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Sunday, January 30, 2022

Social neuroscience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_neuroscience

Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding the relationship between social experiences and biological systems. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather than solitary. As such, Homo sapiens create emergent organizations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures. In this regard, studies indicate that various social influences including life events, poverty, unemployment and loneliness can influence health related biomarkers. The term "social neuroscience" can be traced to a publication entitled "Social Neuroscience Bulletin" that was published quarterly between 1988 and 1994. The term was subsequently popularized in an article by John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, published in the American Psychologist in 1992. Cacioppo and Berntson are considered as the legitimate fathers of social neuroscience. Still a young field, social neuroscience is closely related to affective neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on how the brain mediates social interactions. The biological underpinnings of social cognition are investigated in social cognitive neuroscience.

Overview

Traditional neuroscience has for many years considered the nervous system as an isolated entity and largely ignored influences of the social environments in which humans and many animal species live. In fact, we now recognize the considerable impact of social structures on the operations of the brain and body. These social factors operate on the individual through a continuous interplay of neural, neuroendocrine, metabolic and immune factors on brain and body, in which the brain is the central regulatory organ and also a malleable target of these factors. Social neuroscience investigates the biological mechanisms that underlie social processes and behavior, widely considered one of the major problem areas for the neurosciences in the 21st century, and applies concepts and methods of biology to develop theories of social processes and behavior in the social and behavioral sciences. Social neuroscience capitalizes on biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior, and it uses social and behavioral constructs and data to advance theories of neural organization and function.

Throughout most of the 20th century, social and biological explanations were widely viewed as incompatible. But advances in recent years have led to the development of a new approach synthesized from the social and biological sciences. The new field of social neuroscience emphasizes the complementary relationship between the different levels of organization, spanning the social and biological domains (e.g., molecular, cellular, system, person, relational, collective, societal) and the use of multi-level analyses to foster understanding of the mechanisms underlying the human mind and behavior.

Methods

A number of methods are used in social neuroscience to investigate the confluence of neural and social processes. These methods draw from behavioral techniques developed in social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology, and are associated with a variety of neurobiological techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), positron emission tomography (PET), facial electromyography (EMG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroencephalography (EEG), event-related potentials (ERPs), electrocardiograms, electromyograms, endocrinology, immunology, galvanic skin response (GSR), single-cell recording, and studies of focal brain lesion patients. In recent years, these methods have been complemented by virtual reality techniques (VR) and hormonal measures. Animal models are also important to investigate the putative role of specific brain structures, circuits, or processes (e.g., the reward system and drug addiction). In addition, quantitative meta-analyses are important to move beyond idiosyncrasies of individual studies, and neurodevelopmental investigations can contribute to our understanding of brain-behavior associations. The two most popular forms of methods used in social neuroscience are fMRI and EEG. fMRI are very cost efficient and high in spatial resolution. However, they are low in temporal resolution and therefore, are best to discover pathways in the brain that are used during social experiments. fMRI have low temporal resolution (timing) because they read oxygenated blood levels that pool to the parts of the brain that are activated and need more oxygen. Thus, the blood takes time to travel to the part of the brain being activated and in reverse provides a lower ability to test for exact timing of activation during social experiments. EEG is best used when a researcher is trying to brain map a certain area that correlates to a social construct that is being studied. EEGs provide high temporal resolution but low spatial resolution. In which, the timing of the activation is very accurate but it is hard to pinpoint exact areas on the brain, researchers are to narrow down locations and areas but they also create a lot of "noise". Most recently, researchers have been using TMS which is the best way to discover the exact location in the process of brain mapping. This machine can turn on and off parts of the brain which then allows researchers to test what that part of the brain is used for during social events. However, this machine is so expensive that it is rarely used.

Note: Most of these methods can only provide correlations between brain mapping and social events (apart from TMS), a con of Social Neuroscience is that the research must be interpreted through correlations which can cause a decreased content validity. For example, during an experiment when a participant is doing a task to test for a social theory and a part of the brain is activated, it is impossible to form causality because anything else in the room or the thoughts of the person could have triggered that response. It is very hard to isolate these variables during these experiments. That is why self-reports are very important. This will also help decrease the chances of VooDoo correlations (correlations that are too high and over 0.8 which look like a correlation exists between two factors but actually is just an error in design and statistical measures). Another way to avoid this con, is to use tests with hormones that can infer causality. For example, when people are given oxytocin and placebos and we can test their differences in social behavior between other people. Using SCRs will also help isolate unconscious thoughts and conscious thoughts because it is the body's natural parasympathetic response to the outside world. All of these tests and devices will help social neuroscientists discover the connections in the brain that are used to carry out our everyday social activities.

Primarily psychological methods include performance-based measures that record response time and/or accuracy, such as the Implicit Association Test; observational measures such as preferential looking in infant studies; and, self-report measures, such as questionnaire and interviews.

Neurobiological methods can be grouped together into ones that measure more external bodily responses, electrophysiological methods, hemodynamic measures, and lesion methods. Bodily response methods include GSR (also known as skin conductance response (SCR)), facial EMG, and the eyeblink startle response. Electrophysiological methods include single-cell recordings, EEG, and ERPs. Hemodynamic measures, which, instead of directly measuring neural activity, measure changes in blood flow, include PET and fMRI. Lesion methods traditionally study brains that have been damaged via natural causes, such as strokes, traumatic injuries, tumors, neurosurgery, infection, or neurodegenerative disorders. In its ability to create a type of 'virtual lesion' that is temporary, TMS may also be included in this category. More specifically, TMS methods involve stimulating one area of the brain to isolate it from the rest of the brain, imitating a brain lesion. This is particularly helpful in brain mapping, a key approach in social neuroscience designed to determine which areas of the brain are activated during certain activities.

