No, I think something more like sensory experience is not a distinct layer, but just a component part of perceiving. — hypericin

Right, and they might also question the rest of your analysis. They might say, for example, that the meaningful story is not posterior to the sounds. They may even say that because we often shape and infuse meaning into sounds the meaning itself is more primary than the sounds.

But your characterization is fairly close to what Aquinas says:

Some have asserted that our intellectual faculties know only the impression made on them; as, for example, that sense is cognizant only of the impression made on its own organ. According to this theory, the intellect understands only its own impression, namely, the intelligible species which it has received, so that this species is what is understood. This is, however, manifestly false for two reasons. . .

[...]

Therefore it must be said that the intelligible species is related to the intellect as that by which it understands: which is proved thus. . . — Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.Q85.A2

Or to translate into your terms: <The sense data is related to the intellect as that by which it understands [, not as that which is understood]>. But this gets tricky because you want to talk primarily about sense data (which Aquinas calls phantasms) and Aquinas wants to talk primarily about knowledge.

It is interesting to me that when I studied epistemology the position I hold was called indirect realism, something vaguely akin to what you consider "naive realism" was considered direct realism, and your position would not have been called realism at all, because it terminates in perception and not in the real.

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As to the "intelligibility of nature' example, I think I agree with you since it would be absurd to demand that intelligibility be pointed to as an object of the senses. — Janus

And is it not similarly absurd to ask the indirect realist to point to an instance of direct sensory knowledge? By definition, their position holds that such direct knowledge does not exist. So they might give a counterfactual analysis, "Well, if the world were such that Descartes' belief about direct or indubitable knowledge were correct, and this also held of our sense knowledge, then direct realism would obtain."

Whereas the direct realist does not acknowledge this layer, to them the computer in my example would be the most direct layer. — hypericin

So you believe the direct realist would hold that the layer of sensory experience does not exist and therefore the computer layer is most "direct"? Why do you believe the direct realist would say this?

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Since, according to scientific understanding, thinking, like perceiving, is a process, I don't see why it would not, on the indirect realist argument, equally qualify as indirect. — Janus

Well Descartes thought that we know some things indubitably, and that the fact that we think is one of these things. Descartes' claim acts as a counterfactual which explicates the content of "directness" whether or not the indirect realist thinks it actually exists. I don't see why the indirect realist (or the direct realist) is required to offer more than a counterfactual.

Similarly, someone might claim that reality is fundamentally intelligible to the human mind. Another might object, "Ah, but if you think that fundamental intelligibility is coherent, then you must explain what fundamental unintelligibility is, and you must do this in a more-than-counterfactual manner. Viz., you must point to fundamental unintelligibility in reality." Do you see why this isn't an appropriate objection? Some 20th century logicians thought these sorts of universal claims were vacuous, but whether or not they are vacuous, they are what we are dealing with in conversations such as this.

Another argument in the OP is that because perception is a process we should not think of it as direct. That, if accepted would leave us with no coherent notion of 'indirect', since the terms is meaningless without some criterion of directness that it can serve as the negation of. — Janus

See:

First, to echo Banno's question, what would the correlate to indirect, "direct," mean in the context of your claims? Apparently knowledge of the sandpaper without fingers, nerves, and brain processing would be direct? — Leontiskos

I think there is a general failure to consider a counterfactual understanding of either position. For example, if the indirect realist says that "direct" is as I have described it, this does provide a relevant foil, it's just that the foil is counterfactual and not actual. This directness is something like the way that Descartes' knows that he thinks. Such premises are not incoherent (although I think their conclusion is mistaken).

Some are getting close, although I don't think everyone has the same distinction in mind between direct realism and indirect realism. I think the starting point needs to be a place where one can clearly define the position they hold as well as the position to which they object, and this has obviously been lacking.

↪Leontiskos :up: I've been getting a lot from Vervaeke's lectures. (Mind you, there’s a lot of ‘em.) — Wayfarer

Yeah, it's good stuff. Truth always limps without beauty, poise, and form, and Vervaeke manifests a remarkable beauty and poise when he engages his topics. I think Jordan Peterson does a relatively good job at this popular level, but his temptation is falling into polemics and pugilism (and, in my opinion, too much Jung and too little Plato). Vervaeke has a remarkable balance, and refuses to get pulled in too many different practical directions. In my opinion Plato is the summit of human reason, and Vervaeke actually tries to expound the depths of Plato at a popular level, which is admirable and profound while also being a bit naive. I will definitely keep an eye on him. He seems to be an important voice.

