Disagreement
2008 February 3
As noted on Ian Church’s ‘Reformed Philosophy’ blog, there is a prima facie problem for foundationalists: how to resolve disagreement. The problem would arise because both sides would accuse the other of begging the question by appealing to their foundational beliefs. Let us distinguish between base and superstructure, the base beliefs are held non-inferentially and the superstructure is inferred from base beliefs and rules of inference. In the cases that lead us to be having this discussion the base is some theological system and the superstructure is an epistemological one, but that’s not essential to the debate.
The problem is understanding how two people with different bases can have a meaningful debate about superstructures. It seems that each party believes what they believe for reasons that the other will not accept. Any arguments they offer will be met by a charge of begging the question. What to do?
Ian’s suggestion is to appeal to the following method of resolving conflicts. A conflict is resolved if one side can show that the other is internally inconsistent. I think it’s implicit in what Ian says that we imagine this process to be iterated and that one belief system will emerge from the process as undefeated. As he notes, this relies on the premise that there is at most one consistent base. I think that, if the base is assumed to contain or imply every atomic sentence or its negation (or something of the sort), this is right.
There are a couple of points to make about this, which I think make the view look pretty costly. The first is that it only works if we make the world views extremely comprehensive. This is required by the condition sketched at the end of the previous paragraph. If this is accepted then the other assumption of the optimistic view looks threatened. Why shouldn’t there be more than one internally consistent set of base beliefs plus inference rules? Presumably the world is consistent, but there could be more than one system of reasoning from what is given by it. This problem would be resolved if the inference rules were fixed. But trying to do so will bring back the charge of question-begging. Whoever has their favoured inference rules questioned will cry ‘foul!’
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Being a Calvinist, I am rarely accused of optimism
Fantastic points Tom. I do indeed conceive of worldviews as being quite comprehensive (more comprehensive than a specific worldview-adherer may realize). I think my optimism, at least in part, comes from the brand of theism I endorse; just a product of my worldview I suppose. For what it is worth, I think a worldview can be shown to lead to absurdity in several ways, internal inconsistence being one of them. Presumably, if a worldview could be shown to lead to a proposition that, though consistent, was quite contradictory to basic/universal human experience (whatever that means), that would be a strike against it as well. That said, I don’t think this alleviates your concerns.
Again, thanks again for your commentary. You have brought up issues that I will simply have to address in any full promotion of my methodology.
Cheers,
-Ian
It’s an interesting topic. I’m hoping to write my PhD on relativism from a philosophy of language point of view. I’m sure I’ll be returning to this sort of thought at some point as well.