The Tree of Life and The Way of Grace

Posted on August 9, 2011 by

Abstract. Terrence Malick’s movie, The Tree of Life, suggests a stark contrast between the way of nature and the way of grace. At first, this contrast – but especially its starkness – seems to set the context for a choice that no individual person ever escapes: the choice of whether to live in accord with the way of nature or to live by the way of grace. However, the manner in which the ways of nature and grace are explained in a voiceover very early in the movie, in conjunction with the manner in which the pervasive opportunity for grace is eventually brought to the fore within the movie, actually results in a more elegant and more stark contrast, one which is less immediately apparent than the contrast between the ways of nature and grace, but one which goes much farther in capturing the very crux of being human: The choice which no individual person escapes is whether or not to live by the way of grace, with charity and imbued with the love which goes beyond mere preference. This more exhaustive contrast corrects the common notion that nature and grace are incompatible and sets focus upon the discernment necessary to make grace more manifest within life and nature.

(See also this previous essay.)

I. When did you first touch my heart?

A voiceover which occurs very early during Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life explains that the way of nature is to seek its own pleasure and to have its own way. The way of grace, on the other hand, is put forth more apophatically: It is not the way of grace to seek its own pleasure; grace does not expect or demand its own way,1 and the way of grace does not – and does not seek to – lord over anything. From this it is supposed to be apparent that a person who lives by the way of nature lives seeking his or her own pleasure and trying to have his or her own way. In contradistinction, people of grace are not devoted to the pursuit of their own pleasure; they do not demand their own way, and they do not wish to dominate.

This explanation comes in the voice of Mrs. O’Brien (played by Jessica Chastain), and it occurs so early in the movie that there can yet be no indication whether this expression is presented as a supposed fact of reality or simply as the gist of a personal understanding arrived at by Mrs. O’Brien.

One problem with this depiction, a problem which suggests that this voiceover explanation is but a personal understanding and a limited expression rather than a fact about reality is that the portrayal of the way of nature is exceedingly simplistic. That portrayal makes it quite an easy matter for virtually all persons to insist – with justification – that they most certainly do not live in accord with what appears to be the thorough self-serving identified as characteristic of the way of nature.

Whether not failing to be thoroughly self-serving is sufficient to claim to be living by grace is another matter altogether, but the fact that grace and its way seem to be best characterized by extensively apophatic statements contributes to the ease with which any person could claim to live in the way of grace simply by virtue of not being primarily devoted to his or her own pleasure or to having his or her own way.

It is an easy matter to think that the character of Mr. O’Brien (played by Brad Pitt) is to be understood as nothing more than an exemplification of the way of nature while Mrs. O’Brien exemplifies the way of grace. After all, Mr. O’Brien himself makes it quite clear that he has chosen to live according to the way of nature, where the way of nature is more properly identified as the way of the world, where that world is primarily the human social order which makes itself enticing primarily by the rewards it offers.2 It is the pleasure and benefits to be had from those rewards which Mr. O’Brien seeks. Continue reading →

Posted in Film, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Religion | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Tree of Life

Posted on July 20, 2011 by

Abstract. With his movie, The Tree of Life,Terrence Malick escapes the confines of mere rationalism and the poverty of meager empiricism to remind of the enchantment that is always with and within the ordinariness of reality. Malick locates this enchantment in – or identifies it with – grace. It is not a grace which is distantly transcendent; it is not wholly other than or apart from physical reality. No matter how often it is unseen, it is not even a grace that hides; rather, it is an infusing grace. Precisely because this grace is not remote, Malick eschews the gross symbolism which too often leaves an excessive sense of distance and otherness, and, instead, Malick resorts – not to the indirectness of narrative, but – mostly to the naked juxtaposition of the very sorts of scenes which would often – too often – be ignored as being commonplace. As a result, just as the banal can be a root of evil, the commonplace often contains that grace which waits to be made ever more intensely manifest within our selves and, then, our world.

