Being trapped within the ‘dead’ past and imagined future are of a piece with being stuck within the punctual ‘now’. — Joshs

Yeah, that's well said. :up:

the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (trying to pronounce that name might produce a flow state.) — Wayfarer

:lol:

A question remains though― what use is something's being true if we don't know it. — Janus

Well we could ask whether the 'T' in JTB is "accessible" truth or "inaccessible" truth. Isn't it pretty obvious that it is "accessible" truth? Or is there some JTB proponent I am unaware of who thinks "inaccessible" truths are per se important and also central to the JTB approach?

Again, the JTB approach does not claim that truths are known independently of justification and belief. The whole point of JTB is that nothing is known independently of justification and belief.

(This is why 's concern that one must be able to explain why X is true without giving any justification is a kind of ignoratio elenchus.)

No. I said IBEs are usually the best we can do. — Relativist

Right, but over and over I have been inquiring into whether there is anything other than IBEs, and over and over you keep shying away from that point.

For example:

Here are some questions about which rational answers can be given (IBEs), but the answers do not constitute knowledge:

...

Is my name actually "Fred"? — Relativist

Earlier you gave this as an example of knowledge that is not an IBE, and now it is an IBE and not knowledge.

So it looks like you hold that there is no knowledge; only IBEs. That's what I've been pointing up from the beginning.

But JTB is not about what makes something true, but how I can say I know it to be true. — J

No, that's not right. JTB is not meant to provide you with a recipe for knowledge-cakes. JTB is a descriptive theory, not a normative theory. It is something like an attempt at a definition of knowledge, not an attempt at a recipe for knowledge. It is a set of conditions that is supposed to track when knowledge is present, not a strategy for gaining knowledge.

Like, someone cannot sit down and say, "Ah, I have ten minutes to spare. I'm going to get me some knowledge. I'm going to know that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. So for 'true' I will ask ChatGPT. Check. It is true that Jupiter is the largest planet. Now I need to check the justification box, so I'll look up some arguments for the idea. Check. Now I need to believe it. I think I do believe it, but to make sure I'm going to sit here and repeat to myself the mantra, 'I believe Jupiter is the largest planet, I believe Jupiter is the largest planet...' Okay, well it looks like I now know that Jupiter is the largest planet, given that I have checked all three boxes. Four minutes to spare... what else should I learn today?"

JTB creates so much confusion that I think it may be more trouble than it's worth.

I have to be able to be justified yet wrong. — J

The problem is that you want to make sound justification and unsound justification identical, as if they were the same thing, as if they were interchangeable. You are assuming that the 'J' signifies justification regardless of whether that justification is sound or unsound. You want to say that the person who is justified yet wrong is justified with the same justification of the person who is justified and therefore right.

The crux is that, following Sam26's thought, there needs to be some space between justification and truth in order for JTB to really be a three-legged tripod. — J

...And you think that if we distinguish between sound justification and unsound justification then there is no difference between 'J' and 'T', which is incorrect. This goes back to the "three separate ingredients" strawman.

Aristotle is rather precise on this point in the second chapter of the Posterior Analytics, where he says that scientia proper requires that one knows the explanation for the thing in question. One must know what explains it; why it came to be. One must not merely have an explanation that incidentally lines up with some particular aspect of its existence. One must have more than an unsound argument with a true conclusion in order to have demonstrative knowledge. If one's understanding of 'J' does not take these distinctions into account then they will not be able to make JTB workable.

This is why I see the Gettier literature as a long detour. It multiplies refinements to patch a problem that dissolves once we keep the standard for justification strong. By “strong” I mean publicly checkable, defeater-sensitive, and free of false grounds. If a justification fails those checks, it does not count as justification. Once that is clear, Gettier’s cases lose their force: they are examples not of knowledge, but of its counterfeit—instances where someone takes themselves to know but does not in fact know. — Sam26

I think Gettier would just provide you with a case where the erroneous clock is publicly checkable and defeater-sensitive. For example: a case where multiple public clocks are all simultaneously erroneous.

Regarding the "false grounds," the key to the Gettier case is the difference between a material conclusion and a formal conclusion. So suppose we have two different cases:

Case 1:

J1. John looks at his clock which reads "2:00."
J2. John assumes that his clock is working but in fact it is not.
J3. John infers that it is in fact 2:00.
4. It is, objectively, 2:00.

Case 2:

B1. Ben looks at his clock which reads "2:00."
B2. Ben assumes that his clock is working.
B3. Ben infers that it is in fact 2:00.
4. It is, objectively, 2:00.

Case 1 and case 2 are identical except for the second proposition, and the Gettier case turns on the premise that knowledge should not be able to be had by accident or by sheer luck.

When I say "material" vs. "formal" conclusion I mean that both arguments "reach" (4) in a material sense, but only Ben reaches it in a formal sense. If we conceive of (4) as a kind of goalpost that someone must reach, and it doesn't matter how he reached it, then John has reached it. But if we conceive of (4) as a goalpost that someone must reach, and the reaching of which depends upon the means by which they arrived, then John has not reached it given the means in question. John has reached (4) materially but not formally, whereas Ben has reached it both materially and formally. ...Taken further we might say that a valid conclusion is different from a sound conclusion, and therefore John and Ben have reached different conclusions.

The same thing applies to propositions more generally, including J3 and B3.

I think what the Gettier case shows is that there are at least some conclusions which are material rather than formal, and knowledge of these conclusions is never certain. But his point isn't applicable to justification tout court. It is only applicable to those situations in which luck or accident plays a role. ...Of course the skeptic will argue that luck and accident play a role in every situation (i.e. that every conclusion is material), and that seems to be the crux.

The so-called “Gettier problem” rests on a sleight of hand. It trades on the difference between thinking one is justified and actually being justified. — Sam26

We could construe it as saying that every valid justification can be unsound, and that we can only know that a justification is valid, not sound. Such a perspective might simply argue that not all unsound reasoning has defeaters.

That's what the J is meant to capture, and it leaves room for epistemic bad luck, where your belief turns out false but anyone would have formed the same belief, and it was a one in a million chance that in this case the evidence misled you. — Srap Tasmaner

The counterargument could be phrased this way:

1. Truth is always known via justification, and ensured by justification
2. Justification can never overcome the possibility of the one-in-a-million anomaly
3. Therefore, truth is never certain

This form of skepticism is a bit like the claim that epistemology is like a game of pool and no matter how good you are, there is always a chance that your shot will not pocket the 9-ball. Accidental contingencies are always involved, and therefore the best one can hope for is a good probability (or an ). Such a skeptic would say, "The only way to guarantee that the 9-ball is pocketed would be to pick it up with your own hand and place it into the pocket directly, but that would be cheating."

namely whether the T in JTB is doing any useful work. — J

There are some folk on TPF who do not actually believe in truth or knowledge, and you are the foremost. This has been pointed out quite a few times. So it's no coincidence that you wonder whether "the T in JTB" is doing any useful work, or, "When do I ever know something...?"

