Reformed Epistemology

[mikkel_the_dane]

Oh, no, I am not an Existentialist. I believe that the function of a human being is ultimately derived from evolutionary biology and can be studied like any other fact.

I'm more interested in how you derive individual purpose.

Then find yourself. Shed the parts of other people's propose and find your own. But because I am not you and you are not me, we can only talk about how it works individually. But remember one thing - some parts of you are your own self-constructed narrative and try to make it at least neutral and somewhat positive. If you have to, construct your own purpose and then live it. Then it grows on you and then you are it.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

From Rival's Link:

"Calvin’s claim, then, is that God has created us in such a way that we have a strong tendency or inclination toward belief in him. This tendency has been in part overlaid or suppressed by sin."

Miiiiighty convenient. We get to work in a little commentary on "sin" and how it blinds us to fundamental reality. Plantinga has argued some okay ideas. But I'm not a fan of this one. "If you only had your thetan levels managed properly, you'd realize that Scientology is the way."

Plenty of atheists have lived simple, sagely lives. What was their sin that kept them from perceiving basic reality?

Yeah, but that has nothing in particular to do with sin. There is another one - irrational.

 

[MikeF]

This also means that we are subject to illusion, misinformation, and bias, which can undercut our reason.

I see this as the nail in the coffin for Rationalism.

 

[Ella S.]

I see this as the nail in the coffin for Rationalism.

I don't see how

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

This is a decent article outlining arguments against Reformed Epistemology and I am interested to see if anyone has any decent rebuttals to it.

My comment would be similar to @vulcanlogician 's.

I recognize only empiricism and reason as paths to truth, by which I mean ideas that are demonstrably correct and can be used to correctly anticipate outcomes, and pure reason divorced from the physical senses plays only a limited role, as when considering logical options in the abstract, solving Wordle or sudoku, or proving geometrical theorems.

I found the rebuttal in the link to be on the money. This epistemology is based either in the assumption that God exists because one has been told so and believed it, or the intuition that God exists because one experiences an irresistible intuition to believe. I think people like Platinga and Craig (and many RF posters) are the latter category. The former can be called fideism and the latter intuitionism. I don't see anything reformed about this position. I find compelling intuition to be more valuable than uncritically received wisdom, but intuitions about reality should always be considered speculative. I have a few myself, but I don't consider them knowledge, since they haven't been confirmed empirically.

The following is paraphrased from an anonymous Internet persona. It's an argument for an empirical epistemology, and begins by dismissing faith based beliefs like medieval scholasticism for their lack of utility. Consider astrology, based in faith, and astronomy, based in the application of reason to evidence. Unlike astronomy, which is empirical, and can be used to accurately predict eclipses and where the moon would be when Apollo 11 was ready to touch down on it, for example, faith based beliefs like astrology can't be used for anything practical. It's predictions fail. That's the sine qua non of truth for me - the ability to successfully predict outcomes. Empiricism is a pragmatic epistemology. What value is there in other "ways of knowing" if they can't be used for anything but comfort and reassurance? :

"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No matter what answer you give, literally nothing changes. No decision you will ever make in your entire lifetime can ever be influenced by the answer to this question. If nothing changes even in principle with respect to some proposition being true or false, then the distinction between them just vanishes.

"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.

"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.

"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.

"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything. If God is real and Christianity true, then what tangible manifestation can I produce through that belief in accordance with my actions? If there aren't any to speak of, then there is no truth to the idea that God exists. You need to do better than mere words"​

So, in summary, I reject the idea that "sensus divinitatis," or an internal sense of God, is a valid concept, or the claim that such a thing as a god exists is knowledge, since it cannot be demonstrated, tested, or used to predict outcomes.

 

[Ella S.]

My comment would be similar to @vulcanlogician 's.

I recognize only empiricism and reason as paths to truth, by which I mean ideas that are demonstrably correct and can be used to correctly anticipate outcomes, and pure reason divorced from the physical senses plays only a limited role, as when considering logical options in the abstract, solving Wordle or sudoku, or proving geometrical theorems.

