Justified True Belief

(●) A category mistake treats something as if it belonged to a kind of thing it does not. + Some questions have no answer because they were never really questions. A category mistake is one of those. (1) The question is aimed at the wrong kind of thing. - Gilbert Ryle's visitor is shown around Oxford: the colleges, the library, the offices. At the end he asks where the University is. He has taken it for one more building, when it is the way those buildings and the people in them are organised. Nothing he has been told is false. "Where is it?" is a fine question about a library and no question at all about a university. - A category is a kind of thing, together with the questions that make sense of it. A number has no colour. A Tuesday weighs nothing. A category mistake puts a question from one category to a thing that belongs in another. - The reasons an argument offers are its premises, and what those reasons support is its conclusion. The slip usually hides in a premise, where a word is quietly moved from one kind of thing to another, and the conclusion inherits it. The textbooks have no slot of their own for it; the nearest family is Copi's fallacies of ambiguity, where a word shifts meaning partway through an argument. (2) It tempts because the grammar is perfect. - "Where is the University?" is built exactly like "Where is the library?", and a well-made sentence feels as though it must be asking something. Ryle noticed who makes this mistake: not people muddled about universities, but people who use the words perfectly every day and go astray only when they start theorising. - A child hears that the average family has 2.4 children and wants to know which family that is, and where the 0.4 of a child lives. She has not misheard a word. She has one category for "family", and she has used it on a number wearing a family's name. (3) The name comes from Ryle's attack on the soul. - Ryle introduced "category-mistake" in The Concept of Mind (1949) to attack Descartes's picture of a person as an immaterial mind housed in a body, "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine". Asking where the mind is was, on his account, the visitor asking where the University is. Whether he was right is still argued, and Christians who hold that the soul is real have answered him at length. The tool is useful whichever side a reader takes. It was forged by the other side. - Reification (from the Latin res, a thing) treats an abstraction as a solid object, sometimes one with intentions. "Nature wants the strongest to survive." "The market has decided." Nature and the market are real enough. What neither can do is want. - Misplaced concreteness is Whitehead's name (1925) for taking a useful abstraction for the concrete thing it was drawn from: the tax bracket for the household that pays it. Therefore, a category mistake is not a false answer. It is a question that has wandered into the wrong kind of thing, and the cure is never a better answer but a better question.

(●) Simple example: "I have seen the players, the pitch and the umpires. Now show me the team spirit." + Ryle's other visitor is at his first cricket match, and a friend explains who bowls, who bats, who fields and what the umpires do. At the end he asks which of the men supplies the team spirit. (1) He is looking for one more man on the field. - He has taken "team spirit" for one more job, like bowling or keeping wicket, done by one more man. What was on offer was the way the bowling and batting were being done: keenly, together, for the side. (2) No answer of the kind he wants could settle it. - Point to any player and he will say, rightly, that that is a batsman. Bring on the twelfth man and the question comes straight back. - So keep one question in your pocket: what would count as an answer? When nothing of the kind demanded could ever settle a question, the question is in the wrong category. (3) What the question was really doing. - He was not being foolish. "Player" was the only category he had been shown, so he used it on everything he met, and that is the ordinary way into the mistake.

(●) A critic says: "Who designed the designer? A God who could design the universe would have to be even more complex and improbable than the universe." + This is the central argument of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, which he calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. It deserves better than a shrug, because there is a fair demand underneath it. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that God almost certainly does not exist. The support turns on Fred Hoyle's image of a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard and leaving a 747 assembled on the runway: whatever improbability the universe has, anything organised enough to design it must have more, so a designer explains nothing. - At full strength it is a demand for consistency: if organised complexity always needs explaining, the most organised thing there could be needs it most. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - It sits in one word: "complex". In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins had defined complexity as parts arranged in a way unlikely to arise by chance. That is a good definition, and notice what it is a definition about: things made of parts, a watch, a wing, an airliner. - Alvin Plantinga's review pressed the consequence. The God of classical theism, the unmade spirit of the old mainstream view, has no parts to arrange, so asking how improbable his arrangement is comes to asking how many bricks the University is built of. - Richard Swinburne puts it the other way up. Theism posits one person with unlimited power, knowledge and freedom, and zero and infinity are the simplest values a property can take. A power that stopped at some enormous number would need explaining. One with no limit does not. - "Science has never found God" is the same slip in a homelier coat. The line that went round after Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight, that he had looked around from orbit and seen no God, is usually traced to Khrushchev rather than to Gagarin. Either way it treats God as a possible passenger in low earth orbit. Paul told the Athenians that God "does not live in temples made by man" (Acts 17:24), and he does not live in orbit either. (3) The sound version. - The demand underneath survives and should be granted. A theist who says the universe needs an explanation owes an explanation for God. - The answer theism has always given is that God exists necessarily. Not a brute fact that happens to be there, but something that could not have failed to be, as no possible world has two and two making five. Plantinga adds the point about probability: something that exists in every possible world has a probability of one, which is the opposite of what Dawkins needs. - Whether that succeeds is argued over the contingency and ontological arguments, and Dawkins could fairly have asked for it. It is a different question from how improbable a thing with many parts is. (4) How to answer it. - "Complex compared with what, and made of which parts? If God were a very large machine you would be right, and nobody who believes in him thinks he is. What you are entitled to ask is why there is a God at all, and I will try to answer that." See also: Natural Theology: Leibniz' Contingency Argument Natural Theology: Modal Ontological (Maximal Greatness) Natural Theology: Cosmic Fine-Tuning

