Anderson's fallibility with respect to Fallibilism

It looks like Anderson is making use of some of our exchanges in his courses now. That's partially encouraging, but I suspect that the strawman fallacy abounds. I say this because Gangadeanians in general seem to have a hard time understanding my views as opposed to mere caricatures. This is largely due to the fact that they haven't done their due diligence. They never cared to try and understand because in my experience they tend to be quick to the defense which seems to cloud their abilities to assess things with a clear head.

Anderson in a recent post speaks of fallibilism about knowledge. One should note at the outset that the fallibilism that I am committed to is something like moderate or weak fallibilism--which is just the thesis that knowledge doesn't require maximal justification or epistemic certainty. That's just an existential thesis that might be stated formally in the following way:

Weak Fallibilism: there is at least one subject S and one proposition P such that S knows that P, without having maximal justification for P. 

'Existential' above denotes the quantifier 'at least some' which is to be contrasted with (is sometimes called the 'subalternation' of) to the quantifier 'all'. In other words, I think that we can know things without having maximal justification.

Now to be fair, I supplement this thesis with another. I also think that we don't have maximal justification about most, if not all of our beliefs and by extension, for much or all of what we know. But I'm far less committed to this position. In many of my exchanges with Gangadeanians, I'm happy to not presuppose. The other thing to note is that this second thesis is much weaker than Gangadeanians often attribute to me again due to their lack of due-diligence. To say that we don't have certainty is a claim about actuality. It's not the stronger claim (nor does it entail) that certainty is impossible. To see the contrast, I might say that I don't think that people actually live beyond 140 years, but that doesn't imply that it's impossible for people to live longer.

As it pertains to the Gangadeanian worldview, what I claim is that even if certainty is in principle possible, they haven't shown us a consistent way of ascertaining it. At the "most basic level," they just use intuitions and conveniently switch the label on us. One upshot: suppose that Gangadean were to somehow successfully show that we must have certainty without appealing to intuitions under a different label and without begging the question. Still, that's not the same as showing us how it is that we can attain certainty. Those are just two different things. Now I don't think he's even tried to show us that we need certainty as opposed to simply asserting so much. It's an axiom of his system really (though he wouldn't be caught dead using such a term).

So to be clear, certainty may be possible, but that's not to say very much. If it's a remote enough of a possibility, then who really cares about it? Certainty might even be necessary for certain purposes (though I don't believe this for a minute), but again that's not to have shown much.

The nagging questions are how it is that we can be certain when we have attained certainty? How do we know when something is self-attesting as opposed to merely seeming to us to be self-attesting?Further, is the question that moves beyond possibility to actuality (i.e., can we have certainty vs. do we actually have it?). Further, why does the fact that a proposition is self-attesting count as having achieved certainty of it? You might be tempted to think something like, "that's just what 'self-attesting' means." But how are you so certain that the phrase 'self-attesting' even has an extension? How are you certain that it denotes anything? The Gangadeanian might in turn be tempted to respond with, "well you're using the terms 'self-attesting' and asking how we can be certain that something is self-attesting and so you must be presupposing that it has extension." But that's just confusing the terms of the debate. Here's my response: I'm merely using the word because you've introduced it. For all I've said, it could just as easily be replaced by a variable like 'X' that may or may not have any referent. It's your job to show us that it does!

Yes, I doubt we have certainty of much of anything, which again isn't the same thing as suggesting that certainty is impossible.

Why am I skeptical that we actually have certainty over what we know? Well it's a really high bar. If we equate certainty with maximal justification (as the Gangadeanians do) then this amounts to it not being possible to have more justification for the proposition in question--your epistemic position, as it were, as it regards that proposition couldn't possibly be improved. For the theists among us, you might say that your epistemic position with respect to the proposition for which you have certainty, is no worse than that of God's position. And that just seems crazy to me. It seems to me that we can always improve our epistemic position with respect to what we know even in the things we feel quite certain about (note there's a big difference between mere psychological certainty and epistemic certainty and it's the latter that we're interested in, but I suspect Gangadeanians sometimes conflate to two).

To this the Gangadeanians will no doubt argue in the following manner. We must have certainty, to question anything, including whether we have certainty. Without clarity at the basic level, thinking is not possible and neither is questioning (which presupposes thoughts). The problem is, this is an unproven assumption. As I've pointed out many times in the past, there's just no reason given to accept the claim that we must have certainty for thought or questioning to be possible. It just seems like an intuition that supports their entire worldview.

Anyway, I noticed that Anderson in his post about fallibilism had some of the following "study questions". I'll speak briefly about them since they point to just how mistaken is his understanding of my position as well as fallibilism in general. 

What does it mean for a law to be self-attesting?  Does the fallibilist believe anything is self-attesting?  How could one prove that nothing is self-attesting?

