Knowing vs. Believing Truly that God Exists

I'm traveling and without Gangadean's book, so I can't continue my ethics discussion at the moment. But I've been reading Plato and had a thought relevant to Gangadean's epistemology. One of the most referenced of Plato's dialogues among epistemologists is the Meno. In it, Plato considers what it is that makes knowledge more valuable or desirable than mere true belief.

Philosophers claim that not everything we believe counts as an instance of knowledge. For example, it is hypothesized that one can never know something that is false. You can't know that the earth is flat, just as you can't know that a triangle has four sides even though you can believe such things. Further, philosophers say that some of our beliefs, perhaps even a lot of what we believe, is actually false. So it follows that beliefs come apart from knowledge--the two are not coextensive.

Further, not even all of our true beliefs count as instances of knowledge again according to most philosophers. Suppose you are trying to get to the local grocery store. You come to believe a particular set of directions is the correct way to your desired location. Your belief might be true in virtue of luck in various forms. For instance, suppose that someone told you the correct directions to get to the local grocer. However, this person is a strangely mischievous informant who has meant to mislead you for kicks. Indeed, unbeknownst to you, they often lie about such matters, but you have no reason to suspect as much. Further suppose that this person fully intended on giving you false directions, but due to confusion on her part, wound up accidentally giving you the correct ones. If you take such a person at their word, because you don't know that they intended on misleading you, and form the belief that the particular directions they gave you are the correct ones, many philosophers have the intuition that you don't know the way to the grocery store. This is despite the fact that you wound up with a belief that is true i.e., you accidentally have a true belief about which way to go. Intuitive reactions to thought experiments such as this have lead philosophers to say that knowledge also comes apart from mere true belief. That is to say, not all of your true beliefs count as knowledge. Alternatively you might have just guessed the directions and on the basis of guessing come to believe the directions (you are unusually confident in your ability to guess such things). Your guess and attendant belief might be true, but there again, philosophers are inclined to say that such a true belief doesn't count as knowledge. For example, they think you need to have evidence or some sort of justification which accounts for why you have the true belief in order to have the pertinent knowledge.

Now there's a general meta-level issue here about the method by which philosophers have come to say what counts as a genuine instance of knowledge and what doesn't. At the heart of any such theory are gut reactions or non inferential judgments that philosophers call intuitions. These intuitions are taken as the relevant data and a theory of knowledge is considered good insofar as it can explain or account for them. And I think Gangadean is no stranger to this method. He claims that knowledge is (maximally) justified true belief as opposed to mere true belief, or mere belief, which may be false. But how he comes to such a theory of the nature of knowledge would be utterly mysterious if not for appeals to his own intuitions. This should set off some red flags---at least so long as Gangadean maintains that beliefs on the basis of intuitions are problematic or fideistic or whatever. The sharp reader will notice that this fully generalizes.  Gangadean not only says a lot of things about eternality, causation, time, presupposition, reason, common ground, more basic vs less basic, but also uses his concepts of these very things to build upon. But at some point, he must ask himself what his method is for determining for example, what counts as the right or correct theory of eternality, or causation, or basic, or reason. I suspect that all of this will at some point, rest on raw intuitions, or observations regarding ordinary language usage, and the like. That is to say, something other than proofs, and ultimately fallible methods of inquiry.

Returning to the example of you coming to form a true belief about the directions to the grocery store: it seems like you'll get to the grocery store just fine because you've got a true belief about the whereabouts. This is despite the fact that the way you got it seems intuitively unstable. You fare no worse than in a situation where you have genuine knowledge of the fact. In other words, insofar as the aim of forming the belief is to get you to the grocery store, knowledge and mere true belief will serve you equally well. Again, intuitively, knowledge takes more than mere true belief. It's a special kind of true belief.  It is filling in this "more" that will fill in one's theory of knowledge. That is, figuring out precisely what we need to add to a true belief so that it counts as knowledge represents much of the work of epistemology.

There are two related issues emerging. First, what exactly the difference is between knowledge and mere true belief. As I've noted, essentially this gets us into building a theory of knowledge. And we've discussed before that Gangadean has one such theory of knowledge. But he fails to motivate it properly. If you're going to offer a theory of knowledge as the correct one, given many alternative theories, you ought to explain why yours is the one others ought to accept. The problem here is that Gangadean, if he's being consistent with his own standards, shouldn't depend on the standard methods that philosophers employ to motivate theories namely, using raw intuitions as the data to be explained by a particular theory. As I've hinted at above, the method most often employed by theorists of knowledge is to appeal to intuitions that they have about the nature of knowledge. Often this concerns observing the conditions under which we attribute knowledge of some hypothetical subject. That is an appeal to how people talk and use the word 'knowledge' in everyday discourse. Importantly, this is nothing like proof of anything. There's no argument given at this level or at least arguments bottom out. Moreover, an appeal to language usage is far from infallible as a means of informing a conceptual analysis. After all one might be using the word incorrectly while being ignorant of this fact. This doesn't damn the whole practice of appeals to ordinary language usage--it just opens the door for rational doubt. It calls into question whether one's theories are infallible. Additionally, philosophers create thought experiments and simply ask themselves, does the protagonist of the sometimes fanciful narratives have knowledge or not. For instance, the example I presented regarding the directions to the grocery store. You read it and then have some sort of immediate reaction about whether the subject in question knows or doesn't know the directions. In other words, what philosophers do is consider their intuitive reactions to stories meant to probe one's view of a concept or the meaning of a word like 'knowledge' and use this to build a theory inductively, or better: abductively. Again, neither method should be used by Gangadean insofar as he thinks that the practice of relying on intuitions is simply unfit for philosophy and incompatible with his principle of clarity. And as I've mentioned before, if he claims to have special "rational intuitions" (he's told me this once before) that are particularly reliable and fit for such reasoning, then he's got to give a theory that explains just what makes certain intuitions rational in contradistinction to non-rational intuitions and he better not depend on more intuitions to do so on pain of circularity. I'm often surprised by the fact that Gangadeanians seem utterly ignorant of this background information about theory building in philosophy as it concerns theories of knowledge. It's almost as if they don't realize that since the birth of philosophy, philosophers have appealed to intuitions to build theories in just this manner--and Plato is certainly no exception, neither is their favored Aristotle. So much for the issue concerning theories of knowledge.

The second issue that is emerging in the Meno is often called the value problem of knowledge. So not only does Plato hint at the problem of figuring out what the nature of knowledge is as distinct from mere true belief, but he also asks why it is that we should care about having/attaining knowledge over and above mere true beliefs. So he's assuming there is a difference between mere true belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other and then asking why we should aim at the latter over the former. And this is another issue that Gangadean largely ignores in his book and in my experience, Gangadeanians are by in large ignorant of. So the main epistemological questions to ask the Gangadeanian are two-fold. First, why should anybody accept their theory of knowledge that knowledge = maximally justified true belief, over other theories of knowledge? The point to press here is whether they can prove that their theory of knowledge is the correct one sans appeals to intuition.  If you pay attention and keep pressing the issue, you will see that they ultimately depend on intuitions just like everybody else.

Secondly, even if their theory of knowledge is the correct one (a huge if), why should anybody desire to ever attain it as over above mere true beliefs? As it concerns God's existence, even supposing that one could know with certainty that God exists i.e., it's clear that God exists, it's a separate question whether one should strive to have such knowledge. After all, Gangadean claims that all people should know what is clear---and since God's existence is clear according to him, it follows that as he sees things, all persons should know that God exists. That is, they should know that God exists rather than have a merely true belief that God exists. This is why Gangadean claims that people who believe in God, but are unable to prove that God exists, are falling short in some fundamental way. Presumably Gangadean will say that such persons that believe in God for various reasons that are not the "proofs" that he offers, have a true belief that God exists, but they don't have knowledge. The value problem of knowledge suggested to us by Plato's Meno applied to Gangadeanian views brings about the following question.  Why should anyone desire to know that God exists rather than merely having a true belief that God exists? That is to say, why does Gangadean think people are falling short in some fundamental respect for failing to have a maximally justified true belief that God exists?

From what I've heard, Gangadean often cites Romans 1:20 and the notion that inexcusability implies clarity. But this is no good. In the first place, any claims in scripture are unfit for the task at hand since whether we ought to know something or not is a much more basic issue than whether the bible is the word of God. The matter at hand is "logically" prior to whether a holy book provides the truths for salvation. After all, special revelation according to Gangadean presuppose a lot of more basic issues---you need to know that you're in need of salvation, and that you've sinned, and that God exists and that God is perfectly just and merciful, among other things, prior to coming to know that the bible is the word of God. This is because, as Ganagdean sees it, the bible is about redemption which presupposes that one needs redemption. It's just illegitimate then for Gangadean to appeal to the bible as authoritative on the matter of whether one ought to know that God exists rather than merely have a true belief that he does. I've also already explored more problems with this approach but am currently too lazy to add a link. A brief study of my blog will uncover them, though.

Even if we spot Gangadean the right to appeal to scripture to make his case, the glaring problem is that the bible doesn't distinguish clearly between knowledge and belief. In Romans 1:20, man is held inexcusable for unbelief. It makes no mention of knowledge. Sure if one knows that God exists this seems to entail that one believes that God exists, but the entailment doesn't hold in the other direction. So being held responsible for unbelief in p doesn't mean that one is held responsible for the lack of knowledge regarding p. When Paul speaks of God's existence being clear so that man is without excuse (for unbelief), we need to consider what makes something clear to believe. Perhaps Paul is saying that we all have sufficient reason to believe that God exists, but this need not entail that one has sufficient reason to know it let alone that one has sufficient reason to know it with certainty which is the even stronger claim made by Gangadean.

