Anonymity

I've been putting up some posts because I have a minute to breathe. It dawned on me as I was doing so that I've kept my identity anonymous in this blog. This is something that I've heard criticized (not specifically about me) by Gangadeanians. They sometimes find fault in anonymous criticisms particularly online. I suppose I get some of the sentiment behind it. We want to know something about our discussion partners. And one might worry that anonymity provides one with something like a cover to say whatever one wants to say without having to live up to the consequences. But I don't find it essential to philosophical discourse that one disclose one's identity. Further, people have different reasons for wanting to remain anonymous. At the end of the day it's the ideas and arguments that matter in a discussion and provided that there are overriding (legitimate) reasons for wanting to remain anonymous, I think it can be appropriate to do so. As I said, I have my reasons, but I'm hesitant to share them because I don't want to come off as insulting to my interlocutors or hurt the feelings of those of my friends (few as they are) that are still members of WF. Just know that my choice to remain anonymous has nothing to do with my feeling as if anything I have said is controversial or not worth standing behind. I wholeheartedly endorse everything I've said. Further, I will be willing to engage with anyone in dialogue about its contents either through this blog or via email (you can email me at reasoniidoubt at gmail dot com).

No SR from GR (Certainty and the Bible)

In a previous post I raised problems for Gangadean and Anderson's view that maximal consequences (of unbelief in God) requires maximal clarity (regarding God's existence). The thrust of that post was that there are a number of other beliefs that most Christians (including Gangadean and his kin) would accept to be essential for spiritual life (or salvation), that do not seem maximally clear. Thus, the edict that maximal consequences imply maximal clarity would seem to be in tension with Gangandean's own views (unless of course they want to argue that all that is necessary for spiritual life is maximally clear).

That the bible is the word of God (special revelation) is a central part of the Christian faith. Gangadean affirms that the bible is the word of God and further that it is infallible, wholly true, and the means by which the the holy spirit leads the church into all truth.  It isn't clear whether he thinks that there is some special portion of scripture that one must accept in order to realize spiritual life. In conversation I have heard Anderson and others speak as if spiritual life is not a binary notion, but rather something that obtains as a matter of degrees. Other times I have heard them speak of spiritual life as if some are in fact, spiritually dead (at one time all people) and then have come to be awakened by God's grace---which makes me think it might be a binary matter. Perhaps it's both binary and degreed (there's a number of propositions which you are required to know if you are going to be spiritually alive, but after that threshold, you can increase in spiritual life based on what you come to understand). Whatever the view, let's say that some part of scripture (or knowing some portion of scripture) is necessary for spiritual life. So one might think that if this is the case, and if maximal consequences implies maximal clarity, then it is going to be maximally clear that scripture is the word of God (at least some portion of it). In fact, from what I understand Gangadean makes an even stronger claim that we can come to know that the bible (as a whole) is in fact the word of God (or special revelation). This has to do with the fact that there is more than one holy book purporting to be revelation from God. Thus any thinking person will need to work through the epistemological issue of how one knows when one such book is really the word of God.

Now I want to present an argument that one cannot be absolutely certain that the bible (as a whole) is the word of God. That is to say, there is no sound deductive argument proving that the bible is actually the word of God. My point is not to call the bible into question so much as to show that Gangadean, given his idiosyncratic epistemological views, cannot affirm that he knows (as he defines it) that the bible (the canon as a whole) is the word of God. I hope that this gestures towards a reductio against those that want to affirm that it is rational to both believe the bible is the word of God and accept Gangadean's quirky epistemological views.

It will be important to keep in mind that Gangadean believes the following claims.

1) Knowing some proposition p, is equivalent to having a maximally justified, true belief in p. In short, you know something if and only if, you truly believe it and could not possibly be wrong about it.

2) A person can know (with certainty) that the bible (as a whole) is in fact, special revelation from God. This of course, means that one can know (with certainty) that the bible contains only true propositions.

