Here are some brief notes on John Meier’s goals, sources and criteria in his work on the historical Jesus.
The goal of objectivity
Meier offers the best take when he quotes Karl Rahner’s phrase “asymptotic goal” when speaking of his effort to be objective. Meier tries hard and shows us he’s trying hard through the transparancy of his work. He lays out his methodology clearly, so we can follow along and decide if he’s consistent in applying it throughout. Also, he provides truly voluminous endnotes so we can compare his conclusions with those of other scholars.
“Prescinding” from faith
Meier is a catholic priest. So what is all this talk of objectivity about?! How could he possibly be objective? He admits his biases will reflect his working out of the catholic context. But Meier draws a strict distinction between what he knows about Jesus through research and what he knows through his faith. He will prescind from or bracket his faith for the purposes of the project. It seems to me that he achieves this goal. I speculate that this is something evangelical Protestants and even some conservative Catholics would not or could not do.
The “unpapal” conclave
Meier invokes an imaginative metaphor for his effort at objectivity: he pictures an “unpapal” conclave consisting of a Catholic, a Protestant, and Jew and an Agnostic, “locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library” forced to hammer out a consensus document on the historical Jesus.
Why a “Marginal Jew”?
Marginality is a theme which touches the subject from several angles. While the resurrected Jesus is absolutely central to Christian faith, the historical Jesus seems to have existed on the margins of his family, his society, his religion; he is a figure on the bare margins of political history, certainly.
Sources
The canonical gospels are the primary sources of evidence on the historical Jesus. There are a very small number of verses elsewhere in the NT that are useful. The non-canonical gospels and apocrypha add essentially nothing of real value, according to Meier. Some other scholars do see more value in texts like the Gospel of Thomas or, in John Dominic Crossan’s case, the Gospel of Peter, but these are minority opinions. Of the canonical gospels, some scholars place very little emphasis on John, given its thorough-going theological agenda, but Meier sees some good nuggets in John.
Outside of the NT, Meier gives a detailed treatment of the text with the best claim to attest to the existence of Jesus: this is the work of the Jewish-Roman writer of histories named Josephus. Josephus’ work includes references to Pontius Pilate, Herod the Great, and John the Baptist. The texts also include a brief passage about Jesus as well one on his brother James. The problem is that the text show clear signs of later Christian tampering. So was the reference to Jesus inserted, or was a legitimate reference bulked up and embellished? Meier provides a detailed analysis (as well as his own translation) and concludes it is possible to reconstruct a core which existed prior to Christian tampering. The analysis certainly seems plausible and may be becoming the majority view among scholars, although it must be said that we will probably never have consensus.
The difficulty of the project
Before listing Meier’s criteria for judging NT material, I should stress again that we are looking at creating the best historical construct possible from limited evidence. There is no hope that we can capture what the “real” Jesus was like beyond an outline or sketch. One needs to be skeptical of anyone voicing too-detailed opinions about Jesus’ psychology and motivations in particular, as opposed to measured assessments about the relative historical value of various sayings and actions and some limited inferences about how he related to his time and place and thought of his mission and message.
Criteria
1. Embarrassment
In considering this criterion as well as others, remember again the central problem of analyzing the gospels is that the writers and editors were not striving to create an historical record. Writing from a vantage point several decades removed, they edited, embellished and created material to support and advocate the early church community of which they were a part. The point of the criterion of embarrassment is that anything remaining in the gospel texts which would have been embarrassing to these church communities has a relatively strong claim to historicity. An example might be Peter's denial of Jesus in the passion narratives. With Peter a leader of the early Church, this event in his life wouldn't have helped his reputation.
2. Discontinuity
What did Jesus say or do which finds no ready parallel in OT tradition, what we know of 1st century Judaism, or in early Christianity? The unique character of sayings or actions may give them a greater claim to be historical. An example might be Jesus' rejection of voluntary fasting (Mark 2:18-22), which was a feature of religious practice before and after him.
3. Multiple Attestation
If a saying or action is found in more than one source, this lends credence to its historical nature. The sources must be independent, of course. Within the synoptics, Matthew and Luke’s repetition of Marcan material does not count.
4. Coherence
If an item has merit on some combination of the first three criteria, then the question of whether it coheres with other material judged historical can be considered a point in its favor. One specific variation of this: does the material cohere with or point toward Jesus’ eventual trial and crucifixion, which is the most historically well supported event in Jesus life based on the other criteria?
Other, lesser criteria include inclusion of traces of Aramaic in the Greek texts, and the authenticity of the Palestinian environment depicted (especially since the evangelists at times seem ignorant of the region).
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Some Post-Holiday Blog Discussions
The Consciousness and Culture blog has a series of posts on a subject near and dear to me: the problem of first-person conscious experience. Ellis tries to deflate the issue a bit in his examination. I resist this in the comments.
Parableman had a good discussion (in two parts) of the cosmological argument. It is difficult to use this argument to conclude there is a necessary first cause, without also concluding everything which exists is necessary. Jeremy tries out a strategy which goes about the argument in a different way to try to avoid this. I don't think it succeeds without additional controversial premises, but it's interesting.
