Apologists and Thomas Kuhn: A Love Story

[_MrStakhanovite]

I wrote a post about this some time ago, and I like to link it when Kuhn crops up. I've dubbed the strategy "The Kuhnian Shift" and examined Kevin Christensen's use of Kuhn for his own apologetic purposes. Kevin does a lukewarm response on Runtu's blog, which you can get at on the second page of the thread.

The Kuhnian Shift.

I loved Tarski's summation of it, "Kuhn, therefore Nephi."

[_Cicero]

Stak: Thanks for the link. That was indeed an excellent post. As I have mentioned before, I have been out of the loop on this stuff for about the last 8 years, but I figured that this had probably already been discussed here since apologists have been using the Kuhnian Shift strategy for a LONG time. I also wasn't aware that Kuhn later rejected anti-realism.

DrW: Creationists like to cite Popper? WTF??? I really had no idea. I can't imagine how angry that would make him if he were still alive. Talk about taking a quote out of context.

[_MrStakhanovite]

The aforementioned findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience remind me of Calvin's sensus divinitatis (sense of divinity). Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues in Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000) that sensus divinitatis is properly basic, much like the belief in the existence of other minds. Plantinga has also made a rather famous evolutionary argument against naturalism. To simplify it, assuming our brain is merely the product of random mutations and natural selection, there is no reason to assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable when forming beliefs. The truthfulness of these beliefs become irrelevant compared to their evolutionary advantage. If naturalism is true, the naturalist cannot justify trust in his own cognitive faculties. If theism is true (mainly of the Abrahamic sort), then one is created in the image of God with the capacity for true knowledge.

Go team! Right on! Power to the purple...... or something like that....

I lol’ed at this, because Plantinga is like the bizzaro-world Pragmatist. When Bukowski was over here last time telling me how much Quine represented his views, he is pretty much now endorsing an argument that rests on a rejection of evidentialism.

And then you have Kevin throwing Kuhn around like he is some heavy hitting Philosopher who forever changed the Philosophy of Science (he didn’t, he had a bigger impact on Sociology, and his narrative scheme of revolutions has far too many counter examples to hold).

What you got over there is a large group of name droppers who never bother to learn about a Philosopher and why he or she thought as they did, they just need that link or that blurb to make it sound like they’ve done some kind of heavy reading subject to justify their all too casual confidence.

In short....

[_MrStakhanovite]

Stak: Thanks for the link. That was indeed an excellent post. As I have mentioned before, I have been out of the loop on this stuff for about the last 8 years, but I figured that this had probably already been discussed here since apologists have been using the Kuhnian Shift strategy for a LONG time. I also wasn't aware that Kuhn later rejected anti-realism.

Thanks. That is sort of the catch 22 of Mopologetics, when I was just getting into this, EA would link me all the time to previous threads where the same topic was discussed. They are always slow on the uptake over there and will reuse the same tactics over and over.

Kuhn got a lot of criticism over the years, and like a pro, he would admit error when he needed too and change his over all scheme.

As for Popper, well, dude was kind of a douche. Sometimes when I’m grumpy and I see his name, I wish Wittgenstein would have clocked him with that iron poker after all. In any case, with Popper, he was always quick off the line with ideas that tried to explain too much. He got turned off to the “grand narrative” approach in coffee shops in Vienna where he heard a lot about Freudian and Marxist views. I imagine he also came up against people who were trying to explain everything about human behavior and society in terms of “survival of the fittest”, and he had his typical knee-jerk reaction against that.

[_Cicero]

Plantinga has also made a rather famous evolutionary argument against naturalism. To simplify it, assuming our brain is merely the product of random mutations and natural selection, there is no reason to assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable when forming beliefs. The truthfulness of these beliefs become irrelevant compared to their evolutionary advantage. If naturalism is true, the naturalist cannot justify trust in his own cognitive faculties.

Stak: Is that an accurate summary of Plantinga? I am not familiar with him. To me, that sounds like a bizarre amalgamation of Pragmatism and Dualism, but I certainly could be wrong.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Stak: Is that an accurate summary of Plantinga? I am not familiar with him. To me, that sounds like a bizarre amalgamation of Pragmatism and Dualism, but I certainly could be wrong.

More or less, but there is so much background information needed for the argument to make sense. Plantinga made his bones in epistemology in a specific topic called ‘Justification’. When philosophers talk about justification, they are talking about the evidence and reasons you have for believing a certain proposition, have enough justification and you help qualify that belief as ‘Knowledge’.

The dominant belief about justification is ‘evidentialism‘, which can be understood along the lines of “you proportion your confidence in a proposition based on the evidence at hand”. Plantinga went against this, offered some novel arguments against evidentialism being insufficient for justification and offered up his own theory of justification called ‘proper warrant‘.

