Philosophical Fallacies: Ways of Erring in Philosophical Exposition 3030971732, 9783030971731

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Philosophical Fallacies Ways of Erring in Philosophical Exposition n ic hol a s r e sc h e r

Philosophical Fallacies

Nicholas Rescher

Philosophical Fallacies Ways of Erring in Philosophical Exposition

Nicholas Rescher Philosophy University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-97173-1    ISBN 978-3-030-97174-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97174-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Patrick Grim Collaborator par excellence

Preface

Philosophers address large problems regarding mankind and our place in the scheme of things, difficult issues where deliberations all too easily go off track. And this is particularly so because the discipline tries to meet almost unachievable high standards in its demand for the concurrent realization of generality and precision. This renders certain various modes of error—certain fallacies of reasoning—particularly tempting. The present deliberations will endeavor to illustrate and clarify some of these. Perhaps it was the bleakness of the yearlong isolation during the 2021–2021 pandemic that led me to contemplate the somber scene of philosophical error; thereby, resulting in this book. But be this as it may, I found the exercise instructive and hope that the reader will do so as well. I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her patience and conscientious efforts in preparing this material for the press and to the publisher’s reader for cogent constructive commentary. Pittsburgh, PA, USA May 2021

Nicholas Rescher

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Contents

1 Error, Mistake, and Fallacy in Philosophizing  1 2 Classifying Philosophical Fallacies  9 3 Illustrating Philosophical Fallacies 27 4 The Fallacy of Respect Neglect 57 5 Fallacies Regarding Free Will 67 6 Totalization Fallacies 83 7 The Significance of Philosophical Fallacies101 Bibliography121 Index127

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List of Displays

Display 2.1 Display 2.2 Display 2.3 Display 3.1 Display 3.2 Display 5.1 Display 5.2 Display 5.3 Display 7.1 Display 7.2 Display 7.3

The classification of fallacies Some infeasible inferential transits Philosophical fallacies The regress of idealization The common picture Timing issues Timing and determination Deliberating and probability: an example The ampliative approach The reductive approach A paradox of rational belief

10 20 24 30 39 70 71 73 111 112 114

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CHAPTER 1

Error, Mistake, and Fallacy in Philosophizing

Philosophical Error Aristotle said it well: “Man by nature desires to know.” For us, the absence of information can be almost as distressing as that of food. Philosophizing is a purposive enterprise that addresses the “big questions” of the human condition: man’s place in the universe and the proper management of the obligations and opportunities of human life. It is a venture in rational inquiry that begins with problems and seeks solutions. And the big issues that preoccupy it relate to fundamentals of human concern, being universal in dealing with humans at large rather than particular groups thereof (farmers or doctors or Europeans or contemporaries of Shakespeare). Philosophical deliberations must have a bearing—direct or oblique—upon the key essentials of the human condition—knowledge and truth, justice and morality, beauty and goodness, and the other “big questions” about our place in the world’s scheme of things. In philosophizing, we accordingly engage a range of issues of a scope in generality and fundamentality that removes them beyond the range of our ordinary idealizing and consciously available experience. But the more deeply we enter into the range of matters remote from the course of commonly available experience the more uniform our claims become and the more likely we are to fall into error. And these basic facts of (cognitive) life put our ventures into philosophical speculation on a shaky and problematic basis. In answering our philosophical questions, we have no © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Rescher, Philosophical Fallacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97174-8_1

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alternative but to do the best we can in the full recognition of how that it may well not be good enough. By the very nature of the enterprise, avoiding loose and fallacious thinking is of the essence. A fallacy is a mode of failure in substantiative reasoning. When an argument for a conclusion is fallacious, this truth shows and accounts for its ineffectiveness. And what is crucial here is not the truth of the conclusion but the cogency of its supportive argumentation. When someone falls into error, some crucial questions arise: (1) why did the individual fall into error?; what sort of motivation was at work?; what led the agent to go wrong? This first is a matter of the MOTIVE or RATIONALE for erring—if accounting or the occurrence of error. But there is also another question, (2) What sort or error did the individual fall into?; what sort of error is at issue?; what is wrong with what the agent did? This is a matter of the MODE or MANNER of erring. Fallacy—our present concern—has to do (only) with the second issue. This distinction between motive and mode is critical. The manner of error may be a misspelling or a slip of the tongue or a miscalculation. The motive for its occurrence may be confusion or over-haste. These latter are explanations for the error, and this is for the occurrence of fallacies. They are not themselves fallacies. They explain how it is that the agent comes to commit a fallacy, but are not themselves the particular sorts of error is at issue with the commitment of the fallacy. Committing a fallacy is always a flaw in philosophical exposition. But not all flaws are fallacies. Leaving significant matters hanging as unseparated loose ends in one’s position is a significant flaw—consequentially a defect in philosophizing. But it is not a fallacy. For example, it is clear that in matters of social-political policy and practice it may well be unavailable to ask the individuals of the present to make a sacrifice and pay a priori to enhance the safety and well-being of the populace of the future. But the classical precept of “the greatest good of the greatest number” never really confronted the crucial issue of how to count. But it occurred as a matter of neglect more than of fallacious thinking. Were those at issue to be only one’s living, breathing contemporaries, or were future generations to be taken into account—and how many of them? This lack was inherently a flaw and a significant failure in developing the position. A philosophical fallacy is not a special kind of fallacy peculiar to philosophizing and not encountered elsewhere. It is, rather, a general mode of flaw in reasoning that happens to achieve particular prominence in philosophical discussions.

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The Rule of Reason In philosophy, as elsewhere, there is a crucial difference between motivation and substantiation. A thinker may be ardent in the articulation and defense of a position that he believes, almost instinctively, on the basis of deep psychic resonance and ideological affinity. But this does not make him a philosopher. For what matters here is not the agent’s motivation, however, heartfelt and compelling, but substantiation grounding in reasons why the rest of us should share this sentiment. Reasoning for doctrines rather than their psychic appeal is what matters and the commitment to the counteraction of reason is the crux. Why reason? Because it is of our very essence as rational creations. This last thing we would be willing to sacrifice is our reason, which is as dear to us as life itself. But as thinkers have realized since the days of Aristotle, reasoning requires premisses and these must somehow be made available to reason from without. But whence can they come? This is a matter of the thematic range of deliberations at issue: in mathematics—intuition, in science— observation; in grammar—communicative practice. And in philosophy— the life experience of the wider community as reflected in; proverbial wisdom, common sense, the consensus gentian, the “wisdom of crowd,” as well as the expertise of science and scholarship, all these provide the data that feed grist to philosophy’s mill. The coherent systematization of human experience at large—cognitive, affective, social, and so on—is the definitive task of philosophy. Philosophizing is subject to two principal modes of error: Errors of Reason: Inferential flaws in the articulation of conclusions to be drawn from given premisses. Errors of Judgment: Assumption flaws in the supposition, presuppositions, and grounds of reasoning. Evaluation in the former case lies in the range valid/invalid; in the latter it lies in the range plausible/implausible. Philosophical cogency lies in drawing valid (or appropriate) conclusions for plausible (or reasonable) premisses. And here their acceptability is not absolute but basis relevant, and depends on the experience-determined context of judgment plausibility that is available to the agent. What is judgmentally acceptable to a contemporary of Socrates may well not be so for one of Kant.

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However, this does not make for an indifferent relativism of anything goes. There are facts it is impossible for someone to realize. (Rutherford’s model of the atom was not available to the atomists of ancient Greece.) And, on the other hand, there are no facts that are inexcusable for someone to ignore. (The micro-organisms unavailable to the ancients are unavoidable for the moderns.) Doctrinal availability is generally a matter of historical context. What philosophy strives to develop is an informative and comprehensive view of our position in reality’s stagesetting able to orient us—both as individuals and as social groups—in dealing with our human and natural environment. In sum, it seeks to provide the information needed to guide us in life’s dealings and illustrates the opportunities at our disposal for action in the realization of the desirable and the good.

Error Versus Mistake Error consists in getting it wrong—for whatever reason. Mistake is culpable error—error the agent could and should have avoided. Fallacy is the way of proceeding that leads the agent into error—the pathway to error. (An entire chapter will subsequently be dedicated to one particular fallacy, namely, the Fallacy of Respect Neglect.) Philosophical error can take many forms: oversimplification, inappropriate presupposition, probabilistic analogy, and more. All of these can occur both by innocent and venial unknowing/inadventure and by heedless and compatible and feckless misjudgment. This latter occurrence— outright mistake in philosophy—is fortunately rather rare. There is, to be sure, the change made against Arthur Schopenhauer (1787–1860) that his bourgeois mode of life was inconsistent with his austere and acerbic teaching. But here Schopenhauer sensibly replied that it was quite enough for someone to explain the nature of a good life; that he himself should also exemplify it would be asking too much. Such a discrepancy can be considered as rather uncharacteristic or even hypocritical, but it hardly discerns characterization as erroneous. In large measure, the errors in which philosophizing becomes entangled are not culpable mistakes of incompetence or carelessness, but are aspirationally rooted in the systemic structure of the philosophical enterprise, evoked by the nature of the problem situation that philosophy confronts.

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Mistakes in Versus About Philosophy It is important to distinguish between error in philosophizing and error about philosophizing. The former consists of errors arising when mistaken views are operative within philosophical doctrine, be exemplified by such matters as inconsistency or oversimplification or failure to draw due distinctions. Mistaken views about philosophy arise regarding the objective of philosophy, its limits or boundaries, and its methods or practices. This will include misjudgments regarding the thematic range of the subject—for example, by allocating to it domains which do not belong to philosophy. One key error abut philosophy is to believe that it involves the view that there is uniquely one appropriate and correct philosophy so that one system should suit all thinkers. Such a position reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy. Philosophy is a particular sort of enterprise. It addresses “the big questions” regarding man’s place in the world’s scheme of things. Thus, there can be mistakes about philosophy as well as mistakes in philosophizing. Ethics and metaphysics are clearly in; numeretrics and methodology are out. Philosophy is not opinion-mongering. It is not a venture in simply varying doctrines and assuming affirmations on relevant topics. Philosophy is an exercise in reasoning. To philosophize is not to present—to tell people what to do or think. Its job is to explain: to expand not simply the what but the why; to explain the reasons why the issues should be resolved as is. If you dispense with reason-why explanation you dispense with philosophy itself. Philosophizing admits to various sorts of mistakes, not only mistakes of substance about its own nature but also mistakes of procedure. Both in (mis-)reasoning but also in (mal-)exposition. Thus, mistakes within philosophizing would be exemplified by such matters as inconsistency or oversimplification or failure to draw due distinctions. The radical skeptic who claims to know for certain that nothing can be known for certain is clearly in difficulty. While people can make mistakes in philosophizing, there is no such thing as a winning or erroneous philosophy as such. Granted, every philosopher will think that those who disagree with his position are wrong. But that sort of thing is in fact mere disagreement and does really qualify as error. Mere disagreement does not qualify as error, it cannot be said that when two philosophers answer a question differently, then at least one of them must be wrong. In these matters, it can be the question that is indecisive and not just the answer.

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Error Versus Disagreement The not-infrequent objection—“that’s just not doing proper philosophy”—is accordingly one only available to those engaged in on the battlefield of philosophy itself. The external analyst of the matter cannot operate the destructive good and bad philosophizing. Of course, rhetorical matters—good and bad exposition, reasoning, presentation—are at his command. But good and bad issue-resolution is not. At this stage taking a position within the scope of the subject itself becomes necessary. Errors of exposition are one thing, errors of philosophizing another. To be sure, from within a given philosophical position, a doctrine there is almost invariably the idea that other variant positions and doctrines are false. While people can make mistakes in philosophizing, there is no such thing as a wrong or erroneous philosophy as such. When there is philosophical disagreement on substantive matters, each party—proceeding from its own doctrinal standpoint—will, naturally enough, charge the other with being in error. And the so-regarded recipient will then, of course, simply shrug off such a charge with its counter-­ accusation. The recipient of such a charge will have to take the matter more seriously as now there is a perceptible need for correction and repair. Error—philosophical error included—comes in two forms. First, there is an inadvertent and blameless error. The person who proceeds on the basis of available information that happens to be wrong or the person whose experience provides a misleading bias is blameless for any mistaken resolution. Here, error is blameless and outside reprehension. By contrast, there is the prospect of outright mistake, of insufficient heed to the correct indications, of carelessness or incompetence. Here, we have an outright mistake meriting the criticism that the agent “ought to have known better.” Error of this more serious kind is fortunately rather rare in philosophizing. For example, the distinctions needed to avert confusion, of the information needed to evade inappropriate presupposition needed to evade inappropriate presuppositions may simply not have been available in the state of knowledge of the day. The lack of the fallacy-averting information may thus be due not to negligence, lack of effort, or unacceptance on the agent’s part. The damaging ignorance can simply be an artifact of inaccessible information. In this matter as in others an agent cannot be reprehended for doing what cannot be helped in the circumstances. Is fallacious reasoning blameworthy? Does a philosopher merit reproach and

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reprehension for committing a fallacy in his reasoning? In the end, there is one—and just one—exculpation for committing a fallacy, namely, excusable ignorance. For it is common that certain facts just were not acceptable in the state of information obtaining at a given time. The distinction between culpable and venial error is virtually important for philosophy. When an idea or doctrine is first articulated, its defects or shortcomings may well not be apparent. Only in the wake of further development and critique may such defaults become apparent. The defects it involves are, as such, certainly errors. But they are not mistakes and could not have been avoided at the early stages. To say that a philosopher was in error is simply a statement of descriptive fact. By contrast, to say was mistaken is a graver imputation of flawed workmanship. The history of philosophy is a lack of errors. But outright mistakes are few and far between. Only relation as we say of a philosopher that “he should have known better.” The important distinction between error and mistake is crucial to the present deliberation Alike in matters of answering questions, solving problems, or seeking goals, error is simply a matter of getting it wrong—so proceeding as it fails in creating the objection. Mistake, by contrast, is only a certain sort of error, namely, culpable error, error that arises for some improper proceeding on the agent’s part. With error as such there is no alternative to responsibility, but such an attribution is inherent in mistakes, which as such arises from some inappropriate proceeding on that agent’s part. Mistakes are errors that the agent could and should have avoided. Thus, when relevant information is simply not available to agents—after all, they cannot be aware of discoveries as yet unmade—then one cannot expect the corresponding distinctions or premisses to be taken into account, and any correlative flaws will be unavoidable and thereby excusable/venial. We cannot say that the agent “should have known better” in relation to that which he cannot possibly get to know. And so in philosophy as elsewhere various fallacious reasonings must nevertheless be accounted blameless. Error can be venial and excusable, but with mistakes we have it that “the agent ought to have known better.” When an agent takes the wrong fact in the route, he is in error; when he does so despite good outcome to the contrary, he is mistaken. Again, in the case of Distinction Failure, the agent may well have no grounds in the prevailing conditions to think the distinction to be necessary. On the other hand, if the fallacy is of flawed reasoning, such as post

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hoc ergo propter hoc, then the mistake at issue is indeed culpable and the agent “should have known better.” When important distinctions were not drawn in his day, a philosopher cannot be justly reprehensible for ignoring them. Whenever fallacies are the result of understandable unknowing committing them can be excused. Only when there is culpable ignorance—where it can reasonably be said that the agent at issue “could and should have known better” is the resultant fallacy discreditable. One cannot reasonably expect someone to exceed the knowledge of their day, not hold them blameworthy for failing to so do. In philosophical exposition, a fallacy is something more serious than just a flaw. For a flaw can be the failure to realize something positive, while a fallacy is actually the realization of something negative. And yet, error— as such—is not in and of itself a fallacy. Instead, a fallacy is a failed mode of reasoning that results in error. Erroneous conclusion can be arrived at without any fallacious reasoning at all, specifically when the reasoning— while of itself perfectly correct and non-fallacious—is based on false premisses. Even in the absence of fallacious reasoning philosophical deliberations need not yield correct and tenable conclusions. Avoiding fallacies is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good philosophizing.

CHAPTER 2

Classifying Philosophical Fallacies

Fallacy Philosophical fallacies fall within the larger theme of fallacies in general, regarding which there is a large and diffuse logical and rhetorical literature.1 Logicians have traditionally classified fallacies in line with the taxonomy of Display 2.1. But within this broader context, there is a varied assortment of modes of fallacy that are especially common in specifically philosophical deliberation. It is these characteristically philosophical mistakes that will be presently at issue.

Inconsistency Inconsistency and self-contradiction constitute the most serious of philosophical failings. When a thesis or doctrine is at odds with itself—counter-­ indicated even on its own telling (such as a radical skepticism to the effect that no philosophical thesis can reasonably be maintained)—we are clearly in the presence of something unacceptable.

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Formal:

improper modes of inference

EXAMPLES: Denying the Antecedent, Affirming the Consequent

Substantive [Material]: improper modes of assertion —interpretative: errors regarding meaning EXAMPLES: shifting Equal Terms, Inadequate Distribution

—Presumptive: errors regarding acceptability EXAMPLES: Erroneous Presupposition Begging the Question, Non sequitur

Display 2.1  The classification of fallacies

Unreasonable Demand The Fallacy of Unreasonable Demand hinges on requiring something that cannot possibly be realized. One major form of philosophical improbability turns on the infinite regress of presuppositions. Thus, consider the theses: • The adequate explanation of events calls for explaining their causes adequately. • A case is not adequately explained until all of its cases are so explained. Clearly, these structures render the explanations of events impossible from the very start. And an analogous situation prevails with respect to the thesis • Accepting a conclusion is not justified until all of its processes become acceptably justified. Entanglement in such infinite regress is among the salient flaws of philosophizing.2 Infinite proceedings are just too much to ask for.

A Survey of Philosophical Fallacies Display B gives a survey of the principal sort of fallacies communally encountered in philosophical exposition. The falling observations are in order in this context.

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• Philosophical fallacies so function that errors of omission can be either innocent or culpable, as can errors of presumption; but errors of logic are always culpable. • Fallacies of presumption constitute efforts “to obtain by theft what would by rights be the fruit of toil.” They are almost always culpable. • Fallacies of logic are always culpable. • Fallacies of omission and presumption may or may not be culpable, although the former mainly are.

Failure to Heed Distinctions Men and women differ. Granted, they are not different species—the one from Mars and the other from Venus. But they differ biologically, socially, behaviorally (?). And this is something philosophers can and should take account of. But there are two crucially important respects in which men and women do not differ. One is cognitively with respect to matters of fact. The melting point of lead is the same for men as for women, as is the atomic weight of measuring, and the square root of two. Matters of fact, alike concrete and absurd, are the same for men as for women. There is no male arithmetic or female physics—factual domains are the same for both. The other crucially casting is ethics. Theft is uniformly reprehensible for men and women, and kindness is uniformly virtuous. Moral virtues and values do not admit of gender differentiation. These considerations point to a characteristic fallacy in the philosophical treatment of gender issues. For her is it needful to heed and maintain the essential difference between these issues where gender matters and those where it does not. To proceed otherwise is a Failure to Heed to Critical Distinction.

Contravening Common Sense It is always difficult from a philosophical position to gain a fair hearing in our antagonistic climate of opinion. But, of course, it would be fallacious to reject a contention on grounds of unpopular rather than untenable consequence. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer thus rejected Kant’s theory of space as absurd because it envisioned space as a mind-created thought-­ thing. As Spencer saw it, this violated the common-sense fact that minds

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have to exist and function within space and thus cannot create that which is the essential prerequisite for their own existence.3 Some philosophical dictums are so bizarre in the way of common-sense combination that no one has even actually espoused them and their side status is that of discussable hypotheses available for purpose of contrast. Perhaps the most striking of these is solipsism, the theory that the only existing person is one oneself, and that everyone else is simply a matter of one’s illusions. And a comparably bizarre hypothesis is that the entire world has come into being only a matter of minutes ago, complete with fossils, eroded stones, grown trees, adult people, minds with memories, and so on. The consequences of such a position can always be ironed out through accommodating conjectures. But it can carry no conviction through absurdity in contravening common sense. The classic instance of a purported refutation via common sense is afforded by Dr. Samuel Johnson’s attempted demolition of Bishop Barclay’s idealism: he kicked a stone. His line of thought was straightforward: “If a stone were not solid and material, you just couldn’t kick it. That’s just common sense.” To be sure, Barclay would not have been intimidated. As he saw it the whole business—the stone, the foot, the kicking, the whole business is simply an experiential episode. And as such— that is, as an experience—it is all mental. As Barclay saw it, that too is simply common sense. Thus, the philosopher who propounds the rule that “All rules have exceptions” saws off the very limb on which his own position hinges by subjecting his claimed “all” to the concession of exceptions. It is not difficult to find other examples of this sort of failing: • Radical skepticism. Consider the thesis that there is no achieving knowledge in philosophical matters: that in this field nothing can be established as true. As metaphilosophy is a part of philosophy and all theories about philosophy are themselves philosophical, this doctrine saws off the limb that keeps itself aloft. • Sophomore relativism. Consider the doctrine maintaining that everything is simply a matter of opinion: there is just what you think to be so and what I think, and that there is nothing whatever that should and must be thought in common—alike by you and me and all the rest. But this very thesis that “Nothing qualifies as communally cogent” simply flies in the face of what it itself purports.

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• Global ineffability. Here, we have the doctrine that language is unsayable of formulating philosophical truth: it is a practical resource for dealing with common-place matters but cannot correctly articulate matters of abstract theory. Here, too, we once again have a self-­ conflicting contention. Such cases instantiate positions that are at odds with themselves—unsustainable even from the point of view that they themselves insist on taking.

Consequence Unacceptability Incongruity is closely related to consequence unacceptability. It flies in the face of generally acknowledged fact—that it conflicts with “what everyone acknowledged” to be so and goes against common sense on the consensus generalism as it used to be called. To contradict the “common knowledge” of what everyone realizes as on this basis seen as a decisive defect of philosophical theorizing. While self-contradiction spells self-inflicted disaster for a philosophical position, refutation by consequence-unacceptability is less drastic, envisioning the derivation of something that is not logically self-contradictory but rather clearly unacceptable and false. What is at issue here is the mode of argumentation proceeding by what logicians call modus tollens. A refutation through noting that the thesis or doctrine in question yields a consequence that conflicts with something seems non-negotiably certain. Thus, the logical positivists of the 1930s sought to eliminate the very possibility of metaphysics by denying its prospects of decisive experimental testability. But as various critics soon observed, their position had the unacceptable consequence of unraveling substantial sections of natural science where a comparable decisive testability of significant theories is often also impracticable.4 Again, consider the thesis: “Categorical certainty is never available in matters of empirical fact”. Such a position has the consequence that we could not properly claim such certainty for a proposition like “The moon is not made of green cheese.” This is clearly unacceptable: the claim at issue is being as certain as anything can be. To think otherwise would be to deprive the idea of certainty of any meaningful applicability. Or again, take, the ethical thesis that “All willful killings are murder and therefore morally unjustifiable.” Given that this would have the consequence of condemning those who will in ways that are legally and morally

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not only accepted but even mandated—soldiers and executioners acting in line of duty—this thesis cannot be endorsed unqualifiedly as is. Then too, consider the stance of a radical idealism that there are no objective facts that exist independently of what people think, so that the being of fact consist in their by in thought. This would clearly lead to the consequence that prior to the emergence of minds in the world there were no facts whatsoever—no mind-antecedent state of things which mind-­ endowed beings could emerge. This is clearly an unacceptable consequence (moreover, it obliterates the distinction between acknowledged fact and facts as such). In all such cases, a position is refuted by showing that it leads inferentially to untenable consequences.

