FAITH A N D A FAILURE OF

A R G U M E N T S A G A I N S T SCEPTICISM

JOHN KING-FARLOW*

I have argued in two earlier papers for Sophia that the often
intuitively applicable principle of Maximizing Expected Utility
(Primaxeput) helps admirably to explain why, in certain cases,
religious commitment is quite rational. These papers are 'Rationality
and the Will to Believe', 1969, and 'Gambling on Other Minds
Human and Divine', 1971. In the latter I tried to show, among
other things, that Alvin Plantinga's famous claims that beliefs in God
and in Other Minds belong in 'the same epistemological boat' need
relating to intuitive uses of Primaxeput and relat~ising to certain
already rational individuals' options, utilities and probability
judgments.
Leaving things at such a point now seems to me to concede too
much to the (usually atheist) sorts of critic who reply to Plantinga:
'Well, I kno~ that I have hands and Other-Minded friends, but I
don't know at all that I have a God or even strong evidence of a
God's existence.' (Cf. M. A. Slote, ]ournal of Philosophy, 1970,
p. 45; W. L. Rowe, No~s, 1969, p. 270). In what follows I shall try
to show that currently very popular arguments for removing or
dissolving worries about N A T U R A L I S T S ' needs to take a Leap of
Faith are bad arguments. The Naturalist must take so large a leap of
Faith to embrace Other Material Beings, let alone Other Minds, that
he might be in poor shape and also poor epistemological taste to
denounce rational Leaps by many believers to embrace some Spirits
as well. (I discuss rationality conditions for such Leaps in the two
articles mentioned and at greater length in my book Faith and the
Li[e of Reason, Reidel, 1973.)
Certain forms of 'Private Language' argument and 'Trans-
cendental' arguments have been designed for purposes which I do
not entirely understand, even if their authors really did. The immense
literature published on such arguments would suggest that an equally
immense part of the cornme~*ato~' diffic.,lties has resulted from the
unclarity of their chosen authors' original intentions. Two goals do
* Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Canada.

10
 FAITH AND A FAILURE OF ARGUMENTS AGAINST SCEPTICISM

seem to be beyond dispute. 1 The first ( I ) is to show that a word

actually does have a meaning for one man, say Robinson Crusoe,
only if its meaning could, in principle, be understood by other men
(were they suitably coexistent and present) who would share Crusoe's
aptitude for experiencing similar regularities among phenomena and
for learning Crusonian rules of language. 2
The second goal ( I I ) is to show that the upshot of ( I ) must be
that it make no sense to deny, and scarcely less sense to assert in
closed or open-minded argument, various 'Moorean' propositions 3 to
the effect that I am an intelligent organism with hands and feet,
etc., brought up socially and taught a rule-governed language by
similar intelligent organisms with whom I regularly communicate (or
did communicate before if it was my fate to have become ship-
wrecked for a while); that we live close together on a planet made of
mattcr which existed and will exist for a finite time among incalculable
numbers of planets, moons, suns, quasars and the like in a material
universe (an 'external' world), etc. It is taken that goal ( I I ) is
quickly reached from goal ( I ) and should put an end once and for
all to philosophers' recurrent talk of Sceptical doubts about Other
Minds, The External World, and Solipsism.
What I hope to show is that, as reflective philosophers (if not
as purely instinctive beings), we need a solid grain of F A I T H and
J'amesian W A G E R I N G to take us from accepting ( I ) in a minimally
question-begging way to overcoming most solipsistic doubts which is
goal ( I I ) . I say 'most' because, to make the argument easier to swallow
for those who say they can make no sense of 'bodiless minds', I shall
not try to suggest that a philosopher may need to have F A I T H by
WAGER in the existence of his own body. A philosopher may well
need this, but such a point merits quite a different paper. 4 My method
will be indulgence - - (hopefully illuminating rather than merely
ruminating i n d u l g e n c e ) - in fables about possible, intelligibly
explainable worlds. 5
But before proceeding to the fabulous, one should note the more
mundane matter of 'Transcendental' arguments. If certain forms of
'Private Language' arguments are right, then the fables we will tell
are literally quite unintelligible, or are desperate examples of 'dis-
guised nonsense'. If certain forms of 'Transcendental' arguments are
right, then my fables will be intelligible enough to examine and
1 Cf. Barry Stroud, 'Transcendental Arguments', Journal of Philosophy
65 (1968).
o Cf. N o r m a n Malcolm's attempted expositions of Wittgenstein in
Encvh':'.:,e and C,,rtainty (1963) and elsewhere.
:~ r ,'d,";'~ Wit~gen~te;'~ offers , , n f o r ~ c : - i f i c TM. quite a vast congeries o f such
9\7oorcan' proposi~i.ms at th e opening c f his On Ce,,ainty (1969).
4 See my 'Immortality, Analogy and the P h e n o m e n o l o g y o f Death" in the
1973 Proceedings of the .4 merican Catholic Philosophical Association.
s C o m p a r e m y tactics in 'Evil and Other Worlds', Sophia, 1967; cf. m y
Faith and the Life of Reason (Reidel, 1973), pp. 135-140.