This is related to a recent discussion with @Relativist:

If one locks the subject within their own beliefs, then knowledge is impossible. — Leontiskos

The other question has to do with the modern move where the subject is cut off from reality by fiat of premise. For example, if we can never get beyond our attitudes and make truth- and knowledge-claims that are not merely belief- or attitude-claims, then of course a kind of Cartesian skepticism will obtain. If every knowledge-claim is rewritten as a matter of the subject's attitude or nominalistic beliefs, then realism has been denied a hearing. — Leontiskos

-

The objection to JTB seems to be this:

<JTB means that there are three independent ingredients to knowledge, and once we have harvested all three we will be able to bake the knowledge cake. So we go find our Justification, and we go find our Truth, and we go find our Belief, and then we put them together in our mixing bowl, mix, and bake. Voila! We have knowledge. But where does Truth exist in isolation? Or Justification? Or Belief? They don't exist in isolation, to be harvested at will; therefore JTB fails.>

...That's a pretty wild understanding of JTB. The whole notion is incoherent, given that it presupposes that one can have knowledge of J independently of T and B (and knowledge of T independently of J and B, and knowledge of B independently of J and T). The "three independent ingredients" approach actually contradicts the whole epistemic notion of JTB.

Argument by bogeyman, eh? — apokrisis

That looks like a red herring, given that you seem to agree with what I've said.

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself. — apokrisis

Right, but my point is that your approach is materially identical to post hoc rationalization. "What is superior/pragmatic is that which survives; Nazi Germany did not survive; Therefore, Nazi Germany was inferior." That is the premise, and then one has to provide reasoning to connect the ur-cause to the effect, which in this case has to do with fossil fuels and fascism.

The reason such an approach is not formally identical with post hoc rationalization is because its norm really is survival, and survival really is measured in retrospect. On this approach what is good is precisely what survives, and this is associated with what "works" or what is "pragmatic" or what is "real," and there is no additional good/normativity.

My other point with Nazi Germany is that your approach seems to have suffocated contingency. Most historians would say that the Axis Powers might have won the war, but on a fatalistic view everything that happens happens necessarily (again, unless one makes distinctions such as the short-term vs. long-term distinction). So let's move to that question of contingency and freedom.

I was a climate change activist until about 2010. After that - seeing the reality of the politics and economics up close - I stop wasting my energy. It will be what it will be. And I make my own pragmatic plans within that. — apokrisis

But that's exactly what my argument predicts.

So I see no problem of working within norms and then also challenging norms. The capacity to make this critical choice is central to being a pragmatist. You either play the game or change the game. And it is reason which tells you which way to go and any juncture.

So a climate change scientist can see the need to reduce emissions. But if society fails to heed, then the climate scientist has to think that either society feels it is OK that global collapse is OK - some will survive - or that society lacks the capacity to escape the world view that fossil fuel has constructed for it. — apokrisis

What's interesting about this case is that the climate scientist seems to think that he is opposing activity that is suicidal on the level of the human species (and perhaps beyond). On your evolutionary principle "what works is what survives." So is it possible for the human species to commit accidental suicide and fail to survive? If so, then what survived was precisely what did not work (for humans).

We can make the fatalism argument more abstract if you are concerned about "bogeymen." Suppose that political ideas are measured only by whether they survive. Thus if political idea X out-survives political idea Y, then political idea X is superior to political idea Y by the only possible metric.

Now Apokrisis is standing before a society where X and Y are clashing. He must make a choice. Does he promote X? Y? Neither? If he chooses to promote one of the two ideas, such as he did temporarily in 2010, then he is at the same time predicting that X (say) will out-survive Y. Whether he is right or wrong is fairly simple, for time will tell. If X out-survives Y then he will say, "I was right." If Y out-survives X then he will say, "I was wrong, and now I will switch sides." He is always a "fair-weather fan" in that sense, for moral perplexity cannot arise where there is not more than one moral telos.

The reason the reductio ad absurdum cannot simply be brushed aside with "bogeyman" labels is because there is a very strong cultural premise whereby one would continue to resist the Nazis even after the war was lost and the Nazi "survivability" proved itself superior. The reductio is an appeal to the fairly strong idea that good is not inevitable, and has to do with more than mere survival.

A trivial example is that I refused to be promoted to a Sixer in the Cub Scouts as I said I didn’t want to order the other kids around. The look of incomprehension from the adults made me realise what this para-military organisation was all about and I left soon after. — apokrisis

What's interesting is that this is a moral choice in the classic sense, and not merely a "pragmatic" choice. You seem to be implicitly boasting that you are not the kind of person who wanted to "order the other kids around" and contribute to a "para-military organization." You are not saying, "My survivability and the survivability of my social environment will increase if I refuse the promotion to Sixer, therefore I will refuse the promotion." You are doing much the opposite, "I will sacrifice the boon of the approval of my peers and the Scout Leader because I value something that is more important than that approval, and am willing to act on it." You harmed the survivability of the social whole in order to honor your individual conscience. After all, militaristic hierarchical organization is one of the most time-proven organizational orderings.

This is because you have the fixed normative habit of seeing dichotomies as unresolved monisms rather than the identification of the complementary limits on being - the complementary limits that then make an active choice of where to strike the useful balance. — apokrisis

No, I don't think so. I don't assume that I have the epistemic access to recognize every dichotomy as either an unresolved monism or complementary limits on being. They may be either. I don't know ahead of time. I think there is a resolution but I don't assume that I will be able to understand it.

So my systems perspectives says there can be local ends and global ends. These are measurably different in being selfish and collective. Or competitive and cooperative. So you have some general bounding contrast in play, and the system would want to balance those rival imperatives over all scales of its being. Hence the pragmatic understanding of society as a hierarchy of interest groups. The contrasting pulls of individuation and integration at every level of social order. — apokrisis

But what does the bolded mean, "the system would want"? Does the system have wants and desires, or is it being reified and anthropomorphized?

I understand that you have, say, the pole of the individual human and the pole of the human species, where the first has to do with selfishness and the second has to do with collectivity. But my hunch is that survivability is the only telos for both. "Selfishness" has to do with individual survivability and "collective" has to do with the species' survivability. As a more robust alternative I would offer the classic poles of subsidiarity and solidarity.

My difficulty is that this looks like a rather one-dimensional contrast. The only possible source of contrast and complexity is coming from individual survival vs. group survival. On my view the evolutionary reductionism does not properly account for the human mind and human teloi. Humans often place their end in things that are basically unrelated to survival, and this is precisely what accounts for the vast complexity of social life.