In the comment thread to this post on Philosophy, et cetera, a good point emerges: when arguing about the plausibility of theism, we can't avoid being specific about the details of God's attributes and features. So much discussion seems wasted to me by assuming a false dichotomy between classical Christian theism and materialist atheism.
Parableman had a good discussion (in two parts) of the cosmological argument. It is difficult to use this argument to conclude there is a necessary first cause, without also concluding everything which exists is necessary. Jeremy tries out a strategy which goes about the argument in a different way to try to avoid this. I don't think it succeeds without additional controversial premises, but it's interesting.
In the comment thread to this post on Philosophy, et cetera, a good point emerges: when arguing about the plausibility of theism, we can't avoid being specific about the details of God's attributes and features. So much discussion seems wasted to me by assuming a false dichotomy between classical Christian theism and materialist atheism.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
John P. Meier's Quest for Jesus
This is a new topic for this blog, prompted by my recent re-reading of the three volumes of John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.
[UPDATE 16 March 2009: Please note that volume 4 will be published in May 2009 (amazon link). It focuses primarily on the relationship between Jesus and Mosaic Law.]
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Sometime in the late 80’s I was browsing in my local library and a book caught my eye: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, by Albert Schweitzer. Both the subject and the author sparked interest. I knew of Schweitzer through his reputation as a great humanitarian doctor in Africa, it turns out he was also a philosopher, theologian and New Testament scholar. And what more fascinating subject could one imagine than the study of what we might discover about the “historical Jesus” (as opposed to the Jesus of religious faith)?
A quick digression: I remembered once as a teenager reading the gospels on my own (possibly for the first time) and being absolutely blown away by noticing the passages in Matthew and Mark referring to Jesus’ brothers. Four are named in Mark 6:3: James, Joses, Judas and Simon; I happen to have four brothers, so did Jesus! How was it that in all those years of (catholic) church and CCD classes, I never heard anything about this?! The status of James as a leader of the early church in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:19) makes it yet more surprising that it took so long for me to learn about this. (I later learned that there is a long history in the catholic church of construing the Greek word translated as brother as meaning cousin, but there is little basis for this. Also, I should mention that the passages also refer to Jesus’ sisters – but they are not enumerated or named).
Anyway, while the historical Jesus was a topic I had thought about, I had never before read anything about it. In his book, Schweitzer summarized and critiqued what is now called the “First Quest” (or the “Old Quest’) for the historical Jesus which took place among mainly German scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book, published in 1906, serves as a reference point for the state of scholarship on the subject at the beginning of the 20th century.
Some key themes in modern scholarship already appear in Schweitzer. Foremost is the challenge posed by the paucity of evidence. There are very few useful references outside the canonical gospels. The gospels themselves were written several decades after Jesus’ time. They are formed from composite sources with extensive creative redaction by the final authors – authors who were driven not by a desire to record history but by the priorities of their struggling early church communities. As Schweitzer showed when presenting the work of a great diversity of scholars in his review, the greatest danger is that of merely finding the Jesus of one’s desires or imagination within the skeleton of clues embedded in the gospels. A theme of the book was the conflict between the “rationalists”, who tended to discover a Jesus congenial to the standards of the enlightenment, and theologians who fought a rearguard action to find a Jesus consistent with their faith. Still, there was progress made in some of this early work. For example, a conclusion still regarded as well-founded by most (never all!) scholars is the two-source theory of the Synoptics. This refers to the priority of Mark as the earliest gospel, which was used in turn as a source for Matthew and Luke, and also to Matthew and Luke’s shared use of a written collection of sayings, called the ‘Q’ document. (A brief history of historical Jesus scholarship is here).
The late 80’s and 90’s turned out to be a very active period in the field (the “Third Quest”). The work has benefited from much greater sophistication in source and form criticism and from concurrent advances in the study of the social, political and religious environment of the time and place. But the spectrum of conclusions drawn by scholars is (unfortunately) still very wide.
A great amount of media attention was generated by the Jesus Seminar in this period. The Seminar, founded by Robert Funk in 1985, was composed of a group of 30 or more scholars who met to consider the historicity of the gospels. This effort stirred up much controversy, for 3 reasons that I could see. First, the group approached the task with revisionism in mind. One of the seven pillars guiding the effort mentioned in the introduction to their first work, The Five Gospels, was that the texts were deemed ahistorical until enough evidence showed otherwise; another stated that supernatural material was inherently not historical. Second, they adopted a voting method (using colored beads) which when implemented tended to give greater weight to skepticism (only 18% of the words of Jesus received the highest “red” treatment for historicity). Finally, Funk made public relations a fundamental part of the seminar’s agenda, and this naturally stirred up critics much more than if the debate remained contained in academia. I sometimes thought when reading The Five Gospels that the actual description of the proceedings on the various passages implied a more nuanced and reasonable study than the headlines (and final color coding) implied. The premium placed on generating headlines extended to the title of the book itself: the Seminar elevated the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (found at Nag Hammadi) to a place alongside the canonical gospels. Yet when you looked at the Seminar’s conclusions with regard to Thomas, there was very little in it that they deemed historical which didn’t already have a canonical parallel. Still, the seminar’s overall approach gave critics ammunition for the charge that their methods led to biased outcomes.
