I wonder what the thoughts are of the members of this forum on this subject. — dclements

This article touches on some of the concerns: Population decline's effects on global economy.

South Korea is often held up as an example of negative growth that has passed the point of no return (where the present population no longer has the means to reverse negative growth.) The challenge is adapting to a no growth economy, which is foreign territory for a large chunk of the human population. AI and robots to the rescue?

But how does negation occur? — NotAristotle

It's part of the dialectical process.

JTB amounts to a procedure for working out whether some random belief is actually knowledge. — Ludwig V

I think it's just an expression of one of the meanings of "knowledge."

The non-conceptual is whatever isn't conceptual, which comes down mainly to two specific overlapping meanings: (a) it's what philosophical thought is properly directed towards, also known in ND as what is heterogeneous to thought—i.e., particular things, like physical objects, economic systems, works of art, etc.; or (b) it's whatever eludes conceptual capture. Sense (b) is equivalent to the meaning of the non-identical. — Jamal

I agree with this.

But I see that as a consequence of the basic concept<->(non-conceptual) object relationship. A good way to think about that is to see the non-conceptual as the thing in itself, if you can imagine this to be immanent to experience, decoupled from Kant's formal apparatus, and potentially determinate. In my opinion, Adorno is as Kantian as he is Hegelian, and often more so. You see it especially here. — Jamal

I interpreted Adorno differently. I don't want to drag the thread through parts of the text that have already been covered, but just to explain, these passages made me think Adorno was using or alluding to the specialized meaning Hegel gave to the word concept:

If dialectics has however become inescapable, then it cannot remain glued to its principle like ontology and transcendental philosophy, as a pivotal structure, however modifiable. The critique of ontology does not aim at any other ontology, nor even at one which is non-ontological. Otherwise it would merely posit an Other as what is simply and purely first; this time not the absolute identity, being, the concept, but the non-identical, the existent, facticity.
…
The idea of something immutable, identical to itself, would also thereby collapse. It is derived from the domination of the concept, which wished to be constant towards its content, precisely its “matter”, and for that reason is blind to such. -- ND pg 151, 154

I think the content of the concept is live cases of dialectical thinking, a dynamic flow of thought comparing and contrasting oppositions. An easy example of what Hegel meant by concept is Heidegger's Dasein. Though Heidegger treats it as something static, it's arrived at by a journey of thought that involves subjective and objective poles. Dasein is an example of positive dialectics where it appears we've reached some higher truth about Being and now we can cast aside those poles that had starring roles in the preceding journey. Adorno is saying that this casting aside of the content of the concept creates an illusion.

So it's true that the non-conceptual is particular things, like physical objects. Dialectics tells us that physical objects can't have some substantial existence independent of the "I" but we experience them as separate. That sense of clear separation is part of the journey of dialectics. So it's not just physical things that make up the non-conceptual. Your independent, unique self is also an example. Dialectics says you can't be an independent thing. But that's part of the mechanics of thought. It's a mistake to try to toss it in the trash.

The concept is the union of opposites, the union of subject and object. The nonconceptual is the disunity of same.

When I was reading ND, this is the meaning of "concept" I was thinking of. If you were using a different meaning, we would come up with very different interpretations of Adorno.

CONCEPT (Begriff). Also translated (by Miller) as 'Notion'. The verb begreifen incorporates greifen, to seize. For Hegel, a concept is not (as it is for Kant) a representation of what several things have in common. Per Inwood, concepts are for Hegel not sharply distinct from the 'I' or from objects, nor from one another. When Hegel speaks of the Concept, he sometimes just means concepts in general, but he also uses it to mean, per Solomon, the most adequate conception of the world as a whole. Per Geraets et al, the Concept refers to the movement of logical thinking in its self-comprehension. Solomon suggests that for Hegel the Concept sometimes has the force of 'ourconception of concepts', and that it may also refer to the process of conceptual change, since for Hegel the identity of concepts is bound up with dialectical movement. Inwood suggests that Hegel sometimes assimilates the Concept to God. Kainz glosses the Concept as a 'grasping-together of opposites'. — UC San Diego

If knowledge is just confidence in one's belief, then one's confidence/conviction that one knows would suffice, that can't be correct. — Sam26

I didn't say knowledge is confidence in one's belief. I said we use the word to express that we're confident. The reasons for that confidence vary.