Society for Social Neuroscience

A dinner to discuss the challenges and opportunities in the interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience meeting (Chicago, November 2009) resulted in a series of meetings led by John Cacioppo and Jean Decety with social neuroscientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and neurologists in Argentina, Australia, Chile, China, Colombia, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Social neuroscience was defined broadly as the interdisciplinary study of the neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms underlying the emergent structures that define social species. Thus, among the participants in these meetings were scientists who used a wide variety of methods in studies of animals as well as humans, and patients as well as normal participants. The consensus also emerged that a Society for Social Neuroscience should be established to give scientists from diverse disciplines and perspectives the opportunity to meet, communicate with, and benefit from the work of each other. The international, interdisciplinary Society for social neuroscience (http://S4SN.org) was launched at the conclusion of these consultations in Auckland, New Zealand on 20 January 2010, and the inaugural meeting for the Society was held on November 12, 2010, the day prior to the 2010 Society for Neuroscience meeting (San Diego, CA).

Evolutionary argument against naturalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) is a philosophical argument asserting a problem with believing both evolution and philosophical naturalism simultaneously. The argument was first proposed by Alvin Plantinga in 1993 and "raises issues of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of mind, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers of religion". The EAAN argues that the combined belief in both evolutionary theory and naturalism is epistemically self-defeating. The argument for this is that if both evolution and naturalism are true, then the probability of having reliable cognitive faculties is low. This argument comes as an expansion of the argument from reason, although the two are separate philosophical arguments.

Development of the idea

The idea that "naturalism" undercuts its own justification was put forward by Arthur Balfour. C. S. Lewis popularised it in the first edition of his book Miracles in 1947. Similar arguments were advanced by Richard Taylor in Metaphysics, as well as by Stephen Clark, Richard Purtill and J. P. Moreland. In 2003 Victor Reppert developed a similar argument in detail in his book C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, In Defense of the Argument from Reason. Contemporary philosophers who have employed a similar argument against physical determinism are James Jordan and William Hasker.

Plantinga proposed his "evolutionary argument against naturalism" in 1993. In the twelfth chapter of his book Warrant and Proper Function, Plantinga developed Lewis' idea, and constructed two formal arguments against evolutionary naturalism. He further developed the idea in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Naturalism Defeated" and in his 2000 book Warranted Christian Belief, and expanded the idea in Naturalism Defeated?, a 2002 anthology edited by James Beilby. He also responded to several objections to the argument in his essay "Reply to Beilby's Cohorts" in Beilby's anthology.

In the 2008 publication Knowledge of God Plantinga presented a formulation of the argument that solely focused on semantic epiphenomenalism instead of the former four jointly exhaustive categories.

Plantinga repeats the argument in his 2011 book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.

Plantinga's 1993 formulation of the argument

Plantinga argues that combining naturalism and evolution is self-defeating, because, under these assumptions, the probability that humans have reliable cognitive faculties is low or inscrutable. He claimed that several thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, had seen that evolutionary naturalism seemed to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism and to the conclusion that our unreliable cognitive or belief-producing faculties cannot be trusted to produce more true beliefs than false beliefs. He claimed that "Darwin himself had worries along these lines" and quoted from an 1881 letter:

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

— Charles Darwin, to William Graham 3 July 1881

In the letter, Darwin had expressed agreement with William Graham's claim that natural laws implied purpose and the belief that the universe was "not the result of chance", but again showed his doubts about such beliefs and left the matter as insoluble. Darwin only had this doubt about questions beyond the scope of science, and thought science was well within the scope of an evolved mind. Michael Ruse said that by presenting it as "Darwin's doubt" that evolutionary naturalism is self-defeating, Plantinga failed to note that Darwin at once excused himself from philosophical matters he did not feel competent to consider. Others, such as Evan Fales, agreed that this citation allowed Plantinga to call the source of the problem EAAN addresses Darwin's Doubt. Also, contrary to Ruse's claim, Plantinga gave the name "Darwin's Doubt" not to the idea that the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is self-defeating, but rather to the view that given naturalism and evolution our cognitive faculties are unlikely to be reliable. Plantinga asserts that "this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals."

Plantinga defined:

  • N as naturalism, which he defined as "the idea that there is no such person as God or anything like God; we might think of it as high-octane atheism or perhaps atheism-plus."
  • E as the belief that human beings have evolved in conformity with current evolutionary theory
  • R as the proposition that our faculties are "reliable", where, roughly, a cognitive faculty is "reliable" if the great bulk of its deliverances are true. He specifically cited the example of a thermometer stuck at 72 °F (22 °C) placed in an environment which happened to be at 72 °F as an example of something that is not "reliable" in this sense

and suggested that the conditional probability of R given N and E, or P(R|N&E), is low or inscrutable.

