Sophia, Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006. Copyright 9 2006 Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Replies
REPLY TO NAGASAWA JASON A. BEYER Dept. of Communication Arts, College of Lake County 19351 W Washington St., Grayslake, IL 60031, USA waldenphil@aol, corn In a recent article, I contended that a set of arguments proffered by Michael Martin and others, arguments which purport to show that God's omniscience is incompatible with several other of God's attributes, are answerable on the assumption that it is logically possible that human beings are entirely physical in nature. The upshot is this: such arguments contend that no being which is non-physical, morally impeccable, or invulnerable to such "negative" emotions as fear or despair could be omniscient - there would be forms of knowledge which would be excluded by these other attributes. To the contrary, I contended that if human beings are purely physical in nature, God could know such things as what a pineapple tastes like, what it is like to hate another human being, or how to ride a bicycle, by having full propositional knowledge of our brain states. It is important, I think, to call attention to the logical form of both Martin's arguments and my response. Martin attempts to show that the idea of a being which is morally impeccable, non-physical and omniscient is logically incoherent - such a being is not logically possible. As a result, it need only be logically possible for a being to have all three attributes together for Martin's arguments to be unsound. This will be an important thing to keep in mind when I address Nagasawa's critique of my arguments.
Nagasawa's Critique In his thoughtful critique of my arguments, Dr. Nagasawa contends that my response to Martin's arguments fail because they require a variety of token physicalism that is at the very least highly controversial. Specifically, Nagasawa identifies two weaknesses in my response. First, he contends that an argument of the sort I offer could be successful, but only if there is an a priori derivation of subjective facts from physical facts. He correctly notes that this position is highly controversial, and contends that to make my response stick I must defend this more controversial version of token physicalism. Second, he objects that my response only works if knowledge-
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how is reducible to propositional knowledge simpliciter - that is, if there are no additional requirements, such as being properly physically situated. He then argues that this position is false, correctly noting that propositional knowledge is not enabling - no amount of propositional knowledge is sufficient to be able to engage in the relevant act with any degree of success. My response to Martin, he alleges, requires not just any token physicalism, but a version requiring two specific features, one of which is highly controversial, the other of which is likely false.
My Reply Nagasawa has certainly provided me with a daunting task: defending a form of token physicalism that is at best highly controversial, and at worse false. But is this a task my arguments really require me to undertake? Though I am sympathetic to his objections, in the end, I think not. Nagasawa contends that for my response to work, there must be an a priori derivation of subjective facts from objective physical facts. But this distinction, it seems to me, provides me with a false dichotomy. If some form of physicalism is true, then subjective facts are objective physical facts. His critique seems to fall back on the Leibnizian-style assumptions that lie behind the anti-physicalist arguments of Nagel and Jackson. Just as their arguments assume that "physical language" or "physical facts" are distinct from "subjectivity" or "subjective facts"; so too does Nagasawa's critique assume that - or at least he presents it in such a way that it seems to assume that - subjective facts and physical facts are distinct things, the former of which must be derivable from the latter for physicalism to work. This assumption resembles what Paul Churchland I calls the "Betty Crocker Theory of Consciousness" - that subjective states are caused by brain states. The upshot of this is that a physicalist position does not really require a derivation of subjective facts from objective physical facts at all. Now perhaps Nagasawa's objection can be restated in terms more like the following: my responses assume that acquaintance knowledge is a priori reducible to propositional knowledge. 2 But now it's no longer clear that my arguments commit me to any a priori reducibility. A project like that of the Churchlands', whereby they hope to explain subjective experience in terms of activation vectors in the brain 3, looks like a promising attempt to provide a posteriori reducibility. There is no evident reason why, if successful, this would not be good enough. However, even ifNagasawa were right in these contentions, it would be rather beside the point. For Martin's arguments to be refuted, there need only
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be a logically possible scenario where God could have full acquaintance knowledge by having full propositional knowledge. Perhaps Nagasawa is correct in his contention that my suggestion is a highly debatable one, but that is not sufficient to undermine my response to Martin's arguments. Since the arguments of Martin which I address do not set out to show simply that the God of evangelical Christianity does not exist (on this I agree with Martin), but rather attempt to show the much stronger claim that the concept of such a being is incoherent; it is sufficient refutation to identify a logically possible scenario wherein a being could possess all of the attributes in question. Perhaps more success can be found in Nagasawa's second critique, that some of my responses require that knowledge-how be reducible to propositional knowledge simpliciter. Nagasawa claims to the contrary that it is "plainly false" that possessing full propositional knowledge simpliciter guarantees knowledge-how in the "fullest sense". He rightly adds "in the fullest sense" due to the fact that we are speaking of God's knowledge. He does not, however, acknowledge the problems this creates for his critique of my arguments. I think it is plainly false that I, for example, could have knowledge-how by having certain propositional knowledge (the most detailed knowledge of the rules of chess are insufficient to make me a chess master, and no amount of grammatical knowledge is'sufficient to make me a writer of significant literature). But with omniscience, we are talking about full propositional knowledge - to simply contend that it is "impossible" to get full knowledge-how out of this is insufficient. My intuitions here, I am afraid to report, are not as clear as Dr. Nagasawa's. In any case, since my arguments only require that full derivation of knowledge-how from propositional knowledge be logically possible, to contend that this state of affairs is "plainly false" is beside the point, and to simply claim it to be "impossible" is question-begging. Hence, while I am sympathetic to the problems that motivate Nagasawa's critique, I do not find them sufficiently convincing to justify abandoning my objections to Martin's arguments. 4
Endnotes
1. Paul M. Churchland, "Betty Crocker's Theory of Consciousness: A Review of John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind". London Review of Books, 16.9 (1994). 2. In fact, in my own arguments, I speak of it in these terms. 3. This is outlined, for example, in Paul Churchland's The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Related approaches can be found in the research known as "heterophenomenology" - cf Daisie Radner,
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"Heterophenomenology: Learning about the Birds and the Bees", The Journal of Philosophy, 91 (1994): 389-403. 4. I would like to thank Dr. Yujin Nagasawa for disagreeing with me enough to respond to my initial article. For a younger scholar like myself, it is especially gratifying to be given an opportunity to exchange ideas and arguments with an established scholar. For that, despite our disagreements - or better, because of them - he has my most sincere thanks.
