It is often said that the notion of free will is incompatible with causal determinism, namely, "the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature." But the notion of free will may also be incompatible with classical logic (more specifically, the principle of bivalence according to which, for any proposition p, either p is true or p is false), as Aristotle's discussion of the problem of future contingents suggests.
Consider the following proposition:
Neo will choose the red pill.
On the one hand, if (1) is true, then Neo will choose the red pill and there is nothing he can do about it. On the other hand, if (1) is false, then it is not the case that Neo will choose the red pill and, again, there is nothing he can do about it. Either way, Neo cannot help but choose the red pill if (1) is true, or not choose the red pill if (1) is false, which means that Neo cannot choose freely.
What do you make of this argument? Does it show that the notion of free will is incompatible with classical logic (specifically, the principle of bivalence)? If so, which, if any, should we give up?
When I ask students why they go to college, I sometimes get the following answer: "Because I want a career, not just a job." But what is the difference between a job and a career?
According to the dictionary (via Google), a job is "a paid position of regular employment," whereas a career is "an occupation undertaken for a significant portion of a person's life and with opportunities for progress."
According to these definitions, then, a position as a cashier at McDonald's could qualify as a career if it is held long enough and has opportunities for progress (e.g., a promotion to manager). Most of my students, however, do not think that a position as a cashier at McDonald's counts as a career.
So what is the difference between a job and a career? Or, in philosophical lingo, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for career as opposed to job?
If you have nothing to hide, then you should not worry about the NSA surveillance program. If you do have something to hide, then you don't deserve to keep it private.
The problem is that, as Dennett says, only experts can identify when Ockham's Broom has been used. Novices or non-experts will not be able to tell that inconvenient facts are missing from an argument for or against a certain claim.
If that is the case, however, then should novices rely epistemically on experts? That is, if non-experts cannot tell when an expert is using Ockham's Broom in order to make an argument look more convincing than it actually is, how much trust (if at all) should they put in what the expert says?
Arguments from Authority (or appeals to authority) are non-deductive arguments from premises about an expert who asserts that p to a conclusion that p is likely true, probable, or worthy of acceptance. More explicitly:
Expert E says that p.
Therefore, p.
Now, consider arguments from anti-authority or appeals to bizarro authority. Such arguments go as follows:
In effect, Pigliucci seems to be arguing that Meyer must be wrong because he is not a philosopher. That is:
Non-philosopher Meyer says that p.
Therefore, not-p.
Is this a good argument? Is the appeal to bizarro authority a good form of argument in general? If we accept appeals to authority as good arguments, do we have to accept appeals to bizarro authority as well?
Assuming that "If you're going to boycott Israel, please remove the Intel chip that allows you to speak" is meant to be an argument, one interpretation of it is the following:
If one is to boycott X, then practical consistency demands a full (as opposed to selective) boycott.
Hawking wants to boycott Israel.
Therefore, Hawking must boycott everything Israeli (i.e., full boycott as opposed to a selective boycott).
Presumably, those who put forth this kind of argument assume that Hawking will not boycott certain Israeli things, such as the alleged Intel chip that allows him to talk, and thus he is guilty of practical inconsistency. What do you think about this argument? Is it fallacious?
A collection of propositions is an argument if and only if there is a reasoner R who puts forward some of them (the premises) as reasons in support of one of them (the conclusion) in order to rationally persuade an audience of the truth of the conclusion.
Now, if the function of arguments is to rationally persuade an audience, what happens when they fail to rationally persuade an audience? Are they still arguments? And what if there is no audience? What if I jot down my own reasoning for a conclusion in order to see if my reasoning is valid. Is that an argument?
Many textbook examples of arguments are not intended to rationally persuade the readers of the textbook that the conclusion is true. For example:
The purpose of this argument is illustration, not rational persuasion. So, according to the Pragmatic Approach, is it an argument?
The sorties paradox is a class of paradoxical arguments (AKA "little-by-little" arguments), which arise as a result of vagueness. One such paradoxical argument is known as The Heap:
Would you describe a single grain of wheat as a heap? No. Would you describe two grains of wheat as a heap? No. … You must admit the presence of a heap sooner or later, so where do you draw the line?
Formally, this paradoxical argument looks like this:
1 grain of wheat does not make a heap.
If 1 grain of wheat does not make a heap, then 2 grains of wheat do not make a heap.
...
If 999,999 grains of wheat do not make a heap, then 1,000,000 grains of wheat do not make a heap.
Therefore, 1,000,000 grains of wheat do not make a heap.
The argument is valid but the conclusion seems false; hence the paradox.
Now, consequentialism is "the view that normative properties depend only on consequences." For example, an action is morally good if it brings about good consequences. To make things simple, let's suppose that each good consequence is one unit of good. An action, then, can bring about more than one good consequence, and hence be worth more than one unit of good.
With this in mind, consider the following variation on The Heap; call it The Good:
Would you describe an act that produces a single unit of good as morally good? Where do you draw the line?
1 unit of good does not make an action morally good.
If 1 unit of good does not make an action morally good, then 2 units of good do not make an action morally good.
...
If 999,999 units of good do not make an action morally good, then 1,000,000 units of good do not make an action morally good.
