Abpraxis asked:

I read and hear “logical justification” and I can’t find a definition for it. Is it as pedestrian as it sounds (can be put in the form of logic and makes a valid argument), or is it a term of art? When a philosopher insists that there is no such thing as “empirical justification” and that the “only justification is logical justification”, I’d like to know just what exactly the latter is.

Answer by Graham Hackett

Abpraxis, the more I read about epistemology, the less I think I really know. I think you are right in asking whether an expression like “logical justification” has any real precise meaning, which is invariable from one context to another, or whether it is a “term of art”, only acquiring meaning when we know the context in which it is used. Even more unhelpful if you are looking for a precise meaning, is the suspicion that it might have become a folk term — a well-known phrase or saying — used without much concern for exploring meaning.

You mention empirical justification, and logical justification as though in comparison, and imply that the former is not real, proper, trustworthy justification, whilst the latter is. I assume that you’ve done some background investigation on the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. For example, a form of argument such as;

All men are mortal
Socrates is mortal
Therefore Socrates is mortal

is a famous example of classical logic. My conclusion that Socrates is mortal is based on previous propositions, in this case, that all men are mortal, and that Socrates is a man. No empirical evidence needs to be gathered; the conclusion is justified purely by the structure of the argument, and by the assumption that our propositions are incorrigibly and self-evidently true. 

In comparison, an argument like “all ravens are black” needs empirical evidence, real hard data gathered from many observations of ravens, before we can conclude that it is justified. You can easily see that this kind of reasoning, although it might falsify our assertion that all ravens are black (we might observe some non-black ones), can never prove conclusively that our assertion is true, because any smart Alec (there are many of them) could just suggest that even after a huge number of sightings of black ravens, we have no way of knowing whether the next raven to come will be black or non-black.

So I suppose that you could use this conclusion to hold that empirical justification is never really justification at all. But here we come to the tricky part of the argument. What does justification really amount to? What has to be the case before we can say we are justified in some conclusion we have made? This is where the ground really starts to slip from under our feet.

I don’t wish to become too entangled with questions about the new and old epistemology, but you might like to do a little research on Alvin Plantinga, and his observations on justification, and his preference for using the term “warrant” instead. Although we use both terms often in much the same way — that we are warranted or justified in the things we assert, Plantinga asserts that “justification” has often been too much tied up with evidence. We claim to be justified by our evidence. Plantinga wishes to attach the term “warrant” to our beliefs. Our beliefs can be warranted in many ways. To use Plantinga’s own examples, we can be warranted in our belief that God is speaking to us personally when we read the Bible, or that he disapproves of some action of ours, or that our feeling that God has forgiven us is warranted. What makes us warranted in our beliefs (according to Plantinga) does not always have to be grounded in empirical evidence, or testimony. Our beliefs can be “properly basic” (Plantinga’s own expression) without evidential support.

Plantinga’s ideas on warrant have been much discussed. Many have criticised them as being a case of special pleading for religious claims. Plantinga himself recognises that the idea of warrant cannot be used indiscriminately to declare beliefs as properly basic. The famous example given is that we might easily be led to conclude that belief in the Legend of the Great Pumpkin (Schultz’s Peanuts cartoon) is just as warranted as any other belief, unless we establish some rules about the use of the term “warrant”.

We still have to show that we have used reliable methods, and that our beliefs in some way “track the truth”.

I am sorry that my remarks may be a little disappointing, and I am conscious that I may have muddied the waters rather than clearing them. But my main conclusion I hope is clear; logical justification is no more than a popular phrase. People think they are warranted, or not in believing something, and “warrant” however vague it is, includes more than just the traditional rules of logic and empirical data.

Fabricio asked:

What’s the difference between moral subjectivism and moral pluralism? How do I know which one I follow? I do agree that Stalin was both evil and not evil… but utterly, there is no truth.

Answer by Paul Fagan

I will concentrate on the spirit of your question, in an attempt to describe the two branches of moral classification that you have highlighted; I hope this gives you enough pointers to pursue your own research.

