Inferring and Explaining

44 InferrIng and exPlaInIng Ideal Agnostics I want to share with you an idea that I am very taken with these days. It comes from a contem- porary philosopher, as it turns out a very candid Christian philosopher, named Peter van Inwa- gen. He proposes an audience for arguments (at least those that occur in philosophical debates) that is psychologically impossible but is useful to imagine nonetheless. Te audience is composed of what we might call ideal agnostics. Tat is, they are agnostic as regards the subject-matter of the debate. . . . Each member of the of the audience will have no initial opinion about [the subject of the debate]. . . . My imaginary agnostics . . . would very much like to come to some reasoned opin- ion [on the debate] . . . indeed to achieve knowledge on that matter if it were possible. . . . Tey don’t care which position . . . they end up accepting, but they very much want to end up accepting one or the other. 6 Ideal agnostics are absolutely indifferent— intellectually, personally, and in every way that might bias them—about what the best explana- tion is. But that doesn’t mean they don’t care. Tey are also passionately committed to fguring out which explanation is the strongest. I’m no ideal agnostic and neither are you. But I think we are both well served in our dis- cussions and investigations to pretend that we are. Indeed, I am suggesting that any time we evaluate another’s potential evidence, we try as hard as possible to adopt the position of the ideal agnostic, knowing all along that we will fail in certain respects. When we are presenting our own argument, I would also suggest that we pre- tend our audience is not composed of partisans but rather ideal agnostics. Tis whole little subsection might strike you as a tedious distraction. I am belaboring all this because we all carry with us biases that will inevitably afect some of our rank ordering of explanations. Tat is the position I fnd myself inwith the current argument. I care very deeply about arguments in the philosophy of religion and cognitive science. I have great respect for all the scientists involved in the debate about language, and I also have great respect for Joy- clynn Potter and the tradition she represents within natural theology. I have thought and written about these issues for my entire career. Certainly my lifelong skepticism about religion afected my evaluation of the evidence just as Joci’s committed faith afected hers. In the end, we had to agree to disagree, but hopefully, we understood one another’s arguments better, and we were ultimately in a position to share our joint thinking with a larger professional audience. Rank Ordering the Explanations (for Pinker and Bloom’s Argument) While reading and grading Joci’s exam and later while collaborating with her, I came to agree even more strongly with Pinker and Bloom. Here’s how I rank order the three competing accounts of what we know about language. t 0 . The origin of language is explained through the theory of natural selection. t 1 . Natural selection produced larger, and more neurally dense, human brains. It was a “side consequence” that these brains gave us such remarkable language abilities.