Who has taken the time to read their Hume?:
A.) The Insane Clown Posse
B.) Christopher Hitchens
Here's a tougher quiz. Who is more entertaining and offensive to the tender, mild-mannered mainstream:
A.) The Insane Clown Posse
B.) Christopher Hitchens
I never understood the draw of Hume's thought on miracles. I think the idea that it's an irrefutable formulation comes more from the fact that the framework he employs has been relatively canonized in popular imagination.
ReplyDeleteA book that I have in my head to write at some point would present theories of miracles on a spectrum from Augustine to Hume, where Hume understands them as a complete disruption of natural occurrence while Augustine understands them as a quickening of purely natural occurrence. The only reason why miracles appear to be a disruption, says Augustine, is that they look so odd to us. Hume and Augustine are useful poles of understanding, then (and probably the two most common theories employed when people talk about miracles). But I imagine there's nothing stopping anyone from positing another completely different theory.
Someone's surely written this book already, though... it strikes me as too obvious a thesis to not already be out there.
...all that said, you should have just posted the Insane Clown Posse video by itself. It's less funny when you bring Hitchens in. Just let them glow by their own incandescence.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of it is just common sense, isn't it? I mean, I'm not particularly familiar with it but I always took it to be simply the insight that since miracles by definition resist empirical verification, we should always be skeptical of them. It's a definition of miracles if nothing else. Trust what can be empirically verified, be skeptical of what cannot - and by convention call what cannot be empirically verified a "miracle". I'm not sure if Augustine and Hume are different on the operation so much as perhaps the definition of miracles - not that I've read Augustine on the issue.
ReplyDeleteWell you showed me the video - if you wanted it another way you should have posted it :)
ReplyDeleteI don't know... it felt like it needed something more.
The term "verify" means "to make true," or was, at least, was derived from Old French and Latin terms with that meaning. This was certainly what philosophers of science once used the word to mean, since it led them to the problem of verifying the universal hypotheses of science.
ReplyDeletePutting aside the issue whether empirical observation can make anything true, (even though it may motivate us to tentatively classify a proposition as true), any theory with logical consequence beyond that which has already been observed cannot be verified at all--such as any theory that predicts anything.
This is really why I, following Popper, stress the importance of falsifiability rather than verifiability. Verifiable theories predict nothing but a single observable event, and verified theories do not predict anything at all.
Lee Kelly -
ReplyDeleteEver since I've checked in on your blog I've been walking on eggshells with what I write about empirical verification (well... to put it more accurately I've written what I've always written with the nagging suspicion that what I took for granted before is at the very least phrased incorrectly - if it's not substantively incorrect). Thanks for the clarification.
But you have to at least concede, I'm closer to having a level headed view on all this than the Insane Clown Posse, right? :)
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteThe term "miracle" means lots of different things. For Hitchens a mircale is a suspension of the laws of physics, an intervention by the great law-maker in the sky. The Insance Clown Posse seem to be treating everything that is highly improbable as a miracle. Of course, what measure of probability an event has depends on the particular initial conditions.
At the moment of the big bang, the probability that we would now be having this discussion here would be incredibly low, but at 9am yesterday it would have been considerably more likely. (Note: these comments do not interpret "probability" as a measure of subjective ignorance, but as a property of a physical system.)
My apologies for starting the ball rolling in taking this post too seriously.
ReplyDelete