Instead of trying to provide a definition for knowledge, think about how the word is used. The next time you catch yourself using the word, stop and reflect on what you're trying to convey.

It makes sense to say the man thinks he knows, but he doesn’t. This is something we see all the time: people confuse what they believe with what they actually know. The key difference is that conviction alone isn’t knowledge, and sometimes the evidence that seems to support a belief doesn’t really justify it. — Sam26

I don't think your conception of knowledge is going to stand up to a skeptical challenge. At any time, we may be mistaken about our justifications. So, to nail the jello to the wall, how do you determine if the evidence in front of you is sufficient for knowledge? I say you have no way to do that. You only use the word "knowledge" to signify confidence in your beliefs.

A side issue is that I knew the man was there to kill me because I created the dream specifically to confront certain fears. I knew he was there to kill me in the same way I know the bishop goes diagonally. Life is frequently like this, but realizing this requires grasping the extent to which we live in our own dreams.

I think the concept is about how the mind works, so it's dynamic. It's about standing the thing against a backdrop of its negation, like the black dot exists because of its non-black background. But the mind can never reach a state of conceptual completion. I think @NotAristotle is right: the nonconceptual is the negation of the concept. It's an aspect of the way the mind works, not a material thing pinging the senses which the mind passively takes on as concepts.

Imagine you're inhabiting a character in a dream who is running from the mafia. You're hiding in a cabin in North Dakota, but a man enters your dwelling and you know he's there to kill you.

The concept of knowledge is in play here, and it mostly signifies confidence. It's just turbo-charged belief.

It wouldn't make sense to say it's an opinion, because the mafia threat isn't a matter of opinion. It wouldn't make sense to say the character knows it, but it's not true. So we could add on truth.

I did kill the guy in the dream. I didn't have any choice.

Why does Donald Trump have to be such an idiot?

And you are correct, overcoming the individualism of Kant, Hegel and subsequent writers is an issue. — Banno

:up:

I noticed. — Metaphysician Undercover

:cool:

QUESTION: Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth? — Jamal

AP would say you can't have individual truth in the first place because that would defy the private language argument. Truth has to be social. Wittgenstein suggests that truth is relative to worldviews, but avoids being hypocritical because he says that philosophy is a ladder you toss once you get to the top. Once you realize your philosophy is self-consuming, you go off and do something else.

@Banno might argue that Davidson's On the very idea of a conceptual scheme helps us navigate the diversity of conceptual framework versus the solitary playing field we're apparently placing all these views on.

I actually did a post graduate course specifically on Hegel's dialectics of being. The professor refused to give me the mark I needed, even after I defended my thesis in person. It seems like there is dogmatic principles concerning "the correct" way to interpret Hegel. — Metaphysician Undercover

I guess I agree with your professor.

I think the point is that "synthesis" in the Hegelian representation, is the subject of the intellect, and it is wrong. to make the representation work, requires that we do violence on the concept, falsely represent it. Synthesis falsely represents the 'logical' evolution of the Idea, as something free-floating, independent from the material world, manipulated by human reason. However, as experience demonstrates to us, the Idea does not evolve in a logical way, that is due to influence of "the irrational", which is the true reality of the material world. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is all pretty thoroughly incorrect. You could start with just understanding Hegelian dialectics.

A reason to think about negative dialectics in the first place is the failure of Marxism to accurately predict events. Many people put everything on the line, only to be disappointed. Imagine that NASA planned a manned mission to Mars, demonstrating enough confidence in apriori principles of geometry that people's lives are risked. But then during the mission, something goes wrong that reveals that they didn't understand the world at all. It was like that for some Marxists. They hadn't been slightly wrong. They were completely wrong. Psychology could be brought to bear to answer how this happened, but what Adorno focuses on is something that should have been obvious from reading Hegel: synthesis is not subject to the intellect. It's not that it's wrong, it's that the mind only deals with a dismantled world. Synthesis, especially the Grand Synthesis isn't something available to us for making blueprints of human history. But as Wittgenstein experienced: grasping that there's a point where the questions must stop is fleeting. The hunger to know and predict takes over. We end up overreaching in spite of ourselves.