Now the bible contains a plethora of claims. The bible makes mentions of kings and kingdoms, of persons that lived to be hundreds of years old, of Jonah living in the belly of a whale, of the dead rising at Jesus' command, of water turning into wine and the red sea splitting. It also includes detailed genealogies and testifies of the Christ being crucified for our sins and rising again. It also presents claims about what is yet to occur, for instance, the imminent return of Christ. In short, there are number of historical and even future claims made by scripture. The question I want to raise is, what deductive argument can be given to confirm that all of these claims are actually true?

Gangadean essentially believes that using what we know from General Revelation (those claims that we can be certain about via the use of reason alone) we can deduce a criteria for special revelation, which we can then use to determine the clear winner among the available options. I am going to argue that this is simply not enough if one is after epistemic certainty.

The problem can be seen by considering how there is nothing we can deduce from General Revelation (hence forth, GR) to a claim like, "there was once a man named King David who defeated a giant Goliath." Now as I have written before, I doubt that we can know (on Gangadean's concept of knowledge) that the God of Theism exists, but I'm willing to grant that for the sake of argument here. Further, I'm going to grant even more of Gangadean's views (again not because I think they are correct, but for the sake of the point I'm trying to make, here). You see, Ganagdean takes it that we can know (with certainty) that God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful (that is to say, that there is a deductive argument or series of arguments from "Whatever is eternal is spirit" to "the eternal spirit is at least infinitely just and infinitely merciful." Further, Gangadean takes it that there are deductive arguments for the claim that we are in sin and that we need to be redeemed. Let's grant all of this (though they are highly contentious arguments). From this it is supposed that we can come up with a criteria by which we look at the various purported holy books and determine that the Bible must be the word of God. Whatever is in fact the the word of God must be entirely consistent with what we know from GR. For instance, it should affirm that there is only one God the creator, that man is in sin (fails to seek and know the clearly knowable God), and that God is infinitely just and merciful, and crucially it should explain just how infinite justice can be fulfilled in light of sin, while God's infinite mercy is exemplified (infinite justice cannot merely be set apart, but must be fully realized). Finally, the claim is that no other purported holy book, or parchment or whatever, besides the bible is able to satisfy all these conditions. Hence, the bible must exclusively be the true word of God.

This is a terrible argument. To reiterate, this is because the bible contains so much more in addition to what we can deduce from GR. Take again the claim about King David's existence and his defeat of the giant. This is not something that is deducible from GR. So what are we to make of such claims? What are we to make of all the stories in the old and new testament that do not logically follow from the aforementioned criteria? If we reduce the bible to merely an account of God, sin (and therein good vs. evil), justice and mercy, we lose a lot. We lose all those details from the various narratives, so much of the advice that the epistles provide about how to run a church, and the lessons we draw from the lives of various figures like David, Solomon, and the prophets of old. Further, what are we to make of the book of Revelation? Remember on Gangadean's account of knowledge, we can't know any of this stuff unless it is deducible from GR.

Now curiously, Gangadean's approach is that all of these additional claims in the bible are consistent with what we know in GR.  But this won't do. Consistency is too weak a relation between propositions. At the moment, it is raining outside. It is consistent with this fact that as a result I got wet. But it is equally consistent with the fact of rain outside that I did not get wet. What this shows us is that consistency doesn't rule out much. You can't know with certainty some proposition solely on the basis of the fact that it is consistent with a known proposition. There are any number of claims that are consistent with any given set of facts, and as my lame examples shows, some of these are going to be mutually exclusive. So to say that these additional claims in the bible are consistent with what we know in GR does not make them true (that simply doesn't follow). It is perfectly consistent with all of the assumptions we started with (that there is one God the creator that is infinitely just and merciful, that there is sin, evil, the need for redemption, etc) that there once lived a King named David, that defeated a giant, but our starting assumptions are equally consistent with the claim that there was no such King. So consistency with what is known in GR is necessary but not sufficient for claims being truly the word of God.

