Chris, You claim to have a refutation of my argument regarding the Motive Fallacy. This is surprising, since I have no argument regarding the Motive Fallacy. I merely identify the fallacy and claim that, like the other fallacies of the book, it is unfortunately common. The only serious objections you could make to my position are that the line of reasoning I condemn (and call the Motive Fallacy) is not really fallacious or that it is not really common.
 The line of reasoning is this:

1.  X says that P
2. X has a motive (other than simply to speak the truth) for saying that P
3.  Therefore, it is false that P

That is the line of reasoning I call the Motive Fallacy. You don’t say what you think about the validity of this reasoning, nor whether you think it is common. Instead, you do something bizarre.

You suggest that my illustrative example – regarding my sister and her fat legs – does not really involve the fallacious reasoning outlined above. This is bizarre because, even if you were right, it would be completely irrelevant. The fact that some other kind of reasoning is valid, shows nothing about the validity of the reasoning I am discussing. I say ‘all reasoning of form A is invalid, and here is an example’. You respond: ‘no, this is an example of reasoning of form B, which is valid’. Even if you are right about the example, it doesn’t show that reasoning of form A really not really invalid after all, and it doesn’t show that it isn’t common. So it can hardly show a deep problem with my position, as you claim it does.

The most bizarre thing about your ‘refutation’ (sneer quotes), however, is its premise: namely, that my sister was not really committing the Motive Fallacy but was indulging in some other much more sophisticated kind of reasoning.  How do you know? The conversation occurred in New Zealand 28 years ago. Were you lurking outside our dining room window? Of course, she could have been indulging in the kind of reasoning you suggest. But you must also admit that she could have been indulging in the kind of reasoning that I suggest: i.e. inferring that my parents’ opinion was false simply because they had a motive for expressing it. And surely you will also concede that, when it comes to the question of what she was really doing, my presence in the room at the time gives me a decided advantage over those not present. Of course, I was only ten and I may have gotten the wrong end of the stick. But this doesn’t get to the heart of your complaint about my book, which is that, to quote you:

[I] assume that questions such as 'are my thighs fat?' or 'what will the employment effects of joining the Euro be?' are matters susceptible to true or false answers. In both cases, the answer - and, in fact, the posing of the question - depends upon 'how you look at it'. In other words, both answers are relative; the first to prevailing standards of fatness (since what is fat in 2003 might be thin in 1903 or 3003) and the second according to assumptions about highly complex systems in which causalities are unclear.

I do indeed assume this. But that is hardly a weakness in my argument. Let’s take the questions in reverse order, since the second is more easily dealt with. Joining the single currency will either have effects on employment or it will not. If it has none, then the true answer to the question is ‘none’ and any other answer is false. If it will have an effect on employment, then the correct answer will be some number (perhaps changing over time, but we can leave that complication aside, since it is immaterial). Call this number, whatever it is, i. If you answer our question by saying ‘ i’ then your answer is true. Any other answer is false. It is irrelevant whether or not you know what iis. You may have merely guessed, but if you got lucky, then you spoke the truth.
You have muddled truth and knowledge. There are many things that we do not now know and never will. But that does not mean that there is no fact of the matter. What was the average temperature of your blood last Tuesday? No one will ever know. But there was an average temperature, and if I say the real number then I speak the truth, even if it was just a lucky guess. Economics is a difficult subject. Knowing the truth is hard. That doesn’t show that there is no truth, nor that one attempt at knowing it cannot be better than another – that an economic opinion cannot be the best available in light of the available evidence.
How could the right answer depend on ‘how you look at it’, or on your ‘assumptions’ about economics, as you claim? Look at the effects of the single currency on employment any way you like. Approach it from a Marxist point of view or a monetarist position. Wear dark glasses. Look at it while standing on your head. Assume what you want. Assume that employment varies inversely with interest rates or that it is solely determined by the minimum wage or that it is utterly random. How could the truth about the matter possibly depend on any of these assumptions or ways of looking at it? Are you a god? Does your point of view somehow create reality? 
Of course, what you think is the right answer, and hence the answer you will give, will depend on your point of view. But that is an utterly different matter. That doesn’t show that the truth depends on you point of view. Only your beliefs do. And that is so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. Relativism is surely not the banality that what you believe depends on your point of view. It is the idea that the truth depends on your point of view. That is why people think Relativism is interesting. It is also why Relativism is obvious nonsense.