This past Saturday night I trekked the sixty or seventy miles into town to see Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life. I went without having read any reviews of the movie, and the only description I had seen was the synopsis which appeared when I went to check out the show times. That brief description read in part:

The Tree of Life is an impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950′s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

Aside from the fact that the family actually lives in Texas rather than the Midwest, the synopsis cannot really be said to be flat out wrong; it is just that the description does not come anywhere close to capturing the essence, the spirit of – frankly, the experience which is – this movie.

Of course, an experience is wholly subjective, and anything which is strongly subjective may well be a singular experience. One thing that led me immediately to consider the possibility – maybe the strong possibility – that my experience might not be widely – if at all – shared occurred right in the theater as soon as the movie ended. As the final credits rolled, I overheard the reactions of three gentleman sitting directly in front of me. One of them said, “I don’t know. That went right over my head.” Another wondered aloud whether they should ask their parish priest to see the movie so that he could tell them “what it was about.” Continue reading →

Posted in Film, Javier Marías, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Left

Posted on July 4, 2011 by

Sometimes, some remarks should be cherished by themselves and for themselves, for their insight, for their truth. Here is one such passage from Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías:

The Left has always been a manner of speaking everywhere. I mean, the Left that you … refer to, as if it existed or ever had existed outside the realm of the imaginary and the speculative. You should have seen it in the ’30s, or even before. A mere collective fantasy. Disguises, rhetoric, the more austere the uniform, the more fraudulent, all pompous facets or forms of the same thing, always hateful and always unjust, and invulnerable too. … They’re all oppressors, it’s amazing that people don’t realise this ab ovo, it makes little difference what cause they’re fighting for, what public cause, or what their propaganda motives are. Frauds and transcendental innocents alike all describe these motives as historical or ideological, I would never call them that, it’s too ridiculous. It’s still amazing that some people still believe there are exceptions, because there aren’t any, not in the long run, and there never have been. Well, can you think of any? The Left as the exception, how absurd. What a waste.

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Marías, Javier . Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions Books, New York: 2005, p. 81.

Posted in Javier Marías, Literature, Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Anything goes? Feyerabend and method

Posted on June 26, 2011 by

This entry looks at Paul Feyerabend’s reductio ad absurdum of specific rationalist conceptions of scientific method, perhaps one of the least understood arguments in the philosophy of science. I explain the structure of the reductio before considering how Feyerabend applied it.

The first point to note is that the misunderstanding of Feyerabend’s argument is due to his critics. When Feyerabend first published his Against Method, he was explicit about his aim:

My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. (1975, 32)

He went on to entreat the reader to “always remember that the demonstrations and the rhetorics used do not express any ‘deep convictions’ of mine”. Nevertheless, this work has consistently been described as an attempt to advance and defend the methodological principle “anything goes”, so much so that Munévar complained that “it should be an embarrassment to the profession that many reviews were completely unable to see the structure of this simple reductio” (1991, 181). (See Laudan, 1996, and Newton-Smith, 1981, for examples of such failures.) As a measure of his exasperation at such empty critiques, Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society contains an appendix entitled “Conversations with Illiterates” (1975, 125-218), in which he responded to some of his detractors.

The structure of Feyerabend’s reductio is quite straightforward, notwithstanding its confusion with a positive argument for anarchism: faced with the methodological principles of certain forms of rationalism (or what Feyerabend considered under this rubric, most notably logical positivism and falsificationism) and their proponents, together with so-called paradigmatic instances of these at work in the history of science, Feyerabend sought to show that the same rationalists would have to admit that science has developed in a fashion either contrary to their standards or otherwise in a manner that they would have to characterise as irrational. As a consequence, the standards would have to be dropped.

As a result of this rhetorical strategy, Feyerabend was able to explain his argument clearly:

‘Anything goes’ is not the one and only ‘principle’ of a new methodology, recommended by me. It is the only way in which those firmly committed to universal standards and wishing to understand history in their terms can describe my account of traditions and research practices … If this account is correct then all a rationalist can say about science (and about any other interesting activity) is: anything goes.

The reductio thus took the following form:

  • Take the principles of a rationalist methodology for science;
  • Consider what these rationalists propose as a representative example of such a methodology at work in the history of science;
  • Note that the decisions made on the basis of a rational methodology should, ceteris paribus, be rational; and
  • Demonstrate that an account of this episode in such terms forces us to describe the actions of those purportedly following the rules as irrational or in violation of them.