One thing to note here is that it's strange that the fallibilist would be at all interested in trying to prove that nothing is self-attesting. The fallibilist would say that we can know things without proof. Moreover, many fallibilists are externalists about knowledge. So why would they feel any need to prove that nothing is self-attesting in the first place (do we need more than knowledge of things)? This smells like a slip on Anderson's part where he's smuggling in infallibilism + internalism in evaluating fallibilism which is question-begging. 

Can a fallibilist be certain that a statement he made is actually the statement he made?  Must a fallibilist he concerned for intellectual consistency? 

Here, too again is the same sort of slip as above. Why would the fallibilist need or desire certainty about the statements they are making?! A fallibilist would say that they can know what statements they are making and it doesn't require certainty. So what more do you want? Again, he's assuming infallibilist norms in order to in effect, argue against fallibilism which is obviously begging the question. 

Is fallibilism a neutral position from which to criticize others or does it have presuppositions that need to be identified and proven to be true?

And yet again, same mistake! The fallibilist isn't necessarily a neutral position, but neither does it aim to prove things like the infallibilist of Gangadean's vintage. So why would the fallibilist feel the need to prove it's own assumptions if certainty isn't needed for knowledge? The fallibilist allows that they have assumptions like everyone else does, and even goes so far as to say that these assumptions can count as knowledge without proof. So how is this question supposed to suggest an inconsistency with fallibilism? 

A couple of elementary lesson in argumentation do result from this exploration. 

1) You shouldn't use premises that presuppose that your opponent's view is wrong in order to show that their position is wrong. 

2) If you want to point out an inconsistency in your opponents position, you should stick to premises that they accept. You shouldn't characterize their view as having an assumption that you accept, but they that reject. 

Ganagdean and Infinite Justice and Mercy

What does God's justice demand? Well, what is the nature of divine justice? And how are we to know what divine justice is?

There are various theories of justice and likewise various theories of infinite/divine justice. Many Christians take themselves to have a rather strong grasp of divine justice since they often cite it to answer objections about the doctrine of eternal damnation, and the need for atonement. Gangadeanians are no exception. They believe that divine justice requires that sin not be set aside, but rather must be accounted for. For God to simply overlook or forgive wrongdoing would be to violate his nature as divinely just. So sin must have consequences.

As Gangadeanians see it, the wages of sin are spiritual death which is failing to know what is clear. This is because at root sin is the failure to seek to know what is clear (to live contrary to what it means to be a rational animal/human). Failure to seek leads to ignorance. It's not clear what the nature of the connection is-- but they claim that there is an intrinsic link between failing to seek and failing to know what is clear. I'm skeptical of this purported conceptual connection because it isn't obvious to me that it is logically impossible for a human to know without seeking. I wouldn't limit God to that extent--if God so pleased, it seems to me that it's at least logically possible for him to give a human knowledge directly.

So ignorance of basic things = the wages of sin for the Gangadeanians. It's a very cognitive notion.

But they also believe that God is also infinitely merciful. Gangadeanians believe that even though God cannot (i.e., it's a logical impossibility) merely overlook sin because on their view, this would be incompatible with God's divine justice, God is also merciful. So he must save some (more on this below). But what does it mean to save some? Well, it requires that God forgive some of their sins. It isn't that God ignores the sin, but God atones for it or else again his divine justice would be threatened.

As you're thinking through these lines of reasoning, it's important to keep the following in mind in order to keep the Gangadeanians honest. Often it's not obvious just which claims are supposed to be known via general revelation (via reason alone) and which parts are known via special revelation (scripture). They want to argue for a particular fundamentalist brand of Christianity, but some of it comes from reason alone and others from scripture.

In the first place, the Gangadeanians are claiming to have quite a bit of insight into what God's justice consists of--or else much of the reasoning above won't make sense. But just how do they know that divine justice cannot merely set aside sin? How do they know that God is infinitely just (in just the way that they define 'justice')? How do they know that God is infinitely merciful? How do they know what infinite mercy looks like? In fact, answers to these questions should not appeal to scripture. This is because it is part of their argument for the bible as God's word--so that would be question-begging.

On more than one occasion, I've spoken to a Gangadeanian who assures me that justice consists in "treating likes as like" or in other words an "eye for an eye" notion of justice. People get what they deserve---there are consequences to sin just as there are consequences for good works. And according to Gangadean, divine justice is following this "system" perfectly.

Notice, that this doesn't answer the epistemological question: how do you know what divine justice is? It presupposes an answer and moves to offer a metaphysical theory about what divine justice consists of. This is an important point because it's just another juncture at which Gangadeanians appeal to intuition--they have a sense of what justice is and take it for granted as the correct one (just like they do with their theory of knowledge and any number of other concepts).

