Season 2, Episode 2: Tom Oberle on Grounding and Regress.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ส.ค. 2024
- In this episode Alex is joined by Tom Oberle, who is currently undertaking his PhD in philosophy from the University of Alberta. They discuss Tom's paper 'Grounding, infinite regress, and the thomistic cosmological argument' (philpapers.org..., recently published in the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion.
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Sooooo happy you're making more content!!! Thank you for all you do.
A wonderful discussion, thank you both! It would be cool to see a discussion between Tom and Graham Oppy on whether necessarily existing things require an explanation.
That's excellent. It was about time for someone to seriously challenge the alleged impossibility of an infinite regress of per se chains.
@CosmPharmPhilo: Don't people seriously challenge it constantly already, though?
@@derekg5563 I've never found a paper or chapter in a book written by a professional philosopher trying to seriously challenge this premise.
This was an especially tasty discussion. Good pace and dense content well extrapolated made for ideal grocking.
Great episode. I really enjoyed Tom's paper. It's nice to see the distinction between per se and per accidens causes to be taken more seriously. Super excited about Tom's future work on the subject as well. I was honestly also surprised that Tom was a Theist and admitted that he had trouble reconciling some of his work here with his Theism. I think it goes to show how philosophically informed Theists such as Tom are definitely more humble, knowledgable, and informed, compared to what we saw with Turek and Meyer in the previous episode you guys did.
@RealAtheology: I beg to differ: I think philosophically informed theists are definitely less informed compared to theists that are not philosophically informed.
@@derekg5563 wut
@derekg5563
It's almost as if you wanted to see a point that you thought you disagreed with, so you did...
Only it turned out that you didn't actually disagree with it, so you just ended up with an utterly nonsense self- refuting statement.
It's super impressive.
I've never understood what's supposed to be the problem with infinite regresses. Glad to see I'm not the only one. Also, it never ceases to amaze me how when people invoke their seemings as justifications, they never ask the question of why they have those particular seemings in the first place. Like, I agree that an infinitely long train moving without a locomotive seems absurd. But why is that? Could it be because we only have experiences with finitely long trains? Why should we expect those seemings to be truth-tracking when it comes to infinitely long trains with which we have no experience of?
The observer selection bias is extra obvious when the explanation for all is essentially the same as the thing we observe it with.
What do you mean they "never ask why they have those seemings"? They ask that all the time. Are you skeptical of seemings-as-justification? Why do you think that?
Ultimately this is why Aquinas's arguments are more powerful. When you understand the difference between per se and per accidens ordered series, and how Aquinas argues, you realize it's quite trivial to sidestep this objection, and, in fact, this objection shows a complete lack of understanding of the argument.
That makes it also more fun, because if you want to challenge Aquinas, you actually have to do the metaphysical work to explain why he's wrong and give a positive case for what you believe, rather than relying on "seemings", which, as you pointed out, are much more fungible.
@@VACatholic So, the usual shift of the burden of proof? I agree on one thing though, Aquinas’ question begging arguments must look very powerful to people who lack basic logic skills.
@kamilgregor: There are a lot of thoughts about the general nature of what we are doing when we are using contingent justifications to explain other contingent justifications, that might make us question how it could really operate. There seems to be a sense in which, when we solve something with something that has the same kind of problem as the thing to be solved, no progress is made. If I owe you $5 and I borrow from you $5 to pay you $5, I can do this infinitely and not clear my debt with you at any point: when I borrow the $5, I will owe you $10, and I will pay you $5 to bring it back to $5, and I will just be shifting ad infinitum between owing you $10 and owing you $5, but never getting my debt to $0 (not even temporarily). I mean, that, at least, doesn't seem to require intuitions to seem plausible, but just, an understanding of logic.
On the other hand, if I first pay you the $5, and then borrow from you $5, and pay you $5 again and so on ad infinitum, I will be in debt an infinite amount of times but will also fully pay it off an infinite amount of times (as opposed to zero times in the previous case) with a perfectly symmetrical alignment with the times in which I go into debt, because I already started with paying you, rather than starting with borrowing from you, and that is a distinction that one might call a grounding for convenience, but is some distinction in any case. Otherwise, we would have some pretty cool debt loopholes.
Infinite regresses as the instantiations of a kind of concept aren't a problem, but problems can, at least conceivably, arise when the ones postulated concern only contingent things. At that point, the regress, well, is, in a sense, failing to exist in the same sense in which I am failing to clear my debts with you if I owe you $5 and start paying it off by borrowing from you an additional $5 and so on as I described above.