Therefore, 1,000,000 units of good do not make an action morally good.
As in any sorites paradox, we can also move in reverse, i.e., by subtraction, as follows:
An action that produces 1,000,000 units of good is morally good.
If an action that produces 1,000,000 units of good is morally good, then an action that produces 999,999 units of good is morally good.
...
If an action that produces 2 units of good is morally good, then an action that produces 1 unit of good is morally good.
Therefore, an action that produces 1 unit of good is morally good.
In this clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Dr. Ben Carson's remarks about "changing the definition of marriage" are an instance of which of the following informal fallacies?
The original problem of induction, due to Hume, is the problem of justifying inferences from the known or observed (i.e., that with which we have had experience) to the unknown or unobserved (i.e., that with which we have had no experience). For example:
In my experience, all the New Yorkers I've met so far were rude.
Therefore, in general, all New Yorkers are rude. (Or, the next New Yorker I will meet will be rude.)
This argument is not deductively valid. Perhaps all the New Yorkers I've met were rude, for some reason, but there are New Yorkers out there who are not rude. I just haven't met them yet. We could add the following assumption to the argument in order to make it deductively valid:
(UN) What has happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. (Or, past experience is a sure guide for what will happen in cases that we haven't experienced.)
But then what is the justification for (UN)? (UN) can be justified deductively or inductively. However, no deductive argument can prove (UN) true, since (UN) is a contingent, not a necessary, truth. And no inductive argument can support (UN), since such an argument would be circular, assuming the very thing that it aims to support.
Now, the problem of justifying inductive inferences is supposed to hold for all inductive inferences from the known or observed (i.e., that with which we have
had experience) to the unknown or unobserved (i.e., that with which we
have had no experience). But is there an epistemically relevant difference between inductive inferences from past to future and inductive inference from present to past?
In this NOVA Science Now episode, astronomers draw conclusions about the history of the solar system from meteorites they find on Earth in the present and evolutionary biologists draw conclusions about the evolutionary history of our species from lice they find in our hair in the present.
Should we have more rational confidence in these inductive inference from present evidence (e.g., meteorites and lice) to past (e.g., evolutionary history of the solar system and our species)?
Perhaps. Consider that the past is supposed to be closed, insofar as what has happened has already happened, whereas the future is supposed to be open, insofar as what will happen hasn't already happened. If so, then when we reason inductively from past to future, rather than from present to past, there is simply more that we can get wrong.
If this is correct, then does that mean that we are more likely to get our present-past inductive inferences right than our past-future inductive inferences simply because there is a lot more we can get wrong about the future? And if so, should we have more rational confidence in present-past inductive inference than in past-future inductive inferences?
On the NY Times' The Stone, Gary Gutting takes on the admirable task of defending the Knowledge Argument and the ZombieArgument. Gutting puts the Zombie Argument specifically in terms of logical, rather than metaphysical, possibility. For example, he writes:
The basic premise of the Zombie Argument is that my zombie-twin is logically possible (and therefore that laws of nature connecting physical make-up with experiences are not logically necessary, even if they are physically necessary). [original emphasis]
From the logical possibility of a zombie-twin, Gutting claims, it follows that
my experiences involve something beyond my physical makeup. For my zombie-twin shares my entire physical makeup, but does not share my experiences. This, however, means that physical science cannot express all the facts about my experiences.
But does it really follow? How does it follow from "it is logically possible that I have a zombie-twin with the same physical makeup as mine" that "my own experiences are not entirely physical"? After all, the first claim is about what is logically possible (namely, the idea of a zombie-twin is not logically contradictory), whereas the second claim is about what is actual (namely, the actual phenomenon of consciousness).
Consider the following:
It is logically possible that terrestrial organisms are silicon-based.
Therefore, terrestrial organisms are not entirely carbon-based.
Does (2) follow from (1)? What, if anything, can logical possibilities tell us about what is actual?
All this has stolen into vogue under the sham disclaimer of "I'm not antisemitic, I'm just anti-Zionist"—the equivalent of "I'm not anti-American, I just think the United States shouldn't exist."
In Naming and Necessity, Kripke argues that true identity statements in which the identity sign is flanked by two rigid designators are necessarily true. For example, ‘Hesperus = Phosphorus’ is necessarily true, according to Kripke, although it was discovered a posteriori to be true, since ‘Hesperus’ is a name that was given to a heavenly body seen in the evening, and ‘Phosphorus’ is a name that was, unknown to the first users of the name, given to that same heavenly body seen in the morning. The heavenly body is Venus.
Now, consider the following identity statement:
Peter Parker = Spider-man
This identity statement is true in the world in which Peter Parker exists. But is it necessarily true (i.e., is it true in all possible worlds)?
Couldn't one conceive of a world in which the person who is bitten by a radioactive spider is not Peter Parker, but rather Harry Osborn? And if so, wouldn't it be the case that, in that possible world, 'Peter Parker = Spider-man' is false and 'Harry Osborn = Spider-man' is true? And if so, wouldn't it then be the case that 'Peter Parker = Spider-man' is not necessarily true even though 'Pater Parker' and 'Spider-man' are rigid designators?