But even if we grant them this (and we really shouldn't since they are after epistemic certainty), more problems emerge. Insofar as they have this "eye for an eye" notion of divine justice in mind, and they think that it helps them affirm the bible as the word of God, they should find themselves in quite a quandary. Sure there are instances of "treating likes as likes" in scripture, but then you've got that whole bit about Jesus dying for the sins of his people. That isn't treating "likes as likes" and it's anything but "eye for an eye." It's fairly obvious that God incarnate who is without sin, dying for say billions of unrepentant sinners and thereby preventing them from reaping the intrinsic consequences of their sins is far from treating 'a' as 'a.'  By definition, the regenerate don't get what they deserve. They simply don't reap what they sow. They reap infinitely better than they have sown.

Thus insofar as the Gangadeanian worldview suggests we can deduce from reason alone the claim that the bible is the word of God, based on their notion of divine justice, it's actually a non-starter. Their notion of divine justice should have them rejecting the bible (qua special revelation) outright. Alternatively, they may reject their starting notion of divine justice--but other problems will emerge for their worldview e.g., why is there are need for SR? and why is atonement only limited?.

What about their notion of divine mercy? Again, the same problems emerge as with justice. There are analogous epistemological questions: how do you know that God is infinitely merciful? How do you know what infinite mercy even looks like? Notice, again it would be question-begging to presuppose the bible has any authority at this point--since their claim that God is infinitely merciful (as well as what that looks like) must first be settled since it serves as a premise to their argument for the bible as the genuine word of God. But how reason alone, and considerations of whether something must be eternal, gets them to affirming that God is infinitely merciful, or even what it is that infinite mercy (or mercy at all) should look like (i.e., what the nature of mercy is) is beyond me. Interestingly, I've yet to hear Gangadean's theory of mercy let alone mercy of the infinite sort.

The way that Gangadean frames things then is that he's got a particular notion of divine justice and divine mercy in mind which he claims you can derive from reason alone (just by thinking). You can't and need not appeal to scripture at this point for any insight. Instead there are sound arguments starting from his argument for "something must be eternal" which can provide you with a proof that God is infinitely just and merciful (in just the way that Gangadean defines these things) and then ultimately to the conclusion that the bible is the word of God. I find the prospects of such deductions to be ludicrous. More importantly, Gangadean and his people are super shady about presenting them. My guess is that they don't actually have any such arguments. Instead their tactic is to "get more basic" and try to find a way to label you as someone that denies reason.

My take is that we have intuitive senses of justice and mercy--there are certain phenomena that we have contingently come to call 'justice' and 'mercy,' but there are likely to be difficult cases where we just aren't sure whether one or the other is being instantiated. But it doesn't provide us anything like a sure-fire means from which we can deduce that the bible is the word of God. At any rate, I'd like to see how Gangadean defends his notions of divine justice and mercy from any and all possible contenders.

Beyond that, there's an additional worry about how these twin notions work together. For Gangadean, the bible provides the only account of the reconciliation of divine justice and mercy in the face of sin. There is no other current competitor to our knowledge [notice: he has no epistemological right to say that there is no possible contender].

So in his mind, if we have reasoned carefully and correctly from basic things, we'll all "see" that there is some puzzle to be solved. We'll know with certainty that there is such a thing as sin, that humans have all sinned and also that God is infinitely just (as Gangadean defines it) and infinitely merciful (as Ganagdean defines it). And crucially, we'll further see a real tension between these. The tension is this: if God's justice demands payment for sin, and all have sinned then this is supposed to present some obvious puzzle for God's mercy. But to be frank, I don't know what that puzzle is. As I stated above, I've yet to hear Gangadean's theory of infinite mercy and so I can't even begin to assess whether or not there is some tension with his notion of divine justice. Without this tension, there's no need for special revelation and no "deduction" to the bible as the word of God.

Now, if we think about mercy in the legal setting we might think of it in terms of giving someone less than they deserve or else granting them favor (some good) that they don't deserve. But what would infinite mercy look like? Would it be to grant to all creatures who are undeserving, a little bit of favor? Or would it be to grant 49% of the undeserving, a bit more favor? Or perhaps only a handful with a whole lotta favor? Maybe just one person must get infinite favor? Or perhaps all undeserving creatures, less than infinite favor. Or perhaps all undeserving, infinite favor? How can we settle this via reason alone? I haven't a clue and neither does Gangadean.

What's emerging then is my puzzlement over Gangadean's purported puzzle. Gangadean can't define 'infinite mercy' in a way that contradicts his notion of infinite justice. Otherwise, God couldn't have both attributes on pain of inconsistency. But neither can Gangadean define 'infinite mercy' in a way that presents no tension with his concept of infinite justice or else by his lights, we could not come to affirm "the need for special revelation". Gangadean needs for there to be just the right sort of tension between the notion of divine justice and the notion of divine mercy that he purports to derive from reason alone. But just what is this notion of infinite mercy that he's got in mind? And what is his rational justification for adopting it in the first place? Your guess is as good as mine.