This is a bit like looking at someone building an obviously-unstable tower saying “no, see, my tower is self-supporting, I just have a different notion of ‘self-supporting’!”. If I’m interpreting self-supporting in a physical manner and they’re interpreting it in a tautological manner, then we are talking about different things in saying towers are self-supporting or not.
Note that I said at the top that self-ratification is nontrivial when combined with other coherence conditions; without those other conditions (e.g. in the case of asserting “psychological theories” that make no claim about being representative of any actual psychologies) it’s a rather trivial criterion.
(In the case of eliminativism, what Phyllis would need is an account of the evidentiary basis for physics that does not refer to minds making observations, theorizing, etc; this account could respond to the dualist’s objection by offering an alternative ontology of evidence)
I think you’re dismissing the “tautological” cases too easily. If you don’t believe in a philosophy, their standards will often seem artificially constructed to validate themselves. For example a simple argument that pops up from time to time:
Fallibilist: You can never be totally certain that something is true.
Absolutist: Do you think thats true?
F: Yes.
A: See, you’ve just contradicted yourself.
Obviously F is unimpressed by this, but if he argues that you can believe things without being certain of them, thats not that different from Beth saying she wrote the book by responding to stimuli to someone not already believing their theory.
This is a bit like looking at someone building an obviously-unstable tower saying “no, see, my tower is self-supporting, I just have a different notion of ‘self-supporting’!”. If I’m interpreting self-supporting in a physical manner and they’re interpreting it in a tautological manner, then we are talking about different things in saying towers are self-supporting or not.
Note that I said at the top that self-ratification is nontrivial when combined with other coherence conditions; without those other conditions (e.g. in the case of asserting “psychological theories” that make no claim about being representative of any actual psychologies) it’s a rather trivial criterion.
(In the case of eliminativism, what Phyllis would need is an account of the evidentiary basis for physics that does not refer to minds making observations, theorizing, etc; this account could respond to the dualist’s objection by offering an alternative ontology of evidence)
I think you’re dismissing the “tautological” cases too easily. If you don’t believe in a philosophy, their standards will often seem artificially constructed to validate themselves. For example a simple argument that pops up from time to time:
Fallibilist: You can never be totally certain that something is true.
Absolutist: Do you think thats true?
F: Yes.
A: See, you’ve just contradicted yourself.
Obviously F is unimpressed by this, but if he argues that you can believe things without being certain of them, thats not that different from Beth saying she wrote the book by responding to stimuli to someone not already believing their theory.