On the Argument from Reason: Rationality
As I stated in order to introduce the Argument from Reason in my first post in this series (concerning doxastic voluntarism):
CS Lewis fashioned the Argument from Reason and it has since been taken on by Christian philosophers and apologists such as Alvin Plantinga (in the form of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism - EAAN) and Victor Reppert. For a bit of background reading, it is well worth grabbing John Beversluis's excellent C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (UK). It is also worth reading "Anscombe’s Critique of C. S. Lewis’s Revised Argument from Reason" by Gregory Bassham.
The argument broadly goes like this, as Lewis quotes of JBS Haldane in Miracles:
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
The idea is that naturalism as a worldview is either self-refuting or indefensible. It can be formalised as follows:
1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
2. If naturalism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no belief is rationally inferred (from 1 and 2).
4. We have good reason to accept naturalism only if it can be rationally inferred from good evidence.
5. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, good reason to accept naturalism.
I went on to write about the Fallacy of Division and emergent properties.
Or, simply put, determinism renders naturalism rationally indefensible.
(Just as an aside, it is worth looking at Graham Oppy's criticism of Victor Reppert in conflating inference with logic in "The Argument from Reason (2)".)
Reason-explanations and causal explanations
Elizabeth Anscombe, in her famous disagreements with Lewis, picked apart Lewis's use of "reason" ("I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true"), arguing that reasons-explanations are not causal explanations. Anscombe sets out these different reasons, attacking Lewis on a number of points, not least that these can be mutually consistent:
- naturalistic causal explanations, typically subsuming the event in question under some physical law
- logical explanations, showing the logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion
- psychological explanations, explaining why a person believes he/she does
- personal history explanations, explaining how, in the course of someone's personal history, they came to hold a particular belief
The point is, for Anscombe, that if type 1 explanations are given for a belief, then the other types can't be true; but she insists that they can coexist. What this means is that "Why did Peter boil the kettle" can be answered in a number of different ways, from "because he wanted a cup of tea", to talking of a history of tea-drinking, to talk of biochemistry, physics and neurology,
But let's sidestep this issue for the time being to concentrate on the term "rationality". The main point in this article is that it prompts the question about what rationality really is.
The Oxford Languages definition of rationality is: the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic.
When we accuse another human of not being rational, we are essentially saying that they are not being logical.
The first premise of the argument is: No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
If we parse this down, simply put, someone can't believe something if they use logic to arrive at the belief and these logical processes are as a result of nonrational things.
Computers and other animals
A computer is rational and adheres strictly (much better than humans) to logic and rationality, if the word is described in logical terms. Computers use AND/OR gates and all sorts of logical mechanisms and processes. But a computer isn't alive. It is made of inanimate pieces of natural matter. Rationality is thus not the exclusive domain of humans. Indeed, other animals show rationality to differing degrees. Dogs, primates and so on...
I think this is a key point because adherents to the Argument from Reason often fail to properly define rationality, and often seem to conflate it with deliberation - thinking about rational ideas. But deliberating on a decision is actually just very inefficient (qua poor) rationality. If we were to be purely rational in our computations, then our conclusions would be instantaneous. This is why God, if she was to exist, wouldn't think, wouldn't deliberate. Perfect decisions and decision-making would be non-deliberative.
This is a really important point to make; rationality isn't just thinking or deliberating. These are just very crappy applications of, or attempts to arrive at, rationality. In this way, computers utilising logic are much more efficient rationalisers than humans.
Rationality, for me anyway, is the application of logic and logical rules and this has pragmatic implications, as seen in the last post. And good logic is logic from which usefulness can be derived. Otherwise, logic would be rubbish. If, for the sake of argument, logic and rationality produced uselessness or deleterious consequences, then no entity would favour it since they would end up not existing due to its negative consequences. Rationality is useful, and that is why we have evolved to use it.
To explicitly lay this out, if a computer can be defined as rational, then Lewis's argument falls apart straight away. If they can't be defined as rational, in what way is this so? In what way is a computer categorically different to a human in application of logic that denies them the label of rational or using rationality?
Reppert's defence
Victor Reppert essentially defends the computer issue why saying that computers depend on the rational causal design of humans: "computers function as they do because human beings have constructed them endowed with rational insight". Thus he is not disputing the fact that computers use reason or rationality, only that this is programmed and therefore supervenient upon human rationality. If all humans were to die in a pandemic, yet computers carried on working, I wonder what his position would be. We are talking about different types of causality here. There would appear to be a serious case of begging the question here concerning whether nonrational things can cause rational things.