It's actually pretty interesting how these psychologists are making waves. Peterson takes a first-order approach to the Bible and Vervaeke takes a first-order approach to Plato. Formal scholars of the Bible and Plato are not doing this, and I think there is a general hunger for it.

To argue that the press has a duty to provide only certain facts in order to protect democracy contradicts the idea that the freer the press, the more open the democracy. The net result of using the press as a means to promote certain viewpoints only leads to a distrust of the press even when the press has their information correct. That's exactly what you're seeing now, where no one can speak outside their echo chamber because there are no longer any accepted facts across ideological boundries. — Hanover

Yep.

My question is whether anyone disagrees with what I've said and believes that the press has a duty to stake out a preferred social objective and then to use its power to promote that objective? Do you see the press as a legitimate political force, rightfully empowered to promote the good as the outlet sees fit, or do you see the press as having no objective other than the presentation of facts from various viewpoints, leaving to the reader the conclusions he wishes to draw? — Hanover

I think viewpoint neutrality is important, and objectivity with respect to important stories is important; but on the other hand is the fact that there is no truly objective vantage point when it comes to news, at the very least insofar as story selection goes.

The question seems to be: What is the telos of the press?

See also: "All reporting is biased."

I would agree, but wouldn't this intimate that there are two separate acts taking place, that don't necessarily require each other for pertinence? — AmadeusD

I don't think I would use the word "pertinence." If a speaker knows that someone is not listening, then he will not speak; and if a listener knows that someone is not speaking,* then he will not listen. So at the very least the purpose of either act fails without the other.

* For example, if someone begins lecturing, or mumbling, or shifts into a mode of monologue that is not directed at their interlocutor in any relevant way. Or if someone is pondering out loud and another person begins to interact with their speech, they may say, "Oh, never mind that, I was just thinking out loud. I wasn't talking to you." So apparently here there is a difference between using vocal words and addressing someone, where the words may or may not be addressed to another.

However, in his "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," D.C Schindler... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Awhile back I downloaded a video from Vervaeke to try to acquaint myself with him, and tonight I finally got around to watching the first hour. It turns out that the discussion is on this same book, although their conversation also relates to your thread on logic:



(At 52:00 he reads a footnote that addresses objection.)

The listener is faced with the sign only, and it is up to him to provide it some with meaning. The act of understanding a sign, considering it, giving it meaning, and so on, are very important acts in this exchange and I think they have been largely ignored (as far as I know), at least as it pertains to Speech Act Theory. — NOS4A2

Well, it seems to me that the speaker is trying to communicate something to the listener, and the listener is trying to understand something from the speaker, so that both are contributing towards communication. Would you agree with that?

I performed one visible act, did one measurable thing, but you saw two visible acts, or me doing two visible things. So did I really perform two acts, or are you describing the same act in two different ways? — NOS4A2

Suppose you are standing with someone from the Middle East and you notice a man looking towards the two of you. The man flashes the sign, " :up: ". You, being an American, assume that the man is expressing approval; you smile back. The person from the Middle East assumes the man is insulting them; they glare back.

Now the man "performed one visible act, did one measurable thing," but the two people interpreted his act in different ways. If it is safe to assume that one of the two interpretations is correct, and the incorrect interpretation is not stupid, then the visible gesture taken in itself does not explain what the man was doing or communicating. The man was using his hand to communicate, and he was assuming that the two of you had a preconceived notion of what that particular gesture meant. That's how signs work, including words. To make use of a sign is to use a sensible reality to communicate with others. The sign only has meaning because of an implicit agreement between the communicators, and the same sensible reality can have a different meaning in different contexts.

A stock example in the linguistic sphere would be the Spanish speaker who knows a smattering of English and needs a prescription filled while traveling in an English-speaking country. She finds the words on the label, "Take once daily," dutifully consumes 11 pills on the first day, and dies of overdose. A lawsuit may follow, and the intent and meaning behind those markings, "o-n-c-e," will become the object of scrutiny. The single sensible reality has many possible meanings.