11
 SOPHIA

diagnose as necessarily false or necessarily inapplicable to all possible

worlds because they contain an implicit or explicit contradiction.
It follows that if some Private Language Argument (hereafter PLA)
enthusiasts are right, then one sins against the bounds of sense just
by taking the fables seriously as descriptions of possible worlds,
rather than as jokes, dream-like 'stories', 'myths' or even as products
of an overworked imagination. It follows also that if some Trans-
Cendental Argument ( T A ) enthusiasts (like the followers of the
P. F. Strawson of Individuals) are right, one only sins against the
bounds of sense by trying to believe that such incoherent accounts of
reality are actually true (for some values of 'P', one understands
'P & N O T - P ' but cannot sensibly believe it, where as ' N O T - A N D -
OR-P' is unintelligible per se). But if the following fables are quite
intelligible and coherent, it follows that 'something' is just not cogent
about certain forms of PLA's and TA's, whatever the reasons may be.
Myth MU: In the distant future the earth has almost become
uninhabitable. Almost everyone, old and young alike, will be dead
soon of radiation poisoning. Scientists are unsure about which reach-
able bodies in space are permanently inhabitable for humans, but
they fix upon three of the least unpromising possibilities. The last
six, still radiation-free babies, three male and three female, are
paired-off by sex and placed in three capsules equipped with quite
extraordinarily advanced versions of Skinner boxes administered by
computers. The computers are so designed as to make the children
think that they live in a family and in a broader society, as well; the
computers' various puppets simulate adults speaking a (rule-governed)
language much simpler than English. On their voyage in space, the
children learn to talk with the puppets and with each other in this
tongue. Once landed at their hospitable destination, the children
dispense with the puppets, whom they now recognize to be mere
machines, and subsequently develop together a richer vocabulary
with a suitable range of Speech Acts for adapting to this new environ-
ment. They breed and establish new human races with gradually
emerging families, societies, and languages.
Myth M U I I : The situation on Earth is the same as in Myth Mu
except for three things. First, only one human infant is free of fatal
radiation poisoning. Second, vastly more sophisticated computers,
computer-puppets and Skinner-boxes are available. Third, a human
male infant can much later be trained by the 'polished up' versions
of the Skinner-box to generate a new race of humans by the proper
use of the computers and by inseminating certain organic materials
included in the space capsule. The child learns to speak while believ-
ing that the puppets in the Skinner-box are all persons: they 'talk'
to him and he learns to talk back, foIlowin~ the rules of his computer's
language. Once arrived at his quite habitable destination, he continues
to follow the puppets' instructions and later inseminates the organic
material. Although he continues to follow the puppets' instructions

]2
 F A I T H A N D A F A I L U R E OF A R G U M E N T S A G A I N S T S C E P T I C I S M

for tending the babies which result, he goes through an agonizing

crisis. For he comes to realize and only later to accept with decreasing
pain that he and the babies are persons but not the puppets he had
long treasured as family, friends, neighbors, and teachers.
Myth NU: The situation is very like that at the beginning of
M U II: only one human child is radiation-free. Dying surgeons
rush to operate on the infant's brain, inserting a little device or two
in its cranium, artificially arranging certain 'brain traces' and neuro-
logical patterns. The distance which the space vehicle must traverse
is too great for loading it with much machinery, so all that is installed
is what is required for the child's feeding, cleanliness, and basic
animal needs on the journey as well as for a few years after the
journey's completion m together with the organic materials to be
inseminated. The child's brain and resulting stream of consciousness
is programmed to generate the beliefs that he is talking to other persons,
that he remembers beginning to to grow up in a family and among
members of a society, that he remembers being taught the rules of
speaking English, playing dominoes, adding and subtracting numbers,
and experiencing other typical childhood events. At the age of thirteen
he still believes that the two remaining, English-speaking 'persons' in
his stream of consciousness are indeed real persons. For years he has
spoken a certain amount of perfect English to 'them' (replying to
their questions) every day, but is growingly annoyed that 'they' do
not reply to his questions. At fourteen he 'remembers' that he had
been taught to inseminate the organic materials in the space capsule.
'Remembering' how to inseminate the organic material, he does so.
At eighteen, when he has several eagerly talking children, the 'persons'
in his stream of consciousness fade out altogether.