I found the rebuttal in the link to be on the money. This epistemology is based either in the assumption that God exists because one has been told so and believed it, or the intuition that God exists because one experiences an irresistible intuition to believe. I think people like Platinga and Craig (and many RF posters) are the latter category. The former can be called fideism and the latter intuitionism. I don't see anything reformed about this position. I find compelling intuition to be more valuable than uncritically received wisdom, but intuitions about reality should always be considered speculative. I have a few myself, but I don't consider them knowledge, since they haven't been confirmed empirically.

The following is paraphrased from an anonymous Internet persona. It's an argument for an empirical epistemology, and begins by dismissing faith based beliefs like medieval scholasticism for their lack of utility. Consider astrology, based in faith, and astronomy, based in the application of reason to evidence. Unlike astronomy, which is empirical, and can be used to accurately predict eclipses and where the moon would be when Apollo 11 was ready to touch down on it, for example, faith based beliefs like astrology can't be used for anything practical. It's predictions fail. That's the sine qua non of truth for me - the ability to successfully predict outcomes. Empiricism is a pragmatic epistemology. What value is there in other "ways of knowing" if they can't be used for anything but comfort and reassurance? :

"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No matter what answer you give, literally nothing changes. No decision you will ever make in your entire lifetime can ever be influenced by the answer to this question. If nothing changes even in principle with respect to some proposition being true or false, then the distinction between them just vanishes.

"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.

"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.

"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.

"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything. If God is real and Christianity true, then what tangible manifestation can I produce through that belief in accordance with my actions? If there aren't any to speak of, then there is no truth to the idea that God exists. You need to do better than mere words"​

So, in summary, I reject the idea that "sensus divinitatis," or an internal sense of God, is a valid concept, or the claim that such a thing as a god exists is knowledge, since it cannot be demonstrated, tested, or used to predict outcomes.

I agree a great deal with what you have written here.

In fact, I would add that the existence of God, as posited by reformed epistemology, is axiomatic to the theologies which draw upon this concept.

I am skeptical that axioms themselves are "true" in some sense, rather than acting as standards of methodology, mostly when I think about the use of axioms in logic, math, and statistics.

I agree that empirical data is important when considering truth, as do most modern rationalists, I think, despite the historical disagreements between rationalism and empiricism.

In fact, that is the crux of the issue. I have a few inductive arguments for accepting empiricism, but I have no such arguments for accepting reformed epistemology.

 

[MikeF]

IMO

I don't see how

In my view:

We can think rationally and logically about imagined or imaginary things. The claim of a priori knowledge can be used to justify any belief.

There is no a priori knowledge other than our pre-programmed instinctual behaviours.

What we know about the world around us is through our experience of it. Knowledge is reasoned expectation based on that experience, and as such, is only held with degrees of confidence. The more often an expectation holds true, the greater the confidence in that knowledge.

And even then, we cannot rely solely on our own experience and perception precisely for the reasons you stated, all the many ways we human beings are fallible. To mitigate this problem, we use intersubjective corroboration to verify and reinforce our confidence in our reasoned expectations.

 

[Ella S.]

IMO


In my view:

We can think rationally and logically about imagined or imaginary things. The claim of a priori knowledge can be used to justify any belief.

There is no a priori knowledge other than our pre-programmed instinctual behaviours.

What we know about the world around us is through our experience of it. Knowledge is reasoned expectation based on that experience, and as such, is only held with degrees of confidence. The more often an expectation holds true, the greater the confidence in that knowledge.

And even then, we cannot rely solely on our own experience and perception precisely for the reasons you stated, all the many ways we human beings are fallible. To mitigate this problem, we use intersubjective corroboration to verify and reinforce our confidence in our reasoned expectations.

I think you might be confusing rationalism with logicial positivism.

Rationalism is the belief that all knowledge comes to us through reason. Some older rationalists did posit that all knowledge was a priori, but this is not core to the concept.

I agree that, according to inductive arguments, my experience seems to indicate that there is a concrete, external world through which we can gain limited information on through our senses.