A second worry has to do with the issue of the criteria of "the word of God". I stated earlier that on Gangadean's view, GR provides us with a certain kind of criteria by which we determine whether a book is really the word of God. One crucial issue on Gangadean's view is that whatever is in fact the word of God must present how infinite justice is satisfied by infinite mercy (on the Christian picture, this is the son of God dying for the sins of the world). Now we run into a problem here. Ask yourself, "how would I know whether some narrative explains how infinite justice is satisfied by infinite mercy?" That is, when you read the bible, how can you know (with certainty) that Jesus dying for the sins of the world actually achieves both the instantiation of God's infinite justice and his mercy? This is something like the problem of criterion in epistemology. Philosophers ask how we can know what knowledge is. How will we know when we have the right theory, without already knowing what it is? Similarly, how can we know that in fact, the bible's account is the correct account of the satisfaction of divine justice and mercy? Don't you have to already know what you're looking for in order to recognize it as such? And if you already know what it takes for divine justice to be satisfied by divine mercy, then you no longer need special revelation to show you.

In response one might argue that what we know from GR can provide us a way to deduce everything in the bible---and hence all the contents of the bible are entailed by what is known from GR. In fact, this is exactly what Gangadean needs for certainty that the bible as a whole is the word of God. Unfortunately, it's false. You simply can't deduce the kinds of empirical claims (e.g., that their existed a Jesus of Nazareth, or much of Paul's teachings that go beyond GR, or the stories that line the old and new testament). You may have good reasons to believe it, but it won't be via a deductive proof. So on Gangadean's view of knowledge, you can't know the bible as the word of God.

In speaking with Anderson about these issues, he essentially argued that what is known from GR is found in the bible alone. This gives us proof that the bible, but no other text, is the word of God. He said that this was "enough" of a test. This is truly a puzzling response!

Remember we wanted a deductive proof that the bible is the word of God. That is to say, a way of being absolutely certain that the bible (as a whole) is the one and only word of God. Even if Anderson is right that the relevant details from GR are found only in the bible and not in any other texts, we still don't get a proof that the rest of the contents of the bible are true. Again consistency is not enough. Consistency is necessary but not sufficient for this task.

And it gets even worse for Anderson and company. His response requires that he first prove that there is no other holy book that gets the relevant details of GR right, but he would have to show that no other such book (that will diverge on other details form the bible) is even possible. This is an incredibly strong claim and I don't see how he can motivate it.  Putting all of these considerations together, we have an extremely idiosyncratic view of knowledge which requires epistemic certainty (ultimately, we know only those things we can deduce). But the contents of bible as a whole cannot be deduced. So we can't know that the contents of the bible as a whole are true.

The Gangadeanian culture.

An ad hominem is an informal fallacy where a person purports to debunk another's view on the basis of an irrelevant quality of the arguer. In my experience, informal fallacies (unlike formal fallacies) are often misattributed and ad hominem is probably the most commonly misattributed. The main problem with this fallacy (why it is a fallacy) is that a conclusion or argument is rejected on irrelevant grounds. That is, grounds that have no bearing on the truth of the conclusion. People often think that therefore, any personal attack is an ad hominem---but that's incorrect.

If you question the veracity of a witness in court on the basis of their poor track record as a witness, or their known compulsivity towards lying, this is not an ad hominem. It's good (albeit, inductive) reasoning. Sure they might be telling the truth. It's certainly possible, but you have strong evidence to the contrary that you should heed if you're rational.

I offer these prefatory remarks because I am going to post a criticism about the way that I have seen Gangadean and company do philosophy which gives some reason for hesitation on the conclusions they draw. I don't want to be wrongly accused of an ad hominem in doing so. If you really think I am presenting an irrelevant (to the issue at hand) personal attack, then show me where, but don't conclude that I am committing the fallacy simply because I am raising concerns about a property shared by a person or group of persons.