Now for fat thighs. The fatness of thighs is supposed by you to be relative to prevailing standards of fatness. Fine. What the word ‘fat’ means can vary over time. But the word does have a meaning at any given time (there is a prevailing standard), and so statements like ‘my thighs are fat’ can perfectly well be true or false. Given what the word now means, someone’s thighs can now accurately be described by the word fat – or inaccurately, as in the case of my sister.

This ‘relativity’ is nothing more than the trivial point that whether or not a sentence is true depends on what it means. The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true, but only because ‘white’ means white and not black. If ‘white’ meant black, the sentence would be false. But so what? ‘White’ does mean white, and given that this is what it means, the whiteness of snow makes the sentence true.

Relativism is bankrupt. It is either a triviality: no more than the claim that a sentence’s truth depends on what it means, or that what people believe depends on their point of view. Or it is an absurdity: the view that the truth depends on your point of view, so that we all have the god-like power to create the universe in which we live.

A Reply from Chris

My original argument does entail one of the objections which you deem 'serious'. I am not denying that there is such a thing as motive fallacy. I am saying that you misidentify examples of this. Therefore, inevitably, you overestimate the occurrence of motive fallacy assuming that you correctly identify all the actual cases and then additionally include those cases you misidentify. Therefore motive fallacy is, at least, less common than you think.

In relation to the fat legs case, it is irrelevant that I was not present at the conversation between your sister and parents. We are discussing the conversation as presented in your book, about which we both have precisely equal knowledge (indeed, it would not matter if the incident had never happened and you had invented it for illustrative purposes). We are both interpreting your sister's remark, since she did not actually say to your parents "your statement is false because you have a motive other than to speak the truth in saying what you said". I certainly don't concede that your presence in the room gives you any advantage at all, unless you now want to add some information which you didn't present in your book e.g. if you were to reply that your sister had gone on to make an unequivocal statement of this sort. But I assume that if she had then you would have reported it in your book (you could now make it up, I suppose, but then by the same token I could pretend that I was indeed lurking outside your dining room window). You interpret her statement as motive fallacy, I interpret it as I described in my first posting. I don't deny that your interpretation is possible, I just don't find it plausible. Actually, a more plausible interpretation than either of those so far discussed is that she is angling for further reassurance from your parents. And if so she still isn't committing motive fallacy because she would be continuing to believe that your parents could give a truthful answer to her question. 

On the wider issue. You say that I have muddled truth and knowledge. I say that you have made an incorrect distinction between them. Some kinds of truth are separate from knowledge and others are not. You again give physical examples (my blood temperature last Tuesday, snow is white), even though I explained in my first posting that any number of such examples would not suffice. The fact that truth and knowledge are separate in these kinds of examples does not mean that they are separate in general. Take again the example of beauty, as in my first posting. It would be absurd to say that it was true (or false) that something was beautiful even though no one had any view about whether it was beautiful or not. It becomes true only when it is believed. Nothing about an object changes when it is judged to be beautiful, it is a social (n.b. not individual) process which makes it true or false that it is beautiful. If you will concede this (which I somehow doubt you will) then we need no longer discuss Truth and Knowledge in the abstract, or make grandiose claims about the nature of the universe but instead can consider various kinds of truth and, in particular, truth in relation to common economic and political questions. Presumably you would then say that these questions are like your physical examples and I would say that they are more like the beauty example. But even if you do not concede my argument about beauty then you presumably will still want to say that these questions (and that of beauty) are like your physical examples and I would still want to say that they are not. 

