Justified True Belief

(●) Equivocation uses one word in two senses inside a single argument, so the conclusion only seems to follow. + The Latin aequivocus means "of equal voice": two different things called by one name. The move is to let a word change meaning between one premise and the next and hope nobody notices. (1) The shape of the move is one word doing two jobs. - A church treasurer stands up and says: "Nothing is better than a paid-off building. A bake sale is better than nothing. So a bake sale is better than a paid-off building." Each sentence sounds fine alone. The conclusion is daft. The damage is done by "nothing", which means no thing anywhere in the first sentence and an empty bake-sale table in the second, and the argument walks straight through the gap. - The reasons an argument offers are its premises, and what they are meant to support is its conclusion. An argument is valid when the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true, and equivocation fakes validity. Hold "nothing" to one meaning throughout and a premise goes false; let it slide, and both premises stay true while the conclusion stops following. - Logicians file the move among the fallacies of ambiguity, the ones that go wrong because a word or a sentence can be read two ways. - A syllogism, the three-line argument with two premises and a conclusion, needs exactly three terms, and the middle term must appear in both premises to link them. Change its meaning and three terms have quietly become four. That fault has a formal name, the four-term fallacy (Latin quaternio terminorum). (2) It tempts because words really do stretch. - Most words carry several meanings and we move between them without noticing: a bank, a light, a fine. Because the switching is automatic, a shift inside an argument feels like plain speech rather than a trick. - The tell is a premise that is obviously true in one sense and does its work in another. "Man is the only rational animal; no woman is a man; so no woman is rational." The first premise needs "man" to mean the species and the second needs it to mean the male. Anyone who laughs has understood the fallacy. (3) Aristotle named the fault and its two nearest cousins. - Aristotle listed it first among the six fallacies that "depend on language" in Sophistical Refutations (fourth century BC), calling it homonymy, one name for two things. The everyday sense, a deliberately double answer meant to mislead, came later, which is why equivocating sounds like a moral charge as well as a logical one. - Amphiboly (Greek for "thrown both ways") is the same fault in a sentence's grammar rather than in a single word. Croesus asked the oracle whether to attack Persia and was told that if he did, a great empire would fall. It was his. - Accent shifts the meaning by stress. "I didn't say she stole the money" means seven different things depending on which word you lean on, and quoting a line with a stress it never had is the fallacy. Therefore, equivocation leaves both premises true and the conclusion stranded, because the word joining them changed jobs in between.

(●) Simple example: "The sign said 'fine for parking here', so I parked." + A driver pulls up, reads the sign, and comes back an hour later to a ticket. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that parking here is allowed. The support is the sign, which says "fine", and the driver read "fine" as "all right". The council meant "penalty". Both readings are honest English. (2) Why the support does no work. - Written out, the argument runs: the sign says parking here is fine; "fine" means acceptable; so parking here is acceptable. The second premise is where the reading was smuggled in. Put the council's meaning in its place and the argument says the sign announces a penalty, so parking here is acceptable, which nobody would have taken for permission. - That swap, word out and definition in, is the whole test for equivocation, and it works on arguments about God as well as it works on parking signs. (3) What the reply was really doing. - The driver was not lying, and that is the point. Equivocation usually fools the person committing it first. He wanted a space, the word obliged, and the meaning he needed was the meaning he saw.

(●) A critic says: "Faith is believing without evidence. You admit you have faith. So your Christianity is belief without evidence." + The definition in that first sentence has a published source behind it, and the objection deserves a slower answer than "that is not what faith means". (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that Christian belief is held without evidence. The support is a definition plus an admission: faith means believing without evidence, and Christians say they have faith. - The published ancestor is Peter Boghossian's A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013), which defines faith twice over, as "belief without evidence" and as "pretending to know things you don't know", and holds every religious use of the word to those definitions. - Grant the strongest form at once. Some Christians do use the word that way. "I just have faith", said to end a conversation, means exactly what Boghossian says it means, and the position has a name: fideism, the view that religious belief rests on faith apart from reasons, or even against them. Fideism has real defenders, and many more practitioners who never heard the word. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is in the middle term. In the first premise "faith" carries Boghossian's definition; in the second it carries the New Testament's. - "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1), and the chapter then lists people who acted on what God had told them: Noah building before the rain, Abraham setting out without a map (Hebrews 11:7-8). Faith there is trust in someone with a track record, not belief in the absence of grounds. - Teresa Morgan's Roman Faith and Christian Faith (2015) traced pistis and fides, the Greek and Latin words behind our "faith", across the first-century world, pagan, Jewish and Christian alike, and found them at home in relationships: patron and client, soldier and general, husband and wife. The early Christians took the word as they found it. - Run the swap and the argument comes apart: believing without evidence is believing without evidence; Christians admit to trusting God on his record; so Christians believe without evidence. The middle no longer links. - The mirror works from our side too. "Science rests on faith that nature is uniform; you admit you have that faith; so science is belief without evidence." (3) The sound version. - The critic has a real target and should aim at it. Against fideism the challenge is fair: if your belief has no grounds, do not complain when somebody takes you at your word. - At full strength the demand is the evidentialist's, from the view that a belief is rational only in proportion to the evidence behind it. Show me the evidence, and show me that it is enough. Christianity has always claimed it could. (4) How to answer it. - "If by faith you mean believing without evidence, then I don't have faith, and neither did the people in Hebrews 11. If you mean trust, then yes, I do, and the question is whether the one I trust has earned it. Shall we talk about that?" See also: Philosophy / Epistemology: Warrant Philosophical Theology: Meta-Apologetics: Evidentialist

