Transcendental Arguments (4 of 10) – Contemporary Transcendental Arguments, Part 1

[00:00] Everybody back on this, our second day of a seminar on transcendental arguments. I began yesterday with the opening salvo that I believe that the existence of God is objectively provable. And then I took that and started to do an analysis and to try to qualify and explain what I’m getting at. And we took a while to talk about the notion of proof. When I say objectively provable, what am I getting at?

[00:27] by a proof that is objective, not interested in the man or the source of opinion or how people personally respond and so forth. We’re talking about proof, not persuasion. We’re recognizing the difference between metaphysics, what is the case, and epistemology, how people think and what they believe and how they know and things of that nature. And then after we discussed the notion of proof, we began to look at the kinds of proofs that would be available. The cosmological proof was taken as our stalking horse, and I said the cosmological proof is bad as a proof. It’s really bad philosophically as proof. However, there is something to that, this notion of causation, that if you go back and now do a transcendental analysis of it, does turn out to be, I think, a very strong proof of the existence of God.

[01:19] And so now we have the notion of transcendental proof. We talked in our early discussion of proofs about rational proofs, rationalistic, empirical or empiricalistic proofs, pragmatic proofs, and then transcendental. After we introduced Van Til, both of the easy illustration from Why I Believe in God, and then going to his first syllabus, more technically precise, his philosophical description of transcendental argument, we went back and looked at the history of philosophy to put Immanuel Kant in context.

[01:54] reason for that is that Kant’s the one who in the modern world has brought such attention to this idea of transcendental analysis or argumentation. So we studied the continental rationalist briefly and the British empiricist and we saw that they both for all their differences end up with the same problem. Kant was scandalized by that and suggested a program for answering the problem or solving the problem. I don’t believe Kant solved the problem but I do believe that the program, what he tried to do, his strategy was the right strategy. And so at the end of yesterday’s session, I tried to put modern epistemological approaches into context for you. I said epistemology is stimulated by the skeptic’s challenge. The skeptic says rationality itself is not justified.

[02:41] And then there are all sorts of differences among epistemologists, no doubt about that. But the way in which you respond to skepticism is going to fall into one of three schools of thought, at least in the 20th century, and I don’t think anybody’s going to be creative enough to come up with something that doesn’t fit this pattern. You’re either going to be a foundationalist, you’re going to argue, well, there are some things which are indubitable, be they logical or conceptual, perceptual or a matter of common sense, or you’re going to kind of skirt this whole thing and say, we’re not going to try to argue this way, we’ll be pragmatic about it, Let us talk about what is fruitful and brings success, or what is the model of science, the most rational way to approach things.

[03:21] Or finally, you’re going to be transcendental in your analysis or response to skepticism. And the transcendentalist, as you know, the heart of that is to say the skeptic can’t even formulate his argument without denying what he’s trying to prove. And so foundationalism, pragmatism, transcendental analysis are the three responses to skepticism, and that’s what I left you with yesterday.

[03:44] Now, after we were done, because Randy’s staying with me, we get to have extended conversations about all this. Randy ran past me and said, Now, let me just give you, this is the summary by Bubba, right? I’m stealing his thunder.

[04:01] Randy, when he speaks with me at our apologetics conference on Van Til, he follows me and then he makes fun of me by saying, Now I’m going to explain it for Bubba. But anyway, Bubba gave me his boil down of yesterday’s presentation. I thought it was so much better than what I said. I thought I’ll let Randy give you this summary. I think those of you who are struggling a bit yesterday will appreciate. I’m going to let Randy give it in his words, and then we’re going to turn things over to Mike. Go ahead.

[04:29] As a pastor, a lot of times I think about how Mike presents this material when I get back home to the congregation.

[04:38] and what I did in the summary was not just or I did not cover the issues relating to what Dr. Van Til is going to present because we’re going to be going into more detail with that but what was new to me not being a philosophy student were the things that were mentioned regarding autonomous philosophy and how they’ve gone about trying to answer the big questions and just again this is just a summary of every a lot of which Mr. Dr. Bahnsen just covered but the four general kinds of reasoning that autonomous man has offered to these problems are the rationalist, the empiricist, the pragmatist, and then the transcendental argument. And those are the four attempts made to offer proof for understanding our experience in the world that we live in. The problem with all of those with unbelieving thought, and to me this is the key point that’s going to give us our breakdown, is that he always starts with himself. And when he starts with himself, autonomous man reasoning leads them in a vicious circle dr Van Til i believe said that all reasoning is circular reasoning the problem with autonomous reasoning is that it reasons in a vicious circle it starts with man and it always has to end with man and since it ends with man that led us to the themes that we kept hearing yesterday and that is we’re left with subjectivism that is that we’re left with really each man has his own opinion about understanding reality and since that’s true There’s no authoritative opinion. You have yours. I have mine. Each man has his own position that lead to skepticism.

[06:12] We really can’t know anything for sure. And so from that, there were three attempts to answer skepticism. That is the foundationalist attempts to answer the pragmatist and the transcendentalist seeks to provide a foundation or an answer to the skeptic.

[06:30] And again, one other key point that to me was important for us to remember as we deal with Dr. Van Til is that Kant, who’s the transcendentalist, was asking the right questions. He just didn’t get the right answers. And the reason he didn’t get the right answers is he made the same mistake the others did. He started with man. He started with autonomous man and seeking to find the preconditions for intelligibility. And so what’s going to happen here with Dr. Van Til is going to say, we’ve got the right question. Now, let’s have a difference point. We’re not going to start with autonomous man. So I hope that provides some hook to go with here in understanding why we want to consider the transcendental argument.

[07:15] Well, this morning I’ve been asked to address the issue of contemporary development and transcendental arguments. And I know I shouldn’t start off like this, but I have to warn you that it’s going to be a bit difficult. I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible, and probably we’ll need Randy to come back tomorrow and explain it again better than I did. But hopefully we could pick up something from the contemporary debate and apply it to Van Tilian transcendental arguments and see how they affect, how the current debate affects our view of transcendental arguments, Van Til’s view of transcendental arguments, and see if in any way the criticisms leveled against contemporary transcendental arguments apply to Van Tilian transcendental arguments.

[07:56] Now, let me just give you the layout of the land as we approach the issue of contemporary transcendental arguments. And I should explain what I mean by contemporary transcendental arguments are those that have been prevalent in the philosophical literature for the last 50 years or so. So within the last 50 years, there’s been somewhat, actually 40 years is more close to the number. But in the last 40 years, there’s been a resurgence in philosophy in interest of transcendental arguments.

[08:20] Now, most philosophers to date don’t believe that transcendental arguments are any good. The majority in American and British philosophy is that transcendental arguments are somehow spurious in one way or the other. But there have been some proponents who have tried to make a resurgence of transcendental arguments in order to rebuff the skeptic. That’s an important insight that you have to realize to understand the contemporary debate.

[08:44] Most contemporary transcendental arguments are used to rebuff the skeptic challenge to certain types of issues. The skeptic comes up and says, how do you know that that chair over there is real? How do you know you’re not seeing an illusion? Or how do you know that’s just not a sense impression that your mind is reconstructing? And so philosophers have traditionally tried to refute the skeptic. Modern philosophers have used transcendental arguments to try to rebuff those type of skeptical considerations.