A second prefatory remark is that everything I will say is anecdotal. It is based on my experience (and the experience of a number of others that I have spoken with). But how else can we report things of this sort save for our own experiences? If you need good instances of the phenomena I will be speaking about, then just take a look a the works by Gangadean and Anderson.

What I want to discuss then is that Gangadean, Anderson and company do philosophy in an unusual way that I ultimately think is harmful and dishonest (whether intentionally or not).

In my previous post I mentioned the one-sided nature of Anderson's post about externalism. Again, his post is just a short blurb and so I don't stake my claim on it. I just think it's merely suggestive or reminiscent of a larger problem that I witnessed in my years of interactions with him and other Gangadean followers. In my experience, they tend to have a very narrow understanding of philosophy and keep to themselves in discussing philosophical and theological ideas (unless proselytizing).

It is a very tight knit community of people that all profess to agree on certain core principles (many of them very strong philosophical and theological positions). If you don't agree on all of the core issues, then you are not welcomed within that community and will be asked to seek fellowship elsewhere. Furthermore, they tend to be very closed off from external ideas and persons. It takes a formal invitation and a process to visit their church and during my time there, there was even an instance where a member unknowingly invited someone that was deemed "not prepared" properly and so had to go through the embarrassing ordeal of uninviting the individual. Some of these are cultural quirks that I don't necessarily have a problem with in and of themselves. However, I submit that it feeds the problematic culture of isolation that is an impediment in terms of seeking truth. Philosophy (and theology) done under Gangadean is like doing philosophy in a nuclear silo... It is done either in classrooms where students are often given very one-sided presentations of ideas or within the walls of the church where preaching is done to the choir, so to speak. It is no surprise that most of the philosophy classes taught by the associated faculty all rely heavily (if not exclusively) on Gangadean's book, Philosophical Foundation. And people at WF really love that book without recognizing just how shallow and narrow it really is.

On rare occasion Gangadean has visited public forums like talks or conferences and I think Anderson does more frequently with respect to his scholarship in religious studies and history. But I never once heard them return to report that they had learned there was a problem with their views. This always struck me as so surprising. Are you really infallible with respect to your philosophical/theological work? Indeed this is the attitude that they seem to have. Giving a talk is not about learning how you might be mistaken about your work, but rather for them, it is going into spiritual battle to disabuse others (anybody that disagrees with you) of falsities.

I have had the pleasure of working with a lot of philosophers so far in my young career. Some of them are world-renowned. Compared to Gangadean and company, most of them have a very different way of doing philosophy. There is an openness. I don't mean anything like relativism. No, they have pretty strong convictions and sometimes maintain extreme views. They argue like the best of them. The openness I am referring to is the willingness to see problems in their own thinking. In the classroom, these professors ask the students to point out problems in their work. They of course try to defend their views, but it isn't rare for them to admit that there is a serious flaw somewhere and for them to rework their own thinking in light of it. What is more, these seasoned philosophers submit their ideas to a wide audience. They don't just probe their own students (who may have something at stake in agreeing with them) or their colleagues. They travel the country and sometimes the world to present ideas to a motley bunch of philosophers that will undoubtedly raise difficult objections and counterarguments. They know ahead of time that other philosophers will disagree with them. They do this, in part, because it makes for better more thought out work that has considered a wide variety of angles. Philosophers recognize that in all probability there are serious problems with their most dearest arguments, because they are fallible beings. Moreover, they recognize that they may be too biased or otherwise close to their own work to see the issues. Finally, they recognize that submitting their work to too narrow an audience is not going to be helpful. In fact, this is part of the reason that it is nearly impossible to get a job at the institution that you graduate from. Departments have, as a whole, a way of doing things, that can sometimes get in the way of truth and introduce biases. Likewise, as graduate students, we are often encouraged to spend a semester or year at a different department. Philosophy as it is done "on the outside" is extremely different from the way that it is done by Gangadean and company.