This is one of many ways that modern rationalism has embraced empirical data, but reason is still seen as "higher" and capable of its own knowledge without empirical data. In fact, I would say that empirical data can only lead to knowledge when it is analyzed rationally, otherwise those issues of illusion, misinformation, and bias have no way of being corrected.

Luckily, the methodology of reason is self-correcting.

 

[MikeF]

IMO

I think you might be confusing rationalism with logicial positivism.

Rationalism is the belief that all knowledge comes to us through reason. Some older rationalists did posit that all knowledge was a priori, but this is not core to the concept.

I agree that, according to inductive arguments, my experience seems to indicate that there is a concrete, external world through which we can gain limited information on through our senses.

This is one of many ways that modern rationalism has embraced empirical data, but reason is still seen as "higher" and capable of its own knowledge without empirical data. In fact, I would say that empirical data can only lead to knowledge when it is analyzed rationally, otherwise those issues of illusion, misinformation, and bias have no way of being corrected.

Luckily, the methodology of reason is self-correcting.

To my mind, history clearly shows that we cannot rely on reason alone. Hence the development of scientific inquiry with principles and standards designed to mitigate human fallibility. This is why scientific inquiry had supplanted philosophy as a reliable methodology for knowledge acquisition.

What would be an example of higher knowledge gained through reason alone, absent any experience?

 

[Ella S.]

IMO



To my mind, history clearly shows that we cannot rely on reason alone. Hence the development of scientific inquiry with principles and standards designed to mitigate human fallibility. This is why scientific inquiry had supplanted philosophy as a reliable methodology for knowledge acquisition.

Scientific inquiry is derived from critical rationalism, though?

What would be an example of higher knowledge gained through reason alone, absent any experience?

2-4=-2

 

[MikeF]

Scientific inquiry is derived from critical rationalism, though?

I would say it derived from the culmination, distillation, and refinement of all previous thought.

2-4=-2

Did this concept not derive from experience, though?

Edit: talk about the fallible brain. Small screen one phone and I saw positive 2 on right side of equation and brain saw 4-2=2. Sorry for that inattention!

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I would say it derived from the culmination, distillation, and refinement of all previous thought.



Did this concept not derive from experience, though?
...

Depends on the school of thought about what experience is.

 

[MikeF]

Scientific inquiry is derived from critical rationalism, though?



2-4=-2

Sincere apologies on my last post. Talk about the fallible brain. Small screen on phone and I saw positive 2 on right side of equation and brain saw 4-2=2. Sorry for that inattention!

To your example I would say that the abstraction of arithmetic was originally born out of experience. Experience demonstrated that symbols could represent quantities and transactions. From there, further reasoned abstract concepts are verified because they are used to make observable predictions.

 

[Ella S.]

I would say it derived from the culmination, distillation, and refinement of all previous thought.

I would say that sounds like Scientism to me, and that it holds little to no truth in the philosophy of science, where hypotheses are falsified through formally documented experimentation.

I don't think science is the culmination, distillation, and refinement of all previous thought at all. Science has nothing to do with ethics, aesthetics, logic, mathematics, statistics, linguistics, philosophy, economics, and so on.

Rather, the scientific method developed in order to assist some of the problems in inductive logic. Namely, the fact that you can reach false conclusions through induction if you are lacking the proper information and the fact that you can reach two mutually-contradictory but equally-likely conclusions through reason.

For this reason, Karl Popper came up with the criteria of falsifiability as a part of his "critical rationalism," which is the backbone of the scientific method. Now we can test falsifiable hypotheses in order to gain new data, which we then need to logically analyze in order to falsify or sustain those hypotheses.

Of course, this also more-or-less limits science to falsifiable claims about the natural world. It also means that science can't support any belief, it can only discount beliefs that don't hold up to testing.

Sincere apologies on my last post. Talk about the fallible brain. Small screen on phone and I saw positive 2 on right side of equation and brain saw 4-2=2. Sorry for that inattention!

To your example I would say that the abstraction of arithmetic was originally born out of experience. Experience demonstrated that symbols could represent quantities and transactions. From there, further reasoned abstract concepts are verified because they are used to make observable predictions.

Observable predictions? You mean falsifiable hypotheses?