[09:11] Modern philosophy, as Dr. Bahnsen started off yesterday explaining, is very narrow in its outlook. And so that explains partly why transcendental arguments aren’t that prevalent today. Most philosophers try to break down the field into narrower and narrower and narrower portions, forgetting the whole picture, or their excuse is, well, we can’t make sense of these big issues until we make sense of these little issues. And so because transcendental arguments typically take on major issues, most modern philosophers, at least analytical philosophers, don’t have any interest at all in them.

[09:43] Let me give you an example. I have a friend going to the University of California, and he’s studying with a professor who has an interest, and his only interest in philosophy, in the philosophy of language, which basically asks, what is meaning? How do words refer to the world? How does language work? Questions like that. And his professor is not just interested in that narrow field of philosophy, but he’s interested in one particular question within that narrow field. He’s interested in a topic called direct reference, how do words refer to objects?

[10:13] My friend says that if you ask him questions in other fields of logic or other fields of philosophy, he just has no interest in it. And so he is probably an example of how philosophers have become very pedantic and narrow in their focus, but he’s representative in the sense that philosophers aren’t interested in the big question. So that explains to some degree why a lot of modern philosophers aren’t interested in transcendental arguments.

[10:35] The one thing that should strike us is that if transcendental arguments are so powerful, as Van Til and Dr. Bahnsen maintain, why is it that there’s at least not more philosophers interested in them? And to answer that question is going to take up the bulk of our time. I’m going to give you some philosophers who have thought that they do work and then give you the reasons why other philosophers, the majority perhaps, think that they are not good arguments at all.

[11:01] Now, before I get into the details, let me please encourage you to ask questions and stop me as we go along. I know Dr. Bahnsen brought this up yesterday, But some of the stuff we’re going to get into is quite honestly difficult. And so if I say a word that you have no idea what it means, stop me and interrupt me and we’ll trace our steps backwards and explain it hopefully better.

[11:20] Before we get into the contemporary debate, we need to understand some background information in order to take full advantage or to really come to grips with what’s going on today. In order to understand modern transcendental arguments, you have to understand what a conceptual scheme is. Most modern transcendental arguments take the form of arguing that certain types of concepts are necessary for our conceptual scheme. So the first question we have to ask before we get into the debate is, what is a conceptual scheme? I put here that a conceptual scheme is that scheme through which we interpret our experience, and it’s our conceptual resources that we bring into our experience. A conceptual scheme is a scheme through which we interpret our experience, bringing to bear on our experience our conceptual resources.

[12:10] Now, that’s not going to be too helpful until I give you some illustrations. There’s not one in this room, but let’s pretend that there was a box right here that was made of wood with a glass in front of it with silver knobs and a black wire coming from the back and hooking into the wall. Now, what would we all think of that box? Well, I don’t know if I’m describing it well enough, that I’m describing a television. If we came into this room and saw what I described, we would immediately conceive of that object as a television.

[12:38] And the reason is we’ve lived in the Western world, we’ve had interaction with modern technology, and so we bring certain concepts to bear on our experience. We have certain types of ways of understanding and interpreting the world around us. What would happen if we brought an Aborigine from Australia who’s never had contact with any Westerner and saw the same thing we did? You’d say it as a Michael way? Well, what would he think of it? Let me ask you a trick question. Would he say the same thing that we did? No? Okay. Yes, he wouldn’t. Right.

[13:11] The answer is yes and no. He would have, as philosophers call, the same phenomenological experience in the sense that the brown on the wood, we’d see the glass, the shimmering glass, we’d see the silver knobs on the front, and he would have the same phenomenological experience. in the sense that he would see the same thing we would. The difference isn’t that we have different biological and perceptual apparatus than he does. Basically, we’re hooked up the same. If his perceptual apparatuses are operating properly, then he’s going to phenomenologically see the same thing we do. However, conceptually, he’s not going to see the same thing as we do at all. We both see the same phenomena or the same object, but we see the object differently. I see the object as a television. He sees the object as who knows what, an ugly artifact or whatever. I don’t know what he would possibly…

[14:01] You can have an illustration of that, not space, but artifacts built out of the map in the world. If I go out in the field and I look at a particular portion of the field along with the American Julian’s guide, he and I see the very same thing, yes. I see that graph, he sees that graph. And on the other hand… Because with his experience in wilderness, he sees that here’s footprint, whereas I see that grass.

[14:30] So if he asks, do you see the same thing, the answer is yes and no. We see the same things that are spent, green grass, and so forth. But in his conceptual experience, Richard, we see something there, and I don’t. The same point in your illustration, but that depends on what is that color. Okay. So everybody understand the distinction between seeing and seeing as. That’s going to be important to understand the modern debate on transcendental arguments.

[14:57] Let me give you one more example and we’ll move on. If we were to open a calculus textbook, and I don’t know what your background in mathematics is, mine isn’t strong at all, and we were to look at the equation sprawled out across the page, I would see that as just a bunch of numbers and formula and wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails out of them. Now, if the mathematician looked at formula, he’d be able to see it as something that made sense. he’d probably be able to solve it. We’d all see the same thing on the page, the same print, but we’d see it differently. He’d see it as something that could be solved. I’d see it as something that merely perplexed me. Okay, there’s a distinction between seeing something and seeing something as something. In other words, interpreting something.

[15:38] Okay, now there are levels in our conceptual scheme of conceptual centeredness. There are levels of conceptual centeredness. I’m going to give you three levels and tell you what I mean by that. Some things, some concepts within our conceptual scheme are more important or more central than other concepts. Let me start off by giving a concept that’s not very central at all to our scheme.

[16:01] Most of us, I’m sure all of us, have the concept of the game of billiards. You can all sit back right now and think of what the game of billiards or the concept of the game of billiards is. It’s a game where there are about, I think there’s 15 colored balls. There’s a white cue ball that you use to strike the colored balls. It’s played on a flat table with six pockets. The cue ball is struck by a stick. And the object of the game is to put the colored balls in the pocket in certain orders. Okay, so that is the concept that all of us share.

[16:32] If we were to lose that concept, our outlook on the world or our conceptual scheme wouldn’t be greatly impoverished. We could get on in life very well, unless we were professional billiard players, I guess. But we could get on very well in life if we didn’t have the concept of a game of billiards.

[16:49] Okay, another concept, however, that’s more central is the concept of a game. The concept of a game is, Wittgenstein talks about what a game is, and there’s no one definition of it. He said games have a family relationship with one another. But games, basically, the concept of a game is much more central to our conceptual scheme than the concept of a game of billiards, because it’s much more general.

[17:11] If we lose the concept of a game or we didn’t have it within our conceptual scheme, our lives would be somewhat impoverished, mainly because we wouldn’t understand or be able to play basketball. And that’s really bad. Okay. But you wouldn’t be able to play billiards either. You wouldn’t understand craps or blackjack or football and on and on and on. Any type of game, you wouldn’t understand. If you didn’t have the concept of what it means or what it is to be a game, all those type of activities that we enjoy and engage in regularly, we wouldn’t be able to. It wouldn’t make any sense to us.