WF continues to have strong adherents. And as long as students continue to take classes with them, they will likely continue gaining followers (though they lose followers regularly too). But in my experience, Gangadean's kin, by in large, are young philosophy enthusiasts that have an extremely narrow exposure to one way of doing philosophy--that is, the Gangadean way. During my undegrad, when I was a thoroughgoing member of WF, I shared some classes with a student that had taken all (or most) of Gangadean's classes before he moved to the University where I was already studying. He wanted to major in philosophy (at the university) because he had done quite well in Gangadean's classes and enjoyed it. I think he was shellshocked by the difference and after a few classes decided to change his major. As far as Gangadean's followers go, only a few have degrees in philosophy, and even fewer (maybe a handful) have graduate degrees in philosophy (mostly MA's)--and all from the same institution. They also make up a relatively small body as a whole--which again reiterates the kind of exposure that I find worrisome. Obviously none of what I have said necessarily implicates this group as believing falsehoods. It's certainly possible that their beliefs are correct. It's possible that having a closed off system as the one I described has proven most fruitful for them. It's possible but not plausible. We, as thinkers, all make plenty of mistakes and need constant input from others if we are going to arrive at truth. So it seems to me at any rate.

Anderson on Externalism vs. Internalism

I happened across a blog from Owen Anderson. I'm quoting it in full, below. 

In epistemology, an externalist is one who takes a third person account of knowledge.  Rather than answering the first person question "how do I know?" the externalist describes the conditions of knowledge for a knower in a kind of sociologist perspective.  

One problem that arrises [sic] in fields like sociology or for externalism is that there remains the "how do I know this account is true" problem which is an internalist question. In his book Justification Without Awareness Michael Bergmann gives an externalist account and answers various objections.  One of these is the "anything goes objection."   

This objection says that any religious fanatic can appeal to this same kind of externalist warrant.  Bergmann says "What it does mean is that we must give up on the false hope that playing by the rules of proper philosophical exchange will enable us to resolve all serious disagreement about maters such as fanatical religious views" (233). 

This made me think of two questions.  What about non-fanatical non-theistic religious views?  Suppose that the fanatic actually can't consistently rely on the kind of externalism Bergmann articulates.  It still seems to me that there are many non-theistic religions that can.  Therefore, such an account has not helped us achieve knowledge at all.  It has not and cannot settle the most basic and long lasting divisions between humans about what is real. 

Next, if this epistemology cannot help us on these basic and long lasting divisions then in what sense is it different than skepticism on this point?  The quote above seems to say that we can be satisfied in our beliefs, others can be satisfied in their beliefs, and the discussion ends there.  Which is to say we really cannot know.

This is, on my view, a very one-sided presentation. Sure blogs are prone to be and this is no peer-reviewed journal article...so I can't cut him some slack. The only reason I mention the one-sided nature of this post is that it actually marks a way of doing philosophy that I found to be common under Gangadean and Anderson. I'll leave this metaphilosophical point for my next post.

On to the first order substance then. What Anderson is arguing above is that externalism has some philosophical problems. Sadly, he doesn't bother to discuss problems of internalism (his view). Nor does he discuss any of the responses that externalists have for the objections he raises. Perhaps he just didn't have time, or perhaps he isn't aware of it, or perhaps it was merely beyond the purview of his intended post. So I want to discuss some of these.

If you've read my recent post on theories of knowledge, then you will realize that the first problem he raises against externalism is also a problem for his view, internalism about justification/knowledge. "How can we know that the externalist theory of knowledge is true?"  Well, in my previous post, I noted that Gangadean never argues for the view that knowledge is maximally justified true belief. So if Anderson really thinks the question of "how can I know what knowledge is?" is a problem for externalism, then he owes us a theory of how we can know that knowledge = maximally justified true belief. In my experience, no such account is forthcoming.