Improper Possibility Elimination In canvassing possibilities for search by elimination, it is important to ensure that they are mutually exclusive and (above all) exhaustive. The Fallacy of Ignoring Possibilities is thus a significant flaw in philosophical exposition. It occurs when a canvas/survey has been made of possible ways of resolving a philosophical issue and one (or more) of them eliminated on grounds of having some supported flaw, shortcoming, or deficiency. Reasoning by elimination only works when the range of possibilities is correctly and appropriately mapped out, and employment of this mode of reasoning thus bares significant and substantial presuppositions. And so possibility omission throws the door wide open to the entry of philosophical error. Philosophers happily take recourse to the “Process of Elimination.” By finding flaws and picking flaws in the contentions of their opponents, they seek to establish their own favored positions. However, this proceeding of proof by elimination—this extraction of positivities from negativities— only works when the spectrum of alternatives is mapped out in a way that is both exclusive and—even more critically—totalization with respect to the probabilities. If this crucial aspect of completeness and exhaustiveness is not pre-established and remains no more than a problematic assumption—we have no more than a fallacious hodgepodge: an exercise in the Fallacy of Incomplete Alternatives. Another prominent philosophical fallacy is that of Issue Distortion, which, in effect, improperly changes the subject. In Plato’s dialogue,

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Socrates repeatedly changes his interlocution with this. When the question under consideration was “What is justice?,” they instead provide answer to the question “What (sort of things) are just?” and offered not a specification but some examples. In effect, they provided the right answer to the wrong question. Traditional rhetorician condemned this fallacy as ignoratio elenchi, ignoring the line of deliberation. This sort of subset-shifting of the subject is particularly common in polished philosophy when issue of ethical merit are often replaced by those of material advantage. This fallacy of Issue Distortion can also be characterized as issue conflation or confusion. In its general structure, it is a procedural/methodological flaw rather than a substantive error—although specific cases often take the later guise. Issue Distortion is always a culpable mistake whose perpetuators aught “to know better.”

Coincidence Dismissal The Fallacy of Coincidence Dismissal occurs through transmuting a mere conjunction into an actual connection of some sort, thus moving from and-also to and-thereby. It is a generalized version of the traditional fallacy of post-hoc ergo propter-hoc. This highly problematic mode of reasoning is particularly common in social and political philosophy where it is often argued that because A is found alongside B, this constitutes a connection so that reducing A will reduce B. One mistake is John Dewey’s argument that because traditional literacy education accompanied political unsophistication in the electorate, a more practical and scientific education would make for improved democracy. And a further example would be the Wilsonian idea that because Germany’s militarian existed in the old social order, the augmentation of populism would engender a social benign system. (What they got instead was Nazism!)

Obscurantism Obscurantism is a major fallacy in philosophizing, especially diffuse in the European continent since the days of the French revolution and post-­ revolutionary idealism. Its hallmark is the use of obscure, never properly explained terms that leaves understanding as “as exercise for the reader.” What is Marxists? What is Proudhon’s equality? What is Heidigerian annihilation? Those authors never tell us. The unclarity of these conceptions leaves the constitution of the correlative philosophy as a

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do-it-yourself exercise for the reader. Every interpreter has his own doctrine, and the ideologically detached reader is left to stumble in a fog of apprehension. Recent French philosophizing on issues of personal and social philosophy affords a graphic instance of this sort of thing. Its discourse guidance is the principle that good philosophizing must be intelligible. To be sure clarity is not enough. But by no reasonable standard is unclarity an asset.

Bias and Dogmatism The Fallacy of Bias arises in philosophy when undue and exaggerated emphasis in important or significance is assigned to one aspect of a situation or relation to the rest, as Berkeley’s “To be is to be perceived” brushes aside the equally significant “To be is to be conceived.” Some philosophers seek to erect a construction on sand—without anything like a firm base of support. They fail to fit out their salient commitments without any basis of evidentiation and substantiation, and give reciprocal no good reason for acceptance. (“Take it or leave it” seems to be their motto.) This proceeding is substantially preaching from teaching. It is accordingly the Fallacy of Dogmatism, which leaves the proponent in the role of a guru rather than a philosopher. (Of course, people who are too important for detailed examination and elaboration reasoning may well prefer this sort of thing.)

Analogy Stretching Analogy stretching is another major form of philosophical fallacy. Thus, the analogy of statecraft in difficult circumstances with inauguration in difficult weather has been prominent in political philosophy since ancient times. And yet, the case that can be made for its cogency is feeble at best. Here, the pattern of reasoning has the format “If you say X in this context, you would also have to say X in that one, which—for good reasons— would be quite unacceptable.” For outright refutation this analogy must of course be very tight. An example of such reasoning is found in the contention that heredity bequests should be abolished because monetary awards should always only be rewards—that they should only ever be given to those who have done something to deserve them. Plausible though this may sound it is clearly untenable on closer inspection. For one would now also have to

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abolish the award of treasure troves as well as doing away with lotteries and games of chance. A further illustration of such analogy refutation occurs in the context of a scientific positivism of the rigoristic sort advocated by Ernst Mach, which admits the following critique: “If you reject grounds of experiential micro-­ entities on grounds of their experiential unaccessibility then you must forego any recourse to lawful generalization in explanation, since all experience is finite in scope and can never achieve the universality that is required for actual lawfulness.”

Premiss Deficiency Premiss Deficiency is yet another common form of philosophical fallacy. The unavailability of a tenable rationale for substantiating a philosophical doctrine is obviously a decisive impediment to accepting a philosophical doctrine. It if cannot be plausibly substantiated then it does not really “have a leg to stand on.” This sort of defect is going to be especially critical here: unavailable premisses. After all, philosophical contentions are— or should be—the product of rational deliberation, and rational substation inevitably involves premisses so that one salient way of refuting a philosophical claim or position is to establish the untenability of one or more of its sustaining premisses. A classic example of the phenomenon of premiss untenability is afforded by those parts of Aristotelian cosmology that were geared to a geocentric conception of the universe. Again, it is clear that what is wrong with the idea of Aryan physics or Soviet biology or feminists astronomy is that all of them rest on the common yet deeply problematic and unsustainable premiss that nature’s observable modus is somehow responsive to people’s socio-potential orientation, so that the proper answer to certain questions about how things work in the natural world is something that depends on the investigator’s ideology.

Counterexample Admission One prominent way of defeating a generalizing of the format “All Xs are Ys” is by way of counterexample, that is, by adducing an instance of an X that is not a Y. A classic instance of counterexamples in philosophical refutation is given by René Descartes classic Cogito reasoning: “I think therefore

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I am.” Descartes here projected a counterexample to the radical skeptic’s thesis that certainty is unachievable with regard to factual matters. As he saw it, doubting is by nature a way of thinking so that in doubting one’s own existence one actually affirms it as a thinking being.5 A further illustration of this procedure is set on stage by the thesis that: “Only doings whose agent could have done otherwise in the circumstance can possibly qualify as free acting.” John Locke provided a decisive counterexample here—effectively as follows: “Consider the person who chooses to remain in a certain room and in so doing entirely of his own unfettered decision and unconstrued choice.” By hypothesis the individual remains in the room of his free will. And yet if—unbeknownst to him—the room were actually locked, he could not do otherwise. Again, consider the philosophical contention, “To know a fact is justifiably to believe something that is true.” But then consider a disperative fact “P-or-Q” which is believed by Jones who indeed has justification for his belief because he believes P (which happens to be false), but which happens to be true only because Q is true (which Jones disbelieves). We would then certainly not want to say that Jones knows that P-or-Q, which nevertheless is something true that is believed by him.

Infinite Regression The philosophical dismissal of infinite regresses found one of its earliest instances in the paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (b. ca. 485 BC). He reasoned as follows: Notoriously fleet-footed Achilles has a race with a proverbially slow tortoise. Naturally enough, the tortoise demands a head start. But now by the time that Achilles reaches the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise will have moved on and will be somewhat ahead. And when Achilles reaches that position the tortoise will have moved on and will still be ahead a bit. And so on. Thus Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise.6

Thus, in the face of an infinite and thereby incompletable process, Achilles cannot reach that goal, and actually can never even get started en route to it. With infinite regression thus ruled out as impracticable, Zeno saw his argument as a refutation of motion.

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Plato (c. 428–347  BC) has a prime place in the history of infinite regress. His dialogue Parmenides is a locus classicus of regress argumentation. Parmenides here tries to saddle the Platonic theory of ideas with the objects that it entails on an infinite regression of idea, idea of the idea, idea of the idea of the idea, and so on.7 The reasoning set out here is a variant of that set out in Book X of the Republic when Plato answers for the uniqueness of the Forms of things: [In the realm of natural Form] there is no more than one couch, uniquely wrought and created: the couch which really and in itself is (autên ekeinên ho esti klinê) …. For if there were two, there would now have to be (a third) Form which both of them would have, and then that would be the couch which really and in itself is, and not the other two.8

Analogous reasoning is at issue in the so-called Third Man argument of Aristotle, which criticizes the Platonic theory as requiring a third super idea of man to cement men to the man-idea which links them and thereby embark on an infinite regress.9

Improper Modal Transit In cognition as in human dealings we have to pay our way: there is no such thing as a free lunch. This inheres in the fundamental principle that rational in a derivative as in material production ex nihilo nihil fit: you can only take out what has been put in. And in philosophical contexts, this is most striking and portentous in the context of the corollary principle that modal innovation is impracticable, so that operative here is a Principle of Inferential Homogeneity to the effect that: In valid inference to a conclusion of a given thematic orientation information must of this same thematicity must be provided by the premises.

On this basis a wide array of inferential transit must prove to be impracticable, as per the register of Display 2.2. In each case, a cogent inferential limitation from premisses in the first thematically modal category to a conclusion in the second became possible only when the inference is reconstrued enthymematically subject to the assumption of some tacit premiss to bridge the gap between the modal availability of the antecedent premiss to the modal commitments of the conclusion.

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• • • • • •

fact to value actuality to necessity moves to morals appearance to reality subjectivity to objectivity legality to justice

Display 2.2  Some infeasible inferential transits

Some illustrations will help clarify the matter. Take the philosophically common contention that the fact that people do value something entails that it has value. It is readily seen, however, that this fact-to-value transition pivots on the transit supposition that people proceed rightly, properly, and correctly in matters of evaluation. Without this (clearly non-factual) presupposition the transit from valuing to value becomes unachievable. Or again, take the transit from legality—what the law requires—to justice—what is ethically right and proper. Such a style of reasoning only is cogent subject to the enthymematic supposition of a just legal system that seeks to allocate in fact what is just and fully in principles. As these examples indicate, the Fallacy of Improper Modal Transit can come into play whenever such inferences are projected in the absence of the presupposition and precommitments on whose basis alone the transition at issue will become practicable.

Category Confusion Yet another way of refuting a philosophical position is by noting that it is predicated on a category mistake. Thus, philosophers sometime ascribe temporarily to timeless objects. They wonder whether π existed in Neanderthal times and whether the Pythagorean Theorem will survive the extraction of life in the Solar System. But themes of this sort simply bark up the wrong tree. Quantities and method relationships just are not the sort of thing that exists in space and time. To inquire into them on this basis is to submit to a category mistake. One cannot posit this sort of thing in time any more than one can position one’s right to vote or one’s responsibility toward children in some spatial location or other.

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In philosophy, as elsewhere, one must not conflate the things that belong to different categories. Consider an example. Theorists here suggested that our everyday inductive reasoning has doubtful validity. One philosopher writes: The real question is: Do any number of cases of a law [say of gravity] being fulfilled in the past afford evidence that it will be fulfilled in the future? If not, it becomes plain that we have no grounds whatever for expecting the sun to rise tomorrow.10

But look at those stressed terms. Granted the past ponders no thematically certain proof of what will happen in the future. But evidence? And we indeed have no demonstrably failproof guarantee, but no cogent individual basis? The argument against the rationality of our “individual” belief ridden roughshod over the doctrinarian between individual and deductive: between evidentiation and proof. Different sorts of things are at issue here, and the inaccessibility of the one does not entail that of the other. Consider, again, the thesis that for aught we know to the contrary life is but a dream, an idea loved by Renaissance philosophers and dramatists alike. Among its fatal flaw is that of a mismanagement of language. For the distinction between waking experience and sleeping experience is by its very nature drawn from within the doctrine of experience as a whole to distinguish two different modes thereof. In consequence, it cannot properly be redeployed to contrast experience-as-a-whole with something else outside of it (e.g., reality). To do so would make no more sense than to take the distinction between earlier and later that has to be drawn within time-as-a-whole to attempt to distinguish between time-as-a-whole and something else outside of it—as would be the case if we were to inquire about what sorts of things value going out before time began. As distinction that is by its very nature domain eternal simply cannot be meaningfully redeployed to distinguish that domain from something else outside. Again, Immanuel Kant deployed this sort of reasoning against the Ontological Argument of St. Anselm to the effect that God must exist because he is, by definition, the necessarily existent being. Kant rejected this reasoning on grounds that the transit from in-name-only attribution of a feature order its actual possession by a real object is never automatic.11

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Meaning Deficiency Yet another way of invalidating a philosophical position is by showing that its salient terminology is defective—that some of the terms that figure prominently in its articulation lack a viable sense. After all if the very terminology of a position cannot bear a clear and definite meaning that position becomes untenable. One cannot rationally endorse a thesis or doctrine if one is not in a position to say intelligently what it is that it contends. In philosophy, one certainly cannot buy a pig in a poke. Proceeding from this angle of consideration, John Locke attacked traditional, Aristotle-inspired metaphysics by arguing that its key terms substance did not have a clear, intelligible, informatively constructive sense. And similarly, the enemies of the logical Positivist’s rejection of metaphysics held that their empiricist contention of meaning foundered on their incapacity to provide a viable account of its core conception of “empirical meaningfulness.” If careful and accurate usage is at odds with formulation of a claim, then it had best be qualified or abandoned. Usage-contravening claims are ipso facto untenable. Thus, it simply makes no sense to say “I know that p, but it is somehow doubtful,” or “X knows that p but it may not be so.” Only what is flat out true can appropriately be claimed as knowledge. Of course, one can indeed speak of putative knowledge. It makes perfectly good sense to say “X thinks he knows that p, but be really doesn’t,” or “I then thought I knew p but I really didn’t.” But saying “I know p but may be wrong about it” involves a mis-use of language. In philosophical discourse about knowledge, the distinction between actual and putative knowledge is critical and must be scrupulously honed. (And in view of the nature of substantial philosophical issues, this means that it would be anomalous to speak of philosophical knowledge.)

Value Distortion and Misprioritization Refutation is often attempted via the consideration that while holing a certain position does not make its exponent in error regarding matters of descriptive fact it matters of value priority or the adoption of ends and objectives.

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Political theorists have, for example, held that the founding fathers mis-­prioritized group volition over individual rights, a flaw in their institutional thinking that was not corrected until the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Or again, adherents of the “critical thinking” approach to logic have complained that twentieth-century logicians focused on the mathematizable sectors of logic to the neglect of informal reasoning, judgmental assessment, and discursively rhetorical modes of substation. Another example is afforded by the oft-affirmed thesis that there are no objective standards of merit in art: that one person’s opinion of artistic merit is as good as any other and that (accordingly) with artists and art-­ works one is every bit as good as any other. But this position runs afoul of the elemental fact that artworks are generally created with some sort of purpose in view—sometimes to decorate, sometimes to provoke thought, sometimes to amuse, sometimes to evoke a specific emotion like awe or admiration or surprise. And such purposiveness endows the evaluative enterprise with an element of objective cogency that runs afoul of the evaluative nihilism of the thesis at issue.

Coda Display 2.3 presents a survey of philosophical fallacies. This fact is that philosophical reflection puts no free lunch on offer. None among the alternative problem resolution is important problems of its own—naive affords cost-free resolution of the questions that involve no difficulties and negativities of their own. The task is then not a matter of finding a resolution that is problem-free, but rather one whose ratio of problems-resolved versus problems-raised is optimal It is, in sum, a matter of cost-benefit analysis—of weighting the balance of the positivities versus the negativities involved in the handling of philosophical problems.

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FALLACIES OF OMISSION

Omission vs. Commission

Invariably Culpable ?

Failure to accept an evident fact

O

I

Failure to accept the clear implications and consequence of one’s position

O

I

Failure to accommodate a needed complication (Oversimplification)

O

Failure to effect a needed simplification (Overcomplication)

O

Failure to differentiate respects

O

Failure to draw needed distinctions

O

Ignoring relevant possibilities

O

I

FALLACY OF LOGIC Self-contradiction/inconsistency

C

I

Invalid inference

C

I

Obscurantism (lost meaning)

C

I

Infinite regress

C

I

Improper analogies

C

I

Counterexample admission

C

I

Category confusion

C

I

Improper modal transit

C

I

Dogmatism

C

I

Meaning deficiency

C

I

Consequence inacceptability

C

I

Conclusion jumping/Premiss deficiency

C

I

Unrealistic assumptions (controverting common sense)

C

I

Unsupported or false presuppositions

C

FALLACY OF PRESUMPTION

Coincidence dismissal

C

Observantism

C

I

Unreasonable demands

C

I

Hasty generalization

C

I

Bias/Dogmatism

C

I

Over-ambition

C

I

Issue distortion (ignoratio elenchi)

C

I

Reimpersonalization

C

I

Display 2.3  Philosophical fallacies

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Notes 1. Two particularly informative books are C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies (London: Methuen, 1970) and Hans V.  Hansen and R.  C. Pinto (eds.), Fallacies: Classical and Contemporary Readings (State College: Penn State University Press, 1995). The general literature of the subject is vast, and much of it is causal in the bibliographies of these two books. There is also a series of special studies of particular fallacies. On fallacies of meaning rooted in vagueness, equivocation, and semantical indeterminacy, see Rosanna Keafe and Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), as well as J. C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). On fallacies of circular reasoning and begging the question, see Douglas N.  Walton Begging the Question (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). On fallacies of self-refutation, see J. C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 2. On such issues, see the author’s Infinite Regress (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2012). Relevant technicalities in formal logic are addressed in J.  Barwise and L. Moss, Vicious Circles (Stanford: C. S. U. Publications, 1996). 3. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vol’s (New York: Appleton, 1904), Vol. I, p. 289. 4. Carl G.  Hempel. “Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 416 (1950) pp. 41–63. See also the Preface to the second edition of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1949), which acknowledges the criteriological criticism of Alonzo Church. 5. René Descartes, Discourse in Method. (Many translations are available.) 6. Kirk, Raven, Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 272. 7. On the “Third Man” argument, see Gregory Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 63 (1954), pp. 319–49; reprinted in his Studies on Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. by R. E. Allen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 231–63. 8. Plato, Republic, 597c. 9. See Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 63 (1954), pp. 319–49; reprinted in his Studies on Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. by R. E. Allen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 231–63. 10. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 96. 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A592–B620 ff.

CHAPTER 3

Illustrating Philosophical Fallacies

Prioritization in Pre-Socratic Metaphysics It is instructive to examine a representative sampling of philosophical fallacies prominent in the history of the subject. Accordingly, some two dozen examples will be considered here, beginning with classical antiquity. The doctrine of the four elements was a common heritage of early Greek proto-scientific thought. Its basis was the idea of a physical reality composed of four sorts of constituents that exhibit the fundamental states or conditions of the things we encounter in nature: Earth (the solid) Water (the liquid) Air (the aetherial or gaseous) Fire (the volatile) Fire was the transformational agency that produces change among the three material factors. Its heat provides for the evaporation that turned water into air, and its absence in cold provides for the freezing that turns water into solid. All three of the material basic elements are crucial for human life: with solids via eating and expelling, with liquids via drinking and evaporation, and with air via inhaling and exhaling. However, the early Greek nature-philosophers differed crucially in the question of fundamentality. Convinced that one particular element has to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Rescher, Philosophical Fallacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97174-8_3

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be basic and primary, they disagreed in proposing different candidates for the role: Solidity/earth:  Democritus and the Atomists Liquidity/water: Thales Ethereality/air: Anaximenes Volatility/fire: Heraclitus And the further prospect of an indefinite mixture of elements was also canvassed by Anaximander as a fifth possibility. This is not the place for a comprehensive account of early Greek philosophizing. The salient point for present purposes is simply that with the honorable exception of Anaximander, early Greek nature-philosophy was based on a common and convenient presupposition, namely, that one or another of the four elements must be fundamental. In their philosophy of nature, as in axiomatic geometry and in their military and political organization, the early the Greeks in postulating a hieratical order of priority where some agent has to be fundamental and supreme. And so right from the start, Western philosophy got off on a deeply problematic footing by espousing the idea that when multiple factors are in play one of them must be dominant and basic. This tacit and deeply problematic hierarchic order with a definite controlling factor—heavily prominent in matters of religion, arms, and governance, as well as (in antiquity at least) in familial affairs—came from the very outset to play a prominent role in Western philosophizing.

Self-Contradiction: The Liar From the start, philosophical concern for problems of self-contradiction largely focused on the riddle of The Liar (pseudomenos) of the ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides: “Does the man who says ‘I am lying’ lie?” (Also: “Does the witness who declares ‘I am perjuring myself’ actually perjure himself ?.”)1 The problem that arises here was posed via the following dilemma: The declaration that I lie will be either true or false. But if this declaration is true, then I lie, and my declaration will be false. But if that declaration is false, then what it says—namely that I lie—is not the case and I must be speaking the truth. Thus either way the truth status being assigned is inappropriate.

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Eubulides’ riddle was immensely popular in classical antiquity.2 And it gave rise to the problem encapsulated in the ancient story of Epimendes the Cretan, who is supposed to have said that “All Cretans are liars”—with “liar” being understood in the sense of a “congenital liar,” someone incapable of telling the truth.3 What we have here is a self-falsifying statement that involves a conflict of truth claims. And clearly any self-refuting uber-­ scandal philosophical contention such as the uber-skeptical “No universal generalization is ever true” can be viewed as tenable. Accordingly, “This statement is too complex to formulate” and “All universal statements are false” are self-contradictory and effectively meaningless in their failure to convey any coherent information. To be sure, if by “liar” one meant someone who lies frequently, but not necessarily always, then there would be nothing paradoxical about the Liar Paradox. The salient lesson here is that a sensible philosophical contention cannot possibly conflict with itself. Self-consistency is a crucial and non-­ negotiable requisite in philosophy, and the detection of its absence is a salient mode of philosophical refutation. Consider the variant paradox posed by the riddle: “Does the person who says that he is now lying speak truly?”

This Self-Falsification Paradox now at issue roots in the thesis: (S)

This statement (i.e., this very statement now being enunciated) is false.

This statement confronts us with the perplex: We class S as T F

The truth-value of S according to itself, in consequence of the preceding status of what it claims F T

In no case can we bring these two into alignment. Nor will it help to introduce a third truth value (“indeterminate” or “undecided”). For consider: (S′) This statement is false or undecided

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The situation now becomes: We class S as T U F

Truth-value of S' in consequence of the preceding status of what if claims F T T

Again there is no way of bringing these two columns into accord. The only viable alternative is to view such statements as (S) and (S″) as semantically meaningless, that is, as lacking any stable truth-value status whatsoever— even “indeterminateness” insofar as this is seen as a truth-value.

Plato and the Third Man A key teaching of the “Theory of Ideas” espoused by Plato (428–348 B.C.) was based on the principle: Two particular items (man, horse, apple) qualify as instances of the same kind of thing (X) when both (exemplify instantiate) the corresponding kind-idea (X*)—the model or paradigm of what is at issue).

An objection to this doctrine that has been commonplace as of the time of Plato’s student, Aristotle, runs as follows: X* the ideal X, will itself also have to be an X. And then we will have not only Plato the man, (X) and the man-ideal of his type/kind (X*) but a third man, the ideal man-idea (X*) to provide the unifying idea that qualifies both Plato and the man-ideal as exemplifying the same kind.