[17:45] Okay, so that, you can see, a game is more central. The concept of the game is more central than the concept of the game of billiards. Now, I should, at this point, stop and say, I’m not talking about the word game. We could easily without the word game, we could use another word in its place to mean the same thing. I’m not talking about words. I’m talking about the concept of the game.

[18:05] Okay, finally, there’s things that are much more central than the concept of gain to our conceptual outlook. One example is the concept of causation. The concept that certain events happen for certain reasons for causes typically antecedent or previous to them. If in some way, if somehow our conceptual scheme lost the concept of causation, what would be the ramifications? What would our conceptual scheme be like if we didn’t have the concept of causation? Well, you wouldn’t have the ability to play games because all games presuppose the concept of causation. Billiards, for example, is the easiest example. We would eliminate the game of Billiards at a lower level without also eliminating some effect.

[18:49] I mean, wouldn’t you have to run it yourself and say the conceptual scheme includes this, but not that. I mean, if you lose the concept of Billiards, the conceptual scheme, it also includes the cause effect.

[19:00] Sure. I’m just saying, what if we were to lose or didn’t have the concept of billiard ball, billiards, excuse me. I’m not saying that we’d lose also the concept of cause and effect. I’m just saying, just pretend that the concept, nobody ever invented the game billiards. That’s basically what I’m trying to get you to understand. What would happen if nobody invented the game billiards? How would that affect our conceptual scheme? Not much, unless you were, what’s that guy’s name, Minnesota Fats? Okay. That would affect you big, but unless you weren’t, no big deal.

[19:29] Game is much more central. If we didn’t have the concept of game, our lives would be more impoverished. If we didn’t have the concept of causation, it’s not really clear what we’d have left of our conceptual team. We wouldn’t be able to play games, because games presuppose the idea of cause and effect. If you didn’t have the idea of cause and effect, then what point would there be to play basketball? If you didn’t believe that?

[19:52] Don’t gambler at game, deny causation, and they’re based on chance, right? In my experience, though, I just want to mention what one did you explain it. Is it craps with certain causation, or is it craps with denial of causation?

[20:05] Well, in a sense, yes. In a sense, no. The point I’m trying to make, though, is if you didn’t have the concept of causation, you still wouldn’t be able to play craps. The reason is you believe that if you do certain things, roll the dice or pull the lever, that certain mechanisms are going to bring certain states of affairs. Most people take them to be random states of affairs. But without the concept of causation, you wouldn’t be able to even think about bringing one state of affairs into existence from another state of affairs without a concept of a cause.

[20:35] I feel that two types of causes, my character, why I am a good book called special causes, where you can attribute that cause to the effect. You can link it up and on top. I know why the Saber Boy came three days, you know, came two hours later than the day, because he didn’t get up on time and his mother was there. versus a random cause where it’s still caused by something, the fact that it came late, so you can’t attribute it to any factors. It’s too complex to figure out. Same thing with the goal of the dice. There’s a cause for the first three came up. Can you give me that cause so you can predict and control? No, it’s too complex. But that doesn’t mean that the cause and effect relationship is not there.

[21:15] Right, that’s a good point. Basically, what Bill is saying is that all things presuppose causation, all activities that we engage in, games, whatever, but sometimes we’re not able to attribute what exactly the cause is for a particular state. That’s simply an epistemological problem. We just simply don’t know what the cause of a certain state of affairs is, although we believe that there is a cause. We don’t believe that things spontaneously happen for no reason or for no cause whatsoever.

[21:42] You couldn’t live. No. You couldn’t play games. You couldn’t do science. You couldn’t go to work. You couldn’t go to work. You couldn’t do theology. What’s the first doctrine of the Bible? Did he make a decision? Well, probably. I mean, you probably could make a decision, but if you didn’t believe in causation or you didn’t have the concept of causation, you could make decisions, I guess, but they wouldn’t have any purpose behind them. You could just decide to do something. But you couldn’t do theology. The first doctrine of the Bible is God spoke and created the world. Without the concept of causation, the concept of creation makes no sense.

[22:20] Okay, so if we lose the concept of causation, we’ve lost something that is central to our conceptual scheme and it wouldn’t be anything recognizable to us if we didn’t have the concept of causation our outlook on the world would be completely different so much so that it would be difficult to even imagine what the world would be like or what our experience would be like well, maybe I don’t want to beg any questions but many philosophers think that is the case Some philosophers think that there could be a causeless conceptual scheme or a conceptual scheme without cause. Whether that’s true or not, it certainly is correct to say that it would be so different, it would have no similarities to our conceptual scheme.

[23:01] But you could prove that otherwise by a transfer of art? Prove that there is causation? This is a long way of getting to set up the modern debate in contemporary transcendental arguments. And so what I’m trying to do now is show you that transcendental arguments try to give or try to show the necessity of certain types of concepts. Okay. And I’ve got a few more things to say before I get there, but you’re going off in the right direction. You’re anticipating right where I want to go.

[23:30] Can I just piggyback on that? It seems like some modern philosophers who would say you can have a cause would definitely be, but they can’t say that. They’re not going to be called it. Right. I said there’s a possibility. You can’t a priori say that there’s no such thing as that type of conceptual scheme. But as soon as they started explaining what it would be like, they’re going to get in big trouble.

[23:51] One other point I was working with on Tom. Without the conceptual scheme of cause, I think it still happens, but what about someone who knows that they don’t even ask for, you know, like the trade in their old days where some mysterious forces, like even before Homer, they had to explain, I forget the name for it, but it was the mysterious dream, M-O-I-R-A, whether it’s called, I don’t know if it sounds like it. And that became fate later. But the thing is, it was, who knows what it would do. I get the sense that it would be causing it. Right. But it was kind of a magical concept. Well, but that’s still, remember, that’s an epistemological problem. They just don’t know the fate they’re up to. But they know that whatever happens, fate causes to happen. Okay, everybody on board with this?

[24:38] Loosely speaking, the concept of causation is what is called in philosophy a transcendental. The concept of causation is sometimes or often called a transcendental for those who use that type of vocabulary. For our purposes, we’re going to call that a transcendental. What does this mean? For our purposes, for the present purposes, transcendental, the word transcendental, used as a noun, is a condition of experience. Something transcendental is the condition for some kind of experience.

[25:08] The concept of causation is a transcendental for most of our experience of, well, just leave it there, for most of our experience. The concept of causation is transcendental for our experience. The concept of game is a transcendental to the concept of a game of billiards. That lies in back of the game of billiards. Without that, you couldn’t have the concept of billiards. even more general. Without the concept of causation, our experience would be unintelligible or completely different.

[25:37] So you said the concept of games is a transcendental or the concept of a game of billiards. Right. All I’m pointing out here is that there’s different types of transcendentals. Transcendentals is usually indexed to a certain type of experience or a certain concept. The concept of game is a transcendental to the concept of the game of billiards. But even more general, the concept of causation is a transcendental to many different types of experiences.

[26:03] Now, transcendental, therefore, is different from transcendent. I’m going to define transcendence as that which goes beyond human experience. Based upon that definition, can we have knowledge of the transcendence? Based on that? Mm-hmm. No. Definitionally. We can’t have knowledge of things that go beyond human experience.

