OTOH, here is a short article from my favorite blogger, The Maverick Philosopher, that excoriates those of us asking for plain english. He seems to think that we are lazy or unable to understand advanced concepts.
Bull****, I say. If a person truly understands what they are saying, they can say it in a way that almost anyone who cares to, can understand. It’s hard work to translate the technical terms into ordinary language, but it can and should be done.
I am disappointed in the Maverick Philosopher. But I will continue to read him every day.

maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/ … tting.html

in all fairness…in the spider keeping hobby (and other inverts, to be fair…less so with snakes), we do have a definite bias towards using scientific names rather than common names. i tend to cringe when i hear people say “Costa Rican Tiger Rump” when they could say Cyclosternum fasciatum, for example…the latter is CLEARLY cooler…and a google image reveals wonders for those who are unsure
when it comes to this sort of stuff, though, it can be quite a lot of googling…and by the time you’re done, you’ve forgotten the point of the sentence you were reading

Very much so, James. I was just thinking I should have taken the psychology elective instead of the speech elective . . . but then I read a few more sentences and decided I would definitely have failed it. Maybe advanced Swahili would have been easier.

almost definitely lol

OOPS! I meant philosophy not psychology! See? I can’t even get that right!

And so you should be, Dave. George Orwell, who knew a little bit about writing, listed his ‘rules of writing’ in an essay he wrote in 1946 entitled ‘Politics and the English language’. Here they are:

The main target of George’s essay was the use of “political language” - language “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. He’d be turning in his grave if he were around today to hear politicians talking about war and using the term ‘collateral damage’ instead of ‘killing of innocent civilians’. But he was also dead against the use of unncessarily obscure or ‘literary’ language.

Sometimes long words *are *the right words, even the *only *words. And difficult subjects sometimes require difficult language - perhaps because the things being talked about are only talked about in very specific circumstances, by a relatively small group of people.

But very often this sort of sesquipedalianism is indulged in by people with just enough eductation to know a few long words, but not enough to make their meaning clear using plain English. Such people often resort to the excessively supernumary utilisation of esoteric, polysyllabic phraseology to obscure the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about - or indeed that even if they did, it wouldn’t be worth hearing anyway.

All the best

Johnny

True story: I was rightfully banned from MavPhil’s blog years ago for being utterly impolite to one of his regular atheistic guests. A truly shameful memory. I still recall it today on a regular basis to remind myself that I can too easily fall into competitive gamesmanship. (The fact that I was technically correct was no excuse.)

I don’t know whether the ban was temporary or not, but in repentance for what I did I treat it as permanent. (Just to clarify that he himself may not have permabanned me.)

Holy bleat, someone thinks I write beautifully clear English in exegesis!?!? {looking at my own exegetical notes}

So, yeah, um… that post in less technical language… (I was really replying to Paidion, and wasn’t thinking about trying to make it more accessible to other readers. I mean, it’s a rather obscure topic anyway…)

I’ll see what I can do.

You guys crack me up

Dangit, plain English takes longer to do. Y’all know that, right?!

Okay, to recap for a wider audience what I was replying to from Paidion:

Read his post for more details and examples, but those quotes provide a quick gist.

My replies boiled down to two parts. I’ll try to use plainer language, but that means talking about them at more length. Readers can skip down to the asterik line for the tl;dr version.

A.) The problem he’s talking about doesn’t apply to deductive reasoning, where certain conclusions are validly drawn from premises (as in math for example – or maths as our British friends more properly abbreviate mathematics ).

The problem he’s talking about applies to inductive reasoning, where we intuitively weigh likelihoods to reach expectations about truth. Abductive reasoning is a special class of inductive reasoning where instead of starting with evidence and generalizing an idea, we start with an idea and then check to see how well the evidence fits the idea.

There are disputes among philosophers and other people who study the logic of how we think (which is called epistemology) about whether we use a mixture of all three methods, or whether anyone ever really uses deductive reasoning in practical practice (the procedure being too ideal for actual human thinking), but most such thinkers agree we use some of all three (if they admit humans think at all, which weirdly also gets disputed quite a bit, especially where the topic bumps into the question of whether humans show evidence of behaving in ways categorically different from what Nature could ever produce).

Pretty much everyone agrees we use more inductive or abductive than deductive reasoning, though, because those two types of reasoning are how we deal with less than perfect evidence sets. Which is by far most of the time. Based on a study where I sat around for a few minutes and thought of random typical examples of thinking and then tallying those up I got a picture in my head of a relative proportion of much more than evenly balanced. Which is a pretty typical example of common inductive reasoning. But I expect anyone will arrive at the same result if you try. Based on my imagining trying the same experiment multiple times and coming up with the same result, thus confirming my initial idea by checking whether the evidence fits it. Also a pretty typical example of common abductive reasoning!