This line of regressive thinking soon became standard among critics of Plato’s Theory of Ideas, beginning with Aristotle. The problem posed by the objection arises from assuming the regressive series as per Display 3.1. But, in fact, the Platonic theory admits of a unifying link instance [man X]

unifying link thing kind [the ideal man X*]

higher level idealization [the super-ideal man X**]

Display 3.1  The regress of idealization

unifying link ...

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straightforward solution. For the straightforward way to avert this regress is to change this picture by adopting the principle that X*  = X**. The strategy is to see that thing-kind ideal as a reflectivity self-patterning conforms with and fits itself, so to speak. From this standpoint, the idealization operator * is reflexive and redundantly self-replicating. In the language of modern mathematics, idealization is an idempotent operator, one which—like “multiplication by one” or “producing a perfect copy”— yields the same identical outcome when operated upon itself. The flaw of the Third Man critique of Plato’s Theory of Ideas is thus an error of oversimplification. There are here at least two ways of proceeding, namely, accumulative and the repetitive—and the critics prematurely agreed on foisting the wrong one of them on Plato.

The Skeptical Diallelus The ancient Skeptics of the Empiricist school argued their case by pressing the following argument, which has come to be known as the “Diallelus” or “Wheel.” Let it be that C is our inquiry-guiding criterion for validating the truth of claims. But now consider the pivotal procedural-justifying contention: “Conformity to the criterion C actually yields truths.” If this itself fails to hold as true, then that assessment procedure fails. But our truth-­ determinative criterion cannot meaningfully endorse this, since this would be circular and thereby ineffective. A satisfactory criterion cannot properly be appointed judge in its own care. But then it cannot be claimed as generally sufficient either.

Accordingly, those Skeptics argued that authentic knowledge is inaccessible because a rationally viable truth-criterion able to certify claims as such lies beyond our grasp. However, this line of reasoning has a decisive shortcoming. It fails to acknowledge the crucial distinction between substantive contentions about matters of fact and procedural practices about matters of method and process. True contentions need to be differentiated between those substantive facts that are the products of inquiry and those of methodological impact regarding the processes involved.

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But once this crucial distinction is drawn, there is no longer room for the expectation that the methods of fact-substantiation need to be the same as those for procedural justification. The idea of a homogeneous criteriology of factual truth and procedural appropriateness acceptability must be abandoned. And on this basis the vitiating circularity of the Diallelus argument is lost. In particular, proceedings can be justified not only via the factual claim that they will actually work out successfully but also via the pragmatic consideration that they afford our best (or indeed only) access to the possibility that they might work. The flaw of the skeptical argument at issue is at bottom that of over-­ simplification—mistakenly supposing a homogenous criteriology for acceptability of very different kinds of claims specifically that of factuality and that of methodology.

Buridan’s Ass The classic anecdote of the temped ass—ascribed to the schoolman John Buridan (c. 1295–1356)—affords a good example of a mistake in philosophical reasoning arising from reliance on a false presupposition among its premises. For the Buridan’s Ass puzzle is based on the stipulation that: This mythical creature is a hypothetical animal, hungry, and positioned midway between essentially identical bundles of hay. There is assumed to be no reason why the animal should have a preference for one of the bundles of hay over the other. Yet, it must eat one or the other of them, or else starve. Under these circumstances, the creature will, being reasonable, prefer Having-one-bundle-of-hay to Having-no-bundle-of-hay. It therefore must choose one of the bundles. Yet, there is, by hypothesis, simply no reasons for preferring either bundle. It appears to follow that reasonable choice must—somehow—be possible in the absence of preference.4 But what the story itself demonstrates is exactly that this contention is false. Where there is inherent preferability, rational preference does indeed demand heeding it. But where preferability is absent, selective preference need not be the difference between reasons and motives. When a random selection among indifferent objects is made by me, I do have a reason for my particular selection, namely, the fact that it was indicated to me by a random selector. But I have no preference or psychological motivation of other sorts to incline me to choose this item instead of its (by hypothesis

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indifferent) alternatives. Such absence of a psychologically motivating preference does not, however, entail the impossibility of a logically justifiable selection. A choice can, therefore, be logically vindicated as having been made reasonably even though it cannot be traced back to a rationale of differentiating evaluation. In short, we can have reasons for a choice even where there is no compelling motivation for it. The Buridan problem’s purported paradigmatically pivots on a mistaken presupposition. To see the Buridan example as authentically paradoxical thus involves decidedly problematic articulated in the presupposition formulated at the outset of this article. In coordinating rational solidarity with merit it over-­ simplifies a decidedly more complex conceptual situation. (It is an interesting consideration that the problem cannot be resolved by delegating an indifferent choice to a mechanism such as a coin-toss of a die-roll. For consider choosing between A and B by giving A “heads” and B “tails.” But now there is the entirely indifferent alternative of giving A “tails” and B “heads.” By bringing the die into it, we simply recreate the very problem at hand through yet another situation of indifferent choice.)

Descartes Hasty Generalization In developing the case for his skepticism, René Descartes (1596–1650) presented the following argument: All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either through the senses or from the senses. But it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive. And it is wiser not fully to trust anything by which we have once been deceived. (Mediation on First Philosophy No. I)

But in formulating this principle of reason what is clearly missing is the rider “in matters of the same kind.” There is, of course, an evident plausibility to such thinking. Who would want to trust someone who has previously maintained as falsehood on similar issues? But because expertise is highly context-specific, this proceeding of moving from “actually wrong once” to “possibly wrong always”—or even “possibly wrong here”—is very questionable. And the same holds for various other matters as well. A source that went wrong matters in geometry may be very reliable in matters of botany. And the circumstances that sight goes away in situations of fog, air disturbance, or

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optical manipulation does not mean that it can do so under ordinary, normal, and standard conditions. What we thus have here is problematic through its oversimplification by case a failure to divide the overall range of sensory case into ordinary and extraordinary, instead simply putting everything into the same box.

Cartesian Certainty As he himself pursued it, the quest of René Descartes (1596–1650) for informative certainty is an exercise in futility. His notorious “I think, therefore I am” [a thinking being] invites the response “You sound like an interesting person, tell us more about yourself.” It is entirely subjective about what is being thought; it tells us absolutely nothing about objective reality. To exit from the cage into which he has enclosed himself and emerge into the world’s existing actualities, Descartes needs entirely different resources. Asked about trans-subjective reality, Descartes reply is “God only knows.” (This is very literally so as Descartes himself acknowledges in: the “God is no deceiver” reasoning of Mediation II.) There are indeed many things of which one can be certain: that one thinks, that one has beliefs, that one is under the impression that it is raining, and so on. All these are entirely subjective matters regarding oneself. The transit to objective reality about the world’s arrangements always involves at least theoretical prospect of error—of only via something a fanciful and unrealistic as Descartes “all powerful deceiver hypothesis.” Descartes wants idealized absolutes—what is realistically good enough for all practical purposes does not interest or concern him. And in the end he must pay a substantial price for this—the transit from philosophy into theology. The fatal flaw of Cartesian epistemology lies in its conception—in asking more for a purely rational, mono-theological philosophy than it could possibly deliver. The ultimate lesson here is that if you propose to follow Descartes in his non-negotiable commitment to absolutes ultimacies, you will be impelled beyond the rational limits of secular philosophizing. As long as we remain within the thought confines of my mind via such conceptions as “I think,” “I believe,” “I am convinced that,” “I take myself to know,” and so on, I remain in the arena of subjectivity. And rational inference is self-limiting—it cannot extract in its conclusion what is not provided for in its premisses. Its machinery is such that when nothing but subjectivity goes in, nothing but subjectivity can come out: its rule is nihilo nihil.

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Descartes’ Representative Ego Descartes became ongoingly famous for his dictum “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum). He had much work for this dictum to do: I noticed that even when I wanted to think all things false, it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat, and remarking that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was, so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I came if to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking.5

But just here lies the problem with Descartes argumentation. He rightly stresses that the move from “I think” to “I am” requires this second condition to be construed as “I am a thought-capable being.” But he does not acknowledge that this presupposes the tacit principle: “An activity can only be carried out by an agent: Any action demands an agency—a being to conduct it.” And this bit of ontologizing from activity to performing agent is deeply problematic. In principle, thinking does not require a thinker like raining requires a rainer or freezing a freezer. The Cartesian argument does not establish an ego-agent, it presupposes it, and it thereby fails to achieve its mission. In taking self-apprehension as the model-instance for knowledge, Cartesian philosophy effectively inverted the Copernican revolution in science. For while Copernicus expelled us humans from an Aristotelian centrality in the world of nature, Descartes firmly emplaced us at the very center of the cognitive realm. In their philosophizing, the ancients wanted to know how matters stand in the world; the moderns since Descartes focus their inquiries on how we ourselves can and should proceed in explaining this issue. Their emphasis shifted from “What is the case” to “How can we get to know what the case is?,” with the center of concern now moved from being to knowing, from ontology to epistemology. They refocused attention from the object of investigation to its practitioners and thereby ultimately to the individuals in whose activities any investigating must be grounded.

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The prime example of the philosophical egocentrism that evolved in this way was the English philosopher G. E. Moore. I have asserted that I do have certain perceptions, which it is very unlikely I should have, unless some other person had certain particular perceptions; that, for instance, it is very unlikely I should be having precisely those perceptions which I am now having unless someone else were hearing the sound of my voice. And I now wish to ask: What reason have I for supposing that this is unlikely? What reason has any of us for supposing that any such proposition is true? And I mean by “having a reason” precisely what I formerly meant. I mean: What other proposition do I know, which would not be true, unless my perception were connected with someone else’s perception, in the manner in which I asserted them to be connected? Here again I am asking for a good reason; and am not asking a psychological question with regard to origin. Here again I am not asking for a reason, in the strict sense of Formal Logic; I am merely asking for a proposition which would probably not be true, unless what I asserted were true. Here again I am asking for some proposition of a kind which each of us believes; I am asking: What reason has each of us for believing that some of his perceptions are connected with particular perceptions of other people in the manner I asserted?—for believing that he would not have certain perceptions that he does have, unless some other person had certain particular perceptions? And here again I am asking for a reason.6

The presumption that underpins much modern philosophy is that in regard to philosophical thinking one oneself is typical, paradigmatic, representative—that what holds for me holds for us. This, of course, means that one must take as the central focus those aspects of oneself that are general and generic rather than personal, eccentric, and idiosyncratic. And this is something that is a good deal easier said than done. To take oneself as representative is typical of humanity in general in a problematic and largely fallacious presumption that functions prominently in much modern philosophizing.

Spinoza’s Necessitarianism In his classic 1677 treatise on ethics, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) based his deliberation on the only model of necessity he had before him—that of mathematics, and especially geometry, where everything emerges by deductive inference from basic definitions and self-evident axioms. And

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with an all-determinating role allotted to the laws of nature (both physical and human, for he assimilated the two), he envisioned the world as one vast law-scripted drama of omni-determination unfolding all around us. The idea that these laws themselves—the ruling principles of all occurrence—could be contingent, and might at least theoretically be different from what they actually are, is something that did not figure in Spinoza’s thinking. And so, the prospect of a distinction between absolute and conditional necessity did not enter into his deliberations. In the eyes of subsequent philosophizing, this lack came to be accepted as a serious—perhaps fatal—error of omission. Starting with Leibniz (1646–1716) his successors saw no reason—and Spinoza gave them no reason—why the laws of nature and the principles of logic should be matters of a single, homogeneous, and absolute homogenous necessity.

Kant’s Things in Themselves As the German philosopher-polymath Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) saw it, our sense-perceptive capacity—“sensibility” he called it—enables us to perceive the appearance of things under certain corresponding modes of apprehension. They do not give us access to how things are in themselves, but only manifest how they appear to beings equipped with our particular sort of sensory apparatus: Even if we could bring our perception to the highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby come any nearer to the constitution of objects in themselves. We should still know only our way of perceiving, that is, our ways of sensing (“sensibility”). We should, indeed know it completely, but always only under the conditions that are originally inherent in the perceiving subject. What the objects may be in themselves would never become known to us even through the most elaborate knowledge of that which is alone given us, namely, their appearance.7

What things are like in and of themselves, apart from our modes of perception—what things actually are like, as distinct from how they appear to us—is at best a matter of conjecture. We humans differ in our conception of things: my conception of most any item X is different from yours. But it would be a grave mistake to move from these unquestionable facts to postulating a variety of different X’s along the line of X-as-I-conceive-it; X-as-you-conceive-it; and so on.

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For diversity of conceptions just does not provide for a diversity of objects. Things are neither originated nor created by thought: They have a being of their own. And yet, exactly this error was made when various interpreters misunderstood his position as claiming such a position for Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). To be sure, Kant did distinguish between: • the X as I (subjectively) see it—(viz. the phenomenal object) and • the X as seen correctly (objectively)—viz. the “thing as it is in itself.” But these for him were different (epidemic) ways of conceiving something and not different (ontological) sorts of things. (The difference is graphically illustrated in Display 3.2.) In theory, Kant’s conception of the “thing in itself” is capable of two constructions: For somewhat preemptive reasons most interpreters and critics have opted for the “Common Picture” presented in Display 3.2 in contrast to a variant. But it is clear that in relation to the Variant Picture, the commonly accepted view introduces the needless complication of a dualized ontology, reminiscent of the Platonic duality of mundane and ideal objects. To adopt a dualism that views Appearance as a realm of being unto itself, distinct and disjoint from that of Reality, is to succumb to a misleading overcomplication. After all, Reality is all there is actually to it, and Appearance—right of wrong—is how it presents itself to us. And so, in the end the idea of an item-duality of a phenomenal object of personal experience and a noumenal object of impersonal reality does not do justice to what Kant actually had in mind. He argued explicitly the idea that things are somehow created in thought. Those interpreters who forced it upon him mistakenly saw him as involved in a questionable realm of observative phenomenal object contrasting with a manifold of trans-­ experiential ontological objects. What Kant envisioned, however, is an epistemic differentiation of object conceptions and not an ontological differentiation of objects.

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Display 3.2 THE COMMON PICTURE ONTOLOGICAL DIMENSION

EPISTEMIC DIMENSION the accurate (correct and complete) description of of the object

accurate representation

the real object as it actually is

our contemplated (and imperfect) description of the object

accurate representation

the phenomenal (putative) object as we think it to be

A dual ontology of objects with a single mode of (accurate) cognitive representation versus A single ontology of objects with a dual mode of accurate and (potentially) inaccurate mode of cognitive representation. THE VARIANT PICTURE The accurate (correct and complete) description of of the object

accurate representation

our contemplated (and imperfect) description of the object

imperfect representation

the real object as it actually is

Display 3.2  The common picture

The lesson that emerges here is effectively this: that the only distinction we can realistically draw is entirely intra-experiential, namely, that between the mere or seeming surface appearance of things and their authentic appearance subject to the quality controls of careful inspection and cogent systematization.8 On this common mis-characterization Kant appears as an unusual example of a philosophical overcomplication, the reverse of the usual error of over-simplification

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J. S. Mill’s Fallacious Desirability In the classic 1863 tract in Utilitarianism, J. S. Mill (1806–1873) wrote as follows in substantiation of his utilitarian ethics: The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so on with the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself [viz. happiness] were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. (J.  S. Mill, Utilitarianism (1863), Chapter IV (London: Longmans Green))

However, this reasoning is involved in a serious misunderstanding. The English word-pattern xxxible/xxxable bears two very different constructions. It can be used possibilistically to indicate that what can be xxx’d and is able to be so, as per: • visible, tenable, countable, refutable, measurable Or it can be used normatively to indicate what is deserving to be xxx’d and should be so esteemed and valued, as per: • notable, contemptible, despicable, valuable, estimable, preferable And it is clear that desirable lies squarely in the second, normative category. The two perspectives of being and desired are quite different, and it is obvious that not everything that is capable of being xd (be it made or admired) is deserving of it. Accordingly, Mill’s argumentation goes badly awry here. His evidentiating premisses about deserving all relate to the possibilistic manner of what is or can be done about deserve. But the conclusion he wants and needs hinges on the second matter of what deserves to be so. By neglecting this crucial difference, and inappropriately oversimplifying the issue, Mill conveniently saves his argumentation from failure.

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This fallacious argumentation of Mill’s is one of the rather usual instance of an actual mistake in philosophizing, let alone in the philosophizing of this otherwise highly acute thinker.

Hume’s Self-Seeking The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) was a dedicated empiricist who taught that our knowledge of matters of objective fact cannot possibly reach beyond the limits of our experience. This stance impelled him into various sorts of skepticism. One thing it means for Hume is that the existence of oneself must be equated with the awareness of one’s self. But because we experience our various doings, but never ourselves, the very idea of a self is in trouble: When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.9

Hume held that where mental activity is concerned, the human mind is always an agent which feels this and sees that, and never a mere patient. And it would accordingly be wrong to see the mind as something susceptible to observation or detection. Indeed, for Hume, there is, in the final analysis, no such thing as “the mind.” But, of course, this reasoning is based on presupposing that the Berkeleyan principle that “To be is to be perceived” holds—at least—for the mind itself. And this decidedly problematic assumption means that the Fallacy of Improper Presupposition throws its obscuring shadow across the scene. Accordingly, Hume set out on a course of reasoning that followed the pattern: • Our knowledge of fact entered no further than what is determined in our experience. • Our experiences are always itemic (particular) and never relational (connecting).

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• Therefore no knowledge of connectivity is possible for us—be that connectivity external in “the world” or internal in thought. But even if the validity of this mode of argumentation were granted, the question “Just what does it show?” remains open. One can construe it as per Hume—to demonstrate that the conclusion obtains. Or inversely, one could in denying this conclusion, construe it as a refutation of that first premiss, thereby throwing into question the very sort of empiricism which Hume so ardently espouses.10

Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence An interesting illustration of a philosophical mistake relates to the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence propounded by Friedrich Nietzsche (1834–1900). In contrast to the popular progressivism—of the doctrine of “ever more and better,” Nietzsche espoused a recurrentism—the doctrine of “there is nothing new under the sun”—essentially the future does no more than to provide replays of the past. Thus, Nietzsche called himself “the teacher of the eternal recurrence,” characterizing this as “the doctrine of the eternal recurrence—that is, of the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of things.”11 And in one of Heinrich Heine’s books (which Nietzsche owned), there is a story whose protagonist declares: Time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate number, and the number of the configurations that, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again …. And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me.12

And this, in effect, is how Nietzsche himself saw the matter. He wrote, “The number of states, alterations, combinations, and developments of this [self-maintaining] force [in nature] is, to be sure, tremendously large and practically ‘immeasurable,’ but in any case also determinate and not infinite …. Consequently, the development of this very moment must be a repetition, and likewise the one that gave birth to it and the one that

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arises out of it and thus forward and backward further! Everything has been there countless times inasmuch as the total state of all forces always recurs.”13 As Nietzsche saw it, the course of world history exhibits a cycle pattern of eternal repetition because a physical manifold operating under regular laws was bound to bring any particular arrangement of things back again and again. This idea, however, is just not so. Consider a simple mechanism consisting of two watch-like singlepointer devices so geared together that a full rotation of the one is geared to one of magnitude 2  = 1.414 … of the other. Then, regardless of the starting point, there will never be a repetition of this particular configuration—as a direct consequence of the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides.14 Or again, consider three planets moving with uniform velocity in circular orbit around a common center, as per the following diagram: A B C

Let it be that A completes one orbit in 2 days, B in two days, and C in one day. Then B and C will recur to their indicted initial positions every N days whenever N is even. But at no time when N is even will A ever again be aligned with B and C in those positions. Notwithstanding the simple periodicities at issues, the indicted A-B-C configuration just cannot recur: Never again will those three uniformly moving planets recover their initial alignment.15 The failure of recurrence in such simple mechanisms renders Nietzsche’s thesis untenable. (To be sure, a system with only a finite number of possible states is bound to be repetitious, but the idea that the universe is that simple is problematic in the extreme.) The fatal flaw of Nietzsche’s contention thus lies in its patent oversimplification of the arrangements of physical nature. It is debatable, however, whether Nietzsche’s position is merely an error or actually an outright mistake because he should have realized the problem.

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W. K. Clifford’s Absolutism The Cambridge philosopher and mathematician W.  K. Clifford (1845–1879) famously maintained, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”16 And in this context, he proposed construing “insufficient” as “inconclusive.” But now suppose that we are sailing on the open sea on a vacation cruise ship. It is dusk and the visibility is getting poor. As we stroll on the deck along the rail of the ship, there is suddenly a shout, “Man overboard.” Someone grabs a life preserver from the nearby bulkhead and rushes with it toward the railing. Suddenly, he comes to a stop and hesitates a moment. To our astonishment he turns, retraces his steps, and replaces the life preserver, calmly proceeding step by step as the region of the incident slips away, first out of reach, then out of sight. Puzzled and chagrined, we turn to the individual and ask why he broke off the rescue attempt. The response runs as follows: “Of course, throwing that life preserver was my first instinct, as my behavior clearly showed. But then some ideas from my undergraduate epistemology courses came to mind and convinced me that it made no sense to continue.” Intrigued, we ask for more details and receive the following response: Consider what we actually knew. All we could see was that something that looked like a human head was bobbing out there in the water. But the visibility was poor. It could have been an old mop or a lady’s wig stand. Those noises we took for distant shouts would well have been no more than a pulsing of the engines and the howling of the wind. There was simply no decisive evidence that it was actually a person out there. And then I remembered William Kingdon Clifford’s classic dictum: ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.’ So why act on a belief that there was actually a human being in danger out there, when the evidence for any such belief was clearly insufficient? And why carry out a rescue attempt when you do not accept that someone actually needs rescuing?

Something has clearly gone badly wrong here. We may not choose to fault our misguided shipmate as an epistemologist, yet we cannot but wonder about his moral competency. As William James rightly noted this connection between epistemology and morality, in insisting that the skeptic rudely treads morality underfoot: “If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in [some] doubt whether it is not justifiable homicide, I am virtually

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abetting the crime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my effort will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her…. Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality.”17 There is much to be said for this view of the matter. To operate in life with epistemological principles so stringent as to impede the discharge of one’s standard moral obligations is to invite justified reproach. Where the interests of others are at risk, we cannot, with moral appropriateness, deploy evidential standards of acceptability of a higher, more demanding sort than those that are normally operative in the community in the ordinary run of cases. At this point, epistemology has moral ramifications. For morality, as we know it, requires a common-­ sense, down-to-earth epistemology for its appropriate implementation. And other illustrations are readily available. A metaphysical determinism that negates free will runs afoul of a traditionalistic ethical theory that presupposes it. A philosophical anthropology that takes human life to originate at conception clashes with a social philosophy that sees abortion as morally unproblematic. A theory of rights that locates all responsibility in the contractual reciprocity of freely consenting parties creates problems for a morality of concern for animals. And the list goes on and on. For throughout philosophy, the issues are deeply introverted and the omission of remote implications and consequences is a serious fallacy. Clifford’s view on the matter projects a one-size-fits-all that underscores the tenability of his own position.