[26:22] Now, I’ll take a detour now. Doesn’t the Bible teach that God is transcendent? Therefore, should we conclude with the Neo-Orthodox that we can’t have any knowledge, true knowledge of God? The Bible teaches that God is beyond us, but God is also imminent. We don’t know God fully. We don’t know God as he is in himself and all that encompasses, otherwise we’d be God. But God does reveal himself and is imminent and is able to speak to us. So we can have knowledge of God. But there are things in God that are transcendent, that are beyond us.

[26:52] Transcendental refers to the preconditions for certain types of knowledge. We can have knowledge of transcendental thing, or concepts. We cannot have knowledge of transcendent things. Okay, so a lot of people confuse those that need to have the nomenclature down. So is everything you know about God is not transcendent? Well, we know that God is transcendent, but the knowledge that we have, we don’t have knowledge of God’s, particular knowledge of God’s transcendence. We don’t know certain things about God.

[27:22] Right. Now a transcendental, pardon? It may not be transcendent, but it’s so transcendental. Mmm, no. It also provides for us to provision for our understanding. Okay, I see what you mean, yes.

[27:37] The knowledge of God is a transcendental to any type of knowledge whatsoever. Right, that wasn’t the direction I was going, but that’s the correct insight. That knowledge wouldn’t be transcendent in terms of being beyond our experience, but it would be a transcendental. Our knowledge of God is a transcendental for our experience. Without it, we couldn’t have any intelligible experience. However, knowing God, knowing things about God, say that he is three in one or that he has sent Jesus, his son, to die for our sins, that knowledge is not transcendental knowledge in any straightforward sense. That’s just simply knowledge of theology, what God has done for us and what God is like.

[28:15] If God is transcendent, then you have to be the transcendental of the word of Christ in the end and of himself. Oh, yeah. The transcendental to all knowledge is that God reveals himself. Without God revealing himself, we couldn’t have any knowledge, whatever. That’s because God’s meaning. He could not know what God reveals beyond his experience.

[28:37] Okay, transcendental arguments, this is a long way of saying, transcendental arguments try to show transcendentals. The conclusions of transcendental arguments try to get us to transcendentals. Not transcendent things, transcendentals. And the reason this is important is to make it stand in contrast to deductive and inductive types of arguments.

[29:00] Somebody give me a quick definition of a deductive argument. What is a deductive argument? The conclusion is not sincerely called from the premise. By the way of saying it, it’s like the conclusion gives you nothing new. The argument is invented. If the premises are true, that’s the qualification, then in a deductive argument, the conclusion is true.

[29:19] Deductive arguments and inductive arguments refer to the form of argumentation. Transcendental arguments, although they do refer to a form of argumentation, I’ll get to that in a moment, but they also include the type of conclusion that’s drawn in the argument itself. When we talk about deductive arguments, we don’t make any reference to the type of conclusion that is being drawn, except for the fact that the conclusion follows from the premises. But what becomes a conclusion in a deductive argument can be any number of things.

[29:49] It can be that, I put a couple of examples down here. This is for Dr. Bahnsen. If Notre Dame beats USC ten years in a row, Trojan fans should hang their heads in shame. Notre Dame has beaten USC ten years in a row. Therefore, what’s the conclusion? Trojan fans should hang their heads in shame.

[30:11] Now we can think of other arguments. OK, we can make a conclusion to some arguments that the concept of causation was legitimate. Let’s say I’ll make something. If Bill is drinking coffee from Dietrich’s, then the concept of causation is legitimate. Bill is drinking coffee from Dietrich’s. Therefore, the concept of causation is legitimate. Now, let’s just take I’m not interested in the arguments themselves. I just want to show you the conclusions. Both of those are valid deductive arguments. One conclusion said that the concept of causation was legitimate. It was a bad argument, of course, but valid. The other conclusion was that Trojan fans should hang their heads in shame.

[30:46] Now, what do those two conclusions have in common? Anything? No, they’re completely different. One has to do with something very general and abstract. The other one has to do with something fairly mundane in life. There is no common element in the conclusions of one deductive argument and another one, or I should say not any necessary correlations between the two. Deductive and inductive arguments make no reference to the type of conclusions drawn. Transcendental arguments make a reference to the type of conclusion that is being drawn. The conclusions of transcendental arguments are purported to be or aimed to be transcendentals. That’s important to understand.

[31:25] Now, why am I bringing this up? Well, in the debates on transcendental arguments, there have been some people who think that when you compare a transcendental argument to a deductive argument, for example, All you’re doing is comparing two different forms of argumentation. Now, there is something to that, but that isn’t all that’s going on between the two. To say that there’s an inductive argument, a deductive argument, and then a transcendental argument, and that they’re only different in form, is to make a mistake. To put them all in that category of types of argument forms is a mistake. It’s actually what’s called a category mistake in philosophy. To say that there’s deductive, inductive, and transcendental arguments, and not make any qualifications is to make a category mistake.

[32:06] Now, who knows what anybody here familiar with what a category mistake is? Maybe, right, asking the question, what does green taste like? Right. Green isn’t in the category of things that have taste. Green apples are, but green doesn’t have any reference to taste whatsoever. Gilbert Ryle in his book, The Concept of Mind, used this example.

[32:28] He said if somebody gave us a tour of Oxford University and took us through all the buildings and we saw Jesus College, we saw Radcliffe Camera, the Bodleian Library and we saw all of the campus and then at the end of the day we said, boy, that was a great tour. Now show me Oxford University. That is a category mistake. And the reason is you’re putting Oxford University in the same category as the buildings that make up Oxford University. Oxford University just is all those things. It is Radcliffe Camera and Jesus College and on and on and on. Okay, so that is what a category mistake is. Many people who put deductive, inductive, and transcendental arguments on the same level are making category mistakes if they don’t make further refinements.

[33:09] You have one statement that describes deductive and inductive arguments in terms of conclusions versus, you said a conclusion, transcendental arguments result in transcendentals. Right, try to.

[33:19] The deductive and inductive arguments. Their conclusions of those type of arguments, they don’t conclude to anything in particular. In other words, when you may have a deductive argument, it can be the minutest or the most banal type of thing, or it can be the most highly abstract type of thing. When you talk about deductive arguments, it’s not the conclusion that you’re drawing attention to. It’s simply the form. But in a transcendental argument, formal only. Transcendental arguments have more to do than mere form. They try to get to or conclude in transcendentals. I’m going to get to the formal aspect of them. Right. There’s a material aspect of these arguments that’s important, not just the form. Right, right. Just the form.

[34:05] Now, let me give you the typical form of most transcendental arguments. So what I’ve just said is that there’s a material aspect that’s necessary for a transcendental argument, but that’s not a sufficient condition for a transcendental argument. There’s also a formal aspect. And you should get this into your notes. I’m just going to read this to you, and then I’m going to explain it.

[34:23] This is the typical form of a transcendental argument. For X to be the case, and what I mean by X here is just a placeholder. You know, in mathematics we put X squared plus Y squared equals, and that’s just a placeholder. Okay, for X, for something to be the case, Y would have to be the case. For X to be the case, Y would have to be the case, because Y is a precondition of X. X is the case, this is the next part, and so Y is the case. For X to be the case, Y would have to be the case. Because Y is a precondition of X. X is the case, and so Y is the case.