This highly publicized conclusion that only a small part of the gospels was historical and the resulting consignment of so many of Jesus’ memorable words and acts to theological and mythological invention by the early church met with vehement opposition. The unfortunate consequence is that it seemed an extreme dichotomy was set before the public: a rational historical look at Jesus leads to radical rejection of most of what was distinctive about the Jesus of the Christian faith; therefore the response of Christians should be to reject the legitimacy of the concept of such a historical project. One prominent critic whose book I read was this one by Luke Timothy Johnson. The book offers some criticism of the research and methodologies of the Seminar and other writers, but it ultimately came down to an argument that the historical project is misguided and the only “real” Jesus is the Christ of faith. Other conservative Christian scholars have engaged in more rigorous defense of the historicity of the gospels with the goal of providing apologetic material to their Christian readers (One example would be William Lane Craig).
But apologetics are of little use to an open-minded reader who wants the best and most objective study of the subject possible. While the Jesus Seminar’s approach may have been biased, apologetics by definition prejudge the matter.
Of the books I’ve read so far, I believe John Meier’s work comes closest to this admittedly impossible goal of objectivity. I will follow up with a another post where I’ll discuss some of the reasons for my opinion and give brief examples of his method and results. For now, here is a link to an article he wrote in 1999 about the third quest which gives a flavor for his approach.
[UPDATE 16 March 2009: Please note that volume 4 will be published in May 2009 (amazon link). It focuses primarily on the relationship between Jesus and Mosaic Law.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometime in the late 80’s I was browsing in my local library and a book caught my eye: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, by Albert Schweitzer. Both the subject and the author sparked interest. I knew of Schweitzer through his reputation as a great humanitarian doctor in Africa, it turns out he was also a philosopher, theologian and New Testament scholar. And what more fascinating subject could one imagine than the study of what we might discover about the “historical Jesus” (as opposed to the Jesus of religious faith)?
A quick digression: I remembered once as a teenager reading the gospels on my own (possibly for the first time) and being absolutely blown away by noticing the passages in Matthew and Mark referring to Jesus’ brothers. Four are named in Mark 6:3: James, Joses, Judas and Simon; I happen to have four brothers, so did Jesus! How was it that in all those years of (catholic) church and CCD classes, I never heard anything about this?! The status of James as a leader of the early church in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:19) makes it yet more surprising that it took so long for me to learn about this. (I later learned that there is a long history in the catholic church of construing the Greek word translated as brother as meaning cousin, but there is little basis for this. Also, I should mention that the passages also refer to Jesus’ sisters – but they are not enumerated or named).
Anyway, while the historical Jesus was a topic I had thought about, I had never before read anything about it. In his book, Schweitzer summarized and critiqued what is now called the “First Quest” (or the “Old Quest’) for the historical Jesus which took place among mainly German scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book, published in 1906, serves as a reference point for the state of scholarship on the subject at the beginning of the 20th century.
Some key themes in modern scholarship already appear in Schweitzer. Foremost is the challenge posed by the paucity of evidence. There are very few useful references outside the canonical gospels. The gospels themselves were written several decades after Jesus’ time. They are formed from composite sources with extensive creative redaction by the final authors – authors who were driven not by a desire to record history but by the priorities of their struggling early church communities. As Schweitzer showed when presenting the work of a great diversity of scholars in his review, the greatest danger is that of merely finding the Jesus of one’s desires or imagination within the skeleton of clues embedded in the gospels. A theme of the book was the conflict between the “rationalists”, who tended to discover a Jesus congenial to the standards of the enlightenment, and theologians who fought a rearguard action to find a Jesus consistent with their faith. Still, there was progress made in some of this early work. For example, a conclusion still regarded as well-founded by most (never all!) scholars is the two-source theory of the Synoptics. This refers to the priority of Mark as the earliest gospel, which was used in turn as a source for Matthew and Luke, and also to Matthew and Luke’s shared use of a written collection of sayings, called the ‘Q’ document. (A brief history of historical Jesus scholarship is here).
The late 80’s and 90’s turned out to be a very active period in the field (the “Third Quest”). The work has benefited from much greater sophistication in source and form criticism and from concurrent advances in the study of the social, political and religious environment of the time and place. But the spectrum of conclusions drawn by scholars is (unfortunately) still very wide.
A great amount of media attention was generated by the Jesus Seminar in this period. The Seminar, founded by Robert Funk in 1985, was composed of a group of 30 or more scholars who met to consider the historicity of the gospels. This effort stirred up much controversy, for 3 reasons that I could see. First, the group approached the task with revisionism in mind. One of the seven pillars guiding the effort mentioned in the introduction to their first work, The Five Gospels, was that the texts were deemed ahistorical until enough evidence showed otherwise; another stated that supernatural material was inherently not historical. Second, they adopted a voting method (using colored beads) which when implemented tended to give greater weight to skepticism (only 18% of the words of Jesus received the highest “red” treatment for historicity). Finally, Funk made public relations a fundamental part of the seminar’s agenda, and this naturally stirred up critics much more than if the debate remained contained in academia. I sometimes thought when reading The Five Gospels that the actual description of the proceedings on the various passages implied a more nuanced and reasonable study than the headlines (and final color coding) implied. The premium placed on generating headlines extended to the title of the book itself: the Seminar elevated the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (found at Nag Hammadi) to a place alongside the canonical gospels. Yet when you looked at the Seminar’s conclusions with regard to Thomas, there was very little in it that they deemed historical which didn’t already have a canonical parallel. Still, the seminar’s overall approach gave critics ammunition for the charge that their methods led to biased outcomes.