The last two "problems" have to do with settling disputes. Anderson thinks that externalism cannot help us settle disputes. This is because (in part) there is a worry that one can get warrant for any sort of belief on externalist grounds. I don't want this problem to be exaggerated though. Externalism says that insofar as your belief is formed on the basis of some reliable or otherwise truth conducive, non chancy way, it is justified and can be the basis of knowledge. Sure people can claim to have justification in any belief by claiming that their beliefs are formed in some suitable way, but there will be a fact of the matter and it is this external fact that makes all the difference. So externalism doesn't license "anything goes" at all. It says that only those properly formed beliefs count as justified or as the basis of knowledge. Now might we have a diversity of mutually incompatible beliefs that are formed on the basis of reliable or otherwise truth conducive means? Sure. It's certainly possible. After all, our reliable methods of forming beliefs are not perfectly reliable! So this is a problem for externalism but perhaps not as serious a problem as Anderson made it out to be.

Unfortunately for Anderson, it doesn't take away similar problems plaguing internalism. For instance, internalism faces a regress problem (indeed this partially why externalism gained currency). If you have to be consciously aware of what justifies each of your beliefs (in order to be justified in having them) then you run into a regress of reasons problem. You should know that you know that you know that you know....ad infinitum...that p, if you are to actually know that p. After all, if you claim to know that birds have wings, then you are justified in believing it only if you are aware of the reasons you have for believing that birds have wings. But then it seems like you need to further justify the very reasons you have for believing that birds have wings on internalist grounds which involves another belief or self of beliefs that in turn need to be justified and so forth.

No doubt, Anderson will respond that the regress stops on self-evident, self-justifying, or self-attesting beliefs like the laws of thought to escape this issue. There are some basic foundational beliefs that don't need to be justified like all the other beliefs. But what precisely does it take for a belief to be self-justifying? Or self-attesting? This is supposed to be something very obvious but again, there is no apt analysis here. Am I supposed to just immediately know what self-attesting is? Is the notion of self-attesting, self-attesting? The worry here is that there is a lot of baggage being smuggled in. Ask yourself how do I know whether some claim is self attesting? For instance, people think that 'a is a' (the law of identity) is self-attesting or self-evident. But how do you verify that it is? You might try to say that if we don't assume that 'a is a' or don't believe it, then we can't think or talk. But per my last post, this either seems to confuse pragmatic reasons with epistemic ones or else is question begging.

Instead it seems like it is something immediately known. It just feels or seems to be true. We simply look or think about 'a is a' and then immediately get a sense of its truth or something of the sort. It does not depend on argument but is seen or directly apprehended. The problem here is that if we allow for intuitions like this, then we're back to the problem that Anderson pointed out against externalism but not for internalism. It seems like on internalism "anything goes." Why can't belief in God or belief in penguins or the reliability of my perceptual faculties just be intuitive, direct, have a feeling of truth? If intuition works for recognizing that some proposition (or sentence token) is self-evident, or further, if intuition works for figuring out what we even mean by self-attesting, then why can't it work for belief in God or whatever non-theistic belief? So now if we follow Anderson's line of thinking, internalism is powerless at resolving disagreements and leads to skepticism.

There are a number of other problems with internalism that suggest it leads to skepticism. For instance, to be consciously aware of your justification for any of your beliefs (in order to know them) is really demanding. We simply are not in a position to recall much of the reasons for a great number of beliefs and items of knowledge.

On the possibility of thought and talk.

I wanted briefly to bring up an issue that I've been thinking about that relates to my own research. This has come up in previous posts regarding the memory objection, so you might want to take a look at those (if you have a lot of time on your hands). At any rate, one common line that you hear from Gangadean and his people is that they are seeking to figure out transcendentals---which constitute something like preconditions for the possibility of thought and talk. They take this line from Kant, who thought that our minds could not help but project onto the world particular beliefs (or perhaps frameworks like time, space and causality). So Gangadeanians argue that for instance, the laws of thought are requisite for the possibility of thought and talk. The idea is that we have some insight into the very nature of thought and talk, and also that we can figure out a priori, what the requisite conditions would have to be for thought and talk to exist or be instantiated.

