Blake Ostler in Interpreter: "the Maxwell Institute is a pale reflection of its predecessor."

[Everybody Wang Chung]

This is driving me crazy. What in the world is that thing on Blake’s nose? Is someone shining a laser pointer on his nose for a joke? Is it a giant whitehead? Holy Ghost? Cocaine? Orb? Did Blake photoshop his “nose glow” to draw attention away from his toupee?

[DrStakhanovite]

Reading essays from the ‘Interpreter’ on the topic of philosophy is almost identical to reading medieval Arab commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’. Because those commentators didn’t have access to the tragedies Aristotle was talking about, they came up with some really bad (and often funny) commentary.

Alma’s battle with Korihor that Wrathall so ably discusses demonstrates that the evidence-based approach is the standard or default position (and especially so in our culture steeped in the fallacy of scientism regarding faith).

Fallacies are specific errors in reasoning. Scientism is a particular set of beliefs having to do with metaphysics and epistemology. Arguments are fallacious, not beliefs. How did a category error of this magnitude slip past the reviewers?

This approach just leaves me baffled as to what knowledge is per se or what it is in relation to faith. Wrathall tells us that knowledge is not on a continuum with faith so that faith someday turns into knowledge. But that is what knowledge is not, not what it is. Why can’t Wrathall just define knowledge in relation to faith as follows?

(a) A holds it to be true that p, (b) it is true that p, and (c) A holds it to be true that p based on experiences that are produced by properly functioning faculties. [2]

2: Note that this definition does not limit “faculties” solely to cognitive faculties but to every possible means by which humans discern truth and/or come to knowledge.

So I can tell you right away, without having to even glance at this book, why Wrathall would not “define knowledge” in this manner. In epistemology, proper function (“properly functioning faculties'') is an example of reliabilism and reliabilism is an umbrella term for a group of epistemic theories regarding the justification of beliefs. No iteration of reliabilism out there ever assumes or argues that reliabilism “produces” experiences.

To wit:

Reliabilists, of course, can also grant that the experiences mentioned in the previous paragraph can matter to the justification of your beliefs. However, they deny that justification is essentially a matter of having suitable experiences. Rather, they say, those experiences matter to the justification of your beliefs not merely by virtue of being evidence in support of those beliefs, but more fundamentally, by virtue of being part of the reliable source of those beliefs.

I just like to point out that in the realm of contemporary philosophy, the SEP is considered a peer reviewed reference work and it is entirely appropriate to cite it in top tier journals. The fact that it is completely free and accessible means that it is rapidly replacing printed reference works like the ‘Oxford Companion to Philosophy’.

So Wrathall would never “define knowledge in relation to faith as follows'' because he isn’t incompetent and no reputable journal would let him embarrass himself that badly. But what kills me is that just a paragraph later Blake accurately describes reliabilism:

Moreover, there are numerous ways of looking at the kind of justification needed. For example, William Alston argues that the means of justification is provided by beliefs derived from properly functioning faculties that are likely to generate a high proportion of true beliefs to false ones.

If I can find these kinds of mistakes just skimming the damn thing, it makes me wonder just how poorly the inhouse editing process really is.

Alvin Plantinga argues that knowledge is produced by sufficient warrant that is grounded in “basic” beliefs.

I’m fundamentally at a loss as to why Blake thinks epistemic justification somehow “produces” knowledge. There is no causal relationship between justification and knowledge. Propositional knowledge just doesn’t spring into being when a belief becomes justified.

I’m not even making fun of him at this point, I have seriously never come across this idea that epistemological justification actually produces knowledge. I wonder if it is just bad writing and what he really means is that once the demands of justification have been satisfied, we can now classify a proposition as knowledge when previously it was not classified so.

Plantinga’s view is a form of foundationalism because it bases knowledge on having a reliable justification as its foundation.

Blake Nooooooooooooooooo!