This highly publicized conclusion that only a small part of the gospels was historical and the resulting consignment of so many of Jesus’ memorable words and acts to theological and mythological invention by the early church met with vehement opposition. The unfortunate consequence is that it seemed an extreme dichotomy was set before the public: a rational historical look at Jesus leads to radical rejection of most of what was distinctive about the Jesus of the Christian faith; therefore the response of Christians should be to reject the legitimacy of the concept of such a historical project. One prominent critic whose book I read was this one by Luke Timothy Johnson. The book offers some criticism of the research and methodologies of the Seminar and other writers, but it ultimately came down to an argument that the historical project is misguided and the only “real” Jesus is the Christ of faith. Other conservative Christian scholars have engaged in more rigorous defense of the historicity of the gospels with the goal of providing apologetic material to their Christian readers (One example would be William Lane Craig).
But apologetics are of little use to an open-minded reader who wants the best and most objective study of the subject possible. While the Jesus Seminar’s approach may have been biased, apologetics by definition prejudge the matter.
Of the books I’ve read so far, I believe John Meier’s work comes closest to this admittedly impossible goal of objectivity. I will follow up with a another post where I’ll discuss some of the reasons for my opinion and give brief examples of his method and results. For now, here is a link to an article he wrote in 1999 about the third quest which gives a flavor for his approach.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
The ID Decision in Dover
I'm pleased with the outcome of the Dover case on Intelligent Design (the decision is here, and a blog post with links about the case is here). I want to emphasize one part of this. What I strongly object to is the effort to place ID in public school science classrooms ("full stop"). I have no objection to full and open debate about the merits of ID in terms of philosophy of science, metaphysics, or, of course, theology. While the judge was extremely harsh regarding the religious motives of the board and the claims that ID was a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory, I think it is important to emphasize this part of the decision's conclusion:
"With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."
"With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Stapp and Quantum Agents
For several decades now, physicist Henry Stapp has been publishing books and papers which develop an explanation of human consciousness grounded in quantum mechanics (an online list of Stapp’s papers from recent years is here). I just read this new article, published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. This particular article includes a review of his general approach in layman-accessible terms, and then highlights his proposed linkage of the efficacy of conscious will to the quantum zeno effect. This is interesting stuff, and I would highly recommend that students of consciousness read Stapp. For now, I have a brief comment (which is off the main topic of the paper) on a set of long standing questions I have about Stapp’s work: if quantum effects are needed to explain the workings of the human brain, aren’t they also needed to explain other macroscopic phenomena? Is it only in the human brain where a classical approximation fails to provide a full explanation? In terms of causation, are human beings the only quantum agents?
In other words, I feel like we’re missing some steps in our description of reality. Humans, after all, evolved from lower forms of life. Life itself was bootstrapped out of the inorganic world. While human consciousness is unique in so many ways, it seems most plausible that humans leverage capabilities inherent in other natural systems, rather than utilize utterly unique mechanisms.
Stapp seems surely right when he says that certain brain processes are grounded in the quantum realm (he cites the size of ionic channels between synapses as being on a scale where quantum effects must exist). But couldn’t this be true of cellular processes outside the brain, too? How about in single-celled animals? If quantum interactions (=measurements) are the raw material of the macroscopic world (as I speculated in my recent post), shouldn’t this be in evidence in realms other than the human brain?
Here’s a comment from Stapp on this (made somewhat as an aside):
"But if one considers the Von Neumann theory to be an ontological description of what is really going on, then one must of course relax the anthropocentric bias, and allow agents of many ilks. Yet the theory entails that it would be virtually impossible to determine, empirically, whether a large system that is strongly interacting with its environment is acting as an agent or not. This means that the theory, regarded as an ontological theory, has huge uncertainties.
However, our interest here is the nature of human agents. Hence the near impossibility determining the possible existence of other kinds of agents, will mean that our lack of information about the existence of those other possible kinds of agents will have little or no impact on our understanding of ourselves."
This seems too quick of a dismissal of the ubiquity of quantum agents. For what it’s worth, here’s my alternative view of how things could work. Macroscopic systems in nature can be described in terms of systems which coordinate quantum micro-agents. The raw material of first person experience and intentionality comes from small quantum interactions, which are then leveraged through special functional networks in human brains to give rise to the familiar large scale features of consciousness. This account would be consistent with the fact that consciousness is tied intimately to the specific structures of the brain while also addressing why the deepest mysteries of consciousness (why there is first person experience and intentionality at all) are impervious to description in classical terms.
