Hasker on Ham-fisted empiricism

A redated post.

Ham-Fisted empricism: Hasker on externalism and the AFR
It is of course true that a belief, in order to be justified, needs to have been formed and sustained by a reliable epistemic practice. But in the case of rational inference, what is the practice supposed to be. The reader is referred, once gain, to the description of a reasoning process given a paragraph back. Is this not, in fact, a reasonably accurate description of the way we actually view and experience the practice of rational inference and assessment/ It is furthermore, a description which enables us to understand why in many cases a practice is reliable—and why the reliability varies considerably depending on the specific character of the inference drawn and also on the logical capabilities of the epistemic subject. And on the other hand, isn’t it a severe distortion of our actual inferential practice to view the process of reasoning as taking place in a “black box,” as the externalist view in effect invites us to do? Epistemological externalism has its greatest plausibility in cases where the warrant for our beliefs depends crucially on matters not accessible to reflection—for instance, on the proper functioning of our sensory faculties. Rational inference, by contrast, is the paradigmatic example of a situation in which the factors relevant to warrant are accessible to reflection; for this reason, examples based on rational insight have always formed the prime examples for internalist epistemologies. There is also this question for the thoroughgoing externalist: How are we to satisfy ourselves as to which inferential practices are reliable? By hypothesis, we are precluded from appealing to rational insight to validate our conclusions about this. One might say that we have learned to distinguish good reasoning from bad reasoning, by noticing that good inference-patterns generally give rise to true conclusions, while bad inference-patterns often give rise to falsehood. (This of course assumes that our judgments about particular facts, especially facts revealed through sense perception, are not in question here—an assumption I will grant for the present). But this sort of “logical empiricism” is at best a very crude method for assessing the goodness of arguments. There are plenty of invalid arguments with true conclusions, and plenty of valid arguments with false conclusions. There are even good inductive arguments with all true premises in which the conclusions are false. There are just the distinctions which the science of logic exists to help us with; basing the science on the kind of ham-fisted empiricism described above is a hopeless enterprise. William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Cornell, 1999), pp. 74-75. From the chapter "Why the Physical Isn't Closed."

Wikipedia version of Hasker's Argument Against Causal Closure

• a. Human beings are rational to a significant (though highly imperfect) degree.
• b. If human beings are rational, there is an explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
• c. There is an explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
• d. If conscious experience is explanatorily irrelevant, there is no explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
• e. Conscious experience is explanatorily relevant.
• f. If the physical realm is causally closed, conscious experience is explanatorily irrelevant.
• g. The physical realm is not causally closed.

Hasker on skeptical threats, best explanations, and transcendental arguments

A redated post.

William Hasker, however, while previously endorsing the gist of my claim that the argument should be a best explanation argument rather than a skeptical threat argument, offered another suggestion in his mostly friendly response to me in Philosophia Christi. He wrote:

However, if the Skeptical Threat strategy claims too much for the Argument from Reason, there is a danger that the Best Explanation strategy may claim too little. On the face of it, this strategy seems to invite the following kind of response: “It may be true that we naturalists have not, so far, produced a satisfying explanation for the process of rational inference. But there is nothing especially surprising or alarming about this fact. Finding good scientific explanations is hard work and often takes considerable time, and the relevant sciences are still in their infancy. We must simply be prepared to wait a bit longer, until we reach the stage where the desired explanations can be developed.

He then makes the following recommendation:

The objection is not merely that naturalism has not yet produced an explanation of rational inference and the like, as though this were a deficiency that could be remedied by another decade or so of scientific research. The problem is that the naturalist is committed to certain assumptions that preclude in principle any explanation of the sort required. The key assumptions are three in number: mechanism (the view that fundamental physical explanations are nonteleological), the causal closure of the physical domain, and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. So long as these assumptions remain, no amount of ingenious computer modeling can possibly fill the explanatory gap. In order to bring out this feature of the situation, I propose that the first two stages of the Argument from Reason are best viewed as a transcendental argument in roughly the Kantian sense: They specify the conditions which are required for experience of a certain sort to be possible—in this case the kind of experience found in the performance of rational inference. .

