Theological noncognitivism

As part of getting ready for Budapest, I have been thinking about theological noncognitivism. It is the claim that religious discourse is meaningless, and is related to moral noncognitivism. Most logical positivists were theological and moral noncognitivists, claiming that such discourse was meaningless because it was unverifiable. The verificationist criterion of meaning has been criticised at great length and I would not wish to hang any claims upon it. Yet, I think there is something right about it when it come to religion. One basic difference is that I do not think that the content of religious beliefs is unverifiable simplicita. Yes, it is often such as to make testing it (I use the different term to indicate a less stringent notion) difficult but it is possible to treat religious claims as factual claims about the world and, as such, find adequate evidence for judging it reasonable to conclude them false. However, as I have often stated in this blog, this is definitely not the way religious people normally treat religious discourse, instead ensuring that religious claims are protected against possible falsification. In other words, it is not so much that religious claims are unverifiable but that religious social values make them so. At the same time, theists have to believe the claims to be true in something close enough to their literal meaning to motivate their religious behaviour. This is a position that is difficult to reconcile once it is thought about at any length – witness the great amount of theological discourse that tries to.

For me, the resultant difficulty has been how to express the noncognitivism that is part of my own position. I made an effort to express it in my Fixation of superstitious beliefs paper and will be talking about it in Budapest. Clearly, I can not simply say that religious discourse is meaningless. Firstly, as I’ve just explained, it is not just a matter of the claims made but also of the attitude taken. Secondly, I suspect that religious discourse is full of nonliteral meaning tied to the functions of religious practices. After some toing-and-froing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to express what I am trying to get at is to talk about the noncognitive function of religious beliefs, i.e. the function of the beliefs which is not connected to their truth. This seems to nicely relate my views to those of standard theological noncognitivists, pointing toward both the similarities and the differences. At least, that is my hope.

A couple of older posts about religion

I am getting ready to head off to Budapest, where I am going to give a talk to the Philosophy crowd at the Central European University this Tuesday. I have been trawling the net for some things and come across again a couple of posts about religion that I found most interesting when I’d originally read them a while ago but failed to blog about them (I hope, or I’m repeating myself).

The first is by John Wilkins, who did his PhD at the HPS department in Melbourne Uni, where I did my BA Hons. In it he makes an intersting argument for the proposition that there is no such thing as a monotheistic religion. Given the cogsci of religion definition of a god, this is absolutely correct but, perhaps not that surprisingly, not a point that had occured to me. This is just the first of a number of points that John makes and I suggest the post (indeed his blog) as very much worth reading.

The second post is from the International Cognition and Culture Institute blog and nicely showcases the depth of some of the posts there. Helen de Cruz discusses the varying view-points on the question of the theological significance of the existence of evolutionary explanations of religion, usefully bringing together a fair amount of recent work on the topic. Not surprisingly, Justin Barrett is holding the fort for the theist side, with Paul Griffiths pressing him from the atheist side. I have to say that my own response to these discussions is partly similar to Pascal Boyer’s, i.e. most naturalists aren’t particularly interested in arguing in their work against theists, supernatural claims are simply not an issue. But, then, you get a cognitive scientist like Barrett pretty much arguing for it in his work.

2010 conferences

Last year, I planned to attend eight conferences but ended up going to only three of them. Mice. Men. That kind of thing. I did end up going to a few other conferences I had not heard about at the beginning of the year, of course. I suspect that 2010 will be a more laid back year for me conference-wise as my wife and I are expecting our second child right in the middle of the summer conference season. Terribly inconvenient timing on the part of the tyke, I know, but there you have it. I have even decided not to attend the European Human Behaviour and Evolution meeting despite it being scheduled to take place in Wroclaw, not too far from where I live. As things stand, I only plan on going to the workshop that Marcin and I organise annually in Kazimierz, the European Assosiation for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Bochum and a conference on Explaining Religion that I have been invited to give a talk at by my friends in Bristol. The big problem is that all of these conferences are scheduled right next to each other at the end of August and beginning of September. In other words, right in the middle of when I really ought to be helping my wife and the new arrival. I suspect that it may turn out to be another of those men and mice years.

