gistfile1.txt

This is just some extended material for a blog post I'm writing. I figure not
everyone is interested in this stuff, so consider this a sort of appendix. It
describes what I was working on at the Ph.D programme I was on before I quit a
few weeks back.

Plantinga is a Christian philosopher who pioneered an approach to philosophy
of religion which has come to be called "reformed epistemology". Reformed
epistemology basically says that you are justified in believing in God even if
you don't have arguments, because believing in God is properly basic. There's
sort of two versions of reformed epistemology, the early Plantingan reformed
epistemology, and then the 'warrant'-based reformed epistemology. I was
working on the latter one.

Plantinga's basic argument works a bit like this: philosophers have tried to
come up with accounts of what exactly counts as having knowledge, but all
their accounts fail in some way. Plantinga comes up with some pretty
sophisticated counter-examples showing why they fail which I won't go into.
For the sake of argument, let's grant Plantinga's argument that all the
existing accounts suck. (Obviously, my research was going to look into whether
or not you can salvage any of the accounts from Plantinga's arguments.) Now,
says Plantinga, I have an alternative: an account of how we have knowledge
that isn't subject to the sort of complaints I have about the other accounts.
That account is that you have knowledge if and only if your cognitive
faculties are *actually working* in the environment for which they are
designed. It's a bit more complicated than that, but basically it captures the
fairly plausible intuition that to know things our brains have to work
properly. Malfunctioning brains, like malfunctioning CPUs, tend to produce
unreliable results.

But what exactly does it mean to say that one cognitive system is working and
another isn't working? With computers and cars and so on, we can define this
pretty functionally. I could probably sit down and write a test to see whether
my computer is functioning properly. Something like Xbench, perhaps. But to do
the same for my brain is hard. Plantinga jumps at this point: aha, God!
Naturalists—philosophy-speak for atheists, basically—don't really have a good
explanation for this proper function stuff, so, to quote Nigel Molesworth,
"yar boo sucks", followed by "come to Jesus". If you are a theist, you can 
appeal to the great divine design plan.

Now, as one of those ghastly atheists, I'm not that happy with this argument.
First of all, the proper function stuff seems intuitively plausible, but
unless it can be cashed out, it is just an intuition. I'm also not that happy
that the talk of design plans really gets us much. In non-biological examples,
the reason my computer doesn't work isn't because some aspect of the product
fails to match the "design plan" in my head or Jony Ive's head or whoever.
It's because the RAM is burnt out or the hard drive has failed or whatever.
Plus there's lots of other stuff that it doesn't really account for: for
instance, human beings have this rather good ability to modify their own
bodies and even our minds to do stuff better. The Olympics is on at the
moment, and you can watch people who have through extensive training and hard
work modified their bodies to swim or dive or swing on parallel bars or run or
cycle or whatever.

Well, we do the same with our own brains. Scientists have looked into the
brains of people who have practiced particular cognitive tasks. London cabbies
do The Knowledge and rewire their brains in ways to make that kind of spatial
awareness easier to do. There is research into using this kind of neural
malleability to train those recovering from addictions like alcoholism to
literally have a less addictive brain.

To plug away at Plantinga's theory, there's also the little issue of what
exactly 'proper function' means in terms of relationships between individuals
and groups. Sociobiological research has given us examples of species which
act in ways that do not maximize individual reproductive fitness in order to
give group or kin benefit. Think of worker ants, or indeed the hypothesis that
homosexuality exists to provide extra non-reproducing child carers, or plenty
of other similar examples. Something that looks like a 'problem' at an
individual level can have other roles as part of wider systems. It may just be
that our intuitions about proper function are pre-scientific folk concepts
that don't actually match up with the complexity of the world that biological
science reveals.