For example, the suicide bomber attests to the power of the human mind, which is able to subordinate the end of survival to other ends. There are just too many anomalies for the survival theory. If the survival theory were correct then human social realities would be a great deal simpler than they in fact are.

Happiness is probably a vague enough term to hide the difference between talking about seeking a life balance and pursuing a hedonic pole.

But if we are to understand eudaimonia properly, we have to dig into that exact difference in viewpoint. Do we mean what it feels like to be in balance with our life and world - a state of equanimity - or what it feels like to be madly ecstatic … just turned down to some low simmer that feels like the sustainable norm. A quiet content. A state of equanimity in short. Neither especially happy nor upset. Just ticking along nicely in the sense that sudden joy or sudden upset are adaptive states we could flip into as quick as circumstances might demand or justify. — apokrisis

Perhaps neither (or either), but is either one the same as the evolutionary survival account? For example, the telos of pleasure certainly seems to fold into a eudaimonic account more easily than a survival account, given that people and also groups will often harm their survivability for the sake of pleasure. I actually think your survival-account would track the data points quite well if humans did not exist at all, as the aberrations would seem to be much fewer among non-human animals.

So you keep saying that my position is the one that can’t say anything much about the good and the bad. But my reply is that you don’t even seem to have started to understand the dynamical nature of such things. You are treating the good as a fixed destination placed at some impossible distance from wherever we are. I make the argument for how it is all about the dynamical balance that can stabilise our sense of being a self in its world. The pragmatism of being as adapted as possible, both in the short term and the long term, to the game that is living a life as a social creature. — apokrisis

Oh, that's fine, but I think you will find that if you want to teach people how to pursue such a good you will require a lot more than survivability language. If this is right, then the end you outline will not actually be persuasive to most people, and it will then need to be dressed up in other clothing. So you get a new caste of priests mediating the supreme telos to the masses who cannot interact with it directly. It seems that whenever someone dreams up a new ultimate telos (such as the Enlighteners did), they quickly find that hardly anyone is waiting in line to get on board, and that the masses need to be provided with a "temporary" proxy.

Take technology for example. A new technology can drastically influence the course of human history. Many technologies seem positively opposed to the survival telos (e.g. nuclear weapons, contraception, perhaps even social media), and they are propagated nonetheless. If any such technologies are historically contingent, then we have cases where survivability is strongly impacted by a contingent cause that is not itself ordered to survivability.

I also find that "balance" approaches tend to be almost indistinguishable from other robust approaches in practice. For example, I think you will end up appealing to the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, just in a roundabout way. The question is then whether the simplification is helpful: whether pragmatism prefers that humans conceive of an ur-cause or not.

Meet the new boss… — Joshs

Auguste Comte, generally recognized as the father of social science, explicitly modeled his approach on that of religion in general and Catholicism in particular with his "Religion of Humanity." Indeed, thinkers who apply evolutionary thought to the social sphere don't generally draw a hard and fast distinction between religion and social doctrine.

The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired. — Joshs

A common notion in modernity, found in things like the "invisible hand," is that one should just focus on X and Y will work itself out. "Just focus on what is personally desired and your biological or spiritual compass will guide development in a way that takes care of the ethical." Ayn Rand's Egoism is of a similar modality.

Building on some of , I would say that this requires a kind of naivete about the easy coupling between the private good and the common good, or between the self-interested act and the noble act. "Would that it were so!"

but you don’t question the split between personal and collective desire this presupposes — Joshs

...and the "split" is a phenomenon of philosophical anthropology. It's not so easy for children of Hobbes to reprogram their belief in the split.

As we all at times think, the depravity of some actions is so obviously beyond the pale, to even ask to illuminate the grounds for such judgments is to call something already obvious into question, and thereby potentially undermine its obviousness, which in turn undermines whether it is truly beyond the pale in the first place. This all means someone might judge that, when faced with what is clearly deemed beyond the pale, there is no reason to resist one’s passionate response nor is there reason to seek the illuminating details that justify one’s judgment. And further, as we are fallible when seeking rational illumination, we may undermine our own intellectual confidence by failing to reasonably illuminate what we have already strongly rejected and passionately deemed beyond the pale. — Fire Ologist

Yes, good points. :up:

And whenever one chooses to ignore rational scrutiny, or one cannot control one’s emotions enough to allow room for rational scrutiny, one is flirting with what I see as the most basic component of behavior that is beyond the pale, namely the avoidance of reason. — Fire Ologist

Okay, interesting.

Do I write off the shooting as beyond the pale without giving the shooter a hearing? No, as I would be treating the shooter the same way it looks like the shooter treated Charlie Kirk. But if the shooter will not or cannot rationally illuminate his grounds for shooting Charlie Kirk, then I have reasonable ground to deem the shooting as beyond the pale. And if the shooter asked me what I thought before he shot Charlie, and the shooter couldn’t or wouldn’t provide a reasonable basis to justify killing Kirk, I would tell him that shooting Kirk will be beyond the pale. — Fire Ologist

Okay.

Don’t get me wrong, shooting people for their political speech alone is always wrong and beyond the pale, but it is precisely the silence and foreclosing of discussion that makes it wrong, and so we must interrogate the shooter, seek his rational illumination and then judge the nature of his crime. I suspect he will not be able to justify shooting a man like that. But it would be beyond the pale to judge the shooter without hearing him out. — Fire Ologist

Okay, and this relates to things like the paradox of tolerance.

I suppose one inroad into this topic is Elizabeth Anscombe's comment:

If someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind. — Anscombe, Modern Moral Philosophy, 40

Now if Anscombe's interlocutor thinks that procuring the judicial execution of the innocent is a live option, and if such a person is to be deemed beyond the pale, then at some point or another they must be "written off." Or in your words the discussion must be "foreclosed." The interlocutor will want to keep talking and arguing, but at some point he must be written off.

Indeed if judging someone beyond the pale involves writing them off, then to write off or "foreclose" cannot itself be beyond the pale. This is the paradox.


I myself was thinking more along the lines of the idea that something which is beyond the pale inherently lacks rationality, and therefore is going to be more or less opaque to rational scrutiny. If this is right, then something which can be rationally and transparently proscribed cannot be beyond the pale; and therefore the object of evil that is beyond the pale will always remain fuzzy. For example, we can rationally and transparently proscribe a particular mathematical error, and hence such an error is not beyond the pale. Because the error is "understandable" it is able to be formally/rationally corrected (and because it is able to be formally/rationally corrected, it is understandable).

