I’ve found it hard to be enthusiastic about linking to carnivals, so my carnival linkage has lapsed without my quite intending it to. Therefore, I’ve decided I need to try something new: whenever there’s a carnival, comment on one of the more interesting submissions. Here’s my first entry in this effort:

The 85th philosopher’s carnival contains a post called Intellectual Black Holes by Richard Chappell. The idea is that some beliefs, once really, truly accepted, might trap is in acceptance of that belief:

Perhaps the most obvious example is epistemic nihilism: the view that there is no such thing as epistemic rationality — all beliefs and arguments are equally good (or bad), and rational persuasion is impossible. Notice that if someone came to really, truly believe this, then it would be utterly impossible to reason them out of it: they would be incapable of treating anything you said as a reason worthy of consideration. Their mind could only be ‘rescued’ by some non-rational intervention: brain surgery, perhaps.

Perhaps an even better example would be an extreme fideism that says religious dogma trumps reason no matter what. The thought of such black holes is initially frightening, but I think they are not what they seem.

Why? A useful concept here is that of the fundamental method–a truly adopted method for deciding what to believe in all cases whatsoever. I first encountered the idea in Adam Elga’s writings on disagreement. A key point is that any fundamental method which allows itself to be rejected in some circumstances is inconsistent, and if you (without contradiction) admit it would be wrong to follow a favorite method in some circumstance, then you aren’t promoting it as a fundamental method. For this reason, it’s actually OK for proposed fundamental methods to make seemingly arbitrary exceptions when it comes to evaluating themselves, and Elga applied this to the specific problem of what we should believe about how to respond to disagreement between equally rational, intelligent, informed persons.

Fundamental methods are really what the “black hole” business is about, but if Elga is right, every fundamental method is a “black hole.” So why aren’t intellectual black holes everywhere? Because when we look for methods for reasoning, we typically aren’t looking for fundamental ones. That’s the only way to make sense of an awful lot of philosophical discussion, and helps calm Richard’s fears about intellectual black holes.