Plantinga's argument began with the observation that our beliefs can only have evolutionary consequences if they affect behaviour. To put this another way, natural selection does not directly select for true beliefs, but rather for advantageous behaviours. Plantinga distinguished the various theories of mind-body interaction into four jointly exhaustive categories:

  1. Epiphenomenalism, where behaviour is not caused by beliefs. "if this way of thinking is right, beliefs would be invisible to evolution" so P(R|N&E) would be low or inscrutable.
  2. Semantic epiphenomenalism, where beliefs have a causative link to behaviour but not by virtue of their semantic content. Under this theory, a belief would be some form of long-term neuronal event. However, on this view P(R|N&E) would be low because the semantic content of beliefs would be invisible to natural selection, and it is semantic content that determines truth-value.
  3. Beliefs are causally efficacious with respect to behaviour, but maladaptive, in which case P(R|N&E) would be low, as R would be selected against.
  4. Beliefs are causally efficacious with respect to behaviour and also adaptive, but they may still be false. Since behaviour is caused by both belief and desire, and desire can lead to false belief, natural selection would have no reason for selecting true but non-adaptive beliefs over false but adaptive beliefs. Thus P(R|N&E) in this case would also be low. Plantinga pointed out that innumerable belief-desire pairs could account for a given behaviour; for example, that of a prehistoric hominid fleeing a tiger:

Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. ... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. ... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.

Thus, Plantinga argued, the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is low or inscrutable. Therefore, to assert that naturalistic evolution is true also asserts that one has a low or unknown probability of being right. This, Plantinga argued, epistemically defeats the belief that naturalistic evolution is true and that ascribing truth to naturalism and evolution is internally dubious or inconsistent.

Responses

Fitelson and Sober's response

In a 1998 paper Branden Fitelson of the University of California, Berkeley and Elliott Sober of the University of Wisconsin–Madison set out to show that the arguments presented by Plantinga contain serious errors. Plantinga construed evolutionary naturalism as the conjunction of the idea that human cognitive faculties arose through evolutionary mechanisms, and naturalism which he equated to atheism. Plantinga tried to throw doubt on this conjunction with a preliminary argument that the conjunction is probably false, and a main argument that it is self-defeating; if you believe it you should stop believing it.

First, they criticised Plantinga's use of a Bayesian framework in which he arbitrarily assigned initial probabilities without empirical evidence, predetermining the outcome in favor of traditional theism, and described this as a recipe for replacing any non-deterministic theory in the natural sciences, so that for example a probable outcome predicted by quantum mechanics would be seen as the outcome of God's will. Plantinga's use of R to mean that "the great bulk" of our beliefs are true fails to deal with the cumulative effect of adding beliefs which have variable reliability about different subjects. Plantinga asserted that the traditional theist believes being made in God's image includes a reflection of divine powers as a knower, but cognitive science finds human reasoning subject to biases and systematic error. Traditional theology is not shown to predict this varying reliability as well as science, and there is the theological problem of the omnipotent Creator producing such imperfection. They described how Plantinga set out various scenarios of belief affecting evolutionary success, but undercut the low probability he previously required when he suggested an "inscrutable" probability, and by ignoring availability of variants he fails to show that false beliefs will be equally adaptive as his claim of low probability assumes. Even if his claims of improbability were correct, that need not affect belief in evolution, and they considered it would be more sensible to accept that evolutionary processes sometimes have improbable outcomes.

They assessed Plantinga's main argument—which asserts that since the reliability of evolutionary naturalism is low or of inscrutable value, those believing it should withhold assent from its reliability, and thus withhold assent from anything else they believe including evolutionary naturalism, which is therefore self-defeating—and found it unconvincing, having already disputed his argument that the reliability is low. Even if E&N defeated the claim that 'at least 90% of our beliefs are true,' they considered that Plantinga must show that it also defeats the more modest claim that 'at least a non-negligible minority of our beliefs are true'. They considered his sentiment that high probability is required for rational belief to be repudiated by philosophical lessons such as the lottery paradox, and that each step in his argument requires principles different from those he had described. They concluded that Plantinga has drawn attention to unreliability of cognitive processes that is already taken into account by evolutionary scientists who accept that science is a fallible exercise, and appreciate the need to be as scrupulous as possible with the fallible cognitive processes available. His hyperbolic doubt as a defeater for evolutionary naturalism is equally a defeater for theists who rely on their belief that their mind was designed by a non-deceiving God, and neither "can construct a non-question-begging argument that refutes global skepticism."

In 2020 a philosophy paper was published called Does the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism Defeat God's Beliefs Which argued that if the EAAN provides the naturalist with a defeater for all of her beliefs, then an extension of it appears to provide God with a defeater for all of his beliefs.

Robbins' response

Indiana University South Bend Professor of Philosophy J. Wesley Robbins contended that Plantinga's argument applied only to Cartesian philosophies of mind but not to pragmatist philosophies of mind. Robbins' argument, stated roughly, was that while in a Cartesian mind beliefs can be identified with no reference to the environmental factors that caused them, in a pragmatic mind they are identifiable only with reference to those factors. That is to say, in a pragmatic mind beliefs would not even exist if their holder had not come in contact with external belief-producing phenomena in the first place.

Naturalism Defeated?