Before we look at Feyerabend’s argument, it is useful to take a simple example of a reductio at work. If we are dogmatic falsificationists (or else advocate basing our acceptance and rejection of scientific theories on so-called decisive experiments) and suppose Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity to have been a step in the right direction with regard to gaining knowledge of our universe, we find that we run into a problem. Falsificationists do not dispute the historical account of 1905, in which the first response to Einstein’s paper noted that his theory had already been refuted by Kaufman’s experimental results, published in the Annalen der Physik in that year. The dogmatic falsificationist is thus forced to admit that Einstein should have dismissed his theory as falsified – which, of course, he did not. (This example is discussed in detail here.) We are led to the unfortunate position of either arguing that Einstein was irrational in his refusal to give up the special theory (and moreover that we, as good falsificationists, would have rejected it, along with any consequences), which is a demand we would now consider absurd, or else accepting that dogmatic falsificationism fails.

Feyerabend preferred to use another – more famous – example from the history of science: Galileo’s work on geostaticism. Feyerabend’s reductio here consisted in three stages, designed to critique naïve empiricism, Popper’s falsificationism and Lakatos’ Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes in turn, each being an instance of a rationalist approach to science (and, in the case of the latter two, the most common even today).

For the first of these, he considered the famous Tower Argument, which had been used by Aristotelians to discount the possibility of a moving Earth. Its proponents pointed to the fact that a stone dropped from a tower lands at its base. If the Earth was moving, as some supposed, the tower would move with it and hence we would expect the stone to drop some distance away. (A variant of the same argument stated that an arrow fired vertically into the air should fall far from the firer, since he or she would have moved – along with the earth – while the arrow was in flight.) This was an idea everyone could understand and hence served as a powerful refutation of the notion that the Earth moves.

It does not matter at this stage whether Galileo was an empiricist or not: in order to undertake the reductio, we assume that he was and see what follows. What Galileo did was to accept the observations made by those who had tested this theory (that the stone falls at the base) and then appeal to a principle of relativity (often called Galilean relativity). He asked his readers to imagine two friends throwing a ball to each other while inside a cabin on a ship alongside and then to consider the same situation while the ship was underway, asking whether more (or less) force would be required to throw the ball when the ship was moving. This was also a thought experiment that people could follow and it helped him to explain that there was in fact no difference, since any motion of the ship would also be shared by the passengers. That is, whichever direction the ship moved in, the cabin would as well, along with everything inside it.

As a result of this discussion, Galileo was able to demonstrate that the very same “fact” used in the Tower Argument – the stone falling at the base – also supported the idea that the Earth was rotating, since any evidence that the geostaticist could appeal to would likewise support the alternative (indeed, this is actually an example of underdetermination by data and the theory-ladenness of observational terms). The naïve empiricist has no means of deciding between these two rival theories and hence any choice made by Galileo would violate this form of empiricism. If our methodology insists that only those decisions made on the basis of evidence can be called rational then Galileo and the Aristotelians alike were irrational to prefer geokineticism or geostaticism respectively. We are thus forced either to give up on describing Galileo’s behaviour as rational or else admit that naïve empiricism is inadequate.

The reductio of Popper’s falsificationism proceeded in a similar way. Copernicus’ system predicted magnitudes for both Venus and Mars that were refuted by observations, which led to the same conclusion with regard to dogmatic falsificationism as in the example of Einstein above. Feyerabend instead considered the sophisticated version of falsificationism, according to which Copernicanism should have excess empirical content over the Ptolemaic model, including the prediction of novel facts that were falsifiable. Unfortunately, Copernicanism was of equal empirical content to its rival (see Kuhn, 1985 and Swerdlow, 1973) and was incompatible with the Aristotelianism of the day. This latter point is an important one to appreciate: Aristotelianism did not merely consist in an astronomical theory concerning the heavens but was an integrated system that applied widely. In particular, Aristotle’s dynamics was a theory of change, including explanations of generation, corruption, locomotion and qualitative change. The theory that Galileo proposed in its stead dealt only with locomotion, which was a decrease in truth-content (as always, from the perspective of that time). Thus we find that Copernicanism represented a theory that was falsified, of equal empirical content and of lesser-truth content. As Popperian falsificationists, we are forced again to admit either that Galileo was irrational to persist in his studies or that Popper’s methodology is flawed.

