Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

An educated person today could be forgiven for thinking that it’s pretty obvious that humans and other terrestrial creatures are entirely physical. Humans, cats, and bugs are just biophysical organisms. To think otherwise is a sign of weakness: being unable or unwilling to critically evaluate the comforting superstitious tales one is told as a child.

If the educated person is then exposed to some contemporary philosophy, then they will learn of some anti-physicalist arguments. But if they have a good head on their shoulders, and aren’t suckers for fancy-but-strained patterns of philosophical reasoning, then they might conclude that although physicalism for us creatures is true, there’s some counterintuitive stuff about our mental concepts. Fair enough. We already knew that the universe is weird and our concepts need not latch on to it well.

You don’t have to agree with that. But you can see how it’s a reasonable way to go. Let’s call the above kind of physicalism, PHYSICALISM-FOR-US.

You could accept physicalism-for-us but wonder whether there are any nonphysical entities outside of earth. On the face of it, you could insist that science has shown that the familiar stuff on earth—humans, cats, bugs—are just physical, while humbly acknowledging that maybe there are weird nonphysical things elsewhere or elsewhen. Just because the shit around here is entirely physical doesn’t mean the shit over there is entirely physical. Maybe there are no nonphysical aliens on Mars, but hey: maybe there are some in distant galaxies.

When exposed to contemporary philosophy, one will learn of arguments that conclude that physicalism extends way beyond Earth to other galaxies. These arguments have to do with principles about causality, or perhaps the conservation of energy. Or just the successful march of science. Call this more ambitious physicalism, PHYSICALISM-FOR-OUR-CAUSALITY. It says that everything we can interact with, even indirectly (such as the stuff in distant galaxies), is entirely physical. A little more exactly: if we can interact with X1, which can interact with X2, which can interact with X3, and so on, then all the Xs in that series are entirely physical.

You could accept physicalism-for-our-causality but wonder whether there are any nonphysical entities that we can’t interact with at all, even indirectly multiplied by infinity. On the face of it, you could insist that science has shown that the stuff that bears any causal connection to us is just physical, while humbly acknowledging that maybe there are weird nonphysical things existing right here and now in our spacetime but utterly cut off from anything we can ever know about. You might think science is restricted to talking about stuff that interacts in some fashion with at least some of the physical stuff we know about such as atomic particles, light, neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy, and so forth. Perhaps science is right that physicalism is true for all that stuff but not other stuff.

On the other hand, perhaps there are good arguments for physicalism that conclude that anything with any spatiotemporal relations to us has to be entirely physical—and forget about causality. Maybe something essential to spacetime requires all entities occurring here and now (or in our past or future) to be physical—even if they cannot causally interact with us at all, even indirectly. Call that view PHYSICALISM-FOR-OUR-SPACETIME. It says that there are no nonphysical entities zooming around us but totally noninteracting with us; anything bearing any spatiotemporal relations to us is entirely physical.

You could accept physicalism-for-our-spacetime but wonder whether there are any nonphysical entities that we bear no spatiotemporal relations to at all. These entities might be spatiotemporal—because they bear spatiotemporal relations to one another—but not connected to our spacetime. Maybe there are other universes that aren’t located any distance from us, and they don’t occur before, after, or simultaneous with us either. There is spatiotemporal shit going on in them that is no distance from Earth, and isn’t occurring in our past, present, or future. Sure, this is a weird hypothesis. We have no reason to think there are such universes, you might say. Even so, you might think that we haven’t the slightest reason to think they don’t exist. How on earth could we have any such evidence against them, given that they are not only unrelated to us causally but not even spatially or temporally?

If you think that’s wrong, then you endorse PHYSICALISM-FOR-ALL-SPACETIME. For you, there’s nothing on Earth nonphysical. There’s nothing we can interact with that’s nonphysical. There’s nothing in our spacetime that’s nonphysical. There’s nothing in any spacetime that is nonphysical.

Finally, you could endorse physicalism-for-all-spacetime but still hold that there are entities that have no causal or spatiotemporal relations to anything at all. You might think that numbers are a good example, but I’m not restricting the idea to familiar things like numbers. I remember talking with a fully competent philosopher who thought numbers have at least some causal relations to us. Even if he was right about that, how the hell could we have any confidence in the idea that there are no entities that aren’t causal or spatiotemporal at all, even if numbers don’t count?

You might think that’s impossible. Maybe you think there is a connection between the concept of existence and the concepts of causality and spacetime: in order to exist, one simply has to bear causal and/or spatiotemporal relations to other entities. Okay, then you might endorse PHYSICALISM-FOR-ALL-REALITY.

In sum:

PHYSICALISM-FOR-US: we terrestrial creatures are entirely physical

PHYSICALISM-FOR-OUR-CAUSALITY: anything we can interact with is entirely physical

PHYSICALISM-FOR-OUR-SPACETIME: anything we bear spatiotemporal relations to is entirely physical

PHYSICALISM-FOR-ALL-SPACETIME: anything with spatiotemporal relations is entirely physical

PHYSICALISM-FOR-ALL-REALITY: anything that exists at all is entirely physical

You certainly can improve on this list, but I hope that this quick and dirty discussion is suggestive on how to go about it.

For what it’s worth, I am pretty confident in physicalism-for-us, less but still somewhat confident in physicalism-for-our-causality, but have little to no confidence in the others.

*****

In your 20s and 30s, you figure out what things you like, you hate, you are good at, you are no good at, and so on. Some random examples:

• You find out that you really don’t like participating in team sports. So, you avoid those.

• You find that you enjoy home improvement. So, you seek out projects to improve your home, doing them yourself.

• You discover that you have no talent for learning a musical instrument. Fine; do something else.

• You discover that you love debating highly intellectual topics. So, you engage in discussion on Substack.

• You discover that you don’t like non-monogamy. So, you have monogamous relationships.

• You love taking care of little kids. So, you have a house full of children.

• You hate learning new languages or dealing with the difficulties of translation. So, you avoid going to countries where almost no one speaks your language.

In short, you’re figuring out how to make your life more enjoyable. Needless to say, this is a great thing to do.

Even so, the dark side is that if you continue down that road a long time, even successfully, you will most likely become addicted to presence of comfort and lack of discomfort: physical, material, emotional, and intellectual. And that ends up making you weak and even foolish.

Before I get to the examples and defense, some foreshadowing: I disagree profoundly with what the wellness influencers say about the “value of getting out of your comfort zone”. I think they are doing it completely wrong, for reasons I’ll get to below.

Examples of being addicted to the presence of comfort or absence of discomfort:

• You get addicted to your current, comfortable, material standard of living—in the sense of your amount of income, your amount of savings, and your spending patterns. If your income was halved, it would strike you as an utter disaster. You hesitate to give much money to the poor because you’re addicted to your patterns of spending money.

• You get addicted to your current, comfortable relationship dynamics. If your partner cheats on you, or there is a death in the family, you are likely to almost panic, at least temporarily. If there is an uncomfortable conversation on the horizon, about some highly emotional issue with a loved one, you shy away from it.

• You become addicted to your opinions regarding politics, religion, and morality. You no longer struggle with discovering uncomfortable insights that go firmly against your “tribes”, political, moral, or religious. You quickly disparage contrary views without careful consideration. You’re left-wing, and MAGA will teach you nothing; you’re a theist, and science won’t budge you; you’re politically conservative, and know that purple-haired woke 20-somethings have nothing to teach you.

• Finally, over the years your body probably grows fat and weak, losing muscle mass and gaining all sorts of fat.

All of these happened to me, and I don’t know anyone over 45 or so who has escaped them. For instance, most of my Facebook friends are addicted to intellectual comfort when it comes to politics, religion, and morality. They are very cozy in their preferred tribes, implicitly thinking they’ve figured those things out, at least approximately.

And how many of us don’t gain a lot of fat and lose a lot of muscle, after the age of 40 or 45, say? Some of us manage it, but not a lot.

I hope it’s obvious that arranging your life to make it more enjoyable is usually a great thing. Anyone who purposely arranges their life to be miserable will end up, well, miserable. My point is that virtually all of us carry out the “make life enjoyable” project in the wrong way—so we end up intellectually, morally, emotionally, and physically weak. That weakness bites us in the ass when life eventually throws us a curveball and we have to deal with significant discomfort.

About a decade ago I started paying attention to how I had grown addicted to material, emotional, intellectual, and physical comfort. I gradually saw the same thing in my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Jeez . . . it hits all of us, to different degrees. No one is spared.

But just becoming vividly aware of it gave me the impetus to decrease it. Here’s a recent example from my own life:

Like I said above, it would be silly to avoid all comfort. I happen to absolutely ADORE junk food. Part of me looks forward to receiving a fatal disease diagnosis, just so I can eat junk food all day, given that the end is nigh. Over the last couple years I’ve been enjoying eating junk food. It’s awesome. About six weeks ago I bought a scale and discovered that I weighed 207 lb, the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. I decided that enough was enough. So, I designed an exercise and weight loss plan that I thought would work for me (which of course doesn’t mean its details would work for you, although the general principles apply to virtually everyone).

Six weeks later, I’m at 188 lb. I’ve lost 19 lb. I figure I have 8-11 lb more to go, so I end up at 177-180 lb (I’m 5’11’’). I know I’ll piss people off by saying this, but the truth is that it hasn’t been terribly difficult—because I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. Most people hate dieting because it involves a ton of discomfort. They are totally right about that. They search and search and search for shortcuts, for magic formulas, for hacks, to minimize the discomfort. I do not have any shortcuts or magic formulas, so don’t ask me for them. But if you can adopt a mindset that doesn’t give a shit about mild discomfort, so you don’t spend time, attention, and energy fighting it but just accept it, then losing weight is not terribly difficult (for most of us; obviously there are exceptions for medical reasons).

When I said there is a “dark side” to the project of making your life more enjoyable, I didn’t mean the project has its limits. Perhaps it does, but I’m not saying so. In fact, I think that if you pursue the project well, and are aiming for the long term, then learning to live with short-term discomfort is the best way to make your life more enjoyable in the long term. In short:

If you want to maximize the presence of comfort and absence of discomfort in the long run, then make sure you have plenty of short-term periods of discomfort and lack of comfort.

The reason is this: (i) tragedy is definitely going to hit you, over and over, (ii) your life will be more enjoyable if you can handle those tragedies well, (iii) handing them well requires strength; and (iv) relentless pursuit of the absence of discomfort and presence of comfort makes you weak and foolish.

Regarding (i), some of the following events, or quite similar ones, are going to happen to you eventually:

• you get divorced

• your father gets dementia

• you get a chronic illness that lasts for decades

• you find out your spouse has undiagnosed mental illness

• your sex life becomes almost nonexistent

• your son is arrested for drunk driving

• your sister-in-law is killed in an accident

• your brother goes bankrupt

• your favorite uncle is arrested for child molestation

And so on. That shit is inevitable, if you live 70 or so years. When it happens, if you have long been addicted to the presence of comfort and the lack of discomfort, then your subsequent weakness and perhaps foolishness won’t serve you well in the aftermath. You’ll end up like those idiots who lose their minds when cops pull them over for minor traffic infractions or other penalties (just watch the videos of these people melting down; they’re amazing). It’s much better, for enjoying your life, to have had plenty of experience with discomfort and lack of comfort, so that you can deal with the inevitable tragedies.

The hard part is getting yourself comfortable with being uncomfortable. How does one pull that off?

That’s the BIG QUESTION. I’ll get to it below. First, a top-10 list of basic points about the project of making life more enjoyable:

1. Pursuing comfort and avoiding discomfort are quite different things. I might spend a great deal of energy pursuing comforts—but I don’t give a shit about the discomfort in my life. I’ll probably end up with a quite varied life, rich in highs and lows. Conversely, you might not pursue comfort very much but you do everything you can to avoid discomfort. You’ll probably end up with a pretty mild life, with far fewer highs and lows. Which kind of life is more rewarding depends on the details of your personality.

2. Comfort and discomfort come in degrees. Maybe mowing your lawn sucks for you, but that’s mild discomfort. Summoning the courage to confront your spouse about the lousy state of your marriage will be wildly more uncomfortable. Eating your favorite junk food is mildly comforting. Having regular, loving sex with an incredibly gorgeous person whom you love and who loves you back might be incredibly comforting.

3. The same thing will be mildly uncomfortable to one person and highly uncomfortable to another person. Etc.

4. Clearly, some people’s lives are mostly uncomfortable—and have been so for many years. They probably haven’t grown addicted, to any significant degree, to the presence of comfort or the absence of discomfort. And they aren’t in a position to take on any new sources of discomfort.

5. It’s tough to know the degree to which one is addicted to the presence of comfort or absence of discomfort. My guess is virtually all of us are strongly disposed to underestimate the degree of addiction we have. The woman across the street from where I’m living this spring sometimes brings my newly emptied trash cans from the curb to the entrance to my garage—because she considers it unsightly to have trash cans near the curb. She does this only a few hours after the trash cans have been emptied. My guess—and that’s all it is—is that she lives a really boring life, filled with stupefying comfort, and the incredibly minor visual discomfort of trash cans seems like a big deal to her. I suppose the vast majority of us have similar odd quirks that are somewhat foolish. But my point here is that her behavior might be the result of too many years of comfort and lack of discomfort.

6. In my experience, most people I know—and who read these words—have a lot of comfort and not much high-degree discomfort in their lives. They underestimate their addictions—and usually never even consider that there are at least four categories: physical, material (income/savings/spending), intellectual, and emotional.

7. Again: nothing I’m saying here is meant to suggest that we gotta become fucking Marines, or Navy Seals, and grow to love and seek out discomfort as much as possible—so we can be tough dudes. That’s silly.

8. Also again: discomfort still sucks. It’s discomfort. I don’t like dieting. It sucks. I don’t like being hungry any more than you do, and I don’t like depriving myself of cookies, Doritos, and chocolate-chip pancakes either. Hell no. One should not slip into denial about the badness of discomfort.

9. Opportunities for being mildly or significantly but not extremely uncomfortable—opportunities that when taken could improve your life in the long term—aren’t hard to find. They’re probably right under your nose.

10. Some people try to distinguish discomfort from being uncomfortable. I’m not fussing with that stuff.

When people hear me say these things about comfort/discomfort, they nod their heads and agree. But then they go back to their lives and fail to see the degree to which they have become addicted to comfort/lack of discomfort. They say things like “Oh my God, our bathroom just HAD to be remodeled. It was a disaster”. This is horseshit. The bathroom was working fine. They just had grown addicted to a certain material standard of living. Or when they are confronted with the request to give money to the poor, their addiction to their current financial situation prevents them from acting. Or they shy away from the difficult conversations that would improve their relationships with their spouse, children, parents, coworkers, or bosses. They don’t take seriously political views outside of their tribes, left-wing or right-wing. Their minds are made up when it comes to religion. And so forth.

It’s so easy—isn’t it?—to nod your head at good advice or wisdom but then ignore it in your life. I’ve done exactly that on multiple occasions, and I’m sure you have too.

So, again, how does one get oneself to be comfortable with discomfort?

I don’t know of any easy or (what is different) reliable method. But here are a few observations that I find helpful:

• What works for one person might be a disaster for someone else. So, don’t be too disappointed if you find out that what worked for me, or your sister, just won’t work for you.

• There are degrees of this. You can grow incredibly or just mildly comfortable with discomfort.

• Again, there are distinct areas for this: material, emotional, physical, intellectual. You might be great at being comfortable-with-discomfort when it comes to physical stuff but suck at it when it comes to intellectual stuff. Evaluate yourself on all four categories.

• Maybe you can motivate yourself to accept discomfort because you see in advance that it will be a big ego boost for you. You’ll feel superior to other people, once you’ve had some success accepting discomfort. You’ll be stronger than them. You’ll be the adult in the room, while everyone else is losing their minds and engaging in immature drama. You can weather the storms when others can’t. You won’t be guilty of tribal thinking.

• As the previous remark suggests, it’s not as though one must have a noble reason for growing comfortable with discomfort. You can lean into all sorts of motivations, if they’re actually going to work for you, regardless of whether they sound impressive to others or even to yourself. For comparison, I decided to lose weight not because of health or anything like that. It was pure vanity—and I knew it. For once, I decided to nurture and lean into my vanity.

• If you’re a guy, and you’re at least mildly motivated by masculinity, then perhaps you can convince yourself that “a real man” is a guy who can handle material, emotional, physical, and intellectual discomfort. If this works, great. If it doesn’t, fine.

Final point: wellness influencers take the wrong approach to “comfort is the enemy of progress” (to use one of their slogans). In fact, I think they undermine their own message (e.g., Michael Easter).

They give you a series of hacks, for eating healthy, for exercising, for improving your relationships, and so on. The hacks are meant to be shortcuts for reaching your goals (e.g., “Take the stairs instead of the escalator!”). They are designed to assist you in achieving your goals by minimizing the discomfort of the usual ways of trying to achieve those goals. They are giving you little ways of staying very close to your comfort zone so that you can step just a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Uh huh.

I think the right solution is perfectly general, adequate, and inadequate: get used to being uncomfortable, period. It’s general because it applies to a great many areas of life, physical, emotional, material, and intellectual. It’s adequate because it really does help considerably when you need or want to get something done that involves absence of comfort or presence of discomfort. It’s inadequate because it doesn’t work the way you want it to: it isn’t going to make the discomfort go away or diminish much. Stop looking for hacks that try to get around discomfort.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

Cesar Chavez has recently been credibly accused of grooming and sexually assaulting minors. People are shocked by this. Relatedly, lots of QAnon folks feel vindicated by what has come to light in the Epstein files.

Frankly, I don’t find any of this even the slightest bit surprising—but not because I’m pessimistic about human nature, have any special insights, or anything similar. Instead, it’s just simple probabilistic reasoning.

We have always known that a tiny—but not vanishingly tiny—percentage of the population is sexually attracted to kids. Whether it’s 5% or 0.5% doesn’t matter for this calculation. Suppose it’s 1%. Well, there are hundreds of prominent, powerful politicians. So, obviously, some of them are going to be sexually attracted to kids. Further, since they are powerful people, they will have the means to actually succeed in preying on kids, more so than people who have no power, either political or financial. So, it’s pretty much inevitable that some prominent, powerful politicians have sexually assaulted kids.

This has nothing in particular to do with politicians. Take baseball players. There are roughly 1500 individuals who got playing time in the Major Leagues in 2025. So, given the amount of money and other power they have, surely a bunch of them have, at some time in their lives, sexually assaulted kids. Maybe there were no such cases in 2025. But the odds are quite high that at some point in their lives, it’s happened.

Or take people with an IQ over 150. Only about 1 in every 2000 people meet that standard. There are about 260 million adults in the USA now. So, there are more than 100,000 adults in the USA with IQs over 150. Just going by the odds, surely a bunch of them have sexually assaulted kids—even this year.

Or celebrities. There are hundreds of well known celebrities. So, given the numbers, and their power, of course some of them have sexually assaulted kids. This is not the result of great insight or research.

Clearly, some groups are going to be more prone than others towards sexually assaulting kids. The Catholic church, folks. It depends where the group’s members are located too. Due to major differences in social norms, laws, and law enforcement patterns, it will be easier to get away with it in come countries/cities compared to others.

So, when QAnon people say “See! I told you!”, my response is twofold. First, we already knew that some powerful politicians have sexually assaulted kids. No conspiracy theory was ever needed. Second, your claim that they also worship Satan, kill children, drink their blood, and have the surnames “Clinton” or “Obama” or “Hanks” or “Winfrey” is still unjustified.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

I came across some Substack comments trashing the Twin-Earth thought experiments. The criticisms aren’t new: Chomsky, Dennett, and others thought that Twin-Earth arguments for content externalism are inconclusive for a particular reason.

Truth: their objection sucked. And they should have known it from the very beginning.

According to them, there is no answer to the question ‘Does the protagonist of the thought experiment believe that P?’ Call this the Indeterminacy objection. If this objection is correct, then the thought experiments have much less significance than one would judge from the volume of work written on them.

In this essay I will make three points.

• First, it is easy-peasy to fiddle with the thought experiments (both the Putnam “natural kind” ones and the Burge “social” ones) so that the Indeterminacy objection is completely avoided.

• Second, when so revised the thought experiments dodge some difficult and popular objections to the thought experiments (e.g., is XYZ really a kind of water?).

• Third, Putnam solved this problem in his original work on the topic, some fifty years ago; so there never was any excuse for Chomsky, Dennett, or anyone else to advocate the Indeterminacy objection or make the bad objections.