Such hypotheses also don't verify abstract concepts. They sustain them. Verification is really only possible in pure deduction, such as mathematics, which follows its own set of axioms.

Whether 2-4=-2 has any relevance to the concrete world is irrelevant, because it is necessarily and deductively true under the axioms of mathematics. No testing needed.

 

[vulcanlogician]

From the passage you quoted:

"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.

"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.

​

Interesting that the author mentions pragmatism here. It's interesting to argue that pragmatic epistemology reduces to observation (like, empiricism of a sort). I hadn't fully realized it in that way before. But it works.

Are you familiar with William James's Will to Believe? I found James's argument for faith interesting. One of the few pieces of epistemology advanced by the faithful that is the slightest bit compelling. Of course, I don't think James argues in favor of faith so well, but (interestingly) he does a good job of showing where skepticism begins to outlive its usefulness.

With ideas like "real world skepticism" floating around in the philo-sphere, most of us recognize that skepticism outlives its usefulness at some point. If anything, James gives us some principles that show us where the fault lines actually are.​

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Are you familiar with William James's Will to Believe?

No, but I did a quick search:

"James originally delivered the The Will to Believe as a lecture in 1896, and published it soon afterwards. He explains that The Will to Believe is an essay on the "justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced." Many understand James as defending a kind of fideism - the idea that faith is in some sense independent from (and sometimes perhaps even opposed to) reason. James argues that we may be justified in adopting a belief even if we don't have enough prior evidence in support of it, and in some cases, 1) we may only have access to supporting evidence only after we have adopted the belief, or 2) our adoption of the belief may make the belief true. For James, religious beliefs are paradigm examples of such beliefs. James also discusses and refers to this idea as 'the duty to believe' and 'the right to believe' in other writings."

This sounds like what the OP called reformed epistemology and another poster called Properly Basic Beliefs. My response is the same. Neither faith in gods nor deistic intuitions are a path to knowledge, meaning neither generate ideas that can be used except perhaps to comfort.

most of us recognize that skepticism outlives its usefulness at some point

I confine skepticism to matters of fact, not moral or esthetic judgments, for example. In the arena of what is demonstrably correct about reality, I can't imagine bringing any other approach to the problem or relaxing that standard ever. This is what the faith-based thinkers are criticizing when they use words like materialism and scientism scoffingly - that this view is too narrow, too myopic, filters out too much such as theistic belief. But just ask them what they see with this other way of knowing that gives skepticism the day off, and you get nothing useful.

But perhaps this is not what you mean when you say that skepticism outlives its usefulness at some point.

 

[MikeF]

I would say that sounds like Scientism to me, and that it holds little to no truth in the philosophy of science, where hypotheses are falsified through formally documented experimentation.

I don't think science is the culmination, distillation, and refinement of all previous thought at all. Science has nothing to do with ethics, aesthetics, logic, mathematics, statistics, linguistics, philosophy, economics, and so on.

Rather, the scientific method developed in order to assist some of the problems in inductive logic. Namely, the fact that you can reach false conclusions through induction if you are lacking the proper information and the fact that you can reach two mutually-contradictory but equally-likely conclusions through reason.

For this reason, Karl Popper came up with the criteria of falsifiability as a part of his "critical rationalism," which is the backbone of the scientific method. Now we can test falsifiable hypotheses in order to gain new data, which we then need to logically analyze in order to falsify or sustain those hypotheses.

Of course, this also more-or-less limits science to falsifiable claims about the natural world. It also means that science can't support any belief, it can only discount beliefs that don't hold up to testing.

I see logic and mathematics as tools. I see language as such also, and mathematics as a language in a way.

Aesthetics I see as purely subjective and an area in which logic and reason do not apply. Beauty, as it is said, is in the eye of the beholder.

Ethics, morals, and economics I see as political and subjective in the sense that these are rules and systems devised to manage groups of people. They are derived through either negotiation or can be imposed by one side with greater power where power distribution is asymmetric.