Free Will Issues Theorists who deliberate about freedom of the will nowadays often have it that an action is done freely and voluntarily only if the agent could have done otherwise. But this idea is undone by a clever counter-example offered long ago by John Locke (1632–1704). It runs as follows: Suppose a man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in, beyond his power to get out: he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in, i.e. prefers his stay to going away. I ask, is not this stay voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it: and yet, being locked fast in, it is evident he is not at liberty not to stay; he has not freedom to be gone. So that liberty is not an idea belonging to volition or, to preferring, but to the person having the power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II, chap. xxi, sect. 8)

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The salient point, of course, is that the agent who remains in place under these postulated circumstances evidently does so deliberately and voluntarily, so that while his staying seemingly cannot but be accounted unfree, nevertheless, his choice to stay will be so, in exactly Locke’s sense of having “the power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct.” So while that agent’s staying is indeed free, nevertheless—paradoxical as this may sound—he is not in this instance a free agent. Locke rightly criticized that “could have acted otherwise” theory of freedom as based on the inappropriate oversimplification of conflating choosing and doing. Freedom of the will and of action is an idea of great conceptual complexity, and that people who too eagerly rush to affirm or deny its existence fail to perform the requisite preliminary labor of spelling out in exact detail just what this “it” actually is. In most of the vast literature of the topic—pro and con alike—one looks in vain for a detailed characterization of just exactly what would have to be the case for volitional freedom to exist. Like time, free will is one of those convoluted conceptions where it is all too tempting to think erroneously that one knows what one is actually talking about. Most theorists take the conceived course of necessitation here.

Wittgensteinean Language Sufficiency As the Tractatus of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has it, every fact (positive or negative, actual or possible) admits of formulation in a meaningful proposition. And every such proposition admits of linguistic formulation in a symbolic manifold, so that “humanly constructed language is capable of expressing every sense” (4.002). (References of this style are to the textual enumerations originally given in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.) Language is accordingly viewed as able to give a complete propositional account of things—a complete “picture” (in Tractarain terms) of the whole of Reality, both insofar as it actually exists, and also insofar as it is merely possible. The entire range of actual and possible fact is propositionalizable through what becomes sense-accessible to humans via the symbolic mediation of language which can thus render the whole world of actuality and possibility cognitively available to man. This in essence is the Tractarian doctrine of the ontological sufficiency of language, the position maintaining that language affords the means for

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an account of things able to depict any state of things that could actually be or possibly arise. Granted, the language at issue will need be the language of ordinary usage, the Umgangssprache which is replete with vagueness, ambiguity, and imprecision (3.323, 4.023). Rather, this improved language’s true proportions present the facts precisely (4.023) and thereby provide a complete and accurate picture of reality. In this perspective, it is one of the key aims of the Tractatus to maintain the ontological sufficiency of language, the doctrine that language can provide a comprehensively complete, fully detailed, and accurate representation of the overall domain of existence and possibility. On this basis, language can depict the nature of everything that is or can be, providing adequate machinery to characterize its what, its how, and its why. As Wittgenstein himself put it: “Whereof one cannot speak one must keep altogether quiet” (7). What is it that speaks for this position and renders it acceptable? The Tractatus itself does not provide much supportive argumentation. It presents the matter as though it were obvious and self-evident. What might seem to be the best justification is simply the challenge: “Provide even a single example of a conceivable possibility that cannot be given linguistic formulation.” Faced with this challenge we will of course be tongue-tied. All the same, the thesis of linguistic sufficiency is deeply problematic. It is an oversimplification that ignores a crucial distinction. For there are clearly two very different ways of speaking of something namely: (I) Individually and directly, by way of specific mention via a name or other mode of identifactory specification. (The Eiffel Tower, Louis, XIV, Santé Clara.) (II) Generally and obliquely, by way of its membership in an indicated class. (A French king, a mythological beast, a Greek god.) In English, the difference is reflected in the use of the definite and indefinite article. Now it is important to realize that these and many things of reference-­ mode II of which we cannot ever speak in reference mode I.  For the resources of language are finite (and even in theory at most specifically infinite), while nevertheless there are many things that can be contemplated in reference-mode II that are quantitatively transformative and

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therefore not totally specifiable—colors, shapes, sizes, and numbers among them. Language as we know it is a recursive resource. Beginning with a finite (or at most denumerable) vocabulary, it provides rules of combination that evolve meaningful statements for this limited basis. But such a process can at most yield a denumerable number of linguistic assertions, and so provide for an at most denumerable number of language-presented truths. This can be seen as follows: Take a shaded sequence of colored strips aligned as per:

Let it be that adjacent strips are color indistinguishable. Nevertheless, it can occur that as one moves along to greater distances, there comes to be a clear difference in the coloring. Evidently: (1) we cannot identify real color with apparent color, and (2) there are bound to be a great many more real colors than apparent ones—colors which simply do not adjust of linguistic differentiation. It is perfectly true that “π is roughly 3.14.” But that does not present the reality of it. Interestingly, there is no formulable statement in our language of numbers that can present the minimal value of π accurately. One can describe π linguistically but we cannot express it. And so the Tractarian position is false or at least misleading as it stands, seeing that when construed as “Whereof we cannot speak (specifically) thereof one must be silent (generally)”

is simply false. To appreciate this situation from another perspective, it is instructive to consider the situation of vagrant predicates that indicate the existence of sorts of things for we cannot possibly provide an example. For instance: • a thought no one has ever expressed • a cloud-formation no one has ever identified • an idea that has never occurred to anyone • an integer to which no one has ever specifically referred

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There is no reason to think that “inexpressible fact” is not just another instance of this. Frank Ramsey famously summarized the Tractarian position as holding “What you can’t say you can’t say, and you can’t whistle it either.” But things are not quite so simple as this. For what you can’t say may be ineffable because our language does not permit its accurate and adequate representation, and yet, nevertheless, not be inconceivable because language does afford the approximations, analogies, and limits that render it intelligible, that permit its being not explicitly stated but obliquely indicated. Language can serve not only to state but also to imply. The language-reality relationship faces an insuperable dilemma. If language is allowed the freedom to be imprecise, vague, generalized, and figurative, then its reach may be universal but will lack the accuracy and precision that the Tractatus demands and thus ontologically flawed. But if, on the other hand, those Tractarian demands for detailed precision are imposed then the reach of language will be ontologically insufficient. The linguistic net by which the Tractatus deploys in trawling the sea of reality has too small a mesh to catch the whole range of creatures that dwell there. Inevitably, it misses vast ranges of what is in fact out there in the world.

Philosophical Questions From the skeptics of classical antiquity to the scientistic positivists of the nineteenth century and the logical positivists of the twentieth century, there has been an ongoing chain of thinkers drawn to the idea that grappling with philosophical question is a futile and misconceived endeavor because the enterprise fails to, seeing that a cognitive enterprise issue in consensus thereby manifests its illegitimacy. In this regard, a brief argument between two major twentieth-century thinkers has had substantial repercussions in the philosophical arena. On the evening of Friday, October 25, 1946, the Cambridge Moral Science Club, a philosophy discussion group met to hear a general lecture by Karl Popper (1902–1994) on the topic “Are There Philosophical Problems?” Among those present were Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), two of the most celebrated philosophers. In this celebrated quasi-debate, Ludwig Wittgenstein issued the challenge of demanding if there actually are any meaningfully debatable philosophical questions? But—interestingly enough—this question of the

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existence of philosophical questions is itself a quintessential example of one. For metaphilosophy—the theory of philosophy itself—is and always has been an integral part of philosophy itself. And so that query about philosophical questions provides its own answer: even to ask that question is to answer it, exactly as with: “Can language be used to ask a question?” And so in issuing his challenge by means of that question, Wittgenstein did not present Popper with a quandary, but actually lobbed him what is commonly called a “cream puff.” Intent on the minutiae of his own views, Popper missed a good opportunity: he could and should have maintained that the very question is born self-refuting and based on a clearly untenable presupposition. After all, few philosophical problems are as extensively and boldly contested as is the nature of philosophy itself: its mission, its methods, and its prospects. So here we have what is—curiously enough—itself one of the key questions of philosophy, namely, “What is it that constitutes an appropriate philosophical question or problem?” One would surely want answers to such questions as: “Are all beliefs created equal? Or are those valid considerations to indicate that some are better warranted than others? And if so, what are the considerations at issue here?” From the very start there is a great deal of room for philosophical deliberations about the very subject itself.

Logical Positivism’s Meaninglessness The so-called Logical Positivists readjusted Leibniz’s distinction between truths of reason such as proper mathematics and truth of fact such as chemistry. They contemplated only two exclusive and exhaustive modes of informative truth: those whose validation as acceptable fact roots in communicative conventions, and those whose acceptability is grounded in observation. They accordingly had no difficulty with claims on the order of “Two plus two is four” or “copper conducts electricity.” However, normative claims on the “Crimes deserve punishment,” or “Murder is wrong,” or “Vandalism is inappropriate,” or headiness is foolish eluded their grasp. To be sure, they could unproblematically confirm that people generally think this to be so, but the issue of whether they do so correctly is an issue that did not fit their position. They saw no alternative to dismissing such claims as untenable—or “empirically meaningless” as they preferred to put it. Rather than take greater complexity in stride they sacrificed the tenability of normative contentions on the Procrustean Bed of

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their implausibility restrictive theory of truth. In “Fox and Grapes” fashion they rejected as pointless that consideration which the dogmatic limitations of their theory put beyond reach. But in doing this, they conveniently omitted from view a vast range of possibilities and dropped from sight a substantial rendering of consideration and deliberation. What, after all, are we to say of the doctrine that affirms: “All philosophical claims are meaningless [or untenable or even false].” Itself clearly a philosophical claim, this contention saws off the very limb of its own support.

Austin’s on Imprecision The Oxford philosopher John L. Austin (1911–1960) was a leading member of the school of “Ordinary Language Philosophy” which sought to extract philosophical lessons from careful attention to how language is used by educated speakers in everyday communication. The guiding idea was that in philosophical deliberations “we must pay attention to the facts of actual language, what we can and cannot say, and precisely why.”18 Austin complained that philosophers are fixated upon factual assertions and claims to knowledge to the exclusion of the great variety of other things we do—and can do with language. And accordingly he complained: One thing, however, that it will be most dangerous to do, and that we are very prone to do, is to take it that we somehow know that the primary or primitive use of sentences must be, because it ought to be, statemental or constative, in the philosophers’ preferred sense of simply uttering something whose sole pretension is to be true or false and which is not liable to criticism in any other dimension. We certainly do not know that this is so.19

As Austin saw it, philosophical deliberations regarding language have become fixated upon its informative role to the neglect of other important language uses. And he complained that this has led philosophers into a quite inappropriate transition from acts of saying to “acts of knowing”— which are merely a linguistic (rather than optical) illusion. For—so Austin argued—there simply are no such things. Thus, consider the activities in which persons can engage are represented by possible answers to the question: “What are you doing?” Here Austin stressed that there is an important contrast between verbs that can answer this question and verbs that cannot. Thus, one can say: I am engaged in—

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• running the race • studying the calculus • looking for my lost purse But one cannot say: I am engaged in— • winning the race • understanding the calculus • finding my lost purse The former are activities that may well result in realizing the latter states if pursuit to a successful conclusion. But those states represent outcomes and not activities: they are not actions I am doing but the (possible) results thereof. And Austin observed that just this is the case with knowing: it is not an activity but an end-state, a possible outcome. In proper usage, you cannot say “I am knowing that 2 + 2 = 4.” You can be engaged in learning a fact, but not in knowing it. The verb “to know” does not admit of a present continuous tense in correct English usage. And so to think and talk as though that there is such a thing as an “act, action, or activity of knowing” is simply a grammatical deception. Knowledge is not a kind of activity but a possible end-state in which various sorts of activities like investigating or learning or memorizing can result. Those theorists who deliberated about “acts of knowing” were simply barking up the wrong trees. On the basis of such illustrations, Austin and his followers maintained philosophical confusion and error can often—and some extremists thought always!—be averted by proper heed of the linguistic niceties.20 They saw a Fallacy of Imprecision as pervasive in much (or most) of recent philosophizing.

Inference to the Best Explanation Philosophers have of late often espouse of a mode of reasoning called “Inference to the Best Explanation.” On this basis, they have it that given a certain body of facts we are entitled to infer those further facts which provide the best-available explanation for them. For example, the consideration that it is a far better explanation of the phenomenological facts that we are looking at a real cat on a real mat than that a diabolical deceiver is doing something complicated with our brains

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is supposed to furnish a refutation of skepticism And because it is a better explanation of our observations with an electron microscope that there are actual particle tracks on that photographic plate than that those lines are figments of our apparatus, we are urged to accept a realism of subatomic particles. Along such lines a good deal of philosophical ice has been cut with the machinery of “inference to the best explanation.” There are, however, big problems here. For no considerations of general principle can assure the best available explanation of fact A is compatible with the best available explanation of fact B. A small mammal flits across the field. X claims it is a ferret, Y claims it is a lynx. The best explanation of X’s claim is that it is in fact a ferret. The best explanation of Y’s claim is that it is in fact a lynx. But we cannot have it both ways. (Ironically, it was in actuality a cat, which is clearly something that scarcely qualifies as the best explanation of the facts at hand.) When, after all, is it that a body of given facts F provides a good explanation of the further fact that f? Clearly under two conditions. 1. There is good reason for accepting those explanation-grounding facts F as true or at any rate very likely. 2. We further accept the conditional relationship that: If F obtains, then f must (or very likely will) do so also. This overall circumstance is known as “the Deductive Model of Explanation” and is widely accepted. Consider an example. The plane crashes. The investigative committee issues its report. Its bottom line is that there are several potential explanations: mechanical failure with a probability of 45 percent, human error with a probability of 35 percent, and other possibilities with an aggregate probability of 20 percent. On this basis mechanical failure looks to be the best explanation. Yet, we would surely do well to hesitate to accept it as the truth considering that in the circumstances it is more likely false than not.21 And further difficulty also comes to light with these examples. For “the best explanation” can mean “the best single alternative” or “the best overall.” Suppose that crash report had read: “Mechanical failure 60%, human error 20%, sabotage 20%.” Mechanical failure is now once more the best single alternative. But another, better explanation is available, namely, the disjunctive “Mechanical error OR human error OR sabotage.” This is clearly a more probable explanation—by hypothesis it comes to a 100

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percent certainty. But, of course, its disjunctive character means that— conclusive explanation though it is—it fails altogether to settle the matter and leaves the crucial question of causal responsibility totally undecided. The problem is that the issue of explanation virtually always arises in the context of alternative possibilities. We get up in the morning and find a radial configuration of cracks in a living room window pane. What has caused this? Perhaps a bird flew into the window. Perhaps the neighbor’s mischievous boy was shooting buckeyes with his slingshot. Or perhaps some young hooligans were throwing rocks about. It may well be that the last is the best explanation or offer, seeing that the neighborhood has seen a good deal of vandalism lately. But does this consideration entitle us to see those cracks an instance of vandals at work? Now the trouble with situations of multicriterial merit is that they disassemble the idea of “the best” and leave it suspended in a deconstructive limbo. Consider an analogy. I commission you to go forth and buy “the best car” for me. At once you are faced with the proliferation of criteria of merit: purchase economy, operating economy, crash safety, breakdown infrequency, acceleration, road performance, stability, comfort, and so on, all come into it. And these play off against one another in potential conflict. No sensible person wants a car that is supersafe but has a top speed of 5  mph; virtually nobody wants a car that is the last word in passenger comfort but spends much of its time in the repair shop getting all those springs refitted and cushions readjusted. And, in general, when criteria of merit play off against each other in this sort of way that you cannot maximize them all at once but must pay for increases in one at the price of decreases in others. The very idea of categorical optimality thus runs into problems here. And this is certainly so with respect to explanations as well. The difficulty with best explanation theory roots is that it is predicated on the conviction that there indeed is such a thing as a “best explanation.” But with explanatory merit with so much else there is a variation of respect, with optimality something that can only be assured in this or that regard.

Coda As this historical survey shows, philosophical fallacies are neither uncommon nor insignificant. This of course raises the question of how damaging to a physical doctrine or position is the impact of fallacious reasoning in its articulation and defense? The final chapter of the book will return to this critical issue.

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Notes 1. Aristotle, Soph. Elen, 180a35; Nicomachean Ethics, 1146a71. Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, Vol. I, pp.  50–51. Recall si dicis te mentiri verumque dicis, mentirs. (Cicero, Academica priora, II (30 95–96; and compare, De divinatione, II, 11). 2. It was discussed not only by Aristotle and Cicero (see the preceding note) but by the Stoics (Prantl, Geschichte, Vol. I, p. 490). In medieval times, it was a staple in the extensive discussions of insolubilia. See Prantl, Geschichte, Vol. IV, pp. 19, 41. 3. Several Greek philosophers, preeminently including the Aristotelian Theophrastus and the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote treatises about the Liar Paradox. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, V 49 and VII 196. The poet Phietas of Cos is said to have worried himself into an early grave by fretting over this perplex, and its notoriety was such that even St. Paul adverted to it in Titus I: 12–13. The history of the Liar Paradox is discussed in substantial detail in Alexander Rüstow’s Der Lügner: Theorie, Geschichte und Auflösung (Leipzig: B. G. Treubner, 1910; reprinted, New York & London: Garland Publishing Co., 1987). 4. Buridan’s ass does not occur in his extant writings. There is no question, however, but that Buridan was familiar, in essence, with the example to which he lent his name. In his unpublished commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo, in a gloss on section II, 13, Buridan gives the example of a dog— not an ass!—dying of hunger between two equal portions of food. See the author’s study of the problem in chapter 6 of his Essays in the History of Philosophy (Avebury Press: Aldershot, 1995), pp. 77–115) as well as the article “Buridan” by L.  Minio-Paluello in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1956 edition). This almost, though not quite, bears out Schopenhauer’s conjecture that Buridan’s example was adopted from that of Aristotle’s man perplexed by a choice between food and drink, but that Buridan, “changed the man to an ass, solely because it was the custom of this parsimonious Scholastic to take for his example either Socrates and Plato, or asinum” (Freedom of the Will, p.59). It would clearly be unseemly to present the greats in perplexity. 5. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part IV. 6. G. E. Moore, “Objects of Perception,” in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), pp. 48–49. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A43 = B60. 8. Further Reading: A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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9. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk, I, chap. iv, sect 6. 10. Further Reading: Ralph W. Church, Hume’s Theory of the Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, tr. D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984) does not address the issue as such and is rather an exposition of Heidegger than of Nietzsche (see p. 317). 12. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. p. 318. 13. Nietzsche’s Werke, Grossoktav edition (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986), Vol. XII, p. 51 (italics supplied). Nietzsche’s argumentation would plausibly engender its intended conclusion only for a universe of finite variety and pure chance. 14. Such counterexamples to eternal repetition were originally due to Georg Simmel (1858–1918). 15. A more general argument to this conclusion was initially presented by Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, Ein Vortragszyklus (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1967), pp. 250–51. 16. W. K. Clifford, The “Ethics of Belief” in the Contemporary Review (1877). 17. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), p. 109. 18. J. L Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 37. 19. J.  L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Harvard MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 72. 20. Further Reading: J.  L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); J.  L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); J. O., Urmson et al., “J. L. Austin” in R.  Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); G.  J. Warnock, J.  L. Austin (London; New  York: Routledge, 1989). 21. For criticisms of ITTBE in the mode of “inference to the likeliest cause,” see Nancy Cartwright How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 89–91.

CHAPTER 4

The Fallacy of Respect Neglect

Respect Neglect What is here characterized as The Fallacy of Respect Neglect is particularly common among philosophers. It is a prominent instance of the broader Fallacy of Illicit Amalgamation which consists of treating as a single uniform unit something that in fact involves a diversified plurality of separate issues. Specifically, it has the form of treating a feature F as a unified property that things do or do not have, where in fact F is a matter of various respects, so that things can have F in one respect and lack it in another. There are many instances of this phenomenon, for example, the simplicity of scientific theories, the preferability of objects of choice, the goodness of persons, the fairness of decision processes, and many others. Clearly, some features of things are monolithic and categorical, a matter of yes/no and on/off. And act is either legal or not, a task either feasible or not. But, equally clearly, this is not always the situation that prevails: many features disaggregate into respects. Some features are maxi-respectival: To have F you must have it in all respects: if something fails to be F in a single respect, then it is not F at all. Perfection is like that, as is the justice of an action—or its legality or its honesty or its courtesy. Other features are mini-perspectival: To have F it suffices to have it in some respects: if something has F in even a single respect, then it has F

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flat-out. Imperfection and injustice like that, as is the generosity of an act or its foolishness. It is easy to see that in denying features that are maxi-perspectival or in ascribing features that are mini-perspectival, we can give respects a short shift because one single case suffices. But, of course, not all features will be like that. Moreover, it may also happen that there is respectival dominance where one single factor is by itself all-determinative. In the case of safety, survivability-­geared safety from destruction will be an example: If we do not survive in the short run there is no use worrying about matters further down the road. But it is not easy to think of other examples of this sort where one single respect-dimension is all-out predominant, and thereby able to speak for the totality, so that a proliferation of respects does not come into it. But many important features of things are neither mini- or maxi-perspectival. And here the proliferation of respects becomes critical. And the fallacy of respect-neglect arises when this critical consideration is ignored. Let us consider some examples.

Simplicity It is easy to see why philosophers have a penchant for simplicity. And they are not alone. Simplicity has certainly played a prominent role in twentieth-century philosophy of science—especially in methodologically governed discussions of reductive reasoning. From C.  S. Peirce to Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach and beyond, philosophers of science have seen the simplicity of theories as a key factor for their acceptability. All the same, it is clear on even casual inspection that the idea of simplicity in relation to theories splits apart into a proliferation of respects: • Expressive simplicity: syntactical economy in the machinery of formulation. • Conceptual simplicity: semantical economy of exposition, avoidance of complex ideas and presuppositions that require elaborate explanation. • Instrumental simplicity: in terms of the amount of mathematical apparatus needed for formulating the theory (mere algebra, calculus, complex function theory, etc.).

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• Computational simplicity: how easy it is to compute results and outcomes by use of the theory. • Pedagogical simplicity: how easy it is to teach the theory and to learn it. The salient point here is that we here encounter a diversified manifold of perspectives of consideration from which one theory can be seen as simpler than another. It is an important consideration that these different modes of simplicity are not necessarily in agreement. Consider an analogy: the simplicity of automobiles. One can be simpler than another in point of • being easier to manufacture • being easier to maintain • being easier to start • being easier to drive And these can and actually do conflict with one another. A car that is easier/simpler to manufacture is not necessarily one that is easier/simpler to drive. Moreover, even these factors themselves proliferate further. The “easier to drive” will split apart into “in dry conditions,” “in wet conditions,” “on smooth and well maintained roads,” and so on. With automobiles simplicity is critically respectival. And the simplicity of theories is in much the same boat. To say that one object—be it a theory, an auto, an action, idea, belief, or whatever—is simpler than another is perfectly proper and meaningful— but only if one specifies some particular respect or aspect. Here one cannot appropriately speak of simplicity tout court. And to fail to acknowledge that simplicity is subject to fission into a plurality of respects that may potentially even conflict with one another is to succumb to what might be characterized as the Fallacy of Respect Neglect. It would be futile to seek to escape the Fallacy of Respect Neglect by seeking to have it that real simplicity is a matter of being simpler in every respect, so that respectivization becomes irrelevant. But this is all too often decidedly impracticable. But, of course, whenever different respects are mutually conflicting—as we see in the automobile example—there will be no workable way of taking this step. And this situation is only too common. Whenever a higher-level factor of desirability—such as that of simplicity or economy or convenience—fissions into a plurality of different respects

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or aspects, these will often—perhaps even generally—prove to be combination-­resistant. Consider the analogy of ease and convenience in the context of food. This is clearly something that is subject to respect-proliferation: • easier to produce • easier to prepare • easier to digest • easier to acquire A food that is easy to prepare for eating (e.g., a ripe banana)—will not be easier to come by if we don’t live in a banana-growing region. A food may well need more complicated preparation (e.g., cooking) if it is to be easier to digest and so on. There is no way in which one food can be easier overall than another because the various respects of ease may be—and indeed are—in conflict with one another.