My reasoning is as follows. Take the unemployment example. I assume that it is defined in terms of those people who are not in paid employment and receiving benefits. Let's say there are a million of them. The government decides that from midnight tonight those who have been unemployed for more than a year won't receive benefit. Nothing has changed objectively in the economy. But as from tomorrow, the true answer is now, say, 800,000. And now something does change objectively - 200,000 people no longer receive any money, but this is a consequence, not a cause, of the new definition. Now suppose that I assume that unemployment just means people not being in paid employment, regardless of benefits. Then the truth is that the figure is still one million. I'm not saying that any old answer is as true as any other, I'm saying that whether 1m or 800,000 is a better answer can't be judged in terms of the truth, since that is dependent upon the definition, but only in terms of the adequacy or desirability of that definition. Presumably you would say that all I have done is repeat the 'trivial' point that a sentence's truth depends on what it means. But I think that that is far from trivial because it is contestations over meanings which actually make a difference to people's lives (e.g. on fatness, the prevalence of anorexia, perhaps; on unemployment, whether people starve, perhaps). You seem willing enough to accept that prevailing meanings change over time, but unless you accept that knowledge and truth are interdependent rather than truth being independent of knowledge then you have no way of explaining how or why these meanings actually do change. It certainly can't be that there is a miraculous change in what is true because as the unemployment example shows, what has changed is the definition, from which, then, some (real) consequences flow. Politics is the process through which meanings are contested and, sometimes, changed, which is why most of your politics examples can't adequately be addressed in terms of an independently existing truth in the way you attempt to do. 

And even if I am wrong about all of this, then there still other flaws in your argument. First, in relation to economic predictions, these will of course depend upon assumptions made, even if I were to concede your argument that the ultimate test of their accuracy is whether they prove true. So it is quite reasonable to examine the assumptions a thinktank makes so as better to assess the probability of it proving accurate. Second, so far as any kind of social activity goes, behaviour (i.e. how people truly behave) is susceptible to change by virtue of the predictions and assumptions made about it. If I boil a kettle, it makes no difference if I predict that it will boil at 100C; it will happen independently of my prediction. But if I say to you "I predict that you will not leave this room" then it is quite conceivable that the very fact of my prediction will lead you to act differently from how you otherwise would (perhaps simply to confound me). Such self-defeating or self-fulfilling prophecies are very common in economics e.g. the morning newspaper predicts a petrol shortage, everyone flocks to the garage to fill up, the petrol runs out. Or if managers always assume that employees are lazy and need to be constantly watched then it makes it more likely that on the day when the employees are not watched they will take the opportunity to slacken off. So in these kinds of cases what people think is the right answer (you won't leave the room, petrol will run out, employees are lazy) will actually have an impact on what turns out to be true (you do leave the room, petrol does run out, employees do become lazy). 

Relativism is bankrupt? Well perhaps it is the way you seem to understand it, which seems to be as what I think philosophers (I am not one) call solipsism. But the choice isn't between truth being independent of belief and truth being whatever an individual believes to be true - that is a false polarity. My argument is that some kinds of truth (specifically, those pertaining to social relations) are inseparable from the social relations which take them to be true. This inseparability is in many cases non-trivial because of their capacity to affect people's lives.

Grammar

Alec Mitchell

Pedantic, but important, correction to your use of English on page 36, which reads, just over halfway down the page, "Under such circumstances it can still be rational..."  The correct expression is "IN such circumstances..." We can never be UNDER circumstances, as they are the conditions that SURROUND us (from the Latin "circum" meaning around); if you want to use an expression like "Under such..." then it's probably best to follow it with "conditions".

Finally - Some Questions
of Faith

Luke Beeching,
Civil Engineering Student, Kingston

(p23) The Trinity. It is your underlying assumption in this argument that I do not think can be taken for granted. You assume that arithmetic (3 does not equal one) applies to God. However, arithmetic, and all mathematics, is drawn (directly or indirectly) from the observed nature of this universe. It seems to me unreasonable to suppose that, were something to exist outside or apart from this universe, the ways in which this universe behaves (as described by mathematics and physical laws) could necessarily be applied to it. [I am not including interpretations of quantum theory that differ from the copenhagen interpretation, ie multiverses, as any parallel universes would (I suppose) have the same physical laws as this one.] Furthermore, the doctrine of the trinity is simply the best attempt Christians have made to describe the nature of God. It does show ignorance, which is not a virtue but probably unavoidable given the subject matter! This is far from a perfect analogy, but at one time our understanding of the nature of light was that it behaved as a wave but also as a particle. Its nature was best described (in our ignorance) as wave/particle duality: not the whole truth but a good way of explaining it at the time! Again I would point out that light is a part of our universe. If a Christian God does exist he is not limited to the universe and so presumably, harder to understand.