I have already discussed the transcendental impact of the arguments from reason, and I think Hasker’s suggestion is a good one.

Hasker's argument from mental causation

B. The Argument from Mental Causation
The third argument, and a very significant one, is the argument from mental causation. Recall for a moment Lewis’s discussion of how rationally inferred beliefs must be caused:
But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. \It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief's occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?
There seems to be only one possible answer. We must say that just as one way in which a mental event causes a subsequent mental event is by Association (when I think of parsnips I think of my first school), so another way in which it can cause it, is simply by being a ground for it. For then being a cause and being a proof would coincide.But this, as it stands, is clearly untrue. We know by experience that a thought does not necessarily cause all, or even any, of the thoughts which logically stand to it as Consequents to Ground. We should be in a pretty pickle
if we could never think 'This is glass' without drawing all the inferences which could be drawn. It is impossible to draw them all; quite often we draw none. We must therefore amend our suggested law. One thought can cause another not by being, but by being seen to be, a ground for it.
So besides the existence of facts to think about, and our capacity to perceive a self-evident rule that permits the inference (which we will get to when we talk about logical laws), we also must be able to arrange these facts to prove a conclusion, and it must be possible for new beliefs to be brought into existence by this kind of a process of reasoning. To those who, like Anscombe, are inclined to think that reasons-explanations are always non-causal in nature, I would like to ask how we are to understand words like “convince” or “persuade”? Presumably rational convincing and persuading is the goal of
argumentative discourse, but if reasons are in no sense causal in nature, this is impossible.
Suppose we were to answer Lewis’s questions “Even if grounds do exist, what have the got to do with the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event” by saying "Nothing. Beliefs (if they exist at all given naturalism--of course this is denied by eliminativists) are strictly epiphenomenal. It seems to us that we hold beliefs for good reasons, but if we examine how these beliefs are produced and sustained, we find that reasons have nothing to do with it. We think they do, but this is just one more example of the 'user illusion.'” If we were to say that, it seems to me that the possibility of science as an operation would have to be called into question. As Jerry Fodor once put it:
"If it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying. ..if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it's the end of the world.
Further, we have to look at just what is involved when we talk about causal transactions. Only some properties of an object are casually relevant to the production of the effect. For example, if I take the baseball that Luis Gonzalez hit to win the 2001 World Series for the Arizona Diamondbacks over the New York Yankees, and throw it at the window, it would break the window only in virtue of the force it applied to the window. It does not break the window in virtue of its having been the ball Gonzo hit against Mariano Rivera. When Lewis says “One thought can cause another not by being, but by being seen to be, a ground for it, obviously not only must one mental even cause another mental event, but it must do so in virtue of its propositional content, and in fact, in virtue of the kind of logical relationships between the relevant propositions.
There are a couple of arguments that have been developed to show that given the causal closure of the physical, rational inference is impossible. In William Hasker’s third chapter of The Emergent Self, entitled “Why the Physical Isn’t Closed,” Hasker uses a counterfactual argument to show that the kinds of counterfactuals involved in mental causation will turn out false if the physical is closed. Let’s just take what it is to be persuaded by the evidence for some claim. Let us say that Marcia believes that O. J. Simpson is guilty of murder on the basis of the blood evidence, along with other considerations. What this would have to mean is that if there were no evidence in favor of O. J.’s guilt, she wouldn’t think him guilty. If it turns out she was hardwired or sufficiently prejudiced to think of African-American former football stars as guilty of murder regardless of the state of the evidence, this would make your claim to believe on the basis of evidence false. So for someone to claim to believe that O. J. is guilty (or innocent) on the basis of evidence, the following conditionals must be true.
a) If strong evidence supporting O. J.’s guilt exists, then Marcia would believe that O. J. is guilty
b) If strong evidence supporting
If physicalism is true, then sufficient physical causes for one’s forming the belief that O. J. is guilty must exist if you are to believe that O. J. is guilty. Thus, if the physical conditions exist for you to form the belief that O. J. is guilty, then you will form that belief, and if they don’t you won’t. Yet, those physical conditions contain nothing about blood evidence or any other kind of evidence. After all, could be a similar world in which the evidence-thoughts do not occur, but the belief is formed anyway. As Hasker explains:
Following John Pollock, we assume that a counterfactual conditional is true if and only if the consequent is true in all those worlds minimally changed from the actual world in which the antecendent is true. Would a world minimally changed from the actual world in which she doesn’t see that her belief is supported by good reasons, be one in which she would not accept the belief? No doubt there are a number of different ways in which the world could be changed just enough to satisfy the antecedent of the conditional; in some of these she accepts the belief while in others she doesn’t. And there is no basis for saying that those in which she doesn’t accept it are less changed from the actual world in which she does, or vice versa.
I am assuming here, on the basis of my discussion of intentionality earlier, that mental states are not type-reducible to physical states. However, let us suppose that the mental state supervenes on the physical state. It is true, that, according to strong supervenience, the mental state must exist if the physical state does. Still, we can imagine the truths of supervenience being different from what they are, and if those truths of supervenience are different, the belief is formed in the absence of evidence. Further, if the universe is fundamentally physical, that means that the physical facts are the most fundamental facts in existence, more fundamental, surely, than the truths of supervenience.
Hasker considers the possibility that the truths of supervenience are metaphysically necessary truths. If the laws governing objects in the world are metaphysically necessary truths, then we can take a world of objects similar to this world, except with regard to the psychophysical connections that obtain in this world. Such a world would be a zombie-world, in which the basic properties of matter would be zombie-protons, zombie neutrons, zombie-electrons, zombie-quarks or zombie-strings. In such a world, again, the appropriate beliefs could be formed in the absence of the relevant evidence. The mental states are irrelevant to physical events, which have physical causes and only physical causes, according to materialism, and whatever mental states might exist, exist in virtue of the physical states.
On top of this, I should revert to what I said earlier, that the claim that given the physical, the mental necessarily supervenes seems to me just plain ungrounded. Given the physical, why does there have to be just these mental states? Why do there have to be intentional states at all. Appeal to supervenience in this context is just a mask for a lack of understanding, it seems to me.