The research agenda to get at these issues would include trying to figure out whether single-celled animals might utilize quantum effects and whether quantum physics plays any role in an account of the origin of life.
In other words, I feel like we’re missing some steps in our description of reality. Humans, after all, evolved from lower forms of life. Life itself was bootstrapped out of the inorganic world. While human consciousness is unique in so many ways, it seems most plausible that humans leverage capabilities inherent in other natural systems, rather than utilize utterly unique mechanisms.
Stapp seems surely right when he says that certain brain processes are grounded in the quantum realm (he cites the size of ionic channels between synapses as being on a scale where quantum effects must exist). But couldn’t this be true of cellular processes outside the brain, too? How about in single-celled animals? If quantum interactions (=measurements) are the raw material of the macroscopic world (as I speculated in my recent post), shouldn’t this be in evidence in realms other than the human brain?
Here’s a comment from Stapp on this (made somewhat as an aside):
"But if one considers the Von Neumann theory to be an ontological description of what is really going on, then one must of course relax the anthropocentric bias, and allow agents of many ilks. Yet the theory entails that it would be virtually impossible to determine, empirically, whether a large system that is strongly interacting with its environment is acting as an agent or not. This means that the theory, regarded as an ontological theory, has huge uncertainties.
However, our interest here is the nature of human agents. Hence the near impossibility determining the possible existence of other kinds of agents, will mean that our lack of information about the existence of those other possible kinds of agents will have little or no impact on our understanding of ourselves."
This seems too quick of a dismissal of the ubiquity of quantum agents. For what it’s worth, here’s my alternative view of how things could work. Macroscopic systems in nature can be described in terms of systems which coordinate quantum micro-agents. The raw material of first person experience and intentionality comes from small quantum interactions, which are then leveraged through special functional networks in human brains to give rise to the familiar large scale features of consciousness. This account would be consistent with the fact that consciousness is tied intimately to the specific structures of the brain while also addressing why the deepest mysteries of consciousness (why there is first person experience and intentionality at all) are impervious to description in classical terms.
The research agenda to get at these issues would include trying to figure out whether single-celled animals might utilize quantum effects and whether quantum physics plays any role in an account of the origin of life.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Local vs. Global Possibility and the Link to Causality
Below is a post inspired by reading this paper by Georgetown’s Alexander Pruss (thanks to Tychic for the pointer to this). It has a number of interesting ideas relating to modality and causality.
Early on in this paper, Pruss makes the point that our every-day modal claims are mainly about “local” or adjacent possibilities. For example, “were I to drop this glass, it would fall”. Importantly, our intuition is to view these claims as being about possibilities local to us in this concrete world, not located in another possible world.
He then discusses the philosophical tradition of analyzing of modal statements in terms of possible worlds -- we might call this a “global” treatment of modality. Pruss concurs with the consensus on this subject that there are compelling analytic reasons to approach modality in this way. He also discusses the idea of truthmakers for modal claims, which leads to a discussion of realist accounts of possible worlds.
He spends part of the paper critiquing two main versions of “possible worlds” modal realism; the concrete version of Lewis, and the abstract versions of Plantinga and Robert M. Adams (with emphasis on Adams). One of his two main critiques of Lewis is the charge that inductive inferences about the future are invalid in this scheme (the second is an argument about ethical paradoxes). We could be in a world where gravity fails tomorrow! This point is familiar from discussions of Hume’s treatment of causation. Lewis’ overall scheme of counterfactual analysis of causation plus modal realism is self-described by him as Humean in spirit, so presumably he wouldn’t have been bothered by this criticism.
Pruss mentions a prominent criticism of abstract possible worlds, which is that what distinguishes one possible maximal state of affairs as our concrete world is unexplained – it is a primitive of the theory.
His next criticism is the important one for where he’s going in this paper: He criticizes the abstract system for the fact that all of these possible worlds already exist, prior to any seeming need for them to explain a local possibility in our concrete world. The simultaneous existence of all these abstract possibilities is a problem for Pruss, because it conflicts with the Aristotelian maxim that “actuality is prior to possibility”. And if the maxim is valid and possibility is grounded in actuality, then it means that the actuality “has some powers, capacities or dispositions capable of producing that possibility, which of course once produced would no longer be a mere possibility.”
This again ties the discussion of modality back to a discussion of causality. Abstract entities are usually viewed as categorically unable to enter into causal relations. Aristotle’s system of causation is a real causal production system which follows from the causal capabilities and dispositions of actual entities in the (concrete) world.
If what Pruss says is right and this Aristotelian view can produce possibilities, could this be the basis for a full alternative treatment of modality which obviates the need for a scheme like Lewis’ or Adams? The idea is that “a non-actual state of affairs is possible if there actually was a substance capable of initiating a causal chain…that could lead to the state of affairs we claim is possible”.
Pruss himself sees two obstacles for this approach. First, while it works for local possibilities, it’s not clear you can get global possibilities (whole possible worlds) out of it. The second problem is the initial grounding of the contingent concrete things to begin with: how did this party get started?