Foundationalism is a theory about the structure of knowledge. The “foundation” isn’t “reliable justification” but noninferential justification. This means there are a class of beliefs that don’t rely on any other beliefs for their justification:

Foundationalists are united in their conviction that there must be a kind of justification that does not depend on the having of other justified beliefs They nevertheless disagree radically among themselves as to how to understand noninferential justification. In the latter part of the 20th century, the rise of externalist epistemologies has generated even more fundamentally different versions of foundationalism.

Plantinga has spent his entire career articulating a proper functionalist version of epistemic externalism, which can be categorized as a modest form of foundationalism because properly basic beliefs can be considered rational without the need for propositional evidence or argumentation (noninferential). Not because it makes use of reliabilism.

Who the hell is the intended audience for this? I sure hope it isn't for people who actually read philosophy.

[DrStakhanovite]

Ostler is really just another Midgley, Kiwi/Pahoran, etc., type of character. He is always spoiling for a brawl. I hope for his sake that he does amateur boxing because it suits his physique and pugnacious personality. He is one of the most tedious and intellectually overconfident people I have ever seen in action. There is nothing he won't pontificate about or claim to know about after reading a couple of things. That wouldn't be so bad if he didn't, when disagreement arises, act as though everyone else is an idiot and he is the only person who knows what he is talking about.

Blake behaves like he is playing 5 dimensional chess against three different opponents simultaneously while the rest of us just watch in silent awe. The reality is that Blake is just pushing pebbles around in the dirt while the rest of us gawk. He doesn’t have a scintilla of self awareness whatsoever.

Sure, buddy. solved. E. Gettier must have had a heart of stone to miss it. But wow, A prophet from the ancient world solving problems to be posed a couple thousand years in the future.

lol I went back to give that a closer look.

The problem with knowledge as justified true belief is that it is circular. In order to know that I know, I must first know that what I believe is true. But the entire point of knowing is that what is true is known to be true on the basis of my justification for coming to know what is true.

It is like he doesn’t understand that nobody believes “Justified True Belief” is a sufficient account of knowledge. It just happens to be a convenient place to start a discussion about epistemology because everyone agrees that JTB are necessary conditions for knowledge.

I think he is trying to put what William Alston said about epistemic circularity into his own words here, but Blake is bungling it.

This circularity leads to what are known as Gettier problems: what I believe could be true even if my means of justifying my belief have nothing to do with producing that knowledge. But my knowledge would still count as knowledge, based on the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. I have beliefs. I have justification for my beliefs. My beliefs just happen to be true. It is simply that what I believe has nothing to do with my justification. The problem is that I am simply lucky that my beliefs match the truth because they have nothing to do with the reasons for believing.

Gettier is just exploiting “justification” as an indexical. This is known as the “Epistemic Basing Relation” which draws a distinction between propositional justification and doxastic justification that more or less captures the point Blake is trying to make.

I can’t imagine whoever they got to referee this article had any background in contemporary philosophy. But I’m going to go ahead and predict that when Daniel reads this he’ll post something passive aggressively about an unnamed eminent philosopher who signs off on all relevant articles.

[Physics Guy]

Would you say that Ostler is just getting his terminology confused, or that he is messing up more substantially than that? Can one turn his piece into something correct and insightful by fixing a few words here and there? Or is he just nowhere near to saying anything good?

In the former case I, at least, would be willing to let a few slips slide and give him credit for what he should have said but didn't quite. He's not a professional, is he? I'm not a professional in this kind of field either, so I'm not going to hear a few notes off key, anyway.

In my own line of work there are minor glitches that can let you know that somebody isn't a native speaker of the language, as it were, but that by no means rule out the possibility that they have something important to say. And on the other hand there are lots of things that a crackpot could say, which might sound indistinguishable from great physics to lay people, but which would be utter gibberish.

I imagine that every discipline has a spectrum like that. If that's the case for this kind of philosophy, where is Ostler along it?

