The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

46 Philosophical Failure
realist into a nominalist by means of that argument. On the account of
success I propose, however, a successful argument for nominalism need
only have the power to turn people who accept neither nominalism
nor realism (and who have no initial predilection for either thesis) into
people who accept nominalism—certainly an easier task, a task that it is
more plausible to suppose might actually be accomplished. And here is
an important and related point: on the model of debate I have endorsed,
Norma the nominalist need not worry about whether Ronald the realist
will accept her premises. She is perfectly free to employ premises she
knows Ronald will reject; her only concern is whether the audience of
agnostics will accept these premises. Suppose, for example, that she uses
the premise, ‘‘We can have knowledge only of things that have the power
to affect us.’’ It may well be that no realist, certainly no realist who
had thought the matter through, would accept that premise. If Norma
tried to use this premise in a debate of the first sort, in an attempt to
convert Ronald the realist to nominalism, Ronald would very likely say,
‘‘Well, of course I don’t accept that; that just begs the question against
my position.’’ But in a debate conceived on the forensic model, Ronald
can’t make that response, for the simple reason that what he thinks is
quite irrelevant to the logic of the debate. If Ronald thinks that there
is any danger of the agnostics accepting this premise, it will do him
no good to tell the audience that of course no realist would accept this
principle and that it therefore begs the question against realism. He’ll
have to get down to the business of convincing the agnostics that they
should reject, or at least not accept, this premise.
Mention of ‘‘begging the question’’ brings to mind a closely related
concept, the concept of ‘‘the burden of proof ’’. 2 Where does the burden
of proof lie in a philosophical debate? In a debate of the type we are
imagining, the answer is clear—in fact, trivial. The burden of proof lies
on the person who’s trying to prove something to someone. If Norma is
trying to turn agnostics into nominalists, she is the one who is trying to
prove something to someone: she’s trying to prove to the agnostics that
there are no universals, or at least that it’s more reasonable than not to
believe that there are no universals; that both realism and agnosticism
are untenable positions and that nominalism is the only tenable position
concerning the existence of universals. Ronald the realist isn’t (at this
point in the debate) trying to prove anything—or nothing but things
like, ‘‘My nominalist opponent hasn’t established the truth of the third
premise of her argument beyond a reasonable doubt.’’ So, trivially, in
the case we are imagining, the burden of proof lies on the nominalist.