Ultimately, though, I think proscription necessarily prescinds a bit from the intelligibility of what is proscribed. For example, we say, "Thou shalt not murder," and even though murder is itself an endlessly confusing or privated act, nevertheless the proscription itself remains rational and intelligible. Of course, whether it does remain rational and intelligible is an interesting question. Can, "Do not φ," be transparent if φ is opaque? Presumably the condition must be drawn "materially" rather than "formally," and this may be precisely why an act like murder always retains a certain degree of ambiguity (and why, for example, someone might claim that capital punishment is a form of murder, or that fining a thief is a form of theft).

(Then, bringing in your points, the interesting question arises of how one is to avoid licensing premature dismissals if the object of dismissal necessarily lacks a certain degree of intelligibility.)

And I do make that structuralist claim about human social organisation. The same hierarchical systems logic applies right through history from prehistoric times. A society is a structure of global constraints and local freedoms. There must be a collective state of mind that can then make its individual choices within that context. — apokrisis

Okay, good.

History then becomes about tracking how this general theme becomes expressed in increasingly complexified and mechanised ways. There are the major transitions in the moves from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to agrarian empires to industrialised nation states. We have the shifts from oral to literate to mathematical semiosis. We have the shifts from ancestor worship to the axial religions to pragmatic realism. At each stage, the basic logic of social structure is the same, but its expression becomes focused on meeting the organisational needs of the next step. — apokrisis

It seems like your argument is that history is the inevitable outworking of semiotic or social realities, and therefore each point in history represents the highest degree of progress possible at that given point. Because we now find ourselves in "democracy," democracy represents the highest (and inevitable) degree of progress possible in 2025. If this is an accurate portrayal, then you have your Ur-cause (semiotic or social progression), you have your effect (Western democracy in 2025), and the only thing to figure out is how the effect can be traced to the cause.

Our difference here is similar to what I pointed out in <this post> regarding wisdom. Your controlling theme is your Ur-cause, and you begin with the premise that things like "wisdom" or "democracy" must be outworkings of that Ur-cause. I do not grant that premise. I would want to look at wisdom in itself or democracy in itself, rather than constraining my understanding of such phenomena to outworkings of an Ur-cause. It's a bit of the hedgehog and the fox, if you like, where the fox is not convinced that the One Big Idea will ultimately hold up.

Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the kind of approach I would recommend if one is to focus on the actual genesis of the "Western metadiscourse". — apokrisis

Okay. Lots of interesting ideas there, many of which are plausible. That definitely helps me understand more of the basis for your view.

So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.

You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is. — apokrisis

Let's revisit Count's point:

Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least. — Count Timothy von Icarus

On your sort of reasoning, if Hitler had won the war then Nazism would be wise and it would be a higher point of progress than the more democratic alternative. On your view to know whether Nazism or Western democracy is more aligned with the inevitable outworkings of nature, we only have to look at which phenomenon won out. The Allies won the war against the Axis powers, therefore Western democracy is more aligned with "realism."

That approach strikes me as simplistic. Of course you might make a short-term vs. long-term distinction and claim that unnatural progressions can occur in the short term but not in the long term. Yet in that case the relevant question asks why democracy or liberalism are long term phenomena rather than short term phenomena.

The other oddity here is that if you abandon morality in a thoroughgoing way, then you are not capable of any normative arguments. You end up in the quandary of a fatalism that precludes free will. For example, the climate change theorist might say that we should reduce CO2 emissions, but if we fail to do so and a catastrophic event occurs, he cannot but look back and say that the catastrophe was inevitable and his effort to avoid it had no chance of succeeding. The fatalist cannot choose to fight for the Allies or the Axis.

One can always debate these analyses. My point is that they are plainly far more informative about why as humans we are organised the way we are.

The structuralist perspective – the one that sees humans as social creatures organising to take advantage of the resources that nature has to provide – tells us far more about why we believe what we believe than any amount of "history of moral philosophy" story-telling. — apokrisis

Isolating a metric and making it the whole story always seems simplistic to me. It either ignores the fact that humans act for ends, or else stipulates an end without sufficient evidence. In this case the stipulation is that humans want to "get things done in the world." It seems like a projection of one telos onto all of human history.

Granted, Aristotle says that the human telos is happiness (eudaimonia), and I don't think he is projecting. But eudaimonia is not an everything-is-a-nail to the guy with a hammer. A Western industrialist may well convince himself that everyone at every point in time was only interested in industry, but history tells a different tale.

What did he say about black people or "predominately black neighborhoods?" — Outlander

Yeah, 's analogy makes no sense. I guess when you're justifying murder you have to make up analogies that make no sense.

The self gets treated like a portfolio to be optimized and protected. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Lots of good thoughts. :up:

The classical object of the common good seems mostly invisible to liberalism. The idea of a telos that transcends self is a non-starter, and a beleaguered institutional landscape is icing on the cake. The modern cosmos revolves around the passions of the individual. Alternatives have become inconceivable.

An interesting question that follows upon the OP is this: Does it undermine the strong rejection to rationally illuminate the grounds for strong rejection? For example, if one deems something beyond the pale, is that "deeming" undermined by the act of explaining why it is beyond the pale?

So you are arguing or asking if the assassination of Charlie Kirk was justified?
Youre a mod?
Thats pretty fucked up. — DingoJones

It is, yep.

Charlie Kirk didn't deserve what happened to him in the sense that all he did made him worthy of punishment: But... — Moliere

That's the whole schtick, ": But." The 'but' is the whole point here, and the colon is apt. The rest is just the necessary window dressing needed to get to the 'but'. The caveat on not deserving murder is also pretty wild.

"Fucked up" is the correct description here.

Morality isn't about good and evil, it's about good and bad. Evil is not with good in morality, good is with bad. Evil is purposely failing, and comes about against good in morality but is not part of what morality is. We aren't given the choice to be good or evil, were given the choice to be good or bad. Sure, you can be evil but that's a complete abstraction of morality. Morality is about balance of good. If you lose balance, you perform bad. Confusion arises if we put good and evil together, but it makes complete sense if it's good and bad. — Barkon

Okay good, so it looks like you are wrestling with the argument I gave in that first post.

So what is "bad," and how is it to be mitigated?

The freedom to differentiate combined with the constraint that integrates. A dynamic which always existed as the basis of social order, but with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, a dynamic that could be made even more dynamic by spelling it out as a self-conscious ideology. — apokrisis

As always, your ideas are interesting and possess plausibility. But my difficulty is that you aren't arguing for realism, or democracy, or liberalism, so much as for a particular kind of realism, democracy, or liberalism. And you are also projecting that specific form back onto history, as if the historical development was a straightforward working out of that form. I mostly think that your project could be construed as a kind of hermeneutical battle over the history of such things, which in turn becomes a jockeying for how the essence of such movements is to be understood moving forward.