Even if all that’s fine, with respect to the direct/indirect dichotomy alone, how does that, or how does each of them, relate to realism? Realism is the concept in question, after all, its apparent dual nature, right? — Mww

Once we hit page 20 we will surely be able to say what it is we are arguing about. :grin:

I can't see that you're interacting with my claim.. Which is that 'the work environment' as a concept is literally a tool that appears in infinite forms. It is not a moral concept. It couldn't be, at this stage of analysis. — AmadeusD

Regarding this objection, it strikes me as a subtle ignoratio elenchus. The OP was not speaking about "the work environment" in a purely abstract manner. We know this because of that word, "anymore." The purely abstract notion that you have concerned yourself with does not change from time to time; but that which the OP is talking about does change from time to time; therefore the purely abstract notion that you have concerned yourself with is not what the OP is talking about. Thus you are talking past the OP.

Now the OP certainly needs to give us more information about what he is asking about, but we can be sure it isn't what you make it out to be.

Is there some reason [...] that you're replying to a reply... — AmadeusD

We're all replying to replies. I am agreeing with Moliere. I think his argument is approximately a million times better than yours.

I give time for money. Unless you're talking something like feudalism or before then I think it holds: under capital it's a time-for-money system. That structure is what makes "working conditions" coherent. — Moliere

Right. This should be obvious. Of course, the merry-go-round will now require you to explain what money is.

The relationship between employer and employee has no relationship beyond the fact that they have a relationship, and yet that relationship doesn't involve any interaction or disposition -- ever? — Moliere

Occasionally it is very useful to pretend not to understand what the words "employer" and "employee" mean. :wink:

Like the Buddhist desire to overcome desire, I think an egoist might practice altruism (i.e. non-reciprocal help/care of others) in order to overcome – deflate, sublimate – her ego — 180 Proof

True.

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“Morality” here can be interpreted as [...] a category of strange thing I am not sure exists. — Mark S

And that is the key to the OP: you don't believe morality exists. I would suggest using more scare quotes.

What it has to do with "morality" is that morality as cooperation is the underlying principle that explains why past and present cultural moral norms and our moral sense exist. — Mark S

In other words:

Therefore, our moral beliefs are really just an epiphenomenon of our desire for cooperation. — Leontiskos

I expect you are thinking of "morality" as what everyone imperatively ought to do - a topic in moral philosophy. Morality as cooperation is in a different domain of knowledge - what 'is', which I hope we agree may or may not be what we ought to do. — Mark S

Well then what does the "morality" in your phrase, "morality as cooperation" mean? Or when you speak about "moral norms" in the sentence quoted above, what do you mean? You are pretending to use these words in non-normative ways, but it seems clear to me that you are not being consistent in this.

The only way to fully "explain" a normative term in a non-normative way is to involve yourself in the claim that those who use the term and hold to the normativity in question are fundamentally confused. So if "cooperation" is conceived in a non-normative manner then this Bulverism rears its head; and if "cooperation" is conceived in a normative manner then we have moved out of the purview of descriptive science.

The unvarnished claim here is, "Cooperation explains morality, says Science."

This proposal is incoherent due to the category mistake of reframing non-reciprocity (altruism) in terms of reciprocity (mutualism), or vice versa. Also, it's misguided to assume that calculation (i.e. problem solving) is fundamental to moral judgment... — 180 Proof

These are good, concise points.

The difficulty for me is that the "Freudian psychologizing" can occur at each stage. Egoists will claim that altruists are "really" egoists, and those who reduce morality to calculation or expediency will claim that all morality is "really" nothing more than this, just as those who claim that morality is just game theory or evolutionary will apply this, a priori, to all putative instances of morality.

The egoist can have his theory that there are no true altruists, but this judgment could never be a matter of scientific fact, and therefore it should not be presented as such.

The first two are marker strategies as described in the OP. — Mark S

According to who? Certainly not those who practice them.

What is the "scientist" even supposed to be doing in such a case? "You say you abstain from pigs because they are unclean, but the real reason you abstain from pigs is because you are trying to set group boundaries." And the question is: is this sort of Freudian psychologizing descriptive science?

