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- Title
No God, no God's Eye: A Quasi-Putnamian Argument for Monotheism.
- Authors
Gafvelin, Åke
- Abstract
In the first part of this paper, I present Hilary Putnam's famous BIV-argument against metaphysical realism and find that it relies on the rejection of a noetic-ray theory of reference (NTR). In the second part, I demonstrate two ways in which a metaphysical realist could save the NTR, and I develop Plantinga's claim that metaphysical realists can only rid of Putnam's concerns by adopting the thesis that the objects of our conceptual schemes roughly correspond to the furniture of reality. Thirdly, I argue that naturalism fails to explain such a metaphysically anthropocentric correspondence, and that monotheism is the only candidate that does so successfully. In the last part, I show that metaphysical realism in fact holds. The line of argumentation is two-fold: pragmatic and theoretical. If metaphysical realism does not hold, then normative considerations must guide theory-choice. But fundamental non-verbal normative disputes are not possible if metaphysical realism is false. Hence, there can be no non-equivocal counterarguments to the claim that metaphysical realism should be adopted if it is false. This amounts to a normative consideration in favour of metaphysical realism. Secondly, I employ a reversed Putnamian BIV-argument to show that metaphysical realism is true: if metaphysical realism is false, we cannot assert that it is false, as its denial is only possible from God's point of view. But we can assert that it is false. Hence, it is true. The conclusion, that God exists, is surely apt to generate the sort of incredulous stare that any metaphysically ambitious armchair argument is subject to. The fundamental point of the paper, however, is that no such stare has any epistemological status if God does not exist. No God, no God's eye.
- Subjects
MONOTHEISM; PUTNAM, Hilary, 1926-2016; REALISM; ANTI-realism; THEORY of knowledge
- Publication
Conatus: Journal of Philosophy, 2021, Vol 6, Issue 1, p83
- ISSN
2653-9373
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.12681/cjp.24930