Edward Feser's Blog, page 80

Pigliucci logic

In a recent article (to which I linked last week), philosopher Massimo Pigliucci wrote:
[W]hile some people may very well be “Islamophobes” (i.e., they may genuinely harbor an irrational prejudice against Islam), simply pointing out that Islamic ideas play a role in contemporary terrorism and repression does not make one [an] Islamophobe, and using the label blindly is simply an undemocratic, and unreflective, way of cutting off critical discourse.
Furthermore, to insist that “Islamophobia” is the only alternative to regarding Islam as inherently benign is, Pigliucci says, to promote a “false dichotomy [which] is a basic type of informal logical fallacy.”Not that Pigliucci, though himself an atheist, wants to attack Islam simply because it is a religion.  On the contrary, in the same article he criticizes “overconfident atheists” and “crass new atheism-style ‘criticism’ of religion,” dismisses the suggestion that any religion is somehow “the motherlode of bad ideas,” and acknowledges that “religions have done lots of good in the world throughout history.”  He simply thinks that we need to strive for “nuance” and to avoid “oversimplification,” whether we are speaking well of religious ideas or criticizing them. 

All of which is, of course, perfectly reasonable.  Good for Pigliucci!
But wait…
Recall that in a post from several months ago, I responded at length to some criticisms Pigliucci had raised against metaphysics as a subfield within philosophy.  A reader has called my attention to this Twitter exchange, in which Pigliucci is asked if he has replied to my critique.  Pigliucci responds:
[N]o, not particularly interested to engage with theologically-informed authors.  Sorry.
It is then pointed out to Pigliucci that this is a “surpris[ing]” response given that in fact my “defense of metaphysics doesn't rest on theological premises.”  To this Pigliucci replies:
[I]t lurks in the background, esp. the way [Feser] (mis) treats Hume.
End quote.  So, dismissing criticisms raised by a “theologically-informed author” is OK, even though the alleged theological premises do not actually play any role in the criticism but merely “lurk in the background” in some vague, unspecified way.  And even though this is (for the two or three readers to whom it is not already blindingly obvious) a textbook example of the informal ad hominem fallacy of poisoning the well. 
What happened to “nuance” vis-à-vis religion?  When did “oversimplification” become acceptable?  How did an atheist’s dismissing something simply because it is vaguely associated with religion suddenly become non-“crass” and non-“overconfident”?  Why are informal fallacies suddenly OK?
Apparently, all of these miracles occur when Pigliucci himselfbecomes the object of criticism.  (Ah, the calm sunshine of the Humean mind!)
In fairness, though, when pressed to justify his claim that I have somehow “mistreated” Hume, Pigliucci says he’ll “take another look” at what I wrote.  So I await his more measured response to my (in fact completely non-theological) criticisms.

The comedy keeps coming

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but while we’re on the subject of humor, here’s another mistake that is often made in discussions of it: failing to identify precisely which aspect of the phenomenon of humor a theory is (or is best interpreted as) trying to explain.  For instance, this is sometimes manifest in lists of the various “theories of humor” put forward by philosophers over the centuries.In my previous post, I mentioned (and tentatively advocated) the incongruity theory, according to which we find something funny when it involves some kind of anomalous juxtaposition or combination of incompatible elements.  Other examples would be the superiority theory, which holds that finding something funny involves a feeling of superiority over and contempt for others; and the release theory, which holds that we find something funny when it involves release of tension or pent-up feelings.  (There are several other theories too, but I’m not going to rehearse them all -- you get the idea.)

Now, Aristotle and Aquinas are sometimes represented as putting forward yet another theory of humor, called the play theory.  The basic idea is conveyed by Aquinas as follows:
[J]ust as weariness of the body is dispelled by resting the body, so weariness of the soul must needs be remedied by resting the soul: and the soul's rest is pleasure... Consequently, the remedy for weariness of soul must needs consist in the application of some pleasure, by slackening the tension of the reason's study. Thus… it is related of Blessed John the Evangelist, that when some people were scandalized on finding him playing together with his disciples, he is said to have told one of them who carried a bow to shoot an arrow. And when the latter had done this several times, he asked him whether he could do it indefinitely, and the man answered that if he continued doing it, the bow would break. Whence the Blessed John drew the inference that in like manner man's mind would break if its tension were never relaxed.
Now such like words or deeds wherein nothing further is sought than the soul's delight, are called playful or humorous. Hence it is necessary at times to make use of them, in order to give rest, as it were, to the soul. (Summa Theologiae II-II.168.2)
While excess is possible here as elsewhere, Aquinas is clear that deficiency vis-à-vis humor can even be at least mildly sinful:
In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment… [A] man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude… (Summa Theologiae II-II.168.4)
You might say that for the Angelic Doctor, “chillaxing” can be positively virtuous (as opposed to neutral, let alone bad).  And since humor facilitates chillaxing, humor can be virtuous.
Now, this is often discussed as if it were a rivalto theories of humor like the incongruity theory, the superiority theory, etc.  But it seems to me that that is not the case.  For Aristotle and Aquinas are simply not addressing the same question those other theories are concerned with.  Those theories are addressing the question of what makes something funny, of why we find ithumorous.  But the “play theory” of Aristotle and Aquinas is not trying to explain what makes something funny.  Rather, it is explaining the benefits of humor in human life, its function in facilitating our psychological well-being.  You might say that the incongruity theory, the superiority theory, etc. are theories about the formal cause of jokes and other forms of humor, whereas Aristotle and Aquinas are concerned with the final cause of jokes and other forms of humor.  They are saying, in effect: “Whatever the factor is whose presence causes us to find certain things to be funny -- and we’re not addressing that -- finding things to be funny has an important function of facilitating relaxation of mind.”
To be sure, writers on humor sometimes point out that one can combine different theories of humor, but noting that in this case the theories in question are addressing entirely different aspects of the phenomenon -- a difference which, again, can be characterized in terms of the traditional and independently motivated distinction between formal and final causes -- allows for greater conceptual precision than just averring that more than one theory may contain elements of truth. 
Take another example, from Jim Holt’s little book Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes (which is great, by the way).  Holt reports on a 1998 discovery by UCLA researchers that, by stimulating a patient’s brain, the patient can be made suddenly to find all sorts of ordinary and unremarkable things funny.  Holt worries:
If, given the application of a little current to a spot in the brain, absolutely everything becomes invested with risible incongruity -- becomes, that is, a joke -- then how can humor pretend to be an aesthetic category worthy of philosophical analysis? (Baudelaire observed that the same effect could be produced by hashish, but never mind.) (p. 122)
As that last line (and the overall tone of his book) indicate, Holt isn’t really all that worried by this finding, so I hesitate to attribute to him any weighty thesis about the implications of neuroscience for the philosophy of humor.  But (given the neuromaniarampant today) someone mightseriously think that the finding in question somehow undermines the point of philosophizing about humor.  And as with other instances of neuromania, such a conclusion would be fallacious.  For here too, we have a claim which is not actually in competition with anything the traditional theories of humor are saying. 
For one thing, if the traditional theories are addressing formal and final causes, you might say that what the researchers uncovered were material and efficientcauses.  In particular, they uncovered (some of) the material and efficient causes of the psychological state of being amused.  By contrast, the play theory is addressing the final cause of that psychological state (viz. to facilitate relaxation of mind), whereas the incongruity theory, say, is addressing the formal cause of the psychological state (viz. a perception of something as incongruous). 
For another thing, we need to distinguish between normal and deviant cases.  Neurologically induced hallucinations can tell you something about normal vision, since there are features they have in common, but it would be absurd to conclude from this that normal vision can be assimilated to hallucination.  The differences between the cases are hardly less important than the similarities.  By the same token, it would be absurd to suppose that all cases of finding something funny can be assimilated or reduced to what is going on in the case of a patient whose brain is being stimulated in such a way that he ends up finding all sorts of unremarkable things amusing.  This is a highly abnormal case, and precisely as such, it can only tell us so much about the normal cases.  Yet it is the normal cases that the traditional theories (the incongruity theory, play theory, etc.) are concerned with.
Of course, there are all sorts of nuances and qualifications that a systematic application of the Aristotelian four-causal approach would have to take account of, and I’m not addressing all that here.  Anyway, as in philosophy more generally, so too in even so esoteric a subfield as the philosophy of humor, the four causes continue to have application.  Funny, no?

Dragging the net

My recent Claremont Review of Books review of Scruton’s Soul of the World and Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existenceis now available for free online.
Should we expect a sound proof to convince everyone?  Michael Augros investigates at Strange Notions (in an excerpt from his new book Who Designed the Designer? A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence ).
Intrigue!  Conspiracy!  Comic books!  First, where did the idea for Spider-Man really come from?  The New York Post reports on a Brooklyn costume shop and an alleged “billion dollar cover up.”
Then, according to Variety, a new documentary reveals the untold story behind Roger Corman’s notorious never-released Fantastic Four movie.  (I’ve seen the new one.  It’s only almostas bad as you’ve heard.)The notion of curved space has had predictivesuccess.  But does it make metaphysical sense? At Philosophy Now, Raymond Tallis expresses his doubts.

At National Review, John O’Sullivan on Robert Conquest and his obituaries.
The famous 1968 televised duel between Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal is recounted in a new documentary, as reported by New York magazine and The Weekly Standard .
In New Statesman, John Gray on the F. A. Hayek he knew.
Did the making of the Planned Parenthood sting videos really involve lying?  At Crisis, Monica Migliorino Miller answers in the negative.  Some commentary on Miller from Brandon Watson at Siris.
The New York Review of Books gives two cheers for the Middle Ages.  And Atlas Obscura exposes the myth of the medieval chastity belt.
Atheist philosopher of religion William L. Rowe has died.
Whatever happened to the guys behind the greatly underrated, ahead-of-its-time movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?  The Telegraph reports .
At Salon, Camille Paglia attacks the myth of the open-minded and well-informed liberal.
Scientism: The New Orthodoxy , edited by Richard N. Williams and Daniel N. Robinson, is reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Massimo Pigliucci, at The Philosophers’ Magazine, on a false dichotomy that prevails in post-9/11 discussion of Islam.

Is it funny because it’s true?

