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Plantinga's belief-cum-desire argument refuted

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2010

STEPHEN LAW
STEPHEN LAW
Affiliation:
Heythrop College, University of London, Kensington Square, London, W8 5HN e-mail: think@royalinstitutephilosophy.org
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Abstract

In Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga develops an argument designed to show that naturalism is self-defeating. One component of this larger argument is what I call Plantinga's belief-cum-desire argument, which is intended to establish something more specific: that if the content of our beliefs does causally effect behaviour (that is to say, semantic content is not epiphenomenal), and if naturalism and current evolutionary doctrine are correct, then the probability that we possess reliable cognitive mechanisms must be either inscrutable or low. This paper aims to refute Plantinga's belief-cum-desire argument.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 245 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Plantinga, AlvinWarrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See Plantinga, Alvin ‘Introduction’, in Beilby, James (ed.) Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 5Google Scholar. Plantinga says that ‘roughly, a cognitive faculty – memory, perception, reason – is reliable if the great bulk of its deliverances are true’.

3. ‘Naturalism vs evolution: a religion/science conflict?’, (2007), available online at: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/alvin_plantinga/conflict.html

4. Plantinga ‘Introduction’, 5.

5. Ibid., 8.

6. Ibid.

7. Perhaps it is a mistake to call mechanisms producing mostly false beliefs ‘perceptual’, given that ‘perception’ suggests at least a degree of accuracy or veracity. In at least some cases ‘quasi-perceptual’ may be a more accurate; ditto for ‘memory’, etc.

8. Plantinga ‘Introduction’, 8.

9. Alvin Plantinga ‘Content and natural selection’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming; manuscript kindly supplied by the author.

10. My thanks to the many contributors to my blog (www.stephenlaw.org) who commented in detail on previous drafts of this paper.