CADRE Comments

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous entry in this series of posts can be found here. The first entry can be found here. This entry continues a fourth chapter, begun here. I highly recommend reading at least as far back as this, first.] If my brother, Spencer, thinks he has good grounds for believing that my belief of a snake in the hole has been fostered purely from a cocaine-fit, then he would not (or at least should not) be embarrassed to discover there was, after all, a snake in the hole. He had no good reason to believe the snake was there. Furthermore, my argument that he (and I) should stay away from the hole was ultimately untrustworthy. The form of the argument that we should stay away from the hole was not itself invalid; but without the anchor of rationality at the beginning, there was no good reason to pay attention either to my initial belief ("a snake is in the hole") or to my consequent inferred belief ("we should stay away from the hol...

Intro note from Jason Pratt, guest author for the Cadre... Warning: 14 page post approaching! The original discussion, such as it was, can be found scattered through here on the Cadre journal page. John Loftus eventually continued his replies, first to BK and then to myself, here on the Debunking Christianity journal. You’ll need to scroll down a while through the comments to get to mine, and then to John’s reply. I’m around #11. Where I quote John Loftus, I am sometimes using double-fancy brackets {{like this}}. For in-paragraph quotations, I’ll use regular double-quote marks. Single-quote marks indicate a paraphrase. Since I’m going to end up repeating myself several times, I won’t blame John if he synopsizes in any reply he makes. I would of course prefer that he recognize I made such-n-such reply and include some reference to it, at least in principle, in his own replies. This is one way how discussions ‘continue’ as ‘discussions’. {s} John, {{I hope that [mutual learning] happen...