John Earman

Background

John Earman (1942–) is an American philosopher of physics, long at the University of Pittsburgh, whose main body of work concerns determinism, spacetime, and the foundations of physical theory. He enters this wiki for one book: Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (2000), the most influential contemporary formal critique of Hume's "Of Miracles." Earman is not a theist and does not argue that any miracle occurred; his claim is that Hume's celebrated Part 1 argument fails as a piece of probabilistic reasoning. That combination — a critic of Hume with no apologetic stake — makes him a particularly valuable witness under this wiki's steelman rules.

Positions held in this wiki

• Miracles and the Laws of Nature — the Bayesian rebuttal to Hume. Earman "argues that Part 1 is an 'abject failure'" (SEP Miracles §3.3): trivial where true, false where substantive. He stands with Babbage's theorem that "if independent witnesses can be found, who speak truth more frequently than falsehood, it is ALWAYS possible to assign a number of independent witnesses, the improbability of the falsehood of whose concurring testimony shall be greater than the improbability of the alleged miracle" (Babbage 1837: 202, "cf. Holder 1998 and Earman 2000," quoted at SEP Miracles §2.2.4). Accumulating independent testimony can therefore in principle overcome any finite prior against a miracle.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Hume's Abject Failure (2000) is copyright-locked. Earman's argument is represented via SEP 'Miracles' §§2.2.4 and 3.3, and engaged in the corpus preprint Rockwood, "Two Kinds of Miracles" (forthcoming) cited in Miracles and the Laws of Nature. Logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

Because Earman attacks Hume, his critics are Hume's defenders: - Robert Fogelin — A Defense of Hume on Miracles (2003) "aims to rehabilitate Hume against the critiques of Johnson and Earman in particular" (SEP Miracles §3.3). - Peter Millican — "argues vigorously that the interpretation of Hume's argument offered in Earman (2000) is flawed in multiple ways, as does Vanderburgh (2020)" (SEP Miracles §3.3). - Arif Ahmed — argues the Babbage–Holder–Earman line requires a conditional-independence assumption that is "plausibly always violated," though he concedes his arguments "do not after all realize the 'everlasting check'... that Hume envisaged" (Ahmed 2015: 1042, at SEP Miracles §2.2.4).

See also

• David Hume — the target; the Enquiry §X is in corpus.
• William Paley and Joseph Butler — the in-corpus eighteenth-century anti-Humean evidentialists whose case Earman's formal result vindicates in part.
• Richard Swinburne — the Bayesian cumulative-case program that builds on the same probabilistic machinery.
• J. L. Mackie — the atheist restater of Hume's argument whom Earman's critique also touches.