In the works

I have been working on the much delayed habilitationschrift recently but, also, have been writing a few other things that are tied to the book and are responding to things others have written.

One thing I have mentioned is a Behavioral and Brain Sciences commentary on an article by Ryan McKay and Dan Dennett concerning the evolution of misbelief. The title of my commentary is “Effective untestability and bounded rationality help in seeing religion as adaptive misbelief” and the issue of BBS with it should be out any day now, given that it is a delayed final issue from 2009. The list of commentators sounds very impressive (with some minor names thrown in as filler) so it should make for very interesting reading. As is the norm for BBS.

Another thing that is already done is a long book review for the International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The review is of a very interesting volume of articles edited by Brun, Doguoglu and Kuenzle entitled Epistemology and Emotions. I concentrate upon Peter Goldie’s article from the volume as it makes a number of errors concerning bounded rationality that are both common and serious, giving an opportunity to try to clear them up. I do not know when this will be out but it is somewhere ‘in the queue’.

The next thing is a paper I wrote for a volume coming out of the conference in Prague that was organised at the end of last year by my friend Juraj Hvorecky. Anthony O’Hear gave a talk there which made claims about Darwin and evolutionary theory that run very much counter to evidence and which led O’Hear to make claims about the relationship between cognition and evolution that I consider profoundly wrongheaded. Since he’s written up the talk, I’d decided to write a reply. However, as I went to the trouble of presenting an account of the evolution/cognition relationship, based upon what I see as their shared characteristics of being bounded yet open-ended, my reply has ended up being almost twice as long as O’Hear’s original paper. My paper is still in draft form but I’ll be sending it to Juraj with the hope that O’Hear will have the time to read and respond before the volume goes to press.

In between all this and the habilitationschrift, my paper with Christophe has lain very much on the back-burner. However, I will have to give it some of my time as I will be visiting Christophe in Budapest in two weeks. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to come up with a draft article this time around.

The sacred in modern law

Today, the new Irish blasphemy law has come into force:

A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.

“Blasphemous matter” is defined as matter “that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

Where a person is convicted of an offence under this section, the court may issue a warrant authorising the Garda Síochána to enter, if necessary using reasonable force, a premises.

An example of legal protection being afforded to the sacred which is hard to believe possible in a modern country such as Ireland. Thankfully, people have already organised themselves to fight this. To test it, Atheist Ireland has immediately published a list of 25 quotes that have at one time or another been deemed blasphemous. Regardless of whether one is a theist or not, I find it impossible to believe that anyone half reasonable could defend this offensive law – indeed, it seems to have very little support among the Irish. In support of the effort by Atheist Ireland, I am publishing the following example of blasphemy from their list:

20. Pope Benedict XVI quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor, 2006: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” This statement has already led to both outrage and condemnation of the outrage. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Muslim body, said it was a “character assassination of the prophet Muhammad”. The Malaysian Prime Minister said that “the Pope must not take lightly the spread of outrage that has been created.” Pakistan’s foreign Ministry spokesperson said that “anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence”. The European Commission said that “reactions which are disproportionate and which are tantamount to rejecting freedom of speech are unacceptable.”

I do not believe the statement to be true, of course. Any such simplistic evaluation of a social phenomenon as complex as a religion is bound to be false. But the law makes no reference to whether the blasphemous statement has to actually be believed in. So, I am publishing the statement with the express aim of acting in breach of this law, to the degree that it is possible for me, given that I do not live or publish in Ireland. As such, I suspect mine is ‘the bravery of being out of range’. But my aim is simply to show my support for the campaign to get rid of this outrageous law.

