Alright, I have sent this letter to Dr. Craigs Q&A address. Lets see if he has anything to say. Dear Dr. Craig, Ive been meaning to write to you about this for a while. Ive read a fair bit of your online material, and it seems to me as though you, with fair regularity, espouse two...lets call them epistemic rules, by which you evaluate whether arguments are good arguments or not. Rule A: If a premise is more plausible than its negation, we are warranted in asserting that premise. Rule B: If we are warranted in asserting every premise in a valid, deductive argument, we are warranted in asserting the conclusion. My first question, then, is this: Do you agree with these two rules? If not, which would you reject, or how would you change them? The second part of the question is a critique of these rules, and since Im not entirely confident that I am representing you correctly, feel free to just let me know if you agree. Imagine the following situation. I take two craps dice, one red, one blue, shake them up in a bowl, and turn the bowl over on the table, so the dice are hidden. I then propose the following argument: 1.) The red die does not show a 1 or a 2. 2.) The blue die does not show a 1 or a 2. C.) Therefore, neither die shows a 1 or a 2. The argument is clearly a valid deductive argument. Further, each premise is far more plausible than its negation (each is twice as likely to be true as its negation, after all). If rule A is true, we are warranted in asserting each premise. Finally, if rule B is also true, then we are warranted in asserting the conclusion. Here, though, we run into an obvious problem: the conclusion is actually *less* plausible than its negation. It probably isnt true, and we certainly *arent* warranted in asserting it. Such an assertion is more likely to be false than it is to be true. The unavoidable conclusion is that at least one of these two rules must be false. If they were both true, we would be warranted in asserting the probably-false conclusion in my deductively valid dice argument, and we clearly are not. My second question, then, is this: Which of the two rules do you think is false (or are both false?) How would you modify or replace them so that we have a functional epistemic standard for evaluating deductive arguments? Feel free to take a stab at each question yourself, if you want.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 17:31:33 +0000
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