[Vision2020] Eugenie Scott's Talk at U of I

[Michael]

Joe,

 

Thanks for the thoughts.  Here's what comes immediately to mind:

 

You Wrote:

In light of the diversity of religious and non-religious beliefs, Plantinga

is forced to suggest something like what Michael suggests, e.g., that we (or

some of us) are built with "a highly damaged belief producing mechanism: one

that sometimes hardly works at all, or at other times even when it does

work, it is so weak and faulty that self-deceptive mechanisms." Some people

just get it wrong. I don't find this to be a very satisfying response. To me

it is not so much a response to skepticism as it is a defense of dogmatism.

 

Me:

Yes, I think it is probably more a defense of dogmatism than it is a
response to skepticism. And it may be true from a broad perspective that
Plantinga is forced to say some of these things because of the pluralism
that surrounds him. I'm not sure.  However, I don't think this is actually
how his proposal of 'proper function' works in terms of his conceptual
analysis of 'knowledge.' As you know, Plantinga is just playing the same
analytic game with propositional knowledge, and he argues that 'proper
function' provides a better analysis of what makes our beliefs warranted
than does the more classical formulation of internal evidential
justification. But this would seem to mean that the context of his work is
not primarily the task of 'answering the skeptic.'  Perhaps Plantinga would
simply say, "why do a thing like that?". 

 

This also means that all our knowledge, and not just our religious
knowledge, provides evidence for a 'proper function' analysis.  I know that
you have a mind like me because my cognitive faculties are producing and
sustaining beliefs the way they ought, not because I have sufficiently
certain propositional evidence on which to base my belief that you have a
mind like me.  But if I start believing that my computer has Dr. Campbell's
mind, and this is due to a malfunctioning of my belief forming mechanisms,
then this belief is not 'knowledge' even if it does happen to end up true
(e.g. unknown to me, you have taken control of my operating system and have
began expressing your personality in various multi-media ways).  Plantinga
goes on and applies this to belief in God, but belief in God is not his
originating datum.  Further, the analysis of proper function provides yet
another argument for the existence of God, since naturalistic accounts
cannot seem to get us (according to Plantinga) the intuitive idea of 'proper
function' to begin with, which is why Plantinga's definition of knowledge
needs to include 'according to the design plan' in its necessary and
sufficient conditions.  Also, as I've already hinted at, this idea of
'cognitive malfunction' appears to be one way of expressing traditional
Abrahamic theism, with a cosmic fall as found in Gen. 3.  So it would seem
that Plantinga is just cutting with the grain in a couple ways; he doesn't
seem to be forced into anything because of his 'fundamentalism,' a word
Plantinga enjoys making fun of in Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford
University Press.  

 

And Plantinga is not peripheral in a discussion like this given the
universal appreciation for him.  I knew an analytic philosopher not long ago
who was offered a teaching position at Harvard; he rejected the offer, but
chose Plantinga's epistemology for Senior Seminar that year since he thought
Plantinga was the most brilliant philosopher alive. Interestingly this same
philosopher is a well known proponent of atheism.

 

I like your minimalist analysis of communal belief sharing (if that's an ok
way to put it). I'd like to delve into that too, but I don't have the time
right now.

 

Enjoying the discussion

Michael Metzler

 

 

 

 

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