The other problem here is that insofar as it is descriptive science, it has nothing to do with morality proper. The Freudian "scientist" can theorize, "Well, these primitive people are confused about why they do what they do. They're really after cooperation, not ritual cleanness, because evolution." Okay...? But what does that have to do with morality? This arrogant rewriting of people's beliefs and motives is of course quite silly, but it also doesn't have any logical connection to moral normativity. I'd say this is just about how sophists justify bacon.

But to predicate cooperation of morality is to explain one value term with another value term, and "science," as you have described it, cannot do this. — Leontiskos

What then can descriptive science do? It can study the practices of cultures or people, including their strategies for cooperation. It can study their language. It can describe what they mean when they use a word, such as "morality." But as to morality proper, it can say very little, because morality is a normative sphere and not a descriptive sphere. Those who claim to be doing descriptive science but then manage to make or imply normative moral claims are engaged in sophistry, and this is a problem that plagues our age.

The common example of this is:

1. When we look at societies we find that they were interested in cooperation.
2. Therefore, our moral beliefs are really just an epiphenomenon of our desire for cooperation.
3. Therefore, true morality is cooperation.
4. Therefore, you should be more cooperative.

Put differently, to say that morality is for cooperation is a teleological claim, and according to your understanding of science this is not a scientific claim at all.

But the science of morality can study why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist. — Mark S

A moral norm involves valuation, and therefore any field which prescinds from matters of value cannot appraise moral norms, except insofar as it explains them away. But to predicate cooperation of morality is to explain one value term with another value term, and "science," as you have described it, cannot do this. The account is therefore not even logically coherent.

If you claim "Cooperation is moral," that's not descriptive. — Philosophim

Right.

But the science of morality can study why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist. There is a growing consensus that “human morality” (here our moral sense and cultural moral norms) exists because it solves cooperation problems in groups. — Mark S

There are fallacies at play here. "A moral norm aids cooperation, therefore the moral norm exists for the sake of cooperation." Not only is this fallacious reasoning, but it also departs from the "is" questions that you associate with "science." There is no "is" fact that moral norms exist for the sake of cooperation. Further, this conclusion contradicts the answers you would often receive if you asked the moral actors why they hold to their moral norms. The person who engages in this form of reasoning basically says, "Well, these people tell us that they hold to their moral norm because of X, but they really hold to their moral norm for the sake of cooperation, because [insert fallacious argumentation]."

It is basically Bulverism combined with a substituted motivation, and this has nothing to do with science. One center of the problem is the equivocation between moral norms as active via intentional agents and moral norms as passive via a mechanism such as evolution. Once someone speaks about "moral norms" in this latter sense the equivocation trap is set. The latter sense is in fact not a moral norm at all; it is a correlation.

What the so-called "scientist" has done is redefined morality in terms of expedience, and once that redefinition is complete it gets folded back to cover over the colloquial understanding of morality. Plato was already fighting hard against this move 2500 years ago. Of course it is true that many people throughout time have acted only for expedience. Such people do not believe that morality (or justice) in the true sense exists, and many of the "scientists" come from this group, importing their own view.

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotle’s animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild. — Joshs

This is simply confused. Horses are not humans, nor do they approximate humans. Sorry.

I don't disagree with your assessment at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I do. We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to ten, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human.

- Interesting interpretation. :up:

I've never known any liberals to say this. Can you provide an example? — Tom Storm

For example, look at the post written a few hours before yours, where MacIntyre is being quoted:

Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life.

...fundamentally 'the work environment' is not an object of ethical value. It is functional, to my mind... — AmadeusD

This is another of those strange dichotomies, "It is functional, therefore it is not ethical or unethical." Note that things like genocide, slavery, and drug trafficking are functional, along with pretty much everything else.

I’m assuming his non-opposition is a business move, to avoid alienating some of his fan base. — Joshs

I'm sure that's part of it, but I think it's only one piece of the puzzle. For candidates on the right, he did extended interviews with DeSantis, Christie, and Ramaswamy, but they have all dropped and I know he is not a fan of Biden. It would be interesting to know whether he extended an invitation to Trump. In any case, I haven't been following politics very closely so I will leave it at that, especially for this thread.

