Doing epistemology by the seat of your pants

When is evidence to be demanded? When is a belief to be considered irrational? Implausible? Ridiculous? It is very important to think through these questions carefully, a practice we often fail to do.

Just like we think our music is great (and that guy's music is terrible), that our clothing has style (and that gal's clothing is frumpy), that our cultural foods are delicious (and their foods are disgusting), so it is with belief. It is all too easy to say that our beliefs are rational, sensible, justified, and the beliefs from other belief communities are irrational, ridiculous, unjustified.

Even worse, it is tempting, when pressed on our inconsistencies, to cobble together an ad hoc set of principles as an attempt to justify our prior statements, thereby digging ourselves a deeper hole.

This brings us to the current situation where I have been pressing EssEff and TheOtherSorcero for their attempt to dismiss supernaturalism on principled grounds:

EssEff: "You don't need a reason not to believe in something, you only need a reason to believe, and there's no compelling reason to believe in it."

TheOtherSorcero: "You don't need reason to be skeptical."

After forcing them to back off on these original, unqualified and indefensible statements they have offered reformulations. Let's consider whether these are any better off, beginning with EssEff:

EssEff: "The default position should be only normal things exist. For the paranormal to exist, there has to be verifiable evidence."

Unfortunately EssEff's claim is ambiguous and could mean one of two things (not surprising when you're proposing epistemic principles on the fly).

On the one hand it could mean

"Only ‘paranormal' claims [whatever those are] need evidence. Normal claims [whatever those are] do not."

Now we must ask: what is a "normal claim"? If normal is understood as equivalent to "non-paranormal" then the claim "The flying spaghetti monster exists" would qualify as a normal claim not needing evidence since this entity is a physical (that is, non-spiritual) object made of spaghetti and meatballs. But surely this cannot be right! So then maybe normal should be taken as equivalent to "out of the ordinary". Alas, this won't work either since supernatural claims (everything from the existence of God to synchronicity) are very normal,ordinary everyday claims for most people.

Since neither of these interpretations of the first formulation work, let's consider a second interpretation. "The default position should be that naturalism is true but both specific claims about the natural world and the supernatural world require evidence, only the latter require more evidence in light of our presupposition in favor of naturalism."

The funny thing about this interpretation is that it refutes itself. (Not ha ha funny but ironic funny.) Naturalism cannot be presupposed if claims about the natural world require evidence. So the principle must be revised once again...

This also pushes us back to asking about evidence for naturalism. What evidence is there that ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, abstract objects et cetera are all reducible to naturalistic assumptions? It is interesting to note that major efforts to "naturalize" disciplines like epistemology and the philosophy of mind have been widely abandoned by philosophers, so the prospects do not look bright.

Anyway it is interesting to see how far EssEff has come from the original claim. Not to mention how unworkable this ambiguous revised claim remains on its varied interpretations.

Now a briefer look at TheOtherSorcero's revised position:

"Yes, it is reasonable to be skeptical. But skepticism does not amount indescriminately to disbelief: skepticism is disbelief until evidence is presented."

I'll note just one problem with this ad hoc proposal: A vast arrange of our basic assumptions about the world are such that no evidence supports them over their negations. They must be accepted as starting points or not at all.

Among these are the following:

(1) The universe did not spontaneously spring out of nothing five minutes ago with apparent age
(2) Our cognitive faculties are truth conducive and not merely highly adaptive

Since no evidence from the natural world can be offered to support (1) which would not equally support its negation, and nothing can be offered to support (2) which would not equally support its negation (or agnosticism for that matter), this principle leads us to skepticism.

Here is a good lesson for us all. We should restrain ourselves from invoking a cultural imperialism in belief just as in culture. Even more, we should restrain ourselves from attempting to defend such an imperialistic stance through the postulation of indefensible, ad hoc epistemological claims.