  Truly: $2.50 A MONTH. Since I already gave away most of my possessions & money to the poor (not kidding), please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

1. Putnam

As things actually stand, in our (real) world, the terms ‘walleye’ and ‘sauger’ each stand for a common North American game fish. You can trust me on this fact, as my father fished quite a bit, caught lots of both kinds of fish, which are of course not the same, and told me about his fishing adventures. The two fish are similar to the eye, just like gold and “fool’s gold”. Only an expert can tell the two kinds of fish apart. The scales are slightly different and the biggest walleye get significantly bigger than the biggest sauger.

Now imagine an alternative situation in which ‘walleye’ and ‘sauger’ are switched in meaning. In this imaginary world ‘walleye’ is used to pick out sauger fish and ‘sauger’ is used to pick out walleye fish. So when someone in that world utters ‘Walleye are big’ she has really said that sauger are big.

In this imaginary world my father Ron read an article in an authoritative fishing magazine that contained the sentence ‘Walleye get bigger than sauger’. Clearly, what that sentence means in that world is that sauger get bigger than walleye (because the meanings of ‘walleye’ and ‘sauger’ are switched in that imaginary situation). When the author wrote ‘Walleye get bigger than sauger’, she was expressing the idea that sauger get bigger than walleye. This is uncontroversial. She was expressing a false idea, but it’s an idea all the same. Suppose also that Ron believed what the article said. So he believed what the author said, namely that sauger get bigger than walleye—although he expressed his belief the same way as the author did, with the sentence ‘Walleye get bigger than sauger’.

In this fantasy world Ron tells me his opinion. He says to me ‘Walleye get bigger than sauger’, thereby echoing the fishing article author. As before, what he means with that sentence is that sauger get bigger than walleye. That’s what he and the author believe—that sauger get bigger than walleye.

Let’s say that in that world I am agreeable about such matters, and so I take my father at his word. That is, I come to accept his belief. Like him, I believe that sauger get bigger than walleye and I express this belief just like everyone else does, with the sentence ‘Walleye get bigger than sauger’.

In this imaginary scenario I can’t tell walleye and sauger apart—at least on my own. If you put them in front of me but not allow me to use other people, books, articles, and other sources of information, then I cannot confidently tell you which is which. But of course that doesn’t mean I could never tell them apart at all. I could easily learn about the difference in scales. Or ask an expert. The same actually holds for my individualistic discriminatory abilities vis-à-vis Pepsi and Coke. I can’t tell them apart if you leave me on my own and take off the labels. But I have lots of ordinary Pepsi and Coke beliefs. Individualistic discriminatory abilities are not worth much.

Now let us leave the realm of imagination and return to the real world. A few decades ago when I lived in Minnesota Ron actually told me that walleye get bigger than sauger. And since the only language he knows is English, he used the sentence that actually expresses that idea—the sentence ‘Walleye get bigger than sauger’. As things actually stand today, I firmly believe that walleye get bigger than sauger.

So in the two worlds I believe different things. That’s because it’s plain as day that the belief that sauger get bigger than walleye—my imaginary belief—is distinct from my belief that walleye get bigger than sauger—my actual belief. One belief is the reverse of the other. And of course there is no reason to think that I have both beliefs in both worlds. There may be all sorts of cases in which people rationally hold contradictory beliefs (maybe Lois Lane), but this isn’t one of those cases.

Now comes the clincher: there’s nothing preventing me from being physically identical in the two worlds. For instance, I need never see, smell, or touch either fish, so my experiences with the fish themselves can be identical (since there are none). In addition, my fishing conversations with my father can be exactly the same physically. For instance:

• Me: “Dad, which fish gets bigger?”

• Ron: “Walleye get bigger than sauger!”

• Me: “Okay. Whatever you say. Walleye get bigger than sauger.”

Although I hear the same words (or word-forms) from my father in the real and fantasy worlds, I acquire different beliefs—his beliefs. In fact, all my encounters with ‘walleye’ and ‘sauger’ can be identical in the two worlds.

Although in the actual world I believe that walleye get bigger than sauger, in the counterfactual world I believe that sauger get bigger than walleye. In the actual world my belief is true whereas in the counterfactual world my belief is false—even though the things the beliefs are about (the two kinds of fish) are identical in the two worlds. Hence, any theory that tries to understand a thought’s truth conditions internally, from the skin in, is doomed to fail. When it comes to ordinary truth-conditional content, I differ across worlds.

2. Burge

We can do the same thing for Burge “social externalist” arguments. As I understand it, a heart attack is stipulatively defined as the death of heart-muscle cells from reduced or obstructed blood flow through the coronary arteries. In any case, we can easily imagine a world in which there are these medical definitions. Heart attacks are usually caused by blockage of coronary arteries by a blood clot, spasm or contracture; or a severe disruption in the heart’s rhythm.

A stroke is stipulatively defined as a sudden decrease in the blood supply to part of the brain, damaging the area so it cannot function normally. Hardening of the arteries or high blood pressure are the usual causes of strokes. Most people, at least adolescents who have thus far been removed from people suffering strokes and heart attacks, are not aware of these definitions, although they know that both problems have to do with the heart and are quite serious. In fact, most people have no idea that there are such “definitions”.

Jazmine knows that her Uncle Fred had a heart attack many years ago, that her great-grandmother Ester died of a stroke, etc. And on the basis of the testimony of her trusted friend Reggie, she believes that strokes are more serious than heart attacks.

Now consider a world in which the terms ‘stroke’ and ‘heart attack’ have switched definitions. Suppose further that in that world Fred had not a heart attack but a stroke and Ester died of not a stroke but a heart attack. Finally, suppose that Reggie had come to the reverse opinion, that heart attacks are more serious than strokes—although of course she expressed her opinion with ‘Strokes are more serious than heart attacks’. So Jazmine hears all the same sentences involving ‘stroke’ and ‘heart attack’ in each world. But she obtains different beliefs in the two worlds (just like Reggie): in the actual world she believes that strokes are more serious than heart attacks whereas in the counterfactual world she believes that heart attacks are more serious than strokes. I’m not going to do it here, but it should be plain that it does not take much imagination to elaborate on the thought experiment to make it as realistic as you like.

3. Putnam in 1975

I’m not defending either of those thought experiments. My first two goals are to show that (a) the thought experiments can easily dodge the Indeterminacy objection, and (b) while the question ‘Why isn’t XYZ a kind of water?’ is a good one, it’s irrelevant to the Twin-Earth argument template. As for my third thesis, consider what Putnam wrote 1975: “[J]ust let the words ‘elm’ and ‘beech’ be switched on Twin Earth (the way ‘aluminum’ and ‘molybdenum’ were in the previous example)” (1975, 227). It was all there in 1975 folks!

I hope that the foregoing removes the Indeterminacy objection from our thoughts, shows how some objections (e.g., the one about XYZ being a kind of water) are irrelevant, and rekindles our admiration of Putnam’s work.

Chomsky, Noam (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Dennett, Daniel (1982). “Beyond Belief,” in Woodfield, ed. Thought and Object (New York: Oxford University Press).

Dennett, Daniel (1996). “Cow-sharks, Magnets, and Swampman,” Mind and Language, v.11 n.1: 76-77.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

People often complain that it is not easy to formulate a precise and worthwhile physicalism—and this failure is important to the fruitfulness of debates in the philosophy of mind. Hmmm.

I suspect that we can articulate physicalist theses that are intuitively worthwhile and sufficient for most philosophical discussion despite the fact that they are consistent with some forms of dualism. We can get a worthwhile physicalist thesis without saying anything interesting about “physical”, current physics, future physics, or ideal physics.

1. What the Problem Is Supposed to Be

Like I said, some philosophers worry that no one has constructed a physicalist thesis that is philosophically useful, accords with the bulk of our core physicalist intuitions, and is neither trivially true nor trivially false.

This is old news. It’s also old news that the task doesn’t cause many sleepless nights for philosophers concerned with physicalism. Although they admit that the formulation task is serious, they don’t feel paralyzed by it but continue to debate physicalism more or less as usual. Some think this complacency is a bad thing:

There is little use in arguing about whether the mind is physical, or whether mental properties are physical properties…unless we have at least some understanding of what it means to be physical (Montero 1999; cf. her 2001).

No debate between physicalism and dualism can even be set up. …(P)rogrammes which seek to show that a certain specified range of properties supervene on physical properties are not well-defined. Therefore, since the subject-matter of these debates are not well-defined, the debates themselves and the different positions involved in them lose whatever philosophical importance they were previously thought to enjoy (Daly 1998).

[The doctrine] that all mental entities, properties, relations, and facts are all really physical…lacks a clear and credible definition, and…in no non-vacuous interpretation is it true. …[O]ur arguments entail that there is no divide between the mental and the non-mental sufficient even to set physicalism up as a serious question, let alone as a serious answer to it (Crane and Mellor 1990).

Noam Chomsky (2000), Carl Gillett and D. Gene Witmer (2001), and others have expressed the same or a similar sentiment.

I suspect they’re all wrong.

I think thorny issues regarding “physical” just aren’t terribly relevant to philosophy of mind concerns—even in the philosophy of mind debates over physicalism.

One often reads philosophers who explicitly argue otherwise, but there always is a gap in their arguments. They start from something akin to these:

• The physicalism issue is far from precise and plausible

• No version of physicalism is both non-trivial and truth-valued

I admit those claims might be true, depending on what your goals are. But then they pivot to this:

• Disputes about physicalism are to that extent seriously defective

I think that’s false and doesn’t follow. I argue that those disputes do not, odd as it may seem, require any precise formulation of physicalism, despite the ubiquitous use of “physical.”

Three tasks:

• Formulation Task: the task of coming up with a thesis that is philosophically worthwhile and accords with the bulk of our core physicalist intuitions.

• Ambiguity Task: the task of coming up a precise understanding of “physical” for the Formulation Task.

• Importance Task: the task of articulating a physicalist thesis that is “philosophically important”, in a sense tied to philosophical practice that I’ll describe below.

The philosophers quoted above can be usefully thought of as making the following claim: to complete the Importance Task we must complete the Ambiguity and Formulation Tasks. My hunch is that they are wrong. I will articulate a physicalist thesis that doesn’t complete either the Ambiguity or Formulation Tasks and yet does complete the Importance Task.

2. Particular Molecularism

My physicalist says that the entities that are targets of reasonable anti-physicalist arguments, are made of molecular entities, and “molecular” is not unacceptably obscure even if “physical” is. There are many things that aren’t made of molecular entities, such as atoms, so we can’t say “Everything is molecular”. But that doesn’t prevent the physicalist from saying “All the supposedly non-physical mental particulars philosophers are concerned with are made of molecular particulars.” The candidates for non-physical particulars are such that if they are physical at all, they are made of ordinary molecular things in our bodies (and if they’re molecular, then they are physical).

Particular Molecularism:

(i) Every human mental token particular is composed of just molecular entities (such entities being state, event, process, and substance particulars that have properties from molecular theory).

(ii) Those mental tokens are composed of molecular entities not appreciably different, in their molecular properties and relations, from the molecular entities one finds in human hearts, livers, and stomachs.

(iii) By “composed of molecular entities” I mean they are composed of them in the same way that our digestive processes and events are molecularly composed.

Science texts can be used to make a list of molecular properties.

We can generate additional physicalist theses, such as focusing on atoms instead of molecules. Or, our physicalist can say that all our mental tokens are composed of molecular entities made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other kinds of atomic entities.

3. Objections

One might object that molecular theory is incomplete, it’s partially mistaken, and I have left obscure the notion of a molecular property. But the incompleteness or partially mistaken status of molecular theory does not make the claim “Trees are made of molecules” trivially true, truth-valueless, or trivially false. The same holds for Particular Molecularism. And we don’t care about weird, undiscovered molecules or molecular properties. We are interested in the familiar molecules, with familiar molecular properties, in our bodies: the ones composed of carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, etc.

One might object that the notion of composition is inadequately imprecise. There are deep questions about composition, but that’s separate. When I say that mental events are composed of molecular processes, I am saying the same thing about mental events as we say about our digestive processes. Any ambiguity or vagueness won’t ruin the truth of “Human digestive events and processes are composed of molecular events and processes”.

There is no difficulty in articulating theses that are obviously physicalist even when we don’t know how to define “physical”. “Everything is a molecule” is clearly a physicalist thesis; so is Particular Molecularism. The difference between them is that the latter has a chance at being worthwhile.

Particular Molecularism rules out the existence of human mental particulars that are not molecularly composed. One thing we need from a useful physicalism is a claim that implies that (i) all the (ii) particular things we had (iii) good reason to think non-physical, are really physical. Particular Molecularism does that, satisfying (i)-(iii).

True enough, it doesn’t entail that all particulars are physical. But it does entail the falsehood of the scary dualism: plausible dualism for actual particulars. Part of what makes the physicalist uncomfortable is the fact that there are decent arguments for the conclusion that there are actual particulars that don’t boil down to molecular goings on. That’s what Particular Molecularism rules out.

4. What about Properties?

Tim Crane and D. H. Mellor remarked that “physicalism is a thesis about properties” (1995). I disagree, but never mind that. For some purposes in the philosophy of mind we need a thesis along the lines of “Mental properties are nothing over and above physical properties”.

I think matters are considerably more complicated for properties than particulars. But as a beginning, here is a physicalist thesis for properties akin to Particular Molecularism:

Property Molecularism: Every human mental property is determined by (and not merely supervenes on) molecular properties.

Consider the briefest version of the zombie argument:

It seems possible that I have a physical duplicate who nonetheless has conscious experiences phenomenally different from mine. If so, then the physical facts don’t determine the mental facts. And that means that physicalism is false.

We can get around the obscurity of “physical” by using “molecular” and the argument is just as persuasive and has finessed the Formulation Task and Ambiguity Task with regard to “physical” (complaints about “phenomenal” aren’t my problem).

One thing we need out of a useful philosophy of mind physicalist thesis is a claim that implies that (i) all the (ii) properties we had (iii) good reason to think non-physical, are really fundamentally physical. Property Molecularism helps with that by getting rid of “physical”. Part of what makes the physicalist uncomfortable is the fact that there are non-stupid arguments that there are mental properties (e.g. phenomenal ones) that aren’t determined by straightforward physical properties in our bodies. That’s what Property Molecularism helps with.

5. Ghosts and Magic

Particular Molecularism is consistent with many non-physicalist claims being true, such as “There are ghosts” and “All molecules have magical, non-physical mental properties”. Particular Molecularism’s consistency with them proves that it isn’t a “version of physicalism”, in some sense. Yep.

However, I’m not convinced there is a point to adjusting Particular Molecularism so that it is inconsistent with such anti-physicalist theses.

First, Particular Molecularism remains plausibly true, robustly contentious, well-motivated, philosophically serviceable, and comprehensive enough for most discussion. So we have our philosophically worthwhile physicalist thesis. Second, many anti-physicalist theses are too unclear. For instance, depending on how one fills out “magic” and “ghost”, it might turn out that ghosts and magical things are physical—in something like the way that electricity and light turned out to be physical.

6. Smart’s Proposal

Way back in 1978 J.C.C. Smart argued “that (a) the properties of mind depend on the properties of “ordinary matter” (such as neurons), and (b) that the physics of ordinary matter is complete”. He never formulated any physicalist thesis, and (b) is false. Even so, my proposal can be thought of as a development of his.

*****

I wrote a much longer version of this piece literally 25 years ago but never published it.

References

Chomsky, Noam 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Crane, Tim and Mellor, D.H. 1990. There is no question of physicalism. Mind 99: 185-206.

Daly, Chris 1998. What are physical properties? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79: 196-217.

Gillett, Carl and Witmer, D. Gene 2001. A ‘physical’ need: physicalism and the via negative. Analysis 61: 302-9.

Montero, Barbara 1999. The body problem. Noûs 33: 183-200.

Montero, Barbara 2001. Post-physicalism. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 61-80.

Smart, J.J.C. 1978. The content of physicalism. Philosophical Quarterly 28: 339-41.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

A number of people have asked me for my views in epistemology. More specifically, they ask about my views on

• the typical philosopher’s knowledge of philosophically controversial claims (I’m skeptical)

• philosophical progress (I’m not skeptical).

On the face of it, my views seem to be in tension: if I’m right to be skeptical about the typical philosopher’s opinions on philosophical matters, then how on Earth is there tremendous progress in philosophy?

In this post I present some of my views—without even a hint of defense. I wish more philosophers would do this: “Here’s my view, without argument”. Just hearing what someone’s views are can be illuminating, since it can suggest ideas one isn’t already familiar with. With the better philosophers, like David Chalmers, Tim Williamson, and so on, these testimonies can serve as evidence that there’s probably really good arguments for the views they endorse.

I’ll limit myself to eight theses. As you’d expect, I have others.

First Point: Frequent Weakness of ‘Know’

I suspect that most ordinary tokens (instances, particular uses) of ‘S knows that P’ (e.g., ‘Tom knows that Mary is having an affair’) have quite weak requirements in order to come out true (they have weak “truth conditions”). The weakness shows up in at least two places: (i) the strength of S’s evidence/justification for her belief in P, and (ii) the strength of her grasp/understanding of P.

Regarding evidence, I suspect that in a great many cases, all S needs, in order for ‘S knows that P’ to come out true, is for her reasons/justification/evidence/grounds for believing the truth P aren’t stupid. For instance, if Tom thinks that Mary is having an affair, and it turns out that she was, then even if his evidence wasn’t really that great, ‘Tom knows that Mary is having an affair’ might often come out true anyway, in most ordinary conversational contexts. Evidence is nice to have, and a mild amount is necessary to rule out holding the belief for stupid reasons or no reasons whatsoever, but the main thing needed for knowledge is true belief.

Regarding the understanding-that-P condition, does an 8-year-old child know that Obama was a democrat, after being told so by multiple adults? Well, her evidence might be overwhelming: she has heard it from her parents, her school teacher, her older sister, her aunt, the TV, and so on. But she barely has any idea what a democrat is. You could say that she believes it but just barely, since her grasp of the belief is so weak. I’m suggesting that that’s often accurate: knowledge that P requires very little understanding of P. This applies to things like ‘John knows that E = mc²’ too, where John is an intelligent adult, and not a child. Like most people, John has almost no idea what the Einsteinian scientific claim is. He’s like the child with ‘democrat’. In order to know some truth P, you don’t need much of a grasp/understanding of it. That’s my suspicion.

Hence, I’m saying that for many if not most tokens of ‘S knows that P’, in order for them to be true, the believer needs only a very weak grasp of P and only pretty weak evidence as well—as long as P is true.

Second Point: Polysemy of ‘Knows’

It could be that ALL tokens of ‘S knows that P’ have the same, weak, requirements noted above. So, for instance, no matter what the conversational context, the strength of evidence needed for knowledge is pretty low. I think it’s more likely, though, that ‘S knows that P’ is interestingly polysemous, meaning it has quite different, and differently demanding, truth conditions for different tokens (interpreted literally; I’m not considering metaphorical claims for instance). The factors that determine the truth conditions are probably various.

An analogy helps make this idea comprehensible.

In some conversational contexts, in order for an event to correctly count as a “miracle”, it has to be caused by something supernatural—by definition. That’s one meaning of the term ‘miracle’. But in other contexts, a “miracle” need not have anything to do with supernatural goings on.

• For instance, we talk about miracles in sports all the time. In those cases, a “miracle” is, to a first approximation, an amazing, incredibly rare, and unexpected event. It need not have to do with anything supernatural.

• In yet other contexts, a “miracle” is something wonderous and somewhat baffling—but it need not be rare at all, as it is in sports. For instance, many people will say things like ‘Every birth of a baby is miracle’, with of course the understanding that there’s nothing rare about babies being born. Sure, some of those people are saying, pretty explicitly, that something supernatural is going on with every birth. But for others, it’s the wonder, amazement, and continued mystery of pregnancy and birth that makes births miracles—even if they insist that the mystery doesn’t involve anything supernatural.

So, it’s reasonable to think ‘miracle’ has several different but vaguely related meanings. That’s pretty much what it takes for a term to be polysemous. (It’s interesting that ‘polysemous’ is itself polysemous. Words that satisfy that odd condition of being true of themselves are called autological.)

I suspect that ‘S knows that P’ is like ‘miracle’.