Is negative dialectics potent enough to teach us humility? To reconcile ourselves to partial truths? My answer is: of course not.

Here we must ask if John's understanding of mathematics is relevant to the mathematical truth of his utterance:

From the perspective of the mathematics community other than John, the answer is clearly no; for whether 2 is a prime number is not decided by John's understanding of prime numbers but by a computable proof by contradiction written down on paper and simulated on a computer, that bears no necessary relationship to the hidden causal process of John's neuro-psychology, even if the two are correlated due to John being a trained mathematician.

On the other hand, from the perspective of John, who isn't in a position to distinguish his personal understanding of mathematics from our actual mathematics, the answer is clearly yes. So we have two distinct notions of truth in play: Intersubjective mathematical truth, for which the truth maker is independent of Johns judgements whether or not his judgements are correlated with intersubjective mathematical truth, versus what we might call "John's subjective truth" in which the truth maker is identified with the neuropsychological causes of John's utterances. If John is a well-respected mathematician, then we might be tempted to conflate the two notions of truth, but we shouldn't forget that the two notions of truth (causally determined versus community determined) aren't the same notion of truth. — sime

I don't know what you mean by "John's subjective truth." S is either true or false. Having a limited, subjective perspective just means there is fallibility that, for instance, Laplace's demon wouldn't have. John and Laplace's demon have the same conception of truth. John has to live with the possibility of being wrong. The demon obviously doesn't have that problem.

I don’t mean that literally 80-85% of the country is hostile to the philosophical and political values that urban America stands for. My point is that the cities give us the closest
thing to a consensus on these values, allowing us to think of them as representing a ‘country within a country’ — Joshs

:up: This is a view of Chicago from the suburbs. It looks like Oz.

I’m focusing on the high population-dense cities themselves, not ‘urban areas’ inclusive of vast stretches of sprawling conservative suburbs. The former are the communities I have in mind. Around 15-20% of Americans live within the city limits of the 50 largest U.S. cities by population. — Joshs

Ok, but doesn't that mean the "other America" you spoke of is 80-85% of the population? Is that what you meant?

80% of the US population is considered urban., but Trump got 49.1% of the popular vote..

I think the community you're referring to is educated urbanites, probably mostly white, so it's the 45% of whites who didn't vote for Trump. The group to watch is Latinos, who are now 20% of the US population, and voted for Trump in larger numbers in 2024 than previously.

According to CBS, the FCC's threats are clearly unconstitutional, and ABC/Disney could easily bring it to the Supreme Court, where all nine justices would affirm that the FCC's actions were illegal.

The reason Disney won't do that is because of a multi-billion dollar deal Nexstar was engaged in where they would increase their numbers of ABC affiliates above what the FCC has traditionally allowed. So Nexstar needs the FCC's favor. It was Nexstar that "rushed to cave into" Carr's threats. This is explained in a NY Times article.

It's not "the Jews." It's Soros and maybe a handful of others. He's like Magneto. — BitconnectCarlos

That's incorrect. It's "Jews.". But Soros is legendary among day traders. More like Hell Boy.

Regular Christians don't think Jews are trying to destroy white people. Kirk did believe that.

That's correct.

.

If your objective it to make me remove Kirk from the Saint list, I never put him there, but if it's to have some understanding for those who felt a fleeting sense of joy at his having been shot in the neck, you'll be wasting your time. — Hanover

You said he represented views that might be distasteful to the left. I think it was a little worse than that. He openly disagreed with the principle of separation of church and state, he advocated Christian nationalism, and he embraced the replacement conspiracy theory.

I agree his assassination was a terrible thing, for a variety of reasons. And I'm sure there are evil Jews in the world, but when a person is found to have rambled on about that from a stage in front of crowds of people, a little blip ought to appear on your Neo-Nazi radar. I'm just saying, stop saying he was just a regular devout Christian. That's not true.

He was not a firebrand and he really didn't spew hatred in the sense that I think some on the left think he did. — Hanover

He was like: 'I love Jews, but they hate white people, they want to destroy them by importing non-whites.'