“Messing with the system that makes most other people happy,” to use your phrase, would presumably involve active restraints or disincentives on certain behaviors, as government policy. And Rawlsian liberals believe this is not the right approach, that tolerance of stupidity and wickedness is, in the end, the lesser of two evils. I emphasize again that this whole theory applies to social structures, not individuals. Personally I despise all forms of bigoted rhetoric, for instance, and do everything I can to oppose it; I’m not the least bit personally tolerant in this area. But I don’t want my government to censor or ban it. I’m also against a life of selfish pleasure, but liberalism asks me to tolerate in my role as citizen your choice of lifestyle even though I disapprove. — J

The problem is that liberalism presents a faux neutrality. To say, for example, that hate speech is permitted but assault is not, is to lapse into non-neutrality. What liberals do is highlight all the ways that liberalism is tolerant and paper over all the ways that it is not, and then announce that they are neutral and uniformly tolerant.

What is needed is a criterion by which the state acts, such that hate speech is permissible and assault is not. Liberalism is incoherent because it claims to be value-neutral, and yet there is no way to distinguish hate speech from assault given value neutrality. One could appeal to the proximate regime (modern liberal democracy) or the remote regime (democracy), but the mere appeal to a regime without a justification of the regime is a petitio principii, and this is precisely Rawls' error. It is a stretch for @Count Timothy von Icarus to call it an individual preference, because it is rather a cultural or societal preference, but both are in the same ballpark.

It isn’t only personal desires that thrive in a liberal democracy. So too do ideas, values, commitments, imagination, and deeply experienced “projects” of all kinds. — J

But only at the private level.

I guess another way of saying it is: Rawlsian liberal democracy is our best shot at creating a society that allows you or me the unfettered opportunity to argue for our personal morality, and perhaps see those arguments prevail. — J

But only at the private level.

Whenever someone's arguments oppose Rawls' vision, then they are by definition not allowed to prevail. Liberalism is a two-tiered scheme, where everyone is allowed freedom within the set boundaries, and no one quite knows why the boundaries are what they are.

Granted, "liberalism" in the older, non-Rawlsian sense derives from thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, and they were more willing to try to defend the regime than Rawls was. Rawls is like a politician who sums up and sets forth the values of a people. He does not attempt to justify those values.

One thing we can be certain of is that is is not accuracy or reliability. No matter how indirect an information source is, it can still be accurate and reliable. — hypericin

Already answered:

Well, perhaps I should have said that I don't believe that indirectness entails inaccuracy, because there is a correlation. On average, the more players we add to the telephone game, the more distorted will be the final result, but it is nevertheless possible to achieve an accurate result even with a large number of players. — Leontiskos

Also unanswered:

Second, if the direct realist agrees that fingers, nerves, and brain are involved in sensation, then what is it about your argument that makes us draw the conclusion of indirect realism instead of the conclusion of direct realism? Is it primarily that word, "potentially," along with that final sentence? — Leontiskos

It's fairly important that you be able to identify what it is about your claims that should make us favor indirect realism over direct realism. If you can't identify this then I'm not sure what we are doing.

I'm afraid I still only have one clear answer: for perception to be "direct", naïve realism should be true. The features of our perceptions must be present in reality, so that barns really look red, and violins sound as they do, independently of an observer. But we all agree this is not the case.

Failing that, it seems we are talking about different things. You must be talking about something other than the relationship between perceptions and reality. — hypericin

I think it is a matter of accuracy or reliability. "Are we able to form true propositions which accurately and reliably get at what truly exists in the world?" The so-called direct realist says yes. The so-called indirect realist says, "No, we do not know whether our knowledge is about the world or merely about our representations of the world."

There are a lot of pieces to this debate, but I see Kant as a father of indirect realism, and I think a central task would be to address Hume's skeptical arguments which got the whole ball rolling. Yet since most indirect realists have not read Hume and are simply inheriting an English-speaking philosophical tradition, that approach is not ideal for these settings.

So more practically, I think direct realism is the prima facie (naive) view. Indirect realism responds, throwing it into question. The central argument for indirect realism seems to be analogous to the idea that <if we had only one eye we would not have depth perception>. More precisely, <if we had only one eye, we could not move, and nothing in our field of vision ever moved, then we would not know or understand depth of field> (depth of field would be "noumenal"). This is of course true, and if our epistemic situation is analogous to that scenario then indirect realism is true.