Notwithstanding this, we have a simple acceptance by Reppert that a computer functioning without human interference, on its own, as this laptop will do if I walk away from it, is using nonrational nuts and bolts to do rational processes. This is prima facie evidence against the Argument from Reason (AfR) to which the most famous modern proponent doesn't disagree. Anything beyond the remit of reason - in other words, consciousness or some other idea - then becomes a different argument. But Lewis and Reppert are not making Arguments from Consciousness (AfC).
As Richard Carrier states (before and after explaining it in greater detail):
Now, this all refers to reason simpliciter, the basic processes of deduction and induction, without reference to consciousness. And Reppert does mean Reason, i.e. reason in a sense that is dependent on consciousness, because he includes not just natural reason, but the technology of reason. But I have already addressed the problem of conflating those two things. Naturalists have no problem accounting for the natural selection of natural reason. Likewise, the existence of purely physical machines that can engage in natural reason proves that there is no metaphysical problem for naturalists in inferring the same sort of thing for human reason. And Naturalists have no problem accounting for how an animal with a highly developed natural reason could have discovered and refined a technology of reason. So there is nothing left to be explained—except perhaps how consciousness is produced mechanically, since that appears to be necessary for the exceptional performance required by any animal that relies on culture, even if consciousness is not required for a less impressive performance of all the same functions of natural reason (which computers even today can accomplish). But again, that is not relevant to the AfR as such, but an AfC.
Whether a computer can "see" or be aware of the use of such logic is, I think, irrelevant to the AfR and becomes one about self-awareness and consciousness.
Torley's rejection
Vincent Torley set out a number of issues concerning these ideas in the context of abortion, including:
Jonathan talks of “our rational nature”. – But how does a non-rational process (i.e. evolution) produce a rational nature? – How would the very first supposedly rational creature know it was rational?
Well, if we observe something, and then give that thing a label, then that's how. Technically, we would need to evolve complex language and communication, as well as decent sensory organs. With that, we can start to understand the world. Logic is a language of description about the world that we use because we can and it's useful. I posit that this person thinks he's being clever by offering one of these eyebrow-raising "thoughtful" questions, without realising that the question is a bit empty.
"How would the very first supposedly seeing creature know it was seeing?" You could replace the words there with any kind of idea, but what the question really is, is the Cartesian "How do we know anything?" Descartes answered this by saying we only know one thing to be indubitably true - that the thinking entity exists - cogito ergo sum. Other than that, it is all ranges of probability.
We know we are rational because we define rationality (R) as X, observe ourselves having X and say (using logic), "R is X; we have X; therefore, we have R." His question is, arguably, "How do we know we have X?" and this will come down to axioms and probabilities. We don't know (indubitably) we are not in The Matrix, but we can use some useful arguments to try to answer that.
Perhaps, for any form of suitably complex life, (potential) grasp of logic is a priori? Other animals appear to have a grasp of simple rationality, including dogs. Pavlov's Dogs looks at a form of intuitive inductive reasoning (inferences), whereby inductive reasoning is inbuilt into the dogs' physiology. If someone wants to make sweeping statements as above, perhaps they should read up on certain ideas first: they could start off with, say, the Wikipedia entry on "Animal Cognition". Certain species are adept at problem-solving, which requires reasoning and rationality, even though they may not be aware of that rationality in the way humans are.
This kind of rationality could be seen in the same way as computers. Is the kind of rationality that supposedly requires non-deterministic rational processes merely and explicitly applicable to humans? What about other apparently rational (to differing degrees) animals? What happens when they get closer and closer to what are sometimes called situation-action organisms that more closely approximate computers? At the far end, this would be a light-sensitive amoeba or some such thing. At the other end of the continuum, we have humans. Is it only human cognition that Lewis's argument refers to and, if so, how so?
Do any of these animals know they are rational? No, because they don't understand the word or those concepts. Why? Because they lack the language. Language and ideas are coextensive. Early humans would not have understood love or pride in any definitional sense (they might know they are feeling a thing that we might call pride). These ideas, or at least the understanding of these ideas, are built up upon language. the more complex the idea to understand, the greater the range, understanding and application of language needed to understand or know these things.
And yes, we need to define know.
Let's return to the opening premises again:
1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
2. If naturalism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
Rationality is used or exhibited by computers, and such an explanation can be given for this process in terms of fundamentally nonrational causes - atoms, molecules and wave functions. This seems to refer back to the Fallacy of Division as previously mentioned.
I would disagree with the first few premises to reword it like this:
1. Beliefs can be rationally inferred (or otherwise) and such inferences can be and are explained in terms of nonrational causes. In fact, no other explanation makes any sense of rational inference to belief.
2. Naturalism is true, and there is no problem in explaining it.
Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook:
A Tippling Philosopher
You can also buy me a cuppa. Or buy some of my awesome ATP merchandise! Please... It justifies me continuing to do this!