Sometimes all it takes for ‘S knows that P’ to be true is for the weak condition noted above to be met—weak when it comes to evidence/justification and weak when it comes to grasping the belief. But on other occasions, in order for a token of ‘S knows that P’ to be true, S has to understand/grasp the belief quite well and have really impressive evidence—perhaps evidence that meets a certain strict community standard. For instance, in order for ‘Jan knows that the chemical sample in the lab apparatus contains magnesium’, Jan the scientist needs kick-ass evidence and a real grasp of what the hell magnesium is.

To be clear, I’m not saying that there are just two meanings for ‘S knows that P’, weak and strong. I suspect it’s a lot messier than that, like in the ‘miracle’ case. And like I said at the beginning, I’m not offering supporting arguments here.

I understand that many philosophers throughout history have wanted to glorify knowledge: knowledge is a grand thing, a great accomplishment. I think that’s sort of right but sort of wrong. It depends on the context. The 3-year-old child knows that Mommy is laughing, the blanket is warm, and the dog is outside. Not exactly glory there; knowledge can be virtually effortless and require no fancy cognition. When philosophers and others from centuries past insist that knowledge is a great accomplishment, I think it’s wise to charitably interpret them as talking about a special “subset” of knowledge. That’s cool.

You can’t give an account, or theory, of what a miracle is—because ‘miracle’ doesn’t pick out just one thing. The best you can do is explain that there are several notions here picked out by various uses of ‘miracle’, and maybe after that you can offer accounts/theories of each separate meaning.

Many people think that there must be some correct account of knowledge. “Here’s my idea of what knowledge is”, they say. That’s a kind of presupposition for many of them. Due to the polysemy of ‘S knows that P’, I suspect they’re wrong about that: there can be no “account” of knowledge.

Third Point: Often No Single Truth-Value

For some tokens of ‘S knows that P’, multiple truth conditions apply to those tokens about equally well, so we can’t evaluate the tokens using just one truth condition. In other words, it’s often the case that there are at least two roughly equally appropriate ways to interpret and assess the token of ‘S knows that P’. In these cases, there wasn’t anything in the speaker’s intentions or words or other contextual factors that indicated which single interpretation is relevant to evaluate her claim ‘S knows that P’.

Here’s an example. Bo says ‘Tom knows that Mary is having an affair’. We might think Bo’s remark is true, because Tom’s evidence isn’t stupid and Mary really is having an affair (and Tom knows what an affair is). Then again, we might think Bo’s remark is false, because we are employing a stricter meaning for ‘knows’, and Tom’s evidence isn’t good enough on that meaning. There was nothing in Bo’s mind or words or conversational context that indicated which standard to apply when trying to figure out if his remark is true.

So, Bo’s remark doesn’t have just one truth-value (“true” or “false”). Asking “Is Bo’s remark about Tom true or false?” is a mistake, albeit a natural one to make.

Fourth Point: Skepticism & Presupposition

Just because I think that many tokens of ‘S knows that P’ have weak truth conditions (as explained above) doesn’t mean that I think that those conditions are actually met in ordinary life. Unlike some philosophers, I take seriously the possibility that we have no external world knowledge, even on low-standards interpretation of ‘knows’. I don’t accept that skeptical view of knowledge but I don’t reject it either.

As a result of this opinion of mine, for my own assertions of the form ‘S knows that P’, there is something like an implicit, general presupposition that governs them, one that goes something like ‘Assuming we have tons of ordinary external world knowledge’. I have this presupposition both in ordinary and philosophical discourse. I acquired it only after studying epistemology for a number of years. Of course, the people I’m talking to are unaware of the presupposition. That’s fine. Adequate communication doesn’t need perfect accuracy in interpretation.

There’s a lot more to say about this, and I said some of it in this coauthored BOOK with Michael Huemer. I won’t go into it here because it just can’t be done in a brief way.

Fifth Point: Epistemology Under Skepticism

Even if we don’t have knowledge of the external world, I don’t think that means that epistemology is a disaster. We still have many true beliefs, they have varying degrees of evidential support (very briefly: I think ‘evidence’ is polysemous too), many of them are good enough to rely on in many contexts both ordinary and scientific, and so on. We even have wisdom, which will get filled out as coming not from external world knowledge but of certain key true beliefs with loads of supporting evidence, amongst other epistemic things.

Sixth Point: Possible Incoherence of Truth

Unlike most philosophers, I take seriously the idea that truth is an incoherent notion, and none of our beliefs are true (not even ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or ‘Dogs are dogs’). I take this seriously because I think the semantic paradoxes (such as the Liar paradox) seem to generate reductios of truth. Perhaps ‘is true’ is polysemous too, so ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true for one meaning but not true for another. I don’t know about these things. In any case, I have another general presupposition behind my assertions, which goes something like ‘Setting aside those weird paradoxes’. When, in the fourth point above, I said that we have loads of true beliefs, this presupposition was in force.

People who say that truth is “relative” or “contextual” are saying that some things are indeed true—they’re just true relative to something. The idea that truth is incoherent is quite different. It’s the view that nothing is ever true, no matter what the “context” or whatever. In addition, the incoherency view is not dialetheism, which definitely says that many claims are true.

I have this ‘Setting aside paradoxes’ presupposition not only because of the semantic paradoxes but because of some other considerations, ones I won’t go into here.

Seventh Point: Kinds of Progress in Philosophy

I think there is tremendous progress in philosophy. I believe this mainly because I have experienced it so many times, in virtually every subfield of philosophy. No doubt, it’s a challenge to figure out how to accurately characterize it. But that it exists at all is obvious from a first-person point of view, at least for me. I talk about that a bit in this POST.

There are many aspects of philosophical progress, some more obvious than others. Here’s one way to characterize one particularly important aspect:

Assuming truth is coherent, philosophers have an impressive amount of agreement on many philosophical issues, many of those agreed-upon philosophical claims are true, our evidence for them is quite a bit better than “not stupid”, and the vast majority of philosophers from long ago either (a) weren’t even aware of those claims (and so hadn’t considered them), (b) were aware of them but didn’t believe them, or (c) believed them but didn’t have supporting evidence as impressive as ours; moreover, people today who are outside of philosophy know little of them.

Yes, there is a massive amount of disagreement in philosophy, but there is massive agreement too. I defend part of this thesis in a forthcoming ARTICLE—which is a kick-ass one, if I say so myself, because it’s utterly original.

Eighth Point: Skepticism about Philosophical Opinion

The philosophical truths we agree on (mentioned in my previous point) are largely unmentioned in philosophical writings and teachings. Philosophers tend to focus exclusively on the big, controversial bits only. That’s unfortunate, since it gives nearly everyone the wrong impression of philosophy.

Even so, on virtually all the big philosophical theses we actually discuss and disagree on in our research, I’m skeptical about most of our opinions on the truth-values of those theses. Roughly put, almost no one should have opinions on whether physicalism is true, for instance.

My skepticism here is not the result of my thinking that the requirements for ‘S knows that P’ to be true are very high in those assessment contexts. I suspect that even under a weak meaning of ‘knows’, there is something epistemically bad about the opinions of the vast majority of philosophers on those controversial philosophical claims.

I have arguments for this opinion, which have different but closely similar conclusions. Here is a shortened version of the first argument:

1. Suppose (i) you’re a philosopher who believes philosophical claim P, (ii) P is controversial amongst the philosophers who have investigated it the best, and (iii) you’re not significantly superior to them in knowledge of the topics relevant to P. In other words, P is some ordinary philosophical thesis, and you’re a philosopher but not a philosophical god compared to others.

2. Generalization, G: if (i)-(iii) are true, then the odds are high that your evidence (justification, grounds, etc.) for P isn’t very good. In brief, if it were good, then since the philosophical community has seen your evidence (that’s a realistic assumption), and as a group they still don’t accept P, that evidence probably isn’t so great.

3. Hence, the odds are high that your evidence for P isn’t very good.

4. If your evidence for P isn’t very good, then you don’t know P. If P were some weird proposition, like ‘0 = 0’, then maybe you wouldn’t need evidence, but P is an ordinary, run of the mill philosophical view.

5. Hence, the odds are high that you don’t know P.

Here’s a version of the second argument:

A. Suppose you’re a philosopher who knows (i)-(iii) are true. This means you have some knowledge of P’s place in the profession: it’s controversial amongst the people who investigate it the best. It also means you have some self-knowledge: you know that you’re not significantly superior to them in knowledge of the topics relevant to P.

B. You’re disposed to know that G is true.

C. You’re easily disposed to know the obvious logical truth that if (i)-(iii) & G are true, then the odds are high that your evidence (justification, grounds, etc.) for P isn’t very good.

D. Hence, you’re disposed to know that the odds are high that your evidence for P isn’t very good.

E. If you’re disposed to know that the odds are high that your evidence for P isn’t very good, then there’s an important sense in which you shouldn’t continue to believe P.

F. Hence, there’s an important sense in which you shouldn’t continue to believe P.

Notice that this second argument doesn’t conclude that the philosopher doesn’t know P. Maybe knowledge is weird in the respect that you can know P but there’s an evidential sense in which you shouldn’t believe it. My second argument is modest in that it doesn’t say anything about that issue.

Neither does my argument conclude that you shouldn’t, evidentially, believe P. It could turn out that there are two senses of ‘evidentially should’, and you should believe P in one evidential sense (because, perhaps, you already know P and haven’t been given any new contrary information) even though you shouldn’t believe P in another evidential sense (because of the awareness of profound disagreement).

Most people really can’t stand that kind of semantic complexity, but if you’re going to do philosophy carefully, and well, you had better get used to it. This is especially true when it comes to highly ambiguous words like ‘should’ and ill-defined & ambiguous words like ‘evidential’.

I know that for a significant number of philosophers, premise (A) isn’t true because they refuse to believe (iii): “I am not significantly superior to the philosophers who disagree with me in knowledge of the topics relevant to P”. Or, they don’t know that G is true and would deny G if given the chance. This is understandable if they’re relatively new to the profession. But after many years? I don’t think so. So, if (A) ends up false for either of those reasons, then in most cases the seasoned philosopher is epistemically blameworthy in sticking with P. Hence, it’s almost the case that whether or not (A) is true, the philosopher is a bit screwed.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

Pretend it’s the 1940s or 50s and tennis is never on TV where you live. You absolutely love playing tennis—and you’re better than anyone you can find to play you. Sure, you lose some games and even sets, but you haven’t lost a match in ages. This goes on throughout high school and college. You love tennis, and it seems that it loves you back.

Then you get to play a pro—and they destroy you. Not only do you lose the match, and every set, but you don’t even win one game. The first two sets are 6-0, 6-0 and then the pro leaves, since you’re obviously not anywhere near being in his or her league.

You might have either of two reactions to this extraordinary experience. Each is totally understandable and neither is the “right” one.

First, you might feel utterly humiliated and think that tennis—at that pro level—is definitely not for you. You turn away from tennis. It’s easy to imagine reacting this way. Call it the Rejection Reaction.

On the alternative way to react, you don’t turn away from tennis. Instead, your passion for it only increases—wildly. You think to yourself “Holy shit. That’s what real tennis is. Oh my God, I’ve got to experience that. I have to become that.” You implicitly realize that as rewarding as tennis has been for you, it can be so much more fulfilling if you can play at that pro level. You now thirst for it. That’s the Excited Reaction.

*****

A similar thing happens in philosophy. I don’t know any philosopher who hasn’t had a humbling experience analogous to the one described above.

You start out with all sorts of philosophical ideas. You have your reasons and arguments in favor of them—and you are convinced that at least some of those arguments are simply excellent. Then you get your views & arguments thoroughly evaluated by a seasoned pro and everything falls apart. Not only are those “excellent” arguments revealed to be obviously inadequate to support your view, your view itself is only borderline coherent. It’s actually a mishmash of incomplete idea fragments—so incomplete that it’s not even possible to figure out if your view is true. There’s no there there to evaluate.

This humbling experience might occur all at once or over multiple sessions, perhaps with different interlocuters. For me, it was the latter.

I have seen students have the Rejection Reaction. They sometimes go away with anger towards philosophy, or at least professional philosophy. You can see the bitterness there. Or, they don’t have any bitterness or anger but just go away from philosophy because, well, who wants humiliation or feelings of inadequacy? No thank you!

Other students have the Excited Reaction. That’s what happened to me. Yes, it was sort of humiliating to have my ideas revealed to be shit. But that feeling of humiliation was completely outshined by the brilliance of the realization that there is a way of doing philosophy that is far, far better than what I had been doing. And not only could I see that it was better, I saw that it would be a lot more fulfilling.

Make no mistake: this experience really is humiliating. I’m not exaggerating here. That’s why I like my tennis analogy: it’s easy to see how humiliating that experience could be. In the case of philosophy, I can still picture in my mind the expressions on the professor’s face as he patiently questioned my views—questions that even I could see showed that my views & reasons were shit. Thank God the teachers didn’t hold back the questions. If you’re the type of person who is going to have the Excited Reaction, the worse thing in the world is when the pro tries to spare your feelings.

Like I already said, there’s nothing wrong with the Rejection Reaction. In fact, it’s the one all of us take most of the time. We realize that we don’t have the talent or drive to become tennis players, writers, singers, photographers, influencers, entrepreneurs, and so on. Frankly, all of us suck at most things. Be thankful if you’re really good at even one thing!

It seems to me that these exercises in humiliation continue for years, even after one becomes a pro. That’s obvious in the case of sports. For instance, there were many excellent pro golfers in the early 2000s who saw young Tiger Woods play and realized that they were mere amateurs in comparison. Woods was showing them that there was another, higher, level of performance.

Some golfers took the Excited Reaction route. They doubled their training and analysis. They moved into a higher gear, in response to Tiger’s demonstration. Other golfers did not.

I know it’s depressing to think about, but I’ve noticed some philosophy professors go down something like the Rejection Reaction route in response to encountering superior philosophy. To be sure, it’s subtle. But they end up trying to discount the philosophizing that shows that their ideas aren’t very good. “Oh, the solution to that is just …” they say.

I suppose that in some sense this is the psychologically healthy response. Seriously, how healthy is it to just shrug off humiliation after humiliation after humiliation? You gotta be pretty obsessed to repeatedly shrug it off and try to up your game, so many times.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

I recently got reason to think a close friend of mine had died, a woman I was planning on spending a couple months with later this year. In my past, it would have bothered me greatly, the death scenario impinging on my thoughts throughout the day and preventing me from thinking of anything else. Not anymore. (More on her later.)

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“Being unflappable” means, in this post, reacting to tragedy without shock, emotional misfire, or losing one’s cool. One can pull this off not because one has lost the ability to vividly feel or fully appreciate the horrific situation. Instead, one is psychologically prepared in advance since one is sort of expecting it.

An analogy: if you’re an adult who has followed politics for many years (not always a good thing), and then you discover that a politician you fully endorsed and even admired turns out to be corrupt, you will hardly go into shock, emotionally misfire, or lose your cool. That’s because you’ve seen all this before. You’ve seen this movie many times. It’s old news, and you are already psychologically prepared for more of the same. You had no reason to think that this particular politician would turn out to be corrupt, but you knew, from experience, that some of the politicians you favor are going to turn out corrupt.

Being unflappable = not getting terribly upset or shocked when tragedy hits, because you were prepared for it, psychologically. You are the adult in the room, while most of the people around you lose their minds, because they aren’t unflappable.

The bad news is the primary method for becoming REALLY unflappable sucks. But the good news is that you can get half way there via probabilistic reasoning plus an exercise in imagination instead of first-hand experience.

The straightforward, primary way: experience tragedy multiple times and realize that they will inevitably continue. This is how I became unflappable. It wasn’t pleasant.

Note that the primary, common, road to unflappability has multiple tragedies. One or two won’t cut it. It’s only after you’ve gone through several that you are psychologically ready for more.

The alternative way of achieving unflappability probably won’t generate the very same result but it comes pretty close anyway:

People are typically surprised and even shocked when their spouse betrays them viciously, their teenager is arrested for drunk driving and smashing the car into a house, their mother slips into dementia and even psychosis, their sister suddenly goes bankrupt after getting addicted to heroin, their brother is arrested on child molestation charges, their best friend dies in a horrific accident or is murdered, and so on. (These are relatively big tragedies—that’s what I have in mind. Getting laid off from one’s job, for instance, is usually pretty tame.) There was no way at all that they could have known beforehand that the tragedy was going to occur.

True enough. But you can know beforehand that the disjunction of those, plus similar, events will occur. That is, you know that at least some of those kinds of tragedies will hit you eventually, as it’s just a matter of time. In brief: although you can’t know ahead of time which particular tragedies will hit you, you can be quite certain, on relatively obvious probabilistic grounds, that some will. When one of them does hit you, you will think to yourself “Oh shit . . . . Okay. Well, I knew something like this was on the way. I guess it’s my turn now.”

Naturally, some lucky souls won’t experience anything like those terrible events. But I think the vast majority of us do eventually, usually between the ages of 30 and 60. People who never experience tragedies of that scale are pretty clueless about life, in my opinion. Kind of like a priest who never marries but offers advice on marriage.

That’s part 1: the probabilistic reasoning. Part 2 is the exercise in imagination.

In order for this realization of the truth of the tragedy disjunction to sink in, it’s helpful to look around at your loved ones and vividly imagine various tragedies happening to them, as realistically as possible. (No, it’s not pleasant imagination exercise. It’s not supposed to be fun.) More specifically, imagine how you would react to learning about the tragedy that befalls them.

You need to say to yourself, with firm emphasis, something like “This IS going to happen to me, or my loved ones. Some time in the next few years someone is going to die in a shooting, or get arrested in a major charge, or have their career destroyed permanently, or fall into hopeless addiction. This is actually going to happen. This isn’t fantasy or fiction. It’s future fact. It might not happen next year or even in the next five years. But it is going to happen.”

Next, imagine what it would be like to be the “adult in the room”, who reacts without shock, without spouting gibberish, without denial, without screaming, without frantically assigning blame, and so on. Imagine being the person who more or less takes control of the situation, figuring out what to do next, whom to comfort, and so on.

Finally, imagine yourself being that person. Visualize it.

Earlier I wrote “People are typically surprised and even shocked when” tragedy strikes. True, but it doesn’t have to be you.

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Back to the beginning: fortunately, my friend was not dead! She’s fine. But if I had learned she was dead, I would not have lost my mind. Yes, I’d be very sad, but that’s different.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

The war correspondent Martha Gellhorn is mostly wrong here:

People often say, with pride, ‘I’m not interested in politics.’ They might as well say, ‘I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.’ ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

Let me explain why I have this unpopular opinion.

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Most of my friends and acquaintances pay a lot of attention to politics. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they average roughly 200-400 hours/year of thinking about or discussing politics. My hunch is that there’s something foolish about this. Not for absolutely everyone, but many of us. It’s not outrageously foolish to spend so much time following politics (e.g., it’s a lot more foolish to follow astrology), but the foolishness is significant all the same.

Just to be forthcoming, I am guilty of this too. I pay attention to politics against my will, which I take to be a sign of weakness. So, I’m criticizing myself as well as many others.

When I say it’s foolish to follow politics, I have in mind a comparative claim: for people who read posts like this one, it’s much better to watch sports, see films, or even scroll TikTok, for instance, than follow politics. (If you hate sports and films, make an apt substitution.) Better for you, and better for others.

• If I spend 250 hours/year watching or otherwise paying attention to sports, that can easily be a good way to spend my time. I don’t have any effect on sports by watching it, since I’m not an athlete, coach, manager, etc. But I get a great deal of fulfillment by doing so. I even got a BOOK out of it. In addition, when I watch or discuss sports with friends, we often bond over the experience, which is usually an excellent thing.

• If I spend 250 hours/year watching films, that can easily be a good way to spend my time. I get personal enjoyment out of it, at least most of the time. On other occasions, it supplies a way of avoiding various kinds of difficult thoughts or activities, ones I prefer to not do. I can also learn things from films that make me alter my life for the better. I learn things about human nature that help me interact with people better. That’s a concrete benefit.

• If I spend 250 hours/year scrolling on TikTok, that can easily be a good way to spend my time. I actually do scroll TikTok, and I’ve learned tons of interesting and useful facts—ones that have changed my life for the better. Yes, a large portion of it is mindless, but a decent portion of it gives me information that I actually use in my life, improving it. You can use it that way too.

In contrast, if I spend 250 hours/year thinking about and discussing politics, it doesn’t seem to me that there is much benefit compared to the three cases I just mentioned (as well as many others).

I need to make sure that my thesis is accurately understood.

I’m not saying that politics itself doesn’t matter to our lives. Of course it does.