The last reductio that Feyerabend attempted – that of Lakatos’ much more insightful approach – could not rely on his analysis of Galileo’s behaviour, since Lakatos was in complete agreement (Lakatos and Zahar, 1975; see also Lakatos, 1978). Since Lakatos’ methodology was careful to incorporate the lessons of the failure of falsificationism, his classification of research programmes as progressive if they demonstrate excess empirical content that has been confirmed (and degenerating for the converse) was far better equipped to survive problematic episodes in the history of science. Indeed, Lakatos accepted that a new theory would initially show a loss in empirical content as it took time to become established, and further that ad hoc measures are acceptable insofar as they help the theory avoid falsification and thus allow it to develop. The obvious difficulty with such a methodology, of course, is where to draw the line when so much wriggling is permitted; after all, a degenerating theory could eventually become progressive if given the opportunity (or even if not). It was at this difficulty that Feyerabend aimed his argument and here we finally meet the notion that “anything goes”.

Introducing the concept of an epistemological anarchist, or a person with an aversion to ideologies and opposed “positively and absolutely” to all universal standards (1975, 175), Feyerabend asked how, at the time of Galileo, the actions of an epistemological anarchist would differ from those of a Lakatosian. It was immediately clear that the former could do as he or she liked, by definition, but what of the Lakatosian? Herein lies the problem: Lakatos’ Methodology enables us to describe a situation but it does not tell us how we should act. A Lakatosian could accept Aristotelianism as a progressive research programme and reject Copernicanism as degenerating, but he or she could also do the converse. No restriction is placed on what should be done; all we have is a new vocabulary to explain ourselves.

The reductio in this last case thus consisted in referring again to the “methodology” of epistemological anarchism – or the “anything goes” we began with – and showing that Lakatos’ approach could not be distinguished from it. Since “anything goes” is no method at all, rendering everything rational at a stroke, it follows that we either adopt a method that is not a method (which is absurd) or else reject the approach of the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.

The glaring point to notice in each of these arguments is that it is nowhere necessary for us to accept that there is no possible scientific method; that “anything goes”; that we should all become epistemological anarchists; or that Feyerabend was advocating any of these. All these terms and concepts, employed in critiques of Feyerabend then and since, are intended for use only inside the context of a reductio ad absurdum. The subtlety of this form of rhetoric (which Galileo himself had mastered) is lost when we interpret it as an attempt to replace one set of rules with another (and inexplicably in the face of Feyerabend’s own declaiming the possibility).

In summary, the common (mis)characterisation of Feyerabend’s “anything goes” bears no resemblance to what he wrote and completely ignores both the nature of his reductio argument and its targets. His intention was to free science from methodological and philosophical restrictions, not saddle it with yet another.

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References:

Feyerabend, P., Against Method (London: Verso, 1975)
Feyerabend, P., Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1978)
Kuhn, T.S., The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985)
Lakatos, I., The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)
Lakatos, I. and Zahar, E., Why did Copernicus’ Research Program Supersede Ptolemy’s?, in Westman (ed), The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)
Laudan, L., Beyond Positivism and Relativism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996)
Newton-Smith, W.H., The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)
Swerdlow, N., The derivation and first draft of Copernicus’s planetary theory: a translation of the Commentariolus with commentary (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1973, 117: 423-512)

Posted in Feyerabend, Galileo, History and Philosophy of Science, History of Science, Philosophy of Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Matters of Choice and Free Will

Posted on June 12, 2011 by

Abstract. In his paper, ‘The Act of Choice’, Richard Holton takes up and well discusses an important issue which the great bulk of the literature about free will has tended to ignore. That issue is the matter of choice: the experience and the nature of choice. Holton veritably berates the excessively speculative characteristic of metaphysical musings by libertarians, determinists, and compatibilists; his discussion strongly suggests that a capacity to choose is a necessary condition for free will, and Holton’s capacity is here extended into a discussion about how a capacity to choose would become a capability to choose and how such a capability is essential to the manifestation of increased freedom. Finally, this essay notes how the matter of choice actually works against compatibilist notions – contrary to Holton’s own conclusion.

