[FOM] "Progress" in philosophy

[Robbie Lindauer]

I'm not sure what charles' beef with philosophy is, could he please  
explain his position re, for instance, Lewis' "Counterfactuals"  
Chapter 6?

Are the formal arguments presented there "bad" or just "bad philosophy"?

Is the book as a whole, because philosophy, "bad" or is it bad  
because it is Lewis' attempt at obscurity-ensuing fame?

Formal arguments "for" the existence of God are apparently "bad".   
What about those against?  How about formal arguments for other  
possible worlds?  Are they "bad"?  How about formal arguments for the  
existence of the "ether" are they "bad"?

Why are those formal arguments worse than formal arguments in  
mathematics?  Or even worse than any common presentation of modus  
ponens?  He (Lewis) is working out the consequences of some stated  
assumptions.  That, apparently, has a kind of value.  That his  
overall assumption is ludicrous is irrelevant (e.g. that there are  
these other worlds to which we can't possibly have access of any kind  
and yet about which we apparently know quite a lot).

Thankfully - philosophers, rhetoricians and logicians throughout time  
- have made an attempt to answer these questions about what makes  
arguments good and bad.  This is the reason we have the notions of  
soundness, validity, strength, proof, axiom, assumption, inference,  
etc.  All this waffling about the question is just to ignore those  
fundamental distinctions - distinctions upon which mathematics itself  
is based.  So, I think, Charles' dictum "no further progress is  
possible, a proof is a proof" (quoted below) is just ignoring the  
fine distinctions which we thankfully have.

In the case of axiomatic mathematics, we have what philosophers call  
"valid but not obviously sound" arguments - arguments where the  
conclusions follow from their premises, but premises which themselves  
are doubtable.  To make a stronger claim for them is to claim to have  
a stronger proof - a proof of the axioms, for instance.  The value of  
having these stronger proof is undeniable, but the idea that someone  
possesses them and is not sharing is nearly ludicrous.

Now, there are, of course, philosophers (maybe mathematicians too?)  
who generally deny the importance of these concepts of kinds of  
argument and proof given that we could have different ones, but among  
the "progress" that philosophers have made is that there is some  
agreement about what it is to have demonstrated something at all  
(even if nobody thinks this has ever been done except in the  
negative), and what it is to have committed a fallacy of one kind or  
another (and there's a great internet archive of the various fallacies).

It is possible that because of the distinctions that philosophers  
have made, what Charles announces as a "proof-is-a-proof" simply  
doesn't exist.  It may be that there are only degrees of soundness in  
arguments with variously strong assumptions, etc.  I think, in fact,  
this is a "known known" in many ways.  The number of your axioms and  
the strength of your inference rules determines the extent to which  
you should advertise an argument as a proof.  In fact, I think this  
way of regarding "proof" is essential to science - to seeing that  
anything we may now accept as true may be false and that the reasons  
we may have for accepting them may be replaced or have other  
conclusions drawn from them.

The opposite attitude is a dogmatism which has some obvious value for  
some philosophical programs, but has to be regarded as unscientific,  
surely, and can never really pretend to having intellectual force  
except inasmuch as it makes good propaganda and "there is a sucker  
born every minute".

Robbie Lindauer
robblin at thetip.org



On Mar 12, 2007, at 4:34 PM, Charles Silver wrote:

> Formalized arguments in philosophy tend to be awful, *especially*
> those purporting to prove the existence of God.   Expansion is...
> just expansion.  (Reminds me of a friend who once boasted that at
> least he never wrote a bad novel--not having written one at all.) If
> certain sorts of arguments are junky, more of the same are just more
> junk, it seems to me.

and ...


	Well, suppose a formal argument, as you recommend above, was an
actual *proof* of the existence of God.  Then, there would be no
further progress, as a proof is a proof.  -->> I'm just quibbling; I
know you didn't really mean this!   I agree with what you meant.