(p26) Faith. Faith, used in an orthodox Christian sense, has nothing to do with the definition given here. It is indeed a tragedy if we have given this impression. It is correct to say that faith does not depend on an absolute proof (although what the absolute proof would need to be, I would love to know, suggestions welcomed). However, if faith is indeed based on little or no knowledge it will certainly have little impact on the world around (ah, maybe that's where the church is struggling). Christian faith is a trust in Jesus, demonstrated by actions - I'll come back to the mafia christian (p97) in a sec. This involves a trust (which should be reasoned) in the historical accuracy of the new testament (nobody try the "miracles prove it's false" argument, that begs the question by assuming that a) miracles can't happen anyway, b) Jesus wasn't who he says he was and c) God can't control the laws of probability. All points which form at least part of the substance of an argument for Christianity). It also involves some kind of trust in what other people have said their experience of Jesus is - anecdotal evidence. It is true that faith cannot be totally reasoned and is more a balancing of likelihoods similar to that seen in court, but it is certainly not an abandoning of reason. I have yet to hear a convincing argument either for or against Christianity based entirely on reason, the difficulty normally lying with the initial assumptions of either party. This is not really a comment against this passage of the book simply a clarification that what you are describing is not faith as a christian would understand it.

p(97) mafia christian/good christian? I agree that Jack's argument, as represented here, is less than convincing. I also must admit that I have heard Christians argue in a very similar way! you are spot on when you say that the problem here is the definition of a christian. - Believing in Jesus is a pre-requisite to being a Christian but by itself does not make you a christian. - Being good (or at least, improving) is not proof that you are a Christian but it should be evidence in favour. Likewise, shooting someone is not proof that you aren't a christian but does make it less likely. So Jill's evidence that Mafia Christians kill people is based first (it would seem) on the assumption that believing in Jesus or, indeed, simply professing a belief in Jesus makes someone a Christian, second that when Jack says "open your heart to Jesus" he simply means "believe in" (this is Jack's fault, he should make himself clearer.) Thirdly Jack makes the assumption that these Mafia Christians can't really be christians because they kill people, which is probably, but not necessarily the case. Thus Jack's equivocation is between two partial definitions rather than two differing ones. For example I meet James, who says he is a premiership footballer. He knows a lot about football and a lot about the club he claims to represent, this backs up his claim but does not prove that he does indeed play for a premiership team. He might just be a knowledgeable fan or even a knowledgeable critic. I then play in a game with him in the park, if he plays well he again backs up his claim to be a professional but it is still possible that he is not. If he plays badly it seems much less likely that he is who he says he is but it does not rule it out. Whether or not James does play for the club he says is proven when the manager names his team and the guy I met runs out onto the turf on Saturday afternoon.

(p84) Inconsistency: an all-good, all-powerful God and the problem of evil. Again, the error here is in the initial assumptions made. True, an all-powerful God would be able to avoid evil (incidentally, avoid seems a funny word to use, what made you pick it?). But an all-good God might consider that the avoidance of evil, while a good thing was not the most good thing. If the most good thing and the avoidance of evil were for some reason mutually exclusive then an all good, all powerful God would not avoid evil. Don't forget that Christians also claim God is all-just, all-knowing and all-loving as well. What happens if these other attributes contribute something to the question of evil? I suppose the standard answer is the question of free will. God seems to consider our opportunity for a genuine choice more important than the avoidance of evil. The genuine choice is of how we respond to him, as clearly, although in the west some genuine choice exists about our response to many evils, in poorer countries they are stuck with the evils of hunger, war, treatable disease but no access to the treatment etc (unless we choose to make some kind of an effort). This question is one that theologians and philosophers have struggled with for centuries and a definitive answer cannot be reached by simply ignoring some of the attributes that Christians claim for God in order to produce such a simplified question from which there can only be one reasonable conclusion (God doesn't exist). It also seems slightly harsh to describe attempts to understand this issue as bogus without any kind of explanation of why you consider them such. 