1. The natures of choice, capacities, and capabilities

In his paper, The Act of Choice1, Richard Holton notes that Samuel Johnson long ago said, “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Holton thinks that the “true importance” of Johnson’s remark “has been missed”, because, despite the fact that “Johnson is right to insist that we have an experience of freedom[,]2 … [o]nce we start to contemplate the experience of free will, much of the literature on it seems beside the point.”3 Holton’s contention is that most of the literature gives, at best, only passing and superficial consideration to (when it is not out right dismissive of) the experience of freedom, particularly with regards to the context of human will. Rather than concerning itself with the experience of freedom, the literature extensively concentrates most adamantly upon metaphysical speculations, whether in the form of determinism, libertarianism, or compatibilism.

According to Holton, “choice is the primary ingredient in the experience of free will”4 and “choice comes when the question of what to do arises.”5 He also notes that “[o]ften in our day-to-day activities that question never arises at all.” Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Synthese Debacle and the Louisiana Legislature

Posted on May 28, 2011 by

Much has been written about how the editors of the philosophy journal, Synthese, botched the handling of objections which were raised about at least one or two of the articles in the Evolution and Its Rivals special issue (Volume 178, Number 2 / January 2011). The gist of one sort of concern which arose over how the Editors-in-Chief handled the matter can be found here where John Protevi, a professor at Louisiana State University, said:

A real danger with leaving the disclaimer as it is, or at least not mitigating Beckwith’s use of it, is the extremely high probability that the next time Professor Forrest [a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University] testifies to the LA state legislature (as she often does in these matters, and no doubt will soon in the debate on SB 70, which would repeal the stealth creationist Lousiana Science Education Act or LSEA), some ID partisan will claim she has been “refuted” in the pages of a prestigious philosophy journal and that therefore her testimony should be discounted if not ignored.

This past Thursday, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee rejected Senate Bill 70 (SB 70) which would have repealed this law. This news report about the Senate committee action does not indicate whether Professor Forrest testified (I have emailed the committee in an attempt to get more information about whatever testimony was presented and by whom), nor does the article indicate that the feared refutation charge surfaced. In fact, the article makes it seem as if the committee hearing had next to no contentiousness.

If that was the case, then this may well be because Professor Forrest did not testify (assuming she did not), and, if she did not testify, this might have been either because of a schedule conflict, or it may have been because it was clear ahead of the hearing that the proposed legislation would not be approved by the committee. Maybe the fireworks over her having been “refuted” will have to wait until some local government inserts creationism/ID into the curriculum so that there can then be a lawsuit at which Professor Forrest will testify.

Of course, by the time such a court case comes about, Dr. Forrest could well produce a better argument than she put forth1, 2, 3, 4 in her paper, The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implication for public policy, and that argument could and should make any reference to her previously having been “refuted” a wholly irrelevant matter.
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1 Some criticism of the Forrest paper is to be found here: “Since the matter of SB70 is more a matter of politics than science, it would behoove those in favor of the repeal to avoid such shallow depictions of faith and religion and their relation to epistemology as that provided by Forrest …”

2 More brief criticism of Forrest is here.

3 Here is still some more criticism: “It is perfectly possible to address the epistemology of Johnson, Dembski, and Beckwith without making the overly broad and easily contradicted assertions made by Forrest about the nature of faith and alleged ‘epistemological problems generated by supernatural theism’ … It might be acceptable or honorable as a political tactic to bother with discussion of Beckwith’s Master of Juridical Studies, but that discussion is philosophically unnecessary.”

4 Here is some criticism of the Forrest paper by Darrell Rowbottom.

Posted in Current Affairs, Evolution, History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Religion, Science | 2 Comments

More on Lutz, Laudan, and Demarcation

Posted on May 25, 2011 by

In On Lutz on Laudan and demarcation, Paul Newall notes that:

In his (draft) paper On an Allegedly Essential Feature of Demarcation Criteria of Science, Sebastian Lutz claims that demarcation does not require a criterion that is both a necessary and sufficient condition, as had been discussed in Laudan’s famous paper The demise of the demarcation problem.

