The Failure of Philosophical Knowledge

Front matter

Janos Tozser

Also available from Bloomsbury:

A Philosophy for Future Generations, by Tiziana Andina Four Views on the Axiology of Theism, edited by Kirk Lougheed Knowledge, Number and Reality, edited by Nils Kürbis, Bahram Assadian, and Jonathan Nassim Philosophy, Literature and Understanding, by Jukka Mikkonen

Part 3 Bibliography Index vi

11 43

81 99 119 159

219 227

Acknowledgements

Over the past few years, I have had conversations and discussions with many philosophers on the main topics of this book, both in person and in writing. For all the above, Td like to express my thanks to Tibor Bárány, Tim Crane, Tamas Demeter, Marton Dornbach, Gabor Forrai, Akos Gyarmathy, Gabor Hofer- Szabó, Ágnes Katona, Daniel Kodaj, Andrea Komlósi, David Mark Kovacs, Péter Lautner, Bence Nanay, László Nemes, Tamás Paár, Michele Palmira, Jenő Pöntör, Daniel Schmal, Tibor Sutyák, Peter van Inwagen, Péter Varga, and Zsófia Zvolenszky.

My special thanks go to László Bernáth, Boldizsár Eszes, Kati Farkas, Judit Gébert, George Kampis, László Kocsis, Miklós Márton, and the anonymous referees of Bloomsbury Publishers for their thorough and detailed comments on earlier versions of the manuscript of my essay, in which they pointed out several errors, inaccuracies, and other mistakes.

Finally, Td like to express my gratitude to Zsuzsanna Balogh and especially to Boldizsár Eszes for their invaluable help with preparing the English text, and to the editors at Bloomsbury, Liza Thompson, Colleen Coalter, and Suzie Nash, and to my copyeditor, Dawn Cunneen, for lots of patience and help.

The research leading to this essay was supported by NKFI/OTKA (Hungarian Scientific Research Fund of the National Research Development and Innovation Office) grant No. K123839, K132911 and MTA Lendület “Moral and Science.”

Introduction

All areas of philosophy are characterized by dissent. Philosophers disagree among themselves in innumerable ways, and this pervasive and permanent dissensus is a sign of their inability to solve philosophical problems and present well-established philosophical truths. Every philosopher who has not buried his head in the sand knows or at least suspects this.

The saddest aspect of this failure is that philosophers have been unable to solve philosophical problems which deeply affect all of us existentially— problems whose stakes were the highest out of all theoretical problems. What I have in mind are questions like “Is there a God?”; “What is the relationship between mind and body?”; “Do we have free will and moral responsibility?” Philosophers have also been unable to solve those big philosophical problems whose existential weight cannot be compared to the above three, but whose theoretical significance is unquestionable. These include, for example, questions such as “What is the distinguishing mark of mental phenomena?”; “Do we have direct access to a mind-independent reality in veridical perception?”; “Do physical objects have spatiotemporal parts?” And philosophers have not managed to solve those philosophical problems that have no particular existential weight or even theoretical significance, either. Some examples are questions (concocted in philosophical laboratories, so to speak) such as “What kind of entities are holes?”; “Are disjunctive properties genuine properties?”; “Can one unintentionally produce abstract artifacts?”

Tm not claiming that the community of philosophers has no philosophical knowledge at all. All Pm saying is this: if we collected all consensually (or at least near-consensually) accepted philosophical truths, the result would be painfully modest—especially in light of the big questions that have been left unanswered.

For what would this collection include? On the one hand, it would have trifles like “Nobody can know false propositions’; “Our dream experiences fail to provide adequate justification of our beliefs about the external world” On the other hand, it would include some “If ..., then ...” type statements such as “If the intentional properties of our mental states supervene on the phenomenal properties of those states, then intentional contents cannot be Russellian propositions”; “If proper names are rigid designators, then there is a posteriori necessity.’ Moreover, it would include some assertions about the virtues and difficulties of various philosophical theories, such as “Presentism has the virtue of being consistent with the phenomenology of time, but has a hard time finding adequate truth-makers for true propositions about the past”; “Class nominalism has the virtue of not being committed to the existence of multilocal entities, but has a hard time reducing necessarily coextensive properties.” Apart from these, the collection would include some conceptual distinctions like “De dicto modalities must be distinguished from de re ones,’ or “Determinism must be distinguished from fatalism.” Finally, it might include negative substantive truths such as “The Leibnizian thesis that ‘All true propositions are analytic’ is false”; “The thesis that ‘all mental states are behavioral dispositions’ is false? And that’s all—I believe I have just listed all kinds of consensually accepted philosophical truths.