On another day, I may go back and discuss how this is a great example of how the sacred is a category whose function is to protect claims from investigation and the relevance of it to the stability of religion. Today, however, I am too struck by the sheer knuckle-dragging, antedeluvian wonder of this legal claptrap.

Does Barrett think that Superman is a counterintuitive concept?

Still working through Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God? with my cognitive science of religion class. We’ve got to chapter 6 in which Barrett considers the traits of the christian deity and I have found myself gobsmacked by the argument that Barrett presents. He considers in turn the christian claims that their deity has infallible knowledge, is able to perceive anything we care to think of, is immortal, is able to do anything we can imagine, has created the universe and is perfectly good. For each of these traits, Barrett argues that it is plausible to believe them actually fairly intuitive. His reasoning is that children, supposedly, go through a stage where they consider normal people to have such traits (the evidence being the weakest, says Barrett, for perfect goodness). According to him, children learn that normal people do not have such unlimited abilities but simply can continue to hold the same basic belief in the case of the christian deity. Barrett closes his discussion by considering what implication these finding have for the claim that the christian deity is a minimally counterintuitive concept (87-88):

At first glance, God seems far more counterintuitive than would qualify as minimally counterintuitive. God has funny physical, biological, and psychological properties. So much for one or two violations of intuitive expectations. But a closer look at developmental evidence suggests that many of God’s fancier properties are not counterintuitive at all. ToM allows for a mind to be superknowing and superperceiving and to be divorced from a biological body. Likewise, mental tools do not require a disembodied mind to be mortal. We have no reason to believe that God’s superpowers present any special difficulty. On the contrary, mental tools suggest that someone has intelligently designed much of the natural world and may willingly embrace God as the Creator. On careful examination, it may be that God’s only counterintuitive properties concern God’s physicality, such as being omnipresent or having no location in space and time. If so, God nicely fits the parameters for a minimally counterintuitive concept, or MCI.

When I read this paragraph, I could not help but stare blankly at the page for a minute. I could hardly believe that Barrett had written what I’d just read so I then reread the whole section. Even now, several days later, I still find myself flabbergasted every time I read this section. I’ll try to express my various problems with what Barrett is saying in as coherent a fashion as I can.

Let’s accept for a minute that everything that Barrett claims is correct. What would the consequences of doing so be? OK, the christian deity turns out to be minimally counterintuitive. What about some other examples of deities? How about Zeus? He was immortal, but as we’ve just found out, this is nothing counterintuitive. He was also able to do very many things (not everything) that is humanly impossible, but that also does not have the potential to be counterintuitive. For example, he was able to turn himself into a swan to seduce Leda, but the christian deity was able to turn himself into a burning bush, so that is hardly newsworthy (maybe the truly surprising thing was that Leda found a swan attractive). Of course, Zeus was not omnipresent but spent much of his time on Mount Olympus. So, Zeus – clearly not counterintuitive according to Barrett. The same for Superman. All that leaping of tall buildings and outperforming of locomotive could not, after all, compare to the christian deity’s superpowers. Indeed, if we take Barrett’s claims from this chapter seriously, then pretty much no agent could be counterintuitive, other than the christian deity! Certainly, none of the other things he lists as ‘gods’ on page 21 – ghosts, demons, chimeras (such as centaurs or satyrs), or space aliens – have any abilities that would classify as counterintuitive on this definition.

The situation is worse, however. He claims that the christian deity’s one truly counterintuitive ability is the ability to be present in all places at once. Yet, as he himself points out, when people think about the christian deity they imagine it as moving rapidly from one place to another, rather than actually thinking of it as being in many places at once. So, according to Barrett, when most people think about the christian deity, they are actually thinking of a perfectly intuitive agent!

