Reponses to Pallmann on Presuppositional Apologetics

UPDATED:

There have been several exchanges with Pallmann and even another video responding to critics. I wish to share all the recent relevant information, but with a special thanks to Daniel Akande for his responses and hard work that have been so enlightening. I also wish to thank Pallmann for taking the time to respond to something people usually just scoff at rather than refute.

I will compile some of the responses to David Pallman’s critique of presuppositionalism here. His critique can be found here. I wish to thank Pallmann for his studies and his ability to push presuppositionalists in their claims. It needs to be done, forcing them to deal with these different philosophies seriously. He also looked at primary sources and did the work.

I wish to guide anyone that will try to critique Pallmann that Daniel Akande has the best outline for this:

Main points of disagreement:
1. Epistemic Circularity
2. Direct Acquaintance and Classical Foundationalism
3. Analyticity
4. Direct Inference as a response to the Problem of Induction

On the other hand, I’m rather unphased by his case and think it is a bit overblown. My first impression of it was simply that was clearly subjectivism. I can just say that I know that God is the necessary precondition to intelligibility and that is known non-inferentially and Pallmann wouldn’t have much to critique there. The mind like for Descartes is sufficient to justify our thoughts and this seems to allow that everyone is justified in believing the contents of their minds. The idea that knowledge of God is non-inferential isn’t new to this conversation:

http://spirited-tech.com/2017/12/12/knowledge-of-god/

Secondly, there seems to be a strong disconnect between Pallmann’s epistemology and his metaphysics. I don’t see a point in talking about non-inferential beliefs in a world with no causal connections, that’s chaotic, etc. That’s because in such a world epistemology is like looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn’t there. So, similarly to the Thomists, I think there is a stronger connection to the conversation surrounding being and knowledge.

Thirdly, I don’t understand talking about the Analyticity of classical laws of logic when stating people like Graham Priests have coherent alternatives. It seems that some may think that classical rules of logic are analytically true and others may think non-classical logics are analytically true.

David has taken issue with my comment. He states that he nowhere argued that dialetheism was a cogent alternative. He accuses me of straw man.

This would be a fair objection except that it nullifies his own use of Priest and Butchvarov. That paraconsistent logic is a coherent alternative is an essential premise of citing these philosophers. Otherwise, it’s moot to bring them up at all.

If Pallmann does not maintain that these other logics are coherent or cogent alternatives to bivalent logics, then the objections Graham Preist and Panayat Butchvarov promulgate are of no relevance to Aristotle. But if Priest or Butchvarov have legitimate objections to Aristotle’s transcendental argument, it is only on the premise that these paraconsistent logics are coherent, cogent alternatives – fair game.

Pallmann requires some other criterion to distinguish why he thinks certain rules of inference are analytical and others are not. One wonders what that might be if not a transcendental argument. For more on this discussion:

http://spirited-tech.com/2021/07/28/analyticity-logic-and-aristotle/

The issue of non-inferential knowledge doesn’t show that one can know these things apart from a Christian worldview, but rather that we can have non-inferential knowledge. That still leaves questions about what worldview it makes sense to posit human beings with such knowledge. It is merely assumed that if man can have non-inferential knowledge that he has such apart from Christianity. Where is the argument for that?
Fourthly, it isn’t entirely clear how Pallmann gets around epistemic circularity. It seems in a recent exchange with Dr. Chris Tucker, it was argued that epistemic circularity is involved in an epistemology based on direct acquaintance. Dr. Chris Tucker states:

Here is the key point. Acquaintance theorists generally accept this conjunction: (A) acquaintance can justify a belief and (B ) belief in A can be (partly) justified by acquaintance. I was assuming that accepting this conjunction is tantamount to accepting some kind of epistemic circularity. … You are fine with 1. “acquaintance justifying the belief that acquaintance can justify”. so why aren’t you fine with 2. “a seeming justifying the belief that seemings can justify”? 1 and 2 seem to have the same disadvantages whether we use the term “epistemic circularity” to refer to them or not. And, if 1 isn’t epistemically circular, then neither is 2.

Pallmann maintains that, unlike seemings, acquaintance guarantees the truth of the belief. In response, Dr. Tucker argues that non-inferential justification doesn’t get you infallible justification. He brings up speckled hen case and cartesian demon. Dr. Tucker also states:

The speckled hen cases show that you can be mistaken about which things you are acquainted with (you are responding to a different sort of objection that also appeals to speckled hen cases). The evil demon objection I’m concerned with is one in which your judgments about what you are acquainted with are very unreliable. Classical foundationalists tend to treat their access to what they are acquainted with as less vulnerable to evil demon worries than our perceptual experiences. But that’s not so. (Or maybe I don’t understand talk of evil demons granting you the three acts of acquaintance. Not sure how that helps. If the evil demon grants you perceptual experiences that are reliable, then you are justified according to the reliabilist. But that ignores rather than addresses the problem for reliabilism. likewise, I think your talk of the evil demon granting you the three acts of acquaintance ignores rather than addresses the problem.)
If guarantees aren’t necessary for inferential justification, it is harder to consistently explain why guarantees are necessary for non-inferential justification.

Lastly, I will mention an observation from James Fodor. In their dialogue on foundationalism vs coherentism, Fodor made the point that something seems to govern and add meaning to these things we call perceptions. He used Gestalt as an example. He maintained that observation alone doesn’t tell you what you think you are actually seeing. There is something beyond the perceptions at play. Further concepts that give meaning and significance to one’s worldview. Daniel Akande has explained this in a better way than I can in his last response to Pallmann.

I don’t see how direct acquaintance with your own thoughts is sufficient for knowledge in the relevant sense. At most, it seems sufficient for knowledge that you are presently having a certain thought or appearance.

If I am directly acquainted with the thought, “There is a tree outside,” that might justify “I am thinking that there is a tree outside.” But it does not by itself justify “There is a tree outside.” The latter depends upon an extra-mental fact that acquaintance with my thought does not give me. Knowing that I think P is not yet knowing P.

Nor do I see why you are entitled to restrict direct acquaintance to one’s own mental states in the first place. If immediate acquaintance can ground knowledge, why couldn’t God be an object of direct acquaintance? You need an argument for that asymmetry rather than simply defining acquaintance so that God and the external world are excluded.

There is also a reflexive problem. If your epistemic principle is based upon privileged first-person access, you are not directly acquainted with my consciousness. So how do you know that I am not directly acquainted with God, or with something beyond my own thoughts, more immediately than your theory allows?

The basic point is that acquaintance with a representation is not automatically acquaintance with the fact represented. First-person access does not by itself confer epistemic authority, much less guarantee that one’s understanding is correct. At most, it provides a distinctive kind of access. You still need an argument that this access is sufficient for knowledge, or that no one else could know your mind more accurately than you do. Why assume that because a thought is yours, you are necessarily better acquainted with it than anyone else? I might understand your mental state better than you do, even while you are mistaken about it. People routinely misidentify their motives, beliefs, emotions, and even the implications of their own thoughts.

The Third Man:

Jimmy’s search for the Answer of Induction