Presuppositional apologetics
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TexFire316
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Sounds like something one would take when he is constipated.
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The Matt Dillahunty/Sye Ten Bruggencate debate is a good example. Also the debate between Sye and Aron Ra. Notice how he flounders when Aron Ra takes him off-script.
Also, there is a great exchange in the comments section of this blog between Sye Ten and Dawson Beckrith. Notice how he gets taken off script pretty quickly and resorts to personal attacks and never once addresses Mr. Beckrith's thorough refutation of the arguments on Sye's website. Notice also that there is no argument on his site, only a series of questions that are supposed to lead one to the conclusion Sye wants to prove, but questions are not arguments. Notice how he keeps pressing Beckrith for a live debate. See, he can't go an a gish gallop in a comments section. He wants to be able to keep peppering questions to never let his opponent have a chance to respond substantively.
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No. "True in itself" is an intrisicist term. My worldview rejects both the intrinsic view of truth and the subjective view of truth. Truth does not exist in reality apart from the mind and it does not exist in the mind apart from reality. On my view truth exists in the relationship between the contents of the mind and the facts of reality, hence its dependence on the primacy of existence principle. This is the objective view of truth. The view that the objects of consciousness have primacy over the subject of consciousness or to put it more concretely, wishing doesn't make things so. Facts do not care about your feelings.
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You sound just like Sye.
From the comments section, where Sye posts on the same day that the blog entry was published and is the second comment:
"Maybe someday I'll have the time to read all that.
Perhaps a debate is in order sometime. What say?"
So he rushes over to respond to this criticism of his "proof" on this tiny little blog and then says that he hasn't read the post but yet he wants to debate. ( and by debate, he means browbeating) He goes on to post nine comments over two days, none of which deal with a single point brought against his proof. Instead, he attacks Bethrick's worldview.
He says: "So, in order to get to step 5, (referring to one of the steps in Bruggencates proof) you had to admit that there are laws of logic, mathematics, science, and absolute morality, how do you account for them according to your worldview?"
Now he's on the script. He's hoping that Bethrick is part of the 99.5 percent of people who have never tried to think of how to account for laws of logic, mathematics, science, and absolute morality and would have no idea where to start. He's looking for that blank spot of knowledge to insert his worldview. But unfortunately for Sye, Bethric isn't and his worldview can account for these things.
Bethrick answers "By means of the axioms, the primacy of existence and the objective theory of concepts. That’s how."
To which Bruggencate has no reply. Bethrick's answer blows up the script. Sye makes a few more snarky comments and then leaves.
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Exactly. Sye's own circular reasoning is "virtuous" while he claims everyone else's is "vicious".
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Quid est Veritas?
In Memoriam to CS Lewis
I think you are missing the point, though I am not familiar with the guys you list in the OP. Presuppositional Apologetics doesn't hold their position beyond scepticism, but points out there are good grounds to doubt others - their beliefs are based on Faith, thus giving certainty, but that Faith remains a requirement; or as you put it, an infallible Being has revealed it. That is the presupposition they start with. By taking that Faith as basis, the rest falls into place; while views without it, remain contradictory in some way. The classic example would be the Naturalist considering the valence of an idea to be illusory, but then argues from moral or value judgements to ideas like the best for society, or the good of humanity or posterity.
Cornelius van Till, the 'founder' of this school of Apologetics, argued that unbelievers are both Rational and Irrational, as they reject the Faith based on a semblance of Rationality, but this is shored-up by unconscious irrational positions. In the same way, the Christian Apologist has unconscious positions too. The known positions are the ones rationally chosen, but the point is to deconstruct them until the unconscious presupposition is laid bare - and then to see if that passes muster. If the Apologist finds his presupposition ends at a need to affirm Divine Sovereignty, or Infallibility, or Biblical Revelation, then that is a non-issue; as consciously being an Apologist, he has already affirmed these implicitly in the Faith. If the unbeliever deconstructs to presuppositions, they also need to be affirmed to support the rationalist construct, but there is no concept like Faith to fall back on. They must be taken on that person's whim, or by force of Will, but these are then not reasoned positions, but just the prefered perception subconsciously of that person. Often such positions are implicitly irrational, such as giving primacy to sense-data while well-aware of the existence of illusion, delusion and hallucination, for instance.