Why only mentalistic monism or dualism will do

Exapologist: Do you think Hasker is fair to Chalmers? Has he not read carefully? I strongly recommend Hasker's essay to anyone interested in retaining a common-sense view of the mental while remaining in any sense a naturalist.

It seems to me that these two options are just plain exhaustive:

1) The having of reasons, and other mental states are amongst the fundamental causes of the universe. The causal role cannot be explained in terms of the causal activities of more fundamental stuff.

2) Reasons and other mental states are system byproducts. They do not occur at the most basic level, but arise in virtue of the physical being a certain way.

It seems to me that if you accept 2) you have to live with three possibilities: elimination, conservative reduction, or epiphenomenalism. 1 seems to me to be self-refuting, 2 seems wildly implausible given the logical disparity between the mental and the physical, and 3 is also self-refuting since if it is true no one ever believes anything for a reason, including epiphenomenalism. Richard Carrier, Doctor Logic and Blue Devil Knight will give me an argument on this.

If you agree with me that these won't work, you have to accept a world-view in which reasons are on the ground floor. Theism is one of those alternatives. And if there is honest-to-goodness matter in the world (a mechanistic order of causes) then, in order for the mental to play a causal role in the physical world, you have to accept some kind of substance dualism. That's why I think substance dualism is a better account of the mind than any view, whether we call it physicalism or neutral monism, that says there is a physical realm in which reasons don't play a role, and that everything else supervenes on that.

So the question that one has to ask of any view of the mind is "What think ye of the causal closure of a realm in which reasons play no role?" Are reasons on the ground floor in your world-view, or not. There are alternatives to theism that do this, but those world-views strike me as forms of idealism. There just doesn't seem to be a way to be "neutral" on the question of whether reasons are basic to the universe. The only monism that will work, on my view and given my arguments, is is a mentalistic monism.

Hasker on how not to be a reductivist

This is Hasker's critique of Chalmers.