Now, if you reflect on the facts that: (1) during the 2,500-year-old history of philosophy, philosophers most certainly did not want to come up with merely these kinds of truths, as they had “a somewhat” more ambitious dream, namely to come up with substantive and positive truths, and that (2) pervasive and permanent dissensus about philosophical problems is a clear sign of the philosophers’ failed attempts in this regard, and their failure to fulfil their commitments no matter how hard they try—then you will be hard pressed to conclude that philosophy is a failed epistemic enterprise. If that is the case, then we, philosophers, are members of a failed epistemic enterprise, and our philosophical beliefs are beliefs held by the participants of a failed epistemic enterprise.

This is not a heartwarming thought, so much so that in my opinion, we are epistemically and morally obliged to face philosophy’s epistemic failure, to react to the fact that the community of philosophers (to which we belong) does not know substantive and positive philosophical truths, and to try to account for the epistemic status of our own substantive and positive philosophical beliefs in light of the foregoing. Thus, we have to ask ourselves “What should we do with our substantive and positive philosophical beliefs in the face of the epistemic failure of philosophy?”

It is wrong for us to act as if everything were in perfect order. It is wrong for us to deny philosophy’s epistemic failure (for example, by saying that “Doing

Introduction 3 philosophy has nothing on earth to do with seeking truths—philosophers misinterpret their own intentions when they think they are making attempts to solve philosophical problems”). And it is wrong for us to play down philosophy’s epistemic failure (for example, by saying that “There is nothing bad in philosophy’s not having the final answers—our life would be bleak indeed if we could announce winners in philosophy and thereby make all philosophers regurgitate these winners’ theses all the time”). These, I believe, are unworthy and unscrupulous reactions.

Apart from unworthy and unscrupulous reactions, in light of philosophy’s epistemic failure, there are four ways for philosophers to react to the epistemic failure of philosophy and think about the epistemic status of their substantive philosophical beliefs.

Some philosophers think that they have succeeded in supporting their substantive philosophical beliefs with compelling arguments and urge others to formulate such knock-down arguments. They think that the only way for us to rationally stick to our substantive philosophical beliefs in light of the pervasive and permanent dissensus in philosophy is to be able to compellingly justify them. For if we have compelling arguments for p, then it is irrelevant that others think that p is false.

I cannot identify with this proposal. For one thing, I cannot entertain the idea of being so lucky that I am the one (and not anyone else) who has managed to formulate knock-down philosophical arguments for my substantive philosophical beliefs. For another thing, the philosophers who are absolutely convinced that they have knock-down arguments thereby vindicate an epistemically privileged position to themselves, but they cannot appropriately (non-circularly) justify this privilege or superiority in any way. On top of that, they must consider their interlocutors to be their epistemic inferiors, as they are unable to see the compelling nature of their arguments. Now, I feel that this is not the right attitude—to me, it is not an example to be followed.

Other philosophers think that the pervasive and permanent dissensus in philosophy is a clear proof of the inadequacy and unsuitability of philosophy’s truth-seeking and justificatory tools for establishing substantive philosophical truths, so our philosophical beliefs are inappropriately justified. But if they are inappropriately justified, then we cannot rationally stick to them and have to suspend all of them, however difficult and painful this may be.

I cannot identify with this reaction, either. I have several reasons, but for now I will mention just the three most evident ones. First, I don’t think that anyone could argue for this skeptical (or rather, meta-skeptical) view in a non-self-defeating way. Second, I think that the only way for me to actually suspend all of my substantive and positive philosophical beliefs is to sink into intellectual apathy, and I would not like that to happen. Third, concerning our moral beliefs, I feel that I would be wrong to try to suspend them because if I did so, then I would have to toss a coin (or choose something similar) to decide what to do in difficult situations.