I am sympathetic to it, but I don't consider it the best form of Apologetics. In the end, it remains possible to doubt the outcome, as reconstructing unconscious presuppositions however Biblical or amenable to Christianity, are more often than not a form of circular reasoning. Everything can be doubted, and men must choose to draw their line in the sand somewhere or choose which hill to die on. People often need to be reminded of this. That said, you are clearly erecting strawmen to tilt against that you term Presuppositional Apologetics; but I don't know if what you are saying are valid reflections of the individuals you named earlier. It certainly is a misrepresentation of the school of Apologetics, though.
This is a circular argument. Something exists by being differentiated from something else, which is what the word means - to step forth. Something exists by nature that there is something it is not.
This says nothing about consciousness, but what you believe consciousness is doing - being perceiving something. This is a relational value based on perception - like defining leg as that which walks.
You said:"If my perception is invalid, by what means am I conscious. Blank out." So it seems you are not differentiating those concepts well. But is not a delusion or an hallucination invalid perceptions? Are they then unconscious? Consciousness is a very protean term, but it certainly is not just perception. What of mystical experience, which is perception or consciousness if you will, of non-duality?
This is dependant on what 'that exists' means, that you earlier used in a circular way. For things act on one another, like light giving colour when perceived by an observer. This requires participation, between the observer, the object and the perceived light. Is this identity not then when it is identified? Differentiated or made consciously aware off? Further, you are asserting a specific set of attributes, and a sort of independance - hence you are right into the problem of Universals. For instance, whose attribute is colour? The one perceiving it, or the object itself? What of things like rainbows then? A tautology doesn't mean much, as why can't A's attributes change into something not that same A as before? Why must A always be that A? Does it not depend on the ascribed attributes placed upon A? How can attributes in common between identities then be squared, if they are independant, or perceived as in common?
They certainly do not. They imply the opposite, that existence only exists when consciously perceived.
How on earth do you suddenly jump to independance from conscious activity, after stating that things exist as themselves and are consciously perceived? The former can only follow from the latter, so underneath lies a whole slew of assumptions on the validity of sense-data, perception, empiricism, etc.
None of these things are implicit. You are acting fast and loose with terms. A computer can disagree with a result without being conscious of it, it depends very much what import we apply to 'disagree'. Simple negation does not mean the original exists necessarily nor is valid, except perhaps conceptually. So are you arguing a form of Idealism then? By saying A, everything else is Not-A, are you not then just creating conscious category? How on earth can this imply independant identity at all? If I state A is A, why can't A be a protean thing that changes, like the I of Buddhism or the weather? There is no objective content to a tautology.
What you are saying sounds very muddled to me, so please feel free to explain. Recycling Rand is not really very fruitful.
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I can understand how one might think this way. But I'm going to go the way of the Existential Subjectivist AND the Philosophical Hermeneuticist instead.
Personally, while I agree that Reality and its facts don't care about our feelings, the harder, human 'truth' of the matter is, the extent of the feelings we have about the world around us can affect how and why we handle what we think are data; our emotions might even affect the way in which we understand what we think we're doing as we handle the "facts" of the world. Things do require interpretation, and our processes of analysis require limited inquiry and analysis of our own praxis as well as of the actual act of applying ourselves to the "facts."
So, it's not really like 'facts' smack us in the face clearly and distinctly with their essences, and even if they seem to do so, it's not the case every single time we think we encounter them.
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I interpret everything by means of the axioms, the primacy of existence and the Objective Theory of concepts, which are true, so what's the fuss? Do you think an idea can contradict the axioms and the primacy of existence and still be true? I'd like to see an argument for that. Subjectivism assumes the primacy of consciousness metaphysics, which is false. Also, I'm wondering why you put truth and facts in quotes like that.
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I'm sorry, but what you say is very muddled and rambling and all over the place so I'm not going to try and respond to every point you made. When presuppositionalists say that you can't know anything or make sense of anything without a belief in their God that is an absolute statement and it very definitely does place their position beyond skepticism. According to them, you can't think without God and skepticism is a kind of thinking.