A collection of essays entitled Naturalism Defeated? (2002) contains responses by 11 philosophers to EAAN. According to James K. Beilby, editor of the volume, Plantinga's proposition "raises issues of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of mind, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers of religion". The responsive essays include the following:

  • William Ramsey argued that Plantinga "overlooks the most sensible way . . . to get clear on how truth can be a property of beliefs that bestows an advantage on cognitive systems". He also argued that some of our cognitive faculties are slightly unreliable, and E&N seems better suited than theism to explain this imperfection.
  • Jerry Fodor argued that there is a plausible historical scenario according to which our minds were selected because their cognitive mechanisms produced, by and large, adaptive true beliefs.
  • Evan Fales argued that Plantinga had not demonstrated that the reliability of our cognitive faculties is improbable, given Neo-Darwinism, and emphasizes that "if Plantinga's argument fails here, then he will not have shown that [N&E] is probabilistically incoherent." Also, given how expensive (in biological terms) our brain is, and considering we are rather unremarkable creatures apart from our brains, it would be quite improbable that our rational faculties be selected if unreliable. "Most of our eggs are in that basket," said Fales. Fales argued along the same as Robbins: take a mental representation, of heat, for example. Only so long as it is really caused by heat can we call it a mental representation of heat; otherwise, it is not at all a mental representation, of heat or of anything else: "so long as representations [semantics] are causally linked to the world via the syntactic structures in the brain to which they correspond [syntax], this will guarantee that syntax maps onto semantics in a generally truth-preserving way." This is a direct response to one of Plantinga's scenarios where, according to Plantinga, false-belief generating mechanisms may have been naturally selected.
  • Michael Bergmann suggested that Thomas Reid offered the resources for a commonsense (Reidian) defense of naturalism against EAAN.
  • Ernest Sosa drew on features of Descartes' epistemology to argue that while "[i]ssues of circularity do arise as to how we can rationally and knowledgeably adopt [an epistemically propitious] view about our own epistemic powers," nonetheless, "these problems are not exclusive to naturalism."
  • James Van Cleve suggested that even if the probability thesis is true, it need not deliver an undefeated defeater to R, and that even if one has a defeater for R, it doesn't follow that one has a defeater for everything.
  • Richard Otte thought that the argument "ignore[d] other information we have that would make R likely."
  • William Talbott suggested that "Plantinga has misunderstood the role of undercutting defeaters in reasoning."
  • Trenton Merricks said that "in general, inferences from low or inscrutable conditional probability to defeat are unjustified."
  • William Alston argued that the claim that P(R/N&E) is low is poorly supported; if, instead, it is inscrutable, this has no clear relevance to the claim that (1) is a defeater for N&E.

Naturalism Defeated? also included Plantinga's replies to both the critical responses contained in the book and to some objections raised by others, including Fitelson & Sober:

  • Plantinga expounded the notion of Rationality Defeaters in terms of his theory of warrant and proper function and distinguishes between Humean Defeaters and Purely Alethic Defeaters, suggesting that although a naturalist will continue to assume R "but (if he reflects on the matter) he will also think, sadly enough, that what he can't help believing is unlikely to be true."
  • Plantinga argued that semantic epiphenomenalism is very likely on N&E because, if materialism is true, beliefs would have to be neurophysiological events whose propositional content cannot plausibly enter the causal chain. He also suggests that the reliability of a cognitive process requires the truth of a substantial proportion of the beliefs it produces, and that a process which delivered beliefs whose probability of truth was in the neighbourhood of 0.5 would have a vanishingly unlikely chance of producing (say) 1000 beliefs 75% of which were true.
  • In The conditionalisation problem, Plantinga discussed the possibility that N+ i.e. "Naturalism plus R," could be a basic belief thus staving off defeat of R, suggesting that this procedure cannot be right in general otherwise every defeater could automatically be defeated, introducing the term "defeater-deflector " and initially exploring the conditions under which a defeater-deflector can be valid.
  • Plantinga concluded that the objections pose a challenge to EAAN, but that there are successful arguments against the objections.

Ruse's response

In a chapter titled 'The New Creationism: Its Philosophical Dimension', in The Cultures of Creationism, philosopher of science Michael Ruse discussed EAAN. He argued:

  • That the EAAN conflates methodological and metaphysical naturalism.
  • That "we need to make a distinction that Plantinga fudges" between "the world as we can in some sense discover" and "the world in some absolute sense, metaphysical reality if you like." Then, "Once this distinction is made, Plantinga's refutation of naturalism no longer seems so threatening."
  • That "It is certainly the case that organisms are sometimes deceived about the world of appearances and that this includes humans. Sometimes we are systematically deceived, as instructors in elementary psychology classes delight in demonstrating. Moreover, evolution can often give good reasons as to why we are deceived." We know there are misconceptions arising from selection as we can measure them against reliable touchstones, but in Plantinga's hypothesised deceptions we are deceived all the time which is "not how evolution's deceptions work". He comments that in Plantinga's thinking we have confusion between the world as we know it, and the world as it might be knowable in some ultimate way, but "If we are all in an illusion then it makes no sense to talk of illusion, for we have no touchstone of reality to make absolute judgements."

Ruse concluded his discussion of the EAAN by stating:

To be honest, even if Plantinga's argument [the EAAN] worked, I would still want to know where theism ends (and what form this theism must take) and where science can take over. Is it the case that evolution necessarily cannot function, or it is merely false and in another God-created world it might have held in some way — and if so, in what way? Plantinga has certainly not shown that the theist must be a creationist, even though his own form of theism is creationism.