In a recent article in National Review, Ian Tuttle tells us that “standup comedy is colliding with progressivism.”  He notes that comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Gilbert Gottfried have complained of a new political correctness they perceive in college audiences and in comedy clubs, and he cites feminists and others who routinely protest against allegedly “sexist,” “racist,” and/or “homophobic” jokes told by prominent comedians like Louis C. K.  In Tuttle’s view, the “pious aspirations” of left-wing “moral busybodies” have led them to “[object] to humor that does not bolster their ideology” and “to conflate what is funny with what is acceptable to laugh at.”No doubt he’s right about that.  But what does Tuttle think is the correct attitude to take to humor?  Comedy, he says, is about “speaking truth to power,” and “the comedian[‘s]… jokes are never without a bit of truth.”  Indeed, he writes:

 “Only the truth is funny,” comedian Rick Reynolds observed in the 1990s.  The comedian, in his role as fool, can never stray beyond what is true, or he will have trouble making it funny.
In his May 2014 GQfeature about Louis C.K., Andrew Corsello identified a willingness to tell the truth about what people do and think as part of C.K.’s brilliance: “He’s always striking through the mask, Louis C.K.  It’s not just a matter of braying aloud what the rest of us only dare to think; he says things we aren’t even aware we’re thinking until we hear them from C.K.  That’s his genius.”
End quote.  Tuttle is, of course, hardly the first to assert that comedy is essentially about telling uncomfortable truths.  That Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, et al. were all in the business of “speaking truth to power” has become a cliché.  But (with no disrespect to Tuttle intended) it’s also a pious falsehood.  Indeed, it is exactly the samepious falsehood Tuttle rightly condemns when he sees it in progressives. 
After all, the humorless progressives Tuttle criticizes don’t think the jokes they condemn really do contain any uncomfortable truths.  Rather, they think these jokes promote what the critics sincerely take to be falsehoods.  They think that the jokes in question do not “speak truth to power,” but rather aid and abet the powerful by facilitating lies about those who are less powerful.  This is all overheated and humorless, of course, but that is what they think.  In other words, they are applying Tuttle’s own criterion for evaluating humor.   And if Tuttle were to respond: “OK, but these left-wingers are just wrong about where the truth lies,” then he would be guilty of taking exactly the same ideological approach humor that the left-wingers do.  For of course, they would say that he is the one who is wrong about where the truth lies.
The problem is not that the progressives in question look at humor through the wrong political lens.  The problem is that looking at humor through anypolitical lens, including the right one, is simply to misunderstand the nature of humor.  The fact is that there does not seem to be any essential connection at all between something’s being funny and it’s conveying some truth, uncomfortable or otherwise.  The uncomfortable truth is rather that lots of things really are funny even though they rest on falsehoods, and lots of things are unfunny even though they are uncomfortable truths.
It’s hardly difficult to come up with examples.  To learn you have terminal cancer is to learn an uncomfortable truth.  But it isn’t funny, even if you are one of the “powerful” to whom this truth is being “spoken.”  Probably even your enemies won’t find it at all funny, but will feel sorry for you.  And even if they are very hard-hearted and don’t feel sorry for you, it probably won’t be because they think it’s funny, but rather because they think you somehow deserve it.
Perhaps someone who thinks that there is an important link between truth and humor would respond that there are at least imaginable contexts in which this sort of truth would be funny.  And that is correct -- there is such a thing as dark comedy, after all, and I’ll say more about it in a moment.  But in these cases it is precisely the additional context that generates the comedy, and not the uncomfortable truth itself.
Nor is it difficult to think of examples of things that are funny even though they don’t convey truths of any sort.  What truth is conveyed by a slap fight between the Three Stooges?  Or lines like “Don’t call me Shirley” or “Roger, Roger.  What's our vector, Victor?” in the movie Airplane?  Even jokes motivated by views one takes to be false or offensive can be funny.  For example, even the most ardent admirer of John Foster Dulles would have to admit that “Dull, duller, Dulles” is a pretty funny insult.  In his book Comic Relief , John Morreall suggests, quite rightly in my view, that the reason “Polish jokes” were popular in the U.S. in the 1970s was not because people really thought Poles were unintelligent.  George Carlin was usually pretty funny even though his views about politics and religion were usually pretty sophomoric.  (In my view, anyway; of course, some readers will disagree.  But even those who disagree have no doubt heard somecomedian or other tell a joke that prompted them to think: “I don’t agree with the view underlying it, but I have to admit it’s still funny.”)
Philosophers have over the centuries debated various theories about what makes something funny, and the “It’s funny because it’s true” theory is not among them.  Probably the most widely accepted theory -- and, I think, the most plausible one -- is the incongruity theory, according to which we find something funny when it involves some kind of anomalous juxtaposition or combination of incompatible elements.  Think of Kramer’s ridiculous antics on Seinfeld -- ineptly attempting to masquerade as a doctor, shaving with butter, preparing a meal in the shower, trying to pay for a calzone with a big sack of pennies, etc. -- or Larry David’s over-the-top reactions to minor inconveniences and offenses on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  Or consider the way that the punch line of a joke typically involves some sort of reversal of what one would have expected given the setup. 
To be sure, the incongruity thesis needs to be qualified in various ways.  There is, for example, nothing funny about a rattlesnake you find slithering up next to you after you slip into your sleeping bag while out camping, even though there is an obvious incongruity between settling down to sleep and finding a rattlesnake next to you.  However, if you “detach” yourself from such a scenario -- imagine seeing this happen onscreen in a movie, or even happening to someone else -- it certainly canseem funny.  Similarly, no one who seriously embarrasses himself in public -- by giving a horrible speech or telling a joke that falls flat, by having some personal foible revealed in front of a crowd, by losing control of his bowels, or whatever -- finds it funny at the time.  But such scenarios are nevertheless very common in comedy movies, and even someone to whom such a misfortune occurs often laughs about it later, as do those to whom he relates the story.   It is incongruity detached from any immediate danger that is funny.  (Noël Carroll suggests some other ways the incongruity theory might be refined and qualified in Humour: A Very Short Introduction .) 
It seems to me that people often overestimate the significance of certain kinds of jokes because they fail to see that it is incongruity that is key to their effectiveness.  They wrongly identify some other prominent element as key, and then overreact in either a negative or positive way.  For example, some people find “dark comedy” or “black humor” offensive, because they think it reflects insensitivity to human suffering or that it is motivated by a desire to shock decent sensibilities.  But that is not the case.  Of course, someone who tells such a joke could be insensitive or motivated by ill-will, but the point is that he need not be.  Rather, dark humor is funny precisely because of how extremethe incongruity involved typically is.  (Consider, if you have the taste for this kind of humor, this example, or this one, or the work of cartoonist John Callahan.) 
Similarly, the reason people find ethnic jokes or “dumb blonde” jokes funny need not be because they harbor “racist” or “sexist” attitudes.  Nor need religious jokes be motivated by sacrilegious or blasphemous intent.  For example, the famous Last Supper scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part Iis effective because of the extremeness of the incongruity it portrays -- the preposterous juxtaposition of Christ solemnly teaching while some annoying waiter is trying to push soup and mulled wine on the disciples.  (Note that I am not addressing here the question of what sorts of jokes are appropriatefrom a moral point of view -- that’s another matter.  I’m talking about why people in fact find certain things funny.)
At the other extreme, people can react in too positivea way to comedy when they fail to see that it is incongruity rather than some other prominent element that “does the work” in humor.  And that is, I think, exactly what is happening when people suggest (quite absurdly, in my view) that standup comedy has some profound mission of “speaking truth to power” etc.  The sober, mundane truth is rather merely that comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, or Louis C. K. say things that you are “not supposed” to say -- things that violate the rules of etiquette or decorum, or conflict with the conventional wisdom, or are odd or unusual.  In other words, there is an incongruity between what they say and what people usually feel comfortable saying.  Sometimes what they say captures some “uncomfortable truth,” but sometimes it’s just crackpot bloviating or rudeness.  And when it is true, it isn’t the truth per se that makes it funny, but rather the incongruity. 
Hence, just as critics of some forms of humor overreact because they misidentify the source and motivation of the joke (“That’s insensitive!”  “That’s racist!”  “That’s blasphemous!”), so too do the boosters of certain comedians ridiculously overstate the significance of what they do.  “He’s a genius, a diagnostician of our social ills, an exposer of hypocrisy, he’s speaking truuuuth to powwwwer!”
Nah, he’s just some guy telling jokes.  That’s all.

Religion and the Social Sciences

Check out the recently published Religion and the Social Sciences: Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith , edited by R. R. Reno and Barbara McClay.  The volume is a collection of essays presented at two conferences hosted by First Things on the work of Bellah and Smith.  (My essay “Natural Theology, Revealed Theology, Liberal Theology” is included.)  The publisher’s website for the book can be found here. 

Marriage inflation

When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.
W. S. Gilbert, The Gondoliers
Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion
If you printed a lot of extra money and passed it around so as to make everyone wealthier, the end result would merely be dramatically to decrease the buying power of money.  If you make it easier for college students to get an “A” grade in their courses, the end result will be that “A” grades will come to be regarded as a much less reliable indicator of a student’s true merit.  If you give prizes to everyone who participates in a competition, winning a prize will cease to be a big deal.  In general, where X is perceived to have greater value than Y and you try to raise the value of Y by assimilating it to X, the actual result will instead be simply to lower the value of X to that of Y.You will also merely relocaterather than eliminate the inequality you were trying to get rid of.  If money loses its value, then people will trade in something else -- precious metals, durable goods, or whatever -- and a different sort of economic inequality will arise.  If grades can no longer tell you which students are most likely to do well as employees or in graduate school, you’ll find some other way of determining this -- writing samples, interviews, letters of recommendation, or whatever -- and the hierarchy of student achievement will reassert itself.  If getting a prize ceases to impress, then athletes and others engaged in competitive enterprises will simply find some other way to stand out from the pack. 