I'd really like to know what grounds there are for doubting the axioms and the primacy of existence principle. Just by saying there are grounds to doubt worldviews other than Christianity you affirm my starting point, the axioms, and the primacy of existence. You're making a knowledge claim. Knowledge is some consciousness grasping some fact of reality. There's the axioms of consciousness and existence being used right there. And since your statement makes use of concepts, you performatively affirm the axiom of identity for if the axiom of identity were false, there'd by no way to identify anything and therefore no concepts. And unless you claim that your statements are true because you want them to be or believe them to be, you are also performatively affirming the primacy of existence. The axioms are incompatible with the presuppositionalists worldview and at the same time they make use of all of these principles any time they make any statement. I'd say that thoroughly destroys their argument, wouldn't you?
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You interpret everything by means of the axioms? Whatever do you mean?
Y'know. I have a funny story. When I was in college and I was taking a class in Social Philosophy (or was it my Bio-Medical Ethics class? ~I can't remember which exactly, but the same prof. was in both), there was a student who asked my prof. about what he thought the status and quality of Ayn Rand was as a philosopher. The student (and according to him, his own mother, too) was apparently quite impressed with Ayn Rand and with her Objectivist ideology. But I'll never forget the professor's response to that student--that part of the memory still rings clear in my head. He said that while Ayn Rand was interesting to some extent, he thought she was nothing more than a marginal philosopher, at best. And said this twice to the student.
... and subjectively speaking, my own jaw just about hit the floor when he said that since I was [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] sure that he'd say Rand was objectively awesome, being that it was objectively the case that he was the solid, objectively minded atheist that he was.
As for getting into vetting out your apparent epistemic position, I'll see if I can gather some time to start nitpicking your favored approach.
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Well interpret is really not the right word to use. I would say that the axioms are the foundation, the connection to reality for knowledge. They exist at the point where the perceptual level of consciousness and the conceptual level meet. The axioms are undeniably true. One can not deny them without contradicting one's self. And knowledge is hierarchical in structure. So all ideas no matter how abstract, reduce to the axioms. All true statements reduce conceptually to A is A and all false statements reduce to A is not A. That's right, all truths reduce to a tautology, and tautologies that reference reality are necessarily true.You interpret everything by means of the axioms? Whatever do you mean?
Y'know. I have a funny story. When I was in college and I was taking a class in Social Philosophy (or was it my Bio-Medical Ethics class? ~I can't remember which exactly, but the same prof. was in both), there was a student who asked my prof. about what he thought the status and quality of Ayn Rand was as a philosopher. The student (and according to him, his own mother, too) was apparently quite impressed with Ayn Rand and with her Objectivist ideology. But I'll never forget the professor's response to that student--that part of the memory still rings clear in my head. He said that while Ayn Rand was interesting to some extent, he thought she was nothing more than a marginal philosopher, at best. And said this twice to the student.
... and subjectively speaking, my own jaw just about hit the floor when he said that since I was [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] sure that he'd say Rand was objectively awesome, being that it was objectively the case that he was the solid, objectively minded atheist that he was.
As for getting into vetting out your apparent epistemic position, I'll see if I can gather some time to start nitpicking your favored approach.
So it's better to say that all new knowledge must be integrated with the axioms. If an idea contradicts one of them then it is false. Integration is something you never hear people talking about but it's half of the reasoning process. For most people, they hold a hodgepodge of ideas that often contradict each other. I used to spend hours and hours in my Granddads garage untangling fishing line. He'd give me a jumble of leaders and hooks and rusty lures and whatnot that had been rolling around in the bottom of his tackle boxes for years. It would be about the size of a basketball. I loved doing it. I would find a good starting point of clean line that wasn't tangled and start to unravel the mess slowly and methodically. sometimes I'd find just the right loop to pull that would undo a huge number of knots and that was always really satisfying. I think of that process as being analogous to integrating one's ideas. You have to have a good, clean starting point and the axioms are that starting point. It's taken me over 15 years to root out all the contradictions I had in my own knowledge but it is oh so satisfying. The axioms are analogous to the starting point to untying and tracing the knots in a huge mess of fishing line. The knots are the contradictions in one's worldview. When you are done with both processes, you're left with a neat and orderly collection with everything in its place so you can find it and use it.