Ethics, economics, and politics are systems to manage the competing needs, wants, and desires of individuals that are members of societal groups. I see science as crucial to understanding ethics and economics for these are endeavors of the human animal and it is through scientific inquiry that we can best understand human behavior and human psychology. It is through scientific inquiry that we have empirical data upon which to make reasoned and rational decisions. I find it fascinating when people want to shield these social systems from the purview of scientific inquiry.

To my mind, both science and philosophy attempt to solve the same problems and find answers to the same questions. It is just that philosophy seems to indulge the intuition of the individual philosopher (which I see as it's fatal flaw), and science discounts intuition and actively tries to mitigate the fallibilities of the human investigator.

 

[Ella S.]

I see logic and mathematics as tools. I see language as such also, and mathematics as a language in a way.

Aesthetics I see as purely subjective and an area in which logic and reason do not apply. Beauty, as it is said, is in the eye of the beholder.

Ethics, morals, and economics I see as political and subjective in the sense that these are rules and systems devised to manage groups of people. They are derived through either negotiation or can be imposed by one side with greater power where power distribution is asymmetric.

Ethics, economics, and politics are systems to manage the competing needs, wants, and desires of individuals that are members of societal groups. I see science as crucial to understanding ethics and economics for these are endeavors of the human animal and it is through scientific inquiry that we can best understand human behavior and human psychology. It is through scientific inquiry that we have empirical data upon which to make reasoned and rational decisions. I find it fascinating when people want to shield these social systems from the purview of scientific inquiry.

To my mind, both science and philosophy attempt to solve the same problems and find answers to the same questions. It is just that philosophy seems to indulge the intuition of the individual philosopher (which I see as it's fatal flaw), and science discounts intuition and actively tries to mitigate the fallibilities of the human investigator.

Yeah, that's Scientism.

ETA: Suffice to say I disagree and I think you're neglecting the limitations of science, but at this point we're just going to be talking in circles

 

[MikeF]

Yeah, that's Scientism.

ETA: Suffice to say I disagree and I think you're neglecting the limitations of science, but at this point we're just going to be talking in circles

That's fine. I understand. As a parting note, I would just say that I would think all knowledge pursuits have the same limitation, the human investigator. It is how that limitation is addressed that makes the difference in my opinion.

 

[vulcanlogician]

This sounds like what the OP called reformed epistemology and another poster called Properly Basic Beliefs. My response is the same. Neither faith in gods nor deistic intuitions are a path to knowledge, meaning neither generate ideas that can be used except perhaps to comfort.

It is different. Whereas the OP talks about a properly basic belief (God) as something of an axiom, James is contrasting faith with skepticism. This could be faith or skepticism of anything. Of course, what makes James interesting here is how his arguments may impact religious belief, but they don't necessarily have to.

James, being a pragmatist, wonders about cases where having an unfounded belief plays a genuine role in the outcome, and how we should treat these cases epistemologically speaking. He gives the example of a mountain climber who must make a leap across a chasm in order to survive. Supposing that this person is just barely able to make the jump to the extent that, if he believes he can make the jump, the boost on confidence and sure-of-footness will allow him to succeed. BUT, without the belief, he will fall just short. Is his belief that he can make the jump true or false? In either case (skepticism or faith) he will turn out to be correct. So, in that case, the better belief is the most useful one.

James does NOT endorse believing in falsehoods. If the climber could NOT make the jump, believing he could is bad.

James was responding chiefly to William Clifford who posited that it was unethical to believe in something without a proper degree of certainty. (ie. to Clifford, faith in God is unethical, and leads to unethical behavior/decision making). If anything, I think James does a good job of refuting Clifford. Though I'm uncertain how much work his arguments about faith really do. I'm a skeptic, and I always like to challenge my own positions, so James was really intriguing to me since his argument isn't super weak. Theists are pretty good at bringing the weaksauce (like this reformed epistemology crap). James makes a decent case.

If you aren't familiar with Clifford, I linked it below. If anything, his opening parable (paragraph 1) and Clifford's interpretation (paragraph 2) is must read material for all atheists and skeptics. You can skip the rest as it just goes into more detail from there.

https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf

edit: James's case is NOT super weak (oops)... *corrected*