In the discussion with Lutz which ensued, I began to indicate reasons why necessary and sufficient conditions do indeed have to be taken into account if we are to demarcate – which is to say most soundly determine – both what is science/scientific and what is not science/scientific. This entry originally appeared in the discussion which occurred in the comments responsive to the Newall posting. The statements blockquoted below are remarks made by Sebastian Lutz in this comment. See the rest of that discussion for a more detailed context of what follows here.

1. I am really, really not assuming that the sufficient condition is a conjunction of necessary ones. Thus it is irrelevant that if I did assume that, I would be in agreement with Laudan.

6. I am really, really not assuming that the sufficient condition has to be an if-and-only-if condition (that is, also necessary).

It is true that Laudan’s conjunction could be assumed to be true with the argument against Laudan still succeeding. It has not been said that Lutz made that assumption, but it could be said that: a) logical demands require Lutz to use a combination of necessary and sufficient conditions, and b) if there are any differences between Laudan’s necessary-sufficient combination and a necessary-sufficient combination that Lutz might use to effect a valid argument, those differences are not to the detriment of Laudan’s argument.

2. I have as much in mind for sufficient conditions as I have for necessary conditions: Only their formal relations to ‘being scientific’. If something is a science only if it fulfills condition A, A is a necessary condition, and if something is a science if it fulfills condition B, B is a sufficient condition.

3. A sufficient condition that is not also necessary cannot determine that something is not a science. It can only determine that something is a science. This is, by the way, what Laudan says as well (pp. 118f).

Likewise, Laudan notes that a satisfied necessary condition which is not also sufficient is not enough to establish that something is a science. Hence, we have Laudan putting forth the combination of sufficient and necessary to satisfy both the determination of what is and what is not science/scientific. It is a prima facie legitimate hypothesis if only because, as is well known and as was discussed, the notion of a necessary-sufficient combination or conjunction is utterly conventional, and Lutz seems to have admitted that it is only with some sort of combination of sufficient and necessary conditions that it would be at all possible to determine both what is and what is not science/scientific.

5. Having a criterion with one sufficient and one different necessary condition does not mean that demarcation is subjective. For all those things that don’t fulfill the necessary condition, and for all those things that fulfill the sufficient condition, the criterion delivers a clear verdict, just as a necessary and sufficient condition would. For the unclear cases, there is, of course, no clear verdict.

For now, let us concentrate on the matter of “a criterion with one sufficient and one different necessary condition”; the notion of non-subjective demarcation (what I would more likely call judgment) can be addressed at some other time.
Given one particular context, something which satisfies the contextually sufficient condition must also satisfy the contextually relevant “different necessary condition”; otherwise, it is nonsensical to assert that the supposedly necessary condition is genuinely (or necessarily) necessary. In the case of a context of competing claims, it makes no sense to say that one claim for scientific status need not meet some necessary condition to qualify as scientific whereas an allegedly competing claim must meet that particular necessary condition.

Such an inconsistency (in this case an apparently inconsistent application of a supposed standard) is a telltale sign for possible logical invalidity. To assert that one claim to scientific status need not meet some necessary condition to qualify as scientific whereas a purportedly competing claim must meet that particular necessary condition is nonsensical precisely because it is illogical so long as the inconsistency remains apparent (or, in other words, so long as it is not explained, justified, or validly supported).

This is not to argue that there must only be one standard for all claims to scientific status (even though there might well be such an argument – which happens not to be essential for what is being argued here), but proponents for one claim to scientific status cannot logically relegate to unscientific status a competing claim by virtue of a standard which those proponents do not apply to their own preferred claim or which the proponents’ claim does not itself satisfy. After all, if neither of the competing claims satisfies the necessary condition, then it is either the case that neither claim is scientific, or it is the case that the condition is not actually necessary.

Accordingly, it appears that although Lutz did not assume “that the sufficient condition is a conjunction of necessary ones”, he does in fact rely on a necessary-sufficient combination — if his is a logical argument about incompatible competing claims.