C. S. Lewis framing

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

Plantinga's 2008 formulation of the argument

In the 2008 publication Knowledge of God Plantinga presented a formulation of the argument that solely focused on semantic epiphenomenalism instead of the former four jointly exhaustive categories.

Plantinga stated that from a materialist's point of view a belief will be a neuronal event. In this conception a belief will have two different sorts of properties:

  • electro-chemical or neurophysiological properties (NP properties for short)
  • and the property of having content (It will have to be the belief that p, for some proposition p).

Plantinga thought that we have something of an idea as to the history of NP properties: structures with these properties have come to exist by small increments, each increment such that it has proved to be useful in the struggle for survival. But he then asked how the content property of a belief came about: "How does it [the content] get to be associated in that way with a given proposition?"

He said that materialists offer two theories for this question: According to the first, content supervenes upon NP properties; according to the second, content is reducible to NP properties. (He noted that if content properties are reducible to NP properties, then they also supervene upon them.) He explained the two theories as follows:

  • Reducibility: A belief is a disjunction of conjunctions of NP properties.
  • Strong Supervenience (S+): For any possible worlds W and W* and any structures S and S*, if S has the same NP properties in W as S* has in W*, then S has the same content in W as S* has in W*. Supervenience can either be broadly logical supervenience or nomic supervenience.

Plantinga argued that neural structures that constitute beliefs have content, in the following way: "At a certain level of complexity, these neural structures start to display content. Perhaps this starts gradually and early on (possibly C. elegans [a small worm with a nervous system composed of only a few neurons] displays just the merest glimmer of consciousness and the merest glimmer of content), or perhaps later and more abruptly; that doesn't matter. What does matter is that at a certain level of complexity of neural structures, content appears. This is true whether content properties are reducible to NP properties or supervene on them." So given materialism some neural structures at a given level of complexity acquire content and become beliefs. The question then is according to Plantinga: "what is the likelihood, given materialism, that the content that thus arises is in fact true?"

This way of proceeding replaced the first step of Plantinga's earlier versions of the argument.

Criticism by eliminative materialists

The EAAN claims that according to naturalism, evolution must operate on beliefs, desires, and other contentful mental states for a biological organism to have a reliable cognitive faculty such as the brain. Eliminative materialism maintains that propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, among other intentional mental states that have content, cannot be explained on naturalism and therefore concludes that such entities do not exist. It is not clear whether the EAAN would be successful against a conception of naturalism which accepts eliminative materialism to be the correct scientific account of human cognition.

EAAN, intelligent design and theistic evolution

In his discussion of EAAN, Michael Ruse described Plantinga as believing in the truth of the attack on evolution presented by intelligent design advocate Phillip E. Johnson, and as having endorsed Johnson's book Darwin on Trial. Ruse said that Plantinga took the conflict between science and religion further than Johnson, seeing it as not just a clash between the philosophies of naturalism and theism, but as an attack on the true philosophy of theism by what he considers the incoherent and inconsistent philosophy of naturalism.

Plantinga has stated that EAAN is not directed against "the theory of evolution, or the claim that human beings have evolved from simian ancestors, or anything in that neighborhood". He also claimed that the problems raised by EAAN do not apply to the conjunction of theism and contemporary evolutionary science. In his essay Evolution and Design Plantinga outlines different ways in which theism and evolutionary theory can be combined.

In the foreword to the anthology Naturalism Defeated? James Beilby wrote: "Plantinga's argument should not be mistaken for an argument against evolutionary theory in general or, more specifically, against the claim that humans might have evolved from more primitive life forms. Rather, the purpose of his argument is to show that the denial of the existence of a creative deity is problematic."

Self-reference

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The ancient symbol Ouroboros, a dragon that continually consumes itself, denotes self-reference.

Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philosophy, it also refers to the ability of a subject to speak of or refer to itself, that is, to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person nominative singular pronoun "I" in English.

Self-reference is studied and has applications in mathematics, philosophy, computer programming, second-order cybernetics, and linguistics, as well as in humor. Self-referential statements are sometimes paradoxical, and can also be considered recursive.

In logic, mathematics and computing

In classical philosophy, paradoxes were created by self-referential concepts such as the omnipotence paradox of asking if it was possible for a being to exist so powerful that it could create a stone that it could not lift. The Epimenides paradox, 'All Cretans are liars' when uttered by an ancient Greek Cretan was one of the first recorded versions. Contemporary philosophy sometimes employs the same technique to demonstrate that a supposed concept is meaningless or ill-defined.

In mathematics and computability theory, self-reference (also known as impredicativity) is the key concept in proving limitations of many systems. Gödel's theorem uses it to show that no formal consistent system of mathematics can ever contain all possible mathematical truths, because it cannot prove some truths about its own structure. The halting problem equivalent, in computation theory, shows that there is always some task that a computer cannot perform, namely reasoning about itself. These proofs relate to a long tradition of mathematical paradoxes such as Russell's paradox and Berry's paradox, and ultimately to classical philosophical paradoxes.

In game theory, undefined behaviors can occur where two players must model each other's mental states and behaviors, leading to infinite regress.