In addition, I’m not saying it’s a waste of time to be genuinely politically active. In this post I’m talking only about merely following politics as a mere spectator—and not as a preliminary to concrete political action. If you’re literally marching in the streets, volunteering in various capacities such as driving people to and from voting sites, and so on, then you’re being politically active. I happen to think a lot but not all of that has little overall benefit too, but I won’t be addressing that issue in this post. One thing at a time.

Finally, I’m absolutely not saying there’s no benefit at all to following politics. If you live in Minneapolis these days, then you need to be clued in. And even if you live elsewhere, there is some benefit. I’m merely saying that the benefits are small in comparison, for almost all of us. Some of us think that watching sports or scrolling social media is relatively mindless and doesn’t have much benefit in comparison to many other things we can do with our time, such as playing with our children, reading a novel, or practicing the violin. Fair enough. Even so, my hunch is that sports, films, and TikTok are often if not always more valuable than paying attention to politics.

If we interpret the Martha Gellhorn quote charitably, we can say that she’s advocating actually doing politics, and not merely “being interested” in it as a mere spectator. In this post, I’m talking about closely following politics—not (a) engaging in political activity or (b) politics itself.

Some observations about (merely) closely following politics:

1. In doing so I’m certainly not influencing anyone to do anything that changes public policy or the like. It’s not as though I’m a senator, or I get to talk to a senator or other powerful figure and change their mind about something that alters public policies of any kind. I might convince some of my friends and acquaintances of various ideas—perhaps right here on Substack. But even then, nothing in government or society will change in the slightest due to my paying attention to politics. It’s not as though my newly-convinced friends are going to change a powerful politician’s mind on something of consequence.

2. Tracking politics can make me a lot more knowledgeable, but does that increase in knowledge benefit me, my friends, my loved ones, or anyone else? I don’t see how. It takes little creativity to see that the acquisition of knowledge isn’t always a benefit. I can get more knowledgeable about many things, and it wouldn’t do anyone much good at all.

3. Although my political knowledge acquired by following politics can make me cast my votes well (or so let’s suppose), in the vast majority of cases only a tiny bit of attention to politics is needed for that purpose. And it’s not as though my vote counts for much anyway.

4. Following politics doesn’t do much to improve my life in concrete ways. As a result of paying attention to politics I don’t get more money, more love, or similar benefits. As with watching sports, I can form fulfilling bonds with people by discussing politics with them. That’s a good thing, no doubt. But in my assessment, the bonds forged over sports, for instance, are much more fulfilling than those formed over politics. One can form strong bonds with people by attending political rallies or protests or marches. But even then, going to sporting events with people (which is the analogous thing) can, and usually does, bring a lot more fulfillment. Not always but usually.

5. I don’t get a great deal of personal enjoyment out of it. Watching baseball can, and often is, great fun. Same for movies. Discussing politics doesn’t make me any happier. In fact, as most of us already know, most of the time it pisses us off or makes us a bit more despondent. When it comes to sports, my team might lose the championship, and in so doing make me a little depressed, but if this happened almost all the time—like in following politics—I wouldn’t be watching the sport.

The reply to me that starts with “But if no one followed politics, then …” isn’t apt. I’m certainly not saying that following politics at all is foolish. In fact, I definitely think that the world would be a better place if the amount of attention people gave to politics was increased, not decreased.

I’m only saying this, as my hunch: for the people I know, who are smart and well educated, spending something like 200+ hours/year on politics is foolish in the comparative way described above. Many of the people who read this are in that group. Again, some political spectatorship is beneficial, but the ROI gets really low pretty quickly, if not negative. Being an “informed citizen”, if you hold that that’s a good thing, is pretty easily done by these smart people in far fewer hours.

For what it’s worth, it was only recently in my life that I encountered smart, well-educated, intellectually curious people who not only spend little time following politics but who think that it’s a bit foolish to do so. They look at me with an understanding but “Oh, he’s one of those mildly silly people” expressions. I found it initially disconcerting, kind of like talking to someone who has a long-term successful polyamorous marriage, when you were thoroughly monogamous by default and without thought. It’s as though I got caught being narrow minded—and clueless that I was in that state.

Point (5) above, which said that I don’t get much personal enjoyment from following politics, is a half-truth. More accurately, I think we do get some personal enjoyment out of following politics—but the enjoyment is usually tainted. You might be able to guess what’s coming next.

Some will judge me to be overly cynical, but I think some of causal factors that do the most work in making us follow politics are the following—and when they do benefit us, they do so in an embarrassing manner (and yes, some of this applies to me as well):

• It can be enjoyable to find people to hate. It’s even better to do it with the support of others who hate the same people. Most of us have a need to hate. Following politics is great for this purpose.

• The same thing holds for the need to be angry towards an easily identifiable target.

• It can be enjoyable to make fun of others, even though it’s hardly something to be proud of. MAGA people get a lot of enjoyment making fun of libtards, and progressives love making fun of MAGA folk.

• We like to feel superior to others, and politics is an easy way to get that feeling.

• Many of us enjoy watching disaster movies. Right now, a lot of what’s happening in the USA looks like a disaster movie (whether you’re on the right or the left).

• Some of the political news is pretty earth-shaking, even when it’s not a disaster. There is enormously consequential action, pro or con, on global warming, on poverty, on immigration, and on similar things. We enjoy learning about such hugely consequential events.

The last two aren’t embarrassing, but the first four are.

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For what it’s worth, I also think that adjusting your life to combat global warming is a waste of time, defended here. In contrast, helping the poor in huge ways is pretty easy, also defended in that piece.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

In strong versions of the Problem of Evil, one premise goes something like this:

P: If (a) there has been spread out over the centuries, a large group of people who are highly intelligent, who know an enormous amount about suffering and its potential moral justification, who have spent a great deal of time (centuries collectively) thinking very hard about the justification of suffering, and who have undertaken a very long (again, centuries), intelligent, heartfelt, and otherwise serious search for facts or reasons or whatnot that justify suffering, and (b) they have collectively failed to find them for an enormous number of instances of suffering, then (c) for at least one instance of suffering there were no justifying goods or facts or reasons or whatnot to be found.

Most philosophers will grant that (a) and (b) are true. Both of them seem like pretty straightforward facts.

For (a), the “large group of people” P talks about are philosophers, theologians, and intellectually curious people who think long and hard about why God might allow such horrific suffering that doesn’t, on the face of it, seem worth it. Most philosophers, including theists, accept that (a) is a historical fact.

Most of these theists have the humility to admit that (b) is true too. They have given interesting speculations as to why God allows apparently gratuitous suffering, but they also admit that in many cases it’s just speculation. They don’t claim to have found the justifications for all instances of suffering.

P says that if (a) & (b) are true, then (c) is true. But lots of theists think (c) is false. They think, pretty reasonably, that if God exists, then he is never unjustified in allowing some instance of suffering. Since they typically (not always) think (a) & (b) are true, they are forced to deny P.

What is P really saying?

It says that since we’ve worked so damn hard to find justifications for suffering, and have failed in an epic manner, part of the explanation for that failure is that at least some of those instances of suffering don’t have any justification (that is, God himself is not justified). Obviously, in some cases we fail to find the justifications merely because we screwed up. The justifications exist but we just missed them. P is saying that since there are so many of us looking, and we looked so freakin’ hard, for so many centuries, and we have failed a colossal number of times despite all those efforts, it’s not the case that each instance of suffering has a justification but we just missed it. Instead, for some suffering, the reason we couldn’t find a justification for it is the fact that there wasn’t one to be found.

All of that is familiar ground in the philosophy of religion.

Theists who reject P, and are competent at philosophy, typically appeal to the following four claims in their attempt to argue against P:1

1. The task of determining whether an instance of suffering has a justification can be extremely difficult and thereby generate prolonged, hardened, and reasonable disagreements about whether it is justified. For instance, there are hard questions regarding how much goodness a good has, how much badness an instance of suffering has, what it takes for a good to be appropriately connected with an instance of suffering (so as to partly or fully justify it), what connections actually exist between goods and instances of suffering, etc.

2. Moreover, there are all sorts of vitally important goods and facts about goods (e.g., their indirect and subtle connections to suffering) that even experts don’t know about or that have been discovered only recently that probably apply to the suffering of humans and other creatures on earth.

3. There could (epistemically anyway) be someone who was omniscient about justification and suffering. More importantly, our justification-suffering knowledge would be infinitesimal compared to the justification-suffering knowledge of such a being: she would know much, much more than we do about suffering and how it’s justified.

4. We can imagine all sorts of possible scenarios consistent with all the basic facts we actually know about suffering but in which all instances of suffering are justified.

For the sake of argument, I will agree that (1)-(4) are true. So I’m willing to meet these theistic philosophers half way.

But I think that even if they are true, they fail to give good reason to think P is false. That is, the truth of (1)-(4) does not give you a good reason to think “In every single case in which we fail to find a justification for some suffering—and there are zillions of such cases, despite our best efforts over centuries—the justifications are there anyway”.

Before I start, I should mention that there are loads of shitty reasons people give for rejecting P. I won’t consider those. (1)-(4) are respectable!

Regarding (3):

Theists are fond of pointing out that God, if he exists, will have knowledge of good and evil that infinitely surpasses ours. So, he would know all sorts of facts about good and evil that have entirely escaped us. This remark of Michael Bergmann’s is representative:

[T]he fact that humans can’t think of any God-justifying reason for permitting an evil, doesn’t make it likely that there are no such reasons; this is because if God existed, God’s mind would be far greater than our minds so it wouldn’t be surprising if God had reasons we weren’t able to think of (Bergmann 2009; my emphasis).

I hold that the claim after ‘this is because’ is false. If we spell out Bergmann’s point here, I think we get the following dialectic.

Theist: Imagine for a minute what it would be like to learn that there is a being G whose mind is a zillion times more knowledgeable than our minds.

Non-theist: Ok.

Theist: In that scenario, in which you have learned that G actually exists, you would not find it surprising to also learn that G’s knowledge of suffering and goods is far greater than ours.

Non-theist: I agree. The topic of suffering and goods is one in which I can easily imagine that there are many truths we know nothing about.

Theist: Moreover, if you would not find it surprising to learn that G’s knowledge of suffering and goods is far greater than ours, then you would also not find it surprising to learn that all instances of suffering—including the ones that we haven’t been able to find justifications for—are justified.

At this point the non-theist should not agree. It’s easy to admit that there is a fantastic number of interesting truths about suffering and goods that we don’t know at all. That’s to be expected. The pretense ‘What if there were a being G whose mind was far greater than ours?’ is not necessary for making that modest admission.

But that admission gives one no significant reason to think that the unknown truths about suffering and goods make it plausible that there actually are justifications in all the cases in which we couldn’t find any. The key point:

• We can take ourselves to be excellent at judging a topic even if we admit that there are millions of truths about that topic that we know nothing about.

To see the italicized point more clearly, consider a sports analogy:

Theist: Imagine for a minute what it would be like to learn that there is a being G whose mind is a zillion times more knowledgeable than our minds.

Non-theist: Ok.

Theist: In that scenario, in which you have learned that G actually exists, you would not find it surprising to also learn that G’s knowledge of baseball is far greater than ours.

Non-theist: I agree. The topic of baseball is one in which I can easily imagine that there are many truths we know nothing about.

Theist: Moreover, if you would not find it surprising to learn that G’s knowledge of baseball is far greater than ours, then you would also not find it surprising to learn that almost all of our comparative baseball judgments were mistaken (judgments of forms such as ‘So and so was a better baseball player than the other so and so’).

The if-then conditional in the final line is false, and the reason that it’s false is that we take ourselves to have pretty good judgment regarding baseball comparisons despite our admission that there are millions of truths about baseball we know nothing about. Just because I learn that some being knows infinitely more than I do about baseball, or suffering and goods, or any other topic, gives me no good reason to doubt the reliability of my judgments about baseball or suffering and goods or some other topic.

Here is another way to think about it:

• Suppose you learned that some being knew infinitely more than you do. Would that make you think you are unreliable in your comparative baseball judgments? No, of course not.

• Suppose you learned that some being knew infinitely more than you do about baseball. Would that make you think you are unreliable in your comparative baseball judgments? No, of course not. Just because you admit there are millions of baseball facts you know nothing about doesn’t mean you should admit that you are unreliable in your baseball judgments.

Similarly:

• Suppose you learned that some being knew infinitely more than you do. Would that make you think you are unreliable in your judgments about suffering and goods? No, of course not.

• Suppose you learned that some being knew infinitely more than you do about suffering and goods. Would that make you think you are unreliable in your judgments about suffering and goods? No, of course not. Just because you admit there are millions of suffering/goods facts you know nothing about doesn’t mean you should admit that you are unreliable in your judgments about suffering and goods.

If you don’t like the sports comparison, fine! Feel free to substitute something else for baseball. For those reasons then, I think the truth of (3) fails to provide good reason for doubting P.

Regarding (1), (2), and (4):

In response to (1) & (2) one should admit that human fallibility being what it is, we have missed out on a large number of important justifications for instances of suffering. I’m sure there is a massive collection C_S of facts about suffering that we know nothing about and that applies to the suffering we see on Earth.

But so what? There is a massive collection C_B of baseball facts that we know nothing about. The mere fact that C_B is huge gives one no good reason to think the facts in C_B are situated in such a way that our baseball comparisons (described above) are unreliable. Similarly, as far as I can see the fact that C_S is huge gives one no good reason to think the facts in C_S are situated in such a way that when it comes to suffering all our negatives (i.e., instances in which we have failed to find justifications) are false negatives.

For those reasons then, I don’t see how (1) & (2) work in casting serious doubt on P.

Similarly, just because it is not difficult to imagine all sorts of possible scenarios consistent with all the basic facts we actually know about suffering but in which all instances of suffering are justified, gives no good reason to think P is false; hence, (4) fails to suggest P is false, as shown by a brief comparison with baseball or almost any other topic we have reliable judgments about.

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My target theist wants to give us reasons for thinking that we are truly awful at discovering the justifications for suffering; that would be a good reason to doubt P. But if the above arguments are sound, then (1)-(4) aren’t anywhere near good enough.

I’m not saying the theist has no reasons to think P is false. I’m not saying that at all. Neither am I saying that P is true. Instead, I’m saying that the popular reasons the theist has given for rejecting P, (1)-(4), are not very good.

Anyone who is familiar with philosophy can guess that the theist will have replies to my objections. That’s fine. I just wanted to lay out some of the considerations that help us see into the Problem of Evil in an illuminating way.

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This post is a revision of a small part of this paper.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

This post is a summary of a much longer article.

1. Epistemic Upheaval and Progress

In the bad old days, baseball pitchers were usually evaluated on their number of wins, win-loss percentage, earned run average, and number of strikeouts. Hitters were usually evaluated on their batting average, number of runs batted in, and home runs. No one who has kept up with developments in judging baseball performance thinks this is a valuable way to go.

The reason for the shift is that the field of statistical evaluation of baseball performance has gone through a period of epistemic upheaval. Thanks to the work of Bill James and others, we have far better statistical tools for evaluating performance in baseball as well as other sports. As a consequence, many old arguments regarding such performance are now viewed as almost primitive. What passed for a good argument forty years ago is often judged naïve today, by experts anyway.

The phenomenon of epistemic upheaval applies to philosophy as well. Much of the work from roughly fifty years ago concerning many philosophical topics is almost primitive compared to that of today. I will indicate what ‘epistemic upheaval’ comes to, in philosophy, through four real-life examples.

• Anyone familiar with the state of the art regarding vagueness will find little worth studying from before the 1950s, especially before the 1975 volume 30 issue of Synthese on the topic (not nothing: little). There was a subsequent explosion of good work that utterly transformed the area, particularly with Tim Williamson’s 1994 Vagueness.

• The same is true of material composition, with Peter van Inwagen’s 1990 Material Beings and certain other key works published around the same time.

• The philosophical study of consciousness was transformed in the 1990s and 2000s starting with David Chalmers’ 1996 The Conscious Mind.

• More recently, such transformation happened for the epistemology of disagreement, with initial works by myself, Thomas Kelly, Richard Feldman, and David Christensen.

Over the last fifty or so years, epistemic upheaval has also occurred with topics in the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of biology, and other areas.

I have used well-known examples in order to indicate what I mean by ‘epistemic upheaval’. It’s clearly tied to philosophical progress: regardless of how one construes ‘philosophical progress’, the four examples above definitely involved overall progress by the philosophical community on philosophical issues (‘overall’ in order to allow for some backsliding in addition to forward movement). I won’t offer a definition of ‘epistemic upheaval’, since it turns out that none is needed for my arguments.

In order to get a hint of the surprising argument of this post, pretend what it would have been like to be a philosopher of language working on vagueness in the late 1960s but somehow aware that very soon there will be improvements that make many of the arguments and positions being thought of and discussed in the 60s almost primitive in a comparative sense. Perhaps an oracle informs you of these facts about the near future. Naturally, you are excited to learn these things. After all, the investigation into vagueness is about to make significant progress! This is a cause for celebration and happy anticipation.

But then you go back to your study and look at the vagueness papers you have already published or the new ones you have been working on lately. You can’t help but ask yourself: what are the odds they contain good arguments and positions, given what the oracle just told you?

You should probably guess that the odds are pretty slim, provided (i) in those works you aren’t arguing for logical truths that you can easily symbolize and then derive, (ii) you are arguing for theses more ambitious than ‘That argument of so-and-so has such-and-such flaw’, and (iii) you recognize that you are not a genius when it comes to philosophy. Sure, your essays on the topic might be publishable and good or even excellent for the present time, in the sense they are about as high quality as other essays being published now. The oracle hasn’t told you anything that should make you think your work is worse than that of most other philosophers working on the topic now. Neither has she told you anything scandalous about the work being done by others at your time. But you know, from the oracle, that the odds are very high that there are serious flaws in your work on the topic—so serious that your work will be viewed, by near-future experts, as almost primitive.

Given that insight, what do you now think about the quality of your current arguments regarding vagueness, or some other topic that is going to go through epistemic upheaval?

2. Major Argumentative Flaws in Philosophy

Just because there is going to be great progress in a field or on a topic doesn’t suggest that all or most of the current thinking in that field or topic is mistaken. Even if progress in mathematics is extreme, fifty years from now we are still going to think that 14 x 14 = 196 and, more interestingly, there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by at most 600. This holds in philosophy as well. Even if over the next decade there is going to be all sorts of revolutionary work done in epistemology, for instance, we can be confident that the odds are quite high that each of the following claims won’t be revealed to be seriously problematic.

• Two people can believe the same thing but one person’s belief is irrational while the other’s is rational.

• Knowledge is objective in this sense: just because someone thinks she knows P doesn’t always mean that she really does know P.

• One can have a true belief P without knowing that P.

Even so, it’s informative to skim journal articles from fifty to a hundred years ago. Don’t go for the classics alone. Instead, open a bunch of journal issues at random and skim the ordinary articles that satisfy two conditions: they treat topics you know very well and that have subsequently undergone epistemic upheaval (comparable to the cases indicated in the previous section). If your experience is like mine, it won’t be difficult to find in the vast majority of articles major argumentative flaws such as the following six, which are worded as if by an honest if brusque journal referee.

Problematic Premise. Look at the second premise, P2. The author thinks that it’s unproblematic, as she asserts it with complete confidence, no defense, and not even much comment. [It might not even be stated in the article, if the author is really unaware of its role in her argument.] The author is apparently blind to the fact that there are excellent reasons to think P2 is false--reasons that she has no idea how to counter. In fact, we know today that P2 is highly contentious, as the arguments against it are serious. Now, I’m not saying premise P2 is false. All I’m saying is that she is relying on P2 as unproblematic and yet it certainly isn’t anywhere close to having that status. Sure, she could just respond by saying that she’s assuming the truth of P2. That’s fine, but that move certainly reduces the interest in her argument, as her conclusion switches from C to ‘P2 É C’.

Ambiguous Premise. There’s a serious problem with premise P4. The author seems oblivious to the fact that it’s crucially ambiguous in a philosophically relevant way. If you interpret it one way, then I agree with the author that it’s unproblematic, or at least highly plausible. But then under that reading it offers virtually zero support for her conclusion. If you interpret it the other way, then it would certainly support her conclusion—if it were true. But of course we know that it’s highly contentious when interpreted that way--for reasons that she, like us, simply cannot defeat at all. I’m not saying that P4 really is false. But it certainly stands in need of a defense! Or the author can just assume its truth, but then we have the familiar problem of the significant loss of interest in her argument.

Unsupportive. Perhaps all the premises are true, but the argument isn’t even inductively strong, let alone deductively valid. The premises don’t do shit to support the conclusion!