Is reliance upon such a necessary-sufficient combination any different from Laudan relying upon “conditions which are both necessary and sufficient”? Laudan could just as well be said to be relying upon “both necessary and sufficient conditions”. Would this modification to Laudan’s expression change the meaning he intended?

Apparently not, because Laudan makes it clear that he is talking about individually necessary conditions which produce a sufficient condition when taken jointly, which is to say that Laudan is talking about the combination of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Still, there is that “jointly” matter. There seems to have been agreement in the referenced previous discussion that were a sufficient condition to be defined successfully in terms of all possible necessary conditions to be fulfilled, this would be the most precise sort of demarcation criterion. However, a weaker sort of demarcation could be one in which there is a sufficient condition in addition to – rather than jointly produced by – some necessary conditions. This really amounts to a different sort of “jointly”, but it is still correct to say that even under these circumstances it is the necessary and sufficient conditions taken in combination (or jointly) that provide the best available criterion for being able to designate or determine both what is scientific and what is not. This is to say once again that a necessary-sufficient combination (if attainable) will always produce a clearer distinction than will a sufficient condition alone or necessary conditions alone. (* See below for discussion about the possibility regarding demarcation in terms of unrelated theories.)

This is to say that, in the context of competing theories, Laudan’s combination claim has NOT been shown to be false. This leaves opponents in this context with only one available course of attack against Laudan, and that attack can either be thought of as being conducted in terms of the nature of objectivity, or it can be thought of as an argument over the definition of demarcation. And what I find most amusing about these repeated attacks on Laudan, at least thus far (and I am not here – or yet – including the Lutz argument as one of these attacks), is not that they amount to nothing more than a temper tantrum induced by highly demanding standards; what I find most amusing is not that these attacks do not themselves have anything to do with the activities within science (with what is effectively a unanimity, those involved in the sciences do not think in terms of or concern themselves with criteria for scientific/unscientific demarcation when they are designing and conducting those activities which they presume are scientific). No, what I would probably find most amusing about the attacks against Laudan is that they suggest a mind-set against philosophy – but that actually strikes be as being sad rather than amusing.

Laudan makes it quite clear that the demarcation matter is a non-issue since there are other means by which to deal with the problems that arise as a result of our inability to thus far devise an actually invariant demarcation criterion. The demarcation problem is essentially a run-of-the-mill epistemological problem, and further attempts to alleviate this problem might end up being helpful, but philosophy is concerned with wisdom that goes beyond mere knowledge, and the seeking of wisdom in no way depends upon – and it never demands – the weakening of epistemic demands or stringency.

So, science and philosophy are not lessened by Laudan’s “ideal”. Why, then, are there these repeated attacks on Laudan? For nearly thirty years, Laudan’s opponents, from Ruse through Pennock, et al., have explained the reason quite explicitly. Laudan’s argument is not readily applicable in certain legal/political contexts; Laudan’s argument does not serve certain legal/political interests.

* The earlier discussion concerned claims for scientific status by two incompatible competing theories, since the most common relevant context has been that which is set in terms of evolution and creationism/ID. There is also the possibility that the Lutz argument is supposed to pertain to different theories from different scientific fields. If one presumably scientific field were not to have (let us say) the same necessary condition(s) as a second presumably scientific field, and if a theory in the second field did not satisfy a necessary condition for that field, then that theory would not suffice for inclusion as part of that specific field. However, without additional argument, it is logically invalid to assert that a theory is unscientific on the basis of the failure of that theory to satisfy a necessary condition for one particular presumably scientific field. All that can be validly concluded in the absence of additional argument is only that the theory does not qualify as part of that particular scientific field; whether the unqualified theory is unscientific is another matter altogether. But, then, when we broaden the scope from the question of whether different theories suffice for their different intended fields to the question about whether the different theories are each alone or both together scientific or unscientific, we are back to having to apply to both theories the same standard in terms of a combination of necessary and sufficient conditions in order for us to be able to definitively and validly cover both the scientific and unscientific possibilities. It appears that Laudan’s point about the need for a necessary-sufficient combination remains intact across multiple conditions/contexts.

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