In computer programming, self-reference occurs in reflection, where a program can read or modify its own instructions like any other data. Numerous programming languages support reflection to some extent with varying degrees of expressiveness. Additionally, self-reference is seen in recursion (related to the mathematical recurrence relation) in functional programming, where a code structure refers back to itself during computation. 'Taming' self-reference from potentially paradoxical concepts into well-behaved recursions has been one of the great successes of computer science, and is now used routinely in, for example, writing compilers using the 'meta-language' ML. Using a compiler to compile itself is known as bootstrapping. Self-modifying code is possible to write (programs which operate on themselves), both with assembler and with functional languages such as Lisp, but is generally discouraged in real-world programming. Computing hardware makes fundamental use of self-reference in flip-flops, the basic units of digital memory, which convert potentially paradoxical logical self-relations into memory by expanding their terms over time. Thinking in terms of self-reference is a pervasive part of programmer culture, with many programs and acronyms named self-referentially as a form of humor, such as GNU ('GNU's not Unix') and PINE ('Pine is not Elm'). The GNU Hurd is named for a pair of mutually self-referential acronyms.

Tupper's self-referential formula is a mathematical curiosity which plots an image of its own formula.

In biology

The biology of self-replication is self-referential, as embodied by DNA and RNA replication mechanisms. Models of self-replication are found in Conway's Game of Life and have inspired engineering systems such as the self-replicating 3D printer RepRap.

In art

graffiti art on a wall stating "SORRY ABOUT YOUR WALL"
A self-referencing work of graffiti apologizing for its own existence
 
Self-referencial graffiti. The painter drawn on a wall erases his own graffiti, and may be erased himself by the next facade cleaner.

Self-reference occurs in literature and film when an author refers to his or her own work in the context of the work itself. Examples include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, Denis Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maître, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, many stories by Nikolai Gogol, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Federico Fellini's and Bryan Forbes's The L-Shaped Room. Speculative fiction writer Samuel R. Delany makes use of this in his novels Nova and Dhalgren. In the former, Katin (a space-faring novelist) is wary of a long-standing curse wherein a novelist dies before completing any given work. Nova ends mid-sentence, thus lending credence to the curse and the realization that the novelist is the author of the story; likewise, throughout Dhalgren, Delany has a protagonist simply named The Kid (or Kidd, in some sections), whose life and work are mirror images of themselves and of the novel itself. In the sci-fi spoof film Spaceballs, Director Mel Brooks includes a scene wherein the evil characters are viewing a VHS copy of their own story, which shows them watching themselves "watching themselves", ad infinitum. Perhaps the earliest example is in Homer's Iliad, where Helen of Troy laments: "for generations still unborn/we will live in song" (appearing in the song itself).

Self-reference in art is closely related to the concepts of breaking the fourth wall and meta-reference, which often involve self-reference. The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges play with self-reference and related paradoxes in many ways. Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape consists entirely of the protagonist listening to and making recordings of himself, mostly about other recordings. During the 1990s and 2000s filmic self-reference was a popular part of the rubber reality movement, notably in Charlie Kaufman's films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, the latter pushing the concept arguably to its breaking point as it attempts to portray its own creation, in a dramatized version of the Droste effect.

Various creation myths invoke self-reference to solve the problem of what created the creator. For example, the Egyptian creation myth has a god swallowing his own semen to create himself. The Ouroboros is a mythical dragon which eats itself.

The Quran includes numerous instances of self-referentiality.

The surrealist painter René Magritte is famous for his self-referential works. His painting The Treachery of Images, includes the words "this is not a pipe", the truth of which depends entirely on whether the word ceci (in English, "this") refers to the pipe depicted—or to the painting or the word or sentence itself. M.C. Escher's art also contains many self-referential concepts such as hands drawing themselves.

In language

A word that describes itself is called an autological word (or autonym). This generally applies to adjectives, for example sesquipedalian (i.e. "sesquipedalian" is a sesquipedalian word), but can also apply to other parts of speech, such as TLA, as a three-letter abbreviation for "three-letter abbreviation".

A sentence which inventories its own letters and punctuation marks is called an autogram.

There is a special case of meta-sentence in which the content of the sentence in the metalanguage and the content of the sentence in the object language are the same. Such a sentence is referring to itself. However some meta-sentences of this type can lead to paradoxes. "This is a sentence." can be considered to be a self-referential meta-sentence which is obviously true. However "This sentence is false" is a meta-sentence which leads to a self-referential paradox. Such sentences can lead to problems, for example, in law, where statements bringing laws into existence can contradict one another or themselves. Kurt Gödel claimed to have found such a paradox in the US constitution at his citizenship ceremony.

Self-reference occasionally occurs in the media when it is required to write about itself, for example the BBC reporting on job cuts at the BBC. Notable encyclopedias may be required to feature articles about themselves, such as Wikipedia's article on Wikipedia.

Fumblerules are a list of rules of good grammar and writing, demonstrated through sentences that violate those very rules, such as "Avoid cliches like the plague" and "Don't use no double negatives". The term was coined in a published list of such rules by William Safire.

In popular culture

 

Self-refuting idea

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A self-refuting idea or self-defeating idea is an idea or statement whose falsehood is a logical consequence of the act or situation of holding them to be true. Many ideas are called self-refuting by their detractors, and such accusations are therefore almost always controversial, with defenders stating that the idea is being misunderstood or that the argument is invalid. For these reasons, none of the ideas below are unambiguously or incontrovertibly self-refuting. These ideas are often used as axioms, which are definitions taken to be true (tautological assumptions), and cannot be used to test themselves, for doing so would lead to only two consequences: consistency (circular reasoning) or exception (self-contradiction). It is important to know that the conclusion of an argument that is self-refuting is not necessarily false, since it could be supported by another, more valid, argument.