Myth OMICRON (A Solipsistic Nightmare): In the beginning,

to parody the Continuous Creation theory once held by the astronomer
Sir Fred Hoyle, there were just two hydrogen molecules. Gradually,
ever so gradually, a series of varied particles popped into existence
between those molecules. Even more gradually, the growing series of
all that ever was coalesced to form a space capsule with a baby in
it whose brain was in very nearly the same physical state as that of
the baby in Myth NU. Through interaction with illusory 'persons'
in his stream of consciousness the child learned to speak English,
to do arithmetic, to play dominoes and chess in his head accorc'ing
to the rules for so doing. The growing boy developed a host of social
concepts and continued to believe that he shared a form of life with
the jolly and affectionate 'persons' in his phenomenal world. When
he was twenty-one, his body had reached a state sufficient for pro-
ducing and reproducing its own air, food, and water. The space
capsule dropped, shortly, out of existence. The man continued to
believe that he was leading a highly social life. For his wishes,
desires, fears, and flights of imagination put words other than
mechanical questions into the mouths of the 'persons' he believed to
 F A I T H A N D A F A I L U R E OF A R G U M E N T S A G A I N S T S C E P T I C I S M

be his fellows. He was the only individual in existence, yet he thought

up new versions of epistemological doubts in Descartes and Hume.
He thereafter believed that he had devastatingly answered them with
arguments of his own, not unlike new versions of Wittgenstein,
Strawson, and Moore. He even went so far as to 'prove' to himself
that a vast External World lay at his feet and that many Other Minds
were real. (Of course, i[ other persons with similar brains came into
being, they could learn this formerly unique individual's always rule-
governed language).

So much for the myths. What is the relevance to questions of

Faith and Pascal's Wager? Private Language arguments and Trans-
cendental arguments have been developed and wielded to undermine
Sceptical positions. They tend to move from the premise - - compare
Goal I - - that our concepts are apt for use in a society (since our
claims are checkable in principle, if claims at all) to the conclusions
compare Goal I I - - that our existence itself must be social and so
the most basic resuppositions of Science and Common Sense must be
left beyond question. However, if the succeeding Myths from M U to
O M I C R O N are all quite intelligible, then there is no cogent argument
to take us from Goal I to Goal II, unless we prefer 'cogent' arguments
with false conclusions. Bertrand Russell, for example, in The Problems
of Philosophy was content to say that although Scepticism is coherent,
there is no reason whatsoever to become sceptical. He went on to
insist in that very book, however, that Science and Mathematics are
extremely reliable but Common Sense and the phenomena of plain
human consciousness are not! Such is the sort of dogmatism, a dog-
matism denounced by Russell in the same book and elsewhere, which
William James believed he was attacking in W. K. Clifford when he
wrote The Will to Believe. James argued that one should, in certain
very common situations, be willing to make commitments, rather
than supposed recordings of the indubitable. We have argued before
that the Jamesian improvement upon Pascal's Wager can itself be
improved upon by improving upon the modern concept of Maximising
Expected Utility. For anyone to whom the challenges of epis-
temological Sceptism and Solipsism are real, the possibility that
perhaps he is the individual in Myth O M I C R O N and the thought
that an honest use of TA's and PLA's probably cannot help him will
be no less real.

Suppose then that for some of the profoundest philosophers,

science should begin with an explicit, but rational, act of F A I T H in
a great many things that are not beyond question. Why should an
explicit but rational act of F A I T H in a Creator (or, for that matter,
an Atman-Brahman ground-of-being) and in a justifying Explanation
of the existence of the universe be kept out of the question? It does
not seem that PLA's and TA's supply any proof of any critical weight
for claiming that faith in a 'Scientific World View' is rational whereas

14
 SOPHIA

F A I T H in a religious view of things is not. Of course, there m a y be

better reasons than P L A ' s and T A ' s for saying that the former is
rational. But, some of the allegedly better reasons m a y well turn out
to be variations on P L A ' s and T A ' s in the final analysis!

One of the lessons, then, to be extracted from the myths is that

the attempted refutations of certain sceptical positions are inadequate
and do not serve the purpose for which they were designed. I n order
to debar the sceptic from carrying on his ' p r o g r a m ' of doubt, a non-
sceptic would require virtually to abolish even the possibility of
sceptical meditations. Clearly, it is neither untenable nor illogical to
hold fast to a consistent sceptical posture, one which does not over-
emphasize the role of doubting, but suggests that something is lacking
in even the more arrogantly contemporary accounts of certainty. 6

0 The series of Myths is NOT designed to bring the Res Cognitans to a

final stage where (1) he believes correctly in an External World of
generous proportions and in Other Minds - - but believes for the wrong
reasons. (This is the terminus ad quem of Jonathan Harrison in 'A
Philosopher's Nightmare'. Aristotelian Society Proceedings, N.S. LXVII,
(1966-67), pp. 179-188.) The series is designed to culminate in a stage
where (2) the Res Cogitans believes understandably but falsely in Other
Minds and in a vast External World that is 'external' to his body, as
Naturalists would wish.