A good place to start in this area is provided by James Rachels in his book The Elements of Moral Philosophy, where one chapter is entitled ‘Subjectivism in Ethics’. Basically, if you found an action such as abortion to be reprehensible or you found homosexuality to be disgusting, and you rested your dislike only upon your intuitions, then you would be enacting a form of ‘moral subjectivism’.

However, most of us, when given a choice, change our minds about many important aspects of our lives: our religion; our politics; our diet; and our conduct towards others. The very fact that there are other opinions that we may adopt, should give us a strong hint that being morally subjective is often not the most rational way of living our lives, and we may query whether there are other more cogent moral approaches.

Often such questioning of one’s own opinions is a precursor of accepting, what may be termed, ‘moral pluralism’ (and one definition may be found in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/moral-pluralism/v-1). Moral pluralism generally acknowledges that there is a variety of viewpoints, but moreover, one may be encouraged to apply a selection of these viewpoints to problems to find a solution.

The example of the twentieth century soviet leader, Josef Stalin, provides a focus where both moral viewpoints may be demonstrated. Firstly, if you think that Stalin was a ruthless, political ideologue who would stop at nothing in order to introduce his politics to the world, and nothing will shift your opinion from this, then you are possibly prone to moral subjectivism. However, if you accept this first stance as only one opinion, but at the same time, would also consider that Stalin liberated oppressed peasants by industrialising the Soviet Union and provided the dynamism for the creation of a world superpower, then you are possibly a follower of moral pluralism.

To conclude, if you are set in your ways and have a dogmatic opinion on the most important aspects that affect people’s lives then you may consider yourself to be a moral subjectivist: but if you are likely to change your mind about such things, after due deliberation, then you may be a follower of moral pluralism.

Ali asked:

If the methodology of ancient philosophy was so potentially at odds with faith, why didn’t European thinkers simply ignore it? What does their determination to grapple and reconcile philosophy and reason reveal?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

The idea that Ancient philosophy was ‘at odds with faith’ contains a serious misunderstanding. The way of reason, championed by the Presocratic philosophers, and by Socrates and Plato — for the purpose of this question, I’m assuming we’re talking about philosophy in the West — is a very different thing from contemporary scientism and anti-theism.

I have little to say about the history of montheistic religion, whether it be Judaism, Christianity or Islam. I’m tempted to respond: why wouldn’t the rabbis, monks and theologians want to claim that their views were rationally based, and who better to appeal to than the Greeks? More importantly, you only have to read these works of ancient philosophy to realize just how compelling they are, to anyone with a shred of intelligence. (That may be bias!)

The foundation of Greek thinking was faith in reason. Talk of ‘faith’ isn’t just word play. At the time of Thales, the idea that you could discover truths through the use of reason was a breathtaking discovery. It was also controversial. ‘Theory’ was a novel concept, the notion that by means of reasoning, one could achieve a reliable view of the cosmos and our place in it which was not derived from religious tradition.

Even then, and despite their evident enthusiasm, the Greeks knew that their hold on reason and theory was fragile. The Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes argued for a sceptical approach: even the most strongly supported theory cannot claim to be indubitable truth. Only God knows the truth about the cosmos while mere humans can only make their most reasonable guess.

Possibly the best, and also most moving, defence of reason is in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, which recounts the last day of Socrates’ life. Socrates puts forward arguments for the existence of the soul, while his friends raise various objections. If the existence of the soul could be rationally proved, you wouldn’t need more than one argument! But as Socrates makes clear, this is a topic where certainty is not to be had. He had proved his own faith by refusing the opportunity to escape execution (see the dialogue Crito) and drinking the hemlock without a word of protest.

All the Presocratics, barring the atomists, held that the most reasonable theory of the cosmos was one which hypothesised an intelligent principle (‘Nous’). Plato in the Republic argued that the Forms are arranged hierarchically under the Form of the Good. Aristotle in the Metaphysics argued for an Unmoved Mover. However, as you will rightly point out, none of these god-like principles were conceived as a personal deity: a God who speaks to Moses from a burning bush, or who takes up human form and calls out from the cross, ‘Oh God! Why have you forsaken me?’