But I am a direct realist because I have two eyes. The most basic way to rebut this central argument for indirect realism is therefore triangulation. I have knowledge of depth of field because I have two eyes, because I can move around and examine things from different angles, and because the things in my field of vision move and in so doing provide information about depth of field. Again, this example is merely analogous. I have two eyes, but I also have five senses; and there are billions of humans collecting data for comparison. Animals and robots collect information as well, and this can be leveraged to one extent or another. These are all forms of triangulation, and reason itself is the ultimate tool of triangulation, coordinating the data from all of the various inputs. Only where there are irreconcilable conflicts between the eyes, or the senses, or large populations of people, does indirect realism become plausible.

So if direct realism is the starting point, and if the central argument of indirect realism is that error checking is impossible, then I think triangulation suffices to answer that argument against the prima facie position. It's not a knock-down argument, because someone might argue for the position that all human beings are equally biased, and all of the senses are equally biased, and animals and robots are also equally biased. This argument would undercut the triangulation by reducing all of our various sources of knowledge to a single, flat perspective. But I think this position which denies triangulation is implausible in the extreme.

Finally, modern philosophy got hung up on certitude, and indirect realism flows out of that. When the indirect realist says, "We do not know whether our knowledge is about the world or merely about our representations of the world," everything depends on the meaning of that word 'know'. Even someone like Aristotle or Aquinas would admit that we cannot know this with perfect, mathematical certainty. Similarly, the views of Parmenides and Heraclitus cannot be disproved with perfect certainty. If someone believes that all knowledge must attain to that level of certitude, then they will be an indirect realist. But this standard of certitude is of course strange and unrealistic. Generally when we form opinions we do so in an implicitly abductive manner, choosing the view which is most certain or most plausible. It seems to me that the more certain view here is direct realism. I am more certain that I have knowledge of reality than I am certain that I do not have knowledge of reality, although it is possible that I do not have knowledge of reality.

(There are of course other things at play even beyond Hume, such as the modern mechanistic view whereby man is viewed as a machine, which is something Aristotelians have directly addressed in the form of dialectic materialism. But triangulation seems to be the central consideration at a more surface level.)

So stasis and boredom are never burdensome? We have a word to describe people for whom all activity is a burden: lazy.

I'm favourable towards Vervaeke but a bit wary of Peterson. He's hated by the left. And he's expressed support for Trump, which is a fatal turnoff in my books. — Wayfarer

I won't belabor this, but I don't believe he has. The left has a consistent difficulty in distinguishing someone who doesn't oppose Trump from someone who endorses Trump. They assume that everyone who hasn't opposed Trump therefore endorses him. From what I have seen Peterson hasn't opposed Trump in this upcoming election, but neither has he endorsed him.

The reason that anything appears reasonable is precisely because of the way that actual conditions, context and enviroment intertwine with background history to redefine what is at stake and at issue in the determination of the goals of reason. Trying to separate reason from the real contexts of its instantiation is a recipe for dogmatism. Understanding is enacted in pragmatic interactions, not transported from a transcendent authoritative realm to grace the present from the past. — Joshs

The world exists in a precarious balance of the coincidentia oppositorum. Environment conditions reason and reason shapes environment. To reject either is folly. And yet there comes a point when we must make a choice as to the hierarchy of—from a Platonic perspective—the various parts of the soul. This choice shapes us, and "immanentists" who favor environment and conditioning become immanent, ingrained into their environment and disagreeable to transcendence; while ""transcendentalists"" who hold fast to the idea that there is a part of the soul which transcends environment and conditioning end up transcending and transforming their environment. An immanentist balks at the OP not only because it is based on the work of a Catholic, but also because in bypassing pragmatism and relativism it stretches up towards the transcendent, thereby "making all things new."

In the absence of a sense of the sacred, there is no pole star towards which we orient ourselves. — Wayfarer

A few weeks ago on a road trip I listened to a conversation between Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, originally given a much better title, "The Rebirth of the Sacred." I thought it was interesting, and I was actually impressed with Vervaeke. (Peterson is a bit exasperating in that interview - I wish he had handed the reins to Vervaeke.)