I'm not sure how then Gangadean can answer the value problem for knowledge. How can he prove that all persons must (are morally obligated to) know, with certainty, that God exists. Why can't we just have a true belief that God exists? From Gangadean's point of view, most Christians and theists have true beliefs that God exists, but they don't have knowledge, and this he views as a basic moral failure. But if knowledge is not more desirable or valuable or whatever, then it shouldn't be a problem for the rest of us to believe truly that God exists without knowing it. Of course this would threaten his entire ministry, his life's work. If Gangadean can't justify why all humans ought to know with certainty that God exists, then the purported clarity of God's existence is of little use.

The "Laws" of Thought

I'm writing in response to this video I happened upon. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulmvy4QczV0

The second speaker says that logic is "a description of existence" and uses the analogy of a map on the one hand and the thing that the map refers to, on the other. This is bad. Part of the problem (perhaps) is that 'logic' has more than one use. There's the ordinary usage as evidenced by statements like, "I don't agree with your logic" in response to an argument. Here, 'logic' seems to refer to something like one's line of reasoning. Of course, this is very different from 'logic' as a philosopher's and logician's term of art. 'Logic' in this latter sense refers simply to formal languages like first-order propositional logic, predicate logic, modal logics, meta-logic and perhaps multi-valued systems. The problem is, in neither of these uses of the term does it make sense to say that logic is a "description of existence." And I really don't get the map analogy. If the second speaker wants to get away from reifying rules of valid inference (qua abstract entities), then this analogy is not helpful because by his own words, the map represents things that exist. So if the rules of a formal system are to reality what a map is to the things it represents, then we would actually expect the rules of a given logic to represent things (and what else could they be, but either concrete objects or abstract entities?).
Moreover, 'the laws of thought' need not be coextensive with the rules given in various logical systems, but this exchange seems to presuppose this very thing. There is much debate in the philosophy of logic (this is the subfield of philosophy that studies logic) about just what formal systems like first-order propositional logic are meant to represent (though nobody I know of says it "describes existence"). We know that logics are formal, artificial languages. We also know that natural languages (e.g., English) suggest to us certain patterns of reasoning---that is to say, there seem to be certain rules beyond mere syntax which we presume are in some fashion, truth-preserving which is to say that we can get from one statement or set of statements that are deemed 'true' and then, in some suitable sense, "get to" another statement that is also true. But this is really complicated terrain. I just think whoever talks about the "laws of thought" should not conflate that with systems of logic. I have similar complaints about the first speaker as well, but it'll needlessly lengthen this post. The point is, neither of them seem to be well-versed in philosophy or logic, but it doesn't stop them from using technical jaron, and the result is confusion.

Which brings me to the Gangadeanian at the beginning of the video who raises the question, "do you accept the laws of thought?" Gangadean and his people talk a lot about the laws of thought. They enumerate them as the law of non contradiction, the law of excluded middle, and the law of identity. Gangadean draws the analogy between the laws of nature and these laws. Insofar as the physical laws of nature cease, life ceases and so it is with the laws of thought--if they cease, thinking ceases, so he claims. Notice this isn't a deductive argument. You've got something resembling an argument from analogy (at best an inductive argument). Lest I be accused of misrepresenting Gangadean and his crew, just keep reading and I'll get to ways that they try to motivate this claim. Anyway, with this analogy, you're suppose to just hear this and somehow "recognize" that it's true and that the analogy is apt. It's a picture he paints for you to elicit a certain kind of response. Again, none of this is proof of anything.

Now importantly, it's not a settled matter what a law of nature is to begin with. So this analogy is not going to prove that helpful anyway. There's considerable and ongoing debate concerning laws of nature. A Humean for instance thinks that laws of nature are purely descriptive regularities of the way that nature tends to behave. Or at the very least the Humean thinks we have no epistemological grounds to say more than this about laws of nature. Humeans question whether laws are anything more than a generalized trend based on a bunch of observations. In a terribly simplified example: a lot of things drop to the ground and so we reason that there is this tendency for things to fall to the center of the earth and call it the law of gravity. But there isn't something like a law over and above the regularity denoted. It's certainly not like you can bump into a law of nature. So they don't seem to be concrete entities by anyone's lights. Of course laws of nature could be abstract entities, but it's hard to say much more if we go down that route. The very nature of abstracta is really murky and mysterious. Abstract entities are supposed to be things that exist without being "in" spacetime. They are acausal. They don't interact with anything else that exists. But they are thought to exist nonetheless or be real in some mysterious sense but are usually posited for purely theoretical reasons (for instance, the existence of numbers is one straightforward way to account for how it is that mathematical formulas can be true). And there are other views. Some tend to reify laws of nature as if they are robust, exceptionless rules that all physical stuff "follows." But at best we use words like 'law' and 'follow' and 'rule' loosely. We have some idea of what it takes to be a man made rule like the rules of grammar, or the legislative laws or even social mores---they are prescriptions and proscriptions that cover a particular domain of behavior. But it's not like these laws actually control what people do. Instead they tell us what people should do given certain interests after all, people violate the norms of grammar all the time (and still manage to communicate). But presumably laws of nature are supposed to exert more "control" on their objects. But it's hard to say precisely what this amounts to.

Anyway, the point is not to get into a substantive debate about the nature of laws in general. It's a fascinating issue, but highly complex. The point I want to drive home is that contrary to how the Gangadeanian's present things, the notion of a law of nature is not something we have a satisfying account of. It's not a settled matter that for instance, Humean's must necessarily be wrong in their deflationary account. Laws of nature might simply be generalizations or regularities that we observe or they might not be, but the jury is still out. If the Gangadeanian disagrees, she had better be in a position to disprove any alternatives to her view and explain just what she takes laws to be ontologically speaking.

What this means for present purposes is that the analogy is not very elucidating. If laws of thought are to thinking as the laws of nature are to life, then we need to first settle the matter of the nature of the laws of thought. And part of that will involve determining whether a Humean analogue to the laws of thought is correct. That is, minimally, we need to figure out whether the laws of thought are merely descriptive generalizations about the way that humans characteristically think. If both kinds of laws end up being merely regularities that are determined inductively by observation, then the normative import is inclined to be limited. We have to make room for exceptions (generalizations after all admit to these and are formed by instances and counter-instances). More precisely, it would seem that we would have to put less credence in the notion that every rational being must necessarily think in accordance with them insofar as they are actually thinking.

Now faced with this issue the Gangadeanian is likely to pull the transcendental move. They will ask you to give them one instance of a thought which does not instantiate the laws of thought. They will say, "look, take any thought, aren't you assuming 'a is a' in having that thought? Can you give an example where you don't?" And they will think that they have proven something substantial. The correct response to this is to point out that they've done nothing more than appeal to intuition or common sense. For anybody to determine that a particular thought instantiates the law of identity (or not) for instance, requires that they just immediately "see" it as such. There's no argument. It's an immediate apprehension of sorts. So the Gangadeanian should recognize that they are resting ultimately on intuitions which won't satisfy the skeptic they are always intent on answering.

More crucially, my inability to provide an example of a thought that doesn't (intuitively) instantiate the laws of thought is not any proof that the laws of thought are not merely descriptive generalizations. That simply doesn't follow. Here's an analogy. Suppose you claim that every raven is black. That is you make an absolute claim about all ravens just as the Gangadeanians make a claim about all thought. Suppose I question you. I point out that it isn't obvious to me that all raven's are black. It does nothing to prove your point, if you merely ask me to produce a non-black raven even if I am unsuccessful. Sure, provided that I have access to a large sample of ravens, my inability to produce a counter-instance of your generalization does provide some inductive evidence for it. But that's not the same as proving your categorical rule! 

In response, the Gangadeanian will attempt to pull a reductio. They will say. "Ok let's assume that the laws of thought are merely descriptive generalizations of the way that people tend to reason. If so, then there's no reason why people should adhere to them. But all arguments presuppose that people should adhere to certain principles of reasoning otherwise there's no point. So, you see, you actually accept that they are more than purely descriptive generalizations." Unfortunately, this is just another pull on your intuition strings. The claim that all arguments presuppose that people should adhere to certain principles is far from trivially true. It's stated as a platitude, but that doesn't make it one. The problem is that you've got to just intuit that what was said is true. Once again I don't even know what would count as a proof here. What would possibly prove that all arguments presuppose that certain principles be adhered to? At best what we can say is that all the things we so far have determined to count as arguments appear to presuppose certain principles. But that's not nearly strong enough to support the line we're considering. So here too, the Gangadeanian would have to rest their case on intuition.

Another criticism is that the Gangadeanians seem to be generalizing from a limited sample to the whole which not only definitionally falls short of proof, it's bad induction in the form of a hasty generalization. In other words, you might challenge them on grounds that they have at best weak inductive evidence for their claim that all thinking requires the laws of thought. This is because they have experience with only those thoughts they've encountered in their lifetimes. And suppose we ignore the fact that they are merely using their intuitions to make generalizations about this set of thoughts--still this is a tiny subset of the set of all thoughts in the universe (present, past and future). So it's no good to conclude from this limited sample, anything general about all thoughts.

In response Gangadeanians are inclined to say something about "grasping a concept." Gangadean claims, but has no way of proving, that we grasp the essences of things whenever we "have" a concept. He just says this is so. Hence he and his followers sometimes claim that they grasp the concept of thought---and just by sort of thinking about thinking, they uncover the categorical truth that all thought presupposes or requires or exemplifies the laws of thought. But here again, this is little more than banking on their own raw intuitions. There's no argument given for the claim that "in a concept, we grasp the essence of things." More importantly, how does one argue or prove that one's concept is correct over another's? Suppose that you think it's essential to the nature of water that it is composed of hydrogen and oxygen molecules and I disagree because I think that water in a fundamentally different universe might have been composed of different elements. How can you possibly prove me wrong? There's no basis in argument about whether water is necessarily H20. 