Finishing the paper with a theistic turn, Pruss proposes that a possible solution to these two problems would involve a necessary first cause. A possible world which is not actual would be linked to the actual by following the chain of causation backward until we found a starting point which could serve as a branching point for both worlds. This would be the first cause.
So, starting with an analysis of what makes modal claims true, we’ve taken a roundabout route to the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Whew! (In a second paper here, Pruss has offers further arguments about the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Cosmological Argument and related topics).
There is lots of thought-provoking stuff here. The point I want to emphasize again is the linkage between solving the problems of modality and causality. David Lewis’ system for handling both topics seems rigorous and consistent, but violates our intuition that real causation and possibility are active in our concrete world. It’s unclear that abstract possible worlds can be linked to causality given the normal view of abstract objects as causally inert, so this is a weakness of this approach. Using one view of real causation, the Aristotelian one, Pruss can get to a treatment of modality, but it requires a big commitment to a necessary first cause to make it work. I'm not sure about that move, but it seems right to me that the path to a solution does does depend on working out a system of real causality.
Early on in this paper, Pruss makes the point that our every-day modal claims are mainly about “local” or adjacent possibilities. For example, “were I to drop this glass, it would fall”. Importantly, our intuition is to view these claims as being about possibilities local to us in this concrete world, not located in another possible world.
He then discusses the philosophical tradition of analyzing of modal statements in terms of possible worlds -- we might call this a “global” treatment of modality. Pruss concurs with the consensus on this subject that there are compelling analytic reasons to approach modality in this way. He also discusses the idea of truthmakers for modal claims, which leads to a discussion of realist accounts of possible worlds.
He spends part of the paper critiquing two main versions of “possible worlds” modal realism; the concrete version of Lewis, and the abstract versions of Plantinga and Robert M. Adams (with emphasis on Adams). One of his two main critiques of Lewis is the charge that inductive inferences about the future are invalid in this scheme (the second is an argument about ethical paradoxes). We could be in a world where gravity fails tomorrow! This point is familiar from discussions of Hume’s treatment of causation. Lewis’ overall scheme of counterfactual analysis of causation plus modal realism is self-described by him as Humean in spirit, so presumably he wouldn’t have been bothered by this criticism.
Pruss mentions a prominent criticism of abstract possible worlds, which is that what distinguishes one possible maximal state of affairs as our concrete world is unexplained – it is a primitive of the theory.
His next criticism is the important one for where he’s going in this paper: He criticizes the abstract system for the fact that all of these possible worlds already exist, prior to any seeming need for them to explain a local possibility in our concrete world. The simultaneous existence of all these abstract possibilities is a problem for Pruss, because it conflicts with the Aristotelian maxim that “actuality is prior to possibility”. And if the maxim is valid and possibility is grounded in actuality, then it means that the actuality “has some powers, capacities or dispositions capable of producing that possibility, which of course once produced would no longer be a mere possibility.”
This again ties the discussion of modality back to a discussion of causality. Abstract entities are usually viewed as categorically unable to enter into causal relations. Aristotle’s system of causation is a real causal production system which follows from the causal capabilities and dispositions of actual entities in the (concrete) world.
If what Pruss says is right and this Aristotelian view can produce possibilities, could this be the basis for a full alternative treatment of modality which obviates the need for a scheme like Lewis’ or Adams? The idea is that “a non-actual state of affairs is possible if there actually was a substance capable of initiating a causal chain…that could lead to the state of affairs we claim is possible”.
Pruss himself sees two obstacles for this approach. First, while it works for local possibilities, it’s not clear you can get global possibilities (whole possible worlds) out of it. The second problem is the initial grounding of the contingent concrete things to begin with: how did this party get started?
Finishing the paper with a theistic turn, Pruss proposes that a possible solution to these two problems would involve a necessary first cause. A possible world which is not actual would be linked to the actual by following the chain of causation backward until we found a starting point which could serve as a branching point for both worlds. This would be the first cause.
So, starting with an analysis of what makes modal claims true, we’ve taken a roundabout route to the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Whew! (In a second paper here, Pruss has offers further arguments about the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Cosmological Argument and related topics).
There is lots of thought-provoking stuff here. The point I want to emphasize again is the linkage between solving the problems of modality and causality. David Lewis’ system for handling both topics seems rigorous and consistent, but violates our intuition that real causation and possibility are active in our concrete world. It’s unclear that abstract possible worlds can be linked to causality given the normal view of abstract objects as causally inert, so this is a weakness of this approach. Using one view of real causation, the Aristotelian one, Pruss can get to a treatment of modality, but it requires a big commitment to a necessary first cause to make it work. I'm not sure about that move, but it seems right to me that the path to a solution does does depend on working out a system of real causality.
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Duality at the Heart of Physics
I’m speaking of the measurement problem or paradox in quantum physics. One the one hand we have the continuous deterministic dynamical evolution of the wave function (in Schrödinger’s formulation of quantum mechanics), and on the other we have the discontinuous process of measurement which “collapses” the wave function into a definite state. What, if anything, does quantum physics mean for the nature of reality?