Variations

Directly self-denying statements

The Epimenides paradox is a statement of the form "this statement is false". Such statements troubled philosophers, especially when there was a serious attempt to formalize the foundations of logic. Bertrand Russell developed his "Theory of Types" to formalize a set of rules that would prevent such statements (more formally Russell's paradox) being made in symbolic logic. This work has led to the modern formulation of axiomatic set theory. While Russell's formalization did not contain such paradoxes, Kurt Gödel showed that it must contain independent statements. Any logical system that is rich enough to contain elementary arithmetic contains at least one proposition whose interpretation is this proposition is unprovable (from within the logical system concerned), and hence no such system can be both complete and consistent.

Indirectly self-denying statements or "fallacy of the stolen concept"

Objectivists define the fallacy of the stolen concept: the act of using a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends. An example of the stolen concept fallacy is anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement, "All property is theft".

While discussing the hierarchical nature of knowledge, Nathaniel Branden states, "Theft" is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of "rightfully owned property"—and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner's consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as "theft." Thus, the statement "All property is theft" has an internal contradiction: to use the concept "theft" while denying the validity of the concept of "property," is to use "theft" as a concept to which one has no logical right—that is, as a stolen concept.

Others have said the statement is fallacious only on a superficial reading of Proudhon, devoid of context. Proudhon used the term "property" with reference to claimed ownership in land, factories, etc. He believed such claims were illegitimate, and thus a form of theft from the commons. Proudhon explicitly states that the phrase "property is theft" is analogous to the phrase "slavery is murder". According to Proudhon, the slave, though biologically alive, is clearly in a sense "murdered". The "theft" in his terminology does not refer to ownership any more than the "murder" refers directly to physiological death, but rather both are meant as terms to represent a denial of specific rights. Others point out that the difference between the two examples is that "slavery is murder", unlike "property is theft", does not make a statement that denies the validity of one of the concepts it utilizes. Proudhon does not actually say all property is theft—he is referring to a very specific kind of property rights. Proudhon favored another kind, which he called possession, based on occupancy and use, a sort of usufruct rights idea. In What is Property? he therefore says with the apparent contradiction "property is theft" to denote one sort he feels is this, "property is liberty", referring to the kind he favored, and "property is impossible" to make it clear any sort of property rights cannot be absolute. Separate concepts are therefore laid out in a way that can be confusing, especially if one is not familiar with them.

In logic

Self-refutation plays an important role in some inconsistency tolerant logics (e.g. paraconsistent logics and direct logic) that lack proof by contradiction. For example, the negation of a proposition can be proved by showing that the proposition implies its own negation. Likewise, it can be inferred that a proposition cannot be proved by (1) showing that a proof would imply the negation of the proposition or by (2) showing a proof would imply that the negation of the proposition can be proved.

Examples

Brain in a vat

Brain in a vat is a thought experiment in philosophy which is premised upon the skeptical hypothesis that one could actually be a brain in a vat receiving electrical input identical to that which would be coming from the nervous system. Similar premises are found in Descartes's evil demon and dream argument. Philosopher Hilary Putnam argues that some versions of the thought experiment would be inconsistent due to semantic externalism. For a brain in a vat that had only ever experienced the simulated world, the statement "I'm not a brain in a vat" is true. The only possible brains and vats it could be referring to are simulated, and it is true that it is not a simulated brain in a simulated vat. By the same argument, saying "I'm a brain in a vat" would be false.

Determinism

It has been argued, particularly by Christian apologists, that to call determinism a rational statement is doubly self-defeating.

  1. To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist is impossible
  2. Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each other's minds.

The argument does not succeed against the compatibilistic view, since in the latter there is no conflict between determinism and free will. Moreover, the argument fails if one denies either of the above or its implicit implications. That is, one could avoid the argument by maintaining that free will is not required for rationality or for trying to change one's mind. The latter is a sensible position insofar as one could be determined to try to persuade someone of something, and the listener could be determined to accept it. There is no internal contradiction in that view.

One can also consider a deterministic computer algorithm which is able to make a correct conclusion, such as a mathematical calculation or fingerprint identification. However, on some notions of "rationality", such programs are themselves not rational because they simply follow a certain deterministic pre-programmed path and nothing more. This does not apply if one takes on a position with regards to rationality analogous to compatibilism, namely, one could simply view rationality as the property of correctly executing the laws of logic, in which case there simply is no contradiction with determinism. The contradiction would arise if one defines "rationality" in a manner that is incompatibilist. Some argue that machines cannot "think", and if rationality is defined so that it requires human-like thought, this might pose a problem. But the view that machines cannot "think" in principle is rejected by most philosophers who accept a computational theory of mind.