Egalitarian schemes, in short, often have great inflationary effect but little actual egalitarian effect.  They can amount to mere exercises in mutual make-believe.  You can pretendall you want that all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average.  People who wish it were true may even go along with the pretense.  But of course, it isn’t true, and deep down everybody knows it isn’t true.  Hence even many who do pretend to believe it will act otherwise.  There will be a lot of pious chatter about how special all the children are, but no one will take the chatter very seriously and everyone will in practice treat the children differently according to their actual, differing abilities. 
Now, speaking of egalitarian pretense, consider the idea of “marriage equality,” which Justice Anthony Kennedy pretends to have stumbled upon somewhere in the U.S. Constitution on a Friday morning last June, with (so far) about 42% of the U.S. population going along with the gag.  Depending on the political needs of the moment, the proponents of “marriage equality” have also often pretended that their arguments wouldn’t support polygamy, incestuous marriage, you name it. 
But everyone knows this isn’t true.  For, contrary to some further pretense from the “marriage equality” crowd, the point about the implications of “marriage equality” has nothing to do with making a fallacious slippery slope inference, but rather with making a perfectly valid reductio ad absurdum inference.  A slippery slope fallacy fundamentally involves making a causal claim to the effect that A will lead to B, where there is at best a contingent connection between A and B and where no specific causal path from the one to the other has been established.  A reductio ad absurdum argument, by contrast, involves making a logical claim about the entailment relations between propositions.  In the present case, the idea is that if you not only remove heterosexuality and even fidelity from the essence of marriage, but in general treat the institution as essentially a matter of current social convention and legal stipulation rather than something grounded in nature, then in principle there is no limit to what might be counted as a “marriage.” 
To be sure, a causal claim follows from this logical point.  The causal claim is that, when people see the implications of the redefinition, they will start demanding further and even more radical redefinitions in the directions they favor; and that legislators and courts will have difficulty resisting these demands, because these further redefinitions are implicit in the premises that justified the original redefinition.  But (a) this causal claim is secondary to the logical claim, and (b) the logical claim, since it reveals a conceptual and thus non-contingent connection between the cause and the effect, explains the causal mechanism by which the claimed effects are likely to follow.  So, again, there is no slippery slope fallacy.
And sure enough, the logical and causal claims are being confirmed, it seems, with every passing week.  The latest instance is this week’s article in Slateadvocating -- wait for it -- “marriages” between human beings and robots.  That’s on top of calls for “group marriage,” incestuous “marriage,” and “trial marriage.”  Further out on the fringes but still, it seems, a thing these days, is “self marriage.”   “Marriages” to animals and “marriages” to cartoon characters are also not lacking in advocates.
Now, the people who should be worried about all of this craziness are not the critics of “marriage equality.”  It just gives them an occasion to say “Told you so.”  The people who should be worried about it are the advocates of “marriage equality,” for two reasons.  First, because it gives the critics an occasion to say “Told you so.”  But second -- and more to the point of this post -- because it completely devalues the “marriage” label and thus undermines the whole point of the “marriage equality” movement, which was to dignify same-sex unions by sticking the “marriage” label on them. 
To paraphrase W.S. Gilbert’s line, when everything is a marriage, nothing is a marriage.  Or more precisely, marriage equality, followed out consistently, is marriage inflation.  The more kinds of arrangement there are which people are willing to call “marriages,” the less big a deal it is to have your own favored arrangement labeled a “marriage.”  “So Bob and Ted can now marry?  Whoop dee doo.  So can Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, or Bob and his niece, or Bob and his iPod, or Bob and himself.”  What “marriage equality” gave with its left hand, it threatens to take back with its far left hand. 
That’s only half the problem, though.  Remember the other aspect of the Lake Wobegon phenomenon.  People talk more egalitarian, but they don’t necessarily think more egalitarian or act more egalitarian.  It’s not just that people will use the word “marriage” in a way that so cheapens it that it is no longer much of an honorific.  They will also continue to place greater value on the actual thing that was traditionally called “marriage” than they put on the newer so-called “marriages” -- just as they continue to put greater value on actual knowledge and ability even after the “A” grade has been devalued, greater value on actual athletic skill even after athletic prizes have been devalued, and so forth.
If you want to know what people really think is the essenceof something, you look at how they describe the ideal specimen.  And everyone knows what people think of as the ideal marriage:  You fall in love, you have lots of kids, you watch them grow up and have kids of their own, and you stay faithful to each other through thick and thin and old age until death parts you. 
Why do people idealize this?  For one thing, because of the love it embodies, where by “love” I mean not merely the romantic feelings which get things going (but typically cool), but also and more importantly the self-sacrificeinvolved -- the lifetime surrender of one’s own narrow interests for the sake of spouse, children, and grandchildren.  For another thing, because of the tangible, fleshly tie with other human beings that it represents -- the literal biological connection with past and future generations, and with other living members of the current generation.  In other words, what people idealize in marriage is the perfection, and fusion, of the unitive and the procreative(to use the natural law jargon), the way complete self-giving completely enmeshes one in a literal family and extended family of other human beings. 
The novel arrangements people want to stick the “marriage” label onto are not like this.  All of them involve abstracting out mere aspects of the ideal -- romantic feelings, shared bed and board, legal rights, or what have you -- and redefining the whole in terms of those aspects.  All of these novel arrangements are products of the modern liberal ideology of individual autonomy, and thus all of them explicitly or implicitly rule out absolute, lifelong thick-and-thin commitment.   And except where people of the opposite sex are involved -- and not even there if use of contraception is the rule -- they do not involve the literal biological tie to other human beings that is the natural outcome of the sexual act.
To be sure, these arrangements can be made to seem kinda sorta like the ideal -- via surrogate or test tube parentage, for example.  And of course, as “marriage equality” advocates rightly emphasize, widespread fornication, widespread illegitimacy, easy divorce, and contraception have already moved us far away from the ideal in any case.  In practice, most people in the West are quite willing these days to settle for some distant approximation of the ideal, a watered down substitute, the marital equivalent of O’Douls or Splenda.  The novel “marital” arrangements simply push this tendency out to its logical extreme.  And evolutionary psychologists will assure us that our tendency to idealize the older model is in any event simply an artifact of the conditions under which our forebears evolved, without normative force today. 
Now, the natural law theorist will argue that it doeshave normative force.  (Cf. “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” in Neo-Scholastic Essays .)  But that is neither here nor there for present purposes.  What matters for present purposes is that, whether or not it has normative force and whether or not people today are inclined to try very hard to live up to it, people do still regard the traditional marital arrangement described above as the ideal.  And they attach a dignity to that ideal that they do not attach to the mere approximations.  That old couple you know who’ve been together for 60 years and have five children and fifteen grandchildren has what we call a “marriage.”  And when some actor or pop star dumps his third wife and weds his mistress, we also call that a “marriage.”  But no one thinks that the latter arrangement has anything close to the dignity of the former, or that using the same word for both somehow suffices to make them equivalent. 
Similarly, expanding the use of the word “marriage” to cover various exotic arrangements no more extends dignity to those arrangements than freely giving out As to all the children in Lake Wobegon increases general student knowledge and ability.  With the former as with the latter, some people will think: “How adorable!  I’m glad they get to feel good about themselves.”  But few will seriously think that the exotic arrangements have anything close to the dignity that the traditional marital ideal has, any more than they really think that all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average. 
So, like the “A student” who comes to realize that his “achievement” was due to grade inflation, “marriage equality” advocates may soon wonder whether their victory was a hollow one.

Unintuitive metaphysics

At Aeon, philosopher Elijah Millgram comments on metaphysics and the contemporary analytic philosopher’s penchant for appealing to intuitions.  Give it a read -- it‘s very short.  Millgram uses an anecdote to illustrate the point that what intuitively seems to be an objective fact can sometimes reflect merely contingent “policies we’ve adopted,” where “the sense of indelible rightness and wrongness comes from having gotten so very used to those policies.”  And of course, such policies can be bad ones.  Hence the dubiousness of grounding metaphysical arguments in intuition.As longtime readers know, I agree completely.  But contrary to what some critics of metaphysics seem to think, the dubiousness of this method of doing metaphysics doesn’t entail that metaphysics itself is dubious.  All it entails, of course, is that that particular method is dubious.  Millgram himself is aware that this is all that follows -- he says that he doesn’t think metaphysics has to make dubious appeals to intuition, only that “a lot of it does” in fact do so.  And that is certainly true of contemporary metaphysics.

