Is naturalism coherent?

Here is how Huw Price characterises naturalism in a recent book, although I think it’s a characterisation that many philosophers would endorse:

What is philosophical naturalism?  Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science properly constrains philosophy, in the following sense.  The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjointed, and science takes the lead where the two overlap.  At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science, and that philosophy should defer to science, where the concerns of the two disciplines coincide. [Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism: 3]

But in what sense is it possible for philosophy to defer to science?  One way we might think this could go is in the following scenario: we have in our possession, say, both a successful scientific theory which posits backwards causation, and an a priori philosophical argument that backwards causation is impossible.  Deferring to science—which is an essential trait of naturalism, as understood above—involves accepting the scientific theory and rejecting the philosophical argument as (somehow) unsound.  But there is a problem with thinking of this as philosophical deference to science (as opposed to some other kind of deference to science).  Consider the maxim: When a claim of a successful scientific theory conflicts with the conclusion of an a priori argument, reject the conclusion of the a priori argument in favour of the claim of the successful scientific theory.  This is, on any reasonable measure, a philosophical dictum rather than the claim of a scientific theory.  In which case, someone who follows the maxim is being guided by a philosophical dictum rather than the claim of a scientific theory.  Moreover—although I’m not really arguing for this latter claim here—it is plausible that any adjudicative maxim of this kind would be philosophical rather than scientific per se; and in that case, it wouldn’t make sense to say that philosophy could defer to science.

Semantic Inferentialism and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

My Philosophy Compass article ‘Semantic Inferentialism and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’ now looks like it’s been published online.  Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism has provoked a huge literature since it first began being discussed, but none of the prominent responses to it have, to my mind, been convincing.  In this paper however, I argue that semantic inferentialists, of the Brandomian sort, aren’t subject to the kind of considerations that motivate the argument.  Enjoy!

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12062/abstract

Dialetheism for cheap?

It’s easy to “make” a new truth.  I can define the term busy* thusly:

For any x, x is busy* iff it contains more than five items.

Given this definition it is true that the room I am currently in is busy*.  I can define another term busy** thusly:

For any x,

(1) x is busy** if it contains five items or more, and

(2) it is not the case that x is busy** if it contains seven items or fewer.

Now consider a room containing six items; it is both true and false that the room is busy**.  Clearly the concept of busyness** is inconsistent, yet the sentence ‘This room is busy**’ seems to express a proposition—inconsistent claims are not unintelligible in virtue of their inconsistency.  Since the claim expresses a proposition it has a truth value, and in cases where ‘this room’ designates a room containing six items, the claim will be both true and false.

Now, we might not be too worried about inconsistencies of this sort, since they involve no worldly contradiction—there is nothing inconsistent or incoherent about a room containing six items—only the deployment of inconsistent concepts.  Yet, so long as some sentence or proposition is both true and false—regardless of whether this involve a worldly contradiction)—then, in classical logic, by the misnomed (yes, that is a word) ex falso quodlibet, it follows that every sentence or proposition is true, which is absurd.  As such, cheap dialetheism of this sort is sufficient to show that we must reject classical logic in favour of a relevance logic.

It seems to me something must be wrong with this argument, but I’m not sure what.

Respect and transitivity

The relation over the set of philosophers x respects the work of y is not transitive.