A Thomistic Revision of Dummett’s Proof for God

1 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. 2 Cf. W. J. Mander, “On Arguing for the Existence of God as a Synthesis between Realism and Anti-Realism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, forthcoming; Andrew Beards, “Dummett: Philosophy and Religion,” in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, ed. R. Auxier and E. Hahn (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 2007), 863-88. 211 The Thomist 76 (2012): 211-31 A THOMISTIC REVISION OF DUMMETT’S PROOF FOR GOD JOHN-MARK L. MIRAVALLE St. Lawrence Center, School of Faith Lawrence, Kansas I N 1996 THE BRITISH analytic philosopher Michael Dummett delivered the Gifford Lectures, and a decade later the edited talks were published as Thought and Reality.1 Towards the conclusion of the small volume, the author offers an intriguing and rather novel proof for God’s existence. The late Dummett was a known Catholic, but his argument for God offers a strange blend of analytic tone and idealistic content, and so is jarringly outside the standard metaphysical proofs that have come to be associated with Catholic philosophers. The proof has received little attention,2 possibly because the conclusion is not calculated to be popular with most analytic philosophers and the argument is not calculated to be popular with most theistic philosophers. I propose to present Dummett’s argument as clearly and concisely as I can, and then engage it from the standpoint of Thomistic realism. Although this process will topple some supports that Dummett might consider essential to the proof, I believe the argument can be salvaged within the classical framework. JOHN-MARK L. MIRAVALLE 212 3 See Dummett, Thought and Reality, 50-51, 78. See also Dummett’s original statement of this problem in an early article: “But in order that someone should gain from the explanation that P is true in such-and-such circumstances an understanding of the sense of P, he must already know what it means to say of P that it is true. If when he enquires into this he is told that the only explanation is that to say that P is true is the same as to assert P, it will follow that in order to understand what is meant by saying that P is true, he must already know the sense of asserting P, which was precisely what was supposed to be being explained to him” (Michael Dummett, “Truth,” in idem, Truth and Other Enigmas [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978], 7). One can also find the same problem presented in its current version in Michael Dummett, “Meaning and Justification,” in Language, Logic and Formalization of Knowledge, ed. Brian McGuinness (Gaeta: Bibliotheca di Gabriele Chiusano, 1998), 15-19. 4 See Dummett, Thought and Reality, 56-57. I. DUMMETT’S ARGUMENT The key element in Dummett’s philosophy is his theory of truth and meaning. This theory takes as its starting point the question, what does it mean to understand a sentence? Dummett first considers Wittgenstein’s answer to the question, which posits that to understand a sentence is to know what the world is like if the sentence is true (the “truth-conditional” theory of meaning). He rejects this answer on the grounds of circularity, since it explains knowledge in terms of the same knowledge, or understanding a sentence in terms of understanding that sentence. In other words, one cannot explain the act of understanding A by appealing to the act of understanding that if A, then the world is thus, since understanding that if A, then the world is thus assumes that A is already understood. For that the world is thus is precisely what A expresses. Therefore, to explain understanding proposition A by describing it as understanding that if A, then the world is thus, is to explain that understanding proposition A is equivalent to understanding that if A, then A. Which is, of course, not much of an explanation.3 To escape this circularity, Dummett proposes that understanding a sentence can only be explained in terms of a skill-set, an ability to know how to accept the truth of the sentence in question.4 One has acquired the ability of recognizing the truth of sentences in a way similar to acquiring...