Ethical egoism

It has been argued that extreme ethical egoism is self-defeating. Faced with a situation of limited resources, egoists would consume as much of the resource as they could, making the overall situation worse for everybody. Egoists may respond that if the situation becomes worse for everybody, that would include the egoist, so it is not, in fact, in his or her rational self-interest to take things to such extremes. However, the (unregulated) tragedy of the commons and the (one off) prisoner's dilemma are cases in which, on the one hand, it is rational for an individual to seek to take as much as possible even though that makes things worse for everybody, and on the other hand, those cases are not self-refuting since that behaviour remains rational even though it is ultimately self-defeating, i.e. self-defeating does not imply self-refuting. Egoists might respond that a tragedy of the commons, however, assumes some degree of public land. That is, a commons forbidding homesteading requires regulation. Thus, an argument against the tragedy of the commons, in this belief system, is fundamentally an argument for private property rights and the system that recognizes both property rights and rational self-interest—capitalism. More generally, egoists might say that an increasing respect for individual rights uniquely allows for increasing wealth creation and increasing usable resources despite a fixed amount of raw materials (e.g. the West pre-1776 versus post-1776, East versus West Germany, Hong Kong versus mainland China, North versus South Korea, etc.).

Eliminative materialism

The philosopher Mary Midgley states that the idea that nothing exists except matter is also self-refuting because if it were true neither it, nor any other idea, would exist, and similarly that an argument to that effect would be self-refuting because it would deny its own existence. Several other philosophers also argue that eliminative materialism is self-refuting.

However, other forms of materialism may escape this kind of argument because, rather than eliminating the mental, they seek to identify it with, or reduce it to, the material. For instance, identity theorists such as J. J. C. Smart, Ullin Place and E. G. Boring state that ideas exist materially as patterns of neural structure and activity. Christian apologist J.P. Moreland states that such arguments are based on semantics.

Epimenides paradox

The first notable self-refuting idea is the Epimenides paradox, a statement attributed to Epimenides, a Cretan philosopher, that "All Cretans are liars". This cannot be true if uttered by a Cretan.

A more common example is the self-refuting statement "I am lying" (because the first statement allows the possibility "some Cretans do not speak the truth", the speaker being one of them). The second statement has no third alternative—the speaker's statement is either true or false.

Evolutionary naturalism

Alvin Plantinga argues in his evolutionary argument against naturalism that the combination of naturalism and evolution is "in a certain interesting way self-defeating" because if it were true there would be insufficient grounds to believe that human cognitive faculties are reliable. Consequently, if human cognitive abilities are unreliable, then any human construct, which by implication utilizes cognitive faculties, such as evolutionary theory, would be undermined. In this particular case, it is the confluence of evolutionary theory and naturalism that, according to the argument, undermine the reason for believing themselves to be true. Since Plantinga originally formulated the argument, a few theistic philosophers and Christian apologists have agreed. There has also been a considerable backlash of papers arguing that the argument is flawed in a number of ways, one of the more recent ones published in 2011 by Feng Ye (see also the references in the Evolutionary argument against naturalism article).

Foundationalism

The philosopher Anthony Kenny argues that the idea, "common to theists like Aquinas and Descartes and to an atheist like Russell" that "Rational belief [is] either self-evident or based directly or indirectly on what is evident" (which he termed "foundationalism" following Plantinga) is self-refuting on the basis that this idea is itself neither self-evident nor based directly or indirectly on what is evident and that the same applies to other formulations of such foundationalism. However, the self-evident impossibility of infinite regress can be offered as a justification for foundationalism. Following the identification of problems with "naive foundationalism", the term is now often used to focus on incorrigible beliefs (modern foundationalism), or basic beliefs (reformed foundationalism).

Philosophical skepticism

Philosophical skeptics state that "nothing can be known". This has caused some to ask if nothing can be known then can that statement itself be known, or is it self-refuting. One very old response to this problem is academic skepticism: an exception is made for the skeptic's own statement. This leads to further debate about consistency and special pleading. Another response is that one should suspend belief completely (i.e. pyrrhonian scepticism). However it is not clear whether one can hold this belief consistently since one needs to believe that one should suspend belief. It can be argued that the pyrrhonian could suspend belief on every such principle as one needing to believe something.

Relativism

It is often stated that relativism about truth must be applied to itself. The cruder form of the argument concludes that since the relativist is calling relativism an absolute truth, it leads to a contradiction. Relativists often rejoin that in fact relativism is only relatively true, leading to a subtler problem: the absolutist, the relativist's opponent, is perfectly entitled, by the relativist's own standards, to reject relativism. That is, the relativist's arguments can have no normative force over someone who has different basic beliefs.

Solipsism

On the face of it, a statement of solipsism is — at least performatively — self-defeating, because a statement assumes another person to whom the statement is made. (That is to say, an unexpressed private belief in solipsism is not self-refuting). This, of course, assumes the solipsist would not communicate with a hallucination, even if just for self-amusement.

One response is that the solipsist's interlocutor is in fact a figment of their imagination, but since their interlocutor knows they are not, they are not going to be convinced.

Verification and falsification principles

The statements "statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified" and "statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically falsified" have both been called self-refuting on the basis that they can neither be empirically verified nor falsified. Similar arguments have been made for statements such as "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true", which was a problem for logical positivism.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is an unusual example of a self-refuting argument, in that Ludwig Wittgenstein explicitly admits to the issue at the end of the work:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)

However, this idea can be solved in the sense that, even if the argument itself is self-refuting, the effects of the argument elicit understandings that go beyond the argument itself. Søren Kierkegaard describes it as such:

[The reader] can understand that the understanding is a revocation--the understanding with him as the sole reader is indeed the revocation of the book. He can understand that to write a book and to revoke it is not the same as refraining from writing it, that to write a book that does not demand to be important for anyone is still not the same as letting it be unwritten.

Cryogenics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenics...