No cigar
Religious belief thought experiment still stuck in the same place. The author isn’t dealing with the real objections.
…is it “reasonable” for the fella to believe in the monster (if it is then it shows that epistemic warrant is not a necessary condition of reasonable belief). Too right it is… You say that the perception is real, but it does not follow there’s a physical correlate to that perception. Well, of course, it doesn’t follow (how could it given the possibility of hallucination, etc). Our fella is well aware of this point (he is a good sceptic, after all). But the point is that it also doesn’t follow that something doesn’t exist simply because there is no epistemic warrant to support a belief in its existence. And this, of course, is crucial. Our fella believes because his experience is verdical, the monster is not ruled out by logic, and the belief is of pressing and utmost personal sigificance (he cannot take evasive action unless he believes). This is reasonable – i.e., not contrary to reason.
Suddenly ‘you’ are a fella, which is odd, because in the post ‘you’ are just ‘you.’ But anyway – all of that simply ignores the distinction between whether it is reasonable to believe the monster is real during the experience of its crashing through the bathroom window, and whether it is reasonable to go on believing the monster is real after the experience is over. (We were never told how it ended, by the way. What happened? Did it crash back out the window? Did it fade from view? Did it open the bathroom door and exit, closing the door behind it? Did ‘you’ swoon dead away and awake to find it gone? Did ‘you’ simply close your eyes and open them to find no monster, no broken window, no smell, no nothing? This all makes a difference, frankly.)
Over here, at least, I think we’ve all agreed that it’s reasonable to believe the monster is real while it seems to be sharing the bathroom with you – not that anything really deserving the name ‘belief’ is involved, but call it belief for the sake of argument. We get that. But what we don’t buy is that it goes on being reasonable afterwards. As I said, apart from anything else, it would be a good deal more reasonable to worry about a giant brain tumor and try to find a good neurologist. All the questions about physical evidence and inquiry and what floor the bathroom is on and whether, on reflection, ‘you’ might not wonder if a real monster would have avoided contact – all those have been ignored.
I guess ultimately people might just have different intuitions about what’s reasonable in that situation.
No. It’s not a matter of just having different intuitions – it’s a matter of perfectly reasonable (yes reasonable) questions about physical evidence and objections about believing hallucinations forever as opposed to at the instant they occur.
As a side-note: two or three days ago (I can’t remember if it was before I wrote the first post on this or not) I was reading an old New Yorker from last August and found a Barsotti cartoon that might as well have been done to illustrate the thought experiment. Two little guys are racing down the street followed by a large toothy monster; the guy in front is saying, ‘You’re the therapist – you make it go away.’ Is that apt or what?!
I posted in his thread. Apparently my argument is on point but not convincing. That’s… all the response I got.
I really think he’s eliding on the difference various definitions of the word “reasonable.” He’s also using an odd definition of “pressing and of the utmost concern” or however he’s phrasing it now.
It might be “reasonable” for me to believe in, and react as if I believe in, a vision of a flying brain floating down the street chasing me in the moments when I am seeing, experiencing, and fleeing the flying brain.
That’s because “reasonable” means “understandable,” and its understandable and forgivable and acceptable to believe in something irrational under certain circumstances. I think its understandable that a person might believe in a hallucination while you’re having it.
But it isn’t necessarily “reasonable” in the sense of rational and based on logic and reason. And as the hallucination fades into your memory, you’re more and more obliged to think logically about matters, and perhaps consult a doctor regarding your hallucination.
I also don’t get why he uses the fact that the experience is “pressing and of the utmost concern” at the time that you’re experiencing it to justify continuing to believe it long after its ceased occurring.
I jumped in a little late, but Jeremy seems to be engaging with my arguments. I’m guessing, from what you say here, Ophelia, that I’m saying what’s been said here: that there is a rather mysterious gap between perceptions and beliefs, and Jeremy’s thought experiment only has teeth if we ignore that gap. Of course, the nature of belief and its relationship to perception is so poorly understood that I can’t make a watertight argument, but I’ve tried to suggest that at the very least, we need not ASSUME that the person is reacting to a full-fledged belief in a monster as opposed to a perception or nebulous complex of perceptions and beliefs about those perceptions. Really, I’ve tried to make the case that such an assumption is unwarranted.
