Hume on Miracles

I am going to attempt to clarify what I find objectionable about the miracle argument, because in class I got the “you’re crazy” look from a few people.

Imagine: you are at a bar, sitting next to a rather uninteresting-looking 35-year old man that you have never met. You share a few Belmont-appropriate non-alcoholic drinks, conversing about a variety of topics until he relates one of the two following stories:

1. One day, I was walking home from work and a stray dog approached me. It opened its mouth and, to my amazement, recited a short poem by Sylvia Plath. Then it ran away, and I haven’t seen it since.

2. As I was walking home from work one day, I was approached by a stray dog. It opened its mouth and, to my amazement, spoke to me in English. It told me: “I am Allah, the one true God, and it has pleased me to use this dog to tell you to convert to Islam.” The dog then disappeared.

Both examples are extraordinary, and we have good reason to be wary of the man. That said, the first example is much less believable than the second. In the first example, we have a talking dog, and there is no explanation why that dog could talk. It is purported to have happened within the bounds of ordinary experience, and that there was some connection of events that led to this dog talking that was in principle experienceable by anyone. It implies that the world is the kind of place that, left to itself, could generate a talking dog. If true, it would invalidate “the firm and unalterable experience [that] has established [the] laws of nature” (X.i.12).

In the second, an explanation is offered. The implied connection of events is that something operating outside and above the bounds of ordinary experience caused an ordinarily impossible event to happen for some end. It does not require us to invalidate our firm and unalterable experience. The laws of nature and our sanity are still left intact.

I am not saying that the second account is believable. I am merely pointing out that the second account is less contrary to experience than the first, because the inclusion of an omnipotent being changes the relationship that account has to experience. Because it is less contrary, such accounts can be subjected to slightly less strict scrutiny. How much leeway does this allow? I'm not sure, nor do I have room to develop a guess here. I am merely pointing out that Hume is ignoring an important distinction that makes some miracle accounts much more plausible than others.

The Distinction Between Society and Nature

I would like to bring attention to one of Rousseau’s most important presuppositions: that there is a radical distinction between nature and society. This distinction is evident from the first paragraph of the Preface, when Rousseau talks of man “as Nature formed him” and the need “to disentangle what he owes to his own stock from what circumstances and his progress have added to or changed in his primitive state” (P.1). The state of nature is some sort of default state, and the changes added by society are accidental changes to the nature of man.

I contend that this is a problematic assumption. Rousseau’s stated goal is “knowing men themselves” (P.1). This means the task set before us is to separate nature and nurture, to separate the essence of man apart from the conditioning arising from his environment. To use a modern analogy, if man were a robot, we are trying to understand his programming. Now, man is a very sophisticated robot, a robot that has the ability to change its own programming to adapt to various situations. In order to get at the original programming, we must find some way of abstracting away the various inputs that change its code.

If we say, with Rousseau, that man is capable of being conditioned, I see no reason for privileging the state of nature as man’s default state. The state of nature, too, provides inputs that man will absorb, causing him to change his programming. Admittedly, the input provided by society is more complex, but the man in Rousseau’s state of nature is only “natural” in the sense that he is not in society. Rousseau’s natural man is only an appearance, not a man-in-himself. Assuming Rousseau’s account is right, we have learned only how man would appear after exposure to a certain kind of environment, but we have not learned what the unconditioned man is like. Even if we were to grant that society is the only force that conditions man, we now have simply sidestepped the question and have made no attempt to understand the part of our nature that allows for such conditioning—the most important part. Either way, the absence of conditions is itself just another external state of affairs.

The antinomy that concerns us is not nature versus society, but man versus nature (here in the sense of that man's environment). In this sense, society and nature are not even distinct. Man is presented with a world; man faces nature. Society is merely a force of nature, acting in that environment.

The Piece of Wax

Why does Descartes interrupt his second meditation to play with a piece of wax? Descartes is clearly not ready yet to talk about knowledge of the external world, so what is he doing here?

The first time I read this section, it seemed that Descartes’ observations, although reasonable, were not free from doubt. For example, Descartes claims that although most of wax’s physical properties—taste, shape, smell, color, size, solidity—change when the wax is heated, the same wax still remains. “It must be admitted that it does; no one denies it, no one thinks otherwise” (20, AT30). Perhaps as we heat our piece of wax, invisible wax gnomes are secretly replacing bits of the solid wax with some other kind of non-wax liquid, tricking us into thinking we are holding molten wax. Is this objection ridiculous? Of course, but they remain logical possibilities; thus we could doubt that we ever hold the same piece of wax at any two times.

The second time I read this section, I realized that I was being sophistical and missing the point. Descartes isn’t trying to establish any claims about the external world, but our perception of things in the external world. We do not perceive the “thinghood” of a piece of wax through sight or feeling, but through thought. For example, we know that wax is a corporeal body, and thus extended in space.* Extension is not a property that we perceive by sight, for we will only experience but a few of the countless ways the wax can be arranged in space while still retaining its wax-ness. Indeed, we cannot even imagine all the ways the wax can be arranged: “I would not be making a correct judgment about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination” (21, AT31). The thinghood of the piece of wax is not something we can see, but we instead perceive it in the unity of the wax’s appearances. This unity is something we perceive with our mind: “The perception I have of [the wax] is a case not of vision or touch or imagination… but of purely mental scrutiny” (21, AT31).

Now, if invisible wax gnomes exist, we are still perceiving incorrectly. But the clarity and distinctness that seems to accompany sensory experience (even if it is misleading) actually comes from the mind, not the senses.

*EDIT: A classmate approached me this morning to ask what I meant by "extension." As far as I can tell, extension for Descartes refers to the existence of the wax in three-dimensional space, and thus includes what we normally call "size" and "shape."