Yet other philosophers think that we can rationally stick to our beliefs even if we are unable to justify them compellingly. We do the right thing if we develop a philosophical theory that is in harmony or equilibrium with our fundamental pre-philosophical convictions and defend it from possible objections by showing that none of those are compelling. Once we have successfully accomplished these two tasks, we can rationally believe in our substantive philosophical theses— independently of whether others hold them to be false.

I can't identify with this approach, either. It says that my fundamental pre-philosophical convictions are epistemically unjustified, so they are not based on anything that would indicate what the truth is. Thus, this approach boils down to the following: “I can rationally believe that p is true because (1) I can show that no compelling argument can be made against p and (2) p is in harmony or equilibrium with my fundamental pre-philosophical convictions that I cannot suspend without damaging my personal integrity and my cognitive household.” Now, I think that this kind of justification for p doesn’t entitle me to seriously and sincerely believe that p is true—to believe that p really describes things as they are. It merely entitles me to say “It seems to me that p is true in the light of my pre-philosophical convictions” —and this is clearly not enough for my taking epistemic responsibility for the truth of p.

Finally, some philosophers think that all philosophical problems are meaningless, and so are all of our philosophical beliefs, consequently we cannot rationally stick to any of them. The only meaningful task of doing philosophy is to debunk the appearance-creating mechanism responsible for the genesis of philosophical problems and to work out an effective therapy which cures all persons infected with philosophy of unnecessarily troubling themselves with trying to solve philosophical problems.

I cant identify with this standpoint, either. For one thing, I think that all arguments are bad (and may be self-defeating) whose intended conclusion is that some appearance-creating mechanism is responsible for the existence of

Introduction 5 each philosophical problem—that the surface grammar and the pictoriality of language systematically mislead me. For another thing, I think that all therapeutic exercises are ineffective insofar as they are aimed at curing me of my engagement with philosophical questions so they stop troubling me unnecessarily.

So where does all this lead? As far as I can see, these four reactions (or metaphilosophical visions outlined in a nutshell) exhaust the scope of possible responses, and yet I cannot commit myself to any of them with a clear intellectual and moral conscience. Unfortunately, this means that I cannot reassuringly account for the epistemic status of my philosophical beliefs. I can't stick to them in cognitive peace, with epistemic responsibility and without self-deception, and I cant abandon them in cognitive peace, either, with epistemic responsibility and without self-deception.

You may say these four reactions dont exhaust the scope of possible responses. You may think that the community of philosophers will acquire new and reliable truth-seeking method(s) (whatever they are, e.g., experimental philosophy, conceptual engineering, etc.) with which it can find—or has already found some hitherto unrecognized—compellingly justified substantive philosophical theses.

You're right—I could hope for that. In what follows, I will discuss how much this hope is reasonable (not much, I guess); still, reasonable or not, it isn’t helpful at all when I want to account for the epistemic status of my substantive philosophical beliefs. For the truth-seeking method(s) (however good they be) that community of philosophers will acquire in the future can neither justify nor refute my present substantive philosophical beliefs.

You may also say that I am the only one to blame for my “writhing” and “impotence; as I want to account for the epistemic status of my philosophical beliefs. Of course, if I were able to do philosophy in the spirit of “I don't believe that p (I don’t hold p to be true), I only accept p as a working hypothesis” —that is to say, if my commitment to p were of no significance and consequence to me—, then everything would be in perfect order. In this case, Td really be able to do philosophy without any cognitive uncertainties, because I could remain personally uncommitted while arguing for or against any philosophical theory.

I’m ambivalent about this strategy. On the one hand, I’m a little bit envious of those philosophers who don't have any definite philosophical beliefs (or have no philosophical beliefs at all), and so, after all, it makes no difference to them which philosophical theory they develop. Thus, they are able to serve philosophy’s “great” and “noble” goal of populating the logical space more and more densely with well-constructed and consistent philosophical theories with a clear conscience. On the other hand, this is not an option for me, because I do have some substantive philosophical beliefs, and they are not arbitrary. For example, I don’t merely accept the philosophical thesis that we are morally responsible for certain acts of ours, and the falsity of physicalism is not a mere working hypothesis to me, because I believe that we can be held to be morally accountable for certain acts of ours and I also believe that not everything is ultimately physical—and these beliefs are significant to me, as I have a personal stake in them.