What about the atomists? Atomism was based on a metaphysical principle of the unchangeability of Being, derived from Parmenides. So it is a very different thing from contemporary physics and chemistry. However, what the atomists discovered was that there is, in principle, a way to derive order from random motion of atoms — as counterintuitive as this might first have seemed. A simple example would be an avalanche, where smaller rocks fall into a crevice and larger rocks reach the bottom of the mountain. Or panning for gold, where the heavier particles naturally gravitate towards the centre of the dish.

A contemporary version of this is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The only difference (really!) is in the degree of sophistication. What is required in both cases, the Ancient and contemporary, is a willingness to take a leap — I won’t call it a ‘leap of faith’ — the determined view that, barring any other explanation, this must be the correct model for the way our ordered universe, our human world, arose through a series of stages from disordered chaos.

I am an atheist, and I hold to that view as a matter of philosophical faith. If a ‘God’ does exist, then He ought not to. The notion that the ultimate explanation of everything is some ‘family story’ about a ‘loving father’ strikes me as bizarre and offensive. (See my 2014 article, Philosophy, Ethics and Dialogue.) In my recent book Philosophizer, I compare ‘true believers’ to a zombie plague. It makes me angry that so-called ‘religious’ people think they have a monopoly on faith. Read the ancient philosophers, study them, and you will come to a very different conclusion.

Nigel asked:

What’s so wrong about having lots of money?

Answer by Paul Fagan

Depending upon which philosopher you ask, having ‘lots’ of money may not necessarily be a bad thing. That said, it is argued here that current liberal societies should be wary of too few people having enormous amounts of money.

For libertarians, one should ideally be able to own all of ones produce without interference from anybody, and if this includes lots of money, then being wealthy represents a natural state for some (and for more detail, the reader may like to visit my recent article on this site, entitled Nozick’s libertarianism and self-ownership).

The libertarian position may expect to be opposed by various factions, and this would include communitarians. They may argue that a person is not an entity that can be separated from their surrounding society, and for this reason, an individual cannot expect sole control over wealth, which is in fact society’s wealth. They may further elaborate this argument by noting that individuals learn their skills from society and owe society a debt for their enrichment; additionally persons are dependent upon society in which to exercise and benefit from their skills (and for more discussion, the reader may like to visit one of my older articles on this site, entitled Man is semi-autonomous). Hence, the individual may be considered to be enmeshed within society.

That said, most societies in practice, such as liberal and socialist ones, occupy a position in between these two extremes. In order to prevent suffering within their populaces, or because they feel society would benefit if money was redistributed, most societies value some form of redistribution between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.

However, the modern age may have brought a new phenomenon. It would appear that with the advent of globalisation and the free movement of capital, greater and greater amounts of money are being concentrated in the hands of fewer people. In 2017, the following statement came to light:

‘…the world’s richest one per cent […] own more than the other 99 per cent combined’

This was published by Oxfam (Oxfam. 2017. ‘Press Releases’. https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2017/01/eight-people-own-same-wealth-as-half-the-world), and admittedly, there have been those who query its accuracy. Nevertheless, if we accept for the purposes of argument, that it is roughly correct, then it may contain the seeds of problems for some societies.

This may be particularly true of liberal societies, which generally exalt the freedom of the individual and encourage personal aggrandisement (and a definition of liberalism may be found here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism). To explain, if a few people own enough money to control manufacturing, then they may limit the goods a person may buy, and if a few people own the media, then they may attempt to dictate how people should think. Hence, a paradoxical situation may be arising: although liberalism extols individualism, there may actually be less individualism in practice where a mere handful of individuals dominate the resources.  Liberal societies may be inadvertently limiting liberalism, and when this is realised, they may decide to take remedying action. Hence, from a liberal viewpoint, if too few persons have so much money that they confine liberalism, then it may be considered ‘wrong’ for these individuals to have too much money.

Ladevel asked:

‘In resolving the problem of interaction, Epiphenomenalism shows itself to be a stronger theory than Cartesian Substance Dualism.’ How do I offer a critical analysis and evaluate this in a high school essay for philosophy? I need a solid argument that encompasses objections, weaknesses etc but also arrives at a solid, well justified conclusion.