Another move they might try in response to the charge of generalizing hastily is to say that thoughts come in types. That is, they concede the point that they couldn't possibly have encountered a sufficient number of thought tokens to make a good case for their claim about all thoughts. So they might try to claim that they have at least experience of a sufficiently wide range of the kinds of thoughts that there are and they generalize from there. Of course, this still falls short of deduction--it's induction. But it's also very dubious for other reasons. First of all, they would need infallible access to the properties of every single kind of thought there is--which would beg for a comprehensive taxonomy (for proof of concept). What counts as an argument type? Moreover, there's still just no way to know that we've nailed down every type of thought that there is, possible. And again, if there are any debates about what counts as a thought type (which there are bound to be), there would be no way of demonstrably settling it.

So don't be impressed by Gangadean's claim that the laws of thought are transcendental, or are preconditions to thought and that all thinking would cease without them. Or at least don't take his word for it that he knows these things with certainty (or that these things are absolutely clear to reason). He hasn't shown us that much.  True many philosophers accept the law of identity, and the law of non-contradiction (while fewer except the law of excluded middle). But they don't claim absolute certainty regarding them and freely admit that they accept them on the basis of intuition not via some deductively sound argument. My point here is not to say that the laws of thought are bad in some way to accept. My claim is that Gangadean should admit that he's got no privileged epistemic position regarding them. In the end, if he's consistent, he's just an intuitionist like the rest of us.

Moral Law Part II.2: Justification and Personal Immortality

Continuing with Gangadeanian ethics/meta-ethics. We'll pick up where we left off. We are looking at Gangadean's arguments for what is necessary for ethics as an intelligible field of study. He made the claim that "There are certain metaphysical, personal, and epistemological conditions which are necessary in order to make rational justification for ethics possible" (118).  And we looked at his first purported necessary condition (the metaphysical). Here's a brief-ish recap. If you feel like you got the gist of the last post, then you can skip the next 2 paragraphs.

Last time we discussed how Gangadean has failed to prove that the distinction between good and evil, which, as he sees it is necessary for ethics, requires that only some (spirit) is eternal. In other words, he claims that the God of theism must exist in order for rational justification of ethical views (views on right action and the Good) to be possible. But he fails to prove this. There's no deductively sound argument which has this very claim as its conclusion. In large part, his failure is due to the fact that he simply ignores the non-reductive materialists that also take it that good and evil or right and wrong are intelligible despite not being able to give a purely physicalist or naturalist account of them. But as I argued, showing that such a materialist can't explain how it is that properties like good and bad arise from physical stuff, doesn't prove that such a view is incoherent. At best it suggests that there is more work to do, or that there is some cost to the theory or that there are mysteries beyond our current capacities to account for which is entirely compatible with the naturalist picture of things.

In fact, this reminds me of a common objection against substance dualism (which is a view Gangadean adheres to). Substance dualists believe that there is a non-physical soul which is essentially the substance that underlies mentality (i.e., mental properties). This soul is thought to interact with the body/brain as it concerns human persons. After all it's commonly accepted that our psychological states influence our physical states (and vice-a-versa). Moreover many substance dualists (but not all) maintain that there are disembodied souls (as in the case of spirits, demons, angels, divine beings). But sometimes their critics argue that there is no ready explanation of how it is that nonphysical stuff (the soul) can interact with physical stuff. This is because physical stuff seems to interact on the basis of physical contact, as when a cue ball hits a billard ball causing the latter to roll. Presumably non-physical stuff can't interact in this very same way (being non physical) and so it's a bit of a mystery just how the soul can cause anything in the brain/body, or more generally, in the world. But this is not to prove deductively that substance dualism is false. Just because it can't explain a fundamental issue about mind and body interaction, doesn't mean it's a false view. One simply doesn't follow from the other. It may at best suggest a weakness in the view, but that's not disproving the view. Similarly, just because a nonreductive materialist can't explain how it is that apparently non-physical properties can emerge out of physical stuff, doesn't prove their position wrong. That's the main philosophical payoff of the last post.

Gangadean's second necessary condition for the possibility of rationally justifying an ethical position is personal immortality of the soul. He writes

"If there were not personal immortality, if death were the end of personal existence and if I and everyone else could cease to exist at any moment then I could not rationally justify to myself one course of actions over another" (118).

Unfortunately, there's little else said about this. And I'm rather surprised. We're dealing with a substantive claim that many philosophers will disagree with as will the skeptic. So it's hard to believe that Gangadean offers essentially nothing to justify the claim. He just sort of states these really contentious claims as platitudes. But he hasn't actually proven that rational justification of morally relevant actions would be pointless or impossible if there were not personal immortality. He's just stated it. So once again, Gangadean has failed his own standards for what it takes to know something. So here's his argument, in effect.

(1) If there is no personal immortality, then there is no rationally justifying one course of action over another.
(2) But rational justification of actions is possible.
(3) Therefore, it's not the case that there is no personal immortality (i.e, there is personal immortality).

It's valid, but not sound. It's valid because it's an instance of modus tollens.  But logical validity is cheap. All it takes for an argument to be valid is the following: if the premises were true, then the conclusion would follow. For instance every circular argument is deductively valid because there's no way for the premises to be true while at the same time the conclusion is false. What matters is whether the premises are actually true. And the problem is the first premise (1) is far from it. At least he hasn't convinced anybody that it is so just by merely stating it. Gangadean seems to take it for granted, but that's sloppy. It's a common worry I have about Gangadean's work---that he oversimplies things where it suits his aims. So this pseudo-argument is a far cry from proving anything. A fortiori, he has failed to prove that immortality is required for the possibility of rational justification in ethics and hence has failed to prove that personal immortality is necessary.

p.s. Just to clear about the upshot here, which is important for my readers to keep in mind: I'm not saying that personal identity is therefore not required for ethics (I'm not arguing that Gangadean's thesis is demonstrably wrong). I, for one, find it intuitively plausible that there's a real sense in which worrying about how to live is a little emptier (in some sense that's really hard to get precise about) without immortality. But that's distinct from Gangadean's position. It's logically weaker. What I am pointing out is that Gangadean hasn't proven his claim to be true. And since he calls belief without proof, fideism, he's being a fideist about this unless of course, he can provide a sound (not merely valid) argument for this claim. In other words, once again I'm pointing out that while Gangadean professes to be somehow more rigorous than other philosophers and Christians, this is not evident in his published work.

Moral Law Part II

Following up from my last two posts. Let's press forward or at least inch along on Gangadean's apology for his meta-ethical and ethical views. Quickly (and roughly), let me say a bit about the terms I just used. Ethicists tend to deal with first-order issues like what is good or what constitutes a right action (and some theories formulate right action as a function of The Good). Meta-ethicists deal with the epistemological, semantic, logical and metaphysical presuppositions related to first-order ethical issues. So when an ethicists asks, what is the right thing to do? The metaethicist pushes it up (or down, depending on your orientation) a conceptual step to ask, what do we even mean by 'good' or 'right' ? Note when something is placed in quotes in this manner, it indicates that I'm talking about the word which is surrounded by the quotes rather than using the word (see use/mention distinction).

Now Gangadean does a bit of both (or tries to at least). He does metaethics in much of this chapter, in particular, at the beginning as well as first-order ethics throughout. My last two posts took issue with many of these meta-ethical claims. Claims like, "choice assumes value" for instance. That seems like a metaethical posit. We'll continue on this front.

On pg. 118, Gangadean again makes a bunch of assertions (sans arguments). For instance, after speaking about the good being that which is of highest value (helping himself to the presupposition that there is such a thing), he writes.

And if the good is of the greatest value, and most to be desired, we would not want to come short of what truly is good and have in its place something which merely appeared to be good...We would desire and need rational justification, not mere prima facie rationalization. And in the face of conflicting views and consequent challenges to justify our actions and the moral claim made on others in the name of the good we must be able to justify any knowledge claim concerning the good. For all these reasons ethics must be concerned with giving rational justification for an answer to the question "What is the good?" For rational justification assures that we have knowledge (118). 

Now I just don't see how this passage suffices to prove that we need rational justification to do ethics. To be clear, I think that ethics as a field of inquiry does require (in a very loose sense of the word) that we are able to argue our points of view. However, this is tempered by the fact that our moral views ultimately bottom out at intuitions or core judgments we have that particular things are good, bad, right and wrong. Even the theist has got to admit that there is no argument for why a person should live according to God's design plan. At some point, the answer is going to be, "just because." Why is murder bad? Because humans have intrinsic dignity. Why is it bad to kill someone with intrinsic dignity? Because to have intrinsic dignity means to bear the image of God? But why is it bad to kill someone bearing the image of God? It just is.

But notice Gangadean has committed himself to much more than that, here. He thinks that any knowledge claim concerning the good must be rationally justifiable. And given his bizarre view concerning what it takes to have knowledge, it would seem that rational justification for a claim amounts to giving an impervious proof for it. And now if this is his claim, that he can prove beyond all doubt every moral claim he is making against the skeptic (or challenger), then this is an incredible standard that he has just set himself up against. So it will suffice our purposes to show where he fails on this front. And I guess my first point is that he's actually failed to establish that such a standard is required for the rest of us and our moral claims. He hasn't done anything like prove that anybody that partakes in ethical inquiry must prove beyond all doubt any of their ethical claims against objections. Nor has he proven that ethics in general must necessarily concern rational justification.