To make a long story short, I do have some substantive philosophical beliefs, so I cannot ignore these while doing philosophy. At the same time, it seems to me that there is no such metaphilosophical vision that I could commit myself to in order to reassuringly account for my substantive philosophical beliefs with a clear conscience. Since, in my opinion, most philosophers resemble me in that they, too, have some substantive philosophical beliefs, and since—I suppose— my misgivings about the above four metaphilosophical visions are not entirely groundless and idiosyncratic, it may seem to others as well that we come up against an aporia in trying to account for the epistemic status of our substantive philosophical beliefs. In short, we find ourselves in a situation with seemingly no way out.

I will try to raise the issue differently, with the emphasis laid elsewhere. I assume that you already have some substantive philosophical beliefs—that you hold certain substantive philosophical theses to be true. I also assume that you have philosophical justification for your beliefs—you can underpin their truth with philosophical arguments. And I also assume that you are able to respond to objections to your philosophical beliefs—you can put your finger on some or other weak spots in them. In short, I assume that you have done your best to be able to assert your philosophical views in a form which is as strong and immune to objections as possible.

Nevertheless, even if all the above is correct, you may be faced with three quite nagging questions:

(1) Can you seriously and sincerely believe in the truth of your philosophical theses, and take epistemic responsibility for the truth of your philosophical beliefs in light of the fact that there probably are some philosophers whom you consider your epistemic peers and who, holding opposing philosophical

Introduction 7 views, do not share your philosophical beliefs? This question is nagging because the fact that your epistemic peers do not share your philosophical beliefs may seem to you to be just as strong evidence for thinking that your philosophical beliefs can easily be false after all as the evidence based on which you have committed yourself to their truth.

(2) Can you seriously and sincerely believe in the truth of your philosophical theses, and take epistemic responsibility for the truth of your philosophical beliefs in light of the fact that you have good reason to think that they are shaped and determined by factors (upbringing, socialization, personality traits, epistemic character, etc.) which are not under your control and have nothing to do with their truth or falsity? This question is nagging because if your philosophical beliefs are really determined by such factors (for example, you believe that p is true because you wish that p be true, or you believe that p is true because you were socialized to hold p true), then it may seem to you that your philosophical beliefs are biased.

(3) Can you seriously and sincerely believe in the truth of your philosophical theses, and take epistemic responsibility for the truth of your philosophical beliefs in light of the fact that philosophy as an epistemic enterprise has failed—philosophers have been unable to solve philosophical problems and come up with compellingly justified substantive philosophical theses? This question is nagging because it may seem to you that the best explanation of philosophy’s epistemic failure is that its truth-seeking and justificatory tools are inadequate and unsuitable for establishing substantive philosophical truths—and if this is the case, then your substantive philosophical beliefs are inappropriately justified, and consequently you cannot trust in their truth anymore.

What is common to these questions or challenges is that none of them concerns the content of your philosophical beliefs—they do not bring out the special internal difficulties of your philosophical views. Neither do they concern whether you were maximally circumspect when making sure that you have true rather than false beliefs. Each of these challenges arises “beyond” the point where you have already carefully underpinned your philosophical views with arguments.

And yet, you cannot wave them aside. You would not be right to say: “As I’ve done my best to underpin my philosophical beliefs with the strongest arguments possible, I don't have to address these challenges—I can safely dismiss them.” In short, you have an epistemic and at once moral duty to face these further

(meta-level) challenges, too, regardless of what philosophical beliefs you have and how good your arguments underpinning these are.

Of course, these questions or challenges can be given stock answers aimed at reassuring you. For example, you may reply to question (1) that “It is indeed reasonable that I give more weight to my own view concerning philosophical issues, because the evidence based on which I committed myself to the truth of p has more weight than the fact that others think p to be false.” A possible reply to question (2) could be that “Doxastic determinism is false, I freely decide to believe in the truth of such and such philosophical theses; moreover, even if doxastic determinism were true, it would still not follow that my philosophical beliefs cannot track the truth? You may address question (3) by saying either that “Philosophy’s epistemic failure is not a challenge for me, because I have compelling arguments for my philosophical beliefs,’ or that “I dort need any compelling arguments to be able, in good conscience, to stick to my philosophical views that elaborate my fundamental pre-philosophical convictions, as I can show that no objection of compelling force could be made against them”

In this book, I deal with the third of these challenges—I only discuss the first and the second where they have special importance for one or another reason. The reason I focus on the third one is that in my opinion, out of the three, this challenge is the greatest that we as philosophers must face. I also focus on it because facing this challenge offers me the most convenient conceptual framework to show that, however we want to, we cannot reassuringly account for the epistemic status of our substantive philosophical beliefs—we cannot take epistemic responsibility for their truth.