I think we probably disagree on which direction his boat was eventually going to tip.

..In October 2023, Kirk said on The Charlie Kirk Show that "Jewish donors have been the Number 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi‑Marxist policies ... This is a beast created by secular Jews, and now it's coming for Jews", and also suggested that these Jews control "not just the colleges; it's the nonprofits, it's the movies, it's Hollywood, it's all of it". Soon after, he said that "Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years."[211] Kirk called on American Jews to stop "subsidizing your own demise by supporting institutions that breed Anti-Semites and endorse genocidal killers".[144]

In November 2023, Kirk said that "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them."[212] He went on to claim "the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors", but said he was glad that some donors were reconsidering.[213] Some Jewish public figures have defended Kirk against accusations of antisemitism, citing his pro-Israel stance. Kirk was funded by some Jewish donors, including Bernard Marcus.[214]

In July 2025, Kirk warned his followers against hatred of Jews, calling it "evil" and "demonic".[215] He was quoted as saying that "no non-Jewish person my age has a longer or clearer record of support for Israel, sympathy with the Jewish people, or opposition to antisemitism than I do".[144] However, Kirk was also accused of antisemitism by multiple people and organizations;[144][212][216] the Anti-Defamation League accused Kirk of creating a "vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists".[144] — Wikipedia, NYT

Have you been paying attention to the same courts I have? — Michael

I'm saying we aren't at dictatorship yet. What's happening now is we're all getting used to the ideas associated with it, like censorship, domestic use of the military, rigged elections. Going forward, nothing could stand in the way except the courts. If the courts go under, it's over.

I think right now the only thing that stand between us and dictatorship is the courts.

I think JTB is a characterization of internalism..

"That is a prime number" is true (or false) regardless of what John thinks about it. The question is, How confident can he be that he knows which is which? — J

If he read Descartes' Meditations, he would be cautious about knowledge claims. If he asserts things in spite of Descartes, he could say he's secretly prefacing the assertion with "If the Evil Demon isn't tricking me right now, ..."

Under the strongest possible interpretation of truth-conditional semantics (the principle of maximal charity), the meaning of your use of a sentence S refers to the actual cause of your use of S; — sime

John points to the white board, which has the figure 2 written on it. He says, "That is a prime number." We'll call the sentence he uttered S.

The cause of his use of S is a factor in determining the truth conditions. That cause is not the truth conditions, though. Or if it is, how?

On the other hand, if the community gets to decide the truth-maker of your use of S irrespective of whatever caused you to utter S (the principle of minimal charity), then you cannot know that S is true until after you have used S and received feedback. In which case, the truth of S isn't a quality of your mental state when you used S. — sime

"Truth-maker of your use of S" doesn't make sense to me. What are you talking about?

The problem wasn't what Kimmel said. The problem was that he didn't have anyone on his show to provide an alternate view or argument to what he said. — Harry Hindu

I think the real problem is that ratings are down for all the late night talk shows. They're a vestige. Colbert's show was losing money. In order to be provocative, you have to have a fort from which to shoot.

That's one of those vacuous merely logical possibilities that are best ignored, because even in the unlikely event that it were true (which we could never know) it would be a difference that makes no difference. — Janus

Ah, the sound of intellectual impotence. It's uninteresting. It's unimportant. It's irrelevant. Why in the name of John Locke should I be concerned about what you find to be uninteresting?

A. a belief merely refers to the coexistence of a believer's mental state and an external truth-maker, — sime

Did you mean correspondence? I don't see what coexistence does there.

No belief is an island. Any particular belief implies a web of associated propositional attitudes, much of which is worldview, the present generation's heritage. Being wrong involves miscalculation, misinformation, misconception. What's wrong with that account?

See what I mean?

Anybody else notice that Charlie Kirk's face was too small for his head?

OK. But if you say we don't know, you are suggesting that if certain things happened, you would know. What might those be? — Ludwig V

I don't think we have any criteria for determining what's real and what isn't in the philosophical sense. It's interesting to consider that this might be a dream or some kind of collective construct.

Still, it could be a collective dream. It really could be. We don't know. :grin:
— frank
What's the evidence that it is? — Ludwig V

I didn't say that it is, just that it could be. We don't know.