Clearly, something has gone badly awry in Barrett’s reasoning. He can not have it both ways – either the christian deity’s various alleged traits are counterintuitive or minimally counterintuitive concepts can not be used as an element of cognitive explanations of religion. I’d probably argue that the error lies in claiming that immortality, etc. are not counterintuitive properties. What, then, is the significance of the results coming from the cognitive development studies that Barrett discusses in this chapter? I would argue that, rather than render such concepts intuitive, they render them plausible enough to be considered. Barrett distinguishes between reflective and nonreflective beliefs. However, it is important to consider another distinction in this context that between how children and adults reason that dual process accounts of reasoning may be seen as pointing towards. As cognitive load studies show, adults do not generally stop reasoning in the way that children do but merely overlay more adult reasoning on top of it – being placed under cognitive load being useful to bring out the more childlike reasoning processes. So, counterintuitive concepts may, in fact, function by being attractive to childlike reasoning and counterintuitive to adult reasoning. Of course, this may be an overly complex claim. It may well be that what are called counterintuitive concepts actually function simply because they do appear sensible to child-like reasoning processes and adult reasoning merely fails to completely eliminate them, instead of helping to propagate them due to their surprising nature. Either way, Barrett has a serious problem.

The historical Jesus and the genetic fallacy

One of the courses I am teaching this year is a translation workshop for doctoral students. However, instead of simply giving the students a text that they are supposed to translate into another language (be from Polish into English or the other way around) I have been treating this class as an opportunity for them to work with texts in English. For the first few weeks the doctoral students have been bringing texts in English they are interested in and we’ve been discussing them in class. The effect has been quite interesting in that we’ve looked at quite a broad spectrum of pieces and looked at them from a variety of points of view. The group is small – only five PhD students – which makes it possible to really work intensively and allows us to take into account everyone’s interests without the class becoming a senseless mishmash, somehow.

The most interesting meeting for me, thus far, was last week’s. The text we were given was a fairly traditional historian’s thoughts about the way in which we can investigate the person of Jesus. As such, the article started from making the usual claims about the fundamental divide between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften – which, immediately, set my teeth on edge and got me motivated to ‘engage’ with the text. The actual discussion we had in class focussed around a number of issues apart from the question of the differences between various sciences. Perhaps the main question was set by the student who suggested the text. His stated aim is to look at the historical figures of Jesus and Buddha and try to understand why it is that these particular individuals came to be thought of as deities by other people. Clearly, his intention is to try to look for explanations in the personalities of those individuals. A couple of us, however, pointed out to him that he is assuming that the relevant factors lie in the personalities of Jesus and Buddha as opposed to such things as the social, historical or, as I kept on suggesting, cognitive context. As he said, it would be very surprising for him if there was nothing special about Jesus or Buddha. Yet, special people are born every day and the fact that some of them come to be thought of as deities by some others can only be understood if we consider the cognitive processes of the believers.

An important element of the student’s assumption seems to be a version of the genetic fallacy, i.e. that to understand Christianity we must understand what the historical Jesus was like. This claim is doubly problematic. The first problem is that the nature of Christianity, including its success, must be understood in terms of its beliefs and institutions, as they existed over time. The medieval Church was not central to society throughout much of Europe because of what Christ was like but because it was able to maintain its power throughout that period due to a number of cognitive and cultural factors. This is why the genetic fallacy is a fallacy. The second set of problems is specific to the history of early Christianity. Firstly, from what we know, the historical figure of Christ actually had a very limited amount of influence upon the development of Christianity, with Paul playing a much more significant role. Secondly, the only sources of information we have regarding what Jesus was like come from the various gospels, including the apocrypha. Those documents, however, were written well after Jesus’ death and by people who in all likelihood had not actually met him but were, at best, writing down stories they had heard about him. What is more , it is clear that the gospels are full of elements that are not historically accurate but which were introduced for various political or doctrinal reasons. Of course, there are scholars who are trying to sort through the available information to get at the ‘real’ Jesus but it is very much debatable to what degree this is even possible given the very poor quality of our sources.