Poor Harald Fawkner

David Hulks,
Art Historian

(see page p.51) He seems to have been working on an entirely legitimate argument, to do with describing a stylistic shift in Shakespeare's writing from tragedies to romances. He then attempts to describe, in the standard form of lecture abstract, what exactly his argument will consist of, straining every muscle not to reduce his argument to simple black-and-white terms just because of lack of space. The abstract is intended for fellow academics, who can presumably pick from his complex inflections the sort of points he will be trying to make, so that they can decide whether or not they should attend, but also, and more importantly, so that they can prepare their own point of view and engage more effectively with the professor in the questioning afterwards. The purpose? So that the truth of what the nature of this stylistic shift might plausibly be can can be more rigorously and purposefully pursued in the context of an academic discussion.

All would be fine, and surely this is precisely what tax-payers would want academic staff in a university to be doing. But for a group of cynical and rather rascally students, who decide that they will send the abstract in to Private Eye, presumably in the hope that it might amuse a certain kind of reader, perhaps even in the hope that it might win them £10. Harmless we might say, and quite funny. Except that, for the sake of a laugh - or, worse, for the sake of financial gain - the students' action runs the risk of damaging a senior lecturer's academic reputation. At worse, the students' actions might have made it less likely that anyone will take this academic topic seriously any more. It will be less likely that anyone will engage with the truth or otherwise of the proposal that the professor is asking us to consider because Professor Fawkner has been labeled a fraud.

To make matters worse, along comes a book, written by someone who claims academic authority, where the abstract is re-printed, and where the same thoughtless assumption is made that originally belonged only to some misguided students. But now, under the guise of philosophical analysis, it is argued that the professor's abstract does not intend to communicate the ideas he surely wants to put forward. Rather, it is an attempt to 'give an impression of being learned while saying almost nothing at all'. Is this really likely? Would Fawkner really have attempted to hoodwink his colleagues in this way? Would he really have felt the need to raise his own importance by using baffling phraseology which, were it exposed, would make him vulnerable to ridicule amongst his colleagues? And why would he deliberately want to say 'almost nothing at all'? Surely his aim was precisely the opposite of this: to pack in as much as possible. This is the real reason why he comes across as peddling 'inscrutable verbosity' ('comes across as' should be underlined). But is being inscrutable to others - when it was not even, presumably, a public lecture programme but rather an internal reserach seminar intended for specialists - is speaking to one's colleagues in this fashion really such a crime?

The problem here is that we will never know the value of Fawkner's paper; we are not even allowed to guess. Instead, he and we are told to 'shut up'. We are left in the dark about what the professor might possibly mean by proposing 'emotion as quasi-aesthetically disconnected from the apparently conditioned mundanity of cause and effect'. It's not worth even engaging with, because the professor is clearly a pseud. In fact, perhaps all 'professors' are, or at least all those who work in the faculties of arts and humanities, not philosophy and science. On the question of 'big ideas about the Bard', it seems it's OK, even preferable, to 'remain forever in the dark on the matter'. Why? Because the author has made the sensible decision 'never to attend academic literature seminars' - presumably because he has decided, as a good believer in the integrity of Private Eye, that all such seminars are pretentious and do not set out to pursue the light of truth as he would want them to. 

This seems simple academic rivalry, rather nasty poking at another discipline that by your own admission you do not understand. Furthermore it would seem that your argument is transparently vulnerable to exactly the same accusations that you so unreasonably and dismissively hurls at others. Certainly at this point, 'Bad Thoughts' descends into popularist nonsense, as I hope I've clearly demonstrated, and as others it seems have glimpsed. By including such shockingly one-sided analyses, you disqualify yourself from being able to argue in favour of truthfulness, which is rather foolishly what you set out to do. Therefore you should accept this criticism and retract your statements in this chapter if not elsewhere, since by your own standards the argument above represents much clearer thinking than your own.

Well, of course at the end of the book, you do offer to do this. You say that you will be 'obliged' to accept well-reasoned argument, although only if you judge its 'force of reason' to be sufficient. By what criteria will you make this judgement, we might legitimately ask? Are you the best expert here? You seem to believe that your own authority and