Ambiguous Conclusion. The conclusion is ambiguous in a philosophically relevant manner. Interpreted one way, the supporting argument is great, but the conclusion is philosophically boring—even for the author. Interpreted the other way, the conclusion is definitely worthwhile, by just about anyone’s lights, but the argument doesn’t support it (either validly or inductively), for reasons I already went over elsewhere.

Mess. The argument is a total mess: it’s hardly clear what the conclusion or the premises even are. There are multiple ways of developing it but not in any way that remains at all faithful to the original and gives us premises that aren’t highly contentious and that offer decent support for a worthwhile conclusion.

Tweak. My criticisms wouldn’t mean much if the author could simply tweak her argument so that it was either valid or inductively strong, had premises that weren’t highly contentious, and had a worthwhile conclusion. But I see no plausible way to do that--and more importantly, the author certainly gives no indication that she knows of any such way.

The list is not exhaustive! But it captures a good portion of the flaws we actually encounter in philosophical arguments. Call these six plus closely related ones, Standard flaws.

In saying that the main arguments of those articles suffer from Standard flaws, I am not saying that the articles are bad, relative to the past or even the present. Argumentative quality doesn’t fix the worth of a work of philosophy. For instance, merely articulating an interesting thought experiment can be an enormous advance. And even a definitely bad argument can be highly valuable, if, for instance, it is both highly original and it can be repaired by someone else to become much stronger and retain a philosophically interesting conclusion.

But often enough, when we publish a paper that contains arguments, we think or at least hope the arguments are valid or at least inductively strong, contain premises that aren’t highly contentious, and have philosophically worthwhile conclusions. It’s fine to have an argument for conclusion C that relies on an assumption A that is highly contentious, as when you are not really presenting an argument for conclusion C but for the qualified conclusion ‘If A then C’. But in this case, you don’t want your (other) premises to be highly contentious.

With regard to the perusal of old, pre-upheaval articles, I’m saying that they had those flaws when they were published. For instance, it’s not as though the arguments had unambiguous premises back then but have ambiguous ones now. Decades ago almost no one was in a position to figure out that those arguments had Standard flaws, but the flaws were there anyway, waiting to be revealed.

3. The Unfortunate Consequences of Epistemic Upheaval

After learning that one or more of the Standard flaws is true of the large majority of the primary arguments in articles published before a period of epistemic upheaval, I am pretty much forced, by my own rationality and awareness, to reason inductively that one or more of those flaws is probably true of the primary arguments in the papers I’m writing now, provided my current papers concern topics that are going to undergo epistemic upheaval. After all, I’m just an average philosopher, and I’m not going around arguing for logical truths or overly modest theses of the form ‘Smith’s argument has the following weakness’.

Perhaps there is no current upheaval with respect to topic T that I am writing on today, and there isn’t any strong sign of one occurring soon. But given that this is philosophy, isn’t it highly probable that there will, in the next fifty years or so, be a period of upheaval for T (again, comparable to the cases mentioned in section 1)? If so, then it’s highly probable that that farther-future upheaval will show that it’s highly probable that my work on T is flawed in the sense of having one or more of the Standard flaws.

Whether the upheaval is going to happen in the next few years or in the next few decades or even century matters not at all: either way, one or more of the Standard flaws is very probably true of my work now. We can complain about how progress in philosophy is not nearly as impressive as it is for physics, chemistry, and biology, but what we do know is that we philosophers are simply outstanding at finding serious flaws in arguments and claims. Hence, it’s highly probable that in the future the philosophical community could, given a bit of time and effort, show that some of the Standard flaws are true of my work.

If I have appreciated this probability fact just articulated, then what should my attitude be towards my current and past work—or even future work? It may be well worth publishing, given the current state of the art, but should I believe in the soundness or other cogency of its arguments?

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

After many years of doing philosophy, I have come to the conclusion that most people underestimate the significance of certain traditional philosophical problems. This is true even of professional philosophers.

One such problem is the sorites paradox. Many philosophers think it’s a problem only if you embrace classical logic, or have false views about ambiguity, context dependence, theories of truth, or semantic incompleteness. I disagree. It’s not difficult to see that the fundamental problem can be generated while sidestepping any claims about ambiguity, context dependence, or semantic incompleteness. In addition, I don’t think it has anything to do with truth. Moreover, in order to see the difficulty of the problem, we don’t have to fuss with any of the more complex aspects of vagueness, such as the nature of borderline cases.

I won’t present the rigorous arguments for those claims here. Instead, I’ll present the more user-friendly versions.

1. Alleged Commonsense about Vagueness

Most sentences we use contain vague words. The word ‘yellow’ is vague because there are many shades of color on the border between yellow and orange (as well as yellow and green). You can’t say they’re yellow but you can’t say they’re not yellow either. Even if you have the shade of color right in front of you, your eyes are working just fine, and you know all about its physical properties (such as the wavelengths of light that it reflects), you still wouldn’t be able to classify it as ‘yellow’ or ‘not yellow’.

The source of the problem is not that you need to know more about color. Instead, the problem is that the term ‘yellow’ doesn’t have an exact definition that allows us to figure out, for any particular shade of color, whether it counts as yellow or not. We can figure it out for many color shades, but not all of them. No one ever gave the word ‘yellow’ a perfectly exact meaning.

Or consider the word ‘chair’. There are weird pieces of furniture that are somewhat similar to normal chairs, but they are really different as well. Even if you know everything about chairs, and you know everything about the weird piece of furniture in front of you, you may still not be able to classify it as a chair or not. The term ‘chair’ doesn’t have an exact definition that allows us to figure out, for any particular piece of furniture, whether it counts as a chair. Most of the time it’s easy to tell whether a given object is a chair, but not always.

Sometimes it’s a whole phrase, instead of a particular word, that’s vague. Consider the phrase ‘tall for a 15 year old girl in Hong Kong in 2025’. Suppose you know that Mia is a 15 year old girl living in Hong Kong in 2025, she is 170 cm tall, and the average height for a 15 year old girl in Hong Kong in 2025 is 160 cm. Even with all that information, you can’t tell whether she is “tall” for that group, since ‘tall’ is too imprecise. Your failure to be able to classify Mia as tall or not tall isn’t due to some ignorance on your part. You might know the height of literally every single girl in Hong Kong that year. Instead, your ignorance is due to ‘tall’ not having an exact meaning. If Mia was 162 cm, she definitely wouldn’t count as tall; if she were 190 cm, she would definitely count as tall. But there are lots of intermediate heights that don’t count as either ‘tall’ or ‘not tall’, due to the incompleteness of the meaning of ‘tall’.

Someone could come along and attach highly precise meanings to ‘yellow’, ‘chair’, and ‘tall for a 15 year old girl in Hong Kong in 2025’. For instance, we might say that an object counts as “yellow” in this technical sense = 95% of the light it reflects is 570-590 nanometers in length. That’s fine. We do things like that on certain occasions, like when economists and lawmakers offer relatively precise definitions of ‘poverty’ for the purposes of legislation, record keeping, and economic forecasting. But when those words are used in ordinary, everyday circumstances, they are vague in the ways I described.

Everything I just wrote strikes most people as being pretty obvious. It’s hardly an earth-shaking announcement to say that lots of words and phrases are vague. Even so, there’s a powerful argument that seems to show that there’s a fatal mistake in what I wrote above.

2. Sharpism

Suppose Joe says to his friend, ‘The restaurant I was telling you about is a short walk from here’. That’s the sentence he uttered out loud. Joe and his friend are in Manhattan, just saw a play at a theater, and now want to get a bite to eat. If the restaurant is a mile away, then his sentence is false. That’s because a mile is definitely not a “short walk” when you’re in Manhattan. If the restaurant is 50 feet away, then his sentence is true. If the restaurant is 50 feet and one inch away, then his sentence is true. It’s still true if the restaurant is 50 feet and two inches away.

According to the view I’ll call Sharpism, Joe’s sentence stops being true at a sharp cutoff: it’s just plain true when the restaurant is a certain distance away, but it’s not just plain true if the restaurant is even just one nanometer farther away—even though Joe has never made any fancy linguistic definitions and doesn’t even know what a nanometer is. He is an ordinary speaker of English. Sharpism says that Joe’s sentence had a perfectly precise meaning, totally unbeknownst to him and despite the fact that no one has ever been odd enough to attach a fantastically precise meaning to his words.

In general, sharpism says that our sentences from ordinary, everyday life have supernaturally precise meanings even though no one ever gave them such meanings. (For those who read the literature, epistemicism is only one of the varieties of sharpism.)

You might be thinking to yourself ‘Why would anyone accept a view as crazy as sharpism? Does anyone actually believe it?’ The incredible truth is that there is an extremely strong argument for sharpism, one that can be illustrated with a story.

3. Jo at the Farm, Looking for a Pumpkin

A few days before Halloween, Jo and her niece are walking on Farmer Fred’s farm, where there is a pumpkin patch. Her niece wants to pick out a pumpkin to take home and carve for Halloween. Jo says to her, after they get out of the car, ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’. Jo can see a single large tree about 100 feet away. She wasn’t able to see any pumpkins by that tree, since her view was blocked by a tool shed between her and the tree, but she remembers from last year that there were pumpkins near that huge tree she and her niece see towering behind the shed.

Suppose that you, Jo, uttered that sentence to your niece at noon. Ordinary common sense says that you spoke truly: just as you said, there was a living pumpkin roughly a foot away from the very tree you indicated. Call the situation you were in at that time S₁; so your sentence ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ is true when evaluated with respect to S₁. S₁ is the whole situation you were in at noon on that day: it’s a snapshot of what the ordinary world was like at a certain instant in time.

Now I want you to imagine the story being ever so slightly different: imagine that the top of the pumpkin had had one fewer molecule on it. Otherwise, everything is exactly the same: your body, your mind, your entire history, the tree, the rest of the universe, the English language, and so on. Let S₂ be that alternative imaginary but perfectly realistic situation, with the single microscopic difference from S₁. In both S₁ and S₂ you do the very same things in the very same ways, down to the last detail: bringing your niece to the farm, seeing the tree, and saying ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’. Everything is exactly the same in your own mind and behavior. Our initial question is this: in S₂, was your sentence ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ true?

Obviously, it’s very reasonable to think that the answer is ‘Yes, of course’. The only difference between S₁ and S₂ is the absence of a single molecule. So, given that your pumpkin sentence was true in S₁, it must have been true in S₂.

Now imagine situation S₃, which is exactly like S₁ except that the top of the pumpkin has two fewer molecules on it. S₃ is exactly like S₂, which is exactly like S₁, with the exception of a molecule or two on the top of the pumpkin. Our new question is this: in S₃, was your sentence ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ true? And of course, just as before with S₂, it’s very reasonable to think that the answer is ‘yes’.

Repeat the process over and over: each time consider a pumpkin with one fewer molecule in it, starting from the top of the pumpkin and working down. For each imaginary S situation consider the question ‘Was Jo’s pumpkin sentence true in that situation?’ We are evaluating your pumpkin sentence with respect to many zillions of situations, the Ss.

One could do this literally a billion times and the first and the billionth situations, S₁ and S_billion, would still look identical to the naked eye: a difference of a billion molecules from the top of a pumpkin would be literally undetectable without scientific instruments, as molecules are so small and so numerous in a pumpkin.

But if we add up enough of these microscopic differences, all that will be left of the pumpkin is … nothing. The tree will still be there, and there will be grass around it, but there will be no pumpkin material whatsoever. So S_big, which is a situation when there’s no more pumpkin material, isn’t a situation with a pumpkin by the tree. Your pumpkin sentence evaluated with respect to that situation, S_big, is false. When your niece runs over to the tree in S_big she complains to you that there’s no pumpkin by the tree—and of course she’s right.

At what point in the sequence of situations, the Ss, did your sentence ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ there stop being true? We started with a nice, healthy pumpkin and then considered a sequence of possible situations, each nearly identical to the one before in the sequence. Eventually, we had a situation with no pumpkin by the tree. So, when did Jo’s sentence ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ go from just plain true to something else?

The sharpist (the person who accepts sharpism) says this: I don’t know when the pumpkin sentence goes from just plain true to something else, but I do insist that there’s got to be two consecutive situations in which that’s exactly what happens.

However, when faced with the question ‘When did Jo’s pumpkin sentence go from just true to something else?’ most people will insist that there is something wrong with the question. The question is demanding a particular cutoff: for some number N, in situation S_n the pumpkin sentence is true, but in situation S_N+1, which differs from S_N by exactly one molecule, the pumpkin sentence isn’t just plain true. But of course, most of us are inclined to say, there is no such sharp cutoff! Instead, we insist, the pumpkin goes away in a gradual manner, not all of a sudden. Imagine seeing a sequence of photographs of the pumpkinish thing, starting with S₁ and proceeding through S₂, S₃, and the rest in rapid succession. It would look like a pumpkin being very slowly destroyed from the top down, particle by particle. There would be no one point where you could say with any confidence ‘Right there! That’s the very point when the pumpkin sentence goes from being true to something else. An instant before it was true, but with that one particle gone it’s no longer just plain true’.

Yes, that is the entirely reasonable thing to say, at least before we delve into logic and philosophy. No doubt about it. However, a compelling line of reasoning seems to prove that it’s wrong. And after 2000 years of investigation by philosophers and logicians, there is no stable consensus regarding what’s wrong with the reasoning, if there’s anything wrong with it at all.

4. The Sharpist’s Argument

We have a single sentence, Jo’s pumpkin sentence, evaluated in each of many very similar situations S₁, S₂, S₃, etc. The first situation involves a perfectly ordinary, full-grown, and healthy living pumpkin by the tree. Each situation differs from the immediately previous situation by a comically miniscule difference. We end up with the following puzzling table:

Situation Truth Status of the Pumpkin Sentence

• S₁ True

• S₂ True

• S₃ True

• … …

• S_n ???

• … …

• S_{big – 2} False

• S_{big – 1} False

• S_big False

Perhaps the entries start out, at the top of the right column, with ‘true’ and then, after many rows, change to ‘false’ for the next row. Some people might disagree, thinking that there are statuses other than ‘true’ and ‘false’, such as one or more of these:

• true and false

• neither true nor false

• neither true nor not true

• both true and not true

• meaningless

• indeterminate

• indeterminately indeterminate

• indeterminately indeterminately indeterminately ….

• incoherent

• 93.07768% true

• sort of true

• [no status at all]

• [weird statuses]

For my purposes, it doesn’t matter what goes in the right column, other than this one simple and apparently obvious fact: not all the entries in the right column are the same. I don’t care what all the fancy truth statuses might be, like in the bullet list above. I don’t know, and I don’t care. But I do know that not all the statuses are the same!

If that’s true, then the string of ‘true’ entries starting from the top has to stop at some point. I don’t care what goes in the next row. Maybe it’s ‘false’ or ‘less than 100% true’ or ‘neither true nor false’ or one of the other ideas listed above. In any case, for some number N, there are situations S_N and S_N+1 such that the pumpkin sentence doesn’t have the very same truth status in those two situations.

In order to see why there must be two consecutive rows with different entries in the right column, consider a different table in which the entries in the right column are a bit different:

Situation Status of the Pumpkin Sentence

• S₁ 1

• S₂ 1

• S₃ 1

• … …

• S_n ???

• … …

• S_{big – 2} 56

• S_{big – 1} 56

• S_big 56

You don’t know what the numbers mean and you don’t know what limitations there are on the numbers that can appear in the right column (e.g., whether there can be fractions like 7/8 in addition to whole numbers like 1 and 56). However, even when saddled with this ignorance a quick glance at the table is all you need to feel perfectly confident in concluding that the sequence of ‘1’s that starts the top of the right column has to end at some point, and thus there will be a pair of consecutive rows X and X + 1 such that row X is the last one of the initial sequence of ‘1’s and in the next row X + 1 there is something other than the simple ‘1’. That’s a sharp cutoff. You have no idea whether at the first cutoff the numbers go from ‘1’ to ‘56’ or ‘1’ to ‘2’ or ‘1’ to ‘-34.45’ or ‘1’ to ‘1.0000000000001’ or ‘1’ to ‘Beethoven’ or ‘1’ to ‘I love you’. For all you know, after the initial string of ‘1’s there is a blank in the next row. But you do know, immediately and with very little thought, that there simply must be a last row, counting down from the top, that has a simple ‘1’ in it and the next row will have something else (or a blank).

So, for some number N, there are situations S_N and S_N+1 such that Jo’s pumpkin sentence doesn’t have the very same truth status in those two situations.

Remember that any two “consecutive” situations differ only in one molecule from the pumpkin thing. In particular, you are identical in the two situations: same body, same mind, same thoughts, same behavior, same everything. Perfectly identical. And the English language is identical too, with all the same words with all the same meanings. So, it makes sense to think that your sentence ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ has the very same meaning in each situation.

Since the sentences in S_N and S_N+1 have the same meaning, like I just suggested, then a perfectly ordinary use of ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ has one truth status with respect to one situation, but a perfectly ordinary token of that sentence with the very same meaning doesn’t have that status with respect to a situation that differs from the first in just one molecule. That is, there is at least one sharp cutoff.

5. Why the Sharp Cutoff Seems Impossible

The primary problem with sharp cutoffs is the lack of any plausible story of the acquisition of such cutoffs: we can’t even come close to seeing how an ordinary vague sentence could get such a cutoff.

We can see how ‘The pumpkin by the tree weighs at least 8.888 kg’ is true when evaluated with respect to one situation A and then not true when evaluated with respect to situation B even though the only difference between A and B is miniscule: a loss of one gram of mass. But in this particular case the sentence contains words that allow us to see where the sensitive meaning comes from. The same holds for sentences such as ‘I have more than 43,398.23 USD in my bank accounts at this moment’.

This is a valuable lesson: at least some sharp cutoffs for vague sentences aren’t puzzling—when we can see, at least in outline, how the sentence acquired such a sensitive meaning.

The problem with sharpism is that we don’t see anything in ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ that could give it a comically sensitive meaning, one that makes it change truth statuses when evaluated with respect to situations X and Y even though the only difference between X and Y is incredibly miniscule. Philosophers and linguists think that the meanings of our words are fixed by a whole bunch of factors, such as a person’s intentions, assumptions, linguistic behavior, and mental states, along with facts about her words that don’t come from her as an individual. But no one has ever come up with any idea of how those factors could make ‘There is a pumpkin by the tree’ have a meaning that changes its truth status with the subtraction of a single molecule. That would require a miracle.

We can run the sharpism argument on ‘I wish I had a healthy snack to eat’, ‘Please bring me a glass of cold water’, or ‘Stand over there while I go use the restroom’ to show that there are sharp cutoffs corresponding to wishes, requests, and demands instead of fact-stating sentences such as the pumpkin one. You say ‘Please bring me a glass of cold water’, and in the first situation they bring you a full glass of water at a temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Your request is fulfilled. In the second situation the water is at 37.000001 degrees; in the third situation it’s at 37.000002 degrees. And so on.

Another example. In one situation my daughter and I are in a public place and I say to her ‘Stand over there while I go use the restroom’ while I point to an area right outside the restroom. She does so, and my demand has the status of being complied with. In an alternative situation everything is exactly the same but she stands one picometer farther to the left (one picometer = one trillionth of a meter). In the next situation she is two picometers to the left. And so on. Are we really supposed to believe that my sentence ‘Stand over there while I go use the restroom’ had a meaning such that it changed its “complied with” status in the space of a picometer?

*****

Summing up, there is an excellent argument that Jo’s pumpkin sentence has a fantastically precise meaning, but there’s also an excellent argument that it can’t have such a meaning. That’s the paradox.

There’s a lot more to say about what the basic problem is, but I think I’ve said enough to give you a rough idea of the problem.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

When I was a PhD student in philosophy, I was attending a talk at a conference. The speaker and commentator had finished up, and the moderator, who would be running the Q&A, had just called on the first questioner. But before the questioner could ask his question, someone else in the audience just started talking, asking his own question. He didn’t even raise his hand.

The thing is, it was Peter Geach. He isn’t well known today, but back then everyone knew of him. The speaker, commentator, moderator, and questioner shut up and let Geach ask his question. And then the speaker responded, with respect. I don’t think anyone thought it was unjustified. It was Peter fucking Geach.

I’m wondering why we all agreed to that. I think there are at least three things that can make that kind of interruption socially acceptable, but I’m genuinely wondering whether I’m right about any of it. So, I’d be interested in what people have to say.