Interpretations of this problem historically have tended to devalue the ontological status of one or the other side of this duality. Some versions of the Copenhagen interpretation treated the wave function as a mere calculation framework which shouldn’t be accorded the status of something real. Over recent times, variants of the many-worlds hypothesis have become more popular: these emphasize the reality of the well-behaved wave function, and dismiss our perception of the everyday classical world as either a limited or illusory view of true reality. As I wrote in (the last part of) this post, more careful analysis of Neils Bohr’s own views tend to show he understood that the two quantum processes were irreducibly interdependent.
My own view is that quantum measurements are the events which make up the concrete fabric of our world. The wave function also exists, however, and can be considered the space of abstract possibilities which provide the raw material for the actualization of each event. While we can only observe "inter-measurement" phenomena associated with the wave function (e.g. entanglement) in carefully constructed laboratory situations, it comprehensively enters into our everyday world as well.
In fact, each larger system in nature is an extended event complex which continually self-implements measurements as interactions with the environment. Each set of measurements gives rise to a new possibility space which is raw material for further events.
Interpretations of this problem historically have tended to devalue the ontological status of one or the other side of this duality. Some versions of the Copenhagen interpretation treated the wave function as a mere calculation framework which shouldn’t be accorded the status of something real. Over recent times, variants of the many-worlds hypothesis have become more popular: these emphasize the reality of the well-behaved wave function, and dismiss our perception of the everyday classical world as either a limited or illusory view of true reality. As I wrote in (the last part of) this post, more careful analysis of Neils Bohr’s own views tend to show he understood that the two quantum processes were irreducibly interdependent.
My own view is that quantum measurements are the events which make up the concrete fabric of our world. The wave function also exists, however, and can be considered the space of abstract possibilities which provide the raw material for the actualization of each event. While we can only observe "inter-measurement" phenomena associated with the wave function (e.g. entanglement) in carefully constructed laboratory situations, it comprehensively enters into our everyday world as well.
In fact, each larger system in nature is an extended event complex which continually self-implements measurements as interactions with the environment. Each set of measurements gives rise to a new possibility space which is raw material for further events.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Notes on Plantinga's Modal Realism
Here are some brief notes on Plantinga’s system of modal realism. I have not found this to be easy territory. Sources: Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality, and Christopher Menzels’s SEP article on Actualism.
In place of possible worlds we have a full set of abstract maximal states of affairs. These “worlds”, along with the concrete world we know, are all part of existence. The difference between an abstract maximal state of affairs and our everyday world is that ours happens to be the maximal state of affairs which “obtains” -- this obtaining is analogous to a propostion being true. Note: in some of Plantinga’s writings, he says our world is the actual world, and the abstract ones are not actual, yet they exist. It’s easy for “those of us at home” to be confused when the words ‘actual’ and ‘exists’ are divorced! But leaving this aside, it is a primitive fact that one world – ours—is picked out as the concrete world. Lewis was extremely critical of this aspect – in his system actual is a merely indexical term: the actual world is the world I happen to be in, but otherwise the worlds exist on even-handed terms relative to each other.
Another key aspect for Plantinga is that for any object/individual there exists an individual essence. This is unlike Lewis’ counterpart theory, where I have counterparts in other worlds, and there is no dogma saying precisely when it is that the counterpart’s properties differ enough from mine that it is no longer worthy of being called my counterpart. The postulate of individual essences also seems a brute primitive. It serves to replace possible individuals in modal statements with something ‘actual’. But it’s not an actual individual – it is an (platonic) essence. The notion of individual essence seems to me a way to avoid the question of what it is which makes a bundle of properties an individual. (Some technical objections to this part of the system are also summarized in Menzel’s article.)
Plantinga takes seriously that we need to have truthmakers for modal truths (which I like). He also thinks there are should be no non-existent objects or mere possibilia as truthmakers, so everything needs to be explained via things which exist. To make it work, he needs a panoply of abstract entities to cover all the angles. I don’t have a problem with this in and of itself, since I am open-minded regarding the existence of abstract objects. The 2 issues I have are those mentioned above: first, the way our world gets picked out of the set of abstract worlds is a primitive; and the postulate of individual essences (as distinct from individuals themselves) is another feature I find somewhat gratuitous.
In place of possible worlds we have a full set of abstract maximal states of affairs. These “worlds”, along with the concrete world we know, are all part of existence. The difference between an abstract maximal state of affairs and our everyday world is that ours happens to be the maximal state of affairs which “obtains” -- this obtaining is analogous to a propostion being true. Note: in some of Plantinga’s writings, he says our world is the actual world, and the abstract ones are not actual, yet they exist. It’s easy for “those of us at home” to be confused when the words ‘actual’ and ‘exists’ are divorced! But leaving this aside, it is a primitive fact that one world – ours—is picked out as the concrete world. Lewis was extremely critical of this aspect – in his system actual is a merely indexical term: the actual world is the world I happen to be in, but otherwise the worlds exist on even-handed terms relative to each other.