Answer by Gershon Velvel

Don’t you love it when philosophy instructors tell you in advance what conclusion you should come to in your essay? What if you decided, after looking at the arguments for and against, that substance dualism is the stronger theory? Would you automatically get a D?

It is at least arguable that epiphenomenalism as a solution to the mind-body problem — the theory according to which the brain ’emits’ consciousness in a similar way to a factory emitting smoke — is a feeble attempt to account for our seeming awareness of something ‘inner’. When an epiphenomenalist writes, ‘I believe in epiphenomenalism,’ the causal chain that led to those words appearing on paper or on a computer monitor is physical all the way. The ‘inner’ never came into it, because according to epiphenomenalism, the ‘inner’ is merely an inert by-product of physical processes.

On this count, at least, substance dualism is a clear winner. As Descartes observes in his own case, I am aware of something — my thinking, my experiencing — that could exist even if the physical world did not. When the dualist writes, ‘I believe in dualism,’ the causal chain goes from the actions of ‘mental substance’ — my Cartesian ‘soul’ — to changes in physical substance.

But how could such action, or interaction, possibly take place? Where is the locus of mind-body interaction? This is a point on which Descartes was pressed by several critics, including Pierre Gassendi and Princess Elisabeth. That’s only part of the problem, because the idea of physical changes being brought about by something outside the physical realm clashes with the Law of Conservation of Energy.

The latter, apparently, wasn’t an issue for Descartes because his physics was non-Newtonian. In Cartesian physics, no physical force is required to change the direction of motion of the ‘animal spirits’. If that seems crazy to us today, remember that for Descartes, mental substance and physical substance are maintained in existence by God’s continuous action. The ‘laws’ of physics are based purely on the geometry of extended bodies. The only violations that these laws forbid are geometrical violations (for example, two bodies existing in the same place at the same time). The rest is up to God, who by decree has endowed mental substance with the power to affect, and be effected by the animal spirits.

Well, of course, we don’t believe that now. Our physics is Newtonian (at a first approximation), not Cartesian. But, still, given indeterminacy at the quantum level it not inconceivable that, God or not, mental substance might still have the power to alter local probabilities without violating any laws.

For example, suppose I discover to my extreme surprise that whenever I think of a proposition from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, say, ‘The world is all that is the case,’ the words appear on the fluorescent tube light in my kitchen. The energy emitted by the fluorescent tube remains the same, all that is altered is the pattern of ‘random’ photon emission. That would be very spooky, and one would want to know the explanation. But one candidate explanation which can’t be logically ruled out is that I did it, myself, by a form of telekinesis. Maybe with God’s help. But the laws of nature remain more or less intact. (No mentally knocking vases off mantelpieces, for example.)

The locus of interaction at first sight seems a more intractable problem. Descartes said that this occurs in the pineal gland located in the brain. At what location, exactly? You might be thinking that, as a ‘unextended substance’, the soul could only occupy a geometrical point. But this is wrong. The soul is not in space, because it does not possess any of the essential attributes of extension. It acts  at a specific place, which could be the whole body, or the brain, or the pineal gland — whichever hypothesis seems the most plausible.

Our naive view of causation requires contiguity of cause and effect. Gravity, which at first sight seems to be an example of action at a distance, in fact (according to physics) involves a ‘gravitational field’. Our experience of causes and effects is an acceptable starting point for defining ‘causation’, but it is only a starting point. Descartes believed that he had given a powerful argument against the idea that all causation involves physical pushes and pulls.

Is Cartesian substance dualism a ‘strong’ theory? That all depends on how favourable you are to the alternative view to either substance dualism or epiphenomenalism: namely physical monism. There’s no question that if you give up physicalism, there’s a price to pay, but the question remains open. In academic philosophy, doubts about physicalism are on the rise, though relatively few philosophers would be prepared to go the whole hog and defend Descartes, as I would.

Col asked:

What is your definition of ‘philosophy?’

Do you see any possible objections to your definition?