To give one example, you seem to view liberalism as the freedom of groups (which are formed by free association). This is curious to me both because it is historically inaccurate and because it is close to an Aristotelian revision of liberalism that others propose. In fact liberalism is based in individual freedom, not group freedom, through the ideas of Hobbes and secondary figures like Locke or Mill, and this has become only more obvious with time. The Aristotelian approach sees man as a social animal, and therefore sees groups as primary. For example:

This appeal to the medieval arrangement, or to other arrangements of loose empire with strong local differences and independence as opposed to the despotic liberal state, is not put forward as nostalgia for a lost past. It is put forward as a way of stimulating a more imaginative and free-ranging approach to the treatment of contemporary political questions. In fact, the past combination of extensive empire with the multiplication of local differences could be imitated today precisely by a rethinking of the notion of the liberal state. For the state of nature doctrine (whence the notion of the liberal state principally derives) can be reformed into an argument for loose empire combined with strong communities. All one needs to do is to make the state of nature doctrine apply not to individuals (the way Hobbes and Locke and others did), but rather to communities. So instead of individuals forming a state by means of a social contract, let communities form a federation or league by means of defensive alliances, not unlike the way the former colonies in the United States did by means of the Articles of Confederation. Such alliances may differ in many ways and embrace more or fewer things, and the alliances might depend on a superior power as well as on member communities (the way the medieval arrangement depended on the emperor, or the way the settlement in Greece after the battle of Chaeronea depended on Philip of Macedon and then on his son Alexander the Great). No matter. The basic idea remains the same, and it is the idea that is important, rather than the details.

Such a way of applying the state of nature doctrine would be not only better but also more historically accurate. For it is manifest that men do not exist first, or at all, as individuals but rather as belonging to communities. Not only are we all born into some community, such as the family or the equivalent, but with few and largely irrelevant exceptions, we all remain and function as parts of one or more communities for the whole of life. It is as such parts of communities that we live and act, that we form visions of the good and pursue them, and that, in the service of these visions, we love and hate, fight and die... — Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism, 182

The polis with thick subsidiarity that you describe is simply not modern liberalism. You are taking a reasonably good idea and calling it liberalism even though it is not historical liberalism, and I would rather just admit that it is different from liberalism rather than try to engage in a hermeneutical battle to try to argue that historical liberalism is significantly different than the received view allows.

But also, the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to resist. We see that everywhere we look in modern liberal democracy. Drill baby drill as they say in the US and everywhere else. — apokrisis

As I said earlier, many simply associate their own "good" ideas with liberalism or democracy, because they deem themselves liberals or democrats. But the laws of thermodynamics are no more potent on democracy than on oligarchy, or aristocracy, or monarchy. The idea that a thermodynamic-based theory is somehow "democratic" is not at all in evidence.

Then as for a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles... — apokrisis

Science is not decided by majority vote. It is realist by nature. It has correct and incorrect answers. Democracy is a matter of majority vote. It has no correct or incorrect answers, other than the will of the people. Do you see the difference? So what happens when the scientist claims that Covid-19 requires certain political measures, and the populus does not favor the enacting of those measures? Then you have but one example of scientific auctoritas clashing with a democratic political arrangement.

Science is anti-democratic. Folks miss this because they are predisposed to favor democracy, and they therefore conflate an aristocracy with a democracy. Contemporary science is aristocratic in that etymological merit-based sense. It is a consensus of those with the requisite merit to possess a vote. Scientific "suffrage" extends only to a tiny percentage of the population.

From the start, I was speaking of pragmatic realism. And you immediately projected on to that your own Cartesian framing in terms of the real and the ideal. While never being willing to acknowledge that my arguments are essential Aristotelean in systems science fashion. — apokrisis

You continue to project all sorts of things into this conversation that are not in evidence.

Liberal democracy as a political machinery for trading off the counter-forces of local competition and global cooperation are just expressing that natural hierarchical dynamic at the level of organismic order. — apokrisis

I think that is precisely what liberal democracy is not. Liberal democracy has from its inception erred heavily in the direction of a lack of subsidiarity. It tends towards top-down power structures, globalism, etc. This is precisely why the "revolution of the proletariat" is always a threat to the liberal state.

But I like the Big Picture view that grounds such debates in the reality of systems hierarchical order where complexity arises through an ability to balance the driving dynamics in play over all scales of that hierarchical order.

And this is the basic plumbing issue that liberal democracy is meant to address. The how of how we construct a society that is balancing its freedoms and constraints over all its scales of being – a scale of being that has the added stress of a compounding growth rate. — apokrisis

If this isn't projection, then name me one founder of liberalism who has expressed such views.

So the pragmatic model of society – such as expressed by Arthur Bentley in 1908 based on Dewey – is of a hierarchy of interest groups. Institutionalised habit forming over all levels. — apokrisis

Dewey is late to the game, and so I wouldn't count him as a founder. This is even beside the point that he was a critic of classical liberalism and proposed substantial changes, which is much to the point. Simpson agrees with much in Dewey in his critiques of liberalism.

It is hard to imagine a flourishing society that isn't organised as an organic hierarchy of interests groups properly in touch not just with the real world that is its physical ground, but also with the reality of the world it is thus making.

It is the realism of being self-aware enough that society is in precisely this pragmatic recursive loop of adaptive habit formation and so being able to frame our debate about that fact with intellectual precision. — apokrisis

That's well and good, but I see little relation between it and liberal democracy. I think that such a theory could be applied to most historical political arrangements seen through the bird's-eye view that you take. There is no special compatibility between such a theory and liberalism or democracy. You would be making the same claims if you found yourself in a tribal or feudal society, or a guild-based economy.

I do appreciate the explication. :up:


Edit: Presumably you are coming from a perspective which favors the marriage of market principles to Mill's free speech arguments, found in figures like Adam Smith. That perspective has truly become an inheritance of liberalism, even if it is contested in some ways. This would require a longer conversation, but I think here too there is an overidentification of market principles with democracy or liberalism (similar to the overidentification of thermodynamics with democracy or liberalism). It seems to me that on this point your odd dichotomy between "natural" and "moral" will become especially strained, as will the tension between democracy and your hierarchalism. ...The reason liberal democracies tend towards a thin geography of intermediate institutions (and therefore towards hierarchies that lack robustness) is because the anthropological starting point is too strongly individualist, which in turn creates a vacillation between the individual part and the societal whole (i.e. the liberal state).

I’m asking again how you think the notion of liberal democracy arose and took hold on human affairs. — apokrisis

We're talking about the relation between realism and democracy & liberalism. Now you want to talk about the genesis of liberal democracy?