Which is odd, since it most definitely is nottrue of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics, or of a lot of other traditional approaches in metaphysics.  So why on earth do many contemporary philosophers -- whether they are sympathetic to metaphysics as a discipline or suspicious of it -- think that the resort to intuitions is essential to it?
The reason, I think, is that it is commonly supposed these days that the only thing for philosophy to be, if it is not some kind of natural science, is “conceptual analysis” -- identifying the constituent parts of a concept, explicating its relations to other concepts, and so forth.  And “conceptual analysis” is understood as the investigation of the way we happen to “carve up” the world conceptually and linguistically. 
To be sure, for the early modern rationalist, how we so “carve up” the world necessarily corresponds to the world as it is in itself, at least where our most fundamental concepts (substance, causality, etc.) are concerned.  For the Kantian, while these concepts do not correspond to the world as it is in itself, the mind nevertheless has to “carve it up” in just the ways it does.  For early analytic philosophy in its various forms (Russell’s logical atomism, Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophies, logical positivism, and so forth) the analysis of language could determine the boundaries of intelligible discourse, and decisively show certain ideas, arguments, and problems to be meaningless, confused, or in some other way conceptually unsalvageable. 
But contemporary philosophy has abandoned anything as ambitious as all that.  For many contemporary philosophers, “conceptual analysis” can at best reveal the way our minds have been contingently molded to “carve up” the world -- by evolutionary forces, say, or by the surrounding culture, or what have you.  On this view, “conceptual analysis” can reveal the deepest assumptions that underlie the way thought and language “carve up” reality, the ones abandonment of which we would have the most difficult time making sense of or adjusting to, because such abandonment would have such wide-ranging repercussions.  These are the “intuitive” elements of our conceptual scheme. 
Precisely because they are so fundamental and widely shared, the contemporary metaphysician thinks these “intuitions” well worth investigating, and something which can yield powerful premises for philosophical argument.  But because they are also widely taken to be contingent -- perhaps reflecting onlythe molding forces of evolution, history, culture, etc. rather than objective reality -- and thus in principle revisable, critics of contemporary metaphysics understandably question the significance of conceptual analysis.  They judge that any metaphysics worthy of our attention can only be that which is implicit in natural science. 
Now this bifurcation between conceptual analysis and natural science is essentially a riff on Hume’s Fork, which divides respectable propositions into “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.”  And the two bifurcations face similar problems.  Hume’s Fork itself is neither true by virtue of the relations of the ideas expressed in it, nor by virtue of the empirically ascertainable facts.  Hence it presupposes precisely the sort of third perspective it purportedly rules out.  And the same thing is true of the distinction between conceptual analysis and natural science.  This bifurcation is not itself something arrived at via conceptual analysis, nor (unless we frontload some question-begging premises) is it something confirmed by any findings of natural science.  Hence the very attempt to maintain that philosophy can only be either a kind of natural science or an exercise in conceptual analysis itself presupposes that there is a third kind of thing for it to be.
This third kind of enterprise is what A-T philosophers and other traditional metaphysicians take metaphysics to be.  The failure to see this leads to persistent misunderstanding.  For example, Ladyman and Ross, in their influential book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized , dismiss contemporary “conceptual analysis”-oriented metaphysics as “neo-scholastic.”  But the epithet is inept and ill-informed, since mere “conceptual analysis” is precisely what A-T and other Scholastic writers claim not to be doing.  Consider also the difficulty (usefully discussed by Gaven Kerr in chapter 3 of his fine book Aquinas’s Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia ) of comparing Thomist and analytic conceptions of existence, since for the Thomist the issue is irreducibly metaphysical whereas the analytic tradition has, by contrast, tended to approach it from the point of view of semantics and formal logic -- thereby in effect confining discussion, question-beggingly, to the “conceptual analysis” or “relations of ideas” side of the post-Humean divide.  The analytic critic of Thomism thus tends to talk past, rather than directly address, the Thomist’s arguments.
That the very attempt to wedge metaphysics into the Procrustean “either natural science or conceptual analysis” bed presupposes that there is something outside that bed suffices to show that metaphysics need not rest on intuition-cum-conceptual-analysis.  But there are other considerations that show the same thing.  We can see this both from a consideration of the things to which we apply the concepts the conceptual analyst analyzes, and from a consideration of the minds which do the analyzing.  In both cases, the “policies” and “habits” referred to by Millgram presuppose that which is not a product of mere policy or habit.
Consider first, then, Millgram’s examples of something’s being a road, of something’s being the right lane or left lane of the road, and of something’s being the correct lane to drive on.  These are, of course, matters of convention, and if we had deep “intuitions” to the effect that any of these is an objective matter of fact, such intuitions would (as Millgram rightly emphasizes) merely be a product of our being habituated to certain contingent polices we’ve adopted while forgetting that they are just contingent polices.  But these conventions presuppose that which is not mere convention.  That there is ground for us to build roads on is not a matter of convention, the raw materials out of which we build them are not the products of convention, the fact that cars would tend to crash into one another if there were no policy of driving on one side of the road rather than the other is not a matter of convention, and so forth.  And even if we tried to show that one or more of these factors were somehow a matter of convention, we would still inevitably be left with something that was not.  Again, the policies, habits, etc. that ground some of our intuitions always presuppose something which is not a product of mere policy or habit.  (This is one of the implications of Aristotle’s discussion of nature versus art in the Physics -- a distinction which, as I have argued many times, points to the deeper distinction between substantial form versus mere accidental form.)
Now, metaphysics, as A-T and other traditional metaphysicians understand it, is concerned precisely with the investigation of what the world must be like apart from our conventions, habits, and the like.  Of course, natural science is concerned with that too.  But natural science focuses on material reality, on the material reality that happens to exist, and on those aspects of material reality susceptible of prediction and control.  Are there, or could there be, real things that are not material things?  Could there have been a material world radically different from the sort we in fact have?  If there could have been, are there nevertheless features it would have to share in common with any other possible material world?  And are there features of material reality which are not susceptible of mathematical modeling, or of the prediction and control that natural science focuses on?  However one ends up answering such questions, they are not, or at least are not entirely, questions that natural science itself can answer.  That’s what makes them metaphysical.  And say what you will about the prospects for answering them, they are precisely not the study of how we happen intuitively but contingently to “carve up” the world conceptually, because their whole point is to find out what things must be like apart from how we happen contingently and intuitively to carve them up.
Then there are the minds which set the “policies” Millgram speaks of, which form the “habits” in question, which have the “intuitions,” etc.  Since conventions, policies, etc. presuppose the existence and operation of minds having a certain nature, the existence, operation, and natures of minds cannot themselves coherently be said to be the products of convention, policy, etc.  (Crawford Elder develops this point in chapter 1 of Real Natures and Familiar Objects .)  And when we consider not just the contingent details about what our minds happen to be like, but what any possible mind would have to be like in order to be the sort of thing which can form conventions, formulate policies, etc., we are asking a metaphysical rather than merely empirical scientific question.  And once again, whatever one thinks of the prospects for answering it, it is precisely not a question about how we merely “intuitively” happen to carve up reality.
So, those are three reasons why metaphysics need not be, and (properly understood) cannot be, mere “conceptual analysis” and “intuition”-mongering.  First, the very attempt to wedge all inquiry into either natural science or conceptual analysis presupposes that there is a third alternative.  Second, the things we produce by convention, policy, habit, etc. inevitably presuppose some rock bottom level of mind-independent phenomena which are not the product of convention, policy, habit, etc.  Third, the mind itself cannot be the product of convention, policy, habit, etc.  The first point suffices to tell us that there can be such an enterprise as metaphysics in its traditional form.  The second two points tell us what its subject matter is -- viz. the rock bottom features of mental and extra-mental reality, whatever they turn out to be, which both our contingent conceptual practices and even natural science must presuppose. 
For the A-T metaphysician, these features are described by the theory of act and potency, hylemorphism, the doctrine of the four causes, the essence/existence distinction, etc.  Of course, establishing all of that requires detailed argumentation, and of course other traditional schools of metaphysics (Neo-Platonism, idealism, Leibnizian rationalism, etc.) will disagree with it.  But none of this argumentation boils down to a mere appeal to intuition or conceptual analysis, and the evaluation of it cannot be settled by appeal to natural science.  Furthermore, the attempt to wave it all away by stomping one’s foot and insisting that natural science and conceptual analysis are the only two things metaphysics could be, simply, and massively, begs the question.  There just is no rational alternative to engaging the arguments head on. 
A lot more can be said, and is said in Scholastic Metaphysics . 

Fulford on sola scriptura, Part II

Let’s return to Andrew Fulford’s reply at The Calvinist International to my recent post on Feyerabend, empiricism, and sola scriptura.  Recall that the early Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend maintains that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpretscripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.  In an earlier post I addressed Fulford’s reply to point (a).  Let’s now consider his attempt to rebut the other two points.Elaborating upon point (b) in my original post, I noted that:

