This site, a faith-based Catholic (I think) news site, has an Op-Ed by an erstwhile science teacher on Dennett's Breaking the Spell. It's not pretty to see someone trying to take down a professional philosopher philosophically, when they are not educated in the field
Basically, Dr David Roemer tries to redefine terms that have a long history in philosophy and science in line with the talking points of the Intelligent Design crowd. He says of materialism, which Dennett correctly defines as explanation of phenomena without recourse to the immaterial, such as "soul", that it is in opposition to dualism (which is false - dualism is in opposition to monism, which need not be a materialism) and of dualism that "it was abandoned by philosophers a thousand years ago". This must confuse those who read Descartes, or more recently David Chalmers. Roemer tries to appeal to Plato and the "one and the many", which he gets quite wrong. It was not about humans being one metaphysical composition. The one and the many was about generic terms - how they apply to many things that are somehow one. Plato called them "forms" (eidei), and set up a ticking timebomb for that doctrine in the Parmenides with what is now called the Third Man Argument. Still not about "man", this is a problem of saying that what unites all the men running around, is the form of Man. But what unites "Man" with the men? Plato's interlocutor says it must be a "third" "Man". And this goes on indefinitely. The One and the Many has absolutely nothing specifically to do with the nature of human beings.
Then he goes ever more badly off track. "The philosophy that God does not exist is not materialism, it is naturalism." Say what? When I did undergraduate philosophy, "naturalism" was the view that some aspect of the world could be given a natural, that is, physical, account. So, people offered ethical naturalisms in which ethical values were physical or natural properties (utilitarianism is one of these), or cognitive naturalisms in which cognition was a natural process, or naturalised epistemology, in which knowing was a physical act, and so on. "Naturalism" as an anti-god worldview is the creation, plain and simple, of Phillip Johnson, the lawyer who tried, more or less successfully, to frame the intelligent design debate as a conflict between theist and atheist science. But it isn't. Science is done one way, by natural means, whether one is a theist or atheist. Trying to overextend science into a realm where evidence cannot apply and experiment is impossible, and inference is unconstrained is not "supernaturalistic" or "theistic" science; it is theology, plain and simple.
So, Dennett 2, Roemer 0. We continue...
According to Thomas Aquinas, man is a metaphysical composition of two incomplete beings: a material incomplete being and a immaterial incomplete being. I understand this to mean we can comprehend man because we know everything that happens to man and everything that man does. However, we can't define man because we can't define knowledge and free will.
Can you say "non sequitur"? Aquinas relied on Aristotle's form-substance dualism, which is not so much a metaphysical dualism as the view that form is what gives substantive bodies some or all of their properties. It most certainly does not mean that "we can comprehend man because we know everything that happens to man and everything that man does". Where is he getting this stuff from? Not from the excellent Father Copleston, I'm sure. And defining knowledge and free will have nothing to do with the metaphysics of "Man", not directly. Dennett: 3.
After a dreadful comment about the Cosmological Proof (if only contingent beings need causes, why think the universe is contingent? It may be necessary even if all the entities within it might have been otherwise. The universe is not either necessarily infinite or supernatural. Dennett is right that it fails. And Hume has yet to be demolished on that point), he slides to the "we know revelation is true because it is God telling us, and we know God is telling us because revelation is true" merry go round. Then he moves into the ad hominem territory of calling those who lack faith a nasty name (in this case "scientismists"), adn the panoply of fallacies is fairly complete.
What is most amusing here is that parading his ignorance here is sufficient for him to think he has been successful in "identifying and discussing the more egregious errors and omissions" of Dennett's book. Some professions everyone thinks they can do without training - carpentry, automotive mechanics, philosophy and cooking. Roemer crashed his oven at 60mph, and the joists came apart.
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An excellent post, but if I might offer a small correction. Descartes was not a materialist, but rather a metaphysical dualist. You may be confused by the term ?Cartesian Materialism? which pops up from time to time. This was not a belief of Descartes, but rather an advance on his thought which rejected his metaphysics. Dr. Roemer?s contention that materialism ?was abandoned by philosophers a thousand years ago? is still nonsense of course. Serious philosophers for the last four hundred years from Spinoza to Nietzsche to Ayer and Wittgenstein have largely been materialists. Oddly, David Chalmers isn?t a materialist either; rather he is one of the few dualists among serious non-theological philosophers.
A thinko: I meant to say that Roemer says philosophers abandoned dualism a thousand years ago. I'll amend the post.
Not to quibble (OK, yes, to quibble), but you say:
"'naturalism' was the view that some aspect of the world could be given a natural, that is, physical, account."
I thought physicalism was that view. Granted that terms like "physicalism", "naturalism", and "reductionism" may not have had their genesis as "isms" in the sense of originating as a defined doctrinal position, but rather as attitudes or mindsets that happened frequently enough and similarly enough across enough domains to be labelled after the fact. But even given this vagueness, I understand naturalism in the methodological sense to designate the refusal to accomodate teleology as a fundamental explanatory base, and in its metaphysical variant as the claim that the reason why explanatory naturalism works just is because there is no such thing as an ineliminably teleological or semantic aspect of the world that does not supervene on nonteleological, nonminded substrates (which just incidentally, but not necessarily, are physical).
This is what I understood to be what Dennett was all jumping up and down excited about in Darwin's Dangerous Idea: the notion of natural selection giving a bottom-up view of the world, as opposed to a top-down, mind-first view of the world. The solar system is not elliptical because roundness is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, the eye is fulfills a purpose but was not put here on purpose, and the grammar and vocabulary of the English language we use to describe these things was not decided intentionally, but it too evolved.
So naturalism (as I understood it) was anti-yahweh to the extent that he is claimed to be a free-floating entelechy or the embodiment of nous or some such, but not antigod provided that anything matching the job description will itself be amenable in principle to a natural reduction. How confused am I?