Yes, this is totally unimportant. Professional navel gazing at its worst, I freely admit.

First, Geach was old, maybe 80 or so. We tend to defer to old people, cutting them slack. That’s part of most cultures I think. Sounds good.

But second, I wonder if it had to do with his contributions to the profession. Perhaps some people in the audience were silently thinking to themselves, “This guy has earned the right to do this. Even if you disagree with most of what he thinks in philosophy, you gotta respect him for what he’s done over the last few decades”.

Third, we cut people slack when we know that they are autistic, highly eccentric, or something similar. We make allowances. When I was taking grad classes in mathematical logic in the math department, there was a high school student in attendance. As you’d expect, she was deeply weird (that’s not an insult). When she did something odd in class, no one was offended in the least. We were all happy to let her have her say. After all, who doesn’t want to help out a high school student taking a class for grad students???

Now imagine if Ernie Sosa did what Geach did. Sosa’s about 85 now. I think we’d all shut up and let him ask his question. Just like Geach. We would be totally happy to do so, even though it would be unlike Sosa to do that.

But now suppose it was Tim Williamson, who is 70 now. I think we would give him the same deference. But not because of age, right? I think it might be something like “He’s earned it, for God’s sake. Just look at what he’s done for the profession with all those amazing publications”.

Now imagine Saul Kripke doing it when he’s just 45 years old, in 1985. At that point in his career, he was often thought to be a philosophy god. I don’t think there’s anyone in philosophy today who has the reputation that Kripke had in the 1980s and 1990s. People used to say things like “You see that dry cleaning store across the street? If they hired Kripke, that’d be the best philosophy department in the world”. Funny.

If he had done the Geach thing, maybe some people would think it’s okay he did it because Kripke’s a legit genius and has earned the right to interrupt. But this time, he’s earned it not because of a long career of accomplishment, like in Williamson’s case, but because he’s a freakin’ genius. It’s like we want him to speak, because we think whatever he says will be super insightful compared to the relative idiots in the audience.

Never mind whether people would be right to think that! I’m just wondering what people would think.

The Kripke scenario is complicated by the fact that he was acknowledged to be deeply weird in ways that he couldn’t control, like being autistic. If he hadn’t had any of those psychological problems, would people have happily deferred to him? Or would they think “This guy’s a bully. He should wait his turn, like everyone else. It doesn’t matter that he’s a genius at Princeton”? I don’t know.

Interested to hear what you have to say! You can comment in any of several ways:

1: Here are the social norms actually in place.

2: Here’s what the norms should be, prudentially.

3: Here’s what the norms should be, morally.

4: Tell me more stories about Kripke.

5: What happened to that high school kid?

6: [Something else]

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

A few years ago, I decided that I really, REALLY needed to get better at using PowerPoint. I’d seen so many shitty presentations that I figured mine were probably shitty too. So, I watched the vids from people who studied how to do it. They were helpful. But then I put my philosophy hat on and approached the topic from that perspective. I think I came up with some good ideas that I haven’t seen elsewhere. They definitely can be made to promote evil instead of good.

When you give a PP presentation, you have audience members. You have a goal with them. Typically, you want to get them to know something, make a certain decision, or have a certain emotion (or some combo of these). The PP presentation is a sequence of slides meant to increase the probability that you’ll reach that goal.

So, how does one craft the presentation in order to reach the goal?

You probably believe that if you could just get them to have such-and-such sequence TE of thoughts and emotions (TE = thoughts and emotions), then they would reach the goal you have in mind for them. They will come to know the cool thing you’re trying to teach them, or they will make the beneficial decision you want them to make (e.g., buy your product or service), or they will have the emotion you want them to have (warm fuzzy feelings about your political or moral cause).

So, you want to craft your sequence of slides to make them go through sequence TE. But how do you do that?

At that point I realized that if I can control the audience member’s eyes and ears, then I have a great chance at guiding them through TE. The thoughts that go through their minds during the presentation will be mostly dictated by what they hear and what they see. That’s just biology.

Controlling their ears is easy, since I’m the only one talking in the room. But how do I control their eyes?

Answer: when I go from slide A to slide B, there’s exactly one new thing on B compared to A. It’s probably a sentence, phrase, or word. Given human biology, their eyes will be drawn to the single difference in B versus A. That’s how I control their eyes.

They see the new bit of language and read it—so now I know what state their mind is in. After giving them two seconds to read it, then I say something that helps them along sequence TE.

If your new slide has multiple new things on it, then you’ve lost control. God only knows if they will focus on what you want them to focus on. So, make it just one new thing, every time you can.

In order to pull this off, you really need to think hard about TE: what is the precise sequence of thoughts and emotions that will most likely get them to reach the goal? It’s not easy to figure this out. This is the hard part. But after you’ve done it, you can design the PP slides to correspond to the steps of TE.

This means that you’ll have many PP slides. But that’s okay, since you’ll be going through them pretty quickly. Slide S1 has one sentence, say. Slide S2 will have that sentence plus one more. Slide S3 will have the previous two sentences plus one more. And so on.

Of course, it’s not always sentences. Sometimes the new item will be a simple graph or picture. Or just a bullet point or even a single word. After the new slide is up, you give them a few seconds to read it, and then you talk, so as to get them on the next step of TE.

If they get distracted, it’s not the end of the world because the contents of the last few slides are usually on the current slide. Not always, but often.

Obviously, this isn’t guaranteed to work. For one thing, maybe your TE isn’t convincing, contrary to what you thought. But even if it is, it will be convincing only for people of the right background. Others, with different backgrounds, will be able to see through your self-serving, manipulative bullshit (joking).

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I read shocking things like this from time to time, from several authors:

I think eating meat is morally much worse than being rude to a waiter—if you’re choosing whether to be rude to a thousand waiters or to eat one chicken sandwich, you should choose to be rude to the waiters.

I quoted Matthew Adelstein here, the maestro behind Bentham’s Bulldog, because it’s his posts that prompted me to (finally) write about this topic.

I could hardly disagree with him more. To be precise: I think being rude to one waiter is morally much worse, when it comes to consequences, than eating not just one but 1000 chicken sandwiches. I would have that view even if I thought that factory farming is the worst thing in the world.

But set aside my moral views. This post is NOT about ethics. It’s about causality.

Consider this remark, which is frequently cited as part of the reason for remarks like the one about waiters and chicken sandwiches:

• CAUSE: If you purchase a pound of beef, you’ll cause very roughly one extra day of factory farming.

Adelstein’s idea seems to be this:

If you insult a waiter, his feelings will be slightly hurt for a short period of time, but if you buy a pound of beef, you cause an additional day of torture for a cow (similar facts for chickens and pigs). Clearly, the second thing is way, way worse than the first thing. That’s why insulting the waiter is much, much less bad than buying the meat.

You can see the role CAUSE has in his reasoning for the waiter-chicken sandwich remark. You can find remarks similar to CAUSE in the writings of lots of ethicists.

CAUSE is an empirical claim—not an ethical one. It’s about causality, not ethics. In this post, I investigate it. Just to be absolutely, stunningly clear:

I am addressing a non-moral, causal claim. It doesn’t say anything about ethics or morality. It’s just about causes and effects.

Interpreting “Purchasing Meat Causes Additional Factory Farming”

When people read or hear CAUSE, they often think it means that if they buy meat, then their purchases will cause more factory farming to happen than if they didn’t buy that meat. In order to have a specific example to treat in detail, let’s consider a typical beef-eater and examine this CAUSE-inspired thesis:

CAUSE*. There are two possible futures in front of me. In the beef future, B, I buy a pound of beef every day on average. In the non-beef future, NB, I never buy beef again and replace it with food that doesn’t use any factory farming at all. What we want to know is the likely difference between those two future scenarios. That is, if the two scenarios B and NB proceed under the same usual assumptions (we assume that pretty much everything is the same in both scenarios with the exception of my beef purchasing decision and its consequences), but in one scenario I buy one pound of beef every day while in the other scenario I never buy any factory farming items, what are the likely differences in consequences from those two choices?

Here’s the answer: if I proceed with B instead of NB, then over a period of time of X days, there will be—as a causal result of my beef purchases—very roughly X more days of factory farming than if I did NB.

This interpretation of CAUSE is pretty natural. After all, CAUSE literally says one thing—purchasing a pound of beef—will cause another thing—one more day of factory farming. I mean, just look at CAUSE: the word “cause” is right there in it.

I think CAUSE* is obviously false. I claim: if in one scenario I buy a pound of beef per day, going forward, the odds are absolutely overwhelming that zero additional days of factory farming will happen, compared to the scenario in which I never buy any beef at all. I’ll argue for that thesis in the next section.

Unlike other philosophers who have argued for this thesis, I will try to be as realistic and detailed as possible. We must be, in order to see why the argument is so strong and certain objections to the argument fail.

The Zero-Days Argument

We need to have a vivid sense of what our task is, the task of figuring out if my regularly buying beef will cause more factory farming. Otherwise, our reasoning will run off the rails.

As I wrote above, we have two futures to examine, NB and B. We want to figure out if B will have more factory farming than NB—as a result of my buying beef. Clearly, B could have a lot more factory farming than NB due to events that have nothing whatsoever to do with my buying beef. If the president of the USA makes beef practically free in B but not NB, then we’d expect a lot more factory farming in B than in NB. But of course that’s irrelevant.

So, we want B and NB to be as similar as possible, in order to isolate the causal consequences of my buying beef. That similarity in B and NB will come up a couple times in my argument.

Let’s try to be realistic. Accordingly, suppose that I buy beef from two grocery stores regularly. I also eat out four times a week, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even just a snack (buying a snack counts as “eating out” here). So, my beef purchases are spread out amongst two grocery stores, restaurants, fast-food places, cafeterias, street vendors, vending machines, and so on. Let’s say I get 2.5 lbs of beef from each grocery store, per week on average. That amounts to 5 lbs from grocery stores and 2 lbs from the other sources I listed.

Suppose I made my B/NB choice a few weeks ago. Obviously, there aren’t going to be any differences in factory farming right away. No one who is sane thinks that the instant you buy a 1-lb package of beef a cow undergoes another day of torture. That’s why we fast forward a few weeks.

Today the grocer looks at a spreadsheet of his beef sales over the last few weeks, in order to figure out what adjustments he might want to make for his future purchases. In both B and NB everyone’s beef-buying behavior is identical—except for me, since I buy beef in B but not NB. So, the beef purchases made by everyone except me are exactly the same in NB and B. Again, we’re keeping B and NB as similar as possible in order to “isolate the variable X”, where X = my beef buying habits.

Although there is a significant range, a typical mid-sized grocery store in the USA sells about 1400 lbs of beef per week. When looking at his recent sales figures, my grocer sees something like 1429 lbs/week in the B scenario and 1426.5 lbs/week in the NB scenario, since the only difference in the two comes from my beef purchases. Just imagine the scene:

• In each of B and NB he is in his office, seated at his desk, looking at the spreadsheets on his laptop. Everything in the two scenarios is exactly the same—with the exception that in NB the number in the relevant box on the spreadsheet reads “1426.5” whereas in B the number in that very same box is “1429”.

The odds that he’s going to react differently to these numbers is ridiculously small. He is exactly the same in each scenario, and he’s merely reading numbers that are ever so slightly different. 1429 is 0.18% more than 1426.5.

Just to be clear, that’s not a difference of 18%. It’s a difference of much less than 1%.

So, it’s extremely unlikely that he will react to the differing figures 1429 and 1426.5 differently, buying less beef in NB than in B.

But for the sake of really, vividly, seeing how implausible CAUSE* is, let’s assume otherwise. Let’s suppose the grocery store owner in NB looks at his spreadsheets and orders less beef from his beef distributor-warehouse compared to how much he orders in B. For some reason, he looks at the 1429/1426.5 figures and reacts differently.

He can’t call up the beef warehouse and say “Hey, starting next month I want 2.5 fewer lbs of beef per week”. According to the LLM I used, the minimal decrease in a purchase order would be 10 pounds. So, let’s assume that in both scenarios, NB and B, the grocer looks at his spreadsheets and then orders 10 fewer lbs/week in NB than in B (it won’t matter what the figure is: 10 lbs, 25 lbs, 100 lbs).

What will happen next? In particular, will there eventually be any difference in factory farming? Although we’ve assumed, against expectations, that my beef purchases have altered my grocer’s purchases from the beef warehouse, we haven’t seen anything about its effects on factory farming.

Grocery store owners get their beef delivered from a beef warehouse, which gets its inventory from a slaughterhouse. There’s a range of sizes of beef warehouses, but a typical one will distribute about 350,000 lbs of beef/week. For the sake of using realistic numbers instead of abstract reasoning, let’s go with 350,000 lbs/week.

We are currently assuming that in the NB scenario, the grocer orders 10 fewer lbs of beef from the warehouse than he orders in the B scenario. So, now we have the warehouse owner looking at his spreadsheets in both scenarios. He’s just like the grocer:

• He’s in his office, looking at his laptop with its spreadsheets, and everything is exactly the same in NB and B with one exception. In NB, he sees that the recent sales have been at something like 344,444 lbs/week. In B, he sees that the recent sales have been at 344,434 lbs/week (the difference coming from my grocer).

The odds that he’s going to react differently to these numbers in the two scenarios is ridiculously small. In particular, he’s not going to want to order less beef from the slaughterhouses in NB vs B. And that means there will be no difference in factory farming.

One really needs an adequate sense of the numbers in order to see this. Let’s suppose your net income is about $75,000 a year. In one future, you’re in your office gazing at the spreadsheet on your laptop and see that your average net income over the last few months was $6252/month. In another future, everything is exactly the same but you see that it was $6251.82/month. (That’s the percentage difference for the warehouse owner, 344,434 vs 344,444.) The idea that you’re going to do anything different in reacting to these different numbers is just plain stupid. It’s 18 cents for goodness sakes.

Hence, even if the grocer does different warehouse orders in NB and B—which as we saw is incredibly unlikely—it’s almost absurdly unlikely that the warehouse owner is going to want to do anything different in NB and B. In particular, he’s not going to want to order less beef from the slaughterhouse in NB compared to B, as a causal result of my weekly beef purchases.

If the meat industry were incredibly different, then the warehouse owner might well react differently to 344,444 and 344,434. If the entire industry from start to finish were almost supernaturally precise, efficient, predictable, and had zero waste, then the warehouse owner’s purchases from the slaughterhouses might be incredibly sensitive to miniscule differences, such as that between 344,444 and 344,434. But we don’t live in that world.

Note that there are two tiny probabilities here. First, there’s a tiny probability that the grocer is going to order less beef in NB than in B. Second, even in the scenarios in which the grocer orders less beef in NB than in B, there’s only a tiny probability that the beef warehouse owner wants to order, from the slaughterhouse, less beef in NB than in B. To figure out the probability that the warehouse owner is going to want to order less beef from the slaughterhouse, you have to multiply those two miniscule numbers together. It’s like multiplying 0.0001 and 0.000001: you get 0.000000001.

Guess what? We’re not finished with the miniscule probabilities.

Imagine that the warehouse owner really does want to react differently to the numbers in the box on his spreadsheet: 344,444 vs 344,434. He wants to order more beef from the slaughterhouse in B than in NB. Will he do it?

I don’t think so. According the LLM I used, if a beef warehouse that usually sells around 350,000 lbs/week wanted to increase its purchases from the slaughterhouse the minimal amount, that amount would be anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 pounds, depending on the slaughterhouse. So even if the warehouse owner wanted to give different orders in the two scenarios, based on the differing numbers 344,444 vs 344,434, I doubt that he would actually do it, since a difference of 10 lbs hardly seems to justify a difference in orders to the slaughterhouse of 1,000-10,000 lbs. Even the lowest amount, 1,000, is too much.

Think about it:

• The warehouse owner is in his office, looking at his laptop with its spreadsheets, and everything is exactly the same in NB and B with one exception. In NB, he sees that the recent sales have been at something like 344,444 lbs/week. In B, he sees that the recent sales have been at 344,434 lbs/week. Is he going to order an extra 1,000-10,000 lbs/week in B?

Hell no!

Hence, even if the grocer ordered differently in NB vs B, and even if the warehouse owner wanted to order differently in NB vs B, I really doubt he actually would do so, given the amounts involved in the real world.

In sum, it’s virtually guaranteed that your buying beef will not lead to any causal differences in the slaughterhouse’s purchases from the ranchers.

Here’s a continuation of the argument, one that I’m not as sure about but seems worth articulating:

Suppose, against all odds, that the warehouse owner orders more beef from the slaughterhouse in B than in NB. So, yeah: he reacted differently from seeing 344,444 and seeing 344,434. Since the only differences in B and NB come from my beef purchases, surely he is doing this in response to my beef purchases.

Maybe, but I don’t think so. It seems more like a randomly caused difference, rather than anything caused by the differences in the two numbers. It’s not as though he was thinking, before seeing the figures, “If the recent sales are more than 344,439, then I’ll order 2000 lbs extra from the slaughterhouse”. The odds that he had that thought before seeing the recent sales figures are ridiculous.

Whether this mini argument is right raises issues I can’t deal with properly, so I’ll ignore the argument.

Was This Obvious All Along?

Call the argument of the previous section the zero-days argument, since it’s saying that your weekly beef purchases will cause zero days more factory farming.

The conclusion of the zero-days argument is not that buying beef is morally okay. It’s this: what you do with your ordinary meat purchases isn’t going to make any causal difference to the amount of factory farming.

Some philosophers agree with my thesis. I’m not surprised, as the zero-days argument is not exactly earth-shaking.

Maybe it should have been fairly obvious all along? To see why someone might think so, temporarily set aside CAUSE* and focus on CAUSE**.

CAUSE**. There are two possible futures in front of me. In the beef future, B, I buy a pound of beef JUST ONCE in the rest of my life. In the non-beef future, NB, I don’t buy any pound of beef or other item that uses factory farming. What we want to know is the likely difference between those two future scenarios. That is, if the two scenarios B and NB proceed under the same usual assumptions (we assume that pretty much everything is the same in both scenarios with the exception of my beef purchasing decision and its consequences), but in one scenario I buy JUST ONE pound of beef while in the other scenario I never buy any factory farming items, what are the likely differences in consequences from those two choices?

Here’s the answer: if I proceed with B instead of NB, then there will be—as a causal result of my SINGLE 1-lb beef purchase—very roughly one more day of factory farming than if I did NB.

I take it as obvious that CAUSE** is false. No one thinks that my buying just 1 lb of beef is going to lead to 1 more day of factory farming. The reason no one thinks that is we all know that the purchase is too small to cause any differences in the ranches. You would have to believe in magic to think the grocer, warehouse owner, and slaughterhouse owner are going to do anything different because you bought one freakin’ pound of beef.

And yet, as we have seen, modest weekly purchases are really not that different from the single 1-lb purchase. They’re still way too small to make a difference.

Responding to Objections

Even so, some people have objected to the thesis that your buying beef will not lead to any causal differences in the amount of factory farming. I’ll look at three of them.

OBJECTION 1: Probabilities

For this first objection, I’m going to rely on Amos Wollen’s post from Feb 04, 2025. He quotes Dustin Crummett as follows:

If we are uncertain whether the causal impotence objection succeeds, we still need to make decisions about whether to eat factory-farmed products. [...] it might seem [...] plausible to employ some sort of precautionary principle here. Such a principle would tell us that we should tend to err on the side of caution in cases where a course of action might [my emphasis] turn out to be seriously wrong. In the meat-eating case, nothing of great moral value will be lost if we refrain from eating meat: just a bit of gustatory pleasure. But it may [my emphasis] be that something very bad will be brought about if we eat meat and thereby trigger a production threshold, namely, the suffering and death of many animals, along with the other negative consequences of factory farming. Here, we might suppose that the burden is on the person who wants to run the unnecessary moral risk to show that their action is sufficiently safe.

I’m sorry but this is not an impressive argument. The main problem lies in the two emphases I provided: he uses “might” and “may”, which suggest that we’re dealing with probabilities that aren’t stupidly small. When you say you might or may buy a car soon, you don’t mean that there’s a one in a zillion chance you’ll buy a car soon. We already know that the odds that factory farming in NB is going to be less than it is in B are stupidly small. You might as well worry that your buying beef will cause WWIII.

OBJECTION 2: Adding up Zeros

Suppose that over the next few weeks, 100,000,000 pretty ordinary people in the USA increase their beef purchases by 1 lb/week. After a few weeks, there’s an extra demand of 100,000,000 lbs of beef per week. Over a year’s time, that’s about 5 billion lbs extra demand. Since the current total is about 27.5 billion/year, an extra 5 billion 1-lb purchases/year will definitely cause more factory farming.

