Whenever Christians cite the their faith in support of some unpopular moral view, objectors often turn to a well worn argument. I call it the ‘if you don’t teach this, you can’t teach that’ argument. The argument turns on a comparison between the objectionable view in question and some other Christian view or Biblical text. The objector accuses the Christian of cherry-picking his beliefs. One version of the argument suggests that the Christian obeys only parts of his faith that support the objectionable view while not obeying those that appear to support the objector’s moral view. The longer the list of Christian beliefs that the Christian does not support, the…
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What’s Wrong With Mind-Reading Arguments
Consider Fred. Fred hates cars. But Fred hates cars in 1946. We don’t know why he hates cars and perhaps he might like modern cars. We can speculate all we like, but we can’t say for sure that Fred would like modern cars. We can’t say, “Well, when Fred hated cars in 1946, cars were very different. Fred didn’t even know about modern cars. Therefore, Fred would not hate cars in 2017.” The reason we can’t make the conclusion is because no kind of car was specified as the subject of Fred’s scorn. Indeed, it is highly likely that Fred hated all species of cars not because he hated every…
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Problems of Kind and Identity: Why Gender Claims are Difficult to Ground
2015 was the year of unusual predication. What kind of thing I am mattered more than ever. Consider the following: “I am black”“I am a woman”“I am French” It was not obvious what it was that made a person any of these things. In ordinary speech we assume that some fact about the world makes a property ascription such as the above statements true about the entity we are referring to. However, the claims made by many people in 2015 were apparently fact-free claims. A man claimed to be a woman, Englishmen claimed to be Frenchmen and a white woman claimed to be a black woman. Let’s think about gender for a minute.…