How would you defend your definition against those objections? 

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

I’m going to answer your question with another question: Why is it so important to ‘define’ philosophy? How does it help? What insight might such a definition give into the activity we call ‘philosophy’?

In a wide range of cases (and despite what Socrates repeatedly says in Plato’s dialogues) it is perfectly in order, in response to a request for definition, to cite a range of paradigm cases.

What is physics? Well, Newton’s laws of motion is physics. The structure of the atom is physics. The age of the universe is physics (or, if you want to be precise, the branch of physics known as ‘cosmology’). Still, it is useful to be able to say, with some degree of precision, how ‘physics’ chunks up physical reality in contrast to, say, chemistry or biology. That doesn’t seem too difficult a thing to do although although I won’t attempt that here.

What is science? is a more philosophically challenging question. Karl Popper in his 1934 book Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft (published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959) proposed a ‘falsifiability’ criterion as a means to demarcate science from what he called ‘pseudo-science’. Astrology and astronomy both deal with the heavens, but whereas astronomy is a science — putting forward theories about the stars, planets and galaxies that can, in principle, be overturned by empirical observation — astrology is arguably not falsifiable in this way.

A similar challenge to separating science from pseudo-science arises in philosophy. A lot of things go under the term ‘philosophy’ in popular parlance that professional ‘philosophers’, regardless of their individual differences, would not wish to describe as such. ‘Pop’ philosophy isn’t really philosophy, they would say. Although here the boundaries are more blurred. An increasing number of books have been written by academic philosophers popularising philosophy, and to make a subject accessible you have to make short cuts, over-simplify, paint things in black and white which are more like shades of grey.

Another challenge comes from a different direction. One might say, ‘That’s not philosophy, that’s psychology,’ or, ‘That’s not philosophy, that’s history of ideas.’ I’ve heard student essays criticised on both of these counts. Presumably, the critic has a clear notion of the difference between psychology and philosophy of mind/ philosophical psychology, or between history of ideas and history of philosophy.

For both these reasons — philosophy versus ‘pop philosophy’, or distinguishing philosophy from other disciplines — it would be nice if we could find a formula that would demarcate philosophy, properly so-called, from other things that we would not call ‘philosophy’.

I might state that philosophy ‘uses reasoning to discover things about the world,’ but that won’t do because Sherlock Holmes does exactly that when he solves a case. Certain aspects of ‘the world’, then? Mathematical reasoning discovers things about mathematical reality, the universe of numbers, sets and so on. By contrast, when a philosopher thinks about free will, or the mind-body problem or the problem of scepticism they are thinking about the actual we live in, our life, our place in the universe, not merely a world of grey abstractions.

In the absence of a simple formula, what I propose instead is a more like a template: in philosophical thinking, two fundamentally distinct but connected faculties are deployed in close harness: the faculty of logic (as in Sherlock Holmes) but unlike that great detective the philosopher always employs logic in combination with a faculty of intellectual vision. Philosophy describes the actual world, our world, that’s all it does. But it does this in a way that makes no additional empirical claims.

In a not dissimilar way, an art critic describes a painting, enabling us to see what we did not see before. The ‘facts’, the patches of paint on canvas, are already known. What is more difficult to grasp is the meaning, or the value of what we are looking at, how it all adds up to make a statement, as intended by the artist.

I’m not putting forward an argument for God as the ‘artist’. That’s not the point of the comparison (although a theologian might disagree). The point is that philosophers seek to uncover things that matter in our lives, by using vision and logic to make sense of the world. I wouldn’t even attempt to put this forward as a demarcation proposal, in the spirit of Popper. So ‘objections’ and ‘replies’ aren’t really to the point. But I hope that what I’ve said does help to make sense of the activity we call philosophy.

On this account, ‘pop’ philosophy is philosophy, it just isn’t very good philosophy, because it is marred by illogical thinking as well as false factual claims. Psychology can be philosophy, given a suitable context (for example, Nietzsche’s psychology). History of ideas, done by an historian who is gripped by the ideas in question rather than taking the stance of a detached spectator, shades imperceptibly into philosophy.