(●) A Christian says: "The Trinity is like an egg: shell, white and yolk, three parts and one egg." + A Sunday school teacher with a plate and a hard-boiled egg is trying to help, which is why the illustration is so hard to give up. Water, ice and steam, the clover, the father who is also a son and a husband. Every one is offered in kindness, and every one puts God in the wrong category. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the doctrine of the Trinity is coherent: one God, three persons, no contradiction. The support is an ordinary object that is one thing and also three, offered as a picture of how that can be. - The teacher is right about something, and it is worth saying so before taking the egg away. "Three in one" is not automatically nonsense, and ordinary life is full of things that are one under one description and three under another. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - A physical object can be one-and-three in only two ways: by having parts, or by passing through states. Every illustration takes one road or the other, and each road goes wrong. - The egg and the clover take the first. Shell, white and yolk are each a third of the egg, and the doctrine says each person is fully God, not a third of him. - Water takes the second road, and that road ends at a mistake with a name. Ice, liquid and steam are three states one thing passes through in turn, and one divine person appearing now as Father and now as Son is modalism, which the church rejected in the third century. The father who is also a son and a husband is modalism with a family. - The scene at the Jordan shows what the pictures cannot hold. The Son stands in the water, the Spirit comes down on him, and the Father speaks from heaven to him (Luke 3:21-22). Three are present at once, and one is talking to another. Ice, liquid and steam do not address each other. - The teacher has reached for the one category she had, a thing on a plate, the way the cricket visitor reached for "player". (3) The sound version. - Say what the doctrine says, and say it without a prop. There is exactly one God. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are each fully that God. And they are three, not one God under three names. - The "one" and the "three" answer different questions, what is there and who is there, so there is no contradiction for a picture to rescue us from. - Illustrations are not banned, and the best teachers have always used them. Augustine offered memory, understanding and will as a likeness of three in one mind, and said how far it fell short. A picture labelled with what it gets wrong is a teaching aid. Offered as the explanation, it is the mistake. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "The egg gets you one-and-three, but the wrong one-and-three: three thirds. Let's say what the church says: one God, three who are each fully God and speak to one another. It is shorter than the egg, and it is true." See also: Philosophical Theology: One God in Three Persons Philosophical Theology: The Logical Problem of the Trinity Philosophical Theology: The Two Errors Nicaea Refused

(●) A charge that misses: "Saying God is 'outside the universe' is itself a category mistake. Nothing can be outside everything." + The charge borrows Ryle's tool and turns it on the cosmological arguments. It is half right about the word and wrong about the argument. (1) What the charge claims. - The cosmological arguments run from the world's existence to a cause "beyond" or "outside" it. The charge says "universe" means everything there is, so "outside the universe" is like "north of the North Pole": a phrase with the grammar of a location and nothing for it to name. (2) Why the charge misses. - "Universe" is doing two jobs. In the arguments it is defined: the whole of space, time, matter and energy, which is what cosmologists mean. In the charge it has quietly become "everything that exists". One word carrying two meanings across an argument is an equivocation, and it is the charge that has slid. - "Outside" is a metaphor, and the arguments say so. Nobody defending the Kalam, the best known of them, thinks God is at a spot past the last galaxy. "Outside the universe" means "not a part of it": not in space, not in time, not made of anything. - Solomon prayed it at the temple's dedication, "Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you" (1 Kings 8:27). Moreland and Craig's account of omnipresence says the same in philosophers' terms: present to every place, located at none. - Not every category question is a bluff. One is fair whenever the category is genuinely in dispute, and whether the mind is a thing among things is just what Ryle argued and his opponents deny. Neither side is slipping. - Christians argue their own version. Is God a being among beings, a person of the ordinary kind with no limits, or being itself, the reality in which everything that exists participates? David Bentley Hart presses the second against what critics call theistic personalism, and Swinburne and Plantinga defend the first. - So here is the test to carry away: has the category been argued for, or assumed from the ordinary use of a word? Ryle's own mark of the slip was absurdity, the University standing three storeys high. The visitor assumed. Hart and Swinburne argue. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need the arguments to mean "everything" by "universe", and they do not. Failing that, it would need to show that "not in space or time" is itself incoherent: that a timeless thing cannot act, or a non-spatial thing cannot cause. That is a real objection, argued on the arguments' own ground rather than settled by a word. - The charge does land on a habit of speech, and that should be granted. Christians who picture heaven as a place beyond the stars, with God living there, have made the mistake, and a skeptic who has only heard that picture is right to poke it. The correction is Solomon's. (4) How to answer it. - "You are right that 'outside' cannot name a place. It does not. It means 'not a part of'. By 'universe' the argument means space, time, matter and energy, and asks whether all of that had a cause. Once we agree on the word, let's look at the argument." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Philosophical Theology: Divine Simplicity (Classical / Strong) Philosophical Theology: Divine Simplicity (Weak)