Proper warrant in general can be broken down into three broad tenets. A belief is justified if and only if:

1: The belief results from the proper function of the subject’s cognitive system in a proper environment.

2: The cognitive system itself is aimed at finding the truth.

3: The system on the whole produces true beliefs.

Now full accounts of the theory are far more detailed, but that is the bare bones of it.

So, if you assume Plantinga’s epistemology, he argues that unguided natural selection wouldn’t produce a cognitive system aimed at truth finding, it would most likely be aimed at survival. If a cognitive system is aimed at survival, it won’t have truth as it’s goal and therefore unreliable.

Now I’m skipping over a lot of boring details, but that is the gist of it. This kind of epistemology is very much anti-pragmatic because the utility of a belief doesn’t have concerns about beliefs being true, and there are lots of useful lies out there.

This quote is a bit off:

The aforementioned findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience remind me of Calvin's sensus divinitatis (sense of divinity). Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues in Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000) that sensus divinitatis is properly basic, much like the belief in the existence of other minds.

Plantinga actually argues that belief in God is properly basic, and that humans have a thing called a “sensus divinitatis” that is sort of like a spiritual detection organ, that allows us to perceive God, but the noetic effects of sin have damaged this organ.

[_Chap]

...
As for Popper, well, dude was kind of a douche. Sometimes when I’m grumpy and I see his name, I wish Wittgenstein would have clocked him with that iron poker after all. In any case, with Popper, he was always quick off the line with ideas that tried to explain too much. He got turned off to the “grand narrative” approach in coffee shops in Vienna where he heard a lot about Freudian and Marxist views. I imagine he also came up against people who were trying to explain everything about human behavior and society in terms of “survival of the fittest”, and he had his typical knee-jerk reaction against that.

One does not have to agree with Popper's views to concede that his ideas were interesting, relevant to his time, and worthy of serious discussion.

When Mr S. slips into sophomoric mode as in the paragraph above, his ideas on a wide range of subjects suddenly seem less worthy of attention, which is a pity.

[_MrStakhanovite]

lol @ Droopy qua ShawFanX

We'll have to part company here, I'm afraid. Hitler, just for one example, didn't distort Nietzsche's philosophy so much as expand, interpret, and apply salient aspects of that philosophy in an idiosyncratic and specifically focused manner (just as Marx expanded, interpreted, and applied Hegel and as Du Boise expanded and interpreted Marx), but nothing he actually did is in anyway inconsistent with legitimate readings and understanding of Nietzsche core claims (and I have little interest in Nietzsche's personal perspectives regarding abuse of animals any more than for Pablo Escobar's building of schools, playgrounds, and soup kitchens for the peasants who grew his coca or for Marx' claims of his concern for the poor and downtrodden. My concern is with their ideas and their consequences).

This is one hell of a thread you got here Cicero, all the bad bois of MD&D come out to show how smart they are.

[_MrStakhanovite]

One does not have to agree with Popper's views to concede that his ideas were interesting, relevant to his time, and worthy of serious discussion.

When Mr S. slips into sophomoric mode as in the paragraph above, his ideas on a wide range of subjects suddenly seem less worthy of attention, which is a pity.

[_DrW]

Stak: Thanks for the link. That was indeed an excellent post. As I have mentioned before, I have been out of the loop on this stuff for about the last 8 years, but I figured that this had probably already been discussed here since apologists have been using the Kuhnian Shift strategy for a LONG time. I also wasn't aware that Kuhn later rejected anti-realism.

DrW: Creationists like to cite Popper? WTF??? I really had no idea. I can't imagine how angry that would make him if he were still alive. Talk about taking a quote out of context.

If I recall, someone over on the MADBoard even has Popper's statement as a signature line.

Anyway, here is a quick excerpt from the article I cited above. Later in the article (not quoted here) is a closer look at the story behind the quote by Popper. (Stak pretty much nailed it.)

In a 1981 article in Science Digest, Duane Gish, the master debater among creationists, said:

There were no human witnesses to the origin of the Universe, the origin of life or the origin of a single living thing. These were unique, unrepeatable events of the past that cannot be observed in nature or repeated in the laboratory. Thus neither creation nor evolution qualifies as a scientific theory and each is equally religious. As the scientific philosopher Sir Karl Popper has stated, evolution is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program. [Asimov and Gish, p. 82]

The most direct rebuttal one can give to these charges is that Gish and other creationists really don't believe them! The underlying point of the above quotation is that evolution is unscientific because it is not falsifiable (testable), yet creationists are always producing arguments and "evidences" that they say refute evolution. Gish does it in the article quoted above. In spite of that obvious contradiction, the argument impresses laypeople and legislators. But it completely distorts what Popper calls the logic of scientific discovery.

As to Tarski's "Kuhn, therefore Nephi', it is truly a classic. I love it. (Too bad Nephi never really existed).