In section two (starting on pg 118) Gangadean asserts "There are certain metaphysical, personal, and epistemological conditions which are necessary in order to make rational justification for ethics possible." And he will go on to try and motivate each of these in turn.

1) Gangadean claims that "a necessary condition therefore for rationally distinguishing good and evil is the metaphysical condition that only some is eternal." Does he have an argument for conclusion? We want premises which deductively entail (not just suggest or make likely) this claim. Here's the best I can make of his meandering discussion.

a) There must be a metaphysical absolute in contrast to what is not absolute.
b) This absolute must be eternal and only some is eternal.
c) According to materialism (all is matter) the distinction between good and evil cannot be rationally justified.
d) According to spiritual monism (all is spirit), the distinction between good and evil cannot be rationally justified.
e) According to dualism (matter and spirit are co-eternal) the distinction between good and evil cannot be rationally justified.
f) Hence, only the view that some (spirit) is eternal (i.e., Theism) can rationally justify the distinction between good and evil.
g) Therefore, a necessary condition for rationally distinguishing good and evil is the metaphysical condition that only some is eternal.

This is a bad argument. It oversimplifies a great deal of material. And he really needs to do more about justifying each of these premises (at least if we are holding him to his own professed standards), not the least of which is the first premise a).

It would be really nice if he would first say more about what he means by 'metaphysical absolute.' I I think by it he simply means the God of theism. But I'm not always sure. This is another one of Gangadean's loaded terms which he simply fails to get precise on. And one should be very careful when dealing with Gangadean in this respect. Don't let him get away with failing to get clearer on his technical terms. He owes you that much since he claims that meaning is more basic than truth (and he certainly wants you to say that his claims are true).

More importantly though, why should anybody accept a)? Why must there be a metaphysical absolute in contrast to what is not absolute for there to be a means to rationally justifying the distinction between good and evil? Can he rationally justify his claim that there must be a metaphysical absolute if we are going to be in the business of rationally justifying between good and evil? The thing is, there are people that don't believe in God that also believe in objective moral values. And I'm not sure how the theist can prove that this person is wrong. At the end of the day, the theist has a deep conviction or intuition that the important sense of objective moral value is the one that requires a objective moral law giver (and I don't necessarily mean the kind of law giver according to divine command theory). I think this is an entirely legit intuition--I tend to have it, too. But it's nothing more than that. I know not what to say to someone that thinks there's a perfectly intelligible sense of objective moral value that does not require a transcendental moral law giver. I can pound the table against them. I can shake my head in puzzlement at them. Or better, I can bring up considerations that perhaps tell against their position to some extent. But I certainly can't prove them wrong (just as they can't prove my convictions wrong). There's no such argument that assumes only premises that they would fully accept. But this is exactly what Gangadean needs to do if he's going to claim a). Prove them wrong. And it's plain to see that he hasn't done anything like this in his book.

Also, I want to flag that Gangadean hasn't even told us what he means by 'good' and 'evil'. This will be important because he'll later smuggle in Aristotelian/Thomistic notions of good and evil as if they are just indubitably true. Good for humans for instance, is to be rational according to Gangadean. But he hasn't actually got deductively sound arguments for these proposals.

What about premise c)? Is it indubitably true that on the view that all is matter, that there is no rational justification for distinguishing between good and evil? How does he support such a view? Well, he says that according to material monism, everything is natural (war, famine, death, birth, etc). And sadly that's it. In an effort to be charitable I'll take some liberties to elaborate. The idea seems to be that since on materialism everything (i.e., the totality of reality) is explained in terms of bits of matter there's no way to account for moral properties. This clump of matter in a particular part of space interacting with another clump of matter that we happen to call "harming one's neighbor" can't possibly have the property of being objectively immoral. But this isn't a proof. Gangadean's discussion is as oversimplified as it is anemic.

Here's the problem. Not all materialists are reductivists. Sure a hardcore reductivist that is also a materialist is going to say that there is nothing at all, but merely bits of matter in space time. That's all there is in reality. But there are plenty of materialists that disagree with such reductivism. In fact, there are many materialist philosophers who believe that predicates like 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong' can be used to say true things. Goodness and badness emerge out of the physical stuff in ways that we can't understand. Just as mental properties emerge out of physical stuff in ways we can't account for. Now it doesn't matter whether or not you find such views compelling or without problems. The point is, Gangadean isn't in a position to definitively prove these positions wrong or incoherent. But that's precisely what he needs. Presumably he's after knowledge and knowledge of p according to him, requires showing that not-p is impossible. That is, if he claims to know that materialism of the sort we are considering is false (because his own view that rational justification in ethics requires the existence of God) he needs to show how it is impossible for rational justification in ethics to occur on a non-reductive materialist picture. He might shift the burden of proof--that is, to ask the nonreductivist for a proof that moral properties can emerge out of physical stuff. But that should not be confused with Gangadaean actually proving that such a thesis is incoherent. I can't supply for you a proof for the claim that the earth is spherical. I just don't have the means. But that doesn't prove that the earth is non-spherical! Alternatively, Gangadean might insist that material stuff only has physical properties (location, velocity, mass) and so by definition can't have emergent properties that are in some way beyond physical. But it's hard to see that as anything more than begging the question against the non-reductive physicalist. It's like saying, "look non-reductive materialism is by definition incoherent, therefore it is incoherent." So Gangadean has much more work to do if he's going to convince the skeptic of c). And I suspect, on his own standards, Gangadean doesn't even know c) to be true. So he really shouldn't be using it to prove anything else.

These considerations alone are enough to block the argument from establishing premise f) ("Hence, only the view that some is eternal, can rationally justify the distinction between good and evil"). Which means the conclusion, "Therefore, a necessary condition for rationally distinguishing good and evil is the metaphysical condition that only some is eternal" also fails to follow from the premises. That is to say, insofar as a) and c) are not proven beyond all doubt (i.e., according to Gangadean's own standards) the argument is not sound and thus cannot lead us to knowledge of its conclusion.

Notice I've not even criticized his discussions of spiritual monism and dualism (premises d) and e) ). I didn't need to in order to show that his argument in this section, falters.

Moral Law 1 part 1.5

Before I get to part 2, I feel like I need to make a few remarks of clarification.

As I stated in my last post, Gangadean seems to think that the moral laws (that we ought all to live by) are clear to reason. He begins his argument to this end with a prelude which rests on a proposed definition of ethics. He supposes (but doesn't prove) that ethics is about giving a rationally justified answer to the question, 'how ought I to live?'.

And I just want to be very clear that I think ethicists do pursue the question that he has mentioned just as they do often seek to rationally justify their answers, so far as such rational justification is forthcoming. This is based on my own observations about how ethicists conduct their business.  Part of what I was trying to point out is that Gangadean simply can't rest his definition of ethics on such observations because they don't prove anything about the nature of ethics. Now, what I don't believe is that ethics as an area has a clearly defined boundary line that is beyond all doubt. I also don't see why anybody should think that Gangadean's definition of this area of inquiry is the final word. Indeed I don't think that ethics is necessarily about giving rationally justified answers---because if you look at how philosophers (including Gangadean) approach the topic, they ultimately start with assumptions (got by intuitions)---which are not derived via some argument. Of course, Gangadean will likely pull the "self-attesting" card--that is, he probably thinks that the proper way to do ethics is to begin with "self-attesting" principles and proceed by deduction. But as I've argued before, I find Gangadean's notion of "self-attesting" to be no clearer than Descartes's opaque notion of "clear and distinct ideas." And just as Descartes couldn't (without begging the question) tell us why we ought to trust "clear and distinct ideas" Gangadean can't tell us why we ought to trust that which he labels "self-attesting." For all we know, the very notion of "self-attesting" is a fantasy--a predicate without an extension or at least, what Gangadean calls self-attesting might not actually be self-attesting. Remember, in the end, Gangadean judges something as self-attesting, via his own intuitions.

Importantly, what all of this is dancing around is the fact that Gangadean bears the burden of proving every single one of his claims beyond all doubt because he himself demands it.  This means that he can't help himself to claims like, "ethics assumes choice" and "choice assumes value" and "a hierarchy of values assumes what is of greatest value." He needs to prove each of these to be necessarily true. To do this he needs to provide sound proofs. None of this inductive stuff that I accused him of in part 1. So it's not that I'm trying to be pedantic in my last post, I'm just trying to illustrate how Gangadean has set the bar too high for everyone else and often lowers the bar for himself. For him to actually meet his own standard of "clarity" he needs proofs (remember he thinks that any belief without proof = fideism).

Another notion that Gangadean seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of these days is the notion of "common ground." When the going get's tough (that is when you press and press until you get to the inner core of his belief system) he cites that common ground is a precondition for meaningful discussion. He will essentially push you out of the discussion. Basically, if you don't wholeheartedly agree with certain of what he calls "self-attesting claims", despite his inability to prove that they are in fact self-attesting (or even that such a concept is intelligible), he will say that the conversation is over citing that there is no common ground.

I've explored the problem with this move in a previous post. There I argued that the participants of a conversation need not even mutually believe something in order to hold it as common ground--I can spot you premises for purposes of the discussion (i.e,. hypothetical reasoning). So I don't get why he requires his conversation participants to give full out assents to what he considers self-attesting principles. Gangadean also fails to justify the very claim that without common ground (in particular, as he conceives of it) there is no room for discussion. Again, another thing stated as just plain obvious (i.e,. intuitive), but not proven. Furthermore, Gangadean requires that we all be able to answer the skeptic. He often criticizes philosophers, in particular other theists, for failing to do so (e.g., as it concerns God's existence). Hence, it follows that he, too should be able to answer the skeptic about his claims regarding ethics. And I wonder what he might say to someone who just doesn't share his intuition that for instance, "choice assumes value." This is why I've made a stink in the last post about his lack of proving and relying on intuitions and/or commonsense. It's Gangadean who has set the standards of knowledge and rational justification, too high, even for himself. He's his own worst enemy.