To me this smells like intuition mongering. I mean how could we come to be certain of what counts as thinking vs. non thinking (and what the appropriate preconditions for thinking would be) if not by way of intuition (i.e., something like an immediate awareness or sense)? I doubt that any analysis of a thought is forthcoming (try to come up with the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a thought). Nor can you investigate the nature of thought empirically or anything, so you must be able to investigate thought by, well, thinking--- but how sure can we be about our conclusions here? To reiterate a recurrent theme of this blog,  I think philosophy doesn't get off the ground without intuitions, so such a view isn't so problematic for me as it is for Gangadean (who seems to equate believing at least some things on intuitions with fideism). The trick for him then is to provide a theory of the difference between situations where intuitions are acceptable and those where it isn't. Of course we should expect his theory to not be ad hoc or ultimately itself grounded in intuitions (on pain of circularity). But I want to mention something else, namely, that believing something (e.g., the laws of thought) on grounds that thinking would not be possible if we didn't, is a strange kind of reason to accept something. What it looks like is pragmatism about reasons for belief.

When we consider whether we should believe some proposition, (e.g., the law of non contradiction) we want evidence (or some truth conducive reason) for why it is true. Broadly speaking, there are some propositions (or sets of propositions) which in some general sense make it the case that another proposition is either guaranteed to be true (as in the case of logical entailments), or else provides some reason to think the latter is true. Here you have a relation between propositions that is epistemic. When you ask whether or not it you ought to believe that p, you are asking whether p is true and what reasons you have that indicate the truth of p.

On the other hand you might answer the question of whether or not you should believe p, from practical considerations alone. For instance, maybe believing in an afterlife will make you really happy and so you conclude that you ought to believe in an afterlife. This marks a different kind of reason to believe p, a pragmatic one which doesn't say anything about whether the proposition in question (in this case, the afterlife being real) is true or not. (Note it could make a person very happy to believe something, even if the belief isn't true).

Now returning to belief in the laws of thought, the argument given by Gangadean actually turns out to be a pragmatic one, rather than an epistemic one. The thinking seems to be that you must or ought to believe in the law of non contradiction (for example) because if you don't, then you
cannot think or talk consistently. So the justification for the belief is pragmatic rather than epistemic. It's about what is or will be possible in terms of what you can do, and doesn't tell directly about whether the proposition is actually true. So now it's starting to smell like Pascal's wager (which ironically, Gangadeanians are happy to argue against by pointing out that it confuses the pragmatic with the epistemic!).

*Now one might think that I've misunderstood the argument. Here is a way to make it not a pragmatic one: We assume that we can have certainty about things. Once that is given, then we think about what must obtain (the preconditions) for this possibility. Since giving a theory that explains how something that is taken as true (i.e., the belief that we can/do have certainty) is some indication that the theory is true, this would give an epistemic reason for believing in the laws of thought for instance via something like abductive reasoning (i.e., the fact that a theory plausibly explains an accepted phenomena is evidence that the theory is true).

Not only is this not a deductive argument (and so we're no longer after certainty), the main problem is that it isn't common ground in the first place that we can and/or do have certainty about anything (including this very statement). Indeed the way Gangadean usually wields this argument is in a context where he is trying to show that we can be certain (i.e., that some basic things are clear to reason). So the only way to make his conclusion rest on epistemic reasons is going to be by begging the question in the current context. That is to say, assume certainty is possible to argue that certainty is possible (and actual).

So Gangadean's argument is either a pragmatic one which is troubling in its own right because it says we ought to believe something for non evidential, non truth conducive reasons, or else it is question begging. If there is any interest, I will present an argument for why pragmatism of this sort is a terrible idea in a future post.