[35:02] Now, the because clause here is the thing that we want to pay attention to from the outset. The because clause is usually proved by a reductio ad absurdum argument. For X to be the case, Y would have to be the case because Y is a precondition of X. Now, how do we prove that because? Well, by reductio ad absurdum argument. We show, we try to do, what transcendental arguments try to do is that if you didn’t have Y, then you couldn’t have X. So you assume not Y and you show that starting with not Y, you couldn’t have X. Okay, so it’s an indirect reductio.

[35:37] Reductio ad absurdum arguments are arguments where you take, in this case, there’s informal reductio ad absurdum arguments, but in this case, we’re talking about a formal reductio. You assume the opposite of something and you show that when you assume the opposite of something, then whatever you wanted to hold previously, you couldn’t hold to. In other words, it would generate a contradiction. So we want to have everybody agrees X is the case. The claim is in order for X to be the case, I’m going to give you some examples in a moment. So if you’re having trouble following, just bear with me for a moment.

[36:09] Sure. For X to be the case, everybody agrees that there is an X. Okay, whatever that may be. I’m going to give you an example in a moment. But the precondition somebody claims for X is Y. In order for there to be X, which everybody grants, somebody claims that Y is necessary. Now, how are we going to prove this? Well, the way you prove this is to assume not Y. You say, just pretend Y wasn’t the case. And then you show that if Y wasn’t the case, then after a reductive argument, the conclusion is X couldn’t be the case. But remember, everybody agrees that X is the case. This is a given. This is something that all parties are agreeing to.

[36:47] If Y isn’t the case, then X can be the case. So what is that? What can we conclude from this? If Y is not the case, there is no X. But X is the case. So Y has to. So we have to conclude not not Y. In other words, Y is the case. Okay, so that’s the way you approve the because clause in a transcendental argument, typically.

[37:11] Now, let me give you some examples. Did you say that Y is the wrong transcendental? Did you prove that Y is there to the built in fact is there? Oh, yeah, well… …the wrong transcendental. I’m just giving you the formal aspect. It could be that if somebody assumed not Y, then they couldn’t generate not X, then that would just show that Y is not a precondition for X. So that doesn’t mean just because somebody claims Y is a precondition of X doesn’t mean he has a good argument for it.

[37:37] Let me give you a basic example of a form of a transcendental argument. For there to be carpeting in this room, there has to be a floor underneath it. Why? Well, because for X to be the case, for there to be carpeting in this room, there has to be something under it to support it. In other words, carpets just don’t hang loosely in the sky and float in the sky. Okay, so from that we can say that, well, we know that carpeting is in this room. I’m putting my feet on it right now. Therefore, there is flooring under the carpet.

[38:06] Now, that isn’t a transcendental argument because it’s not broad enough in scope. But it shows you the type of, the form of that, the reasoning has. For there to be carpet in this room, there has to be a floor to fold up the carpet. Since having floor under, is a necessary condition for carpet to lie flat. There is a carpet in this room, so there’s a floor under the room. There’s a floor under the carpet, excuse me. Okay, let me give you another example. Even though you can’t see the floor, right. Now, that’s not a great transcendental argument. There can be other things accounting for it. but I just want to give you the general feel of what the form of transcendental arguments take.

[38:41] Let’s take another one, the concept of creation. We’ve already discussed this. For the concept of creation, for us to have the concept of creation, there has to be a concept of causation. Now, here comes the because clause. Because the latter, the concept of causation, is a necessary precondition for the concept of creation. What would happen now, we’re at the claim there that y is a precondition for x. Now, how are we going to prove that? Let’s assume that we don’t have the concept of causation. If we don’t have the concept of causation, could we have the concept of creation? No. Creation is simply, theologically, God’s acting to bring about a state that previously wasn’t in existence. In other words, that God caused something to come into existence. So without Y, you couldn’t have X. But we know we have X. We know that there is creation. Therefore, we have to have the concept of causation.

[39:36] right now there’s a difference between these two types of arguments oh yeah I’m being sloppy so don’t hold me to all this stuff I just want to give you all the general feel of a transcendental form of argumentation okay now quickly there are distinction between those two types of arguments that I gave you the one about the carpeting and floor and the one about creation and causation the The first one is ontological, if you don’t know, it’s O-N-T-O-L-O-G-I-C-A-L, ontological, which has to do with what type of things exist.

[40:13] Ontology is the study of what types of things exist. That argument is ontological in the sense that it’s claiming that certain physical things exist. It’s making an existence claim. It says that if there is carpeting, then there is, there exists, it’s laundering. So that argument, the first one is ontological and narrow in scope. We’re only talking about carpeting in this particular room. You know, it’s not that central to our lives. Well, it has existential import, right? We’re making an existential claim. Right, right. So what I’m saying is that there is, there be, there is a floor. There be a floor.

[40:58] Okay, the second argument is conceptual and general. The second argument makes no existential claim to anything existing in the world except for, if you want to call it, we have a concept in our mind, but we’re not going to call that an ontological claim. The second argument about the causation says that we have to have a certain type of concept. And it’s also more general in scope. The scope is much wider. Now we can mix and match these categories. You can have ontological arguments of small scope and ontological arguments of large scope.

[41:34] Van Til’s presuppositional argument is an ontological transcendental argument of large scope. It makes an existence claim. It claims that God exists, and without God existing, you couldn’t make sense of experience. Most modern transcendental arguments are not of that form, though. They are general in scope, but they are conceptual in nature. They say that we have to have certain types of concepts in order for us to get along in the world or to have the experience that we do. This is a very important distinction. We’re going to come back to it later. Okay.

[42:04] Van Tilian transcendental arguments make an ontological claim. They say that it proves, the conclusion of it proves that God exists, that God exists, that God is real. Modern transcendental arguments or contemporary transcendental arguments aren’t ontological in nature. Typically, there might be some exceptions. But most of them simply try to show that certain concepts aren’t necessary for experience in general or for particular experiences. They’re large in scope. They’re large in scope, though, right.

[42:32] I’ll give you a small-scope conceptual transcendental argument. In the 50s, it was popular for Oxford philosophers to have certain types of what were called polar case arguments. Polar case arguments were arguments that tried to show that certain types of polar opposites were necessary to make sense of certain words. The famous example is John Austin’s use of the word real. He said if we want to use the word real properly, we have to have it in contrast with other concepts. You can contrast it with the concept of fake. There can be real cream and fake cream. Or you can contrast it with phony. You can contrast it with artificial or synthetic or bogus.

[43:11] Austin says, however, you can’t use real in a vacuum. You always have to use it with a certain type of polar concept so it will define it. In other words, these two types of words are symbiotic on one another. Okay, so that type of argument shows that in order to use a certain concept, a certain other polar concept is necessary. But it’s very narrow in scope. It doesn’t have large conceptual ramifications.

[43:32] Transcendental arguments purport to have large conceptual ramifications because whereas the polar concept argument says to use this type of concept, you have to have another type of concept, transcendental arguments say that in order to have certain types of general experiences, you have to have certain types of concepts. So they’re much more general and broad in scope. I wouldn’t put in Milstrom. You’re dealing with an existential claim. Some transcendental arguments, Van Til’s transcendental arguments, are trying to make an existential claim. Contemporary transcendental arguments don’t typically try to make that.

