Brooks W: Just finished it up. If I had to give my two cents, I think your use of the Stroudian objection fails to appreciate that the falsity of skepticism is a point of contact for many unbelievers. If they were to try to hold on to skepticism to escape the conclusion that Christianity is true, defending or asserting skepticism is self-stultifying. We can know skepticism is false, which you seemed open to but not entirely convinced of. Otherwise, I don’t see why one would use the Stroudian objection unless they thought a skeptical scenario was plausible. Have you changed much in your thinking since then?
Balint: If we take the falsity of skepticism as an assumption shared with the unbeliever, then yeah, the Stroudian objection doesn’t apply. But I think some TAG advocates claim that the argument can do more than this—it can prove skepticism false. That, I don’t think it can do. You ask how much my thinking has changed since then. Well, I’ve moved further away from presuppositionalism. I now think that what’s good in it is not unique to it, and what’s unique to it is not good.
Satan For Christ: The consistent critic might ask you how you know Christianity from the falsity of skepticism.
Brooks W: Well, that was a different criticism than Balint’s use of the Stroudian objection.
Balint: If we take the falsity of skepticism as an assumption shared with the unbeliever, then yeah, the Stroudian objection doesn’t apply. But I think some TAG advocates claim that the argument can do more than this—it can prove skepticism false. That, I don’t think it can do. You ask how much my thinking has changed since then. Well, I’ve moved further away from presuppositionalism. I now think that what’s good in it is not unique to it, and what’s unique to it is not good.
Brooks W: I think you may have to elaborate on how skepticism is self-refuting if the interlocutor were to adopt skepticism to avoid the conclusion that Christianity is true. After they have failed to provide an alternative account for the preconditions of intelligibility or failed to show that Christianity fails to account for them or is in some way internally inconsistent, I don’t see how that is an insurmountable difficulty that spoils TAG.
Balint: I’ve drawn a distinction between two kinds of self-refutation. One kind just has the upshot that a view cannot be held rationally (e.g., the view that ‘no view is held rationally’). Another is such that uttering it reveals it to be false (e.g., ‘I can’t speak any language’). I think we can only show that skepticism is self-refuting in the former sense, but that doesn’t tell us that it’s false. My published criticisms of TAG assume that it is an argument for the truth of the Christian worldview. If you look at it merely as a dialectical tool for persuasion, then you needn’t care about the Stroudian objection.
Brooks W: Yes, I think skepticism is self-refuting in that when one argues for its truth or mere plausibility, they are demonstrating its falsity. To say that it is merely self-refuting in the sense that it is irrational but not proven false is to argue for skepticism’s truth or its plausibility, which I’m not sure there is even a difference there because if you argue that skepticism might be true, that you don’t know it’s false, then you are agreeing with skepticism in its refusal to affirm knowledge and intelligibility.
Balint: How do you think that works?
Brooks W: I think it is pretty straightforward that to engage in argumentation demonstrates knowledge that skepticism is false and that human experience is intelligible. But to be a little more specific, the comprehension of TAG demonstrates that the one objecting by asserting skepticism knows someone has argued TAG. It also demonstrates that he knows the words’ meaning (roughly) contained in TAG, which assumes some continuity in the meaning of the words formed from the time TAG has been written or uttered to the time the objector has read or heard them. That he thinks and formulates a response demonstrates that he knows that conceptual human thought categories and the laws of logic have not changed either since the time TAG was spoken or written to the time the objector has heard/read and considered it, to the time the objector has formulated and communicated a response. These are just a few of the things the objector demonstrates that he knows and a few points of intelligible experience that must be in place for him to be objecting, all of which torch skepticism as an escape route to the conclusion that Christianity is true. So to object that skepticism is true demonstrates that it is false that human experience is intelligible, and intelligible human experience logically entails that Christianity is true.
Satan For Christ: IMHO, people miss the inherent ad hominem nature of TACT here. Strictly speaking, you’re not saying skepticism refutes any position, let alone skepticism, because it cannot afford to justify any belief whatsoever. What you’re really saying is that the skeptic unintentionally refutes his own position. Or maybe—okay, it’s not that people “miss” the inherent ad hominem nature of TACT. It’s just that it goes unappreciated in these contexts, I think.
Balint: How do you think that works?
Satan For Christ: If you ask me, Brooks W, time and again, people are treating proof like there’s such a thing independent of “provers,” when there is no such thing. All arguments terminate in the people making the arguments, their precommitments, their bottom-line motivations. Skeptics always depend on eschewing this fact. It’s a sort of burden avoidance syndrome. Like, you ask, Balint, how does skepticism refute itself as Brooks intends to say it does. Okay, but I mean, just ask the reverse: how does skepticism preserve rationality? If there’s no answer to the second question, then you have your answer to the first. All Brooks has to do then is point out that positive knowledge is a condition of rationality, and the skeptic cannot disagree unless he means to say he knows Brooks’ objection because he (the skeptic) is rational, thus tacitly claiming that such knowledge is a condition of rationality. But all of this only works in light of the goals the skeptic has, not some abstract skepticism, which frankly I don’t believe exists to be refuted at all. Maybe I’m just too skeptical though.
Brooks W: “If you ask me, Brooks Weaver, time and again, people are treating proof like there’s such a thing independent of “provers,” when there is no such thing. All arguments terminate in the people making the arguments, their precommitments, their bottom-line motivations. Skeptics always depend on eschewing this fact. It’s a sort of burden avoidance syndrome.” To the credit of Joshua Pillows, especially in the appendix of his recent book, he did a good job on emphasizing this point, whereas many Van Tilians (myself included) tend to forget this and let the interlocutor get a pass on that. I’m not sure I followed the rest of your points, but I started off saying that it is pretty straightforward that skepticism is self-refuting. Anecdotally, I had my first in-person witness encounter a month into discovering presuppositionalism; I didn’t know hardly anything. In this encounter, I was outnumbered five to one, and was taking on 40-somethings and 50-somethings. At one point, backed into a wall, the brightest of the pack said, “There is no absolute truth,” to which I responded, “Is that absolutely true?” He went silent. A few minutes later, after the others had their turns trying to refute me, he jumped back in with, “Okay, there is absolute truth, but we can’t know what it is,” to which I responded, “Do you know that statement is absolutely true?” Again, he went silent, letting others try to take a crack at me. By the end of the night, no one had any smidgen of success trying to undermine Christianity or my argumentation. The point of the story is that it is straightforward and easy to demonstrate the falsity of skepticism in practice if the unbeliever is so desperate as to go there, even when the interlocutor has a much greater than average philosophical sophistication, and more philosophical sophistication than you.
Further Reading:
The Council 