If you say that scriptural passage A is to be interpreted in light of scriptural passage B, then how do you know you’ve gotten B itself right?  And why not say instead that B should be interpreted in light of A?  Inevitably you’re going to have to go beyond scripture in order to settle such questions.
In response to this, Fulford says:
The problem with this overall objection… is that it overlooks the fact that texts are intrinsically meaningful, and that people are capable of perceiving the intending [sic] meaning of others when they communicate…  [T]here is no special problem with the interpretation of scripture that does not arise for the interpretation of any human communication, including the ex cathedra pronouncements of a putatively infallible Pope.  If reason can understand the words of such a Pope, there is no reason in principle it could not understand scriptural passage A or B.  There may be particular problems as a result of historical ignorance, but these can be resolved in principle the same way any issue of interpretation for any human text is resolved… [I]nterpreting texts in their natural [historical] context, the rule that “scripture interprets scripture” is entirely reasonable: the books of scripture are the products of authors writing closest in time and culture to other books of scripture.
End quote.  Now, the trouble with Fulford’s remarks here is that they ignore the crucial differences between texts on the one hand and the persons who write and interpret texts on the other -- thereby missing the entire point of the critique of sola scriptura.  Start with the fact that texts are quite obviously not “intrinsically meaningful,” contrary to what Fulford says.  Texts are made up of linguistic symbols, and linguistic symbols are human artifacts.  That the shapes you see on your computer screen as you read this count as linguistic symbols at all is a result of the conventions of English usage.  That they convey the specific meaning they do in this blog post is a result of those conventions together with my intentions in writing the blog post.  Apart from those conventions and intentions, the shapes would be meaningless, mere patterns of light on a screen or (if you printed this post out) patterns of ink on paper.  The linguistic symbols that make up scripture are, of course, like that too.  They bear the meanings they do because of linguistic convention together with the intentions of the authors. 
Fulford would no doubt agree with that much.  He would also evidently insist that we have evidence of a historical sort concerning the conventions and intentions in question, and he is right about that.  Just as someone who knows English and has read a number of other things I’ve written is going to be able to understand much of what I have to say in any particular blog post, so too is anyone familiar with the relevant languages and historical background going to be able to understand much of what he reads in scripture, and in any other historical document for that matter.  No one denies that.  Certainly, critics of sola scriptura are not denying that you can to a considerable extent understand scripture just by virtue of knowing the languages in which it is written, something of the historical and cultural contexts of the events it describes, etc.  They aren’t claiming that without an authoritative institutional Church, scripture would be as unintelligible as (say) Esperanto is to most people.  So, pointing out, as Fulford does, that “context,” “time and culture,” and the like can clarify the meaning of scriptural passages is not really to the point.
What is to the point is that there is, nevertheless, necessarily going to be a degree of indeterminacy in the meaning of any text, considered just by itself, even givenknowledge of linguistic conventions, historical context, etc.  This is in the very nature of texts.  I will explain why this is a problem in principle in a moment, but first let’s notice how great a problem it can be in practice even in the case of an author whose writings are numerous, well-known, and have been the object of scholarly study for centuries.  Consider, to take just one example, that the correct interpretation of Aristotle’s views on the nature of the intellect and the possibility of personal immortality is notoriously controversial and has been for centuries.  Can it be shown on Aristotelian philosophical grounds that the individual human soul survives death?  I certainly think so.  But that question is very different from the question of whether Aristotle himself took that view.  Appealing to Aristotle’s writings on the subject cannot by itself settle this exegetical question, because how to interpret those writings is precisely what is at issue.  In particular, reading Aristotle passage A in light of Aristotle passage B won’t solve the problem, because which passages should determine how the others get read is part of what is in dispute.  Interpreting all of the relevant passages in light of the larger body of Aristotle’s writings, historical and cultural context, etc. hasn’t settled things either.  And the one certain method of determining what Aristotle himself thought -- asking him -- isn’t possible because he’s dead.  Examples of this sort of problem could be multiplied by citing other well-known authors of the past.    
Now, does scripture raise exegetical issues which appeal to scripture by itself cannot settle?  The existence of myriad Protestant denominations and sects which agree on sola scriptura but nevertheless somehow disagree deeply on many matters of biblical interpretation is, I submit, pretty good evidence that it does.
Yet might not sufficient good will, along with sufficient knowledge of a linguistic and historical sort, at least in principle solve the problem?  No, they would not.  The reasons should be obvious to anyone familiar with the various indeterminacy arguments which James Ross once rightly characterized as “among the jewels of analytic philosophy,” and which I have discussed many times (e.g. here, here, and here).  The problem is that material symbols and systems of symbols -- and texts are collections of such symbols -- are, no matter how complex the system in question, inherently indeterminate in their meaning.  There are always in principle various alternative ways to interpret them, alternatives which the symbols themselves cannot adjudicate between.  This (as I and other writers have emphasized) is the deep reason why computationalist and other materialist accounts of thought cannot possibly be right.  Thought can be determinate or unambiguous in its content in a way material symbols and systems of symbols cannot possibly be.  But the system of symbols that makes up a text is no different in this regard from a purported system of symbols encoded in the brain.  By itself it can never be as determinate as the thoughts of the author of the text.
Notice that the claim is not that “anything goes.”  It is not that a text might plausibly be given just any old interpretation.  There may be any number of proposed interpretations which are ruled out.  The point is that the text cannot by itself rule out all alternative interpretations.  Notice also that the claim is not that texts are indeterminate full stop.  The claim is that a text all by itself cannot rule out all the alternatives.  Appeal to something outside the text is necessary.
Nor do we need exotic scenarios like Kripke’s “quus” example in order to make the point (though such examples are certainly relevant).  Consider instead the critique of the symbolic processing approach in artificial intelligence developed by philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle.  The approach in question presupposes that intelligence can be embodied entirely in explicit representations and rules, such as the symbols processed by a Turing machine and the algorithms by which they are processed.  And the problem with this is that the interpretation of representations and rules presupposes an intellect which does the interpreting, so that such representations and rules cannot coherently be taken to explain the existence and operation of the intellect. 
Consider even a very simple set of rules, such as those commanding the following series of actions:
1. Walk from the back of the desk to the front.
2. Walk from the front of the desk to the back.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.
Almost anybody following these rules will do so by walking around the desk, but there is nothing in the rules that really requires that.  One could follow them instead by stepping up on the desk and walking acrossit.  Now these two interpretations are incompatible, at least insofar as you can’t walk around the desk and across it at the same time -- though one could decide instead to walk around it at first, and then in later applications of the rules to walk across it.  In any event, the rules themselves won’t tell you which of these three interpretations (walking around, walking across, or doing both but at different times) is the right one.
Suppose we tighten up the rules in order to clarify this.  Suppose they instead read “Walk aroundthe desk from the back…” etc.  You might think that this now makes things completely unambiguous.  And perhaps most people who follow these revised rules will proceed, in following them, to walk clockwise around the desk.  But there is really nothing in even the revised rules that requires that.  One could instead walk counterclockwise, or mix things up by walking clockwise sometimes and counterclockwise at other times.  Again, nothing in the rules by themselves determines which of these procedures is correct. 
Nor would revising the rules again in order to get around this problem eliminate all indeterminacy.  Suppose we altered them to read “Walk clockwise around the desk from the back…” etc.  Now everything would be clear and unambiguous, right?  Not from the rules all by themselves.  Should one move around the desk in a circular path?  Or should one trace out an extremely wide oval path?  Should one walk in a shuffling way?  Do a zig zag?   Are hopping and skipping allowed?  When beginning one’s walk from the front to the back, should one first leave the room and then reenter before reaching the back?  Further additions could be made to the rules to settle such questions, but however that is done, it will only leave us with a revised body of rules which will itself be susceptible of yet further possible alternative and incompatible interpretations.
Now, in real life what determines how rules get followed are people -- the people who make the rules and the people who follow them.  You ask the person who made the rules: “Do you want me to do it this way or that way?,” or you just decide yourself to do it one way rather than the other.  You may do so deliberately, or you may do so unconsciously, by virtue of certain habits you picked up in childhood or from the culture around you.   (Both Dreyfus and Searle in their different ways emphasize the aspect of intelligence that is tacit or not fully brought to the level of conscious consideration.)  Either way, it is the fact that people are intelligent that makes them capable of interpreting systems of rules and representations.  Hence it gets things the wrong way around to try to explain intelligence in terms of rules and representations.  It isn’t rules and representations that explain why intelligence exists; rather, it is intelligence that explains why rules and representations exist.
When people focus their attention on computers themselves and don’t dwell on how they got here, computers can seem self-contained.  It can seem that it’s just an intrinsic or built-in fact about them that the symbols they process have such-and-such a meaning and that they are running such-and-such algorithms.  The illusion develops that the computer is somehow doing what it’s doing all by itself, and that’s why it can seem a good model for understanding human intelligence.  But this isan illusion.  In reality, there is no fact of the matter, from the intrinsic physical facts about it alone, concerning what meaning the computer’s symbols have or what algorithms it is running.  It is only because the machine’s designers constructed it a certain way, and its users use it a certain way, that its internal physical processes count as having the significance they do.  The meaning of the symbols and the precise algorithms that it is running are determined by something outside the machine, and it is only by appeal to this externalsource of meaning that questions about the precise significance of the machine’s operations can in principle be settled.  (Cf. my previous posts on Kripke’sand Popper’s and Searle’s critiques of computationalism.)
Texts are like computers in this respect.  It is easy to focus one’s attention on the text itself so that the author, like the computer’s designers, disappears from view and the text can come to seem to have a meaning or significance all on its own, “built in” as it were.  Hence Fulford’s casual remark that “texts are intrinsically meaningful.”  But this is no less an illusion than is the computationalist illusion that there could be such a thing as a machine whose syntax and semantics are intrinsic to it rather than relative to the intentions of the designers and users of the machine.  (Feyerabend compares sola scriptura to classical empiricism.  He could just as well have compared it to the computationalist model of the mind.)
Now, for everyday purposes, it is of course not necessary to advert to the designers’ intentions when using a computer.  You just use the computer and get along well enough.  But when something goes wrong, or there is some ambiguity in how the machine is functioning (“Is it supposed to be doing this?”), the designers’ intentions alone can settle the matter.  Similarly, when reading a text, for the most part we don’t need consciously to bring to mind the fact that the text has a specific author who had such-and-such intentions in writing.  We just read the text, and for the most part we get along well enough.  But when the text is unclear, or seems to be inconsistent in places, the author’s intentions come to the fore, and can alone settle the matter.  And if the author is dead, the matter may well never be settled -- hence the problems in interpreting Aristotle’s De Anima. 
Now, where scripture is concerned, both the Catholic and Protestant sides in the dispute over sola scriptura agree that it has a divine author, who is of course not dead.  But both sides also agree that this divine author works through human instruments.  What they disagree about is whether these human instruments are all dead.  The sola scriptura position is, in effect, that they are all dead.  For it holds that God reveals what we need to know for salvation via scripture alone, and the human authors of scripture are all dead.  The Catholic position, by contrast, is that some of the human instruments in question are dead, but some are not.  For it holds that God reveals what we need to know for salvation in partvia scripture but also in part via an ongoing institutional Church which has divine guidance in interpreting scripture.  And it holds that unless there were such living human instruments, we would be stuck in something like the position we’re stuck in vis-à-vis the interpretation of De Anima-- worse, in fact, since settling the question of how to interpret De Anima is not relevant to salvation, whereas settling the question of how to interpret scripture is relevant to salvation.
You might say, then, that the scenario described by the Catholic position is comparable to a situation in which Aristotle is still alive, and while he doesn’t answer questions about the proper interpretation of De Anima directly, nevertheless does answer them indirectly, by speaking through intermediaries.  The sola scriptura position, by contrast, is comparable to a situation in which Aristotle is still alive, but neither answers questions about De Animadirectly nor speaks through intermediaries.  He just leaves you with the text of De Anima itself and lets its readers quarrel over its proper interpretation interminably.  Worse, it’s like a situation in which Aristotle allowed this and alsobelieved that getting De Anima wrong would lead to serious errors of a theological and moral sort. 
Now, Fulford insinuates that interpreting “the ex cathedra pronouncements of a putatively infallible Pope” is no less problematic than interpreting scripture.  But (with all due respect to Fulford) this is as silly as saying that in understanding De Anima, asking Aristotle himself what it means -- or rather, asking Aristotle’s representative, sent by Aristotle precisely for the purpose of answering questions about how to interpret De Anima-- is no better than just reading the text.  It is as silly as saying that in trying to find out how some computer is supposed to function, asking the technicians who represent the company that manufactured the computer is no better than just examining the computer for yourself.  Of course, what Aristotle or his representative might tell you, or what the computer technician might tell you, might itself have ambiguities of its own or raise further questions.  But precisely because these are literal, living persons, you can literally ask them for further clarification if need be.  You can’t literally ask a text or a computer anything. 
Fulford also says:
[I]f verbal statements or written texts always require further interpretations external to themselves to be intelligible, we would need an infinite series of interpreters to understand any human speech, even that of infallible Popes.
This is like saying that since what the computer technician tells you might raise questions of its own, you need an infinite series of technicians, or that since what Aristotle’s representative tells you might be ambiguous, you need an infinite series of representatives.  In fact, this doesn’t follow at all.  All that follows is that you might have follow-up questions for the same, one technician, or the same one representative.  Of course, the technician or representative in question might die, but as long as there is some new technician or representative to take his place, you can just ask for clarification from that one new technician or representative.  Similarly, you don’t need an infinite series of interpreters to understand the statements of some pope.  You just ask that one, particular pope for clarification, and if he dies you just ask the next particular pope. 
Fulford’s mistake is that he thinks the issue has to do with how many texts there are.  He says there’s one, and he thinks that what the Catholic critic of sola scriptura is saying is that there’s more than one.  And his objection is that any problems that would arise with the one text would arise also with a larger set of texts.  He’s right about that much.  But he’s wrong on two counts.  First, if the Catholic position really did differ from sola scriptura only in the number of texts it posits, that wouldn’t show that sola scriptura is right after all.  Rather, it would show that the Catholic position and sola scriptura are both wrong, and for the same reasons.  But second, the difference between sola scriptura and the Catholic position is not fundamentally about how many texts there are.  Rather, the Catholic position is that it can’t all be just texts in the first place.  Rather, we have to be able to get outside of texts, to persons who have the authority to tell us what the texts mean.
Let’s now turn briefly to point (c) of the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend -- the idea that scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.  Fulford responds that:
[T]he objection relies on a misapprehension of what sola scriptura claims… [I]t never meant that scripture apart from the rational capacities of human beings was somehow to function as an authority in the church; Protestants recognized that individuals had to subjectively understand and appropriate the message of the Bible.
To see what is wrong with this response, consider the theological controversies that have arisen over the centuries concerning the Trinity, the Incarnation, justification, transubstantiation, contraception, divorce and remarriage, Sunday observance, infant baptism, slavery, pacifism, the consistency of scripture with scientific claims, sola scriptura itself, and a host of other issues.  Now, either scripture alone can settle these controversies or it cannot.  If Fulford says that it cannot, then he will thereby make of sola scriptura a vacuous doctrine, since if it cannot answer such questions then it cannot tell us whether it is Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic Christians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Mennonites, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarian Universalists, or some other group entirely who has got Christianity right. 
Presumably he would not say this, though.  Presumably he would say that scripture alone can settle such issues, and certainly most sola scriptura proponents have thought so, since they tend to regard the holding of certain specific positions on at least many of these issues as a requirement of Christian orthodoxy.  But in that case Fulford will be saying something false, since scripture alone manifestly cannot settle these issues, for opposite positions on all of them have been defended on scriptural grounds. 
Moreover, what even most Protestants regard as the orthodox view on some of these issues was hammered out on grounds that are philosophical, and not merely scriptural.  For instance, it is not merely scripture, but scripture together with considerations about the nature of substance, persons, etc. that leads to the doctrine of the Trinity.  Now, the sola scriptura-affirming Trinitarian might say that you simply cannot make sense of the entirety of what scripture tells us about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit unless you bring to bear such philosophical considerations.  Hence anyone who wants to do justice to scripture had better be a Trinitarian.  I think that is correct.  But a sola scriptura-affirming anti-Trinitarian might respond that since these philosophical considerations are not themselvesto be found in scripture, the Trinitarian doctrine that presupposes them cannot be binding on Christians or definitive of orthodoxy.  Which of these “scripture alone” affirmers is right?  Scripture alone cannot tell us.
Or consider disputes about how to reconcile scripture with the claims of science.  Should we read Genesis in a way that requires us to conclude that the universe is only a few thousand years old?  Or can it legitimately be read in a way consistent with the universe being billions of years old?  Does scripture teach that the earth does not move, so that it conflicts with a heliocentric view of the solar system?  Or should the relevant passages be read another way?  Should we regard Adam as having been made directly from the dust of the ground, or is there wiggle room here to regard Adam’s body as having been made from it indirectly, God having used as raw material a pre-human ancestor whose own ancestors derived remotely from the dust of the ground?  If Fulford were to say that scripture alone can settle these issues, he would be saying something manifestly false, since there is no passage of scripture that tells us which of the competing ways of reading the passages in question here is the correct one. 
I imagine he would not say that, though.  I imagine he would say instead that we have to look outside scripture itself in order to settle these matters.  But to admit that is to give the game away.  For an enormous amount rides on how these matters are settled.  For one thing, whether scripture is in general reliablerides on how they are settled, and therefore everything else scripture teaches rides on it.  For another thing, how we decide these matters will involve deciding upon general principles of scriptural interpretation, and those principles are bound to have repercussions for other doctrinal questions.  But if it is consistent with sola scriptura to say that the general reliability of scripture, and general principles for interpreting scripture -- matters which in turn affect everythingscripture teaches -- can legitimately come from outside scripture, then sola scriptura once again seems vacuous. 
Then there is the fact that the problem for sola scriptura raised by point (c) is inseparable from the problem raised by point (b).  For the sorts of conclusions we can draw from scripture obviously depend on how we interpret scripture.  The problems with Fulford’s response to (b) thus inevitably leak over into any attempt to respond to (c).
So, I conclude that Fulford’s response to points (b) and (c), like his response to (a) considered in my previous post in this series, fails. 
A final analogy: In the movie Memento, the protagonist Leonard Shelby loses the ability to form new memories after a blow to the head from an attacker who also raped and murdered Shelby’s wife.  Shelby attempts to track down the killer, tattooing clues onto his body so that he won’t forget them, and writing himself notes and taking photographs to remind him of where he lives, what car he drives, who the people he comes into contact with are, and so forth.  The trouble is that his inability to form new memories has also robbed him of the ability properly to understand the meanings of the tattoos, notes, and photos.  Hence he misinterprets what he has written and draws mistaken conclusions from it.  Shelby’s error is supposing that the tattoos, notes, and pictures by themselves will suffice to tell him what he needs to know.  And they do tell him quite a bit.  He is able to infer correctly that the man he is after has the first name “John” and a last name that begins with “G,” that the people in the photographs are people he knows and that the car he sees in one of them is one he has driven, and so forth.  But he nevertheless gets other, crucial things badly wrong -- for example, he continually misinterprets exactly who “John G” is, does not realize that the car in question in fact belongs to someone else, has completely forgotten the true reason one of his notes identifies a certain “John G” as the killer, and so forth.  Moreover, if Shelby thought about it, he would realize that he cannot even be sure that all of the notes and tattoos were really left by his earlier self in the first place.  Maybe someone else wrote some of the notes, or had certain things tattooed on his body while he was drugged or held at gunpoint. 
In short, Shelby is in a situation that mirrors each of the three problems with sola scriptura we’ve been discussing.  All he’s got to go on are his notes and tattoos.  But (a) the notes and tattoos by themselves cannot tell him which notes and tattoos are genuine or indeed whether any of them are, (b) the notes and tattoos themselves cannot tell him how properly to interpret the notes and tattoos, and (c) the notes and tattoos themselves cannot tell him how to derive implications from the notes and tattoos.  And just as sola scriptura advocates disagree radically among themselves about what scripture teaches, so too does Shelby come, at different points in the movie, to radically different conclusions about what his notes and tattoos mean -- at one point thinking a certain person is “John G,” at other points thinking that some totally different person is “John G,” at one point thinking that a certain motel room is his while believing at another point that he occupies a different room, and so forth.
Alas, poor Shelby sees no alternative to his incoherent “sola notes and tattoos” position.  But the Christian does have an alternative to sola scriptura, or so we Catholics maintain.