(●) A Christian says: "Evolution is just a theory." + The same slide from our side of the table, and said so often that it has a rehearsed reply waiting, which the Christian then has to stand and take. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that evolution need not be taken seriously, or at least ranks no higher than its rivals. The support is the word "theory": a theory is a guess, and a guess can be declined. - The point underneath is not silly. There is a real difference between what has been observed, variation within populations and the order of the fossils, and the account offered to explain it, and a Christian who wants that difference kept in view is asking for something honest. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - In everyday English a theory is a hunch: "my theory is that the cat did it". In science it is the opposite of a hunch, a framework of explanation tested against evidence many times over and still standing. Germ theory, plate tectonics, atomic theory. Nobody declines an antibiotic because germs are "just a theory". - Replace the word with its definition, as with the parking sign. In the science sense the sentence reads "evolution is just a well-tested explanatory framework", which is no objection at all. In the everyday sense it reads "evolution is just a hunch", which is false. The sentence works only while the hearer grants one sense and hears the other. - Christian arguments slide the same way. The modal ontological argument opens with "it is possible that a maximally great being exists", and that works only if "possible" means metaphysical possibility, that such a being could really have existed. Let it mean "for all we know", as popular presentations do, and the premise no longer says anything about God. Alvin Plantinga, who built that form in The Nature of Necessity (1974), holds that the argument shows theism rationally acceptable rather than proven, because the first premise is the one it cannot establish. - The Kalam concludes to a cause with certain properties, and "therefore the God of the Bible" changes what "God" means between the conclusion and the sermon. (3) The sound version. - Whatever evolution's standing, it is not an argument against God. A God who makes the world through a process has still made the world, and Christians have disagreed about the mechanism while agreeing about the Maker. - The argument worth making is Plantinga's: evolution plus naturalism, the view that nothing exists beyond nature, gives you no reason to trust the mind that believes in either. That takes evolution at full scientific strength and asks what follows from it. (4) How to answer a fellow Christian who says it. - "In science, 'theory' is the strongest word they have. If we want to question a claim, let's question the claim rather than the label. And a God who works through a process is still the one who did the work." See also: Natural Theology: Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) Natural Theology: Modal Ontological (Maximal Greatness)

(●) A charge that misses: "The Kalam equivocates on 'begins to exist'. Everything you have ever seen begin was made from something. The universe would begin from nothing." + The charge is aimed at the Kalam's first premise, that whatever begins to exist has a cause, and it is the most serious objection that premise faces. It is not equivocation, though, and a real objection deserves an answer, not a label. (1) What the charge claims. - The premise draws its support from experience. Chairs, storms, children: none of them appear uncaused. - But every one of those began as a rearrangement of stuff already there, and the universe, on the Kalam's own account, began with no prior stuff at all. So, the charge runs, "begins to exist" means one thing in the evidence and another in the conclusion, and the support does not carry across. Wes Morriston has pressed the strongest form of the worry against Craig in print, as a doubt about the evidence rather than a charge of equivocation. (2) Why the charge misses. - Run the test. Replace the phrase with its definition in both places: "comes into being at a time, not having existed before". Chairs do that. The universe, if it had a beginning, does that. The meaning holds steady; what changes is the surroundings. - What is left is whether the two cases are alike enough for the evidence to transfer, and that is a question about induction, reasoning from the cases we have seen to the ones we have not. - The line to carry away was drawn in Douglas Walton's Fallacies Arising from Ambiguity (1996) and stated in textbook form by Copi, Cohen and Rodych. A word with two meanings is not a fallacy by itself; equivocation happens only when the argument's validity depends on the shift. The test is the one that caught the parking sign: if the argument survives the swap, the fault lies somewhere else. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - Restated as the inductive worry it is, the charge is live, and the Kalam's defenders answer it. Craig's reply to Morriston (2002) has two parts. - The causal principle concerns efficient causes, whatever brings a thing about, rather than material causes, the stuff it is made from. A sculptor is the efficient cause of a statue and the marble is its material cause, and the premise claims only the first. - And a beginning from nothing without a cause is harder to credit, not easier. If things could come from nothing, nothing would explain why bicycles never do. - Where the charge partly lands, and it should be granted: the premise's support is thinner for the one unique case than for the everyday ones, and its defenders ought to say so. Craig and Sinclair treat the causal principle as a first principle of metaphysics rather than a generalization from experience precisely to meet that worry. (4) How to answer it. - "You're right that the universe's beginning is unlike a chair's. But 'begins to exist' means the same thing in both, so the question isn't whether I switched words. It's whether something can come from nothing without a cause, and I'd like to hear the case that it can." - Even a fallacy correctly named leaves the conclusion where it was, a mistake with its own name, the argument from fallacy. See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Philosophy / Logic: Inductive Arguments