[44:08] They’re saying that we have to think in a certain way. We have to have certain concepts in order to have certain types of experiences. Van Til says, in order to have any experience, God has to exist. The God of the Bible. That makes an ontological claim. That says something has to exist in the world for us to make sense of our experience.

[44:26] But that puts very deceptual into the ontological claim. Oh, sure, sure. Right, right. You’re watching examples of deceptual claim that is also a kind of small scope. Narrow in scope, right. It’s dealing with narrower concepts. We could get along without the concept of real fairly well in this world.

[44:48] our conceptual outlook would be impoverished but we could get along without it but it’s a much different case to use our tried example, causation it’s not clear at all what would be left of our conceptual scheme if that were removed from it you mean how much that concept encompasses our whole lives right, right if we didn’t have the concept of causation just try to imagine what your experience would be like without it I don’t even know where to begin You know, I mean, it’s like, that’s what Buddhist monks try to do, right?

[45:19] They try to, you know, tune out all type of distinctions and type of causation, which is included in distinctions, and just try to think of nothing. I mean, they try to think of nothing whatever. And that’s kind of what you have to do if you want to get rid of the concept of causation. You know, what would be less of our conceptual scheme? Okay, so this is all in the background. Now that we have this in the background, that should be helpful to understand the conceptual, the contemporary debate.

[45:43] Now, let me say, before we get into that, the conceptual debate, a few words about Immanuel Kant. I’m not going to get into Kant’s actual use of transcendental arguments, so you don’t have to worry about that. It’s just important to note that the contemporary debate in transcendental arguments always makes reference to what Immanuel Kant was doing in his critical philosophy, and in particular, what he was doing in the critique of pure reason. And there’s a wide variety of interpretations of what he was doing in them.

[46:11] Now, the only reason I bring this up, I don’t think it’s of great importance, but the only reason I bring it up is because a lot of people, I shouldn’t say that, some philosophers today claim that what’s going on today under the name transcendental argument is something very different from what Kant was doing in the Critique of Pure Reason. Because of that, so the argument goes, they don’t deserve or they should not call their argument transcendental argument. Okay, let me read part of my thesis, and I just want to give you the bottom line on this. The charge goes that since modern transcendental arguments aren’t Kantian in nature, they’re spurious arguments. They’re not real transcendental arguments. Okay, so that’s the background of this debate.

[46:53] Before analyzing and evaluating contemporary transcendental arguments, it is obligatory to say a few words about Kant. A number of philosophers have accused contemporary advocates of denuding transcendental arguments of their distinctives, so much so that their reformulation, it is charged, do not even deserve the title transcendental argument. Now, it is tempting to set aside, to cast aside this whole debate as petty etymological squabbling. In other words, well, what’s in a name? You know, why, you know, so what is it, what’s going on today isn’t transcendental arguments in the sense that Kant thought they were. So it’s tempting to set aside the whole debate as petty etymological squabbling, and indeed much of it is.

[47:32] For although Kant made the term a technical one and thus must be conceded a certain propriety over it, philosophers should be more concerned with the success and failures of arguments at hand rather than lexicographical particularity. What I’m just getting at is, it’s more interesting to take the modern versions of transcendental arguments on their own terms and evaluate them than to say, well, is this really a Kantian transcendental argument? There is, however, a bit more at stake than mere linguistic proprietorship. Kant is, among other things, the father of transcendental arguments.

[48:03] Now, in the history of philosophy, I brought a copy of a portion of Aristotle’s Metaphysics where he argues transcendentally for the law of non-contradiction. Okay, so the transcendental-type reasoning goes way back into the beginnings of Western philosophy. But Kant is certainly the father of modern, the father of transcendental arguments. Thus, it would be a rather odd conclusion to state that his arguments were not really transcendental arguments at all. In other words, if we want to say, well, contemporary transcendental arguments are real or true transcendental arguments, and they differ so much from Kant that Kant really can’t be said to be doing transcendental arguments. I mean, that would be just a ludicrous claim.

[48:37] So indeed, one is tempted to say that whatever Kant is doing in the first critique, he is arguing transcendentally. In other words, just definitionally, whatever Kant says is transcendental argument, that is what a transcendental argument is. This is perhaps what one philosopher says when he states that the first order of business in any discussion of such argument is to try to see what Kant understood by the term. And another philosopher is even more explicit. He states, Since Kant invented the label, anything properly called a transcendental argument must have some analogy to the arguments which Kant used. Okay, so this is the modern debate background to it.

[49:11] They want to see if the contemporary arguments are really the same type of arguments Kant was giving in the first critique. Now, I’m not going to bore you with the details. My argument, my conclusion is, what Kant was doing, what he thought he was doing and using transcendental arguments is not what contemporary proponents of transcendental arguments are doing. They’re two different types of arguments altogether. Okay, now what’s the bearing of that? Well, let me say another thing.

[49:36] However, within Kant, within even the Critique of Pure Reason, there’s an argument form. It’s found, if you’re any Kant scholars in here, in the second analogy in the refutation of idealism. There’s an argument form within Kant that is analogous to contemporary transcendental arguments. So let me just say a few more words and wrap this section up. This really isn’t strictly necessary, but I wanted to give you some background into Kant’s interpretation and if it has any bearing on the modern debate at all.

[50:04] Before we acquiesce to the claim that contemporary transcendental arguments are unconscious, which is my claim, that contemporary transcendental arguments aren’t really what Kant thought transcendental arguments were, before we acquiesce to the claim that contemporary transcendental arguments are unconscious because they do not make appeal to certain types of things, it is important to point out the obvious Kant did use arguments analogous to contemporary transcendental arguments in the refutation of idealism and the second analogy so in another sense it is not correct to call contemporary transcendental arguments un-Kantian they are indeed Kantian arguments but they are not Kantian transcendental arguments

[50:41] what then of the charge that they are spurious remember people came forward and said these aren’t Kantian arguments therefore they’re spurious they’re not really transcendental arguments and my conclusion is at this point the question becomes merely linguistic. Nothing of philosophical import hangs on the answer at all.

[50:57] And so, since it has been the practice to call contemporary transcendental arguments transcendental arguments, as some philosophers have pointed out, Kant did not take out a copyright on the term. You know, Kant just doesn’t own the title transcendental argument. There seems to be no pressing need for a change in nomenclature. And it is little more than schoolmarmism to insist that all transcendental arguments must comply to strict Kantian constraints in order to warrant the honorific title, Transcendental Argument.

[51:23] What I’m getting to here, bottom line, if you’re thinking, what is all this about? Is that most modern philosophers use a transcendental argument in a certain form that is not the form found in Kant. There are different types of arguments. Kant’s transcendental argument, and this is a matter of debate, this is what I argue in my thesis, is different from what modern transcendental arguers took forward.

[51:43] However, within Kant, there is a form of argument that’s analogous to the modern debate. and that’s how some modern philosophers had been confused. They thought that this was a Kantian transcendental argument and so they rehabilitated it and called it a transcendental argument but it really wasn’t what Kant thought was a transcendental argument at all and so there’s a bit of confusion in the literature. All I’m doing there in this part is try to clear some loose ends that modern arguments, transcendental arguments are different from the arguments that Kant has in his first critique.