Fulford on sola scriptura, Part I

At The Calvinist International, Andrew Fulford replies to my recent post on Feyerabend, empiricism, and sola scriptura.  You’ll recall that the early Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend maintains that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpret scripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.  Fulford says that these objections “essentially rely on a caricature of the teaching,” and offers responses to each point.  Let’s consider them in order.In response to point (a), Fulford cites some arguments made by 17th century Protestant theologian Francis Turretin which, Fulford claims, “[explain] how Christians can rationally come to know that the Bible is divinely authoritative.”  The interested reader is advised to consult Fulford’s post to read in their entirety the passages from Turretin that Fulford quotes. Here I’ll quote what seem to be the most relevant lines.  First, Turretin says:

The Bible proves itself divine, not only authoritatively and in the manner of an artless argument or testimony, when it proclaims itself God-inspired... The Bible also proves itself divine ratiocinatively by an argument artfully made… from the marks which God has impressed upon the Scriptures and which furnish indubitable proof of divinity. For as the works of God exhibit visibly to our eyes by certain marks the incomparable excellence of the artificer himself and as the sun makes himself known by his own light, so he wished in the Bible… to send forth different rays of divinity by which he might make himself known…
[B]efore faith can believe, it must have the divinity of the witness to whom faith is to be given clearly established and certain true marks apprehended in it, otherwise it cannot believe. For where suitable reasons of believing anyone are lacking, the testimony of such a witness cannot be worthy of credence.
And what exactly are these reasons Turretin says make scripture worthy of credence?  Fulford adds:
Turretin provides extensive arguments from historical evidence for the reliability of the apostles and Moses as historical witnesses; this established, when they testify to miraculous confirmation of their message, and then claim to be divinely inspired, they are credible witnesses to this divine confirmation of their claim to inspiration. They thus provide a rational basis for belief in the divine authority of their own writings.
End quote.  The overall argument, then, seems to be this:
1. Historical evidence shows the reliability of the writings of Moses, the apostles, etc. 
2. Among the things which Moses, the apostles, etc. report are miracles.
3. So these miracle reports are reliable.
4. These writings also claim to be divinely inspired, a claim which would be supported if backed by miracles. 
5. So the claim to divine inspiration is reliable.
6. Faith in testimony as divinely inspired is well grounded when supported by evidence of the sort in question.
7. So faith in these writings as divinely inspired is in fact well grounded.
Now, there are grave problems with this considered as a response to point (a) of the Jesuit critique.  First and foremost is that it simply is not really even a prima facie response at all, because it changes the subject.  The subject is the question of exactly which writings are to be counted as part of scripture; what Turretin and Fulford are addressing instead is the different question of what defense can be given of the divine inspiration of certain specific writings typically claimed to be scriptural. 
Hence, suppose we ask questions like: Are what Catholics call the deuteroncanonicals (and Protestants call the Apocrypha) to be counted as part of the Bible?  Should purportedly non-canonical books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, etc. also have been included?  Should purportedly canonical works like Esther, the Epistle of James, and the Apocalypse have been left out?  Is the Quran divinely inspired?  How about the Book of Mormon?
The Turretin-Fulford argument doesn’t answer such questions at all, as is evidenced by the fact that both Protestants and Catholics could accept the specific points Turretin makes in the passages cited and still disagree about the deuterocanonicals.  Mormons could also agree with the Turretin-Fulford argument, as could advocates of books like Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla.  They would just add that there are yet other books that Catholics and Protestants should accept.  Even Muslims could accept the Turretin-Fulford argument with qualifications.  They could say that Moses, the apostles, etc. really were divinely inspired and their words backed by miracles, and that the writings Christians regard as scriptural reflect these facts.  They would just add that those writings include errors mixed in with the historical facts they report, and that the Quran corrects the record where these errors have crept in. 
Suppose there’s a room full of piles of what is purportedly U.S. currency, some of which is genuine and some of which is counterfeit.  Suppose different people take bills from different piles and stuff them into bags.  Each person claims his own bag of cash contains only genuine money and that other people’s bags contain either all counterfeit money or a mixture of genuine and counterfeit money.  Suppose some particular person claims to be able to show that his bag is the one that contains only genuine cash.  He supports his claim by taking a few bills from the bag and arguing that they show certain marks of genuineness.  Obviously he will not thereby have shown what he claims to have shown.  He will at best have proven the genuineness only of those particular bills, and will not have shown either that his own bag contains only genuine bills or that other people’s bags are wholly or partly counterfeit. 
The Turretin-Fulford argument has the same problem.  At best it would show that certain specific writings (such as those associated with Moses and the apostles) are divinely inspired.  It would not tell us whether or not otherbooks are scriptural.  And, crucially, it certainly would not show that scripture itself tells us which books are scriptural.  Yet that was the issue that point (a) of the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend was addressing: Exactly which writings count as scripture, and how could scripture alonetell us?  The Turretin-Fulford argument doesn’t even address this problem with sola scriptura, much less solve it.
So the Turretin-Fulford argument would fail as a response to point (a) even if it sufficed to establish the scriptural status of the specific writings it discusses.  But another problem is that it does not suffice to establish even that.  Suppose a skeptic agreed that the books traditionally associated with Moses and the apostles contained solid evidence about various historical events, including even miraculous events, and about the teachings of the prophets who performed the miracles.  Such a skeptic could still ask, in a way that is perfectly consistent with that acknowledgement: How does that show that those books are themselves divinely inspired, infallible, etc. in their entirety? 
Suppose Christ appeared to me today -- that I was not hallucinating, etc. but that it really happened -- performed certain miracles in my presence, and revealed certain future events to me and certain teachings of a moral and theological nature.  Suppose some of these events would take place decades from now, but that among the things revealed was who would win the 2016 U.S. presidential election, what would be the exact state-by-state tally of electoral votes, etc.  Suppose I recorded all this as an entry in a daily diary I keep as a file on my computer, alongside the other events I recorded for that day.  And suppose that there was solid evidence afterward that all this had happened.  For example, suppose that there were credible witnesses who reported observing Christ’s appearing to me and performing miracles, that the events of the 2016 election turned out exactly as predicted, etc.   Certainly we’d have good evidence in that case that I had really witnessed a divine revelation and certainly we’d have reason to believe that everything Christ said to me was infallible. 
But would this show that all the files on my computer -- the various blog posts, journal articles, book manuscripts, etc. -- are divinely inspired?  Would it show even that just the diary as a whole is divinely inspired?  Indeed, would it show even that the entire single entry for that particular day is divinely inspired (including the events recorded from earlier in that day, which involved me giving such-and-such financial advice to a friend, such-and-such moral advice to one of my children, etc.)?  How exactly would it show any of that?  Indeed, how would it show even that I’d gotten Christ’s words exactly right?  Maybe I recorded the part about the 2016 election correctly, but made certain mistakes when recording what Christ said about the other matters.
By the same token, how would establishing that the writings associated with Moses and the apostles are accurate in their record of such-and-such miraculous events, their record that certain prophets and apostles taught such-and-such, etc. show also that the writings themselves -- as opposed to some of the events and teachings they record -- are in their entiretydivinely inspired and thus scriptural?  Perhaps instead (a skeptic might suggest) they contain accurate information about certain miracles that actually occurred and certain teachings that really were divinely revealed, but in such a way that various errors are mixed in with this otherwise accurate reporting.  Maybe (the skeptic continues) it isn’t really the writings themselves which have divine backing, but rather only certain events and teachings reported by these otherwise flawed documents that have it.
Hence the Turretin-Fulford argument fails even to show that the specific scriptural writings it deals with (Exodus, John’s gospel, etc.) are in their entirety divinely inspired -- let alone showing that every book Fulford and Turretin would regard as scriptural is divinely inspired.  And the argument certainly fails to show that scripture alone suffices to show us that these books really are divinely inspired.
Which brings us to a third problem with the Turretin-Fulford argument.  Suppose the argument could be developed in a way that would get around the first two problems.  How would that show us that scripture alone suffices to tell us what counts as scripture, or that scripture alonesuffices to tell us even that the writings associated with Moses, the apostles, etc. count as scripture?  For the Turretin-Fulford style of argument makes use of historical evidence, criteria for evaluating such evidence, general logical principles, etc. which are not found in scripture itself. 
Now, sola scriptura tells us that scripture alone suffices to tell us what we need to know in matters of faith and morals.  Well, the question of whether a certain book is scriptural is itself certainly a matter of faith and morals.  But the Turretin-Fulford argument, in making use of historical evidence, criteria for evaluating such evidence, general logical principles, etc. -- evidence, criteria, and principles which cannot themselves be found in scripture -- in order to settle this matter, thereby violates sola scriptura in the very act of defending it.  For it uses extra-scriptural information and principles in order to settle a matter of faith and morals.  In other words, it does precisely what the Jesuit point (a) cited by Feyerabend says a defender of sola scriptura implicitly has to do.  So how exactly does the Turretin-Fulford argument constitute even a prima facie answer to point (a), or show that (a) is aimed at a “caricature”?
Notice that I am not denying that the specific writings the Turretin-Fulford argument makes reference to are divinely inspired.  I think they are divinely inspired.  But I think that in arguing for their divine inspiration, it is a mistake to start with scripture itself.  Rather, what comes first in the order of apologetics is an argument for the necessity of an infallible and authoritative institutional Church.  We know that such-and-such purportedly scriptural writings are in fact infallible and authoritative only if we first know that there is an infallible and authoritative institutional Church, and that this Church has herself judged those writings to be infallible and authoritative.  As St. Augustine wrote, “I would not believe the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me.”
Of course, Fulford will disagree with this position, but neither this post nor the previous one are about the reasons for the Catholic position.  What they are about is the problems with sola scriptura, and those problems remain whatever one thinks of the Catholic alternative.   Some readers of my post on Feyerabend responded to the Jesuit criticisms Feyerabend cites by criticizing the Catholic position.  This is fallacious for two reasons.  First, I was not trying to give an exposition and defense of the Catholic position in the first place.  That’s a separate topic.  Second, even if the Catholic position were wrong, that would not show that sola scriptura is correct.  It might only show instead that both positions are false.  So, critics of the points summarized by Feyerabend should try to answer those points, rather than changing the subject by attacking the Catholic view.
Anyway, Fulford does try to answer the Jesuit points.  However, as we have just seen with respect to point (a), he does not do so successfully.  Neither does he succeed in answering points (b) and (c), as we’ll see in a follow-up post.

Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura

In his essay “Classical Empiricism,” available in Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 , philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend compares the empiricism of the early moderns to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.  He suggests that there are important parallels between them; in particular, he finds them both incoherent, and for the same reasons.  (No, Feyerabend is not doing Catholic apologetics.  He’s critiquing empiricism.)To understand Feyerabend’s comparison, we need to be clear on what “empiricism” is.  (Here and when commenting on sola scriptura I’ll be going a bit beyond what Feyerabend himself says, since some of his remarks are sketchy and merely suggestive.)  In the generic sense, empiricism is of course the view that all knowledge derives from experience.  But there are different ways to interpret that thesis, and the empiricism of Aristotle and Aquinas is by no means the same as that of Locke and Hume.  For the Aristotelian, Feyerabend says, “experience [is] the sum total of what is observed under normal circumstances (bright daylight; senses in good order; undisturbed and alert observer) and what is then described in some ordinary idiom that is understood by all” (p. 35).  It also involves interpreting what is currently perceived in light of “tradition” or “preconceived opinion” (p. 37).  Hence ordinary, everyday statements like “The gunman was wearing a ski mask” or “This apple is stale” -- which presuppose that we already know, from past experience, what a gunman typically looks like, what stale apples taste like, etc. -- would for the Aristotelian provide examples of the sorts of things we know immediately via experience.