Further Examples Political theorists of democratic inclination often maintain that in matters of social decision the preferability of alternatives is to be decided by the choices of individuals. Philosophers of science maintain that in matters of theory choice the preferability of alternatives is to be decided by the explanatory merit of theories. But the eligibility of items from the standpoint of individuals may well be (and all too often is) a matter of respect with A being preferred to B in one regard and B to A in another—and neither respect predominating over the other. And the explanatory merit of theories in one regard (e.g., generality) and range of applicability may be at odds with its explanatory merit in another (such as ease of application). Merit and preferability in all applications of their idea are matters of respect. Take something as simple as a house. Clearly, one may be superior to another in part of location, roominess, circulation, solidity, and more. And this sort of situation obtains with matters of social policy as well. Take equality—another theme that is currently popular with political theorists. Equality can be a matter of opportunity, of access, of regard, of treatment of shares in the distribution of good and bad, and so forth. And here too there can be conflicts. In giving each holder of a lottery ticket an equal chance at the whole prize we preclude their sharing it equally.

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Again take the idea—popular with some philosophers of science—that scientific theories “are equivalent when they have the same mathematical structure.” This could perhaps be made to work if the idea of structure were a respect-free: monolith rather than respectival. But just as a sentence expressed in language has a grammatical structure, a lexicographic structure, a thematic structure, and a rhythmic structure, among other things, a scientific theory has many sorts of structure. And indeed even a given mathematical fact can find its expression in ways that differ substantially in structure. (The structure of the expression of the fact that two plus two is four is very different in the arithmetic of Principia Mathematica and in its formulation by Goedelian means. And conversely, a single “structurally identical” formula can acquire very different meanings in different contexts, e.g., in binary and decimal arithmetic.) Hermeneutic theorists occasionally embark on the quest for correct interpretation. But clearly the real question is not “Is there a single right interpretation?” as per a recent book of that title.1 For to ask if there is one single right interpretation (of a literary or philosophical text, a painting, etc.) is to invite the Fallacy of Respect Neglect. To pose a genuinely meaningful question one would have to ask “Is there one single interpretation that is optimal in a certain particular specified respect.” And here the correct answer is that rather uninteresting response—sometimes Yes and sometimes No. After all, that original question is muddled through the fact that interpretations have different aspects and different respects. Interpretation can be geared to the intentions of the author, to the general understandings and expectations of the audience, to the issue of utility for our own problems, and so on. And it is effectively impossible—in principle as in practice—that one single interpretation can be right or optimal in every respect. Such deliberations point to a general conclusion. Committing the Fallacy to Respect Neglect invites unhappy consequences—confusion if not outright self-contradiction. And this is not only in the case of the particular issue that presently concerns us—such as simplicity—but is a whole host of other cases as will (preferability, similarity, utility, predictability, importance, testability, etc.).

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Perspectival Dissonance and Non-amalgamation It might be thought that respective fusion or amalgamation is the cure for respect-proliferation. It is not. Thus, suppose some good or bad is to be allocated among several equally deserving parties. Then there is • fairness of opportunity • fairness of result • fairness of process In point of result it seems unfair to allocate the entire item to X rather than Y. But if this was determined by a spin of the roulette wheel then there was fairness of opportunity. On the other hand, if the good was divisible and could have been shared out in equal portions, then it is processualy unfair to allocate it by lot. But, of course, the case of indivisible goods shows that one cannot say that (categorical) fairness is simply being fair in every respect, seeing that here realizing fairness is one respect may prelude the prospect of realizing it in another. Perfection is yet another concept that is unraveled in point of meaning by respect neglect. Take the idea of a perfect house. Houses can have such merits as • spaciousness • convenience for care maintenance • primacy • convenience of access to support facilities But clearly we cannot possibly have it all ways at once. Realization of all merits is undesirable seeing that they compete with one another. So, if optimality in point of all relevant merits is what constitutes perfection, then its achievement is in principle impossible. And just the same sort of situation is going to obtain in the case of such concepts as similarity or preferability or the like. All of them dissolve into a plurality of respects which will themselves have yet further respects. And—most relevant for our present purposes—this is going to hold for simplicity as well. For most any respect-involving notion like those just mentioned is going to be inherently diversified, subject to different aspects that cannot simply be forced together in smooth coordination because more than one of them will be obtainable only at the price of less of another.

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And this internal diversity stands in the way of amalgamation even as the inner tension among the various rational aspects of simplicity precludes one thing’s being simpler than another in every potentially relevant respect. There will be no way of fusing the different aspects into one unified overall result. For seeing that the simplicity—in our present case—is inherently respect-localized, it fails to admit a global, symphatically unified version. There will be simplicity (or preferability, or similarity, etc.) in this or that respect, but no such thing as an all-in, unrestrictedly global realization of the idea. And to insist on overlooking those manifold discordant respects is to prelude the realization of anything meaningful. The complex realities of the case block the prospect of integrative fusion, of overall unification. The fallacy of respect neglect leads to another philosophical pitfall, which might be called a desideratum perplex. This arises when things can be desirable in many different respects which unfortunately, however, cannot all be combined at once, even as a house that is large enough for extensive entertaining will not be small enough for ease and economy in matters of cleaning and maintenance. There are various vivid illustrations of this in recent philosophically significant contexts. One relates to what is called the “Arrow Paradox” in matters of economic rationality. In his Nobel Prize–winning work in the 1950s, Kenneth Arrow was able to show that in their pursuit of economic optimality, the afficionados of preference-based welfare economics had projected a manifold of idealized desiderata which (in the very logic of the situation) just were not conjointly satisfiable. A further illustration of this phenomenon arises in relation to what has been called Milnor’s Paradox in the theory of economic rationality. When an individual faces problems of choice in conditions of uncertainty, there are various standards of rational choice, each looking to the matter from the angle of a different aspect of desirability. But here, once again, as John Milnor showed in 1954, conjoint realization of these different aspects of desirability is a logico-mathematical impossibility.2 As such cases illustrate, if one ignores the potential conflicts among respects of desirability and simply operates with an uncritical amalgam in which diverse aspect of desirability are run together, one may well have an unrealizable impracticability on one’s hands.

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Problems of Analogy Philosophical deliberations frequently resort to analogies to make their points (as has been repeatedly done here). But this very much requires due caution. Analogies are based on similarity, and similarity, like simplicity, is inherently perspectival. Thus, take simplicity. Just as there is no overall, bottom-line, all-comprehensive simplicity way for something to be simple, so too is this the case with similarity: If anything is respectival, similarity is. And for this reason, analogy must always be used with caution. Due care has to be exercised to assure that the particular respect in which the analogy obtains constitutes a saliently relevant factor as regards the particular conclusions that is being drawn.

Summary The fallaciousness of respect neglect roots in the fact that we cannot, in general, make absolutes out of comparatives. One leaf may be greener than another, but there is no such thing as an anything absolutely and utterly green. One book may be harder than another, but there is no such thing as an absolutely and totally hard book. One route may be easier than another, but there is no such thing as an absolutely or totally easy route. Against this background the move from comparative to absolute simplicity—or equality, or preferability, among other things—becomes deeply problematic. Nor can we generally make categoricals out of respectivals. A sentence may be awkward in this or that respect but it cannot be unrestrictedly awkward. A tool may be useful in this or that respect, but it cannot be unqualifiedly useful. And even so, one thing can be simpler than another in this or that respect, but it is not only will not but cannot be categorically (unrestrictedly, unqualifiedly, and unavoidably) simple. The long and short of it is that respect neglect is a pitfall in philosophical deliberations. And regrettably a rather common one. For in neglecting respects and riding roughshod over the differences that they engender, we all too readily fall into contradiction and thereby become unable to do that to which philosophers must always aspire: talking good sense.3

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Notes 1. See Is There a Single Right Interpretation, ed. by Michael Krausz (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 2. On these issues, see Paul Diesing, Science and Ideology in the Policy Sciences (New York: Aldine, 1982), pp. 44–47. 3. This chapter is a somewhat revised version of a piece published in Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, vol. 71 (2005), pp. 397–398.

CHAPTER 5

Fallacies Regarding Free Will

Problems of Free Will As understood here, free will calls for an agent’s being in control of what he does in a way whose adequate explanation requires his thoughts and intentions to be invoked. Denial of this has become entangled in a considerable array of fallacies. The first of them to be considered here relates to an objection that Daniel Dennett has formulated as follows: If determinism is true, then our every deed and decision is the inexorable outcome, it seems, of the sum of physical forces acting at the moment; which in turn is the inexorable outcome of the forces acting an instant before, and so on to the beginning of time …. [Thus]—If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.1

It is exactly in this italicized transit from “and so on” to “the beginning of time” that constitutes what one might call the Zenonic Regression Fallacy. And fallacy it is because it overlooks the prospect of backward convergence, drawing ever closer to a fixed prior terminus, but never passing it.2 And this terminus can and should be the point of decision of the agent’s resolution and not something “before we were born.”

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The failing at issue here is substantially that of Zeno’s notorious paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. Both alike involve a fallacy in overlooking the circumstance that thanks to convergence, an infinity of steps can be taken in a finite distance, provided merely that the steps get ongoingly shorter. Once it is granted that, even if a cause must precede its effect, nevertheless, there is no specificative timespan, however small, by which it need to do so, the causal regression argument against free will loses its traction. With Zeno, Achilles never catches the tortoise because his progress must go on and on before the endpoint is reached. In the present reasoning, explanation will never reach an initiating choice-point because the regress goes on and on. But in both cases alike the idea of a convergence which terminated the infinite process at issue after a finite timespan is simply ignored. A second flaw in Dennett’s argumentation lies in its commitment to the action. An action is unfree when it is the consequence of conditions and circumstances that are “not up to us.” After all, our tastes and inclinations are not up to us, but the choices and actions in which they result will be as free as can be. The fact is that “up to us” is equal to: it can mean either what depends on our choices or what depends on our nature (i.e., constitute a makeup). And so even if up to us is seen as a sine qua non conclusion for free agency, the fact that one of these senses does not apply does not stand in the way of the other.

Need Free Will Violate Causality? A related fallacy runs as follows: If all events are explicable in the order of natural causality, then so are all of those supposedly free decision of agents. This means that the Law of Causality leaves no room for agent causality, and thus no room for free will.

To avoid this Fallacy of Insufficient Distinction we must draw some rather subtle distinctions and involve ourselves in a bit of process metaphysics to boot. The first and most crucial distinction here is that between two sorts of occurrences, merely events and eventuations. Events are occurrences that form part of nature’s processuality. They are happenings on the world’s spatio-temporal stage and constitute parts of its processual occurrence.

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Eventuations, by contrast, are not parts of nature’s processuality but terminating points within it. They are occurrence-boundaries temporally punctiform and themselves without duration. They mark the beginnings and endings of events. For example, Peter’s searching for his key is an event, but Peter’s finding the key is not: “to find” (like “to start” or “to win”) is a success-verb, not an activity-verb. Now all human acts (all actions and activities) are even-like. They occupy time. But the junctures of resolution that mark the completion of a process of choice of decision are not events. Such completions are not actually processual doings, but rather are mere junctures of passage—transitions that mark the beginnings and endings of events. Looking for something is an activity, but actually finding it is not. (There is no present continuous here. One can be engaged in looking but not in finding.) Listening to someone is an activity, but hearing what they say is not. Activities are events, terminations and completions are not. The running of a race is an event (as are its various parts, such as running the first half of the race). However, finishing the race is an eventuation. Such eventuations are endings or culminations. One can ask “How long did he take him to run the race?” but not “How long did he take to start the race?” And even as the race ends when it is won (or lost), so the task ends exactly at the moment when it is completed (or abandoned). Finishing is thus an eventuation and accordingly, the finishing-point of a race, instead of being the last instant of the race, is the first instant at which the race is no longer in progress. And just this is the case with the decisions and choices that terminates a course of deliberations. Eventuations, so understood, are not parts of nature’s processual flow as parts of processes are always processes themselves. Rather, eventuations—their beginnings and endings—belong to the machinery of conceptualization that minds impose on nature: instrumentalities of descriptive convenience that do not correspond to anything enjoying independent existence in the real world. Like the North Pole or the Equator, they are not real items existing physically in nature, but rather thought instrumentalities projected into reality by minds proceeding in the interests of description and examination. Deliberations, so regarded, are seen as events—as processes that occur over open-ended intervals of time and culminate in decisions as eventuations. And here the situation is as per Display 5.1. As this display shows, there will always be an interval of time between a decision and any subsequent action—an interval able to accommodate intervening events to

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point of decision time 

starting time of a decisionsubsequent event

t0

t0 + ∆ room for further event-explaining events

NOTE: There is no next point after a given point and the starting point of a subsequent open interval.

______________________________________________________________ Display 5.1  Timing issues

serve as causal explainers of that decision-consequent action. Because there is no such thing as a next time subsequent to a point of decision, there will always be room for squeezing in further events before any particular decision-subsequent event. The prospect of determination by events is thus ever-present. And analogously, there is no first decision-­ succeeding event that excludes the prospect of an occurrence-explaining prior event. This is critical for the present positions regarding the causal explainability of actions. Freedom of decision accordingly does not impede causal explicability. However, what one has in the wake of a free decision is a phenomenon that might be characterized as “causal compression.” Every event that ensues from that decision can be accounted for causally—but only with reference to occurrences during the immediately preceding but decision-subsequent timespan whose duration converges to zero as the point of decision is approached. In sum, once we duly distinguish events from eventuations we can regard all action (as events) to be causally explicable in terms of what precedes. Free will becomes reconciled to the causal explicability of actions. A free decision inaugurates a series of events, each of which is fully explicable and determinate on the order of natural causality. But this is something that is true of all those decision-subsequent events, and does not hold for that free decision itself.

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Such a perspective on the Fallacy of Insufficient Distinction leaves the Principle of Causality wholly compatible with freedom because all those causal consequences of the act remain causally explicable.

Distinguishing Matters of Determination A third fallacy runs as follows: Because predetermination is incompatible with free will, so is the determination of a decision’s outcome by the agent’s own decision-engendering deliberations.

This objection overlooks an important distinction, namely, that between predetermination and what might be called precedence determination. The former calls for predictability as of some antecedent time; the latter involves no such thing. This crucial difference is illustrated in Display 5.2. With predetermination what happens at t0 is determined (i.e., law-­ deducible from) that which happens at some earlier time t. Already at this earlier time the decision becomes settled: a foregone conclusion that is reached in advance of the fact. Some earlier state of affairs renders what occurs at the tie causally inevitable. With precedence determination, by contrast, what happens at t0 is also determined by what goes before—but only by everything that happens from some earlier time t up to but not including t0.3 Both alike are modes of determination by earlier history. But unlike the former, the latter requires an infinite amount of input-­ information which is of course never available. What we thus have in this latter case is a mode of antecedence-determination that does not give rise to predictability but is in fact incompatible with it. Just exactly such precedence determination can and should be contemplated in relation to free decisions and choices: a determination by the

Some t < t0 time

t

Display 5.2  Timing and determination

point of decision t0

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concluding phase of the course of the agent’s deliberation that issues in the decision or choice at issue. Predetermination means that the outcome becomes a foregone conclusion at some antecedent time. The entire matter becomes settled in advance of the fact. This is indeed incompatible with free will because it deprives the agent of the power to change his mind. There is some time in advance of the point of decision when the whole matter becomes settled. The events that constitute a course of deliberation antecedent to a decision or choice so function as to determine the outcome, it is only the end-­ game, the final concluding phase, that is decisive. Precedence determination, by contrast, means that the final phase of the deliberation is decisive. Only the entire course of the agent’s thinking from some earlier point up to but not including the point of decision suffices to settle the issue. The outcome is never settled in advance—it isn’t over “until the fat lady sings.” And it should be clear that this sort of antecedent determination geared to the unfolding course of deliberation in its final phase is nowise at odds with freedom of the will. The situation of a free choice among alternatives is thus associated with the following sort of picture regarding the situation at issue. Consider, by way of example, a course of deliberation for deciding among three alternatives A, B, and C with the decision ultimately arrived at in favor of A at time t0, the “point of decision.” At every time t before t0 there are three possible outcomes A, B, and C whose probabilities (at any given time prior to t0) make up a band of width 1 overall, as per Display 5.3. Throughout the course of deliberation, these quantities may wobble across the probability band but in the end they must converge in a way which at t01 gives the whole probability to one outcome alone. But at any time prior to t0 there is a non-zero probability that any of the three outcomes will result—at no anterior time is the outcome a foregone conclusion. The endgame is never definitively settled before the end is reached: only at the very end (at t0) is there a “probability collapse” into 1 and 0’s. Until the issue is “fully decided,” there is a non-zero probability of the agent making a choice different from the one that ultimately eventuated.

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t0 __________

_________________________________________________

Probability of A Probability band of

Probability of B

width 1 Probability of C __________

_________________________________________________ time 

t0

Display 5.3  Deliberating and probability: an example

The crux here lies in the consideration that a rational agent’s decision is not invariably foreshadowed by developments outside the sphere of his decision and action: It is something for which his intervention is indispensable. The agent’s decisions are not something made for him by function internally to his wants, objectives, and choices but are matters in which these functions play a decisive and indispensable role. The controlling combination of the agent himself is a sine qua non for free agency. And the prospect of a change of mind is never precluded. Granted, as the “point of decision” is reached it becomes more and more likely how the issue will resolve itself. But there are no guarantees. At no time before that point of decision is there a “point of no return” where the resolution becomes a foregone conclusion, beyond the reach of the agent’s decision. Describing itself is thus a process of a special (sui generis) sort, to wit a process of mental deliberation inherently involving thought and intention. And the grievances of this again invoke the acknowledged versus success verbs distinctions. The process (considering, deliberating) is the acting and resolving (deciding) the matter, the success. The matter once more reverts to the key distinction between eventuations and events. Deliberation, then, is a process where as the point of decision is needed that outcome becomes increasingly probable but yet never certain before that point. The decision itself effects what physicists call a phase transition.

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So once again a distinction comes upon the scene to save the day. The objection in view is fallacious because it overlooks the crucial distinction between the two very different modes of “determination by what precedes” represented respectively by predetermination and precedence-­ determination of the sort just described. And one other point is important here. The first question to ask of any mode of determinism is determination by what? By matters outside the agent’s range of motivation is one thing. But by the agent’s own deliberations—by the manifold of inclination that encompasses his wants, wishes, aims, and choices is something else again. Determination of decision outcomes by the agent’s thoughts is surely a requisite of free will rather than an obstacle to it. Again a Fallacy of Insufficient Distinction is at work here.

Freedom and Deliberation And this brings us to a kindred fallacy which runs as follows: An act can be free only if its productive source is located in the thoughts and deliberations of the agent. But this is never the case because the tight linkage of mind-activity to brain-activity means that the thoughts and deliberations of the agent’s mind are always rooted in and explicable through the processes at work in the agent’s brain.

To see what is amiss here consider the classic freshman-physics set-up of a gas-containing cylindrical chamber closed off by a piston at one end. The temperature inside the chamber is lock-stop coordinate to the distance of the piston-wall from the fixed wall: When the piston moves the temperature changes correspondingly, and conversely, when temperature changes are induced the piston moves correspondingly. But this condition of functional lock-step correlation leaves the issue of imitative wholly open: One may be either changing the temperature by moving the piston or moving the piston by changing the temperature. Thus, lock-step coordination as such does not settle the question of the direction of determination of which of those coordinated variables is free and which is dependent. The fact that two parameters are lock-step coordinated does not settle—or even address—the issue of processual initiative. A crucial flaw here lies in the unwarranted supposition that coordinated comportment resolves the question of causal responsibility.

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For the sake of illustration consider two small boys on a teeter-totter or, alternatively, a pulley wheel with weights suspended on either side. Here the up-or-down motion of the one side is inseparably tied to the corresponding motion of the other. And this illustrates the larger point: however tight and rigid the functional coordination between two operative agencies may be, the issue of initiative and change-inauguration is something that yet remains entirely open and unaddressed. Mark Twain’s tendentious question “When the body is drunk, does the mind stay sober?” is perfectly appropriate. But then the inverse question “When the mind panics does the body remain calm?” is no less telling. All of those myriad illustrations of a condition between thought and brain activity are simply immaterial to the issue of who is in charge. For what is involved cannot settle the question of whether mind responds passively to brain-state changes or whether it actively uses the brain to its own ends. For the determinist, to be sure, agents are productively inert—what they do is always the product of what happens to them: They simply provide the stage on which the causality of nature performs its drama. The voluntarist, by contrast, sees intelligent agents as productively active participants in the drama of the world’s physical processuality. And the reality of it is that mind-brain correlation cannot effectively be used against him. It is simply fallacious to think that the intimate linkage between brain activity and thought puts the brain in charge of the mind. But if mind as well as matter can seize the initiative with respect to human action so that we can act in the mode of agent causality, while nevertheless all human actions can be explained on the side of natural causality, then we confront Kant’s paradox of reconciling the two modes of causality.4 On such an approach, the brain/mind is seen as an emergently evolved dual-aspect organization whose two interlinked domains permit the impetus to change lie sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other. For the direction of determination so far remains open. Given these interlocked variables, the question of the dependent-versus-independent status is wholly open and the question of initiative unresolved. And the fact that mind and brain sail in the same boat is no reason why mind cannot occasionally seize the tiller. What is at issue is a partnership of coordination not a state of inflexible master-servant subordination. In particular situations the initiative can lie on one side or the other—all depending.

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But all depending on what? How does it get decided where the initiative lies? Well—think again of the pulley situation. When the cube rises, is this because someone is pushing up on it or because a bird has alighted on the sphere? The system itself taken in isolation will not answer this for you, but the wider context—the overall causality synoptic and dynamic context—will decide where the initiative lies. It is all a matter of where the activity starts and what stands at the end of the causal line. And the free will situation is much the same. When I read, the mind responds to the body; when I write, the body responds to the mind.

Freedom and Necessitation Consider the following objection: If the acts of an agent are somehow determined—if they are anywise necessitated—then they cannot possibly qualify as free.

Both Aristotle and the Stoics sought to reconcile the volitional freedom they deemed requisite for morality with the determinism they saw operative in the circumstance that character dictates decisions. To accomplish this without adopting the Platonic myth of character selection, they maintained that what would impede freedom is not determination as such but only exogenous determination rooted in factors outside the agent’s self-­ produced motivations. The crux of freedom, so viewed, is not indetermination, but autodetermination—determination effected by the agent’s agency itself—sua sponte as the medievals put it. And accordingly, an action predetermined by the agent’s own autonomous choice or normally formed predispositions or tasks need not on this basis be accounted unfree. On such a compatibilist view, the crux of the matter is not whether or not there is determinism—it is conceded that there indeed is, albeit of the agent-internal variety. The crux is whether there is an agent external determinism—a determinism where all reference to the agent and his motivations can be out of consideration in matters of explanation. The crux of freedom does not lie in that of determination, but in its how, its procedural mechanisms. For as long as those deliberative factors the basis for freedom is secured. Thus, what we have here to distinguish between endogenous (agent-­ internal) and exogenous (agent-external) determination. Clearly, if that determination is effected without reference to the agent by forces and

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factors above and beyond his control by thought, then we can hardly characterize that agent as free. But if those determinative factors are agent-­ internal, if they are a matter of the agent’s own plans and projects, his own wishes, desired, and purposes, then the deliberation of the values of decisions and choices nowise stands in the way of the agent’s freedom. Quite on the contrary. A choice or decision that was not the natural and inevitable outcome of the agent’s motivations could hardly qualify as a free decision of his. And so freedom of the will is nowise at odds with the Principle of Causality as long as the locus of causal determination is located in the thought-process of the agent—that is, as long as causal determination is canalized through the mediation of the choices and decisions emergent from his deliberations. And there is consequently no opposition between freedom and causal determination as long as that determination is effected by what transpires in the principle of agents and the matter is one of agent-causality.5 In sum, to set free will at odds with determinacy is fundamentally fallacious because it too rides roughshod over the crucial distinction—that between the agent-external causality of impersonal events and the agent-­ internal causality of deliberative thought.