[52:13] Okay, but like I concluded, there’s really not much importance in that because we still need to take these modern arguments and find out if they work and evaluate them, because they have at least some analogy to our previous discussion about what a transcendental argument is. They’re not Kantian, but they are, we’re going to keep on calling them, transcendental arguments. In other words, Kant doesn’t have a copyright on the term. If what we’re going to discuss aren’t Kantian arguments, Kantian transcendental arguments, that doesn’t mean they’re not transcendental arguments. Okay, before I go on, is there any questions?

[52:44] We have no modern Yeah. Now, I didn’t give you my version of what Kant’s transcendental arguments were like. I didn’t want to go into it because it’s somewhat confusing and unnecessary. Basically, Kant thought that transcendental arguments always, always had to do with the mind and how the mind imposes certain things on our experience. Kantian transcendental arguments have to do with constructive knowledge, knowledge that human beings are involved with or that our minds are involved in creating.

[53:16] Kant’s transcendental arguments always show that there are certain forms of sensibility and understanding that are brought to bear on our experience and that make certain experiences possible. In other words, Kant thought that transcendental arguments showed that certain concepts were in our understanding and that these concepts constructed and set the limits for what type of experience we could have. Modern transcendental arguments are just conceptual solely. Kant’s are constructive in nature. They try to show that we have to have certain types of constructive faculties in order to have experience. Modern transcendental arguments just simply try to argue that certain concepts are necessary for the types of experience that we have.

[53:54] Well, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not, we know the nature. Okay, right. We don’t know how to think about it. Right, that’s good. Before I divided them between conceptual and ontological, and now there’s a third one. There’s a Kantian transcendental argument, which is neither. It’s closer to the conceptual bill, but it says that transcendental arguments conclude with certain types of faculties of the understanding. That for what Landy is saying, it’s indeed not failed, and it’s needed to be guarded since those facts under the land. Well, that’s certainly the case.

[54:27] I mean, to go off on a little bit on Kant, I mean, with Kant’s view of knowledge and what transcendental arguments do, he obviously can’t have any knowledge of the real world or the things in himself from a noumenal reality, because all the knowledge coming into our mind, our past, if I can use a crude analogy, through a filter. It’s an active filter, but when things come in, our mind molds the objects of experience into objects of the understanding.

[54:51] And so what we see is never the world as it is in itself. Even to call it the world is going beyond what we’re allowed to. But we can never have direct contact with the noumenal world, the things as they are in themselves. We can only know things as they are, as they appear to us, after the two faculties of sensibility and understanding have got a hold on them. And so the real world is completely unknowable to Kant.

[55:13] Not sure, really. Oh, yeah, that’s why his project failed and ended in skepticism. Now, Kant says, well, no, that’s just where my arguments lead us. And this is just the way things are. And so if you don’t like it, you know, tough luck. This is the best we can do. But it still ends in skepticism. And, I mean, there’s a number of criticisms of Kant, but for our purposes, I just wanted to simply show you that there’s a distinction between contemporary transcendental arguments and Kantian transcendental arguments. Mark?

[55:40] Now it’s been a part of the reason we have for medical science that we need to move on today. Look, who’s man with a complete kingdom who has to bore them? He lacks the issue of evil with understanding. He said Israel, he was supposed to be told. I knew he was a shame. In other words, God has revealed that to join in the future of Israel. He told Israel, he was a shame. I knew it’s been sure of any of them. I don’t know. They took them. They’ll probably know.

[56:07] But isn’t it kind of the same where he lacks the… There wasn’t people who had regenerated speech. Yeah, but he had no speech, though, because God slowly received the emotion. You know, they’re inside hard. They’re not going to be hard enough.

[56:20] Well, I don’t want to get down a bunny trail on this. That’s an interesting question. Prima facie, I’d say, no, it wasn’t a transcendental argument for the reason Bill said. I mean, he should have known. I mean, unbelievers should know and do know that God exists. But for unbelievers to accept Jesus as their Savior, they have to be regenerated by their spirit. that’s really not a transcendental I mean to understand the things of God you don’t have to be regenerated every man knows certain things about God it’s just to consciously affirm them and embrace them with your heart you have to be regenerated We talk about technology and a lot of things we need to align with.

[56:56] We still have a lot of other things. So not all things are trans-consumption of things we think. So in the past, we’re doing this next year. We’re doing this next year. We’re doing this next year. We’re doing this next year. God. He’s not saying that he really pretends from actually thinking about the thinking of God, but that also wraps him up in heaven as he goes in and was seen more. And he’s talking about a foot more extensive, which means the subjection of change, which means to meet the moral positive and your findings, then he’s going to miss in order for him to be willing to accept students about the thinking of God.

[57:36] Well, let’s go on to the contemporary debate. Finally, right? All that background. One thing you have to… It would be. I’d prefer to get some more done right now. Contemporary transcendental arguments, remember, keep this in the background, are always aimed at the skeptic. The skeptic comes with a certain challenge, and so a transcendental argument is going to try to defeat the skeptic. Okay, remember, let’s do a quick review. Transcendental arguments conclude with transcendentals. They take this certain type of form. For X to be the case, Y has to be the case, because Y is a precondition of X. X is the case, therefore Y is the case. That’s the general form they take. And there’s differences between transcendental arguments. There’s ontological transcendental arguments and conceptual and then consiment. Okay, so that’s all in the background.

[58:27] Contemporary transcendental arguments try to defeat the skeptic. The most famous contemporary transcendental argument is found in Sir Peter Strawson’s book, Individuals, an essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. This was published in 1959 and kind of set off the whole modern debate. And so what I thought I would do is read for you and give you a taste of what a modern contemporary transcendental argument is like to give you a feel for them and enable you to compare them to Van Tilian transcendental arguments. Then we could try to draw some analogies between them.

[58:58] We’ll look at some of the criticisms of Strawson’s argument, and then we’ll see if they apply to Van Til. Some of the arguments against Strawson are fairly powerful. And so if there’s a close enough analogy between Strawson’s Transcendental Arguments and Van Tilian Transcendental Arguments, there’s a potential difficulty there for our apologetics. Okay, so that’s why we’re doing this. There’s an important relevance to Van Tilian Transcendental Arguments.

[59:21] I’m just going to read to you from page 35 of Individuals. This is his most famous argument of the book. Now, I’m warning you, it’s a bit difficult, but I’ll explain things as we go along. Strawson, S-T-R-A-W-S-O-N, Sir Peter Strawson, obviously from Britain. There is no doubt that we have the idea of a single spatio-temporal system of material things.

[59:44] What is he talking about? Don’t let the fancy posterium. All he’s saying is, when we view the world, we picture the world as a single spatio-temporal continuum.

[59:54] And what he means by that is that my experience now, I assume that my experience now has some relationship to my experience in this room yesterday and then my experience at home the day before and my experience at church Sunday. I assume that the objects I saw at church Sunday are in some relationship, spatial relationship, to the objects I see now. In other words, I conceive of the world as having one space, that all things I see, all material objects, are in one single space, rather than different dimensions, different types of space.

[60:27] You know, take, for example, although heaven’s a physical place, it’s in a different type of space than Irvine, California. I could get to Irvine from Placentia, but I can’t get to heaven from Placentia in the same way I could get to Irvine from Placentia. Okay? Well, some people have claimed that, but all Strawson is saying is, this is the way we commonsensely view the world.