• Leontiskos: How does realism generate democracy or liberalism?
• Apokrisis: Give your alternative explanation.
• Leontiskos: Alternative explanation to what?

Are you saying, "If realism did not generate liberal democracy, then what did?" Or, "If society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism did not generate liberal democracy, then what did?"

Realism, democracy, and liberalism are three incredibly complex and plastic notions. It may be that society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism supports liberalism or democracy, but first we must recognize that realism and society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism are not the same thing even if the latter is an instance of the former, and the conflation between the two seems to miss this. Second, I don't see how your relatively novel notion of society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism caused "the notion of liberal democracy [to arise and take hold on human affairs]," given the anachronism.

Historically speaking, liberal democracy arose in the relative absence of realism,* and theories such as Peirce's draw on sources behind and outside of the nominalism that had become so prevalent at the time of its rise. Presumably you are conflating realism with Baconian science, which did in fact attend the rise of liberal democracy. Of course the fact that liberal democracy arose in a relatively anti-realist period does not mean that the two are incompatible or that some variety of realism such as society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism does not support liberalism or democracy.

More generally, the democratic moral principle is that everyone is equal and votes in public affairs. The liberal moral principle has to do with individual freedom. The form of realism that will actually support democracy is therefore one which holds that equality among the demos is real, and the form of realism that will actually support liberalism is one which holds that individual freedom is real. That is how the practical-speculative juncture must be laid for things like democracy or liberalism to flourish, and my earlier point was presupposing that the juncture between the speculative sphere and the moral sphere is itself moral (and also speculative). For example, the thesis that each member of the demos is equal vis-a-vis the act of voting in public affairs is both a speculative and a practical thesis. It means that there is in fact an equality and that a political program follows upon this equality.

You only seem to be leaving supernatural circumstance as your position. And I can only conclude you are too shy to try and support that in a public forum. — apokrisis

These strawmen and the ignorance underlying them are actually rather amusing. Apparently you think that everyone who disagrees with you is naively appealing to "divine will" (whatever that is supposed to mean). I'm not much interested in engaging the anti-religious chip on your shoulder, as it seems to be an excuse to avoid giving explanations for your claims (such as the claim that realism generates democracy or liberalism).


* Modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and therefore presuppose deep-seated disagreements. Thus it is no surprise that a large dose of nominalism attended their rise. I think a rather compelling argument could be made that realism goes hand in hand with intellectualism, whereas democracy and liberalism are bound up with voluntarism. This is a basic reason why we now see a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles - there is an inherent tension. Yet Aristotle pointed out long ago that there are different forms of democracy.

Here's what I've been saying from the beginning:

Whether realism has to do with opposition to "social media psychodramas" or the strangeness of intersectionality, either way there is nothing connecting democracy or liberalism to this realism, and therefore deviation from this realism is not a deviation from democracy or liberalism. — Leontiskos

You claimed a connection between realism and democracy & liberalism, and I have been asking how that is supposed to work. That's the discussion I've been having with you from my very first response to you.

As I have said any number of times, my metaphysics is naturalistic. I understand society as a biosemiotic organism. An organism is a dissipative structure that persists by constructing a model of itself in its world. An Umwelt. And so “humanity” can be best understood by accepting this is really what is going on... — apokrisis

So let me ask you a preliminary question: do you think that realism gets one to democracy and liberalism, or do you think that your specific variety of realism (society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism) gets one to democracy and liberalism? Because realism and what you are setting out here are not the same thing. Lots of people are realists who do not believe that society is a biosemiotic organism. Do those realists still arrive at democracy and liberalism?

I'm asking if you have any reasons for your claim here:

I would say it is more correct that it is realism that gets you to democracy and liberalism. — apokrisis

How does realism get you to democracy and liberalism?

So what does pragmatic realism have to do with democracy or liberalism? — Leontiskos

Having A contain the potential for B doesn't change A and make A something other than A. A could not have been the "cause" of B if it wasn't capable of bringing B from potency to act. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

You seem to be understanding “realism” as “political realism” here. And I mean realism as in knowing the rational truth of the matter. Pragmatic realism. — apokrisis

So what does pragmatic realism have to do with democracy or liberalism? Democracy and liberalism are moral/political positions.

But no, I am not understanding "realism" as "political (or moral) realism." For example:

Part of the difficulty is that trying to entangle realism with democracy or liberalism presupposes moral realism — Leontiskos

In that sentence the bolded "realism" does not mean "moral realism."

- :up:

Do you think we can take your same argument and use it to show that physical to physical causation is not possible if physical events are related?

There is no noun "mental" in the English language. This poses a problem for an OP that takes such a word for granted. Much confusion will come from making up a word wholecloth and pretending that it has some determinate meaning.

I don’t see why someone cannot hold an individual guilt theory and hold that Original Sin is the causal consequence of the first fall. If my parents are given 10,000,000 dollars and they waste it and I consequently get no inheritance, I don’t think that infringes or impedes on guilt being individualistic: I wasn’t owed that money. — Bob Ross

The problem with the analogy is that Original Sin doesn't merely deprive you of a gratuitous gift; it actually harms you. You come to harm (or come to be compromised) through no fault of your own, and because of someone else's poor decision.

Likewise, correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think Orthodox and Catholic Christians believe that Aboriginal Sin is something one is guilty of: they believe that it is something one is not culpable for but still causally affects them. — Bob Ross

Right, but it's always an uneasy notion. It's not natural evil and it's not personal evil. It is a natural consequence of another person's individual evil. This is by no means sui generis. That sort of thing happens all the time. A quintessential example is the crack baby. But there is a prima facie injustice about the plight of the crack baby. It's not easy to reconcile.

As Chesteron said, Original Sin is perhaps the most empirically verifiable Christian doctrine, but it nevertheless still has about it the mystery and opacity of evil.