Another key aspect for Plantinga is that for any object/individual there exists an individual essence. This is unlike Lewis’ counterpart theory, where I have counterparts in other worlds, and there is no dogma saying precisely when it is that the counterpart’s properties differ enough from mine that it is no longer worthy of being called my counterpart. The postulate of individual essences also seems a brute primitive. It serves to replace possible individuals in modal statements with something ‘actual’. But it’s not an actual individual – it is an (platonic) essence. The notion of individual essence seems to me a way to avoid the question of what it is which makes a bundle of properties an individual. (Some technical objections to this part of the system are also summarized in Menzel’s article.)
Plantinga takes seriously that we need to have truthmakers for modal truths (which I like). He also thinks there are should be no non-existent objects or mere possibilia as truthmakers, so everything needs to be explained via things which exist. To make it work, he needs a panoply of abstract entities to cover all the angles. I don’t have a problem with this in and of itself, since I am open-minded regarding the existence of abstract objects. The 2 issues I have are those mentioned above: first, the way our world gets picked out of the set of abstract worlds is a primitive; and the postulate of individual essences (as distinct from individuals themselves) is another feature I find somewhat gratuitous.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Platonism on Tap at Maverick Philosopher
Monday, November 07, 2005
Driven to Abstraction
Plato just won’t go away.
I’ve been thinking about whether the truthmakers for modal truths could involve abstract possible worlds, but this requires backing up a bit in order to consider the status of abstract objects in general.
Defining what it is to be "abstract" is not trivial. Lewis made this point in On the Plurality of Worlds. His breakdown of several ways to approach the question is followed by Gideon Rosen in this brief SEP article on Abstract Objects. The most often used methods are to define abstract objects in terms of what they are not, and then work out the idea using examples. Abstract objects are neither physical nor mental – usually they are thought of as unchanging and causally inert (the potential role of abstract objects in a theory of causation is something to come back to, however). Numbers and universals (“redness”, “roundness”) are paradigm examples.
This SEP article on Platonism in Metaphysics, by Mark Balaguer, summarizes the state of abstract objects in modern metaphysics. He surveys the landscape by seeing how the main candidates for abstract object status (mathematical objects, properties, propositions, possible worlds) fare under Platonism and its main rivals (nominalism, immanent realism, conceptualism). It’s an exceptionally reader friendly article, and was a helpful review for me.
One item I thought was interesting is that, according to Balaguer, the strongest argument for Platonism is a truthmaker argument. The things denoted in literally true statements (“3 is prime”) must exist as abstract objects in order to make the statement true. Alternative accounts of how these statements work or attempts to deny their truth all have problems and objections.
Of course, Platonism has strong objections. Balaguer singles out the epistemological issue as the biggest problem: if abstract objects are non-physical (and exist outside of space-time) how can we have knowledge about them? Different accounts have been proposed regarding how this can work; objections have been lodged, and the debate continues.
There is a running “meta-theme” here which I’ve been thinking about as I’ve tried to survey different topics in metaphysics (ontology, causality, modality). These metaphysical questions are difficult, and simple solutions obviously don’t work or the debates would have ended long ago. What this means to me is that the common presumption that something like physicalist monism should be the “default” metaphysical position is unfounded. More “extravagant” metaphysical systems need to be weighed in the quest to find a better mousetrap for explaining how the world works.
I’ve been thinking about whether the truthmakers for modal truths could involve abstract possible worlds, but this requires backing up a bit in order to consider the status of abstract objects in general.
Defining what it is to be "abstract" is not trivial. Lewis made this point in On the Plurality of Worlds. His breakdown of several ways to approach the question is followed by Gideon Rosen in this brief SEP article on Abstract Objects. The most often used methods are to define abstract objects in terms of what they are not, and then work out the idea using examples. Abstract objects are neither physical nor mental – usually they are thought of as unchanging and causally inert (the potential role of abstract objects in a theory of causation is something to come back to, however). Numbers and universals (“redness”, “roundness”) are paradigm examples.
This SEP article on Platonism in Metaphysics, by Mark Balaguer, summarizes the state of abstract objects in modern metaphysics. He surveys the landscape by seeing how the main candidates for abstract object status (mathematical objects, properties, propositions, possible worlds) fare under Platonism and its main rivals (nominalism, immanent realism, conceptualism). It’s an exceptionally reader friendly article, and was a helpful review for me.
One item I thought was interesting is that, according to Balaguer, the strongest argument for Platonism is a truthmaker argument. The things denoted in literally true statements (“3 is prime”) must exist as abstract objects in order to make the statement true. Alternative accounts of how these statements work or attempts to deny their truth all have problems and objections.
Of course, Platonism has strong objections. Balaguer singles out the epistemological issue as the biggest problem: if abstract objects are non-physical (and exist outside of space-time) how can we have knowledge about them? Different accounts have been proposed regarding how this can work; objections have been lodged, and the debate continues.
There is a running “meta-theme” here which I’ve been thinking about as I’ve tried to survey different topics in metaphysics (ontology, causality, modality). These metaphysical questions are difficult, and simple solutions obviously don’t work or the debates would have ended long ago. What this means to me is that the common presumption that something like physicalist monism should be the “default” metaphysical position is unfounded. More “extravagant” metaphysical systems need to be weighed in the quest to find a better mousetrap for explaining how the world works.
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