Is Free Will Unnatural? Yet, neither fallacy inheres in the following reasoning: Free will is mysterious and supra-natural. For it requires a suspension of disbelief regarding the standard view of natural occurrence subject to the Principle of Causality.

In just this vein one recent writer complains: Agent causation is a frankly mysterious doctrine, positing something unparalleled by anything we discover in the causal processes of chemical reactionism, nuclear fission and fusion, magnetic attraction, hurricanes, volcanos, or such biological processes as metabolism, growth, immune reactions, and photosynthesis. Is there such a thing? When libertarians insist that there must be, they [build upon sand].6

But this sort of complaint is deeply problematic.

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Free will, properly regarded, hinges on the capacity of the mind to seize the initiative in effecting changes in the developmental course of mind-­ brain coordinated occurrence. Need this, or should it be seen as something mysterious and supra-natural? With the developments of minds upon the world stage in the course of evolution, various capacities and capabilities come upon the scene emergently, adding new sorts of operations to the repenetorness of mammalian operations—remembering past occurrences, for example, or imagining future ones. And one of these developmental innovations is the capacity of the mind to take the initiative in effecting change in the setting of mind from coordinate developments. Now the explanatory rationale for this innovation is substantially the same as that for any other sort of evolution-emergent capability, namely, that it contributes profitability to the business of natural selection. There is nothing mysterious or supra-natural about it. The failure at issue with this fallacy is again a Fallacy of Insufficient Distinction. It rests on a failure of imagination. It is predicated on an inability to actualize that with the evolution of intelligent agents there arises the prospect of intelligence-guided agency determined through the deliberations of these intelligent agents.

Freedom and Motivation Down the corridors of time have echoed the words of Spinoza: Men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and decision, and think not in the slightest about the causes that dispose them to those appetites and volitions, since they are unknown to them.7

And here Spinoza was echoed by Charles Darwin, when soon after the voyage of the Beagle, he wrote: The general delusion about free will is obvious because man has the power of action but he can seldom analyze his motives (originally mostly instinctive, and therefore now [requiring] great effort of reason to discover them …).8

Apparently, Darwin thought—with Spinoza and perhaps Freud—that action is only genuinely free when it is activated entirely by recognized and

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rationally evaluated and approved motives. But this simply confounds free with rational agency. As long as the agent acts on his own motives—without external duress or manipulation—his action is free in the standard (rather than rationalistically reconfigured) sense of the term. Motivation as such does not impede freedom—be it rationally grounded or not. Our motives, however inappropriate and ill-advised they may be and however little understood in terms of their psychogenesis, nevertheless do not constrain our will externally from without our self but are the very core of its expression. A will that is responsive to an agent’s motivation is thereby free, and it matters not how compelling that motive may be in relation to the resolution at issue9 After all, a person’s nature is manifested in his decisions and finds its overt expression realized in them. His decisions are nothing but the overt manifestation of his inner motivational nature. It is through his decisions and consequent actions that a person displays himself as what he actually is. Consider this situation. I ask someone to pick a number from 1 to 6. He selects 6. I suspected as much: His past behavior indicates that he has a preference for larger numbers over smaller and for evens over odds. So his choice was not entirely random. Does that make it unfree? Not at all! It was nowise forced or constrained. Those number preferences of his were not external pressures that restricted his freedom: On the contrary they paved that way to self-expression. It would be folly to see freedom as antithetical to motivation. Quite to the contrary! Volitional freedom just exactly is a freedom to indulge one’s motivations. To “free” the will from obeisance to the agent’s aims and motives, needs and wants, desires and goals, likes and values, personality and disposition is not to liberate it but to make it into something that is not just useless but even counterproductive. What rational agent would want to be harnessed to the decision-effecting instrumentality that left his motivations by the wayside. A will detached from the agent’s motives would surely not qualify as his! It is a rogue will, not a personal one, and its endorsement reflects a grave failure to heed due distinction.

Is Free Will Unscientific? Our final instance of fallacious illustration on this matter is noted in the objection:

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The very idea of free will is antithetical to science. Free will is something occult that cannot possibly be naturalized.

It is—or should be—hard to work up much sympathy to this objection. For if free will exists—if Homo sapiens can indeed make free choices and decisions—then this of course has to be part of the natural order of things. So if we indeed are free then this has to be so for roughly the same reason that we are intelligent—that is, because evolution works things out that way. What lies at the heart and core of free will is up-to-the-last-moment thought-control by a rational agent of his deliberation-produced choices and decision in the light of his ongoingly updated information and evaluation. To see that such a capacity is of advantage in matters of survival is not a matter of rocket-science. The objection at issue is thus fallacious in that it rests in the inappropriate presupposition that free will has to be something super- or preter-­ natural. If there is free will, it is an aspect of how materially evolved beings operate on nature’s stage.

Conclusion We have now examined some eight fallacious arguments against freedom of the will, and the list could easily be continued. But the overall lesson should already be clear. In each case the misconception at issue can be overcome by drawing appropriate distinctions whose heed makes for a more viable construal of how freedom of the will—if such there is—should be taken to work. So at each stage there is some further clarification of what free will involves. There gradually emerges from the fog an increasingly clear view that what is at issue here is the capacity of intelligent beings to resolve matters of choice and decision through a process of deliberation on the basis of its beliefs and desires that allows for ongoing updates and up-to-the-bitter-end revisability. Properly understood, freedom of the will should not be at odds with our knowledge about how things work in the world. A viable theory of free will should—nay, must—proceed on a naturalistic basis. It has to see free choosing, like language-use or mathematical reasoning, as a historically evolved aspect of human intelligence. But the idea that this is infeasible is by all the available indications based on an incorrect and fallacious view of what freedom of the will is all about.10

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As the present deliberations indicate, the case against free will is riddled with fallacies. This, of course, is still far from establishing the will is free. In rational dialectic—including philosophy—the presence of a bad case against a position does not constitute a good case for it. But it certainly does suffice to reverse the impetus of presumption and burden of proof.

Notes 1. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p.  99 (my italics). Compare also ibid., p. 134, and Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 16. 2. To illustrate “backward convergence” think of retreating to point 1 from point 2, and does so by successive halfway steps, first to the midpoint between 1 and 2, then to the midpoint from there to 2, and so on With each step one draws closer to point 2, but will never succeed in reaching it. 3. Note that while predetermination entails precedence-determination, the converse is not the case: precedence determination does not entail predetermination. 4. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A803 = B831. 5. “A proper Principle of Causality nowise impedes free will” (Das wahre Causalprincip steht … der Freiheit nicht im Wege). Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation to the World (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1885), p. 16. 6. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 120. 7. Spinoza, Ethics, Book I, Appendix. 8. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. by Paul H. Barrett, Peter Jack Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 187. 9. Lotze, Microcosmus (op. cit.), p. 287. 10. This chapter is a somewhat revised version of a study of the same title published in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 62 (2008), pp. 575–589.

CHAPTER 6

Totalization Fallacies

Sufficient Reason and Any/Every Issue The classic Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in effect postulates the distributive explicability of all facts through stipulating that, given any particular fact f1, there are effective explanations via some further fact f2 for that initial fact being as is. Put symbolically, what it affirms comes to:

 f1   f2  f2 Ef1  , when E stands for “accounts for” or “explains” the fact at issue.

(6.1)

On this basis, given any actual fact there is another (obviously different) fact that provides for explanation. In sum, the realm of fact is pan-­ explainable in that each of its members is subject to an appropriate explanatory accounting of some sort. It is clear, however, that this condition of there being an explanation of every fact is something very different from there being a collective or synoptic explanting of all facts—a single, unified, all-at-once super-­explanation for the totality of fact. For the distributive omni-explainability of (6.1) above is something very different from its quantifier-reversed cousin:

 f2   f1  f2 Ef1 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Rescher, Philosophical Fallacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97174-8_6

(6.2)

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The idea of such an all-at-once mega-explanation poses the problem of totalization inherent in the fact that such explicating comprehensiveness simply cannot be actualized. After all, the fact that every child had a mother does not mean that there is a single mother for all children, nor does the fact that every integer (n) has an immediate successor (n + 1) mean that there is a massive mega-integer which succeeds all the rest. In essence, then, the omni-explainability of fact stipulated by the Principle of Sufficient Reason does nothing to ensure the pan-­explainability of the range of fact as a whole.1 An explanatory regress can come to a stop at two sorts of contentions: I. Ultimate Facts (Epistemic Finality) • definitions and tautologies • generally known commonplaces • situationally evident considerations II. Personal Concessions (Dialectic Finality) • claims accepted by all parties involved in the deliberations at issue • assumptions or conventions agreed to by the concerned parties Explanatory regression considerations.

can

terminate

when

it

reaches

these

Is Origination Ex Nihilo Compatible with the Principle of Causality? Paramount for problems of explanatory regression is the bearing of the Principle of Causality. The Principle of Causality has it that every state of things is the causal product (i.e., the result of the operation of causal law) of the conditions and circumstances obtaining at an earlier state. Now let it be that the world itself (i.e., the total set of states of affairs) had an origination ex nihilo. Just what does this mean—what does it call for? The best way to understand this is to consider a timespan represented by a line open to the left: 0

t

time

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At point 0 there is nothing; but at every time t > 0 there exists some state of affairs. Such a condition of things—one where there simply is no first time— although at every specifiable time t > 0 there exists some state of things—is perfectly compatible both with a Principle of Causality (as there are always earlier time-states to do their causal work) and with an absolute origination of things, seeing that there is no first state of things as all. On this basis the Principle of Causality is perfectly compatible with an origination ex nihilo seeing that • At every point in time, every state of affairs the antecedents needed to provide for its causal explanation while nevertheless, • There is no first (original) state of affairs able to resist earlier-­ condition explainability. If the realization of a state of affairs is characterized as an “event,” the proceeding situation can be summarized by saying • That every event occurs at some time is causally explainable in terms of earlier events while nevertheless • There is no initial origination event: the sequence of events has no temporal starting point. But where can explanatory regression ultimately end, • When can explanation begin? The answer is that there simply is no such beginning. The PRS does not settle the issue of ultimate explanation inherent in the question if there is a single unified account of why reality is as it is. It settles the question of explanatory totalization at the distributive level, but leaves the issue unresolved at the collective level of overall totality.

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Ultimate Questions and Totalistic Problems Questions such as “Why is there anything at all?,” “Why are things-in-­ general as they actually are?,” “Why is the law structure of the world as it is?” cannot be answered within the standard causal framework. For causal explanations need inputs: They are essentially transformational (rather than formational pure and simple). They can address themselves to specific issues distributively and seriatim, but not collectively and holistically. If we persist in posing the sorts of global questions at issue, we cannot hope to resolve them in orthodox causal terms. Does this mean that such questions are improper? On the rejectionist approach, the entire question of obtaining the (or a) reason for the existence of things is simply dismissed as illegitimate. Even to inquire into the existence of the entire universe is held to be somehow illegitimate. It is just a mistake to ask for a causal explanation of existence per se; the question should be abandoned as improper—as not representing a legitimate issue. We are assured that in the light of closer scrutiny the explanatory “problem” vanishes as meaningless. Dismissal of the problem as illegitimate is generally based on the idea that the question at issue involves an illicit presupposition. It looks to answers of the form “Z is the (or an) explanation for the existence of things.” Committed to this response-schema, the question has the thesis “There is a ground for the existence of things—existence—in-general is the sort of thing that has an explanation.” And this presumption—we are told—might well be false. In principle, its falsity could emerge in two ways: 1. on grounds of deep general principle inherent in the conceptual “logic” of the situation, or 2. on grounds of a concrete doctrine of substantive metaphysics or science that precludes the prospect of an answer—even as quantum theory precludes the prospect of an answer to “Why did that atom of Californium decay at that particular time?” Let us begin by considering if the question of existence might be invalidated by considerations of the first sort and root in circumstances that lie deep in the conceptual nature of things. Consider the following discussion of C. G. Hempel’s: Why is theft anything at all, rather than nothing? … But what kind of an answer could be appropriate? What seems to be wanted is an explanatory account which does not assume the existence of something or other. But

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such an account, I would submit, is a logical impossibility. For generally, when the question “Why is it the case that A1 is answered by “Because B is the case”… [A]n answer to our riddle which made no assumptions about the existence of anything cannot possibly provide adequate grounds … The riddle has been constructed in a manner that makes an answer logically impossible. …2

But this plausible line of argumentation has shortcomings. The most serious of these is that it fails to distinguish appropriately between the existence of things, on one hand, and the obtaining of facts, on the other,3 and supplemental also between specifically substantival facts regarding existing things, and nonsubstantival facts regarding states of affairs that are not dependent on the operation of preexisting things. We are confronted here with a principle of hypostatization to the effect that the reason for anything must ultimately always inhere in the operations of things. And at this point we come to a prejudice as deep-rooted as any in Western philosophy—the idea that things can only originate from things, and that nothing can come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit) in the sense that no thing can emerge from a thingless condition.4 Now this somewhat ambiguous principle is perfectly unproblematic when construed as saying that if the existence of something real has a correct explanation at all, then this explanation must pivot on something that is really and truly so. Clearly, we cannot explain one fact without involving other facts to do the explaining. But the principle becomes highly problematic when construed in the manner of the precept that “things must come from things,” that substances must inevitably be invoked to explain the existence of substances. For we now become committed to the thesis that everything in nature has an efficient cause in some other natural thing that is its causal source, its reason for being. This stance is implicit in Hempel’s argument. And it is explicit in much of the philosophical tradition. Hume, for one, insists that there is no feasible way in which an existential conclusion can be obtained from nonexistential premisses.5 And the principle is also supported by philosophers of a very different ilk on the other side of the channel—including Leibniz himself, who writes: The sufficient reason (of contingent existence) … must be outside this series of contingent things, and must reside in a substance which is the cause of this series….6

Such a view amounts to a thesis of genetic homogeneity which says (on analogy with the old but now rather obsolete principle that “life must

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come from life”) that “things must come from things,” or “stuff must come from stuff,” or “substance must come from substance.” What, after all, could be more plausible than the precept that only real (existing) causes can have real (existing) effects? But despite its appeal, this principle has its problems. It presupposes that there must be a type of homogeneity between cause and effect on the lines of the ancient Greek principle that “like must come from like.” This highly dubious principle of genetic homogeneity has taken hard knocks in the course of modem science. Matter can come from energy, and living organisms from complexes of inorganic molecules. If the principle fails with matter and life, need it hold for substance as such? The claim that it does so would need a very cogent defense. None has been forthcoming to date. Is it indeed true that only things can engender things? Why need a ground of change always inhere in a thing rather than in a nonsubstantival “condition of things-in-general”? Must substance inevitably arise from substance? Even to state such a principle is in effect to challenge its credentials. For why must the explanation of facts rest in the operation of things? To be sure, fact-explanations must have inputs (all explanations must). Facts must root in facts. But why thing-existential ones? A highly problematic bit of metaphysics is involved here. Dogmas about explanatory homogeneity aside. There is no discernible reason why an existential fact cannot be grounded in nonexistential ones, and the existence of substantial things be explained on the basis of some nonsubstantival circumstance or principle. Once we give up the principle of genetic homogeneity, and abandon the idea that existing things must originate in existing things, we remove the key prop of the idea that asking for an explanation of things in general is a logically inappropriate demand. The footing of the rejectionist approach is gravely undermined. There are, of course, other routes to rejectionism. One of them turns on the thesis of Kant’s First Antinomy that it is illegitimate to try to account for the phenomenal universe as a whole (the entire Erscheimoigswelt). Explanation on this view is inherently partative: Phenomena can only be accounted for in terms of other phenomena, so that it is, in principle, improper to ask for an account of phenomena-as-a-­ whole. The very idea of an explanatory science of nature-as-a-whole is illegitimate. Yet, this view is deeply problematic. For all intents and purposes, science strives to explain the age of the universe-as-a-whole, its structure, its volume, its laws, its composition, and so on. Why not then its existence as well? The decree that explanatory discussion is necessarily

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partial and cannot deal with the whole lacks plausibility. It seems a mere device for sidestepping embarrassingly difficult questions. Rejectionism is not a particularly appealing course. Any alternative to rejectionism has the significant merit of retaining for rational inquiry and investigation a question that would otherwise be abandoned. The question of “the reason why” behind existence is surely important. If there is any possibility of getting an adequate answer—by hook or by crook—it seems reasonable that we would very much like to have it. There is nothing patently meaningless about this “riddle of existence.” And it does not seem to rest in any obvious way on any particularly problematic presupposition—apart from the epistemically optimistic yet methodologically inevitable idea that there are always reasons why things are as they are (the “principle of sufficient reason”). To dismiss the question as improper or illegitimate is fruitless. Try as we will to put the question away, it comes back to haunt us.7

The Hume-Edwards Principle In formulating a version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, Samuel Clarke and Leibniz shared the conviction that accounting for existence of the universe-as-a-whole requires explanatory resort to something above and beyond the universe itself.8 In reacting against this line of thought, David Hume wrote: Did I show you the particular cause of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think that it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.9

This Humean position holds that if we are in a position to explain any and every member of a series of events (even an infinite one), we are thereby in a position to explain the series as a whole. The underlying idea of a distributive, piece-meal explanation is far older, however. Thus, William of Ockham wrote in ca. 1320: The whole multitude of … causes is indeed caused, but neither by any one thing that is part of this multitude nor by something outside this multitude, but rather one part is caused by one thing which is part of this multitude, and another by another thing, and so on ad infinitum.10

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And later traces of this line of thinking can be found in many critics of the Cosmological Argument from Immanuel Kant11 down to such twentieth-­ century writers as Paul Edwards.12 In reviewing the literature of the problem, William R. Rowe dubbed the idea of distributive explanation at issue the “Hume-Edwards Principle,” formulating it as follows: If the existence of every member of a set is explained the existence of that set is thereby explained.13

In unison with this line of thought, philosophers of positivist inclinations often maintain that we should forget about general explanations for reality-­at-large and pursue our efforts at understanding the world in a disaggregated, piece-meal manner. They insist that in matters of ontology we simply need not try to account for existence-at-large in one all-­ encompassing collective explanation, but simply to account for the reality’s several constituent elements in a way that proceeds in a disaggregated, seriatim manner. And on the basis of this perspective they tend to eschew the global and synoptic perspective of the accustomed “big questions” of the philosophical tradition. The thinkers of this tendency (Hume and Edwards themselves included) have seen the principle as an instrument of ontological simplification (or indeed even purification) and have viewed its salient lesson as lying in the implicit injunction: “Don’t trouble to ask for a collective explanation of existence-at-large, a comprehensive distributive explanation of the particular existents will provide you everything you need and want.” Yet, notwithstanding its widespread acceptance and influential impact, the principle is deeply problematic, nay simply wrong.

Counterexamples It is not hard to find plausible counterexamples to the Hume-­Edwards thesis: • If the existence of each book in its collection is explained, the existence of the library-as-a-whole is thereby explained. • If the existence of each part of the car is explained, the existence of the vehicle-as-a-whole is thereby explained. • If the existence of each composition in our symphony’s evening program is explained, the existence of the program-as-a-whole is thereby explained.

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Such examples cast a deep shadow of doubt over the Hume-Edwards thesis. For it is only too obvious that to explain and account for the existence of the words does little to explain or account for the existence of the sentence. To do the latter we would have to account not merely for the existence of those individual words but for their collective co-presence in that particular context. Constituent-oriented existence explanations that do not account for contextual co-presence within a pre-specified entirety cannot explain its existence. Explaining the parts may achieve nothing whatever toward explaining the existence of wholes. For those wholes must, as such, have a unifying identity and an explanation of their constituents viewed separately and individually does not suffice to explain it. Nor does explaining each event in a series explain its entire course, much as someone’s understanding each sentence may well fail to explain their understanding the whole book. In other words, the Hume-Edwards thesis suffers from a critical flaw of omission. For where the parts of wholes are concerned, context makes for structure. It does not suffice to note that we are dealing with a three-letter word in which the letters D, G, and O figure co-presently, seeing that there yet remains the massive difference between GOD and DOG. Moreover, the aspect of explanation and understanding can be put aside and the principle viewed ontologically rather than epistemically in the form: • If every part of a whole exists, then so does the whole itself. or • If every member of a collectivity exists, then so does that collectivity itself. The preceding examples of libraries, automobiles, and symphony programs show that this ontological version of the Hume-Edwards Principle also does not work. Only within totally unstructured collectivities (such as the mathematicians’ set) will the envisioned relationships obtain. So if— contrary to fact—our sole concern were with the abstract rudimentary “sets” of the set theory (Mengenlehre) of pure mathematics, the problem would not arise. Those mathematical “sets” are defined purely extensionally on the basis of their membership alone: They have no form or structure whatsoever. But this circumstance is realized only in abstractions and never concretely. And in any other setting—even that of the “ordered sets”

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of pure mathematics—what the principle claims just is not so. In general, the world’s wholes always have a characteristic structure and could not be what they are without it. The inherent problem of the Hume-Edwards Principle accordingly emerges when one steps back to consider just what it would take to fix it. And this comes to light in considering a reformulation of the thesis by the addition of a few crucial and critical words: If the existence of each part of a whole is explained in conjunction with an account that also explains their mutual coordination within the larger overarching setting of that whole, then the existence of that whole is thereby explained.

As this amplification shows, that which is missing from the Hume-Edwards thesis—and engenders the flaw from which all of those counterexamples— is the lack of an account of the co-existence of those several constituents as parts of the whole in question. For only an explanation of the existence of the parts of a whole is their role as constituting parts of that specific whole will explain the existence of that whole. It is this holistic demand—a factor which most exponents of the Hume-­ Edwards Principle deem anathema—that is indispensably required for the viability of the principle.14 Without this factor the Principle cannot do its intended work. The long and short of it is that the Hume-Edwards thesis radically oversimplifies the actual situation. For it rides roughshod over the consideration that over and above items or objects there are structures (patterns, forms of order) that can organize those items into different sorts of wholes, and that throughout our concerns with collectivities these structures matter. And it does not matter whether the structure is processual/temporal rather than physical/geometric. (To explain the existence of each issue of a complex menu does not account for the meal-as-a-whole.) The Hume-­ Edwards Principle radically oversimplifies the actual situation by failing to reckon with the holistic aspect of the situation. Explaining the parts severally and distributively simply does not account for the collective unity at issue with their coordinate co-existence as part of one single whole. The inherent logic of the situation is such that in asking for a collective explanation of existence one is stating a demand that no merely distributive explanation—however extensive and elaborate—is able to meet.