[60:55] Okay, now, what he’s setting up is, here comes a skeptic who’s going to question this. One form of skepticism says that we can never know things have identity through time. This chair was here yesterday, or so I thought it was. I come into this room today and see this chair here. I assume it was the same chair here as the chair that was here yesterday. Some philosophers come up and ask, well, how do you know it’s the same chair? Were you continually observing it? Now, this is a question of identity in philosophy. How do you know what makes for something to be the same through time? Since I wasn’t sitting here observing it the whole time, why am I in a position to say, yeah, this is the same chair that was here yesterday?

[61:33] Okay, so the skeptic brings up that contention. How do you know that material objects have identity through time? That’s the skepticism that Strawson wants to take on. So he starts off by saying there is no doubt that at least we think that objects have identities at times. We view the world as having one spatial-temporal continuum, that objects that I see yesterday are in some relationship spatially and temporally with the objects I see today. There is no doubt, he says, that this is our conceptual scheme. Now, Strawson sometimes can be floppy, and he’s floppy here. There’s no doubt that this is part of our conceptual scheme, he should say. This certainly isn’t all of our conceptual scheme, but this is part of it. So all he’s saying is there, this is certainly how we view the world.

[62:12] Now he turns to the hub of his argument, and it’s very subtle. He says, now I say that a condition, and what he means there is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition, but a necessary condition of our having this conceptual scheme, that all objects are in one spatial temporal continuum, is the unquestioning acceptance of particular identity, and at least some cases of non-continuous observation. More jargon, right?

[62:38] What he’s saying there is if we have this conceptual scheme that I just mentioned, then the necessary precondition of it, let me put this on the board, if we have, I’ll just use the same letters, if we have this conceptual scheme, call it X, that all objects, we believe at least that all objects are in the same space and time continuum, then claims Strawson that the necessary condition for this is Y. And what is Y? Why is that our having this conceptual scheme, the condition for having this conceptual scheme, is the unquestioning acceptance of particular identity in at least some cases of non-continuous observation?

[63:16] What he’s saying here is simply that in order to have this conceptual scheme, we sometimes have to come into a room and say, oh, that’s the same chair that was there yesterday. In other words, we have to, when we stop observing something and then see it again later, say, well, that’s the same thing I saw earlier.

[63:32] We do that all the time. I went to bed last night, and the last thing I saw was my alarm clock. Now, when I woke up in the morning, and as much as I thought about it, I said, that’s the same alarm clock that was there last night. I didn’t look at it and say, well, I imagine that. That’s a similar alarm clock than the one that was sitting on my counter when I went to bed.

[63:49] Okay, I assume, unquestionably, that some objects, when I start perceiving them, are the same when I perceive them again. Now, I’m being sloppy. I’m begging the question in that statement. All I’m saying is when we come and see our experience is such that when we stop observing things and we see them again, we don’t say that they’re different things. We just say that they have continued to exist, even though we haven’t observed them. Yeah, he’s appealing to our unquestioning acceptance that we sometimes do re-identify things even though there’s an interruption in our observation of that thing.

[64:33] That’s the hub of the argument. He’s going to do something really cute and interesting with this form. but this is the setup. He says we have X and nobody wants to doubt X. That’s just the way we view the world. So everybody, including the skeptic, agrees with X. Y is more controversial though. Now here comes his reductial argument for Y. He’s going to now assume not Y. And he’s going to show that if Y is not the case, X is not the case. Now what happens once he does that? We already know that X is the case. The skeptic agrees with that. So then it’s not not Y. And so therefore, why? So we’ve established why.

[65:13] Now what happens, we’ll get to the punchline right now. What happens if we establish why? What was the skeptic trying to do? The skeptic is trying to question whether things continually exist through time when we don’t perceive them. He says, how do we know that that lamp is the same one as was there yesterday when we saw it there? I wasn’t observing that lamp the whole time. Oh, I could even close my eyes right now and then open it. Now I’m assuming that the lamp I saw before I closed my eyes is the same one. The skeptic says, well, how do you know that?

[65:39] The point of Strawson’s argument is to say that whole question, that whole skeptical challenge, can’t even get off the ground. The reason is to have this conceptual scheme, the one in which the skeptic accepts, remember he’s not questioning that we have this conceptual scheme, he’s just questioning it’s an appropriate conceptual scheme. He’s just having doubts about whether it’s true or not, but he doesn’t doubt that we have it. Strawson maintains that a precondition for having this conceptual scheme is that we have to, at least in some cases, unquestionably assume that things continue to exist through time, even though they’re unperceived.

[66:14] Now, that knocks off the legs from out of the skeptic. Why is that? Well, if he has to assume that things continue to exist in time to have this conceptual scheme, then his skepticism doesn’t make any sense. He’s calling into question the precondition of his conceptual scheme. Okay, is that too fast? Okay.

[66:35] X is the fact that we have the idea that things continue to exist in a… Well, it’s even more general than that, that there is a single spatial temporal continuum. Every material object is in the same time, in the same space, as every other material object. Y is the alleged necessary precondition for X. Y says that in order for X to be the case, we have to, at least in some cases, assume that objects continue to exist even though we don’t perceive them. Then I haven’t got to his reductio argument yet. I’m just giving you the punchline.

[67:11] The punchline is, assuming that Strawson’s reductio is correct, that if this is a precondition, if Y is a precondition for X, and Y says that you have to unquestionably, at least in some cases, believe that objects continue to exist and perceive, then for the skeptic to come up to you and say, how do you know that lamp is the same one there yesterday? Or how do you know anything that you experienced now is the same thing that you experienced yesterday?

[67:33] In other words, how do you know that there’s been a continual existence in that chair or any other particular thing? The answer to him, according to Strawson, is you can’t even formulate that skepticism. It makes no sense whatsoever, because in order to formulate it, you have to assume why. And why says that you have to assume that things continue to exist unperceived. So the skeptic is saying, in other words, that he asks, well, how do you know things continue to exist unperceived? But even in asking that, he has to assume that objects continue to exist unperceived.

[68:04] I hope it’s better if I’m successful with you, who I talk about. How do you know that particular chair is the same one that was there particularly yesterday? How do you know there was some very clever guy who went to the furniture store last night when Dr. Bahnsen was asleep, substituted one chair for another? in particular.

[68:29] objection or a particular question and challenge it envisions furniture stores people coming in at night and something so that’s not the instruction is refueling to refute that and somebody posed that you have to say well what’s the evidence pro and con and all that what he’s talking about and considering absurd is what we might call general skepticism i don’t have any particular reason to wonder about that chair in this situation i just say in general how do we know things and strongly in saying well you have to assume that even to raise the army i i hope that helps

[69:07] because you might go home thinking well then we know everything no one could ever deceive but rossom knows we can be deceived and since you have to have three instincts within to be deceived we can’t just have a general fit because how do we know everything is soft Or how do we know if we can’t, why don’t we just say we can’t know anything? That’s just too general. Right. We’ve been saying that until we’ve been able to know. Right.

[69:31] Well, we’re going to take a break now, and when we come back, we’ll start off with questions. We’ll finish this up and then go over the relevance this has to Van Til. Thank you.