[Philo Sofee]

I would be interested in seeing on what basis he thinks he knows, and why he believes what he believes. What evidence gives his belief power to him to believe what he does in other words. He does appear to me to be trying to put it out there, but it doesn't quite appear coherent yet. But hey, he is trying...

[Kishkumen]

Thanks to our friends and colleagues for revealing Ostler’s pretended learning in Latin and philosophy.

[DrStakhanovite]

Would you say that Ostler is just getting his terminology confused, or that he is messing up more substantially than that? Can one turn his piece into something correct and insightful by fixing a few words here and there? Or is he just nowhere near to saying anything good?

In the former case I, at least, would be willing to let a few slips slide and give him credit for what he should have said but didn't quite. He's not a professional, is he? I'm not a professional in this kind of field either, so I'm not going to hear a few notes off key, anyway.

In my own line of work there are minor glitches that can let you know that somebody isn't a native speaker of the language, as it were, but that by no means rule out the possibility that they have something important to say. And on the other hand there are lots of things that a crackpot could say, which might sound indistinguishable from great physics to lay people, but which would be utter gibberish.

I imagine that every discipline has a spectrum like that. If that's the case for this kind of philosophy, where is Ostler along it?

This is an interesting question PG.

Contemporary philosophy from the advanced undergraduate phase to completion of comprehensive exams in the later phases of graduate school puts a heavy emphasis on writing. In the smaller seminar classes it isn't uncommon for undergraduates to be required to produce essays of 3,000 words on a regular basis and that can even be a weekly workload. The purpose isn’t to craft works fit for publication and are not graded according to demanding rubrics, but rather just to practice writing. Ideally when you are turning in a new essay, you are getting the previous one back that is marked to hell. The grind is demanding and can really take its toll on your mental health, but the payoffs are huge in terms of growing and developing your skill set.

The mistakes Blake is making in this paper in particular are mistakes every single student makes while coming up through a program. The writing doesn’t have to be essays either, I’ve had a few instances where instead of essays we had to produce chapter summaries that could not exceed a page in length (single spaced) where large swaths of information had to be neatly condensed and organized, forcing you to write robustly yet concisely. Another time I was required to maintain a notebook where I had to keep a running commentary on a book we were studying, the notebook was turned in with the final paper and it wasn’t returned until the following semester. During the break, the professor went through each notebook and made annotations, corrections, and offered encouragement.

In the humanities, philosophy has a reputation for being one of the more rigorous disciplines and also one that creates a lot of insufferable blowhards. It is an atmosphere where argumentation and critique are currency, you actively seek out disagreement because it is often the only way you can develop your own ideas. It is one of the few areas in the humanities that is still overwhelmingly dominated by men and still fosters a culture that can be very hostile to women. The idea of the eccentric genius toiling away alone in their little bubble is still revered, being unsociable isn’t just tolerated, but viewed with sympathy as if it were a feature instead of a bug.

Now Blake may act like an insufferable blowhard on social media, but he doesn’t display any of the characteristics one would also expect from the world of academic philosophy. For example, Blake never really drops the usual lexical cues one finds on the regular in refereed articles and books. He displays attitudes that are very cavalier which only demonstrate to me that he doesn’t really have mastery of the concepts involved.

There are passages in this essay that I could take to some of my Facebook groups and share it in the spirit “dumb stuff my students write” and everyone would probably assume it was written by a undergraduate who skipped the readings and just banged out some B.S. so they didn’t miss a due date. For the record, I hate this practice of demeaning students by mocking their work in our bitchy knitting circles and don’t think it's funny, but this is just the sad reality of the field.

I actually regard Blake as a philosopher and he is just as much of a philosopher as anyone currently working in a philosophy department at a R1 school. I don't think Blake is LARPing as something he is not and I don’t consider him to be some kind of pseudo-intellectual suffering from delusions of grandeur. I’m not playing gatekeeper here.