Abstract—Some current positions in the philosophy of mind, while ostensibly non-reductive, are in fact reductivist in ways that are seriously problematic. An example is found in the “naturalistic dualism” of David Chalmers: by maintaining the causal closure of the physical domain, Chalmers makes the rationality of conscious experience inexplicable. This can only be remedied by abandoning causal closure and acknowledging that micro processes in the brain go differently in the presence of conscious experience than they would without it. But this move has startling consequences: once it has been made, major objections to mind-body dualism disappear, and determinism is seen to be a theory that is completely lacking in empirical support. Thomas Nagel and John Searle are cited as examples of philosophers who make a serious effort to face up to the consequences of not being reductivists.

Hasker, sensible naturalism, and causal closure

From his essay "What About a Sensible Naturalism"


What would the naturalist have to accept, in order to accommodate the demands of reason at this point? At minimum, the naturalist must accept the existence of emergent laws—laws which manifest themselves in complex organic situations, and which result in behavior of the fundamental particles of nature different from the behavior predicted on the basis of the physical laws alone. To admit this is to reject the “causal closure of the physical domain” that is so dear to the hearts of many, perhaps most, contemporary naturalists. The naturalist will have to acknowledge that new causal powers emerge in suitably complex configurations of organic chemicals.—powers that are not evident in simpler situations, and are not deducible from any laws that operate in simpler situations. It will have to be true that, given a particular sort of brain-state, there supervenes, say, a desire to hear a performance of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and that, in virtue of this desire, certain actions, and certain bodily movements occur that could not be predicted merely on the basis of the physical laws that apply to the elementary particles making up the nervous system. A view that countenances the emergence of such causal powers might provide the basis for understanding mental states that could be effective in virtue of their propositional content. Many naturalists, however, will be extremely reluctant to abandon causal closure; if they do so, their status as naturalists in good standing could plummet alarmingly.

Hasker on the divide and conquer strategy

Typically in the philosophy of mind we hear that there are two kinds of problems for naturalists. One is to account for raw experience or raw feels. Given physicalism, can we have the sorts of experiences that we would ordinarily think we have. The other concerns our intentional states.
Now many philosophers have suggested that the latter problem is less of a serious problem for physicalism than the former problem. The argument from reason deals primarily with the latter problem, and so in some sense it might be thought to be superfluous in this sense: if physicalists can get around the problem of qualia, dealing with intentionality or reasoning should be pretty easy.

Steven Stoljar in the essay on Physicalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:

As with the knowledge argument, the issues surrounding Kripke's argument are very much wide open. But it is important to note that most philosophers don't consider the issues of intentionality as seriously as the issue of qualia when it comes to physicalism. In different vocabularies, for example, both Block (1995) and Chalmers (1996) distinguish between the intentional aspects of the mind or consciousness, and the phenomenal aspects or qualia, and suggest that it is really the latter that is the central issue. As Chalmers notes (1996; p. 24), echoing Chomsky's famous distinction, the intentionality issue is a problem, but the qualia issue is a mystery.

William Hasker, however, does not seem to see it quite this way. He writes:

A maneuver that has recently become somewhat popular needs to be taken account of here. Some philosophers have thought it plausible to accept a functionalist account specifically for intentional states, while conceding the "phenomenal properties" objection for qualia and giving some other account (e.g., token identity) for those states. Once again let us concede, for the sake of argument, that th functinoalisty can successfully identify intentional states in causal-functional terms. Even so, ther eare at least two reasons why this maneuver does not succeed in disposting of the materialist's problem with intentional states. For one thing, some intentional stattes do involve qualitative "feels"; being embarrassed about one's appearance is an example of such a stae. In general, emotional states involve both a particular qualitative feel and also an intentional reference to whatever it is that one is happy, sad, proud, indignant, or embarrassed about. For these particular states, the "divide and conquer"strategy can't succeed.