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In explanatory contexts the move from parts to whole is highly problematic. Consider an example. We can explain for any time t of his lifespan why Kant never left Prussia roughly as follows. For every such t, there is a timespan e such that at the time t-minus-e he was at such-and-such a location in Prussia, and there simply was not enough time, given the available means of locomotion, for him to reach the boundary within the timespan e. That achieves an explanation of sorts. But would anyone hold that this yields an adequate explanation of why, throughout his lifetime, Kant never left Prussia?15 We must not be misled into thinking that we have explained the whole as such when we are in a position to account for its membership seriatim. When we ask an explanatory question about a whole, we don’t just want to know about it as a collection of parts, but want to know about it holistically qua whole. A seriatim explanation of why each and every dodo died is not thereby an explanation of why this type of bird died out as a species. When we know why each particular day was rain-free (there were no rain clouds about at that point), we still have not explained the occurrence of a drought. Here we need something deeper—something that accounts for the entire Gestalt. The Hume-Edwards Principle fails to heed certain critical conceptual distinctions that are readily brought to light by means of a bit of symbolic machinery. Specifically, let us adopt the following abbreviations: p @ q for “p [is true and] provides an adequate explanatory account for q,” where the variables p and q range over factual claims. E!x for “x exists,” where the variable x ranges over existing objects. Because the variable x ranges over existents, we have it that (∀x)E!x. On this basis it is readily brought to view that the form of the statement “Everything has an explanation” or “There is an explanation for everything” admits of two very different constructions: • Distributive explanation: “There is some case-specific explanation to account for each and any existential fact.”

 x   p  p@ E ! x 

(6.3)

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• Collective explanation: “There is one single generic explanation that accounts for all existential facts—each and every one of them.”16

 p   x  p@ E ! x 

(6.4)

As these specifications indicate, two decidedly different questions can be at issue, namely: • Does every existent have its own (individual) existence-explanation? • Is the one overarching single explanation that suffices to account for existence at large, encompassing each of the things that exists? To be sure, we have it that (6.4) → (6.3), but, of course, the converse does not hold. The Hume-Edwards thesis proceeds on the mistaken idea that it does. With distinctive and collective explanations different questions are at issue and different matters are at stake. And in posing different questions we must be prepared for the possibility of different answers.

A Last-Ditch Stand In endeavoring something of a last-ditch stand, Hume-Edwards partisans might propose taking a very different line as follows: You misunderstand us. We are actually not trying to enunciate an explanatory principle at all. Rather, our concern is with a procedural policy; we want to urge a certain line of approach to the global explanation of existence. Our position is not that of the structure: “Don’t bother to ask for a collective explanation of existence at large because a distributive explanation will give you everything you want.” Our position is, rather: “Don’t go so far as to ask for a collective explanation for existence at large because this is asking for too much. For global explanation is something inherently unrealizable. A distributive explanation of existence is the best and the most that one can ever hope to get.”

However, to endorse this policy-recommendation is—clearly!—something quite different from accepting the Hume-Edwards Principle as a factual thesis, and any victory that could be gained by this particular defense is Pyrrhic. For in taking this line one does not support—or even invoke—the Hume-Edwards thesis as generally understood, but actually

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abandons it. Moreover, once the idea is abandoned that the policy rests on a correct and cogent principle, then justifying that policy emerges to saddle its exponent with a heavy burden of proof—one that goes counter to much of the philosophic tradition and requires its exponents to embark on a large and deeply problematic project. What does all of this mean for the issue of holistically synoptic explanation? It serves to indicate that Leibniz and Clarke were right at least in this that explaining the existence of the universe-as-a-whole is something that encompasses a distinctive demand over and above a putative explanation of existence of the individual components involved. That mega-issue is not to be sidelined by a disintegrative principle of the sort envisioned by Hume and Edwards. In the final analysis, their thesis fails in its aspiration to provide a small instrument for sidelining a big issue. But, of course, when the issue of existence-explanation is posed with respect to the decidedly unusual issue of existence-as-a-whole we must expect that with what clearly is an unusual question, there will also have to be an unusual answer. The rationale of the Hume-Edwards Principle is simply unsustainable. The problem of overall explanation simply cannot be resolved substantively on a factual, piece-by-piece basis. If there is to be a synoptic explanation of existence, it will have to be something distinctive and different that faces the explanatory problem in its totality.

A Radical Turning Now if ever there is an extraordinary, unusual, out-of-the common reason sort of question, this quest for a synoptic all-at-once explanation of things provides it. It is, if you will, the mother of all oddities. And it is clear that none of our standard means of explaining substantiation even begins to address it adequately. Standardly, there are two ways substantiating a fact and establishing its acceptability: the evidential and the methodological route. We substantiate a fact evidentially by presenting some other fact or body of facts in its support. By contrast, on the methodological route, we validate its acceptability by showing that it has the supportive backing of a reliable method (e.g., by the inductive method or by the testimonial support of expert authorities). But in the present case neither of these approaches will do as with both routes we already need pre-established factual inputs either evidential or authority-conforming. And this means

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that we would have to presuppose as available facts whose availability is in question, so that our proceeding unraveled through becomes the fallacy of “begging the question.” Accordingly, any validation of the standard sort is predestined to failure in the present case. The usual measure effective explanatory substantiation is impotent for validating all-inclusive of falsifying-as-a-whole is at issue. Here our usual standard modes of explanatory substantiation are bound to fail, and we are driven into the unwelcoming situation of the matter. “When you ask extra-ordinary questions, you must be prepared for extra-­ ordinary answers.” But what sorts of variant, extraordinary modes of explanation could possibly be available to us. If the requisite explanation cannot proceed in terms of otherwise available facts what else can possibly provide a fulcrum for its probative work? Are we now not driven not of the factual claims altogether. The answer, strange though it may sound, is yes we are. We are now draw to a recourse that is both available and inevitable: values. To see this we must go back to basics and consider the conditions which—in the circumstances—must be met by a viable/workable answer: 1. Non-factuality and value (AXIOLOGY). Because any factual recourse would make for vitiating circularity, the explanatory work must be done by considerations of positivity—and must thus rest on considerations of merit and value—and, in particular, or positivity value. That is the explanation provided requisite for the pan-explanatory job in hand has to be axiological in nature. 2. Self-sufficiency or auto-validation (FINALITY). The explanatory principle which itself forms part of the fabric must be self-validating. For it is rested in further normative principles it would not accomplish its requisite explanatory work. We would be entrusted as a prospect of putting the tortoise on the head of the elephant on the back of the alligator and so on. And so, in the final analysis, there is but one principle of normative autovalidation that can possibly do the job, a resort to the Principle of the Best to the effect that That alternative which is overall for the best is ipso facto actual: what is optimal is for his very reason going to be real.

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And this principle does the job because (1) its antecedent condition requires no factual input but by its recourse to optimality relates to evaluate matters alone, and (2) it requires no further “external” validation but itself obtains entirely on its own telling, seeing that its obtaining is something that is itself for the best. Granted, this axiological principle of fact explanation sounds extraordinarily unusual. But this is simply inevitable because the fact it is being invoked to explain is—as already stressed—something that unavoidably requires unusual explanations. At this stage our thinking must proceed entirely “outside the box.” There is no help for it. Were the explanatory principle at work not something highly eccentric it could not be expected to accommodate the highly task at issue. The axiological Principle of the Best (PB) takes a clearly nonstandard approach to existence explanation. So how can one guide an account for the obtaining of the principle itself: what is the raison d’etre that answers the “Why is it so?” question about it. The answers—lo and behold!—lies in the principle itself. The principle obtains because that very fact is for the best. It is reflexively automatization and requires no means of external support. In this context it is important to distinguish between two rather different contentions: • Whenever p obtains, then this is optimal because it being so is for the best in the overall scheme of things. The reality is optimal:

p  Op  Optimalism 



• Whenever p is optimal (in its being for the best in the overall scheme of thing that p should obtain), then p is actual (i.e., it will be so that p indeed obtains). The optimal is real.

Op  p  Optimalism 



The two are not equivalent. For, in general, of course, A → B is something very different from B → A. But only if several distinct alternatives were maxi-meritorious (and so optimal) would Op → p fail.

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It must be noted that this technical optimalism is not necessarily all that optimistic. For the best possibility may yet turn out to be the best of a rather bad lot. Finally, however, a substantial difficulty remains to be confirmed. When one refers to “the best” or “optional” alternative what is the standard of validation that is at issue? What sort of existence-oriented value is at work in these deeply metaphysical deliberations? Clearly as the pivotal issue is that of the reason for existence it cannot but be the factors of rationality itself. It is only natural and fitting that a reasonable universe should look to reason itself as the paramount positivity. And on this basis the merit/value at issue would pivot on the external to which an existential manifold supposition the interests of reason—that is, facilitates the development of rational beings and principles them with the occasions and means for deploying that reality on developing an understanding of its nature. User-friendliness in relation to the best intent of reason would thus become the Casual value standard for rational deliberation. But is such optimalism not merely the product of wishful thinking? By no means? For grounding lines in the operations of what might be called the Sherlock Holmes Principle: Once every other possibility has been eliminated, the alternative that remains, however improbable, must be the case.

Notes 1. Because the comparative complex f1 and f2 is a fact whenever f1 and f2 are facts, the PSR does ensure the explainability of finite fact conjecture. But, of course, the al-comprising infinite mega-fact is something else again. 2. Hempel, Carl G., “Science Unlimited,” The Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 14 (1973), pp. 187–202. (See p. 200.) Our italics. 3. Note too that the question of the existence of facts is a horse of a very different color from that of the existence of thing. There being no things is undoubtedly a possible situation, there being no fact: is not (because if the situation were realized, this would itself constitute a fact). 4. Aristotle taught that every change must emanate from a “mover,” that is, a substance whose machinations provide the cause of change. This commitment to causal reification is at work in much of the history of Western thought. That its pervasiveness is manifest at virtually every juncture is clear from W. L. Craig The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (London: Macmillan, 1980).

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5. Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London: 1779), p.189. 6. Leibniz Monadology, 1714, “Principles of Nature and of Grace,” sect. 8, italics supplied. Compare St. Thomas’ master, Aristotle: Of necessity, therefore anything in process of change is being changed by something else. (S. T., IA 2, 3) The idea that only substances can produce changes goes back through Thomas” master, Aristotle. In Plato and the Pre-Socratic, the causal efficacy of principles is recognized (e.g., the love and strife of Empedocles). 7. For criticisms of ways of avoiding the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” see Chap. III of William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1975). Cf. also. Donald R.  Burrill, The Cosmological Arguments: A Spectrum of Opinion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), esp. “The Cosmological Argument” by Paul Edwards. 8. See Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attribute of God (London: Printed by Will Botham, for James Knapton, 1705), and Leibniz Monadology, sect’s 37–38. 9. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part IX. See also Joseph K. Campbell, “Hume’s Refutation of the Cosmological Argument,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 40 (1996), pp. 159–73. 10. William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. by P. Boehner (Edinburg: Nelson, 1957), p. 124. 11. A deep distrust of aggregative totalization pervades the whole first section of “The Antinomy of Pure Reason” in Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 12. Paul Edwards, “The Cosmological Argument,” The Rationalist Annual for the Year 1959 (London: Pemberton, 1960), reprinted in Donald R.  Burrill, The Cosmological Arguments: A Spectrum of Opinion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). 13. William Rowe, “Two Criticism of the Cosmological Argument,” The Monist, vol. 54 (1970). (See p. 153.) On this principle see also Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Alex Pruss, “The Hume-Edwards Principle and the Cosmological Argument,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 434 (1988), pp. 149–65. 14. Note that the cognate thesis “If every member of a collection has a certain property then so does the collection as a whole” is obviously in trouble. It works just fine with arguments like “If every part of a machine is made of iron, then the machine-as-a-whole is made of iron.” Or “If every part of a

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field is in Pennsylvania then so is the field as a whole.” But it fails grievously to obtain in general, seeing that it commits the so-called Fallacy of Composition. Every member of the collection may well fit in this box without this being true of the entire collection. Or consider a mathematical example. Every member of the series {1}, {1, 2}, {1, 2, 3}, and so on is a finite set, but the series-as-a-whole certainly is not. As Patterson Brown has rightly observed, with inference by composition “each such proof must be considered on its own merits.” See his “Infinite Causal Regression” in Anthony Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), pp. 214–236. (See p. 230.) 15. A strange object springs into being as of t0; it does not exist at t0 but does exist at any subsequent time. Now for any time t after t0 we can explain its existence at t by noting that it existed at the prior time t-minus-epsilon and (so we may suppose) is self-preserving. But would anyone suppose that this explains its existence at large? (I owe this example to Michael B. Burke.) Cf. also the discussions of Chapter III of William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1975). 16. Note that neither of these is the same as (∃p)(p @ (∀x)E!x) which obtains trivially given the symbolic conventions adopted here.

CHAPTER 7

The Significance of Philosophical Fallacies

Oversimplification as a Key Source of Philosophical Fallacy Throughout situations of disputation, dialectic, and controversy, the classic probative principle applies: The burden of proof rests with the proponent (agenti incumbit probatio). And in philosophical discussion, in particular, we operate under the presumption that in endeavoring to support a claim, the proponent does its utmost and puts his best foot forward. Failure in supportive argumentation thus becomes a negative credential at this point, not just a loss of potential possibility but a realization of actual negativity. Fallacious reasoning in philosophical substantiation betokens not just an absence of gain but the presence of loss: It does not restore the dialectical status quo ante, but indicates a defeat in the battle if not the war. And in view of the scope and complexity of philosophical issues, there is much potential for fallacy here, with oversimplification as the cardinal, and pervasive mistake of philosophizing. Pretty much everything that goes wrong ultimately roots in some mode of oversimplification. And in philosophy, as elsewhere, it is important not to require more than can possibly be had. It would be absurd to measure weight of a person to the nearest milligram. We cannot expect commonality on matters of personal practice or public policy. The history of philosophy is the ongoing story of growing complexification, of correcting over-simplifications. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Rescher, Philosophical Fallacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97174-8_7

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In effect, the philosophical problem-solutions of one stage bring to light through oversimplification the further complexities needed to deal adequately with the problems on the agenda as it stands, but requiring a move into ongoing complexity and sophistication. The errors made at a given stage of the subject are then not failures in philosophizing but hallmarks of its development. A particular version of oversimplification—namely, oversight—the failure to take note of relevant considerations—is a basic source of philosophical mistakes. A cognitive myopia here results in simplifying matters by omitting to take due note of pertinent possibilities. Such omission is bound to create situations where relevant considerations are allowed to escape from view. In promoting his thesis that “To be is to be perceived,” Berkeley generalized too readily from actuality to possibility by conflating perceiving and perceivability. Consider an illustration. If you oversimplify matters to the point where dotted boxes are just simply that—dotted boxes—you will simply overlook difference at work in:

•



These two boxes will be descriptively identical for you so that you will fail to realize that significant difference at issue and impose a spurious sameness—and thus generality—upon the situation. In philosophy, as elsewhere, oversimplification costs information and thereby creates problems. When Descartes bifurcated organic reality into the mentally thinking and the physically inert, he rode roughshod over a complex and convoluted organic realm. In reading philosophy, one sometimes has the feeling that the opposite feeling, overcomplication, is at work. But one has to distinguish flaws of thought from flaws of exposition, between doctrinal oversimplification in ideas and in expository oversimplification is their exposition. Expository complication arises from filling the blank of incomprehension with unhelpful verbiage. To be sure, there is, in theory, overcomplication as well as oversimplification. This is relatively rare in philosophy throughout philosophizing, where the policy of avoiding needless complications prevails. After all, when someone gets to the point of pursuing complications for their own sake, they tend to lose their audience. (Some of Hegel’s writing illustrates this.)

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One version of the Fallacy of Oversimplification that is particularly prominent in philosophy is reification (also “hypostatization”) which occurs when a difference in the state or condition of things is transmuted into different kinds or sort of things. Thus, there are not two different types of iron, solid and molten, but only one type of thing, iron, in one or the other of these two states. And there are not many types or kinds of sentences long, medium, short, but only the type of thing, sentences, of veering length. And in philosophical deliberations, there are not many types of luck—moral, ethical, sportive gambling, culinary, philatelic, and so on— but there is only being lucky in one or another of these contexts of operation. Thus, in recent years, there has quite erroneously sprung up an elaborate dimension about “moral luck” arising when someone is inadequate saved from committing a moral act (or purported act a morally possible one) by pure inadventure. (For instance, intent on a murder he finds that someone has only just beaten him to it.) Here luck has saved him from performing the act but not from the onus its intent it would and should have occasioned. But this sort of thing is not a special ethical sort of luck, but a luck pure and simple occurring in a certain sort of situation. (Any more than there is a special sort of culinary luck that someone has when a power outage prevents overcooking the casserole.)

Foresight Problems Over-ambitiousness (hybris) is another prime source of philosophical mistakes. For philosophers are not much concerned with what is common, usual, normal, contingent, but with what is general, convenient, and necessary. Conceptual innovations that come in the wake of philosophical development generally bring new and different issues and insights into view and that lead us to recognizing and acknowledging the shortcomings of our earlier conceptions and operations. In philosophical matters as with those of science, the present cannot speak confidently for the future. The insights of the future are (by definition) unavailable to the present. New questions demand new answers and these require new concepts and ideas to the laborers of the day have no avail. The resolutions of problems on the agenda of the present always raise further issue than those further questions. The dialectic of philosophical development is such that for the range of what comes later that which is available at present is always enmeshed in over-ambition.

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And all this of course means that philosophical disagreement is inevitable over the course of time. In forming our judgments about the world’s doings and dealings, we have to suppose that what lies outside the reach of our experience is pretty much like what lies inside: Some version of a Principle of Uniformity is unavoidable for us. And this supposition is, in its way, the grandfather of all oversimplification.

Philosophy Is No One-Size-Fits-all Endeavor: The Inevitability of Philosophical Variation and Disagreement In a complex world simply “more of the same” is not usually on offer. To project present trends is simply oversimplification. A notable mistake of much philosophizing lies in the projection of present trends into future lines of development. The technological and individual pages of the later nineteenth century were projected by many thinkers into the vision of a utopian future. The breakdown of European civilization in the wake of WWI was viewed as the harbinger of a characteristically distressed and distraught instability whose only preventive lay in “strong leadership.” Theorists of the left and right alike throughout this era insisted on projecting current trends into the unfolding future. But the reality of it is that trend projection represents a vast oversimplification in human affairs. Philosophical history presents an ongoing series of surprises. It can, of course, be objected that this thesis of ongoing variation is itself no more than a projection of trends. But here one must be careful and take a variety of due distinctions into account. Salient among them was that between local and global trends—those in the near term and those in the longer term. General trends and limited situations are rotated like long-term and short-term “on average” development. You may be able to predict quite fairly how much rain there will be in a given year, but lack the ability to say how much will occur in a given week. It is constructive in this regard to consider the case of time-series statistics as per stock prices, motor vehicle registrations, or burglaries. Even when it transpires that there is a long-­ term increase as per there is no answer that within any given space of a particular length matters would evolve one way or another: up or down. Long-term increases (or decreases) are invariably compatible with opposite movement over a limited term of any given length.

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quantity time

Assessing a philosophical position as appropriate and tenable is bound to depend on matters of personal situation; but whether it is articulated competently and cogently for the fundamentals that serve as its premisses is subject to objective and impersonally cogent standards of appraisal. There is thus far less difficulty with process than with product. Finding of substantive errors in philosophizing—such as appraising a certain presupposition as appropriate—is a matter of one’s personal doctrinal commitments, but finding a procedural error, such as the presence of inconsistency, is something that is—or should be—objective and impersonal. And yet, the transit from the subjectivity of personal experience to the objectivity of impersonal fact is the prime stumbling block of cogent philosophizing. Complications cannot be taken into account until circumstances have brought the corresponding conceptualization into our range of vision. Complex phenomena involve being seen from different points of view. When the landscape varies, the different perplexities bring different scenes to light, so that different sections provide for different impressions and appreciations. The American poet and journalist John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) was the nation’s most notable humorist before Mark Twain. A Washington hostess regarded him as “deserving capital punishment for making people laugh themselves to death.”1 He earned lasting fame with his poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” which tells the story of certain blind sages, those Six men of Indostan To learning much inclined Who went to see the elephant (Though all of them were blind).

One sage touched the elephant’s “broad and sturdy side” and declared the beast to be “very like a wall.” The second, who had felt its tusk, announced the elephant to resemble a spear. The third, who took the

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elephant’s squirming trunk in his hands, compared it to a snake; while the fourth, who put his arm around the elephant’s knee, was sure that the animal resembled a tree. A flapping ear convinced another that the elephant had the form of a fan, while the sixth blind man thought that it had the form of a rope as he had taken hold of the tail. And so these men of Indostan, Disputed loud and long; Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong: Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong.

Philosophers are all too prone to accuse their colleagues of leaping to large conclusions on small evidence. The danger of this failing—detected more readily in others than oneself—is among the instructive lessons of this philosophical poem. To be sure, one might attempt to overcome this circumstance via the idea that different accounts—seemingly discordant philosophical doctrines—all quite correctly characterize the truths of different realms of one, all-embracing reality. Viewed in this light, reality is complex and internally diversified, presenting different facets of itself to inquirers who approach it from different points of departure. And on such an approach, diverse philosophical systems could seem as describing reality variably because they describe it in different aspects or regards. Everybody is right— but only over a limited range. Every philosophical doctrine is true more suo—in its own way. In principle, the various accounts can all be somehow superimposed or superadded. Apparently diverse positions are viewed as so many facets of one all-embracing doctrine; they can all be conjoined by “but also.” Such a Multifaceted Reality Doctrine would combine the several apparently, discordant alternatives in a way that gives to each a subordinate part in one overarching whole. Reconciliation between diverse doctrines can thus be effected additively through the conjoining formula “but furthermore in this regard,” even as the elephant is spear-like in respect to his tusks and ropelike in respect to his tail. William James’s pluralism was of just this sort. He wrote: There is nothing improbable in the supposition than an analysis of the world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts. In physical

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science different formulae may explain the phenomena equally well--the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity, for example. Why may it not be so with the world? Why may there not be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose between, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as someone has said, a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different mode of description.2

And so the question arises: Are discordant philosophical views actually conflicting, or are they mutually complementary—different components of one complex overall position? It would, of course, be generous and irenic to take the view that everybody is right in part. But unfortunately, this line does not look promising. For the reality of it is that philosophical views positions are devised to conflict. Their very reasons for being of a given position in philosophy for being are to deny and contradict those discordant alternatives. And in the end we have little choice but to conjecture that the general reality of things is as our own limited experience of it shows it to be.3 The prospect of error creates room for variation. Philosophical proliferate not because philosophers are unintelligent but because the issues they confront are inherently many-sided and complex in nature. The ever-expanding and varying landscape of philosophizing requires an inseparable mix of objective and personalized considerations. The most fundamental and pervasive mistake that is made about philosophy is that the field is viewed as a one-case-fits-all endeavor. The issue-relevant data that are effectively available to the thinker are a mix of the conditions of this individual’s place and time and of the specific orientation of the personal interests, concerns, and values at issue. What is simply unknown or what is deemed anathema will not—cannot be— invoked as premisses for deliberations. All this is a matter of personal context and situation and the construction of a philosophical position emerges. The very issues, questions, and problems that form the agenda of a philosopher arise from a mix of the cultural environment of that thinker’s objective context and that individual’s personal concerns.

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Not Every Philosophical Defect Is the Product of Fallacy Not every philosophical position is endangered by invoking a fallacy of reasoning: Take, for example, the clearly problematic thesis of constitutive reductionism, to the following effect. (R) Every collective fact F(G) regarding a group G can be inferred from the distributive facts fi regarding the members constituting that group (that is for the conjunction f1(g1) & f2(g2)) … for all members gi of G and suitable fi.

Sometime this is indeed the case. For instance, the average age (F) of the citizens of a country can be deduced from the individual ages (fi) of those citizens. But as a general role (R) fails to hold. Thus, the facts about those individuals will not yield the correct general contention that average age of people in the year X will not differ by more than 1% from that of year X + 2. And the stability of suicide rates will not follow from any available body of personal information about the individual citizenry. Thus, (R) is simply unavailable as a general principle of philosophical reasoning and it would be fallacious to rely upon it. Philosophical fallacy arises through errors of reasoning in answering questions. But there are also very different sorts of defects. Some of these relate to the very questions themselves: Are they instructive? Are they important? Misjudgment in this regard is clearly erroneous.