The Moral Law part 1

I'm starting to look through Gangadean's section on Ethics, (part III of Philosophical Foundation). From what I can gather Gangadean thinks that we can derive the moral law (a certain construal of the 10 commandments) from reason alone. I think this is an incredible claim. In fact, I'll argue that Gangadean fails to show that the moral law is clear to reason. Instead he rests his case on raw intuitions and commonsense reasoning under the guise of "reason".

Recall that for Gangadean a thing is clear = one can know that thing with absolute certainty. Meaning one can rule out even the remotest of remote possibilities that one is wrong about what one purports to know. So for you to know that you have hands, you have to be able to show how it's logically impossible for you to be a handless brain in a vat (and any number of skeptical hypotheses e.g., that your hands have been replaced with incredibly convincing fake hands). If you can't do the latter, then you don't know that you have hands. So for Gangadean to claim that the moral law (the 10 commandments) are knowable/clear to reason means that he ought to be able to rule out even the most far-fetched possibility that he's wrong (i.e., he needs to prove that it's logically impossible that the 10 commandments are not morally binding norms). On his own standard of knowledge, he's got to provide airtight, deductively sound arguments showing that everyone ought to follow these laws, which amounts to being able to derive them (qua moral laws) purely via deduction.

To begin, Gangadean considers the first moral law (starting on pg 121). I'm not entirely sure what he's getting at. He says that the first moral law is about "the moral absolute" (God). He also writes, "the first moral law can be stated as follows: God, the Creator of human nature, is the determiner of good and evil for man" (125).  I don't get this because it doesn't sound like a moral law to me. But in this same section he contrasts theism with non-theism. So I guess that the first moral law really is about knowing that God is qua determiner of good and evil. I'm not entirely sure, but that's the best I can do. Hopefully, he thinks that the moral law is clearer to reason than he is at spelling it out.

Now since I've got nothing better to go on, I'm again going to assume that to obey the first moral law (as Gangadean sees it) amounts to knowing that God is the determiner of good and evil. This presupposes of course that one knows that God exists and also something about the nature of good and evil. In other words, the first moral law is primarily an epistemological law or norm. It's most essentially about what one ought to believe (given that knowledge entails belief). At this point, the best way to think about all of this is that Gangadean is telling us a story about what he thinks are the moral norms by which we are all obliged to live. Importantly, the reader must be armed with the fact that just because he says things are a certain way doesn't mean that they are. So now we need to look at his arguments. How can he know with absolute certainty that all humans ought to know that God exists and that he is the determiner of good and evil?

Let's look at his arguments. It would have been really nice if he gave us an explicit argument with premises and the following conclusion: "for any person s, s ought to know that God exists and that he is the determiner of good and evil." That would have made things much clearer to the reader. But we are without. So we'll have to do our best to figure out his argument from a series of discussions that he includes in this section.

For starters, Ganagdean provides a prelude to this section with a discussion about how the good must be clear to reason (pg. 117). He tells the reader that he will be proposing a definition of ethics and then providing an explanation for this proposal. This is interesting. Proposing a definition is essentially stipulating a definition or trying one out. Maybe Gangadean is finally hedging his claims! Unfortunately, the hedging soon disappears. But it's important to acknowledge just what it means to propose a definition rather than figuring out the right definition.  As I've discussed before, Gangadean just presents his account of knowledge and reason, as obviously the correct ones. For instance, he just flat out asserts that reason is the laws of thought. It never occurs to him that he needs to defend these proposals. It never occurs to him that he might be wrong, that reason is not identifiable with the laws of thought or even that the laws of thought are not as he thinks them to be. But curiously, here he's actually showing you his cards. He seems suddenly aware that he's merely suggesting or hypothesizing about the nature of ethics (or what we mean by the word 'ethics') and then he'll try and support why we should agree with him on his definition. Sadly, the self awareness is short-lived. He doesn't ever make good on this. It's as if by the end of the section he's forgotten about the tentative nature of his proposal and he seems to think that he has proven the thing that follows from this definition (even though the definition actually remains up for debate).

If you suppose something to be the case in order to derive some conclusion, your conclusion will be hypothetical. Undergraduates that have taken first-order logic will know this. It's called a conditional proof. You assume something and then show where it leads (via valid rules of inference). Importantly, all you get to conclude form such an argument is a conditional statement---what is true provided that the starting premise is true. So if Gangadean is engaging in something like a conditional proof (where he's assuming a definition and seeing where it leads), his conclusion should be nothing more than a hypothetical one.

Alternatively, he might be arguing abductively. That is, he might be arguing that his definition of ethics does the best job at explaining some set of data. But this won't work for his purposes either. Abductive reasoning is a form of induction. It's never gets one to certainty like deduction is supposed to. This is because in an inference to the best explanation you have to start with certain phenomena that is agreed upon as in want of explanation. Then the theoretician attempts to come up with what she thinks is the best explanation of the data, fully acknowledging that it isn't the only explanation possible. And things get really murky here. For example, it isn't clear what makes an explanation the best one. The natural question that arises is best in what sense? At this point philosophers and scientists consider things like simplicity, explanatory scope, and the like. But as Hume famously suggested, it isn't clear why we should think the world cares about simplicity or explanatory scope, even if we do as theorizers. In other words, it's a bit of a mystery why we should think that the fact that a proposal is simple or explains a lot of phenomena indicates that the proposal is true.  To sum up: whether Gangadean is proposing his definition for purposes of a conditional proof or as a means to abductive reasoning, neither gets him to knowledge (according to his own standards).

So what is Gangadean's proposal? He writes,

"Ethics is an area of philosophy concerned with giving a rational justification for an answer to the question, 'what is the good?'" (117).

He then goes on to talk about how ethics assumes choice and that choice assumes value. Moreover he states that a hierarchy of values assumes that something is of the highest value (note he is presupposing that there are such things as a hierarchy of values here).

Notice these seem to be "observations" that Gangadean is making. But I wonder, on Gangadean's own quirky standards for knowledge, whether he would count as knowing them all to be true. It doesn't seem so. How can one come to know with certainty that for instance, there are such things as a hierarchy of values? I mean, maybe he's making the more modest claim that when you consider human psychology, we act as if there are such things as a hierarchy of values. For instance, we tend to desire world peace more than we want dessert (expressly at least). Now I don't think Gangadean could ever be certain of even this claim based on his standards---this is because one derives such a psychological observations via fallible perceptual faculties and then uses these observations to make generalizations that are a far reach from deductive inferences. So I don't know how he could possibly count as knowing that all people believe that values are hierarchically ordered, in fact, given what he demands for knowledge, he can't even know that people tend to.

More importantly though, even if he could know psychological facts as these, it doesn't get him to where he wants to go. What he really needs for his project is not some facts about how people behave or what they think about the nature of values. Gangadean needs to show that it is in the very nature of values that they be ordered hierarchically. Not that we merely think that they are. And it seems that the claim he wants to derive is that whether or not people tend to see things this way (or behave as if they do), they ought to because it's a fact of reality that we should in some suitable sense track. This is why I think he falters here. He just doesn't have sufficient reason to believe this (or at least he hasn't presented us with any). My guess is that he's making the same mistake that I have often accused him of making before. He seems to think that he's got infallible a priori access to such facts. The idea being he thinks he can just think, from his armchair, about the very nature of values and can derive that values have this property of being hierarchically arranged. But this is incredibly contentious. I mean, how does he know that he isn't just uncovering his own idiosyncratic views on the matter? And where is his argument? If he's actually got some airtight deductive argument which shows that there is in fact a hierarchy of values, why doesn't he provides us with it?

And this worry extends quite easily to all of this claims of the "X assumes Y" form. For instance, how on earth does he know with certainty that ethics assumes choice. Or that choice assumes values? Again if he's just making psychological discoveries, then all he has are descriptive facts about how people tend to behave or what they think. Even if we act as if choice assumes values. It doesn't follow form that that choice in fact, assumes values. None of what he has said gets him to the nature of choice, or ethics, or value since the fact that we act as if something is the case doesn't entail that it is the case. So then where are the arguments that prove that ethics assumes choice. Or that choice assumes values?

Gangadean is merely helping himself to claims/premises which according to his own standard of knowledge, are not known by him--viz., he is ignorant about them. The same goes for the following claim: "when we choose something, we choose it either as a means to something else or for its own sake" and "it is the good that is ultimately sought through choice" (117). How can Gangadean prove these things? How can he know them?

My take is that Gangadean is pumping the reader's intuitions, once again. Gangadean finds each of these claims intuitive, or in line with his own commonsense (even though he wouldn't use those labels on pain of hypocrisy). He is counting on the reader to share these same intuitions, without realizing that they are intuitions. You might even find yourself feeling as if they most certainly have to be true--like, "duh, they just seem like platitudes." But these are substantive claims that some might disagree with and so Gangadean should (according to his own standards) provide rational justifications for them (i.e., rock-solid, sound-deductive proofs). I'm curious why Gangadean often blames other philosophers and Christians for failing to answer skeptical worries and yet ignores them himself when it suits his own interests.

Notice after having said all of this, what I haven't been able to discuss, yet, is whether Gangadean has shown that his conception of the first moral is correct. Recall, that the first moral law requires that one know that God is the determiner of good and evil. What I have done is to show that Gangadean in setting up his argument/arguments to this end, has failed to abstain from commonsense and intuition pumping. Since this is getting quite long I've decided to break this post up into parts. So we'll continue the inquiry next time.