The problem is that ab/in-ductive reasoning leads to results which are merely probable, not strictly certain. And not even merely probable in the mathematic sense of probability! – although that’s obviously kind of related, too, and it’s very easy to slip into saying things like I’m at least 94% sure that 100% of people use ab/in-ductive reason at least 80% of the time. You just saw how I got to those results, though! That wasn’t even remotely a mathematic estimation of probabilities! (Or at best it was only remotely like that.)

Yet I feel really really really confident that my inductive (and abductive) expectations are true about the actual facts of how often humans use induction and abduction instead of deduction.

But since I cannot be formally certain about the answer, how can I say with any seriously accurate meaning that I know how often humans use inductive and abductive reasoning instead of deduction? Even if most readers chime in and say, yep, y’all checked a sample of your typical reasonings, and they were mostly abductive and inductive methods, thus lending confirmational strength to my hypothesis (increasing the abductive result in my estimation) – can I really have knowledge this way that my theory is true?

I’ll briefly note in passing that this touches on the debates about biological evolutionary theory: it’s a theory about what a large set of evidence implies about facts, because we don’t have all the facts, and never will have all the facts, but isn’t there a point at which a person affirming some version of b.e.t like neo-Darwinian gradualism can legitimately say they know it’s true, and that b.e.t is real knowledge compared to, say, descent with variation from special creation? In other words, “It’s only a theory, it isn’t true, stop talking like it’s true!” “It isn’t just a theory, it’s real discovered knowledge about facts, based on valid implications of accurate evidence, it’s true!” This form of the disagreement isn’t over whether the evidence has been accurately understood, or is even accurately reported, nor about the validity of reasoning from the evidence, but about whether a theory can ever result in real knowledge. The same challenge can be and often is aimed at theists by atheists (and vice versa), basically saying that their inferences are only theories and shouldn’t be treated as actual knowledge. Thus inspiring the topic of Keith’s article.

(I will also briefly note in passing that I will temp-ban the first person who insults someone else over this in this thread. TEST THE PINTOS OF MY BOTTLED JUDGMENT AT YOUR PERIL! {obscure BadLipReading reference})

Back to my (A) reply: regardless of whether inductive or abductive reasoning can legitimately lead to true knowledge, those problems don’t (or mostly don’t) apply to deductive reasoning. We can prudently check whether the premises are actually factual (whether Socrates is really a man, or whether all men are mortal – which themselves may be inductive or abductive inferences!), but if we can ascertain the premises, and if we can ascertain that the premises are sufficiently exhaustive (we haven’t missed an important principle or fact somewhere), we can reach a valid conclusion (assuming we’re competent at validly reasoning): Socrates is mortal.

(That’s the classic example of the “syllogism” form of a deductive argument, by the way.)

We can know Socrates is mortal – if we know prior facts (and are competent at putting them together). Some people would reply that in practical practice the attempt at getting a deductive argument relies on inductive and/or abductive results, which fatally salt the attempt at sure knowledge by this route; but that is why I said (following Lewis, btw) that my knowledge that 2 + 2 = 4 doesn’t depend on my never having caught them behaving otherwise, even if as a historical fact of my life I tried that out various ways as a child (as my nieces are in various stages of doing with math right now. Maths. )

This is where I wanted to quote Lewis on the differences between inductive expectation and actual knowledge, but I’ll get back to that later (probably in a subsequent post).

B.) My other line of reply was that, even if we discount deductive reasoning (for whatever reason, pun intended ), and stick with ab/in-ductive reasoning methods, this can still meet the standard criterias Paidion (correctly) reported for knowledge. The third criteria, as Paidion (also correctly) noted, can vanish up its own butt trying to meet standards of sufficiency; which is one big reason why some epistemologists (philosophers and other people who think about thinking) get nervous about whether any human mental state can qualify as knowledge. Including Keith in his article.

But while standards of sufficiency are important to try to meet, a rational agent (someone who actively thinks, not just reacts and counter-reacts for various results like a calculator machine being pressed in various ways) is ultimately personally responsible for actively deciding what standards he or she will accept for sufficiency on whatever topic. Imposing, on an agent, an infinite regression or other solvently sceptical standard of sufficiency (so that no sufficiency is ever sufficiently sufficient, so to speak) is intellectual terrorism, and an agent at least has the ability (maybe also the ethical right) to stand up against that and refuse to be bullied by an imposition of epistemic hopelessness.

(Quietly insert connections to the recent gunfights here on various topics as you wish, BUT TEST THE PINTOS OF MY BOTTLED JUDGMENT ETC.! )

And yes, I acknowledge atheists have that ability (and right, for what it’s worth) just as much as theists do.

What this means, in practical practice, is that if a person believes P (meeting criteria #1), that person (X) already thinks she has sufficient evidence that P is true (meeting criteria #3). You or I may think she doesn’t have sufficient evidence, but you and I aren’t her.

