Presumptions are necessary for reasoning to work

Almost everybody who has had a child -- that includes me -- knows how annoying it can be when they learn how to make "Why?" into a way to drive a parent crazy.

You need to turn the TV off and go to bed.
Why?
Because it's late and you need to go to school tomorrow.
Why do I need to go to school?
So you can learn things.
Why should I learn things?

And so it goes, until the parent gets fed up and ends the discussion with "Because I said so! Go brush your teeth!"

Andy Norman uses this sort of Why? reasoning (or pseudo-reasoning) to illustrate a philosophical point in his book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

(See here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Many people consider that the essence of sound thinking is supplying reasons for something you consider to be true. That's basically correct, but two extremes need to be avoided.

One is requiring that every reason be backed up with evidence.

That leads to a infinite regress where every claim needs an evidential foundation, which itself needs an evidential foundation. This lays the groundwork for extreme skepticism where nothing is viewed as proven since every claim of truth depends on another claim of truth, and so on, and so on.

The other extreme is faith, a natural result of that sort of extreme skepticism about our ability to know reality.

If nothing can be known for sure, then why not have blind faith in this or that? This eliminates the need for reasons, and hence the infinite regress of reasons leading to the need for more reasons to support those reasons.

Norman concludes, persuasively, that the way out of these extremes is to recognize that presumptions form the basis for collaborative dialog aimed at gaining an understanding of some issue. This is the way of science, he writes.

Practicing scientists don't wipe the belief-slate clean, then painstakingly populate it only with evidence-based conclusions. Like all of us, they take many things to be presumptively true, and reason from them. (Without these presumptions, they wouldn't get very far.)

Science isn't special because it starts from scratch and builds everything from evidence and logic alone; it's special because it's resolutely committed to countenancing cogent challenges and making necessary revisions.

...Practicing scientists, in other words, give evidentialism a Socratic rather than a Platonic spin. They grow into a community of inquiry that takes many things as presumptively true, and for the most part, they accept those presumptions. That's part of the process of becoming a scientist. 

Sometimes, a scientist will challenge elements of the scientific consensus and succeed in overturning one or several of them. But they never discard all their discipline's presumptions, and start from scratch. If they did, they'd be doing something like Cartesian epistemology, not science.

...The New Socratic picture of reason, then, doesn't require us to abandon the sufficient evidence standard. Instead, it urges us to enrich our picture of how reasoning and inquiry work. Inquiry yields findings, which are then presumed, for the most part, to be true.

These presumptions become available for premising, and a spur to new inquiries. Often, these presumptions summarize accumulated evidence or otherwise encode hard-won insights. In this way, the evidence and insight they contain become the "basis" of new knowledge.

...So in a sense, presumptions are repositories of evidence.

This discussion of presumptions, along with my reading of the rest of Mental Immunity (I'm almost finished with the book) helped me realize why comment conversations on this blog so often go awry. Religious believers tend to ignore the implied presumptions that I and others who accept the scientific worldview make in our arguments.

Here's examples of what I presume:

-- Our universe is real, not an illusion.
-- Objective reality exists independent of the human brain.
-- Consciousness arises in the brain.
-- The human mind is subject to errors about reality.
-- Science is the best way to correct those mental errors.
-- Nothing is 100% certain, but some things are more certain than others.
-- Most of what science knows can be relied upon as true, until proven false.

These presumptions aren't wild or crazy. They are founded on a massive amount of study, research, and experiments aimed at understanding reality. When I refer to these presumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, anyone who disagrees with one or more of them has the burden of providing persuasive reasons why a presumption shouldn't be accepted.

That person probably has their own presumptions. They might include:

-- Our universe is illusory; reality lies elsewhere.
-- God is the creator and sustainer of reality.
-- Consciousness can exist apart from the brain or body.
-- Some humans have perfect knowledge of reality.
-- Religion or mysticism is the best way to know reality.
-- Perfect mystics or prophets have 100% certain knowledge. 
-- Science can't be relied upon, so it is fine to ignore it.

Problem is, those religiously-based presumptions aren't founded on solid evidence. So they aren't really valid presumptions at all. They're beliefs. If someone puts them forward as reasons for an argument being made, it makes sense to ask "Why do you say that?" 

This is a valid use of Why? because the so-called presumptions are anything but. They're the sort of reasons that may make sense to a religious believer, and can be fashioned into a mutually reinforcing set of beliefs, but they are very weak philosophically and scientifically. 