Checking in

I've been swamped with school and so haven't had occasion to write anything new (although I've got pieces of drafts floating around). But I just wanted to let any readers know that I'm still around and hope to put up new pieces when I have a moment to breathe (the semester is almost over!).  I intend on putting up more posts, but I also find it sad that the Gangadeanians have yet to offer any real responses. I suspect that in large part Gangadean has directed his people not to read my blog, nor engage with it.

But I continue to be puzzled by how such a culture of isolation could be conducive for philosophical and theological development. I am one of the few people around that has taken the time and effort to actually presenting challenges and objections against their views rather than engaging in personal smear campaigns. When I was a member, I recall that Gangadean often refused to engage with challengers, citing that his objectors were merely interested in personal attacks and not willing to discuss things. Furthermore, Gangadean often criticized Christians (or "popular christians" as they were called by Gangadeanians) that were outside his congregation, for refusing to engage with the challenges that he brought against their theological and philosophical views.

So I guess I expected Gangadean to live by his own words and teachings and I thought that he would hold himself to the same standard that he has long held other people (including other Christians) to. But I guess this is just not the case.  I think he's simply chosen (and so have many of his followers) to avoid difficult challenges. Anyway, since I've designed this primarily as a resource to people outside the congregation-- I have every intention of carrying on. So stay tuned.

On Gangadean's proof of the External World.

In his book, Philosophical Foundation, Gangadean offers a series of arguments where he purports to prove various things that skeptics have historically called into question. Now it's important to keep in mind that 'skepticism' doesn't really refer to a singular worldview. There are many kinds of skepticism. One kind of skeptic, Descartes and those inspiried by him, suggest that our best evidence doesn't rule out the possibility (as remote as it may be) that there is no mind independent reality. By mind independent reality, I mean a real world, "out there" if you will, that isn't merely a fragment of our imaginations like a dream or matrix-like scenario. So Descartes suggested that in light of our best evidence, we can't rule out the possibility that we might be imagining everything that we think we interact with each day. Another way of putting it is to suggest that were the world not actually real (but merely a figment of my imagination) all of my beliefs/evidence would look exactly the same to me as it does now (presumably where the world is real). And since I can't tell the difference between the two, I don't can't rule out the possibility that it is all a fiction.

Importantly, to entertain such doubts or even to take them seriously is not the same as believing that there is no mind independent reality. Descartes didn't believe that an evil demon was causing him to see a world that didn't actually exist. He just wondered how he could tell the difference. In other words he was pointing out that our evidence for claims like "there exists a mind-independent world" is at least inconclusive (leaves room for doubt or to use Gangadean's words, "is unclear") and at worst, non existent (i.e., whatever evidence we thought we for the belief in an external world is equally evidence for a matrix-like scenario).

Philosophers have taken various lessons from such considerations. One view is to consider Descartes' presuppositions. Descartes seems to assume that in order for us to be justified in believing in the external world, we need to be able to tell the difference between the kind of mental states we would be in in the real-world vs. the mental states we would be in in a matrix-like scenario. But some philosophers call this into question. They think that one's belief in the external world can be warranted or justified simply in virtue of the fact that the belief is caused in the right way by the external world. It doesn't matter that you can't prove that your beliefs are caused in the right sort of way. All that is required is that one's belief actually be caused in the right way (i.e., by the proper environment). Indeed one can even know that the external world exists so long as things have gone correctly. These philosophers think that Descartes' worries are actually about whether one can know that one knows that the external world exists and they insist that we needn't worry about knowing that we know things. Some philosophers think that belief in the external world is basic--that is, it enjoys a special epistemic status of being entitled/warranted/justified in virtue of the kind of belief it is. So it doesn't matter that we don't have evidence for our belief in the external world, because it doesn't need evidence to be justified or warranted.

Gangadean on the other hand attempts to prove definitely that there is no rational room for doubting the existence of the external world. Here is the argument.

1) The cause of what I see is either in my mind, in another mind or outside of all minds. 

2) If the cause of what I see is in my mind, then I should have complete control over anything I see. 

3) If the cause of what I see is in another mind, then I should have no control over what I see. 

4) It is not the case that I have complete control over everything I see nor is it the case that I have no control over what I see (that is, I have some control over what I see, but not total). 

5) Thus, the cause of what I see is neither in my mind, nor in another mind. 

6) Ergo, the cause of what I see is outside of all minds.

Gangadean claims that his proof is sound. Now a sound argument should be deductively valid (the conclusion must necessarily follow from the premises) and also must contain only true premises. No doubt it's valid, but a valid argument is not hard to come by. The real test of an argument of this sort is whether or not all the premises are uncontroversial. In this case, they are not.

The main issue with the above argument is that it takes for granted the claim that one can know infallibly whether or not (and to what extent) one is in control of what one perceives. The whole argument rests on this assumption. Notice how premise 4) simply asserts that I do not have complete control over what I perceive.  This assumes that Gangadean can tell whether or not he is in control of what he perceives. But how does Gangadean know that? Once again, Gangadean seems to be appealing to intuitions, here. He takes it that he can just immediately apprehend that he does not have complete control over what he perceives. Further, he thinks he can distinguish between having full, partial, and no control over what he perceives. Of course, he's counting on his own judgment to be infallible here. But how can he trust his judgment like that? For all he knows, it could merely seem to him as if he has only some control over what he sees. But I wonder how he can rule out the possibility that he's wrong. Maybe he has no control over what he perceives. Or maybe he has total control over what he sees despite it seeming to him to the contrary. The question is how he could know the difference? So before this argument can get off the ground, he needs to first articulate and rationally support his method for determining whether or not he's got partial control, full control, and/or no control over what he perceives. Otherwise, the argument above is a non-starter. I have no idea what such a method would be other than introspection. But how can we trust introspection to that extent? How can we know with certainty that introspection is infallible? It all smells of intuitions to me.

A second problem is that premise 2) is also far from obvious. Gangadean needs to argue for this premise. He needs to prove beyond any doubt, how, if our perceptions were the result of our minds, we would have full control over what we perceive. And I just don't see how the consequent follows from the antecedent. Indeed, I spoke with Gangadean once about this. I was reading Descartes at the time and noticed that in his Meditations he mentions in passing the remote possible that all his perceptions/experiences are caused by a faculty in his mind of which he was unaware. Similarly, it's at least possible that our minds are responsible for all that we see, despite our not having control over what we perceive. This would just mean we don't have any actual control (even if it seems/feels to us as if we have some control) over what we perceive.

As I recall, Gangadean admitted that he hadn't given this issue consideration before. Unfortunately he never gave me a fully satisfactory account. His initial response was that admitting to there being such a faculty, would be admitting to the mind being divisible. But it was his view that minds were indivisible, necessarily. But that doesn't count as any proof of anything. First of all, where is the argument that minds are necessarily, indivisible? That's a very substantive claim about the nature of minds, but from what I gather he just took it for granted (perhaps again on an intuition).

Further, to admit to various faculties of the mind is not to admit to the mind being divisible in the first place. 'Faculty' might simply refer to various processes that are instantiated by the mind, like memory, reasoning, executive function and the like. Admitting that the mind is comprised, in someway, of a faculty that is responsible for all our perceptions doesn't imply that the mind is divisible anymore than admitting that the mind consists of a memorial faculty. In other words, 'faculty' as I am using it, is really just a stand-in for picking out particular kinds of mental processes that seem distinct. So the suggestion on the table is that it's at least possible that I am in someway the cause of what I see, despite being unaware of this. The main point is that Gangadean has taken great liberties to make strong claims about the nature of minds. But he can't just state them because they feel right to him. He shouldn't just insist that minds are indivisible. He shouldn't just insist that thinking of minds as consisting of various faculties implies that the mind is divisible. Likewise he shouldn't simply insist that he knows whether or not he's got only partial control over his perceptions. These crucial premises, suppressed as they are in his argument, need to be proven prior to his proof for the external world. Until that day, Gangadean hasn't proven the existence of the external world which means (on his definition of knowledge) he doesn't know there's an external world.

This has major implications for his worldview. For one thing, on his view, creation is supposed to be revelation. We are to know about God on the basis of knowing about creation. But the way that Gangadean has set things up, we can't even know that the external world exists, let alone derive true facts about it.

Now the correct response to these considerations, from my perspective, is not to doubt the existence of the external world.  It's to reject the assumptions that got us into this pickle in the first place and that is to reject the kind of proof that Gangadean demands for rational belief and knowledge. We don't have a proof that the external world exists (just like we don't have a proof for the vast majority of what we believe and take ourselves to know). But this is no impediment to knowledge---it doesn't mean the skeptic wins. We know lots of things because knowledge doesn't require absolute certainty to begin with. Of course, this option is not open to Gangadean and his followers. Skepticism seems the only road for them.

Matter, Spirit, and a Third substance.

In this post, I questioned the following argument.

 1) Something must be eternal.
 2) Matter cannot possibly be eternal.
 3) Therefore, at least some spirit must be eternal.

