So anyway, apparently she once took down C. S. Lewis in a debate over naturalism.
The point at issue concerns a famous occasion in 1948 in which Lewis debated, at the Oxford Socratic Club of which he was president, with a young Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe. In his book Miracles, Lewis had attacked what he called “naturalism”, the thesis that there is nothing that exists that is not part of nature. He maintained that naturalism was self-refuting, since if it was true, any statement of it would be irrational. Predicates such as “true” and “rational” could not be attached to any thought or belief if it was simply the undesigned product of cerebral motions. Anscombe contended that Lewis’s argument involved a confusion between reasons and causes: if a weighing machine that spoke one’s weight said “you weigh fifteen stone”, that statement could well be true, even though produced entirely by mechanical causes.The summary must not be fair to her argument, because it's not a very good argument as presented. If a weighing machine speaks your weight, the weight it gives may be accurate. It may, in that sense, be true.
But it is not produced 'entirely by mechanical causes.' The machine is able to "speak" this fact only because it had a designer, and the designer had a rational standard. "Stone" sounds like a natural kind, but it is in fact a rational and not a natural measure. It's not that you could pile up fifteen stones -- the sort you find in the world -- and it would be equal in weight to the man on the scale. Rather, the measure is a mathematical object, which is to say that it is a logical and not a natural object.
One could still defend the idea of naturalism if you can show how a capacity for the creation of logical objects arises naturally. Yet even that wouldn't be sufficient: believers above all people should expect reason to be embedded in the structure of the world. Even if the point were better defended than the author here presents, then, it need not be a danger.
9 comments:
Oh, but you're mistaken. Math is very natural.
It may be that in fact, everything is math.
That's a highly debatable proposition. (Although it was Pythagoras'.)
Even granting it for the sake of argument, however, the measure "stone" is not natural. No more than "meter" or "gram" or "mile." You won't find these things in the natural objects.
Weight is natural. That people choose to express a representation of weight in some sort of arbitrary manner, well, that is an idea.
Those are pretty natural too.
It's the significance of that 'arbitrary' bit to which I want to draw your attention.
What does it mean for something to have a nature? It means there is something about it that is deterministic. If you have a natural object (say a lump of gold of a given size), its mass is natural because it can't be otherwise. I mean, you could cut part of it off, but then the mass of each of the two pieces would be determined by nature. A piece of gold of size X has mass Y every time. (Its weight may change with gravity, but given a gravity Z, it will have weight W.)
The idea 'stone' doesn't have a nature. It could have been heavier or lighter than it is.
Nothing natural is arbitrary. Arbitrary means, literally does mean, that it is a function of will. Arbitrary is another word for voluntary. Natural things may be random (as quantum physics suggests), or they may be determined (as relativistic physics suggests), but they cannot be arbitrary.
Now, you may want to say, 'Well, what about animals? The bee built its hive here and not there, and it wasn't determined to do so; but it wasn't random either. Isn't that arbitrary?'
The bee is governed by a nature insofar as it built a hive and not a house. That's determined. It's also governed by a nature insofar as it builds in log or a particular kind of shelter, according to instinct. That's determined by nature. It happened upon this log and not another one randomly, at the right time for its nature to suggest it should be building a hive.
All that's natural enough, and apparently either random or determined by nature. But if the bee should decide instead to build a city, that would be an act of will.
Well, Hives are basically bee cities, if you think about it a bit.
But I think you have got into the 'If a tree falls in the forest and no hears it, does it make a sound?" sort of territory.
arbitrary = voluntary? I think you are playing with words now.
The Sun is bigger than the moon. And that is natural. But to describe that, which is an idea, (probably using math) humans employ language to convey meaning and so forth, and the sounds or signs or symbols that are understood to represent meaning or the ideas or whatever, well, those are not determined by nature, because people think them up, but it is determined by nature that they are necessary for humans to communicate.
Some reports contend that Lewis was put out and irritated by the exchange, and felt he had been taken down. Other biographers report that Lewis took it as an opportunity to clarify what he realised was a vagueness she had exposed.
Don't know, myself.
AVI:
I don't know either. I've only read this one version of the exchange, which I suspect is unfair to Anscombe. But she was a student of Wittgenstein's, so it's quite plausible that she'd raise an argument that would unmask a problem with language. That was definitely right in his lane.
Eric:
arbitrary = voluntary? I think you are playing with words now.
It's an odd use of the word, isn't it? We normally think that something arbitrary isn't at all similar to something voluntary, but mandatory. But actually all three of those words are from Latin concepts about the use of the will in giving law. An arbiter has the power 'to judge or to ordain at will'; the root of 'voluntary' is voluntas, 'will'; and what is mandatory is that which becomes an obligation because it was commanded by a judge.
So the distinction between those words is merely the question of which will is acting to give the law or the command. It can be given to you, or it can be given by you, but in all three cases it's an act of will -- not a force of nature.
Anscombe was talking about causation, apparently, so we can talk about it that way too. Natural laws have a certain form: 'an X will Y if a Z does W to it.' For example: A piece of ice (X) will melt (Y) if a fire (Z) heats it (W). That kind of causation is not arbitrary, but necessary.
But the will is capable of being arbitrary. You're right, of course, that what the will has chosen to judge is a natural difference (the sun is bigger than the moon). But it could have chosen to judge it differently, and it could have chosen not to judge it at all. It's not difficult to imagine a civilization that doesn't bother with such things, perhaps similar to the Kalahari Bushmen, who might have little use for concepts like mass. We think of it as necessary because weights and measures are very important to trade (and therefore property), but there are civilizations that have done without trade and property.
I'm not saying that's better or worse -- this isn't that kind of claim at all. All I am saying is that there's an act of will involved. Will is capable of acting on or interacting with the natural, but it is defined by itself, and not by some law of nature. It doesn't share the kind of causation we find in things that are acting from nature, and thus it can produce arbitrary results.
I think you'd find essentially any society anywhere near a hunter-gatherer niche would care about mass. Is it more urgent to catch a tiny animal or one that's big enough to make several meals? Is that thing going to kill me if it falls on me?
The general idea of things we care about that other cultures might be utterly indifferent about seems sound, though. If you could show them about polarized light, they might well not care that much, even if some locally available mineral could be used for the demonstration. Or the distinction between electrical conductors and insulators, demonstrated using natural static electricity. Or magnetism, at least as long as you didn't tip them off that it could be used to find direction.
Post a Comment