In short, my argument is that the belief that you were attacked by a monster is reasonable if there’s mysterious paw prints on the floor and shattered glass everywhere, but not if everything is neat and tidy. My claim would be that it’s this very process of trying to assimilate anomalous perceptions that allows us to start talking about beliefs as true or false, or for that matter reasonable or unreasonable. When we first see the monster, a physiological reaction occurs due to an anomalous perception. This is probably more like pulling your hand back from a hot stove than it is like looking both ways before crossing a street (the latter behavior no doubt depends on beliefs about streets and cars, whereas the former requires no beliefs about hands or stoves).
In contrast, suppose that you ran from the bathroom, slamming the door behind you, and subsequently assimilated the experience by assuming it’s a real monster. Is it reasonable to believe there’s a monster in your bathroom? What would you say if you had a friend who told you not to use the downstairs bathroom because she was attacked by a monster there and for all she knows it’s still there? Would you think this is reasonable? Or would you think that the woman should have done a little bit of work to actually figure out whether or not there’s a monster in the bathroom?
Importantly, he seems to concede that he has not made the case that believing in monsters is analogous to believing in God in the right way to justify the thought experiment as an argument. He also concedes that he hasn’t dealt with the issue of ongoing belief; at this point, my argument is that “ongoing belief” is just belief and that the type of “belief” he’s talking about is really much closer to “perception.”
I think people are driving right on target when it comes to the deeper issues involved here.
Patrick is right to point out the ambiguity between “reasonable” and “understandable”. If Jeremy means something like “understandable”, then it is consistent for us to call the person in the case vaguely pitiful, which Jeremy doesn’t seem to want us to do. So Jeremy must be using the word “reasonable” to mean something besides “understandable”.
If that’s so, then he must mean something like “warranted assertability” when he talks about being “reasonable”. In that case, Jeremy must take the stance that it is proper for the man to make a claim about something, and the person is warranted to make their claim depending on whether or not the claim is grounded in a normatively reasonable set of beliefs. This is in contrast to a fashionable view these days to the effect that you aren’t warranted in asserting something unless you *really know* it. People who adopt this other view will reject Jeremy’s case out of hand, since everyone agrees that there’s no actual monster, and so, there’s no monster to *know*.
But then Jeremy is stuck on two ends of a dilemma. For when we talk about reasonable beliefs, as Ophelia points out, we’re either talking prospectively or retrospectively. If we’re thinking retrospectively, it’s fair for us to go along with fashionable opinion and to say that we aren’t warranted in asserting something unless we really know it — and hence, we have to reject Jeremy’s case. On the other hand, if we’re thinking prospectively, that means we are stuck asking whether or not his claim fits with a sound reasoning process. But by hypothesis, the person in the thought-experiment is a good skeptic, so it is unreasonable for him to believe in the monster.
In order for us to avoid this fork, we’re supposed to appeal to intuition. But like I said in the other thread, that’s a bunch of fashionable nonsense, the idle daydreaming of philosophasters. Honestly, whatever happened to logic and following a train of inferences?
I saw that, Patrick. 1) rude and 2) not playing by the rules. Ah well.
I guess Jeremy is attempting to show there IS a reasonableness to religious belief and unreasonableness in “new” atheism. He said as much in that sarcastic post on his website: “atheists are rational.” I’m not sure if he really believes what he’s saying, or whether he’s just playing tennis. I suspect it’s the latter.
Oh, definitely – he’s well embarked on a campaign of mocking ‘new’ atheists, and this post is of course a branch of that campaign. It’s partly a way of jeering at me, but I don’t want to be all delusions of reference about it – I’m sure it’s only partly that.
A monster keeps using my bathroom – and leaving the toilet seat up. Sometimes it forgets to flush if it’s only had a pee. Well, that’s what I told my girlfriend but for some reason she remains skeptical.
‘Believing’ in monsters suggests a ‘suspension of disbelief’ rather than a belief as such. I don’t believe in ghosts yet I’ve read some very scary ghost stories, and seen some pretty scary movies.
Our brains are modular: they process different things at different speeds. Reason is a higher function than the survival instinct: naturally we suspend it when faced with a possible (if unlikely) threat, just as blood is redirected to where it is needed most and our breathing pattern changes.
When the ‘danger’ passes our reason takes over and we can more accurately judge whether the threat was real. A common response is then to giggle at our own behaviour.
That was the reason I thought the Russell Stannard interview put paid to Jeremy’s argument. Stannard points out that a person who has a religious experience can’t go to someone else and say, “Look, here it is. Check it out if you think I’m wrong.”