I noted that the move from 2) to 3) rests on an assumed dichotomy, namely, that reality is solely comprised of matter and spirit. But if this assumption is false or can be doubted, then 3) simply doesn't follow from 2).  I also considered some potential responses that the Gangadeanians might have and suggested their limitations. I also discussed how the Gangadeanian might suggest that a 3rd substance that is non-conscious (non spiritual), non-extended (immaterial), and causally efficacious substance was inconceivable--like a circle square. I then pointed out some worries with such a position. For one, I just think it's perfectly conceivable and so to insist that it isn't conceivable doesn't serve as a response to someone like me. But here's something I didn't consider at the time that I think is more important to the larger theme of my blog.  This move, claiming that such a third substance is inconceivable, should be in tension with Gangadean's views about the illegitimacy of intuitions for knowledge and rational belief formation. Why? Because to make the claim that something is inconceivable, (like a circle-square, or a non conscious, non extended, causally efficacious substance) is to make a claim grounded in an intuition. When someone says a circle-square is a contradiction, you either "see it" as such, or not. There's no sound argument that gets you there. It's immediate. You just think about what it means to be a circle and you think about what it means to be a square and you immediately see that there is a contradiction of terms or you don't. But it isn't a sound argument that makes it apparent. And so it is with the claim that a non-conscious, non-extended, causally efficacious third substance is inconceivable.  In other words, if the Gangadean makes the claim that such a third substance is a logical impossibility, one need only ask the Gangadeanian how he knows this with absolute certainty. What argument can they offer you that doesn't beg the question or rest on other premises that depend on intuitions? So it just isn't an open move for the Gangadeanians, on pain of inconsistency.

Christian doctrines as incentive/support for more basic beliefs?

In my previous post, I mentioned that the Gangadeanians sometimes speak as if their theory of knowledge is correct or at least that the kind of certainty they equate with knowledge is attested to by certain Christian doctrines. When faced with the challenge of differing accounts of the nature of knowledge, they sometimes respond with, "well, fine but the kind of knowledge I'm interested in and the kind of knowledge that we ought to have regarding God's existence, is absolute certainty." And I pointed out how this seems to be a fallacious move. This move depends on presupposing the bible (or at least particular segments of it) to be true. For example, the thinking is that not-knowing God leads to maximal consequences, and so it must be maximally clear (knowable with certainty) that he exists. But the issue of which theory of knowledge is correct, and what kind of knowledge (whether absolute certainty or not) we ought to have with respect to our most basic beliefs, is logically prior to beliefs about whether the bible is the word of God and thus offers any divine insight. So you've got to answer the more basic ones first, and not refer to the less basic issues to support claims about the more basic ones at least unless one thinks this kind of circular reasoning is perfectly acceptable. This has gotten me thinking about certain conversations I've had with Gangadeanians during my departure from the congregation.

When I raised challenges or objections to core doctrines of the church, that is, on matters that they deemed to be most basic, I was sometimes met with the following response. "You know, if you go down that path, you will end up eventually denying Christianity."  Further, on more than one occasion, I've heard Gangadeanians point out that persons who had similar questions as I did, eventually ended up in "bad places" where bad places meant walking away from the faith. The more I think about this approach, the more I think it's entirely illegitimate in just the way that I highlighted above. It sounds a lot like appealing to the bible and Christian doctrine (which are comparatively less basic) to support more basic issues---the very issues that are logically prior and supposed to provide the basis for the less basic issues. Perhaps it's also an appeal to fear.

Any way you cut it, one ought not to evaluate my objections on the basis of what they imply about the Christian faith, the veracity of scripture, lifestyle and the like. This is because my objections are more rudimentary---they have to do with issues that are logically prior to whether Christianity as a worldview is a cogent one. Indeed the kind of move that I'm speaking of actually sounds like a very different kind of presuppositionalism from the kind that Gangadean endorses, namely, the kind that takes the tenants of Christianity as the starting point of all inquiry. To forget about this and to allow for the kinds of reasoning I am calling into question is to lack intellectual integrity, at least by Gangadean's standards. But this is just the sort of thing I've heard from more than one Ganagdeanian on more than one occasion.

New posts up!

I've been slacking the last week or so but am making up for lost time. I just put up 3 new articles today.

Clarity, Inexcusability and Knowledge.

I have challenged the idea that we can have absolute certainty of the things Gangadean claims to have. More precisely, I have tried to show that whatever system or method that Gangadean appeals to in trying to attain certainty turns out to be inconsistent. Notice my claim needn't be that we can't have certainty. It's simply that Gangadean hasn't shown us a way to certainty. This is so, even if the kind of certainty he is after is logically possible--he hasn't shown us the way to it. His account ultimately fails its own test. This is because his most basic beliefs end up being grounded in intuitions or otherwise groundless. Unfortunately, I've heard no direct answer to any of my objections. Often I have asked for supporting arguments for a number of the central claims that Gangadean rests his worldview on, but have heard nothing. For instance, I have asked Gangadean to rationally support his theory of knowledge. He tells us what his theory is (though he doesn't recognize it as just one of many theories), but he doesn't tell us why we should think his theory is correct. He still hasn't answered this.

Instead, one psuedo-response has been to shift the direction of the discussion in the following way. He says that the kind of knowledge he is interested in, is the kind that makes sense of the inexcusability of unbelief according to Christian Theism or the bible. In other words, he's sort of conceding in a roundabout way that there are many different conceptions of knowledge out there. But rather than prove that his theory is the correct one, he's saying that his theory plays a particular role in his theorizing about a particular Christian doctrine. Furthermore, he's claiming that it's the only kind of conception of knowledge that will do this job and it's the kind of knowledge that we should have regarding our most basic beliefs, according to Christianity.

So let me put a little pressure on this line of "response."

1) Just because a particular conception or theory fits one's philosophical/theological project, it doesn't mean it's true. These are just two entirely different things.

2) Gangadean hasn't proven from reason alone that we should care about explaining the inexcusability of unbelief. In fact, he derives the notion from the bible (Romans 1:20). But the issue of whether he's got the right kind of theory of knowledge, and whether it must be clearly knowable by reason alone that God exists, are supposed to be known via reason alone. So it achieves nothing on that front to merely appeal to scripture as if they support his claims-- that's putting the cart in front of the horse. He's got to prove these claims via reason. How does Gangadean know by reason alone that i) unbelief in God leads to maximal consequences, ii) unbelief in God is inexcusable and iii) that maximal consequences implies maximal clarity? That is, he can't just insist these things are true, he ought to prove them and should not appeal to the bible to do so. I have raised these and related concerns before.

3) As I've written about in this post, his Calvinism implies that, even if it were clear that God exists, unbelief is still excusable because the unregenerate can't possibly desire to seek God. This desire to know what is clear is requisite (and sufficient) according to Gangadean to know what is clear, but it's also entirely out of the unbelievers hands whether they have this desire to know/seek or not to begin with. Pair these considerations with the fact that Gangadean maintains the ought-implies-can principle, and you have the following result. If I ought to desire to seek God, then I can desire to see, which is false given his commitment to soft determinism/Calvinism (the unregenerate cannot desire to seek, because they are dead in their trespasses). And so if it isn't the case that they can seek, it follows that they are not required to seek, which means they shouldn't be held responsible for not seeking. So the unbeliever is with excuse or rather, they need no excuse because they haven't done anything wrong.

4) Now even supposing that it were legitimate for Gangadean to reach into the bible for a proof text (which it certainly isn't), we still have the problem of interpretation. I've written about this issue before as well. Briefly, the problem is that Gangadean has a particular conception of "without excuse" and "clear" when he reads Romans 1:20 which states that "being clear from what is made so that man is without excuse." And he's got a particular doctrine of the consequences of unbelief in mind which inform what he draws from this text. But there is controversy all along the way. Why should we think that Paul was thinking of "clear" and "without excuse" in the way that Gangadean has in mind? Can Gangadean prove that he was? Again take a look at this post where I discuss these matters in more detail.

5) The reason that Gangadean thinks inexcusability of unbelief implies clarity is because he thinks that there are maximal consequences (spiritual death) that is part and parcel of unbelief in what is clear. So we can derive from that that any belief which failure to have results in maximal consequences/spiritual death are going to be absolutely clear or can be known with certainty.

However, according to the most common forumlations of Christianity including Gangadean's, spiritual life (avoiding spiritual death/maximal consequences) requires more than belief or knowledge that God exists. It requires, among other things, belief in Christ's redemptive work, which requires that one believes that Christ actually existed, took on the sins of the world and the like. And I take it that Gangadean is committed to the further view that belief in these claims is not enough, but one must have knowledge, his kind of knowledge. But one can't possibly know that Jesus existed, was the incarnation of God and died for our sins just by thinking about it. We need the divine revelation of God, the message of the gospel via the bible. So now it seems like according to Gangadean's standards one must also know (with certainty) that the bible (at least with respect to what it says about Christ's redemptive work) is true. So there is a lot to know here, and to know with absolute certainty according to Gangadean. Since failure to know any of these things leads to maximal consequences, it follows from Gangadean's position that each and every one of these propositions must be provable via a deductively sound argument. In other words, Gangadean must be able to prove how he can know that Jesus existed, was the incarnation of God, and took on the sins of the world and that the bible is true (at least insofar as it speaks of Christ). Can he prove each of these via reason? Here again is the post where I explain this objection and here is another that shows how Gangadean's can't prove that the bible is special revelation (i.e., actually the word of God).

6) Since Gangadean is so keen on citing Romans 1:20 as a proof text and appealing to particular words (in English translations) such as "without excuse" and "clearly" to make substantive philosophical claims, I wonder why he ignores the fact that Paul is speaking about unbelief with respect to God, rather than knowledge.  Knowledge according to Gangadean requires certainty, but belief does not. We have all sorts of beliefs and not all of what we believe counts as knowledge. So perhaps all Paul is saying in that passage is that one ought to believe that God exists, because there are compelling reasons to believe even if these reasons don't provide knowledge or Gangadeanian knowledge (certainty).

More on "response to critics": Is Gangadean a Fideist or Skeptic?