The reality is just that Blake is not a very good philosopher; not even marginally good. This is because he simply hasn’t done the work that is required. Chiding him for saying foundationalism “bases knowledge on having a reliable justification as its foundation” instead of talking about noninferential justification may look like unnecessary nitpicking, but it actually reveals something that makes one pause.

Why? Well it has to do with how epistemology is taught today in the English speaking world. You cannot understand the theory of foundationalism without knowing what a noninferential justification is and the specific problem that foundationalism is attempting to overcome with it. It is a mistake that could have been corrected by simply consulting the myriad of free reference works and doing 15 minutes of reading. That's it. If Blake and whoever “peer reviewed” this essay can’t be bothered to do the minimal amount of work so they can use appropriate terminology, then I’m just going to assume they think their audience is too stupid and/or ignorant to care and will just nod along while waiting for the polemical fireworks where the apologist dunks on the anti-Mormon critic and declares themselves to be the winners.

Does Blake have something meaningful to say and does he have the capacity to make a meaningful contribution to a discussion? I think so. I’m not very confident on just what point Blake is trying to make, even after reading the essay. I’d probably have to read the book under review first, because Blake is the epitome of the unreliable narrator.

If I was refereeing for the Interpreter (e-mail me Daniel!), I would have suggested a complete rewrite and have Blake try to ditch as much philosophical jargon as possible. You can talk about epistemology without using jargon at all and you can describe reliabilism correctly without a digression into William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. Not to beat a dead horse, but that is another sign that someone has put in the work and knows their stuff, because they can take a complex concept and explain it in terms that people who don’t read philosophy habitually can understand.

Philosophers just don’t diagram arguments, we learn to love them.

[Philo Sofee]

Thanks for a valuable over view Mr Stak! I too, am trying to give Blake the benefit of the doubt here. It's just not in my field, and I am treading deep waters, to be sure.

[Philo Sofee]

Ostler
The predecessor demonstrated that the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price would be able to withstand and even foster faith in the face of such empirical challenges. The Maxwell Institute either currently lacks that faith or just wants to avoid it.

The predecessor, it would be more accurately stated by Ostler, tried to withstand the empirical claims and counterclaims, and failed to do so. There is literally nothing of all the production of Book of Abraham materials which the original Maxwell Institute published which has stood the test of evidence and time. It has all failed to live up to its billing. There are several of us here on this message boards which is the fallout evidence of the lack of success the original Maxwell Institute to refute that claim. And we are giving an ongoing analysis of much else besides that which the original MI published, and finding it fails to satisfy the minimum requirements of valid evidence, let alone increasing faith. That just hasn't happened yet in any manner.

[Physics Guy]

[It] is another sign that someone has put in the work and knows their stuff, [that] they can take a complex concept and explain it in terms that people who don’t read philosophy habitually can understand.

Philosophers just don’t diagram arguments, we learn to love them.

My feeling is that being able to put things in ordinary terms, without having to drop names or jargon, is the mark of really knowing one's stuff in any field.

In some ways that ought to be easier in philosophy than in other fields because everyone has access to the subject matter. In physics one might be working on phenomena that most people have never seen or of which they have never even heard, so that you have to explain first what the thing even is before you can say what questions concern it.

But on the other hand I think that the apparent familiarity of their subject must often pose quite a communication problem for philosophers. If you're working on things that most people take for granted as obvious then you have to explain first why there are any questions at all, before you can talk about any particular questions. Lay people who are baffled by science are generally respectful at least; those who are baffled by philosophy can be scornful. That can be frustrating, and I can imagine that would-be philosophers who can't make their problems clear might well blame the audience and retreat into a pose of authority.

It sounds as though Ostler is out of his depth. That can happen to anyone but the problem is that once you're out of your depth at all, it's hard to tell how far out of your depth you are. BSing to fill in the gaps is a dangerous habit that can take you from undergrad naïveté all the way to sheer lunacy.