But consider the zero-days argument I gave. I can trot that argument out for each of those 100,000,000 people. Each person fits the argument perfectly. If my zero-days argument works when applied to me, then it must work when applied to each of those people—since they’re not relevantly different. Hence, I can give 100,000,000 of my zero-days arguments to allegedly prove that there will be zero extra days of factory farming: 0 + 0 + 0 + …. But that’s clearly false. So, my zero-days argument must have been flawed.

The problem with this objection is the claim that the zero-days argument will apply to each of those people. Remember, in the zero-days argument both of these happen:

• The grocer looks at his spreadsheets and sees something like 1429 lbs/week in the B scenario and 1426.5 lbs/week in the NB scenario, since the only difference in the two comes from my beef purchases.

• The warehouse owner looks at his spreadsheets and sees something like 344,444 lbs/week in the B scenario and 344,434 lbs/week in the NB scenario, the difference coming from my grocer.

Neither of these happen in the vegan-nightmare scenario in which 100,000,000 people increase their beef purchases. So, no: the zero-days argument can’t be multiplied 100,000,000 times.

A causal claim like “If a huge group of people purchase an additional 5 billion lbs of beef per year, they’ll cause very roughly an extra 5 billion days of factory farming per year” is probably true. The grocery stores, beef warehouses, slaughterhouses, and ranches will definitely notice the differences in their spreadsheets and act quite a bit differently. But that doesn’t happen in the realistic scenario we have been examining. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been trying for realism in my zero-days argument.

OBJECTION 3: Average Impact & Not Being “Special”

Here’s Matthew Adelstein again, with one of his key premises in his argument for claims like CAUSE*:

This is a pretty general logical principle—if you have no specific information beyond the average impact, and no reason to think either your contribution will be more or less than average [my emphasis], you should expect to have the average impact. If you know that the average person rides 10 trains in their life, and you are assigned a random person who you have no information about beyond that they exist, on average, you should expect them to ride 10 trains.

Roughly put, he’s arguing for the idea that you should expect that the causal impact from your buying a pound of beef is one day of factory farming, given that (a) in order to produce X pounds of beef, we typically use X days of factory farming, and (b) you have no reason to think you’re special here.

There are a couple problems with his argument.

Problem 1. His “pretty general logical principle” includes an assumption which is usually false. I’ve put it in bold italics. In many cases, I have overwhelming, virtually conclusive evidence against the claim in bold italics.

In fact, his own train example demonstrates this quite well. If there are 8 billion people, and there are 80 billion train rides amongst those people, then of course the average number of train rides per person’s life is ten. But you’d be grossly mistaken to expect that a randomly chosen, non-special, person rides the train exactly ten times in their life. Contrary to Adelstein, that’s extremely improbable. A huge number of people have zero train rides in their life. A great many others have many hundreds or even thousands of train rides in their lives (one trip to work, one trip back home, every working day for a period of years). There’s an enormous range, and the odds that a person has exactly ten—or even, say, 7-13, is quite small.

For another example, suppose you’ve got a million people, and their combined net worth is $100,000,000,000. Then the average net worth is $100,000. The odds that a randomly chosen, non-special, person in that group has a net worth of $100,000 is extremely small. In fact, the odds are extremely small that their net worth will be even near that figure.

The problem lies in the use of “you have no reason to think you’re special here”. The person who rides the train 1234 times in their life isn’t special at all, since zillions of people ride trains very roughly that many times in their lives. The person who rides the train only 4 times in their life isn’t special either, since zillions of people ride trains about that many times in their lives. Even so, the two people are very different in their train life and far away from the statistical average.

Problem 2. Terms such as “average impact”, “expected impact”, and “expected effect” have to be interpreted carefully, and when we do it right, I don’t see that they give good reason to accept CAUSE*.

For some research modeling purposes, one can use the term “expected effect” so that the “average person” does have exactly 10 train rides in their life, to use the train example. You just do the calculation: 80,000,000,000 rides/8,000,000,000 riders = expected train rides is 10/rider. And then you use that figure in subsequent calculations.

Similarly, you do the beef calculation: 27,500,000,000 lbs/27,500,000,000 days of factory farming = expected effect of purchasing 1 lb is 1 additional day of factory farming. (The actual numbers are different, but not by much. If the “expected effect” turns out to be 0.5 days or 2.0 days, it doesn’t matter here.)

I have no objection to any of that! If using that model is helpful for some purposes, go for it. When doing science, we use idealized models all the time—and the results can be awesome. For instance, when faced with certain problems in physics, we treat electrons as point particles—and that’s a useful idealization for some but not all calculations. In formal (mathematical) epistemology, researchers often assume that each person knows all the logical consequences of each truth they know. This is a false but useful assumption. Science is littered with this kind of thing, and it’s turned out to be enormously useful. Ya gotta love scientific modeling.

But that’s a technical sense of “expected effect”. Like I already showed, the overwhelmingly likely effect is wildly different:

• Expected effect (theoretical modeling) = 1 lb beef purchase —> 1 additional day of factory farming.

• Overwhelmingly likely effect (causality) = 1 lb beef purchase —> zero additional days of factory farming.

Here’s why this matters so much:

When people worry about the ethics of their meat purchases, they are often picturing themselves in a grocery store, looking at a package of beef. They’re wondering “If I keep buying beef regularly, will it really cause about an extra day of factory farming for cows, for every pound I buy???” They are worried about causality, about the causal consequences of continuing to pick up packages of beef and buying them. They aren’t wondering about theoretical modeling.

It’s a mistake to respond to a person’s worries about the causal consequences of their meat purchases by ignoring the causal consequences of their meat purchases in order to focus on theoretical notions such as “expected effect”.

Again, I’m not saying it’s morally okay to buy meat in grocery stores. I’m not saying that at all. But I am saying this: if there is a good moral case against buying meat from your grocery store, it won’t be because buying it will increase factory farming; it will have to be based on something else.

1. In your view, does an external world exist as a collection of objects, states of affairs, or facts that are independent of perception, reason, and consciousness? Can we prove, justify, or rationally confirm the existence of the external world; if so, how exactly? Does overcoming skepticism regarding the external world hold any philosophical value or significance?

The external world existed a long time before there were any humans or aliens. If it’s “dependent” on human or alien perception, reason, or consciousness in any remotely interesting sense of “dependent”, then human or alien activity has had a backward causal influence of billions of years. I don’t think so.

Even now, with human mental activity happening, nothing but bad philosophizing suggests that the existence of the external world depends on human or alien mental activity. I don’t believe in magic. Now, if you want to slap a weird semantics on “dependent” so that “The external world depends on human or alien consciousness” comes out true, that’s fine. But I doubt that the subsequent thesis will be of any interest.

If I were a theist, then I might think the universe came into existence via God’s mental activity. That would mean the creation of the external world is straightforwardly dependent on consciousness, albeit a supernatural one. But that wouldn’t mean that the external world continuously relies on God’s mental activity for its existence. I’m not a theist, and if I were, I would be humble enough to realize I have no decent evidence regarding these issues, so I wouldn’t have any opinions on them.

Some people might say that what we’re really interested in, with (1), is whether the filing of the external world into certain categories is dependent on consciousness, perception, or reason. So, it’s not a question of the external world’s existence but of how it’s cut up into pieces.

Even so, I’m like most philosophers in thinking that the external world is cut up into various objects, those objects have various properties and relations to one another, and human or alien consciousness has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The properties of protons, stars, or quasars aren’t dependent in any way on any human or alien consciousness. No magic.

A more interesting possibility is that the existence and/or characteristics of the external world don’t depend on human, alien, or supernatural mental activity but they do depend on extremely primitive mental activity—because every object in the universe has mental characteristics. This is the idea behind panpsychism. Every bit of the external world depends on consciousness because, trivially, it depends on itself and at least some other objects, each of which has some degree of consciousness. I don’t think there’s any evidence that the mental characteristics in question are anything like our thoughts or feelings, but perhaps they count as mental anyway in some stretched sense. Philosophers of mind have explored this idea, with some endorsement.

As for the external world existing “as a collection of objects, states of affairs, or facts”, it’s difficult for me to see how that could be false, given that “object” is pretty flexible. Perhaps “event” or “gunk” (a weird term from analytic metaphysics) should have been added to the list.

Moving on to address the second question, I suppose “prove” and “justify” are pretty flexible, but under most meanings I think we cannot “prove” the existence of the external world. As far as “rationally confirm”, I think it has weak meanings so that I rationally confirm the existence of trees when I see one in ordinary circumstances, and I can then deduce “Since trees count as external, there’s an external world”. That sounds like rational confirmation of the external world.

So, I think that in any super interesting sense, no, we can’t prove or justify the existence of the external world. Many philosophers have gotten comfortable with this result, thinking it’s not a big deal, but I have not. I can prove the existence of two-headed snakes just by going on YouTube; and the inference from “There are two-headed snakes” to “There is an external world” is solid. So, one would think it’s easy to prove the existence of the external world. Philosophers rightly think this is a genuine puzzle.

For the final question, regarding overcoming skepticism about the external world, I have a mix of thoughts because I’m uncertain as to what “know” amounts to.

I suspect that “know” has a semantics that makes knowledge unimpressive on the evidence/reliable process side. That is, it doesn’t take much for a true belief to count as knowledge. The reason so many epistemologists think otherwise is due to a professional selection effect: philosophers don’t become epistemologists unless they think evidence and justification are really important. In contrast, I suspect that what really counts for the acquisition of knowledge is having a true belief; matters about evidence or warrant aren’t remotely as important. So, that thought inclines me to think that skepticism about the external world is false, since we have plenty of knowledge of external matters.

Let me try to explain this a little further.

Someone tells you that he has friends who are witches. You object that that’s silly, since there are no witches. But then he informs you that “witch” is synonymous with “a woman who is eccentric, is really into the dark arts, and identifies as a witch”. Pretend he is right: that’s what “witch” really means in contemporary English.

Since he convinced you of that linguistic matter, you now admit that in English, your friend’s remark “I have friends who are witches” is straightforwardly true even though there is no such thing as black magic. In effect, the term “witch” has a watered-down meaning so that it doesn’t take much for someone to count as a “witch”. It is watered-down compared to what you thought it was; it is a helluva lot easier to be a “witch” than you thought.

Similarly, someone might say that the term “knowledge” has a watered-down meaning so that it doesn’t take much for a belief to count as “knowledge”. Regarding what it means for it to be watered-down, the witch case is supposed to help.

So, I’m inclined to think we have knowledge of external affairs, mainly because the bar for such knowledge is pretty low. In order to have a belief that is justified enough for knowledge, it doesn’t take much. I go over these issues in chapter 1 of Can We Know Anything?, co-authored with Michael Huemer, Routledge Press, 2023.

2. What do you think about G.E. Moore’s proof of an external world and, more broadly, the Moorean counterarguments against skepticism?

Here is one way to make the Moorean Move precise enough to evaluate:

When confronted with a deductively valid argument against P (e.g., P = “Jo knows there are trees”), the Moorean thinks that there is much more justification for P than there is for the conjunction of the premises in the argument against P. So, she concludes that it’s highly probable (but not guaranteed) that at least one of the premises is false—even if she hasn’t bothered to figure out which one is false, or why it’s false.

Let’s say that the Moorean move fails when it’s not true that the justification for P is much stronger than the justification for the conjunction of the premises in the argument against P.

I think there are plenty of occasions in which the Moorean Move is highly reasonable. For instance, there’s a famous “proof” that the sum of positive integers is -1/12. It’s reasonable to conclude that there’s a false premise somewhere, even if one has no idea where it is.

For the most part, I think philosophers overestimate the epistemic significance of common sense. Many beliefs are highly commonsensical but I don’t think that means that all or most of them have loads of justification—or, more to the point, a lot more justification than premises in some anti-commonsensical arguments. Roughly put, to be commonsensical, the belief has to be practically useful, but the connection between practical usefulness and justification isn’t as tight as most of us think. The Sorites paradox, the Liar and other semantic paradoxes, the Problem of the Many, and the material composition paradoxes all show that many commonsensical beliefs are false, even if we haven’t figured out which ones (see my The Epistemic Consequences of Paradox, Cambridge University Press, 2022). Similar remarks use not philosophy but physics.

So, I’m not impressed with the Moorean Move applied to deductive skeptical arguments. And even if they didn’t fail in the sense described above, they do nothing at all to tell us which skeptical premise is false or why. So even if the Moorean Move is successful, we still have to probe the skeptic’s argument to figure out where it goes wrong. Given that we have been doing that for centuries, with no stable consensus resulting, this particular Moorean Move seems unwise to me.

3. Consider the statement, ‘There exists some planet N, located beyond the observable universe (in such a way that the existence of this planet is fundamentally impossible to confirm or refute empirically, either now or in the future), and on N there is silver’. Can this statement be considered meaningful, or is it merely a nonsensical collection of words? Does this statement possess a truth-value (i.e., either it is true or it is false), given that it cannot be empirically confirmed or refuted?

I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a meaningful sentence. It consists of perfectly good words put together to make a declarative sentence that I understand just fine. In that way, it’s similar to the famous Chomsky sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”: of course we understand its meaning just fine.

Think about “Colorless green ideas don’t exist” and “Nothing sleeps furiously”. Those are true, but in order for them to be true, they have to be meaningful. So, both “colorless green ideas” and “sleeps furiously” are actually meaningful. So, put them together and you get . . . “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.

Under a natural reading R1, the Chomsky sentence is saying that every colorless green idea sleeps furiously. Alternatively, on closely related reading R2 it’s saying that the vast majority of colorless green ideas sleep furiously. On reading R3 it’s saying that the typical or generic colorless green idea sleeps furiously. Since there aren’t any colorless green ideas, the Chomsky sentence is kind of like “People with ten heads sleep furiously” or “My brothers live in Iran” (I don’t have any brothers). In order for the Chomsky sentence to be false, under any of the three interpretive ideas R1-R3, there would have to be a colorless green idea that doesn’t sleep furiously. Since there aren’t any colorless green ideas that don’t sleep furiously (because there aren’t any at all), the sentence isn’t false. It’s true.

Alternatively, one might think that the Chomsky sentence has a false presupposition, namely, that there are colorless green ideas. Since the sentence has a presupposition, and that presupposition is false, they say that the sentence itself is not true. But even then, we know all this in part because we know the meaning of the Chomsky sentence.

I understand that question (3) is probably trying to get at some other notion of meaning, so the above reflections might be beside the point. But I don’t know what that other notion is.

4. Is skepticism about the external world exclusively a product of Early Modern European philosophy, or does it possess universal relevance?

I don’t know.

5. How do interpretations of quantum mechanics that posit consciousness as a factor in wave function collapse influence debates about the independent ontological status of the external world?

I have a Master’s degree in physics and I know full well that I’m ridiculously underqualified to have an opinion on that matter. It would be best to ignore what epistemologists say in response to that question. I would ask some of the very few people in the world who know a great deal about the philosophical issues of quantum mechanics and who are great at philosophy as well, such as Tim Maudlin.

But I can’t help myself: how on Earth are my perceptions supposed to be factors in wave function collapse? If I look at a tree, which wave functions am I collapsing? Just one? Or trillions every second? There are many simple questions here that I never see even articulated, let alone reasonably answered.

6. What is your stance on the simulation hypothesis, the idea that our world is a computer-generated construct?

I cowrote a book on skepticism, so you would think I would have something intelligent to say in response to this question. Alas, life is short and my interests in skepticism have pretty much run out! I have various things I’m strongly tempted to say in response to (6), but since I know they will be amateurish, I don’t make them public.

7. What texts would you recommend as essential reading on skepticism about the external world?

For a book I’d recommend Barry Stroud’s The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Oxford University Press, 1984. For articles, I would go with some of the entries in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, especially those for “Skepticism”, “Epistemic Closure”, “Transmission of Justification and Warrant”, and “Epistemic Contextualism”.

If you want the best book ever, then of course the book I cowrote with Michael Huemer is the obvious choice: Can We Know Anything?, Routledge Press, 2023.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

I had an illuminating conversation with a coaching client after I mentioned that the biggest events of my childhood were intellectual epiphanies. He remarked that that was really weird. I hadn’t thought about it, but of course he’s right. In general, I think you can learn a lot about someone by figuring out what they would focus on if they started to write their autobiography. Here are some samples.

• Most will write about their key relationships: mom, dad, siblings, pets, best friends, first lovers.

• Many will write about scary events: the broken arm, the car accident, the neighbor’s being shot.

• Many will write about their biggest accomplishments: the sports trophy, the academic award, the time they had sex with a model.

• Many will write about their biggest adventures: the time they camped for a month, living off the land; the two years they lived in Saudi Arabia because mom’s/dad’s job forced them to go there for a while.

• Many will write about their most intense emotional highs and lows: their first all-encompassing crush, the unbelievable heartbreak, the unexpected accomplishment.

Each of those looks fine to me. However, for me, the biggest moments are, let us say, atypical. I’ll be brief in my descriptions, since they aren’t the main point of this post.

EPIPHANY #1. I used to ask my best friend Greg how old he was. I did this probably every month for a while, even though I knew his birthday was 10 September. I did it because I had just started to be fascinated with dates and numbers. I was 5.5 at the time, and he was 4.5. In response to my question, he would hold up his hand with four fingers up and his thumb halfway up. Like so:

I saw him do this a couple times and then I found inspiration: “You’re holding your thumb that way because you’re four and half, and the thumb is for the half!”. Needless to say, this was totally false. God only knows why he held his thumb in that weird position. But I remember that event even now because it was a huge intellectual epiphany for me.

EPIPHANY #2. I remember being in my room, playing with Legos on the floor. My grandma was sitting in the corner knitting in a rocking chair, looking after me. I suddenly stood up and asked her to teach me how to count to 100. We had already learned it in school but I never paid attention so I didn’t know it. She taught me and my brain was utterly transformed. It was like an intellectual orgasm. Part of the amazement was the realization that there’s a pattern to it all, and it goes on forever. No wonder I still remember it so vividly.

EPIPHANY #3. I remember reading a science book in school that described the atomic theory of matter, suitably simplified for kids. I was shocked at the idea that everything in the universe is made of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. (Never mind that that’s not exactly true.) The mere universality of the claim struck me as crazily illuminating.

EPIPHANY #4. I remember taking geometry in my sophomore year in high school, as that was what was available. We were doing proofs in Euclidian geometry, and I just wasn’t understanding the concept at all. On one day, the teacher—who was simply wonderful—gave each kid a theorem to prove. We had to then go up to his desk so that he could evaluate our proofs one on one, privately. I put together a shitty proof and presented it to him. He immediately said it was no good and proceeded to show me how to work it out, in the process of brainstorming. Honestly, it was like a nuclear explosion in my head.

This is easily one of the key moments of my life. To be honest, it was much more important than losing my virginity, for instance.

A couple months later I got in trouble on Christmas because when I was supposed to be cleaning the living room before guests arrived, I was working on a proof of a particularly tough theorem. I turned into a freakin’ proof machine in that math class. For instance, I once got 163% right on an exam, because I did all the extra credit problems at the end of the exam. Not kidding.

EPIPHANY #5. When I took Calculus in high school I ignored the assignments and just did every single problem in the book that had an answer listed in the book’s appendix. I did way more problems than necessary, even though I skipped a bunch that the teacher assigned (the ones that didn’t have answers in the back of the book). I wanted to know if I had done the problem correctly right away, so that’s why I chose the problems answered in the back. This went on for months, and it was my main activity in life. Everything else in my life—family, friends, and so on—paled in comparison.

EPIPHANY #6. In college I studied physics but eventually took a philosophy of religion course. I was stunned to learn that people actually thought about the evidence regarding religious claims—and they evaluated it both fairly and with an open mind. That struck me as absolutely insane, in comparison to anything I had encountered in my life up to then. I have a vivid memory of walking back to my dorm after that philosophy class, muttering to myself as I went through the arguments that had gripped me. I must have looked like a real nutjob to everyone who saw me.

EPIPHANY #7. In college I read a little about the epistemological issues about sense perception, was introduced to the concept of strict solipsism, and was completely flabbergasted. I remember trying incredibly hard to think of ways to independently verify sense perception, but failing over and over again. At one point when I was home visiting my parents, I went into the den to watch sports with my dad, and I wondered—for real—whether he truly existed or was just a stable illusion. It was an unsettling experience, to say the least.