About a month ago, I found a new Gangadeanian website featuring articles, one of which was a "response to critics." Here is the article and here was my initial reaction to it. Gangadean featured some of my objections, but did a poor job at addressing them. Partly due to ignorance. It's hard to respond properly to a challenge when you don't understand it very well. Anyway, below is another excerpt from Gangadean's article. I've suggested before that Gangadean's theory of knowledge actually leads to a form of skepticism. If you maintain that knowledge requires absolute certainty like Gangadean does, then much of what you think you know turns out to be instances of ignorance. If you consider a great many of my articles you will see that I've been pushing this line. I've attempted to show how Gangadean's worldview is internally inconsistent. He disavows skepticism about basic things, but his theory of knowledge if held consistently, actually leads to skepticism about these very things. He disavows fideism ("belief without proof" as he defines it) but he rests his most foundational views on immediate, non inferential beliefs. Sometimes he refers to these beliefs as "self-attesting" but what about the belief that a is a is self-attesting? Is it self-attesting that it is self-attesting? How does he know when something is self-attesting? Isn't this belief without proof since proof requires argument and there is no argument given for when something is self-attesting rather than not? Again, that is the way to inconsistency. As I see it Gangadean sort of endorses fideism about the most basic things under the guise of "self-attesting" principles though he won't admit it. But what I want to focus on here, is how his views lead to skepticism. Below we have one of the "objections" and "responses" that Gangadean presents on his website. 

Objection 13: Reason cannot get you very far beyond a is a. 

Response:

1. Reason is first the test for meaning. What violates a law of thought lacks meaning; a meaningless statement cannot be true, but is necessarily false (by reductio ad absurdum).

1. The contradiction of what is necessarily false must be true.

1. We can know by reason that there must be something eternal and that only some is eternal; we can know by reason that the good for a being is according to the nature of that being.

1. Therefore, the basic things about God and man and good and evil are clear to reason (PC).

1. The Principle of Clarity has substantial content that can be extended by the Principle of Rational Presuppositionalism, both of which are affirmed in Common Ground.

Ignoring for now how he has just dished out more mere assertions (i.e., he never argues for the claim that reason is first a test for meaning**), the main issue with this representation of the dialectic is that it doesn't do justice to the objection. Basically the objection is given as if it is merely an assertion and then the response is essentially "nope." It's puzzling to me how this would be helpful for anybody. But it seems consistent with the way that Gangadean and his people approach these matters at least in my experience so far. Unfortunately, it's makes for poor philosophy. So let me see if I can fill this stuff out so it's actually of some use. 

First what is the objection? Well it isn't that reason doesn't get us very far in terms of knowledge (again a misconstrual on Gangadean's part). Instead the objection is that Gangadean's requirement that one must always avoid fideism (belief without proof) in order to come to know things that severely limits what we can know. Proof that God exists is not attained by having excellent reasons or evidence that God exists.  Having proof that God exists according to Gangadean means having a deductively sound argument where the conclusion "God exists" necessarily follows from indubitably true premises (although as I mentioned in this post, even this account of proof faces serious worries).  So any belief you have on the basis of anything falling short of a sound, impervious, deductive argument, is a belief that fails to be knowledge. You are being fideistic according to Gangadean should you believe something without such proof and also if you're unable to recite that proof. Of course he'll cite "self-evident" or "self-attesting" principles, but as I've already pointed out, these are dubious notions. He needs to tell us why we should think there are such things in the first place and also give us a method of determining when something is genuinely self-attesting/self-evident (is something self attesting because it seems to him to be?). Now he grants that there are a great many things, "less basic" things that you can't know on his theory of knowledge. You can't know ahead of time who will win the next world series. You can't know how the stock market will do tomorrow and the like. But what he fails to realize (though I've presented my case to him on more than one occasion) is that his theory of knowledge actually takes away much much more than what he professes it does. He may not want admit it, but that's precisely what follows form his own views!

For instance, Gangadean criticizes empiricism for relying on sense impression as an infallible source of knowledge. He argues that our perceptual faculties (e.g., vision) can fail us as in cases of optical illusion. That is, at any given moment, we can't be sure what our sense report to us is truly representative of the world out there. This means that any time we have a sense impression, the veracity of the impression is called into question. So Gangadean uses this line of thinking to call empiricism into question. The problem is, he never gets around to explaining how it is that reason helps solve the problems he has exploited. We can't depend on our senses alone to know things (with certainty), and so we should depend on reason, so he claims. And then he goes on to present arguments that purport to prove that God exists entirely apart from our unreliable senses, (recall that he actually appeals to the senses in arguing this. See this post). Though I think and have argued that he fails in this "proof", let's just suppose that he has succeeded. So you know with certainty that some spirit must be eternal (see this post to see that he actually fails to do this as well). But what about other things? If knowledge of some proposition requires that you have (in some suitable way) proof of that proposition (and presumably believe the proposition on the basis of that proof), then you don't know anything that doesn't meet these criteria. If you don't have a sound proof of any proposition or you don't believe some proposition on the basis of a sound proof, then you don't know the proposition, period. That is Gangadean's view. But since he's just called into question the trustworthiness of our senses, that means anything you believe, even partially on the basis of your senses, is something you can't possibly know with certainty. You can see how this leads to skepticism. And it gets worse. Induction (the crown jewel of any hard science) falls short of proof. So to believe something on the basis of induction, is fideistic, it leads to ignorance rather than knowledge. 

Again, I had more than one conversation about this with Gangadean. I noted that I couldn't possibly know that I exist on this standard. I don't have a proof that I exist, nor do I believe on the basis of any proof that I exist. I just believe it immediately. So that means I can't know that I exist by Gangadean's lights. I can't know that I am a man (since this belief depends on my senses). I can't know that I was born at such and such date, or that I am married (these depend on the senses and testimony). I can't know that I wake up next to my wife each morning --I just don't have a deductive proof, bur rather depend on my senses and induction! What is more, much of these beliefs involve moral matters (by his lights). Think about any decision you make, maybe it's having a sexual relationship with the person you take to be your spouse, or maybe it's being a witness in a criminal jury, or maybe it's investing money to a good cause. Or maybe it's disciplining your children for something that you strongly suspect and have every reason to believe they did wrong. The examples are plentiful. In fact, Gangadean at some point concluded that I was a reason-denier and thus shouldn't be at his church. This, too, was based on his sense impressions of me (or my express behaviors) as well as his interpretations of those sense impressions. Bottom line, we don't have anything like a deductive proof about propositions that are relevant to important decisions and actions we take. If I am about to have sex with the person I take to be my marital partner, but I can't trust my senses and so can't know that this person is actually my partner, then I had better opt out. 

This way leads to skepticism. That is my objection. It's isn't that reason doesn't get us very far. It's that Gangadean's requirements on knowledge, his views about fideism (and how it's somehow wrong to believe things without proof) actually leads to a form of skepticism. Gangadean ought to be a skeptic if he's being consistent. 

In a personal conversation, Gangadean simply insisted that on his view you could be absolutely certain of all the things that I've called into question.  He essentially gave a Cartesian response. You see, the French philosopher Descartes once tried to argue for a similar view as Gangadean. He thought you could be sure of something just in case you had a clear and distinct idea of that thing. The problem of course is that he hasn't really told us what counts as "clear and distinct" and more importantly, how we can be sure when we have a clear and distinct idea vs. falsely thinking we do. Gangadean has essentially replaced "clear and distinct" with "self-attesting" "self-evident" or "makes questioning possible." But again, same problem. He hasn't told us how we know when something fits any of these and how we can determine for ourselves when we falsely believe something to be for example, self-attesting rather than not. Anyway, Descartes ran into this problem when it came to propositions that we believed on the basis (at least partial basis) of our senses. Given that our senses sometimes fool us, even when we don't see any reason to doubt them, he had to explain how we could trust our senses at all. This is just the problem that plagues Gangadean and he seems to have followed Descartes down a dubious path. It is the blind leading the blind. So Gangadean's response was something like, "well, we already have proven that God exists via reason and we know that God is perfectly good, so we can trust that God would not fool us when it comes to propositions that are relevant to moral matters." 

I was actually quite shocked that this was his response and I hope he has since changed that view or that I have grossly misunderstood him. The problem of course is that you need to be able to know that your senses are faithfully reporting reality in order to even determine whether some belief is going to be morally relevant in the first place. Presumably, my stealing something in a dream is not an iniquity. I just don't have any sort of control over my dreams and more importantly, no actual harm has been done as a result of my imagined action. Now suppose you just saw someone leave an expensive cellphone at a restaurant. You ask yourself, did I just imagine this, am I dreaming, or did someone in fact, leave a cellphone in the restaurant?  That is, you ask yourself whether you can trust your senses on this occasion. Gangadean's response is that if it is a morally relevant belief, then you can rest assured that God would not let you be fooled about your senses. The problem is, you need to first determine whether this is going to be a morally relevant belief and it's only morally relevant if it's real and your senses didn't play a trick on you and you're not dreaming! So you are again faced with the problem. How do I know when I can trust my senses and when I can't? So this "response" is actually of no use. It's a case of what I call the philosophical runaround. 

Once we understand the real objection we can see that the "response" featured above on behalf of the Gangadeanians, is nothing of a response. 

**Note Gangadean does say that "meaning is more basic than truth" in Philosophical Foundation. But this is not an argument for the claim that reason is first a test for meaning. It's just another assertion. He then follows this with an example. "All glics are grue" and notes that you cannot know whether it is true or false until you first know what it means. Neither is this a sound argument unless arguments don't have premises and deductive relations. Instead it's an example that is supposed to elicit an intuitive reaction from the hearer.