They're akin to the delusions of a psychotic who has a worldview that makes sense to them, yet lacks a grounding in the reality almost everybody else lives in. Sure, it's possible that the psychotic has an insight into reality that the rest of us lack, just as it's possible that a religious mindset is true.

The odds are just very high that such isn't the case, because the presumptions of both the psychotic person and a religious person aren't based on demonstrable evidence.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

As must have been observed plenty of times by plenty of people, religious beliefs are quite literally psychotic. If a single person held those beliefs, they'd definitely be locked away, or at least fawned on by scores of psychiatrists sticking needles into them and pouring drugs into them and making many a career out of studying them. Because instead of one, or two or four or ten, we have literally thousands and millions and even billions holding these absurd unevidenced beliefs, therefore we call them "religion", and those sheer numbers end up giving these psychotic beliefs legitimacy (which legitimacy, if clearly recognized as no more than pragmatism, might make some kind of sense; but in as much as it is often seen to speak to the truth value of those beliefs, or at any rate to equivocation about such beliefs, to that extent this is no more than a fallacious, and often implicit, argumentum ad populum).

----------

Incidentally, as far as your main argument here, Brian, I'd like to add:

A superficial reading into your excerpt and comments above might lead some to point and cry "No True Scotsman". Therefore it might be important to add this:

Those recursive "Why"s isn't something we're arbitrarily putting a stop to by introducing arbitrary axioms. Such presumptions, and indeed such axioms, as we do introduce, those too can very well be defended, if one wishes to clearly examine the foundations of one's belief systems.

For instance, if asked for proof of prime movers et cetera, the theist is reduced to half-witted Aquinianisms (that, in Aquinas's time, may well have been understandable, and indeed even brilliant, even if mistaken; but are simply ignorant and stupid if held on to today). On the other hand, the presumption of an objective reality --- the first of your the presumptions in your list --- can be indeed be defended, not so much on strictly epistemological grounds, as by a simple application of Occam's Razor, and as the simplest and most apt explanation of our model of how things work. (Which does mean that that presumption is tentative, as indeed all science is tentative, but nevertheless it is entirely a fully justified presumption, one that we can clearly defend if asked to.)

[um]

>>This is a valid use of Why? because the so-called presumptions are anything but. They're the sort of reasons that may make sense to a religious believer, and can be fashioned into a mutually reinforcing set of beliefs, but they are very weak philosophically and scientifically. <<

If so ... so what?

Scholar, scientists and others the like are like people running and frequenting 5 stars Michelin establishment. This discussions among chefs, columnists, writers of cook books and the consumers, is only open to the happy few, that have the money, the time and who are educated to talk about food in terms of gastronomy .... but .... for the rest of the majority, the "loosers" ... it is enough to talk about food, in terms of health etc. staying alive, where to get the money to buy food, how and where to get proper drinking water.

It is alright, let the 5 stars restaurant and everything related to it flourish, but do not set it as a standard for all.

Yes ...mental ill people have presumptions but not all people that have these presumptions are mentally ill .... and what to say about those that make it seen that way??

Things are what they are
mostly not what the seem to be
let alone how the are presented by say atheists or people that want them selves to be seen as such, or try to converse the worl to thing their way, for their own good.

[Dungeness]

@ Brian ; [ -- Our universe is illusory; reality lies elsewhere.
....
-- Religion or mysticism is the best way to know reality.
-- Perfect mystics or prophets have 100% certain knowledge.
-- Science can't be relied upon, so it is fine to ignore it.
]

This screed that mysticism is nothing but baseless belief is inaccurate.
The last item -it's fine to ignore an unreliable science- is a pure fabri-
cation. It has the distinct pall of someone overreaching and conflating
religious anti-vaxers with mystics.

Mystics do not support blind belief. That's often a charge justifiably
leveled at followers of many religions however. Don't conflate the two.
For the former, belief alone isn't enough. The goal of mystic discipline
is to confirm every claim scientifically within through mindfulness and
an intense devotional path. Whether followers always succeed, even
after years, isn't the point. A true mystic will encourage a follower to
shift course and try another path if dissatisfied or results aren't attained.

[Vinny]

And after school life person learns that Christian thieves have stolen everything from Sanskrit to form false language English.

[Vinny]

There is a you tube video Christian Thieves by Frank Padilla.

[Tendzin]

Your essay is the most impressive strawman argument that I've seen in my 20 years of experience with internet apologetics. I'd write a detailed rebuttal but frankly, it would just take too long to do.

Instead of making ludicrously broad accusations about anyone who disagrees with you, it would be more fruitful to focus on specifics opinions or incidents that you find fault with.