Linearly Inferential Versus Dialectically Cyclic Reasoning Much, if not most, of our thinking is carried out under conditions where we do not deem the premisses from which we reason to be absolutely certain truths, but merely very probable or plausible suppositions. This situation has far-reaching implications for the appropriate character and structure of our reasoning, implications which are generally unheeded and unrecognized. Whenever we reason in a deductively valid way from assured premisses—premisses viewed as being true in line with the traditional conception of “truth” as systematized in classical logic—we automatically know (a) that our conclusions are themselves certain and thus one and all unproblematically acceptable. Moreover, we also know (b) that they are

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mutually consistent—compatible not only with the totality of our initial premisses but also with each other. Accordingly, our reasoning can be linear and progressive. We can march straight on, never needing to look back over our shoulders at earlier findings to assure ourselves that the new ones have not rendered the old unacceptable, or that prior results are reconcilable with the new ones. We can constantly forge ahead into new territory, confident that there is no point in looking backward to re-examine old positions in the light of new ones. By contrast, “dialectical” reasoning is a matter of the repeated reconsideration of old issues from newly attained points of view. The root idea of such reasoning is that of a multistage process where we repeatedly re-­ examine one self-same issue from different, and mutually inconsistent, points of view. It is a matter of developing a course of reasoning in several phases or “moments” where we consider an issue from different and mutually incompatible points of departure, moving in a roundabout way from a thesis via another not altogether compatible with it to a conclusion of some sort. We proceed in circles or cycles where we return to a certain issue first in this light and then in that. We do not constantly press onward to new ground; we repeatedly crisscross the same terrain, approaching old issues from different and often discordant angles. We have a plurality of witnesses, for example, who assert conflicting claims with respect to a historical episode. And we give each of them a favorable, sympathetic hearing tentatively accepting the assertions of each “to give them a run for their money.” Thus, by examining the entire situation sequentially in the light of different “versions,” we try to distill out a plausible overall account that may—even in the end—leave various issues unresolved and unreconciled. This cyclical aspect, with its reconsideration of the same issues from various perspectives of consideration, is the feature which, above all, sets “dialectical” thinking apart from the standard case of linearly inferential reasoning. In this way, there is a sequential deepening of the case for the conclusions one is endeavoring to substantiate. One “tightens the net,” so to speak, though the sequential development of an increasingly adequate case, consolidating the issue now in this aspect and now in that, returning to the same issue from different angles, making use of varying and even mutually inconsistent premisses for its substantiation. When we are doing history, for example, this is exactly the sort of thing we have to do. As this illustration indicates, there is a vast difference between the case of reasoning from premisses pre-established as certain (as certainly true), and that of reasoning from premisses whose acceptability is based on a

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footing of mere plausibility (as plausibly or presumably true). In this sort of circumstance, it can make eminent sense to proceed sequentially, returning to the same contention from different angles of consideration. There is an important lesson here. In situations when the cognitive ground beneath our feet is not totally firm—where our deliberations are relatively speculative—it may make perfectly good sense to proceed dialectically and consider an issue prismatically in the variable light of not merely different but even inconsistent perspectives. It is possible to envision situations in which as good a case can be made for inconsistent claims as for almost anything else that one accepts. We are well advised to steel ourselves to tolerate occasional inconsistencies. There is nothing irrational about this.

Ampliative Versus Reductive Reasoning There are two profoundly different approaches to the cognitive enterprise which, for want of better choices, might be called the ampliative and the reductive, respectively. The ampliative strategy searches for highly secure propositions that are acceptable as “true beyond reasonable doubt.” Given such a carefully circumscribed and tightly controlled starter-set of propositions, one proceeds to move outward ampliatively by making inferences from this secure starter set. The resulting picture is as follows. After all, in many matters our concern is not with certainty and confident acceptance but with provisional credibility and tentative acceptance. The implementation of an ampliative epistemology calls for a keen eye to basic certainties. The quest for that appropriate starter set of secure axiomatic propositions is the paramount task. A reductive epistemology calls for a mind-set oriented to breadth in the first instance rather than depth. It is a matter of a wide-ranging search for plausibilities rather than a deep-probing reach for fundamentalities. The model is that of a detective searching for plausible clues and indications rather than that of a mathematician searching for assured axioms. The process of disputation and controversy affords a good illustration of the sort of thing that is at issue. Argument in a controversial discussion, rather than mathematical demonstration along Euclidean lines, is the best model for dialectics. Not only do the two different approaches—the inferential/ampliative and the dialectical/reductive—call for very different views of acceptability, they invoke very different views of consistency as well. With i­nferential/

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ampliative reasoning, consistency is everything. When our starter set of initially accepted premisses is not consistent, we can reach no viable conclusions. When our conclusions are inconsistent, we are in an untenable position. With dialectical/reductive reasoning, the case is very different. As Display 7.1 indicates we here proceed expansively, by moving outward from the secure home base of an entirely unproblematic core. The reductive strategy, however, proceeds in exactly the opposite direction (See Display 7.2). It begins in a quest not for unproblematically acceptable truths, but for well-qualified candidates or prospects for truth. At the outset one does not require contentions that are certain and altogether qualified for recognition as genuine truths, but proposition that are no more than plausible, well spoken-for, well-grounded candidates for endorsement. Of course, not all of these promising truth-candidates are endorsed or accepted as true. We cannot simply adopt the whole lot, because they are competing—mutually contradictory. What we have to do is to impose a delimiting (and consistency-restoring) screening-out that separates the sheep from the goats until we are left with something that merits endorsement. And here we proceed by way of diminution or compression as per the

Secure starter set

Ampliated range of derived propositions

Display 7.1  The ampliative approach

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Start set of plausible acceptance candidates

Contracted range of fully endorsed propositions

Display 7.2  The reductive approach

constructive picture which makes it clear that the reductive approach proceeds by narrowing that over-ample range of plausible prospects for endorsement. While the paradigm instrument of ampliative reasoning is deductive derivation, the paradigm method of contraction is dialectical argumentation. To effect the necessary reductions we do not proceed via a single deductive chain, but through backing and filling along complex cycles which crisscross over the same ground from different angles of approach in their efforts to identify weak spots. The object of the exercise is to determine how well enmeshed a thesis is in the complex fabric of diverse and potentially discordant and competing contentions. We are now looking for the best candidates among competing alternatives—for that resolution for which, on balance, the strongest overall case can be made out. It is not “the uniquely correct answer” but “the most defensible position” that we seek in dialectics. Nor should be daunted by residual problems and difficulties. The aim need not be a position that is problem-free, but one that faces lesser difficulties than its available rivals.

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Two Very Different Sorts of Acceptability: Qualified Belief The epistemology of a reductively developed cognitive discipline is thus something radically different from that of an ampliatively developed one. With ampliative reasoning we proceed “foundationally” in the manner of an axiomatic approach. The first and paramount task is to obtain that “starter set”—that firm basis of secure, certain, and unquestionably acceptable propositions from which the rest of the system can be ampliated. We embark on a quest reminiscent of Descartes for clear and distinct certainties on whose basis we can erect a larger cognitive structure. Security, certainty, unproblematic acceptability become our touchstones. With reductive reasoning, however, the matter stands on a rather different footing. The touchstone is now not certainty, but something on the order of plausibility, or credibility, or likelihood, or verisimilitude. Here we want to cast our net widely to gather in as much as we can of all those contentions that “have something to be said” for them. We are not searching for cognitive “solid citizens” alone, but are involved in gathering in as many “plausible prospects” as we can get hold of. Our view of “acceptability” changes from acceptable-as-certain to acceptable-as-a-credibleprospect—from outright endorsement to serious entertainment. Very different sorts of cognitive acceptability are accordingly at issue: acceptability as certain (C-acceptability) in contrast with acceptability as credible, as plausible and promising (P-acceptability). The former is a matter of unqualified endorsement, the latter of tentative or provisional endorsement. Accepting something as a certain fact is something very different from accepting it as a promising prospect. Consider the situation depicted in Display 7.3. Clearly, this situation confronts us with an outright contradiction. Something must give way. But what? Because (1) and (2) and (6) are merely hypotheses here, they stand secure. Four alternatives are thus open: • One can abandon (3). • One can abandon (8).

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(1)

One believes it to be the case that p.

(2)

One is a rational agent.

(3)

Rational agents act on their beliefs.

(4)

One will act (in any and all circumstances) on one’s belief that p. (From (1)-(3).

(5)

One recognizes (concedes, allows) that there is some small chance that p might be false.

(6)

One’ is offered a bet that will pay one cent if p is true and invoke an awful catastrophe (say the end of organic life in the universe) if not-p is true.

(7)

One would bet on p in this case. (From (4), (6).

(8)

Rational agents are (somewhat) Bayesian. They guide their actions by the balance of probabilistically assessed risk and return. And so they do not accept minute inducements to run even small risks of (sufficiently great) disasters.

(9)

One would bet on not-p in this case (From (5), (6), (8)).

Display 7.3  A paradox of rational belief

• One can abandon (5) as untenable in the presence of (1) and (2). None of these options is attractive. We do not want to abandon (3) and dissociate belief from action in the context of rationality. Again, we do not want to abandon (8). We are rightly reluctant to forego the Bayesian approach to rational decision making. Nor is it all that easy to abandon (5). For it is not an appealing prospect to hold that rational believers cannot concede some prospect or possibility that their beliefs might be false— that is, that they are constrained to see all their beliefs as absolutely and definitively certain. How can we exit from difficulty? As is so often the case with such theoretical difficulties, the way out lies through the door of a distinction. Our beliefs are not all of a piece. There are two possibilities as regards their epistemic status. There are things we believe-to-be-absolutely-certain. We view these as totally secure and utterly safe. We would bet literally everything on them. With respect to these beliefs—but only these—the inference from (1)–(3) to (4) holds good. Such wholly unconditional beliefs, of course, are few and far between. The rational man uses due epistemic caution. Most of what we believe we

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believe-to-be-plausible (P-beliefs). We view these as adequately secure and relatively safe—but not as altogether certain. They are secured against all realistic possibilities that something might go wrong, but not against all conceivable possibilities. For these P-beliefs we would not put “everything” at risk. On the basis of this distinction, then, we are able to avert the paradox of Table I. The reading of “belief” in (1) that authorizes the move to (4) via (3) presumes that we are dealing with C-beliefs. But the reading of “belief” in (1) that allows us to invoke (5) is predicated on its being P-beliefs that are at issue. The distinction between C-beliefs and P-beliefs averts the paradox at issue. It enables us to effect a reduction of that over-­ rich family of (inconsistent) initial commitments. (Note that this very methodology itself exhibits the reductive approach.) And this distinction is in itself a perfectly rational one. We are prepared to chisel some of our beliefs in stone. Others we readily admit to be written in sand. Some things we accept in a dogmatic frame of mind, while others we accept only guardedly. What is at issue with regard to this distinction between C- and I P-beliefs is not, of course, a difference in content of beliefs. The difference is one of status. At first I accept something on the basis of surmise and conjecture; eventually I come into possession of strongly confirming evidence. It is not the contention at issue that changes, but the light in which I view it. Some contentions (viz., those represented by C-beliefs) I accept absolutely, others I accept all right (and, of course, accept as true because that is what “acceptance” is) but in a less committed, more tentative frame of mind. When I set down my contentions, I write the former in red with the latter in black. Regardless of what color ink I use, when I make the statement, I use it to say the same thing—it makes exactly the same claim. The different is only in respect to my confidence in this claim.4 Answers to our questions are only available via standards of acceptability. These, however, always admit some “noise” into the system—some degree of entropy and imperfection. And this allows for a certain amount of misinformation and disinformation along with the information. Thus, we are put into the position of having to pay a price for the relief of ignorance—by accepting a situation where the avoidance of “errors of omission” carries the prospect of “errors of commission” in its wake. In these circumstances, the price of inconsistency avoidance in terms of information loss can become simply too large for comfort. The trade-off between

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sporadic (localizable) anomalies and information forfeits is so balanced that we are “rationally well advised” even to take (occasional and localizable) inconsistencies in our stride.5

The Place of Dialectics in Philosophy Hegel saw history as a court of final appeal that wards its just verdict through ultimate success or failure. As regards philosophy, this view of the matter is not entirely accurate. For it is always questionable to issue death certificates for philosophical doctrines. They have a tendency to survive through self-emendation. Thus, there are no longer any normalists of the scholastic type, but the ranks of their spiritual descendants are well-filled. There are no longer materialists of the seventeenth-century (Hobbism) variety—matter itself has become too de-modernized for that. But there is no shortage of physicalists who espouse an ideology indistinguishable position. Philosophizing is inherently complex and many-sided, a matter of inner tensions, of competing pushes and pulls in varying directions. In biographical interpretation, in the description and explanation of historical transactions, in the interpretation of literary or artistic creations throughout the humanities, in short—this prismatic complexity comes to the fore. In the natural sciences, cognitive systematization almost always conforms to the ampliative paradigm. We begin with a relatively modest starter-set of observational results, well-confirmed through repeatable experiments and explanatory theories, well-established in contexts of prediction and application. And we then proceed outward by the deductively inferential means of mathematical derivation. The expansive model standardly prevails. However, in the human science—philosophy included— the situation is generally very different. Paradigmatically (e.g., in historiography), one proceeds not inferentially but dialectically. One gathers in all the promising “data” and prunes them into a coherent structure. The contractive model comes into prominence. Both processes aim at the same end result, insofar as both are ventures in “the quest for Truth.” But they proceed in this common quest in very different ways—ways that, though very different in certain fundamental respects, are alike in their common allegiance to rigorous rationality. The salient difference is not between quantitative sciences and non-­quantitative disciplines, but between those areas where one’s reasoning is deductively inferential and those where we must proceed by dialectical means. The

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processes of inferential and dialectical reasoning, however different in other ways, are not different in that one is a matter of rigorous thinking and the other of irresponsible sloppiness—that one is “genuinely scientific” and the other “mere basket-weaving.” The widespread tendency to think of the “human sciences” (the historical and humanistic disciplines) as non-scientific is based on an overly narrow and narrow-minded conception of rigorous reasoning. Aristotle has much to answer for his own explicit disavowal of the quest for unwarranted rigor notwithstanding. By his insistence that deductively articulated science alone is genuinely scientific and that dialectics is a matter of “mere rhetoric,” he set back for some 2000 years the development of rational dialectics (and the dialectical disciplines themselves). Even now, some two millennia later, we are far from freeing ourselves from his prejudice that only ampliative/deductive reasoning is genuinely cogent and that reductive/dialectical reasoning is something inferior and second rate. We are still caught up in the backwash of Greek beliefs that only those disciplines whose rational systematization proceeds by way of mathematico-­ linear development are rigorous and solid and that those disciplines that proceed by way of dialectically cyclic argumentation are somehow inferior and unsatisfactory Surely, a more liberal and open-minded attitude is in order. In those cases where the linear approach can be implemented effectively, well and good. But there is nothing to apologize for in those cases where a more complex and “messy” dialectical approach to cognitive systematization is needed to accomplish the work in hand.

Good Philosophizing “Who killed Colonel Blimb?” You respond: “The butler in the hall with the candle stick.” Note that: (1) you have provided an answer, and (2) in doing so you have committed no grammatical fallacy. But, of course, you may well be off the track. (The actual killer may well be “the cook in the pantry with a carving knife.”) The situation is the same in philosophy. Despite absence of any formal flaws, room for substantive error yet remains. No matter how cogent the reasoning, problematic premisses cannot ensure correctness. One can be wrong about things without getting involved in fallacious reasoning: Fallacy avoidance is not enough for assuring adequacy. Cogent philosophizing is—and always has been—a difficult challenge.

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What is to be said about the status of a philosophical thesis or doctrine that succeeds in evading all of those fallacy pitfalls, and has the good fortune to stand secure against the standard sorts of philosophical unacceptability. Would its immunity from refutation mean that the position is acceptable? Clearly not. The mere fact that a philosophical thesis or theory cannot be refuted by the standard tactics does not mean that it can be viewed as established. A philosophical position cannot be established wholly along the via negativa solely by being inevitable to certain particular modes of objection. Its substantiation demands positive reinforcement—producing good reasons not simply for their considerations as viable possibilities but for their acceptance as cogent and correct. All that we can claim for the thesis and theories that survive the gauntlet of defeating objections is that they are plausible (rather than true) and worthy of consideration (rather than acceptance). Even if the supportive reasoning for a philosophical position is altogether fallacy-free, that position cannot be taken as established. For reasoning that proceeds from false and unacceptable premisses—however cogent and error-free as such—can still lead to absurd conclusions. Moreover, philosophical doctrine is a complex position that is bound to have many parts and components—it is a mansion of many rooms, and even if one of them is uninhabitable much else may remain intact.

Fallacy Need Not Prove Fatal Philosophers are only human. They too became entangled in error. Sometimes these result from outright mistakes due to inept and careless thinking. But more often than not their sort roots in the nature of the subject itself. For error is pervasive in philosophy not because its practitioners are incompetent or careless but because the problems inevitably outrun the informative reach of our cognitive resources. The data and the conceptual tools for their explanation are too meager for the massive difficulties required to address adequately the “big questions” with which the philosopher is confronted. Old ventured solutions invariably crumble in the wake of new challenges. And philosophers are no better than anyone else in seeing around corners to achieve a present apprehension of future problem-solving. In general, errors in which philosophizing becomes entangled are not culpable mistakes of incompetence or carelessness but are rooted in the

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systemic structure of the philosophical enterprise: errors evoked by the nature of the problem situation that philosophy confronts. In the wake of more extensive and clear insight into the problem at hand, philosophers develop issue-resolutions whose fuller examination debated explanation leads to expanded recognition of the complex arrangements of a difficult world. Philosophical absolutism is a version of “baying after the moon,” of requiring something that simply is not to be had. It is exemplified by the Cartesian demand of absolute certainty in matters of objective knowledge. (If that were a requisite of such knowledge then there simply wouldn’t be any.) That fact puts no free lunch on offer. None among the alternative problem-­resolution is important problems of its own—naive affords cost-­ free resolution of the questions that involve no difficulties and negativities of their own. The task is then not a matter of finding a resolution that raises no problems, but rather in whose realm of problem-resolution versus problems-raised is optimal It is in sum, a matter of cost-benefit analysis—of weighting the balance of possibilities versus negativities. The seriousness of fallacious reasoning—the extent to which it does damages the substantiation of a philosophical position—depends critically not in the nature of the fallacy itself, but it is the exact placement of its occurrence. For the impact of fallacy in philosophizing is a substantially contextual matter. For only if that fallacious argumentation occurs in the setting of reasoning that is of crucial or at least weighty significance in bearing will fallacy do significant damage to the overall position as issue. There are two importantly distinct modes of supportive argumentation for philosophical contentions: I. The Chain model: Here the reason is linear, sequential, and destructive. As in a mathematical proof, everything depends completely on what has gone before. And the operative prospective is that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. II. The Rope model: Here the reasoning is developed by independently reinforcing strands and its substantiation cogency is parallel, cumulative, and aggregative. The operative principle is that the putative strength is mutually reinforcing and stronger than a single strand of argumentation.

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The presence of fallacy in the supportive argumentation for a philosophical position has distinctly difficult implications with regard to these modes of reasoning. With chain-model substantiation fallacy is fatal. By breaking a link in the chain, it destroys the value of the whole. With rope-­ model substantiation its impact can be virtually nil. In breaking a single strand, it may well leave the supportive impact of the whole virtually intact. To be sure, in the rope-model substantiation, the contribution of fallacious reasoning is nil. But that choice method to diminish (let alone annihilate) the supportive impact of the rest. With characteristic zero in point, fallacies here make no addition, but they effect no substitutions either. With the chain model fallacy will prove fatal whenever it occurs. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link. But with the rope model fallacy can prove substantially irrelevant. The loss of a single strand is only rarely fatal with a rope. To be sure, any position that is supplied only by fallacious arguments is thereby fatally flawed. And so, the damage done by fallacious reasoning in philosophy depends on the details of its overall substantiation and turns less on the what than on the where and how of it.

Notes 1. Sara A.  Pryor, Reminiscence of Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 70. 2. William James. “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans Green, 1899) p. 76. 3. Further Reading: William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans Green, 1899); William James, The Works of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, various dates); John Godfrey Saxe, Poems (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850). 4. The well-known “preface paradox” should be considered on this basis. The author is not really contradicting himself in telling us in the preface that some of the statements of the text are false. He is just putting us on notice that the text is printed in black ink (so to speak). The author believes those statements of the text are all right and invites us to believe them as well. But only in the qualified way that characterizes the rational man’s approach to the great bulk of factual issues. 5. This presupposes that we have in hand a body of logical machinery that does not allow us to deduce anything and everything from an inconsistency, so that even a single inconsistency renders a body of assertions cognitively incoherent. But such inconsistency-tolerant (or “paraconsistent”) logics— are nowadays abundant.

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Index1

A Anaximander, 28 Anaximenes, 28 Anselm, Saint, 21 Aristotle, 1, 3, 19, 22, 30, 55n2, 55n4, 76, 98n4, 99n6, 117 Arrow, Kenneth, 63 Austin, John L., 51–52 B Barclay, Bishop, 12 Berkeley, George, 16, 102 Brown, Patterson, 100n14 Buridan, John, 32–33, 55n4 Burrill, Donald R., 99n7 C Carnap, Rudolf, 58 Cicero, 55n2 Clarke, Samuel, 89, 95

Clifford, W. K., 44–45 Copernicus, 35 Craig, William Lane, 98n4 D Darwin, Charles, 78 Democritus, 28 Dennett, Daniel Clement, 67, 68 Descartes, René, 17, 33–36, 102, 113 Diogenes Laertius, 55n3 E Edwards, Paul, 90, 95, 99n7 Epimendes, 29 Eubulides, 28, 29 F Freud, Sigmund, 78

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

H Hamblin, C. L., 25n1 Hegel, G. W. F., 102, 116 Heine, Heinrich, 42 Hempel, Carl G., 86, 87 Heraclitus, 28 Herbert, Sandra, 11 Hume, David, 41–42, 87, 89, 90 J James, William, 44, 106 Johnson, Samuel, 12 K Kant, Immanuel, 3, 11, 21, 37–39, 75, 88, 90, 93 Kenny, Anthony, 100n14 L Leibniz, G. W., 37, 50, 87, 89, 95 Locke, John, 18, 22, 45, 46 M Mach, Ernest, 17 Mill, J. S., 40–41 Milnor, John, 63 Minio-Paluello, L., 55n4 Moore, G. E., 36 Moss, Leonard, 25n2 N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42–43, 56n11, 56n13

P Peirce, C. S., 58 Plato, 14, 19, 30–31, 55n4, 99n6 Popper, Karl, 49, 50 Pruss, Alexander R., 99n13 R Ramsey, Frank, 49 Reichenbach, Hans, 58 Rescher, Nicholas, vii Rowe, William R., 90 Russell, Bertrand, 49 Rüstow, Alexander, 55n3 Rutherford, Ernest, 4 S Saxe, John Godfrey, 105, 120n3 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 4, 55n4 Shakespeare, William, 1 Simmel, Georg, 56n14, 56n15 Socrates, 3, 15, 55n4 Spencer, Herbert, 11 Spinoza, Baruch, 36–37, 78 T Thales, 28 Twain, Mark, 75, 105 W Walton, Douglas N., 25n1 William of Ockham, 89 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 46, 47, 49, 50 Z Zeno of Elea, 18