Not quite. It's a scope matter - physicalism is the claim that only the physical exists. Naturalism is a program to give something not previously thought to be physical such as ethics, epistemology, mental phenomena, and so on a "natural" account. It's not to imply that everything must be given that account (although I am a physicalist myself - this is just about exactness of terms).
Take "function" - if we adopt a teleosemantic account (one in which function is that activity of a reproducing system which exists in present instances because it was advantageous in ancestors), then we have naturalised function, because teleology was previously thought to be something in addition to the physical aspects of organisms. But it doesn't follow that everything must be natural (I might adopt this and still be a theist, you see; leave it as read that this is conceptually possible, to avoid that debate for now).
Likewise, those who think that mental activity is just a set of multiply-realiseable states of brains think that the mental is "natural" (which means here physical), and have naturalised the mind. Ditto for ethics - if you equate the Good with, say, pleasure or freedom from pain, then you have naturalised the Good.
John Wilkins wrote
Nah, carpentry, car repair, cooking and winning back the Ashes are difficult - philosophy's a doddle. All you need to remember is that anything you can think of has already been thought of by some Greek or Roman or medieval cleric or Rennaissance geek, so it's just a question of finding the right one to quote to sound smart.
At least, that's how the likes of Roemer seem to think.
His purpose is not to engage in a debate with philosophers. He has a different audience in mind, an audience not schooled in philosophy and, hence, susceptible to being dazzled by his erudition, an audience who probably view philosophers with deep suspicion but who are nonetheless heartened to hear that there are philosophical justifications for their beliefs - in other words, demagoguery not pedagogy.
A nice blog entry with which to start my day! Thank you!
I find it very difficult to keep track of the various "isms" and their respective modifiers (methodological, metaphysical, etc.). Even the various attempts to straighten out the mess usually leave me more confused than before.
In general, I take "naturalism" to say that an explanation of a given phenomenon (ethics, intentionality) should be modelled off of successful paradigmatic scientific theories. Sounds loose, I know. But "modelled off of" captures what I do want to be committed to, and none of what I don't.
Consider Spinoza. Certainly a metaphysical naturalist (and a pantheist), clearly hostile to teleological explanations, and more importantly, Spinoza attempted to explain the nature of substance, emotions, and virtues as if they were objects of a Galilean-Cartesian sort of physical theory. ("I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids." Ethics III Preface)
Likewise, Hume's philosophy of mind gives us a non-teleological theory of causal relations between "impressions" and "ideas." These relations are modelled off of something like Newtonian mechanics. (I say 'something like' only because I've heard it said that Hume did not really understand Newton very well.)
Now, Spinoza and Hume are clearly not physicalists -- or even materialists. Hume does not try to show us how to reduce mental entities to non-mental ones, and Spinoza puts mental events co-equal with physical events as "attributes" of the single natural-divine substance.
I would even go so far as to say that there's a substantial tradition of non-physicalist naturalism -- e.g. Nietzsche, Bergson, James, maybe Whitehead.
The main advantage of "physicalism" over "materialism" is that modern physics is committed to the existence of many things that are irreducible to "matter" in the Democritean sense. The question is whether physics should be taken as the sole arbiter of our ontological committments.
It's important to make these kinds of distinctions in order to show that there are many more possibilities than the Johnson-Dembski folks want to admit. Because they want to win by default -- they don't want to have to argue for their view, they only want to argue against whatever straw man they've set up as the only alternative to their view. And in doing so, they make the whole debate much less interesting than it could otherwise be.
Generally, when people start naming positions as if they were Platonic solids, you know that harm is being done to the issues. Johnson is a master of that obfuscation.
One minor point, though - physicalism is not the view that our present physics is the arbiter of ontology, but some final, complete and idealised physics should be (one presumes on parsimonious grounds, although that is sometimes left unsaid). So I can hold out that quantum indeterminacy is an artifact of incomplete theory [this is a red rag to a friend].
I agree with you about obfuscation, and Johnson's mastery of it. It reads like a parody of Richard Rorty's broad-brushed tactics.
Johnson is also a master of obscuring the distinction between metaphysical issues and cultural problems. Thus, "materialism" or "naturalism" in a metaphysical sense are identified as the root cause of "materialism" in the sense of consumerism, existential rootlessness, and narcissism.
As for physicalism: that's no doubt an important qualification, though it seems to take the sting out of physicalism. After all, are we really in any position to say what entities will or will not be countenanced by a "final and complete" physics (assuming there is such a thing)? With what confidence can we say that the physicists of 2506 will not be saying, "how could those 21st-century physicists have been so foolish as to deny faster-than-light travel?" Either we can say, with confidence, that they won't be saying that - a confidence based on our best present physical theory -- or we should be entirely pragmatic, a la Quine, and not make any claims at all about what our descendents will believe. In that case, then, physicalism would seem to go out the window.
I've heard from my physicist friends, both Bohmians and non-Bohmians, that quantum indeterminacy could well be an artifact. I'm not competent to judge those arguments. But those arguments are made from the position informed by our best current theory, and our best current understanding of how intuitively obvious the axioms of a mathematical theory ought to be, etc. So I don't see how any appeal to "a final and complete theory" is going to save physicalism.
To keep the record straight: The idea that human being have souls mesmerized philosophers until the middle ages. Midieval philosophers emphasized the unity of man and said that man was an embodied spirit. Materialism is such an irrational philosophy that it is difficult to know what philosophers like Dennett are thinking.
For example, many materialist-reductionists say free will is an illusion, but they live their lives as if they had free will. They feel guilty, apologize, and promise to reform just like the rest of us.
The proof of God's existence on my website. If anyone has any questions, I'll be glad to answer them.