But they are decidedly not the sorts of thing empiricism as it developed from Locke to the logical positivists regards as immediately knowable via experience.  Developing as it did in the shadow of Cartesian skepticism, modern empiricism holds that since you might be dreaming or hallucinating the gunman or the apple, what is immediately knowable from experience must instead be something that would remain true even if you were dreaming or hallucinating.  A first suggestion might be that what you know is that “It seems to me that there is a gunman wearing a ski mask” or “It seems to me that I am eating a stale apple.”  But this will not do, because even these statements presuppose all sorts of things which might be doubted. 
For example, they presuppose memory of recent events in light of which what you are experiencing now is best described in terms of a gunman or an apple.  But maybe where you now think you see a gunman, you thought, a few moments ago, that you were looking at your friend playing the part of a gunman in a play you are watching, and you have now forgotten about this context (under the influence of a Cartesian demon, say).  Or maybe a moment ago it was a circus clown that you thought was standing where the gunman now seems to be, and you have forgotten about that context (because of the LSD that someone put in your drink and that has just kicked in).  So why say “It seems to me that there is a gunmanwearing a ski mask,” as opposed to something like “It seems to me there is a person (who may be a gunman, or my friend playing the role of a gunman, or a clown who for some reason suddenly looks like a gunman) wearing a ski mask”?  Indeed, why speak in terms of a person, since maybe instead it was a shoe or a ham sandwich you thought you saw there a moment ago (and then suddenly forgot about it under the influence of LSD, or a Cartesian demon, or whatever)?
So, the modern empiricist analysis of experience proceeds by abstracting out more and more of what common sense and Aristotelian empiricism alike regard as “experience.”  On this view, it isn’t statements like “This apple is stale” that we know immediately from experience, but rather something like “There is currently a reddish patch in the center of my field of vision” or even “I am being appeared to redly,” or some other bizarre sort of proposition, that we know immediately.  And to describe what it is that we know from these basic propositions, we cannot use our ordinary concepts but need to develop a new technical vocabulary and talk of “sense data,” “protocol sentences,” and the like.  Everyday statements like “This apple is stale” have to be somehow derived from or reconstructed out of these purportedly more basic statements -- as do all the propositions of science and whatever else we can truly be said to know.
Notoriously, attempts to reconstruct everyday knowledge and scientific knowledge from such purportedly more basic statements all fail.  Not only could modern empiricists not derive everyday and scientific statements from the purportedly more basic ones, they couldn’t agree on what the basic ones were supposed to be.  For the Aristotelian -- and for other critics of modern empiricism like the later Wittgenstein -- this is exactly what we should expect, for the whole project is incoherent.  Statements like “There is currently a reddish patch in the center of my field of vision” are not more basic than statements like “This apple is stale,” but less basic.  The notion of a reddish patch in the center of one’s field of vision (to stick with that example) is parasitic on the notion of everyday experience of objects like apples, an abstraction from such ordinary experiences.  We talk of reddish patches and the like precisely to describe experiences that are abnormal, cases where the ordinary course of experience has in some way broken down.
In effect, the modern empiricist takes the most aberrant possible cases of “experience,” tries to find out what they have in common with all other cases, and makes of that lowest common denominator the baseline from which to reconstruct all experience.  It’s like a psychologist taking the thought processes of the most insane person he can find, teasing out whatever it is those thought processes might have in common with those of all other people, and then attempting to reconstruct a notion of “rationality” in terms of that.  The whole procedure is perverse, a matter of letting the tail -- indeed, a diseased, gangrenous tail -- wag the dog.  The correct procedure in the case of rationality is, of course, to start with paradigmatically rational thought processes and evaluate the various kinds of irrationality in light of those.  And the correct procedure where experience is concerned is to take the ordinary cases as paradigmatic and evaluate the aberrant cases in terms of those, rather than the other way around. 
Now, just as you are never going to derive everything that is constitutive of rationality merely from an analysis of the thought processes of which the most insane person is capable, neither are you ever going to derive everything that is constitutive of ordinary experience merely from the desiccated ingredients -- color patches in fields of vision, etc. -- to which the modern empiricist tends to confine himself.  There is simply far more to ordinary experience than that, and if you refuse to allow in anything but what can be constructed from the desiccated bits, you will inevitably undermine the very notion of empirical knowledge and end up in total skepticism (as Hume does).  And if you don’t end up in total skepticism, it is because you will surreptitiously be smuggling in elements to which you are not entitled given a modern empiricist conception of “experience.”
Thus, though hardly a philosophical traditionalist, Feyerabend judges that:
Aristotelian empiricism, as a matter of fact, is the only empiricism that is both clear -- one knows what kind of thing experience is supposed to be -- and rational -- one can give reasons why experience is stable and why it serves so well as a foundation of knowledge.
For example, one can say that experience is stable because human nature (under normal conditions) is stable. Even a slave perceives the world as his master does.  Or one can say that experience is trustworthy because normal man (man without instruments to becloud his senses and special doctrines to becloud his mind) and the universe are adapted to each other; they are in harmony.
This rational context which enables us to understand the Aristotelian doctrine and which also provides a starting point of discussion is eliminated by the ‘enlightenment’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
…It is characteristic of this enlightenment that it constantly mentions new and undiluted foundations of knowledge… while at the same time making it impossible ever to identify these foundations and to build on them. (p. 35)
Feyerabend’s own main interest is not in what modern philosophersmade of empiricism, though, but what early modern scientists like Newton made of it.  And he argues that, like any modern empiricism that does not dissolve into skepticism, the empiricist scruples of scientists like Newton were applied selectively and inconsistently. 
But what does this have to do with sola scriptura?  The idea is this.  Summarizing an early Jesuit critique of the Protestant doctrine, Feyerabend notes that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpretscripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, and the like.  Let’s elaborate on each and note the parallels with modern empiricism.
First, there is no passage in any book regarded as scriptural that tells you: “Here is a list of the books which constitute scripture.”  And even if there were, how would we know that that passage is really part of scripture?  For the Catholic, the problem doesn’t arise, because scripture is not the only authoritative source of revealed theological knowledge in the first place.  It is rather part of a larger body of authoritative doctrine, which includes tradition and, ultimately, the decrees of an institutional, magisterial Church. 
This larger context -- tradition and Magisterium -- is analogous to the larger context within which both common sense and Aristotelianism understand “experience.”  Experience, for common sense and for the Aristotelian, includes not just sense data -- color patches, tactile impressions, etc. -- but also the rich conceptual content in terms of which we ordinarily describe experience, the immediate memories that provide context for present experience, and so forth.  Just as modern empiricism abstracts all this away and leaves us with desiccated sense contents as what is purportedly just “given,” so too does sola scriptura abstract away tradition and Magisterium and present (what it claims to be) scripture as if it were just given.  And just as the resulting experiential “given” is too thin to tell us anything -- including what counts as “given” -- so too is scripture divorced from its larger context unable to tell us even what counts as scripture.  The modern empiricist inevitably, and inconsistently, surreptitiously appeals to something beyond (what he claims to be) experience in order to tell us what counts as “experience.”  And the sola scriptura advocate inevitably, and inconsistently, surreptitiously appeals to something beyond scripture in order to tell us what scripture is.
Second, even if what counts as scripture could be settled, there is still the question of how to interpret it.  Nor is it any good to claim that scripture itself interprets scripture.  If you say that scriptural passage A is to be interpreted in light of scriptural passage B, then how do you know you’ve gotten B itself right?  And why not say instead that B should be interpreted in light of A?  Inevitably you’re going to have to go beyond scripture in order to settle such questions.  Similarly, even if the modern empiricist can settle the question of which contents count as “experience” -- again, color patches, tactile impressions, or whatever -- there is still the question of what significance to attach to these contents.  Should we interpret them as properties of externally existing physical objects?  Should we interpret them instead in a phenomenalist way?  Is there some “natural” set of relations they bear to one another, or are all the ways we might relate them sheer constructs of the human mind?  However we answer such questions, we will be going beyond anything “experience” itself, as the modern empiricist construes it, could tell us.
Third, even if you can settle the questions of what counts as scripture and of what each scriptural passage means, scripture itself cannot tell you how to infer anything from scripture.  For example, when applying scriptural principles to scientific issues and practical problems, which background empirical, historical, and philosophical assumptions about the world should we employ?   In drawing inferences, should we use a traditional Aristotelian system of logic, or a modern Fregean one?  Which system of modal logic should we use?  What should we think about quantum logic, free logic and other such exotica?  Scripture itself obviously offers no answers to such questions.  Again, in drawing inferences from scripture we will be going beyond anything scripture itself says.  Similarly, “experience” as the modern empiricist construes it tells us nothing about how we are to infer anything from experience, so that in doing so we will thereby be going beyond experience.
Hence, just as Feyerabend thinks Aristotelian empiricism superior to the modern form, so too, on the question of how to understand scripture, he remarks: “We see how much more reasonable and human the Roman position has been” (p. 37).  But as I have said, he is not doing Catholic apologetics, but philosophy of science.  His point is that since sola scriptura is problematic, so is the classical empiricism in terms of which modern science was for so long interpreted.  Clearly, though, the sword cuts both ways.  If the parallels are as Feyerabend sees them, someone who already thinks sola scriptura problematic but is sympathetic to modern empiricism should re-think the latter.  (Cheekily, Feyerabend characterizes Baconian empiricism as “the second great fundamentalist doctrine of the seventeenth century” (p. 37))  But someone who is sympathetic to sola scriptura but already thinks that modern empiricism is problematic should re-think the former. 
Why, if these views are so clearly self-undermining, do their partisans not see this?  In answering this question, Feyerabend devotes much of his article to a discussion of the details of the history of the debate over Newton’s theory of color.  His aim is to provide an illustration of how the purported “success” of the empiricist interpretation of science -- which might seem to confirm that interpretation, despite its conceptual problems -- involves selective and inconsistent application of empiricist scruples, question-begging assumptions, ad hoc hypotheses, and so forth.  And once again he sees parallels with sola scriptura.  In both instances, Feyerabend thinks, partisans of the doctrines in question claim “success” by focusing their attention on cases they think confirm the “rule of faith” while dismissing problematic cases as relatively insignificant puzzles raised by heretics and other oddballs.  Though question-begging, this procedure seems reasonable to them because they are surrounded by a “community… which is already committed to a certain doctrine” (p. 38) and which thereby reinforces their perception that the doctrine is the one that is accepted by all reasonable people.  These communities inculcate a “party line” (p. 39) which determines how one perceives the weight of various objections, the significance of the relevant pieces of evidence, etc.  Hence the doctrines in question -- classical empiricism and sola scriptura -- “although logically vacuous, [are] by no means psychologically vacuous” (p. 38). 
(I’ve noted before -- for example, during the debate over Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos-- how contemporary appeals to the “success” of science as an argument for naturalism or scientism are similarly question-begging, but also have similarly powerful psychological support via the kind of groupthink Feyerabend is criticizing.)
Now, a critic might ask: Wouldn’t the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura apply to the Catholic position as well?  And wouldn’t Feyerabend’s proposed application of it to classical empiricism apply also to the Aristotelian conception of experience?  Indeed, wouldn’t this style of criticism undermine anyproposed epistemological criteria, leading to a radical skepticism?  No, no, and no.  
Note first that there is no “sola” prefixed to the Catholic and Aristotelian positions, nor to many other possible epistemological positions.  Sola scriptura and early modern empiricism were both self-consciously revolutionary doctrines, intended decisively to rein in what their proponents thought to be epistemological excesses.  Hence they were formulated precisely so as to lay down an unambiguous line the crossing of which is strictly forbidden, thereby to take down in one fell swoop enormous bodies of doctrine (Catholic theology in the one case, Scholastic and rationalist metaphysics in the other).  They were, you might say, “weaponized” theses from the start.  That isn’t what is going on with positions like the Catholic one and the Aristotelian one.  To be sure, both clearly rule many things out, but neither was formulated with such polemical intent, and thus neither takes the form of a crisp and simple thesis that might lend itself to a charge of self-refutation -- of a weapon which might be wrestled from the wielder’s hand and immediately aimed back at him.  They aren’t trying to boil everything down to some tidy epistemological thesis which might be deployed as a cudgel against opponents, but rather trying precisely to capture the complexity of our epistemological situation, including the complexity inherent in appeals to revelation or experience.  Thus, if someone is going to accuse either position of somehow undermining itself, it will take considerable work to show exactly how it does so.
For another thing, there is a crucial feature of the sola scriptura and early modern empiricist positions that makes them open to the Jesuit/Feyerabend attack, but which the Catholic and Aristotelian positions lack -- namely, commitment to a “myth of the given,” as it has come to be called in discussions of empiricism.  In the case of early modern empiricism, the myth in question is the supposition that there is some basic level of sensory experiences whose significance is somehow built-in and graspable apart from any wider conceptual and epistemological context (as opposed to being intelligible only in light of a body of theory, or a tradition, or the practices of a linguistic community, or what have you).  Aristotelian epistemology not only does not commit itself to such a “given,” it denies that there is one.  In the case of sola scriptura, the myth is the supposition that there is a text whose exact contents and meaning are somehow evident from the text itself and thus knowable apart from any wider conceptual and epistemological context (as opposed to being intelligible only in light of a larger tradition of which the text is itself a part, or an authoritative interpreter, or what have you).  The Catholic position not only does not commit itself to such a scriptural “given,” it denies that there is one.
Now, the reason sola scriptura and early modern empiricism get themselves into trouble is that they purportedly limit themselves to the deliverances of a “given,” but where the existence of the purported “given” in question and the imperative to limit ourselves to it are not themselves knowable from the “given.”  This entails a kind of self-refutation to which doctrines that do not posit such a “given” in the first place are not subject.
Bas van Fraassen, commenting on Feyerabend in his article “Sola Experientia? Feyerabend’s Refutation of Classical Empiricism” (available in John Preston, Gonzalo Munévar, and David Lamb, eds., The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend ), writes:
[T]he Jesuit argument does not lead to skepticism but only to a rejection of any position that posits a foundation representable as a text.  For we cannot draw on a text in any way without relying on something else, if only on our own language.  This is true equally whether we regard the text as being in our own language or as translated into our language.  But what we rely on is not itself representable as a text or body of information, so the same questions do not arise. (p. 33, emphasis added)
If either the Catholic position or the Aristotelian one “posit[ed] a foundation representable as a text,” then they would be open to the Jesuit/Feyerabend objection.  But that is precisely what they do not do.  The Aristotelian epistemological view does not conceive of “experience” in terms of a sensory “given.”  And the Catholic position does not merelyposit a larger text or set of texts (one that would add the deuterocanonicals, statements found in the Church Fathers, decrees of various councils, etc.).  The trouble with texts is that you can never ask them what exactly they include, or what they mean, or how they are to be applied.  But you canask such questions of an authoritative interpreter who stands outside the texts.  And such an interpreter -- in the form of an institutional Church -- is exactly what the Catholic position posits.
Anyway, I imagine Feyerabend might have sympathized with Ralph McInerny’s quip that “modern philosophy is the Reformation carried on by other means.”