(This is related to the importance of avoiding the “externalistic fallacy”, where an analyst’s reasoning becomes mistaken for the reasoning or even the rationality of the object being analyzed. This is also related to my critique of how Bayesian Theory tends to be applied in apologetics, but since that would take a whole other huge long post to talk about, I’m going to pretend I didn’t mention it in my earlier post and so don’t have to explain in plainer language what I was talking about here. )

Here are those criteria again for ease of reference:

This leaves over criteria #2, which is important. I thought I knew P, but P turned out to be false, so I was mistaken about knowing P. The question of whether I had “sufficient evidence” may explain why I made the mistake, or it may not, but either way I had enough evidence for me to infer P, whether or not my inference matched accurately with objective reality.

And as a matter of experimentally demonstrable fact, humans do routinely reach correct beliefs about facts despite less than deductively perfect evidence, and even with very scanty evidence, by means of inductive and abductive reasoning. The demonstrable fact that we do routinely reach correct beliefs about facts this way, can lead to some faulty expectations about whether we are reaching correct beliefs in particular examples: well, I usually reach correct facts this way, and I’m using this way now, so I’m probably correct and even feel strongly that I’m correct in believing that all swans are white because I’ve seen a hundred white swans!

But even that mistaken inductive conclusion could be rephrased to be (as it happens) 100% factually correct: in this time and place, the vast majority of swans are white.

That still isn’t a deductive conclusion, because I might have just accidentally seen the only one hundred white swans in North America, out of a population of four hundred thousand other black ones. (Someone might mistakenly get an impression about white tigers visiting a big cat rescue park, for example.) Enough observations have been made to verify the factual correctness of the expectation by what amounts to a mass deduction: we have in fact together counted up all swans, and only a very few are black. Or we might have discovered why swans are particular colors, and discovered that this causation is passed along from generation to generation in a stable fashion producing white swans except for the occasional blip.

In a comparison with objective reality, the truth of P is important for whether a person really knows P or not. But then again, we often aren’t in a position to know the truth of P except by inductive or abductive reasoning, even on a mass scale.

This is why I think it makes more sense to regard criteria #2 to be about correct knowing, not about knowing per se. If we can (and we can) talk about correctly and incorrectly knowing something, without talking nonsense, then “knowing” must refer to an action which is still “knowing” whether the result is true or false to the objective facts.

Thus I argued, which also happens to be true as a matter of common English usage, that “knowing” means the same thing as “strongly believing”. Whether the person accurately knows something or not is different from whether the person knows, because the interior subjective experience shouldn’t be lost or just discounted as though it’s unimportant, no moreso than the question should be discounted of whether the person’s personal experience corresponds to an accurate understanding of the facts (in truth).

What I mean, and am trying to say is, this: when a person “knows”, she is strongly standing up for what she believes to be true, which is important and worth doing even if she happens to be inaccurate in her knowledge.

Someone could deny this by denying that there are any external facts for her to correspond with. But that leads straight to the dissolving of all claims to knowledge. (A point that atheist philosophers sometimes level at theism, but which *-itarian theism happens to avoid the threat of, by the way, because God Most High alone would still have distinct Persons actively corresponding with one another even if God never created any not-God entity.)

Or, someone could deny this by asserting that external facts don’t care a single poot about our agent and her personal striving for true correspondence to facts; the only thing that matters in “knowledge” is how effectively correct she is about her beliefs. Which means as a practical fact that most of her beliefs are never going to be good enough to count as knowledge, regardless of whether she thinks they’re good enough. Because she isn’t omniscient, and she arrives at most of her beliefs by abductive or inductive reasoning which formally can only approach certainty, and if she attempts any deductions then those only work (aside from purely speculative if/thens, divorced from practical assent about objective reality as it actually is) if the premises are known facts. But the knowledge of those facts can usually or always be challenged as having been based on inductive or abductive reasoning! This leads either to the outright dissolving of all claims to knowledge, or to a creeping suspicion which amounts to the same dissolution in practice.

Human (or other creaturely non-omniscient) claims to knowledge can only securely be treated as knowledge if the foundation of reality, itself not a creature of reality, personally cares about, and approves of, our agent’s attempts at reaching for personal correspondence with facts.

If truth doesn’t love us, then we can have no security in reaching for knowledge of truth, and thus claiming to know truth. Even if we happen to be factually correct about our reaching for truth.

If truth does love us, then we can have security in claiming to know truth, despite being only creatures who can only partially know facts, and who may be wrong about what we think we know. Even if we happen to be factually incorrect about our reaching for truth.

Our security in knowing truth, doesn’t ultimately depend on being correct about objective facts (important though that also is to strive for), but on whether truth truly loves us, and wants us to succeed in knowing, but still loves us even when we’re mistaken about what we’re thinking we know.