We suggested that his methodology should be to try to identify generally the kinds of factors that determine whether people consider someone to be a deity, factors that will primarily be cognitive, and then to consider the degree to which Jesus’ or Buddha’s personality would have been relevant to those factors. Indeed, in a way, this approach might allow us to make some educated guesses about the personality of Jesus if there are certain traits that do make it generally more likely that a person will be deemed a deity. Of course, even if successful, such an investigation will not necessary reveal anything significant about the nature of Christianity, as already pointed out.

Pigeon qualia soup

Well, actually, The Superstitious Pigeon on Qualiasoup – an extremely well put-together visual presentation of some ideas and research concerning superstitions. The Qualiasoup videos are a great resource to use in teaching critical thinking classes, I think. Nothing paltry about it.

Knowledge, value and evolution in Prague

Recently returned from the Knowledge, Value and Evolution conference in Prague. Given that one of the organisers is an old friend of mine and that three of the four key-speakers had been key-speakers at the Kazimierz workshops, it was something of a social get-together for me. Listening to the various talks I have found once again that the way a lot of people do philosophy now brings out in me exactly the same kinds of reactions that I had seen Werner Callebaut having. What is more, I no longer try to hold back as much in expressing these reactions as I might have previously. On the other hand, I probably do not express my reservations in quite the same straight-forward way that Werner often does. More’s the pity, perhaps.

My own talk was a discussion of the ways in which supernatural beliefs can be protected against coming into conflict with evidence and the implications this has for their function. I tried to aim this version of the talk at issues that philosophers are traditionally most concerned with. My talk was almost the last in the meeting and everyone was tired so the discussion afterwards was half-hearted. Still, I did get a couple of good questions that I had actually previously considered and was, thus, able to give thought out answers to. I am not sure to what degree I got the questions I did because I was dealing with a mostly philosophical audience and to what degree it was because of the way that I presented the material.

Loose ends in Brno

Last week I was at a small, two-day conference on the cognitive science of religion in Brno. There were only twenty-something people there, mostly from the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Poland, The only exception were the two key speakers, Armin Geertz and Jesper Sorensen, who were from Aarhus in Denmark. Most of the papers were quite valuable in some way but the biggest plus of the meeting was definitely the discussion. Armin Geertz has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of a very broad range of material and a fine philosophic sensibility and Jesper has very refreshing attitude to bunk – quite reminiscent of Australian academics at their best (I rather enjoyed half-jokingly turning some of his pointed comments against him after his talk). In addition, Jesper has been working on cognitive explanations of magic, i.e. pretty much the same topic as what I have been dealing with. Indeed, he had a book on this topic out with AltaMira in 2006 - I’ve put it to the front of my reading queue. The fact that I had not come across it earlier is, unfortunately, evidence that I am yet to get a proper grasp of the wealth of material that is out there.

I had only heard about the meeting fairly recently and ended up presenting the same paper as in Bristol. There, the questions were mostly coming from philosophers and psychologists, including of course developmental psychologists. In Brno, it was mostly cognitive anthropologists with a thorough knowledge of religion, which made for a different but also very insightful and challenging audience. The main impression that I got from the discussion was that the kind of epistemological issues that I raise do not fit easily with that approach. This means that I have to be very careful how I phrase things. Jesper, for example, wondered whether I was not falling into the ‘propositional attitudes’ view of beliefs. If he is right, it would be more than troubling, but I tend to think it is more a matter of presentation (both in terms of making my views clear to the audience and in terms of making sure no such assumptions sneak into my own thinking through the back door of inappropriate language). The secondary impression I got was that I have managed to get something of a broad understanding of the main issues, even if many details are still missing – many points that Armin raised, for example, were ones that I had been mulling over and had come to much the same conclusions about. Also interesting was the to and fro on the question of the distinction between magic and religion. Jesper thinks there isn’t one, while I do; even having talked to him. What did become somewhat clearer to me is that I should be explaining that I consider superstition to be a result of the way in which the magical and religious are forced apart in our modern societies that value rationality. This may be a fairly obvious point but it helps to clarify what I see as the relationship between the three, a major issue in my book.