Stannard is right. You can’t. The same goes for the experience of – or “of” – the monster. After the experience there’s nothing to point to, nothing to check. That’s the problem with private languages. As Wittgenstein pointed out, you can’t check either, because you can’t know that you are using your language consistently to refer to the “same” experience. That’s why, in the end, theologians are left trying to eff the ineffable, or going all marshmallowy in the centre talking vaguely about love and compassion.
Yes, Eric, that’s what I’ve been trying to say . . . veridical experience and ineffable experience are pretty much opposites. Jeremy said himself that he suspects religous experiences are not veridical, and that that puts paid to the argument.
I guess he’s sort of thinking out loud, hence “playing tennis.” Which is fair enough, and has its place, especially as a thought experiment. His argument provided good fodder for the Secular Society, and he engaged me in a dialogue about his argument at TPM, which I was grateful for. He’s got quite a few years of education and experience on me!
I do think it sounds heinous that Ophelia has been blocked: if you’re reading this, Jeremy, I think that bit sucks . . . please unblock her!
Dan, good stuff. I think, though, we can call a visual seeming an intuition, and define an intuition as “an inclination to believe” (as Michael Lynch does). During the moment, the person had monstery experiences, and so (s)he was inclined to believe in the existence of the monster. You might not want to say that they really believed it, because of a lack of due diligence and/or self-reflectiveness (yielding a sense of the conditions under which the claim would be falsifiable). But surely we can’t just put a total wall between perceptions and beliefs — we have to say how they’re connected.
Still, I don’t see how any of this helps JS’s argument very much.
I just don’t have any problem with believing it at the time (though I did at some point say I’m not sure that counts as ‘belief,’ which I still think, but at the time that doesn’t really matter). I don’t think there’s any shame or blame in accepting what seems very real at the time. But I also don’t think that forces us to accept anything further. At all.
Maybe the monster-episode (at the time it occurs) is supposed to be prime facie evidence, i.e., a candidate for revising our beliefs, and which has squatter’s rights in our heads until it is kicked to the curb by more powerful beliefs and doubts. Then JS could keep talking about it not having epistemic warrant, but still having some kind of epistemic standing. In that case, if a belief in the truth of the episode is “reasonable” in JS’s sense, then it would mean only that it qualifies as prime facie evidence.
A lot of this depends on prior experience with monsters. If I’ve never had a monster experience before, then it will obviously seem at least like the episode is prime facie evidence for belief in the monster. But if I’ve had the experience before, and convinced myself that it’s not real, then it will seem at most like it’s prime facie evidence.
Though the question is, why does the episode seem to have squatter’s rights during the duration of the episode? It doesn’t have to. There are plenty of episodes in our lives that don’t even have squatter’s rights. For example, a mere intuitive reaction to a thought-experiment is ephemeral, and can be kicked to the curb by any other reason that wanders in the way.
No, it doesn’t have to – that’s why I think it’s question-begging. The experience has to be made so convincing that it doesn’t resemble actual hallucinations (at least not as described it doesn’t). So the TE becomes just ‘suppose you had a hallucination that was so real-seeming that you couldn’t doubt it’ – which makes the claim true by definition.
Well sure enough, if hallucinations were like that, and inner experiences of God were like that too, then everything would be different. But they’re not, so it’s not.
My intuition isn’t pumped, anyway.
I don’t think that JS wants to go that far. I think he wants to say that you can (and do) have doubts in that situation, because he agrees that the person has no epistemic warrant. I think he wants to say, instead, that as doubts go, they’re not terribly effective. One’s reasons are lightweight champions in a ring full of heavyweights.
In other words, there seems to be a perceptual/emotional override of the TE’s reasoned prior convictions. But then this would seem like a canonical example of being in a state where one cannot be reasonable, since one is overriding the bulk of one’s skeptical convictions. So for instance, JS says that this perceptual/emotional part must be contributing something reason-like, too, even though it involves flouting the rest of one’s web of reasoned beliefs. (Aside: It’s hard to read JS at this point in the discussion. He mentions, but does not describe or explain, the three necessary-not-sufficient conditions for his sense of “reason” in a parenthetical remark: “two of which involve a rational/logical element, and one of which involves an evidential element”. I’m not sure if he thinks the TE’s knee-jerk response is supposed to satisfy only a few of these elements (whatever they are) — or if it satisfies all of them, but gets trumped by stronger contenders in the cool hour of reflection.)
JS is putting a lot of weight on the notion of risk. He might say that standards for belief are not context-neutral, but context-sensitive; and especially, risk-sensitive. In that context, since the risk is high, the standards are lower. And he might say that this is a reasonable thing. But in order for this to be right, the knee-jerk reaction has to be deliberative in some sense.