Outstanding, thanks for the hard work!!! I benefited a LOT from that explanation.

Thanks, Geoff! Phew!

Now for my Lewis quote digression.

In Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Lewis doesn’t distinguish very clearly between a merely reactive expectation from stimulus of past events, and rational inductive inferences; consequently he seems to regard deductive reasoning as the only rational inference, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually mean that, he was just trying to talk about the difference between instinct and reason, and slipped back and forth between instinctive reactions to past stimuli and inductive expectations from evidence of past experience.

This is after Lewis has stressed the importance of criterion #2 in Paidion’s list of criteria for knowing: the positive character of the act of knowing must be determined by the truth it knows. But Lewis also indicates he doesn’t mean mere factual correspondence as a result of the process, since he acknowledges that responses to stimuli could be exquisitely sharpened by natural selection to correspond to external facts with a utility that might serve as well as reason or in some circumstances better. But that still wouldn’t be reason, a rational act of knowing. “Our psychological responses to our environment – our curiosities, aversions, delights, expectations – could be improved indefinitely (from the biological point of view) without becoming anything more than responses. Such a perfection of the non-rational responses, far from amounting to their conversion into valid inferences, might be conceived as a different method of achieving survival – an alternative to reason.” But “[t]he relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and the truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. But neither this improvement nor any possible improvements we can suppose could bring it an inch nearer to being a knowledge of light. It is admittedly something without which we could not have had that knowledge. But the knowledge is achieved by experiments and inferences from them, not by refinement of the response.”

“The act of knowing has no doubt various conditions without which it could not occur: attention, and the states of will and health which this presupposes. But its positive character must be determined by the truth it knows.” Unfortunately, this looks like Lewis means correspondence to external facts, when he afterward (as quoted) shows he doesn’t mean that. So scholars have been disputing over what he meant (and whether he quite knew what he meant) ever since.

I think he was mainly trying to talk about the difference between rational “action” and automatic “reaction”, and the importance of rational action for knowledge, and didn’t realize (or maybe didn’t care) he was scraping up alongside a long-standing epistemic debate over whether it’s possible under any circumstances to have knowledge at all, which is a different question than whether rational action is necessary to even try to have knowledge.

Lewis certainly comes down on the side of real knowledge being possible and practicably attainable, at least from deductive reasoning. But I think his goal in the chapter is to show that the behavior we necessarily presuppose for our reasoning has certain characteristics, and that we ought to reject lines of philosophy (like Naturalism, by which he means naturalistic atheism, though his argument would work for supernaturalistic atheism, too) which would indicate a sceptical threat to our reasoning capabilities if true. Once he thinks he has established that and answered various anticipated rebuttals, he has accomplished his goal and moves along, without caring if some readers are stuck back a few pages wondering if inductive reasoning is rational or non-rational behavior and, if rational, whether he meant to imply it cannot possibly result in knowledge.

Gee Jason,

Now your post is way too long!

Thought I might offer a perspective from an agnostics point of view in this provocative article I found rummaging through the Internet:

agnosticweb.com/agnostic_brief_guide4.pdf

I must say that while it is a disquieting article, in terms of what most of us believe about God, D.H. Wilson does do a fair assessment on the issue, particularly in his criticism of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. But he equally ponders the theists’ dilemmas as well.

Provocative indeed - thanks for posting.
George MacDonald’s father once told him: “All a man can do is choose to believe”.
I think that’s true. What I don’t think is true is maintaining that because it is a choice, it is not knowledge. I go back to Paidion’s post above as saying it as well as I could ever put it.

Off doing other things (manfully trying to finish Dr. R’s tome for example, no less than 6 days behind schedule – my brain eventually just demanded I halt and go do other things for a while); just wanted to let y’all know I wasn’t offended by Allan’s joke, since there was some concern about that previously.

Besides, that’s why I put in the tl;dr section.

Agnosticism is necessary because a finite being like me cannot ever be sure about an infinite being like God. I’m perfectly happy with that. What’s more, a finite being like me cannot even be sure about a finite being like my wife. For all I know, she might harbor a dark motive for increasing my insurance cover . But I really don’t think so. She’s sweetness and light. And that’s what she’s banking on! Yikes! Paranoia, anyone?

As an agnostic, I choose to seek the good God because it’s the only rational thing to do. Basically, all the alternatives stink. As a pilgrim on a mad quest, I count the stuff I experience on the road to be true knowledge, but the Destination will always be essentially unknowable.

Come along now, Jason. We expect better of you…

AllansS wrote: “all the alternatives stink”

Thank goodness; I thought the cat had dragged in another dead squirrel, and it’s only those alternatives, dang it.

I’d written a far less polite phrase, but decided to change it. For the sake of our more sensitive readers.