An even more fundamental problem, however, is encountered in the "aboutness"which is the very essence of an intentional state. There just is such a thing as thinking about something, worrying or hoping that something may happen, believing that so-and-so is the case, deciding on a certain course of action--and in such cases one ordinarily has a distinct, conscious awareness of the "intentional object" of one's mental state. This sort of mental state is utterly familiar to each one of us, and if anyone were to claim not to understand what is meant, such a claim would be entirely lacking in credibility. Furthermore, the claim that a person is in such an intentional state is clearly not equivalent, logically or conceptually, to any causal-functional description of the person. The causal-functional properties of the sate identified by functionalism can be completely described and explained in terms of the physical structure and behavior of the state in question and its relations to other physical states. There is simply no place in such a description for the "aboutness which is essential to intentional states as such. And so we can pose a question parallel to he one asked previously: Are these causal-functional states such that they essentially involve "aboutness"? If the do not involve "aboutness" then they just are not intentional states--once again, the subject has been changed. If they do, then a crucial, and logically essential, aspect of those states has been left unexplained; we still have no idea how "aboutness" is to be incorporated into a materialist world-view.

The Second Step in the argument from reason

Once we agree on a definition of physicalism or physical causes, we have to understand what mental states are. This description by William Hasker makes sense to me:

Let us begin with a modest proposal: there are intentional conscious experiences. There are, that is to say, such episodes as a person wondering whether it is going to rain, or believing that this has been an unusually cold winter, or deciding to let the credit card balance ride for another month. In typical cases such as these the intentional content of the experience, what the experience is about, is something distinct from the experience itself, something that could exist or obtain (or fail to exist or obtain) regardless of whether or not the experience occurred. These episodes are consciously experiened; when we have them we are aware of having them, and there is "something it is like" to be having them.

This is an important concept. The idea that there is "something it is like" to, say, find a winning combination against Reppert in chess, is critical. When I play against a computer, and the computer finds a winning combination against me, the thing "functions as if" it has found the winning line against me, but there is nothing it is like to find that combination. Fritz wins all the time but never experiences the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.

My conviction is that the intentionality Fritz possesses is a second-rate, derived, kind of intentionality, which is not to be confused with the intentionality that comes from my conscious perception of what is going on on the chessboard. Therefore, in my view, the problem of propostional attitudes "inherits" all the "hard" problems related to consciousness. When I am talking about intentionality, this is first and foremost what I have in mind, and acccounts of intentionality that leave this out are drastically incomplete.

This, to my mind is a "great divide" between myself and many naturalists.

Hasker on externalism on ham-fisted empiricism

A final escape route for the physicalism might be the adoption of a thoroughly externalist view of justification. What determines the justification of a belief, on this view, is not internal cognitive processes such as were described above, but rather one simple question: was the belief produced by a a reliable belief-forming process? If it was, then no further questions about justification--those asked by the Argument from Reason--need be asked.

It is of course true that a belief, in order to be justified, needs to have been formed and sustained by a reliable epistemic practice. But in the case of rational inference, what is this practice supposed to be? The reader is referred, once again, to the description of a reasoning process given a few paragraphs back. Is this not, in fact, a reasonably accurate description of rational inference and assessment? It is, furthermore, a description which enables us to understand why in may cases the practice is highly reliable--and why the reliability varies considerably depending on the specific character of the inference drawn and also on the logical capacities of the epistemic subject. And, on the other hand, isn't it a severe distortion of our actual process of reasoning as taking place in a "black box," as the externalist view in effect invites us to do? Epistemological externalism has its greatest plausibility in cases where the warrant of our beliefs depends crucially on matters not accessible to reflection--for instance, on the proper functioning of our sensory capacities. Rational inference, in contrast, is the paradigmatic example of a situation in which the factors relevant to warrant are accessible to reflection; for this reason, examples based on rational insight have always formed the prime examples for internalist epistemologies.

There is also the question for the thoroughgoing externalist: How are we supposed to satisfy ourselves as to which of our inferential processes are reliable? By hypothesis, we are precluded from appealing to rational insight to validate our conclusions about this. One might say we have learned to distinguish good reasoning from bad by noticing that good inference-patterns give rise to true conclusions, while bad inference-patterns give rise to falsehood....But this sort of "logical empiricism" is at best a very crude method for assessing the goodness of arguments. There are plenty of invalid arguments with true conclusions, and plenty of valid arguments with false conclusions. There are even good inductive arguments with all true premises in which the conclusions are false. These are just the sort of distinctions which the science of logic exists to help us with; basing this science o n the kind of ham-fisted empiricism described above is a hopeless enterprise.

William Hasker The Emergent Self (Cornell, 1999) pp. 73-5