If you're just fine with there just being no real explanation for something, fair enough, but the idea of there just being infinite contingent explanations as a means of doing explanatory work of the whole just seems to result in being in endless debt no matter what part of it you consider. Paying off debt in the way I described is as ineffective as just telling you, "I am not going to pay you; deal with it." At no point in the infinite chain of contingent things is existence ever really established; the constituents could be thought of as conceptual points that are "trying" to establish something but actually don't. We don't explain A except in terms of how B explains it, which in turn is itself only explained in terms of how C explains that, and so on.
Your point, implied by your talk of "seemings," about how this kind of thinking _could_ be wrong isn't an invalid point, but is rather trivial. Sure... we should always challenge our own theories, lol. I don't see what else you are really getting at with that. You could be wrong, too. The idea that someone could be wrong isn't really an argument against it, but more like an encouragement or reminder to someone to challenge their own concepts. Well, yeah, this is philosophy, and by definition, any serious philosopher basically does that, or is consciously looking to do that with everything.
Let's say we have accepted that we could be wrong. Okay. Right about now is when we would actually start looking at counterarguments being made. Provide something that might challenge the credibility of the intuitions that may or may not be at play, so that we have something with which we can instantiate the advice "challenge your own theories," or else you are not really providing an argument addressing the subject matter.
As an interesting aside, if there are a finite number of things for example, there is still an infinite amount of possibilities that we cannot eliminate until we get relevant empirical information. For example, if there is a finite amount of things in the universe, it could be 10^500 things, but we can't rule out that it's 50 googolplex things either, or 50 googolplex^googolplex things. That's just epistemological, though, and it would have to be one of the finite possibilities out there, but from our perspective there would be an endless list of things that we would entertain when asking about how many objects there are. Any amount you could imagine has a kind of infinite amount of impotence because the agent of this finite amount has an infinite amount of amounts from which to choose, so to speak, as that finite amount, so our minds can't really close off possibilities just knowing the amount is finite without knowing where it is on the infinite number line that there is correspondence between it and the finite number of things that exist in the universe. In that kind of way, treating the universe as if it were infinite would give us a conceptually identical relation to reality to applying that treatment to a universe that actually _is_ infinite, again, until empirical data gives us cause for a deviation.
I was about to go watch some old Alex vids, and then I see this awesome new video in my notifications!
Tom said our intuition that an infinite regress of per se chains is impossible is only nomological/physical; not metaphysical.
An objection that immediately came to my mind is that this would still be problematic for an infinite regress of *physical* objects (since they would be nomological). Therefore, while one could freely postulate an infinite regress of immaterial substances (say, some sort of causal Platonic objects or gods), the same wouldn't be true for material objects.
But if you're going to posit the existence of causal immaterial substances, then why not a finite amount? Indeed, why not just one? Doesn't that seem less ontologically extravagant and more economic? Why do we even need an infinite regress?
Now, I guess one potential counter-reply is that our intuition only applies to _this_ physical universe. Who knows whether other physical worlds would behave in the same way? If our intuition is merely nomological, then if you radically change the laws of physics, then the problem goes away. So, perhaps there is an infinite regress of physical worlds, each sustaining the existence of the other.
Don't the versions of theism defended by Schelling, Fichte and Hegel not foundational ?
Hi there. Is there a way to connect with you?
Interesting discussion. By the end of it, I have to admit, I wanted to tell Tom - maybe you should go with "there's no god" and see if this removes many (or all) of those difficult problems for you.
Maybe he thinks dualism is more probable and that’s why he’s a theist I would like to hear arguments he likes more
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf Yeah, although I am yet to meet a person who is a theist of any kind based on arguments and not on some sort of faith that is then rationalized with some convoluted piece of reasoning.
@@LouigiVerona I think the psycho physical harmony argument is interesting and the fine-tuning type argument you see from Robbie collins
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf Sure, they are "interesting". But I can't imagine anyone hearing them and going from atheist to theist, you know what I mean?
@@LouigiVerona well it has as people have converted I think it would been interesting to have Ed feser and this guy discuss it since he’s a huge Thomist
On infinitism, is the PSR itself supposed to have a ground? (if the unrestricted form doesn't exempt necessary propositions)
Yeah get a discussion with josh on it would be interesting
Tom barely opens his mouth when he talks.
So circular explanation of contingent things is better explanation than appealing to a necessary existence?
I believe the point is we can't fully rule out an infinite regress.
If each member has the power in itself to cause the next member, then this is a per accidens series; not a per se series.
The issue with the infinite regress is that X (a medium) is supposed to have Y in virtue of another. But if the series is infinite (all are mediums), then no member has Y. So all Xs have Y in virtue of another, but no others have Y. It’s a contradiction. It’s a claim that another has Y and doesn’t have Y.
🌸 *promo sm*