To sum up, I dont argue for meta-skepticism, according to which we must suspend our substantive philosophical beliefs. If I were to name the view I side with, I would call it “meta-meta-skepticism” for lack of a better name, immediately adding that instead of attempting to develop a stable metaphilosophical conception, I offer a dialectical path, which—inevitably, I think—leads to intellectual breakdown.

Part One

Philosophy is a heterogeneous formation, which involves quite a wide variety of activities. That is why I’m not even trying to define it. But despite its heterogeneity, there is a (more or less uniform) philosophical tradition, whereby the main purpose of doing philosophy is to assert substantive truths about the nature of reality, knowledge, the right action, and to justify the asserted propositions with a claim to truth compellingly. In other words, to provide correct answers to a variety of metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical questions—to solve philosophical problems. I will refer to this tradition as the epistemic or truth-seeking tradition of philosophy.

The philosophers of this tradition do not set themselves the less modest goal of exploring logically possible (i.e., consistent) stances on philosophical problems. They do not consider making types of propositions such as “If mental content is broadly individualized, you must deny a priori self-knowledge” or “If meanings are in the head, you must deny that meaning determines reference.” The epistemic tradition of philosophy is not content with such non-substantive truths. It does not seek to show which propositions can be true at the same time, but to show which propositions are true simpliciter. Seen from the epistemic tradition of philosophy, this more modest goal is at most preparatory work, since the main purpose of philosophy is to establish the truth—to choose the true set of propositions from the various consistent sets of propositions.

I don't claim that all great dead philosophers belonged to the epistemic tradition of philosophy. But I do claim that most great dead philosophers were followers of this tradition. They pursued philosophy in the spirit of this tradition and interpreted their own activities in the same spirit. Anyone who denies that most of the great dead philosophers intended to assert compellingly justified substantive truths doesn't have acquaintance of the history of philosophy. Nor do I claim that the trust in the success of philosophy as an epistemic enterprise today is as unbroken as, say, at the dawn of the modern era. But I do claim that this tradition is alive today. Anyone who considers this tradition to be a thing of the past doesn’t have acquaintance of contemporary philosophy. And anyone who simply denies the existence of this philosophical tradition doesn't have acquaintance of philosophy itself, or (worse but more likely) misinterprets the intention of most philosophers, either deliberately or due to some prejudice.

Of course, one could argue whether or not a philosopher is a follower of the epistemic tradition. Obviously, there are clear and less evident cases. Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, and Husserl certainly pursued philosophy in the spirit of this tradition; Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, and Richard Rorty certainly didn't, and although I would classify Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, for example, as followers of the epistemic tradition, the jury is still out on them. In short, all I am saying is that there was and still exists a truth-seeking philosophical tradition, not as a small minority, but—at least until the twentieth century—as a prevailing trend, and it is not on display in the wax museum of the history of ideas but is a living tradition.

In this chapter I characterize the epistemic tradition of philosophy by outlining its defining features. I just want to say some platitudes or commonplaces about it. Of course, this is not an easy task. The epistemic tradition itself is also a heterogeneous and very old (2,500 years) formation, so my characterization will inevitably be simplistic and sketchy, and will surely contain minor or major distortions and anachronistic wording. In brief, everything is much more complex, complicated, and colorful than I will describe it—my characterization would require deeper analysis and further refinement at every point.

If the main aim of doing philosophy is the assertion of substantive truths (compellingly justified true propositions)—as the members of epistemic tradition of philosophy claim it to be—, then the only epistemic value of philosophy in its own right is knowledge. So, in characterizing this tradition, I need to clarify two key concepts. On the one hand, the concept of truth or true propositions, since the followers of this tradition want to assert truths. On the other hand, the notion of philosophical justification, because the members in this tradition try to justify (moreover, compellingly justify) their philosophical beliefs. Make no mistakes: by doing so I don’t commit myself to the JTB theory of knowledge in general. All I claim is this: no matter what we think about the general definition of the concept of knowledge, the epistemic tradition takes philosophical knowledge to be compellingly justified true belief.