The idea that "good" always refers to something like "thou shalt" is a product of Reformation volanturist theology, the tradition that shapes Hume. To say that all value claims are about "thou shalt" isn't to observer an ironclad law of philosophy or language. It's just the (originally explicitly theological) premise that shaped Hume's context, i.e., "there is no intrinsic value (teloi) because intrinsic value would be a constraint on the divine will. Thus, value must be about divine command." — Count Timothy von Icarus

(@Ludwig V)

This is a bit tangential, but John Henry Newman has some interesting argumentation vis-a-vis Hume, law, and will:

There are philosophers who go farther, and teach, not only a general, but an invariable, and inviolable, and necessary uniformity in the action of the laws of nature, holding that every thing is the result of some law or laws, and that exceptions are impossible; but I do not see on what ground of experience or reason they take up this position. Our experience rather is adverse to such a doctrine, for what concrete fact or phenomenon exactly repeats itself? Some abstract conception of it, more perfect than the recurrent phenomenon itself, is necessary, before we are able to say that it has happened even twice, and the variations which accompany the repetition are of the nature of exceptions. The earth, for instance, never moves exactly in the same orbit year by year, but is in perpetual vacillation. It will, indeed, be replied that this arises from the interaction of one law with another, of which the actual orbit is only the accidental issue, that the earth is under the influence of a variety of attractions from cosmical bodies, and that, if it is subject to continual aberrations in its course, these are accounted for accurately or sufficiently by the presence of those extraordinary and variable attractions:—science, then, by its analytical processes sets right the primâ facie confusion. Of course; still let us not by our words imply that we are appealing to experience, when really we are only accounting, and that by hypothesis, for the absence of experience. The confusion is a fact, the reasoning processes are not {71} facts. The extraordinary attractions assigned to account for our experience of that confusion are not themselves experienced phenomenal facts, but more or less probable hypotheses, argued out by means of an assumed analogy between the cosmical bodies to which those attractions are referred and falling bodies on the earth. I say "assumed," because that analogy (in other words, the unfailing uniformity of nature) is the very point which has to be proved. It is true, that we can make experiment of the law of attraction in the case of bodies on the earth; but, I repeat, to assume from analogy that, as stones do fall to the earth, so Jupiter, if let alone, would fall upon the earth and the earth upon Jupiter, and with certain peculiarities of velocity on either side, is to have recourse to an explanation which is not necessarily valid, unless nature is necessarily uniform. Nor, indeed, has it yet been proved, nor ought it to be assumed, even that the law of velocity of falling bodies on the earth is invariable in its operation; for that again is only an instance of the general proposition, which is the very thesis in debate. It seems safer then to hold that the order of nature is not necessary, but general in its manifestations.

But, it may be urged, if a thing happens once, it must happen always; for what is to hinder it? Nay, on the contrary, why, because one particle of matter has a certain property, should all particles have the same? Why, because particles have instanced the property a thousand times, should the thousand and first instance it also? It is primâ facie unaccountable that an accident should happen twice, not to speak of its happening always. If {72} we expect a thing to happen twice, it is because we think it is not an accident, but has a cause. What has brought about a thing once, may bring it about twice. What is to hinder its happening? rather, What is to make it happen? Here we are thrown back from the question of Order to that of Causation. A law is not a cause, but a fact; but when we come to the question of cause, then, as I have said, we have no experience of any cause but Will. If, then, I must answer the question, What is to alter the order of nature? I reply, That which willed it;—That which willed it, can unwill it; and the invariableness of law depends on the unchangeableness of that Will.

And here I am led to observe that, as a cause implies a will, so order implies a purpose. Did we see flint celts, in their various receptacles all over Europe, scored always with certain special and characteristic marks, even though those marks had no assignable meaning or final cause whatever, we should take that very repetition, which indeed is the principle of order, to be a proof of intelligence. The agency then which has kept up and keeps up the general laws of nature, energizing at once in Sirius and on the earth, and on the earth in its primary period as well as in the nineteenth century, must be Mind, and nothing else, and Mind at least as wide and as enduring in its living action, as the immeasurable ages and spaces of the universe on which that agency has left its traces.

In these remarks I have digressed from my immediate subject, but they have some bearing on points which will subsequently come into discussion. — Newman, Grammar of Assent, Chapter 4

Part of what Newman is doing here is arguing that, in the more primary epistemic sense, law has to do with will and not with nature. He is turning Hume on his head, and will continue to do so.

What is of practical siginficance (IMO) is the importance of making an effort to seek truth through good epistemological practices. What I've been arguing is that inference to best explanation (IBE) is usually the best we can do. I doubt that any IBEs can constitute knowledge, — Relativist

Right, and that's what I've been driving at: it seems that you think IBE's are the only option, and IBE's do not constitute knowledge.

but that doesn't mean we should treat all inferences as equally credible. — Relativist

If there is no pole of knowledge then I don't see how one IBE can be better than another (because no IBE can better approach that pole).

Similarly, if we know what ice is then we have a pole and a limit for the coldness of water. If we don't know what ice is, then the coldness of water is purely relative, and there is nothing to measure against. I would argue that knowledge is prior to IBE, and that IBE is parasitic upon knowledge. Thus if you make IBEs the only option, then there is nothing on which an IBE can be parasitic upon or subordinate to, and this undermines IBEs themselves.

So you don’t see realism assumed as a foundation of the social package but rather an optional flavour? Institutions such as independent courts and a free press aren’t envisaged as basic? — apokrisis

I don't see why independent courts or a free press lead ineluctably to realism. There are different ways to conceive of liberalism, but are any of them inherently bound up with realism?

I would say it is more correct that it is realism that gets you to democracy and liberalism. A public concern for the real facts, the real truth, is the precondition. — apokrisis

I am not convinced of that either. Part of the difficulty is that trying to entangle realism with democracy or liberalism presupposes moral realism (which in this case is a moral-political realism), and the democratic sentiment of the West now generally opposes moral-political realism—where the general opposition to moral-political realism is a large part of what liberalism has come to mean.

So even if the is-ought distinction is false, the fact that a large percentage of Westerners believe it to be true itself militates against the thesis that realism and democracy go together.

- It seems like you want to talk about how one thought can follow from another in a non-logical way (i.e. via psychological association).

It's a bit odd to try to set out on a grand quest for all "mental to mental causation," and then immediately dismiss logic. Logic is obviously one way that "mental to mental causation" occurs. There are other ways too, such as association. But if you want to talk about association rather than logic, then you want to talk about per accidens causality rather than per se causality, which is less philosophical than psychological. It's also less interesting, because the answers are less intelligible. "But why did his ice-cream thought follow upon his grasshopper-thought?" "Because he associates ice cream with grasshoppers, likely because of the Grasshopper cocktail."

So the proper connection between democracy and liberalism is that it speaks to society as a dynamic community of institutions. People are free to collectivise around any common interest that appears to have a useful end. This was always the case for societies. But liberalism puts it on the democratic basis where the resulting institutions can all contest for their fair share of the total social pie. Funding becomes a global capital flow that can be piped into any social function according to political will.

The design is commonsense. Let everyone organise on any scale. But the total of the activity has to produce the surplus that gets parcelled out accordingly. And realism is about being able to tie the two sides of the social bargain together in an empirically determined way.

This realism about what the actual facts are – what people really want and the scale of the surplus that exists to be shared – is basic to liberal democracy working as a coherent system. And it is the realism that has fallen apart in a big way. Voters are now entrained to the various brands of cultural make-believe. — apokrisis

Whether realism has to do with opposition to "social media psychodramas" or the strangeness of intersectionality, either way there is nothing connecting democracy or liberalism to this realism, and therefore deviation from this realism is not a deviation from democracy or liberalism.