But what about my friendships, lovers, and so on? Wouldn’t I mention them in my autobiography?

Well, most of them strike me as mere details. Yes, they were important. But in the narrative of my life, they don’t stand out as important compared to the intellectual epiphanies. There are a few exceptions: my kids, and my romantic experiences in New York, and Hong Kong, but that’s about it.

I suspect that for some people, who value close relationships over everything else, their autobiography would put those relationships front and center. For an elite athlete, who became a professional, it would be the key events in their training and education in their sport—plus the key victories and defeats. For an artist, it might be some of her most inspired moments of creativity.

As a game to be played with friends or family members, it would be cool for each of them to try to guess what you would emphasize if you started on your autobiography now. And then the focus for the game would go from person to person, around the room. But it would take courage to play this game, since our failures and embarrassments are sure to be things we would be tempted to put in our honest autobiographies.

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

There has been a lot of recent posts and notes on Substack regarding whether claims about miracles have decent backing evidence. I thought I’d weigh in.

The overall reasons so many philosophers are highly skeptical about claims about miracles are two.

• First, some of them are irrationally wedded to kinds of secularism that rule out miracles.

• Second, some of them have looked at the evidence for some miracles, judged it to be meager, and grown tired of bothering to address the topic anymore.

In my experience, more people are in group 2 than in group 1. You can fight over the percentages, but that’s something I don’t care about. Theists can rant about the irrationality of non-theists, and non-theists can rant about the irrationality of theists. Both ranters are right, as there are irrational people in both camps, but it doesn’t do much to settle the issue of whether the evidence for miracles is any good.

I am in group 2. But unlike many philosophers, I respect those who take seriously the case for miracles. Being open-minded about this is different, I think, in being open-minded about astrology, say (which is stupid). Yes, plenty of people who believe in miracles are suckers who let motivated reasoning rule their opinions. True enough. But that doesn’t mean everyone who believes in miracles is a moron. Neither does it mean there are no miracles.

Let’s go over four reasons why so many people like me are skeptical about reports of miracles.

One reason for being in group 2 is this: a colossal number of people are incredibly poor at reasoning, observing, and/or communicating. People with high IQs often radically underestimate this negative capacity of humans—especially if they hang out with smart people most of the time.

A second reason for being in group 2 is this: people lie or exaggerate a colossal number of times. Once again, high-IQ people underestimate this. In particular, people who care a lot about accuracy and truth radically underestimate it. I used to be one of those people. You don’t appreciate this unless you’ve spent a lot of time outside of intellectual circles. If you’re under 30 years old, forget it. You don’t have enough life experience.

A third reason for being in group 2 is more interesting than the first two: people are awful at dealing with probability judgments. Something genuinely highly improbable happens, it has the aura of being appropriately divine, and people jump to religious conclusions. Again, smart people significantly underestimate how often these evidentially hasty judgments occur. They also underestimate how epistemically poor the judgments can get. Sometimes it’s truly as bad as hearing a door slam, with no wind detected, and then the person concludes there are ghosts slamming doors. Other times, it’s not anywhere near as foolish. But if you understand how probabilities apply to ordinary life, then you won’t be fooled.

In brief, a zillion things happen to you every day, and the odds are very high that eventually bizarrely odd couplings are going to happen. For instance, a person is taking their morning shower and the thought hits them that their father is in trouble, even though he’s never had troubles before. Sure enough, he was in trouble that very morning! Obviously, that’s a highly improbable coupling of events 1 and 2: event 1 is thinking dad’s in trouble, and event 2 is dad’s really being in trouble. Even so, it’s virtually guaranteed that weird shit like that is going to happen to you. It’s like flipping a coin a trillion times. It’s virtually guaranteed that you’re eventually going to get ten heads in a row, at some point. Anyone looking at you during that time is going to conclude that the coin isn’t “fair”. It must be unbalanced in some way, they say. But no, it’s not. If you flip a coin enough times, weird but random shit will happen.

Similarly, if you live long enough, weird but random shit will happen. You have all sorts of thoughts all day, most of which occur over just a few seconds and then you forget all about them. Virtually none of them are remarkable. But if you live long enough, then of course weird, improbable couplings will happen. In fact, it’s kind of a giveaway that elderly people typically have the most claims of alleged miracles. They have had so many more experiences, and thoughts, than younger people that the odd couplings happen more often to them.

So, it is very highly probable that highly improbable couplings or other events are going to happen to you—even if it’s happening randomly. Some of them are going to have the aura of being divine, simply because they fit one of the molds you’ve heard about. The mere great numbers guarantee it. Hence, we don’t need gods for there to be events that look exactly like miracles.

A fourth reason for being in group 2, the miracle-skeptics, strikes me as more interesting than the first three because it has been around for only a couple decades. It’s this: if there were miracles occurring nowadays, then we would have excellent video evidence of them. (I actually made this point in a Substack note months ago, but it didn’t generate any discussion because people weren’t getting upset about miracles back then.) If people levitate, predict the future, perform telekinesis, grow new legs, or whatever, then given that for years now most people have phones equipped with cameras in most populated places on Earth, we would have a great many excellent videos of those miracles—videos just as good as the ones we see every day on YT, IG, and so on. But that didn’t happen. And nowadays? Well, with the AI tools, it’s hard to believe new videos anyway—for good reason.

As you might expect, some believers in miracles will respond by saying that miracles are really rare now, so we don’t have video of them—even though there are far, far more people around today than in centuries past. How convenient. If these people are clever, they will invent reasons to support their view. “You see, God doesn’t want to reveal himself explicitly, so he just gives hints”. Uh huh, okay. The reasons offered for the quoted claim are never terribly impressive.

Look, none of the above says that miracles don’t occur. None of it even faintly suggests that all beliefs in miracles are foolish or not based on evidence. But it does explain why so many educated people are highly skeptical about stories about miracles.

In most cases one acquires the pro-religious belief B (e.g., “God really exists”, “Jesus really came back from the dead”, “Muhammad spoke with an angel”) via testimony when one is young, where (i) the testimony comes from people one would regard as one’s superiors on the matter (for one thing, they are adults and you are a child at the time) and (ii) one learns pretty quickly that a great many adults have that belief B. It is usually later that one learns of people who disbelieve B, and this realization typically has several distinct stages.

• Stage 1. One learns that there are other religions—ones that differ from one’s own.

• Stage 2. One learns that these other religions have different beliefs: whereas mine has beliefs B1 and B2, that other one has beliefs B3 and B4. Note that stage 1 and stage 2 are different stages: there could be religions that differed in numerous significant ways but had the same beliefs. (In fact, I suspect that many people don’t consider beliefs to be central to religions.)

• Stage 3. One learns that the other religion denies what one’s own religion affirms: we think their B3 is false and they think our B1 is false. So, finally, the person becomes aware of religious disagreement as such: we can’t all be right in our religious beliefs, so someone is wrong.

• Stage 4. One proceeds to the crucial “Wait a minute” realization, which can be expressed this way:

Wait a minute. There are loads of religions out there: dozens and dozens if you separate different kinds of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. They can’t all be right: they conflict in many ways. If the Catholics are right about X, then the Muslims are wrong about X and the Buddhists are so far off it’s almost funny. How do I know my religion, the one I’ve grown up with, is the right one? I think Mohammad spoke with an angel and Jesus was just a man, not a supernatural god. But lots of other people say those beliefs are false. We can’t both be right! Of all the dozens of religious views out there, how do I know I’ve managed to latch on to the right one? Is it okay [prudentially? morally? epistemically?] for me to just have faith or hope that I’ve got the true one?

These stages of intellectual maturity might all occur in one conversation, but then again their unfolding might occur over a span of a decade or more. How long it takes depends on the child’s intellectual sophistication and curiosity, as well as the promptings of the people she talks with.

Even at stage 3, the problem of religious disagreement might not arise with much force in one’s consciousness. A great many religious people will acknowledge that there are hundreds of millions of people who think the central tenets of their religion are false, but no real reaction goes along with that knowledge. They don’t pause to think about it at all.

What should be obvious: this has nothing specifically to do with religion. Some of one’s political and moral opinions are subject to the same sequence of stages.

If my students are at all representative (at universities in five countries), then the “Wait a minute” stage 4 of awareness is uncommon. For what it’s worth, when I teach the topic I encounter a significant percentage of students who by their behavior and facial expressions have clearly not reached stage 4 even though they have managed to reach stage 3. To put the point unkindly: just because the challenge of religious disagreement has been served on silver platter does not mean that people will catch a whiff of it.

Here is another way to think about the topic, one that might be more vivid:

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Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

Here is the highly common situation, call it TYPICAL, I want to focus on, which applies to many people I know.

1. They spend a large amount of money on things such as these: concert tickets, comedy shows, and similar entertainment items; extra shoes and other clothes; movies; sporting events; many decorations in the home; extra furniture; extra kitchen supplies; restaurants; collections of books or art or jewelry or watches or similar items; Spotify or something similar; streaming services such as ESPN, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+; video or virtual reality games; bathroom or basement remodels, room expansions, and similar large projects in the home; extra cosmetics and similar items; vacations; gym memberships, fitness classes, personal trainers, and related items; new phones, headphones, and other tech; cleaning services; and so on.

2. They know that spending money in that way has benefits for themselves and their loved ones.

3. Because they’re smart and well-informed, they know that they could use that money to benefit strangers who are much poorer or otherwise much less fortunate than they are.

4. Because they’re smart and well-informed, they know that the strangers in question would benefit from that money much, much more than they and their loved ones do. For instance, giving the gift of sight is actually quite cheap in many cases, and it would be child’s play for many of us to pay for it for literally dozens of people. Of course, this is just one illustration; there is a great variety and number of ways to donate money to do amazing good for strangers.

5. They plan on continuing to spend the money in (1) instead of using it to help the poor.

There is absolutely no accusation here, either moral or psychological. In no place am I going to argue or even faintly suggest that you should, morally, give up most of the category (1) expenses and use that money to help the poor. Instead, the TYPICAL situation merely invites the Reasons Question, RQ, “What are your reasons for spending money on the things listed in (1) instead of helping the poor?”.

The point of answering RQ is to increase one’s knowledge. That’s all.

For instance, some of us are guilty of moral hypocrisy: we say and believe principles that obviously require us to not spend all that money on category (1) stuff, but we do it anyway, year after year. Or, maybe we realize, after doing this exercise, that our moral principles are quite different from what we thought they were. Or, maybe we see that some of our loved ones are moral hypocrites, or have moral principles quite different from our own. Or, maybe we learn that when it comes to big questions regarding morality and the poor, we have been sleepwalking through life, doing things in a clueless, unreflective manner.

In any case, it’s been instructive for me to go through the exercise, and I recommend it for others.

Typical Responses & Their Evaluation

You don’t have to have much life experience to know full well that most people in TYPICAL will react in a defensive manner to RQ. That usually comes from an implicit assumption they have that the “right” thing to do in TYPICAL is spend a lot less money on the items in (1) and use that saved money to help the poor.

Again, I’m not saying that that’s actually the right thing to do. On the contrary, just because someone feels guilty for something doesn’t mean that they are actually guilty for that thing. For what it’s worth, my own moral views are weird and, because they are of course so incredibly subtle and sophisticated, resist summary (joke).

Let’s articulate 16 of the usual responses to the RQ, with short evaluative remarks.

1: “Ethics is all about taking care of your own tribes, not total strangers”.

A reasonable response to the RQ. I know most people will object to it, but I won’t. If that’s one’s view, then one isn’t guilty of any moral hypocrisy in this situation.

2: “We should spend the money on other issues, such as climate change, factory farming, education, healthcare, or something else”.

Fair enough. As with the previous response, I know some people will object to it, but I won’t. If you give up most of the category (1) expenses and devote that money to these other causes, you’re amazing. You’re also incredibly rare.

3: “Ummm, I’m poor too. Seriously, I live in a shit apartment and I barely make ends meet. The vast majority of stuff in (1) is a joke to me, as I can’t afford it”.

Yet another reasonable response to the RQ. You have my sympathy too, as I’ve been in those circumstances multiple times in my life. Most people who read this aren’t anywhere near that poor: they spend a lot of money on category (1) items.

4: “This is old news. People have been badgering us to give to the poor forever”.

True enough. One reason RQ doesn’t go away is that it makes so many of us think we aren’t doing near enough to help the poor. The RQ might not be trendy right now, depending what social circles you’re in, but if you allow trends to dictate your moral code, then you’ve got other problems.

5: “But when does it end? How much am I supposed to give away? Am I supposed to give until I’m practically homeless?”

On the one hand, this is a deep, difficult question: how much does morality demand of us, when it comes to helping those in much less fortunate circumstances? But we need to keep in mind what RQ is actually saying.

It’s asking why you spend money on the things listed in (1) only. That’s it. It says nothing about your rent or mortgage payment for instance. Or your support to your financially strapped mother, brother-in-law, or other relative. It doesn’t say anything about the college expenses for your kids. Or your car payment. It’s actually quite limited in scope.

It targets expenses that, roughly put, (a) you can end pretty easily and (b) are for items that are clearly non-essential. For instance, it’s hard to get rid of your mortgage payment. You can do so of course, by selling your home and finding a less expensive housing situation, but that’s a big deal. In contrast, cancelling Netflix or Spotify, not going through with the bathroom remodel, forgoing new clothes, not buying a new phone, skipping your next vacation, going to restaurants only on very special occasions, and so on, are easy to do and concern obvious non-essentials. RQ is asking why you don’t stop those expenses and use the money to help others who are far, far less fortunate.

Giving up those expenses isn’t going make you destitute, homeless, or anything remotely like that.

Regarding the more philosophical question raised by the response—“How much should we give?”—the person in TYPICAL agrees that they are morally obligated to support their family members, even though there’s no easily known answer to “How much am I obligated to give them?” Even without that answer, they admit that they have moral obligations to do at least some things for their family members. So, just because we don’t know the answer to “How far am I supposed to go in my support?” doesn’t prevent us from knowing that you have to give some support.

6: “So, what do you do, Bryan Frances? Do you practice what you preach? Probably not!”

It would be easy to pass over this response to RQ as irrelevant, but pursuing it does lead to an important wrinkle.

First, I’m not preaching anything. Again, there’s no moral accusation here. In fact, I’ve already allowed that one might not be guilty of anything in continuing to not give to the poor—provided the responses in 1-3 apply to you. All we have in this post is a request for an answer to a question—and I’ve already granted that some answers are fine and indicate nothing like moral hypocrisy, other moral fault, or anything else bad.

Second, this reaction to RQ is clearly just a diversion in almost all cases. The person faced with the RQ feels attacked, realizes that the attack is serious, and so they react in such a way as to avoid the issue entirely. This will be true for most of the responses I examine below too.

Third, we have the wrinkle I promised. On the one hand, I do pay for Spotify, the New York Times, and Netflix. I also often have a gym membership, and I go to maybe three or four movies a year. So, yeah: I have some of the category (1) expenses. But on the other hand, I don’t live anywhere or own much of anything anymore (e.g., no house, apartment, car, furniture, and so on). So, I have no rent or mortgage payment, no car payment, no home improvement projects, and basically no room for acquiring material possessions, since I have no home at all. To a certain extent, I justify my Spotify and other category (1) expenses by not having any of the much bigger expenses so many others have.

7: “Poor people won’t use the money well”.

First off, neither will you. If the poor people want to use some of your money to smoke weed and get a PlayStation, so what? You smoke weed and have a PlayStation! Or something similar anyway. You spend money on plenty of stupid shit. So, that’s not exactly a great excuse for not helping the poor.

Second and more importantly, for the most part, the poor will use the money to pay for essential bills.

Third, this reaction to RQ usually is just another diversionary tactic. Often enough, the person in TYPICAL searches for an excuse, no matter how weak, to avoid the issue. Saying that poor people will just use the money for drugs or alcohol or similar items is a classic case of diversion. Again, most poor people won’t do that.

Fourth, you can use your monetary contribution as you see fit, at least sometimes. I recently did that with someone. It wasn’t that hard. It’s easier to control your contributions when they are in your own community.

8: “Poor people need to pull themselves up. There are plenty of opportunities for them to do so. If you remain poor for years and years, it’s your own fault”.

Well, this is false for a great many poor people. Yes, it is true for some, but it’s false for zillions. We can argue all day about the percentages, but it’s obvious that an enormous number of poor people are not guilty of laziness or anything similar.

9: “The government and rich people should do it, not me”.

The idea behind this response is that the government of wealthy countries and rich people should, morally, do a lot but people in my situation need not, even though we do spend a fair amount of money on the items in (1).

Maybe the first part is true: richer governments and people have a moral obligation to do quite a bit. Let’s assume it is. That hardly means the people in TYPICAL are off the hook. On the face of it, a part of the reason rich people should do something for the poor is because it’s so easy for them that they won’t miss the money that much, and they know how to go about it too. But that’s true for you too, with your streaming services, restaurants, vacations, yoga classes, and similar expenses.

Oddly enough, if the rich person has the moral obligation, then those of us who have a lot of the expenses in (1) have the moral obligation too—and for the very same reason.

By the way, I know that people like to raise some of these moral issues with the drowning-child-in-a-pond thought experiment. I am against that technique. It encourages people to just debate things purely philosophically instead of taking action or evaluating their actual behavior. You probably haven’t actually encountered the drowning child case but you know all about the very real plight of the poor, both in distant countries and in your own community. You are probably spending money on category (1) stuff nearly every day, and yet you also know of the poor. The TYPICAL situation is about as real as it can get; the drowning child thing is a mere thought experiment.

10: “There are always going to be millions of poor people. My money will never make the slightest dent in that problem”.

The person in TYPICAL isn’t supposed to put a dent in the global problem of poverty. That’s silly. You can literally choose just one family to support. It’s not hard. This response is just diversion again.

11: “Giving money to the poor almost always involves putting money in the pockets of politicians, warlords, or other people who don’t need it”.

12: “Giving money to charitable organizations is often counterproductive, as it ends up not making poor people better off, collectively and in the long run”.

13: “Giving money to places in poor areas of Africa or wherever is totally uncertain. We have no real way of knowing where that money goes or how it’s actually spent”.

You can bypass politicians, warlords, and others by supporting people in your own community, or nearby communities. And you can specify how the money is used. I’ve done it multiple times. Problem solved.

But let’s suppose for a moment that you live in the USA, UK, or continental Europe and decide you want to give money to a charity organization somewhere in Africa, where you have no ties whatsoever. Let’s also suppose that a portion of your money ends up in the pockets of obviously rich or corrupt people.

So what? If $1000 of my contribution ends up in some scumbag’s hands, probably $4000 ends up in the hands of poor people. The extra money isn’t going to keep the scumbag afloat. But the extra money for the poor people can be a really big, life changing deal.

It might take you a week to work out some efficient ways to use that money to do good in Africa, but it’s not as though you need to find the best or error-free way to do it. Forget finding the best or error-free way of doing almost anything in life! It wouldn’t be difficult to use the extra money in a way that produces a stunning increase in well-being of the poor compared to how you would use it on yourself or loved ones.

But as I said above, one simple solution here, if you’re bothered by the issues raised in 11-13, is to direct your money in other ways.

14: “Some of those expenditures are actually crucial for my career, my most important projects in life, or my mental health”.

Really? Netflix? ESPN? A personal trainer? A vacation? Seriously?

Even if for some reason some of the category (1) expenses are super important for you (e.g., your profession requires you to be in amazing physical condition, so a gym membership and personal trainer are needed), the vast majority of them aren’t. If you think you “need” another vacation, regular trips to restaurants, or new pairs of shoes, then you’re just wrong. Grow up; stop deluding yourself.

15: “I already give 10% of my income, which is quite a bit more than what most people do”.

16: “If I gave away that money, it would be unfair, since almost no one else in my position will do so”.

What’s important here? (i) The unfairness of different contributions or (ii) the lives of the poor? If you forgo most of the expenses in (1) in favor of giving that money to the poor, then yeah: there’s a new unfairness in the world, since you’re giving up more than most people. Then again, you will be making a colossal difference to some people’s lives. Consider which is more significant.

*****

For what it’s worth, I think most of us in TYPICAL are tempted to endorse moral ideas that say we are being seriously immoral by sticking with TYPICAL. One response is to just admit the hypocrisy and continue to live with it. Another is to change one’s ways. Yet another is to conclude that morality isn’t at all what you thought it was, and you really aren’t under any obligation to help the poor.

So, what’s the upshot?

There isn’t one. Again, the point of the exercise is to see what your response to RQ is—and what it says about you, your character, moral code, and so on.