As far as your professor goes, I hear such ignorant proclamations all the time. It's like there's a website somewhere with a list of things to say if her name comes up, I hear the same lame criticisms over and over. What I never hear is a substantive criticism of her ideas that does not grossly misrepresent them. The reactions you see are usually more emotional than intellectual. The fact that your professor was an atheist, I don't know why this would be relevant. Every atheist I've met hates her. I mean frothing at the mouth hatred. That's because they are almost all leftists and she is seen as right-wing which is kind of funny. She didn't like conservatives at all. She hated Ronald Reagan with a passion. She said that if anyone voted for him, "may you be damned". So when I hear someone say that Rand was a mediocre philosopher, I know that they haven't read her works and integrated the ideas. Her Theory of concepts was truly groundbreaking and she gave the first objective account of morality. She solved the is-ought problem. She made so many contributions to the field and I hope that one day her ideas become the dominant ideas in the world because if they don't, we're doomed. I mean take a look around you. The exact opposite of her ideas hold sway all over the world today. Like what you see?
If you think she's so mediocre, let's have a real criticism. What's wrong with her metaphysics, what's wrong with the Objective Theory of Concepts, the Objective Theory of Ethics, the trader principle, the secondary objectivity of consciousness, the metaphysically given vs. the manmade, the refutations of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, the realist view of perception. And let's not forget her identification of the stolen concept fallacy. That alone is a weapon of mass destruction against all manner of bad ideas, such as Islam. Totally destroys Islam.
All great philosophers are system builders. Kant was a system builder. She built a fully consistent, completely integrated philosophy, built on Aristotelian tradition. Kant did the same thing in the Platonic tradition. Ayn Rand counted Kant as one of the greatest philosophers in history, even though she disagreed with everything in his system. She also called him the evilest person to ever live. I just wish that her opponents, even if they disagree with her totally, would acknowledge her genius as a system builder and integrator.
Absolutely, please if you can find a flaw in the Objective Theory of Concepts, bring it. But do me a favor and don't just go to some website and cut and paste. I'd be thrilled to death if you read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and give me your own thoughts. A good understanding of concepts is the key to learning to reason properly. And as far as my apparent epistemic position I have only begun to scratch the surface. Epistemology is a very complex subject, unlike metaphysics.
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Epistemology is a complex subject, as you've so very well illustrated with profuse assertions and details. I'd also offer to you that it can be complicated ... too.
And if there's one axiom that I think is true, it's that no one single person knows everything, has the perfect epistemology, or is equipped with the genius to solve all of humanities problems. Do you think that's an axiom that might need to be added to those you've already collected? [Actually, that might be three axioms, but I'll not press the issue ...
]As for Ayn Rand, if you think you can bring her here and use her as a battering ram against all forms and notions of the Christian faith or Christian thought--or even against other, non-Christian philosophers and atheists--you might have another axiom to consider.
So, tell me: What's your background in Philosophy proper? You sound fairly articulate. Are you degreed in Philosophy, or is it kind of a passing hobby of import for you?
Also, if you want me to read something, then you'll need to do the same in return for me. In case you do, or in case anyone else does, here's a little something to start us off:
The System that Wasn't There: Ayn Rand's Failed Philosophy (and why it matters) -Nicholas McGinnis - The Rotman Institute of Philosophy
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Clizby WampusCat
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I think the most dishonest thing they do is claim to know what you think or believe. Many will say I believe in God and that I have no better basis for my beliefs. These are both false. Not all presuppositions are the same. You cannot demonstrate that the presupposition that a god exists is true. I can show that the presupposition of the laws of logic are correct as we have never found a way to violate them. Except for the trinity of course.
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The good thing is it doesn't take a presuppositionalist to begin to find naturally occurring fault lines in Ayn Rand's philosophy. (See the article I linked above in post #35 )
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