Realism is great, but it isn't democracy or liberalism (per se) that gets you there. If one wants to use democracy or liberalism to achieve realism, then they need a particular flavor of democracy or liberalism. The flavor of liberalism has to do with a focus on the individual and inalienable rights. The flavor of democracy has to do with a relatively autonomous demos (which is probably no longer possible in our internet age).

What we see so often today is a population that says, "Democracy is good, my ideas are good, therefore my ideas are democratic," or, "Liberalism is good, my ideas are good, therefore my ideas are liberal." That's why it is so easy for opponents to wield the same terms. A culture with a hyper-specific concept of democracy and freedom has forgotten that their concept is hyper-specific; and they can no longer justify or even properly perceive what has come to be taken for granted.

Liberalism is about freedom of association. — apokrisis

Wouldn't you agree that freedom of association is always a subordinated value within liberalism, subject to various conditions?

They deride the West as not being truly democratic, as having become an oligarchy, or just as often, as having fallen into a sort of technocratic socialism. Such criticisms accept liberal values however. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say that democracy isn't inherently liberal, and liberalism isn't coherent,* and we are seeing these two facts work themselves out. For example, what is happening in many places is that liberalism is being checked by democracy and because of this those in power are becoming increasingly anti-democratic. The West has lost authority because it is beginning to cannibalize itself.

* If liberalism were coherent then I think it would be more significant that opponents both appeal to it.

Rather, both sources are saying that knowledge constitutes a a subset of ones beliefs. — Relativist

Well that's a rather different claim, isn't it? "X is Y" is not the same as "Some X is Y." Philosophical discussion requires linguistic precision. That sort of conflation, over and over, is unphilosophical.

I provided the definition from the Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy that categorically states that knowledge is belief — Relativist

No, your source did not say that knowledge is belief. Go back and have another look.

(belief that is adequately justified and true) — Relativist

Neither did it say that knowledge is belief that is adequately justified and true. You keep playing these word games where you equivocate and stretch the meanings of words, omit certain semantic ranges, inaccurately portray what a source says, etc. That sort of tinkering causes a lot problems when precision is needed.

But my original point holds: saying that "I know X" is a statement about belief is like saying "I baked a loaf of bread" is a statement about yeast. Equivocation is occurring.

I'll give two examples:
I. :My name is Fred.

I believe this to be true, and I have strong justification to believe it (it's the name on my birth certificate, the name my friends and family have always called me, and the first name on a variety of legal documents). — Relativist

So your argument here is, "I believe X is true and I have strong justification to believe it, therefore it is true [or, therefore I know it]." But why do you think those two conditions are sufficient? Those conditions obviously fail to generate knowledge in certain circumstances. And this idea of "strong" or "adequate" justification is not even in keeping with that broad sort of Gettier epistemology. It looks like a subset, something like probabilistic internalism.

But again, rather than falling into the rabbit hole of contemporary epistemology, my claim is that the traditional epistemic opinion is that knowledge is possible - that I can know and know that I know certain things. I don't see how you would be able to accept such a view.

We could look at the three Gettier conditions:

1. X is believed
2. The agent is justified
3. X is true

On your approach where everything is reduced to belief, we get something like this:

1. I believe X
2. I believe that I am justified (or "adequately" justified)
3. I believe that X is true

Yours is far from the Gettier model. You have three beliefs; the Gettier model does not. And no one thinks these three beliefs of yours generate knowledge. The Gettier model requires more than just belief, which is why your belief-reductionism is incompatible with it.

Now I think this form of skepticism is becoming common, so it's understandable in certain ways. My point is that it is a significant deviation from traditional epistemology. If one locks the subject within their own beliefs, then knowledge is impossible. This presumably includes even probabilistic knowledge.

It's easy to see how the two often become mixed together though. I think this is especially actue in metaethics, where empiricsts epistemic presuppositions essentially amount to metaphysical presuppositions. "Examine the sense data; there are no values (or universals, or facts about meaning, etc.) to be found." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and I think 'value' fails to be a neutral word here given the way contemporary philosophy is prone to the verb (subjective) form of the word. The idea is that the act of valuing is made, not found, and is therefore ephemeral. So perhaps the first shift is to move from the act of valuing to the recognition of value; from deeming worthwhile to recognizing intrinsic worth. There is an indoctrination into the idea that one should never speak about what has intrinsic value or worth. One must be shaken out of that doctrinal slumber. ...The word 'good' is not as easy to subjectivize.

Admittedly, you can believe in both (see the catholic church). However, I think that they have different motivations for their belief. The "god of the parish" addresses the human tendency towards religion (fraternity, moral certainty, explanations and relief, etc.) while the philosophical god was a way to justify that tendency and/or the product of metaphysical investigations. That doesn't discount the philosophical god in any factual way, but it is nevertheless important to acknowledge. After all, even if a deistic god is entirely plausible, it does not mean that the god of the parish is (hence my point that conflating the two might be subconsciously beneficial to organized religion). On its own, a philosophical god would very likely seem soulless to most church goers — finarfin

I suppose I would argue that there is a continuum between the two, in much the same way that a child will begin to refine its understanding as it grows and matures. There is a difference between the layman's and the theologian's understanding of God, but I don't see them to be in conflict. I don't see that they believe in two different Gods.

By analogical predication, I mean when one predicates a property of a thing by way of an analogy that is in no way meant to be taken as one and the same (viz., univocally) or completely different (viz., equivocally): — Bob Ross

Okay. Interesting article. :up:

I think it is important when specifically speaking of God to use analogical predication; because God's nature is not known to us as He is in Himself but, rather, is known to us by way of analogy to His effects. He is known from what He is not that He produces and not what He is.

God’s true nature is not apparent to us, as it is in-itself, exactly because He is never afforded to our senses (nor could He be) and is always the necessary precondition, as Being itself, for all things sensed. — Bob Ross

Fair enough. That seems like a good account.

(Sorry, I sort of forget where I was going with this. :blush:)

However, this is not incompatible with the ‘strong natural theism’ I expounded: the central thesis merely claims that we can know through reason applied to the natural world around us about God’s nature—it could be equally true that God could expedite the process by just telling us. — Bob Ross

Okay.

I will say that knowing God through reason applied to the ordinary world is stronger and richer than if God were to reveal it to us; because epistemically it would be much less certain with Divine Revelation and it comes with many other disadvantages (such as requiring faith, tradition, etc.) unless we are talking about God supernaturally infusing us with immanent knowledge. — Bob Ross

Sure, and Aquinas would agree that knowledge by sight is more satisfying than knowledge by faith.