On the one hand, we don’t really have any reason to think the person is deliberating at all. For it is easy to illicitly overintellectualize an instantaneous reaction. Just as we can pretend that everyone and their dog knows geometry just because they have the idea of space, we can appeal to subjective probability judgments and so on when really a person is just acting like a big sissy. Still, let’s suppose it is some kind of deliberative process. The question is, is the process of deliberation reasonable? We’re fully entitled to ask whether or not the inner tribunal in charge of deliberation amounts to a kangeroo court. And indeed, since by hypothesis we’re flouting our deeper epistemic convictions, it’s not a hard case to make.
Hm. You have a clearer understanding of what JS wants than I can get from that post (or the later comments)! You may be right, but there are so many holes left open that I really can’t tell what is meant, apart from the (apparently) obvious.
I just agree with the thought that if there’s a perceived risk, one should take it seriously until it’s not there any more. Unless of course you’re at a dinner party and it would be too embarrassing to scream and run out of the room, in which situation I would sit in Stoical sweaty silence while the monster strolled up and began sharpening its machete.
But once the risk is not immediate…then things are different, not least because, as I keep plaintively saying, the real risk is probably not a monster at all but a giant brain tumor. If you trust the kangaroo court you just get precautions against bathroom-monsters and nasty death from brain tumor.
Benjamin:
“I think, though, we can call a visual seeming an intuition, and define an intuition as “an inclination to believe” (as Michael Lynch does). During the moment, the person had monstery experiences, and so (s)he was inclined to believe in the existence of the monster…. But surely we can’t just put a total wall between perceptions and beliefs — we have to say how they’re connected.”
I disagree that we can necessarily call a visual seeming an intuition or define it as an “inclination to believe.” “Perception,” “belief,” and “intuition” are all synthetic and fairly arbitrary categories about a very mysterious process. Once we have more scientific knowledge about that process, I think it’s quite likely that the vocabulary of folk psychology will have very limited descriptive power.
And this is exactly why I’m hesitant to explain how perceptions and beliefs are connected — because we simply DON’T KNOW how they are connected. I mentioned one difficulty at Jeremy’s: at least some beliefs are derived from perceptions, but beliefs also have a hand in determining what is perceived. To me, the fact that we have two-way traffic here suggests a deeper structure of which we’re mostly unaware. This is what I liked about the thought experiment; it got me thinking about this very problem.
OB:
“I just don’t have any problem with believing it at the time (though I did at some point say I’m not sure that counts as ‘belief,’ which I still think, but at the time that doesn’t really matter). “
A big part of the problem is that the word “belief” covers a lot of ground in the English language. I suspect Jeremy is working from a very broad intuition-based definition, while most of us taking the “unreasonable” side feel that if “beliefs” aren’t persistent in some significant way, it only confuses the situation.
“a deeper structure of which we’re mostly unaware.”
Right…Oliver Sacks writes somewhere about a congenitally blind guy who had surgery that fixed whatever had made him blind, when he was middle-aged or thereabouts. What he saw at first (and for a long time) was just ‘a blooming buzzing confusion’ (William James keeps returning to this discussion). He had no idea what he was seeing, how to identify anything, how to connect what he was seeing (or ‘seeing’) with what he knew from touch. It was all just blotchy soup.
I didn’t get that from the thought experiment though. I must be missing something – in fact quite a lot.
‘But once the risk is not immediate…then things are different, not least because, as I keep plaintively saying, the real risk is probably not a monster at all but a giant brain tumor.’
Well, gee, thanks.:I had put my occasional night terrors down to eating cheese before bed time – now you’ve got me genuinely worried there’s a real ‘monster’ eating my brain from the inside…
Dan, even the eliminativists recognize that some fictions are more useful than others. If neuroscience of the future will moot the language of today, then that’s fantastic for the future. That doesn’t make any difference to the language we use today, making use of the best inferences we can using a careful taxonomy based on self-conscious purposes. For instance, the formulation of “intuition” as “inclination to believe” captures and clarifies much of what we want from an epistemic discussion. Define it some other way, if you like, and then we can invent new words to describe the division of labor.
Shatterface – well occasional night terrors are within the range of the normal, right? So you were right the first time! On the other hand if you have ones that fit the description in the TE – well – maybe have a chat with someone of a medical bent. But I bet you don’t. If yours were that extreme you would have been worried on your own, that’s my guess. (Or to put it another way – sorry, didn’t mean to!)