1 Truth

Many truisms have been mentioned about the concept of truth (see Lynch 2009: 7-13; Wright 1998: 60). Now, I will only pick out the three most innocent of them to characterize those truths that philosophers intend to assert. In what follows, I will use the term “proposition” to refer to truth-bearers—in my intention, in a neutral sense, without any metaphysical commitment. Here they are:

(1) A proposition is true if and only if things are as it says they are. (2) Two contradictory propositions cannot both be true. (3) Truth does not admit of degrees.

Truism (1) tells us just that: the truth of a proposition depends on how things are (whatever they may be and however they may be), and not on how we would like them to be. It says what Aristotle did: “[T]o say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaphysics 1011b25).

In my opinion, (1) is indeed an innocent truism, without any substantive commitment to the nature of truth. By asserting (1) I do not commit myself to the correspondence theory of truth, according to which a proposition p has the property of being true if and only if p is in the appropriate correspondence relation to the world that exists independently of p. (1) says nothing about correspondence relations or the mind-, language-, or proposition-independent world—it says nothing about what kind of special relationship there is between the truth-bearer and the world described and represented by it, or about what kind of entities (facts, events, objects, properties, etc.) the world must contain in order for the truth-bearers to be in the appropriate correspondence relation to the world.

What truism (1) says is this: when we claim about a proposition that it is true (e.g., it is a true proposition that “All ravens are black”), what we claim is that things are in a certain way—things are (the world is) in a way that all ravens are black. We can have a more formal expression of this by using the so-called (T)-schema:

(T) The proposition that p is true if and only if p.

Whatever meaningful sentence we replace “p” with, we will get a true biconditional, and every appropriately replaced instance of (T) is necessarily true and can be known a priori. Thus (T), says the same as (1), which everyone accepts, independently of the ways in which they attempt to define truth more accurately or informatively. Debates about theories of truth among correspondists, coherentists, pragmaticists, verificationists, pluralists, primitivists, and deflationists are almost exclusively about the epistemic status of (T)-biconditionals. In other words, they are about whether the (T)-biconditional is sufficient in itself to clarify the concept of truth, or if it is not, how it should be amended in a way that complies with the next schema, i.e., what we should put in the place of “F” in the formula (T+) below.

(T+) The proposition that p is true if and only if p is F

(T+) actually says more than (1) and there is no agreement among theorists of truth about what “F” should be replaced with in it. I, however, don't have to deal with this problem, as my asserting (1) commits me only to (T), but not to (T+).

Truism (2) is the principle of non-contradiction, according to which either p is true or not-p is true, but they cannot both be true. No one thinks that the propositions “There are immortal souls” and “There are no immortal souls” are both true. No one thinks that the propositions “Every event has a cause” and “Not every event has a cause” are both true. No one thinks that the propositions “All of our ideas are innate” and “Not all of our ideas are innate” are both true.

There are kinds of logic that reject the principle of non-contradiction (see e.g., Priest, Beall, and Armour-Garb 2004). This is undoubtedly an interesting thing, but I do not have to deal with it now. For philosophers of the epistemic tradition certainly do not want to commit themselves to inconsistent propositions, whatever they think about paraconsistent logic. I suppose, even paraconsistent logicians wouldnt be happy to see that their paraconsistent logical theory is paraconsistent itself.

Truism (3) says that if a proposition is true, then it is not a little bit, somewhat, or very but completely true. (If you think this claim is false because there are “half-truths,” complex propositions that can be part true and part false, e.g., “Napoleon was born in Corsica and died in Paris,” consider a simple subjectpredicate proposition.) As opposed to the justification of our beliefs which can have degrees, truth or falsehood cannot. As Frege puts it: “Truth cannot tolerate a more or less” (1918/1956: 291). Just think about it. If there was a truth which was only partially true, then that would mean that it would be partially false. Or, if there was a falsehood which was only partially false, then that would mean it is partially true. To be honest, I don’t think anyone could take the dispute of Theists and Atheists seriously if they concluded that the proposition “There is a God” is very true, but a little bit false, and the proposition “There is no God” is very false but is a little bit true.