In that same interview Peterson talks about a book he is working on, which looks to be a psychological version of Peter Simpson's Political Illiberalism. From my understanding it is a critique of the liberal Enlightenment view which undergirds the idea that the individual can be morally or religiously neutral, as if one could approach such questions of value from a purely objective vantage point. I don't see that critique as controversial, but I am glad to see it being popularized.

Well, Hume and Nietzsche would be forerunners of the attack on reason. Schindler's argument, which seems credible, is that this has expanded from individual thinkers and lines of critique to whole areas of discourse where reason is secondary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's fair, so long as we are open to the various additional factors that exercise an influence.

Some of the bullets, particularly the last, would seem to make identity trump reason. Of course, there is also a difference between "all past discourse and attempts to produce rational evidence is corrupted by power relations, identity, etc." and "reason cannot adjudicate these issues, even in an ideal setting." Yet it's easy to see how one bleeds into the other, or how the former, if it makes the conditions where reason is valid utopian and forever out of reach, essentially becomes the latter for all practical purposes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, you're preaching to the choir. :smile:

Agree 100%. I meant more that it's an accident that similar lines aren't popular in other places, that it doesn't seem like a necessarily Catholic set of ideas. But I agree that historically it has an extremely close relationship. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, I don't think it's Catholic per se. I think it's important to be able to read a Catholic's book on Plato without reading all sorts of religious influences into the text. The emphasis on "power relations" has become so strong that many find it difficult to concentrate on or address an idea without constantly adverting to the religion of the person who thought it. This is related to your newer thread, where you make the point that reason must be allowed to transcend its conditions and environment, having authority in itself. Viz:

In a consequentialist era the notion that reason is per se authoritative is elusive. On a Platonic metaphysic of participation, acting reasonably flows from the inherent authority (ex-ousia) of reason... — Leontiskos

Oh, there are plenty of other ways of determining what is the case besides using Popper’s method. I’m not a Popperian, I’m a Kuhnian, so I don’t think science itself should proceed by the method of falsification. — Joshs

Okay.

But perhaps you can explain to me what kind of non-dogmatic method of truth-making allows Schindler to assert that liberal politics is evil because it doesn’t accept the truth of the resurrection. — Joshs

From earlier:

...The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact. — Leontiskos

For someone who believes that the Incarnation occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Incarnation is evil.* Similarly, for someone who believes that the Holocaust occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Holocaust is evil. Germany goes a step further and basically requires non-neutrality, prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust.

But I think did a good job underlining the problems with your understanding of "dogmatism."

* Note that Schindler specifically says that he is speaking of evil as privation, not as intentional moral evil.

Isn't the Christian doctrine that 'Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize'? I can see a line from Aristotle's 'nous' and Augustine's doctrine of 'divine illumination' to that conception. The point being, again, that severing the link between individual conscience and the larger sense of reason as an animating factor of the universe leaves the individual marooned in a meaningless universe, a stranger in a strange land. — Wayfarer

Conscience is a notoriously ambiguous term, and there are different conceptions of conscience even within Christianity.

But to your point, today we are seeing a constriction of the idea of conscience due to the conditioning from individualism, such that "conscience rights" are potentially thought to exist independent of any appeal to religion, tradition, or reason. I think Catholics would see that as a corruption. ...But none of this adjudicates your difference with @J.

Yes, what you say about Simpson's criticism is similar to the points that Nussbaum and others have made. — J

Okay.

As for cultural relativism, I don't know what Rawls may have said about it to Hare or anyone else, but to me it's plain from reading A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism that Rawls was trying to craft a conception of justice that was in some important ways transcultural for democracies. I'm not sure if Rawls ever gave an argument as to why an autocracy, for instance, could in principle not be just. He was concerned with finding a firm basis for liberal democratic values as he understood them, and also (to quote his opening statements in Political Liberalism), "to develop an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior to utilitarianism." — J

This is a salutary correction. I was glossing Simpson, and would probably need to go back for a tighter critique, but I can't remember all of the sources. For Simpson Rawls' intuitions are related to modern liberal democracies, and systems derived from Rawls tend to be unable to adjudicate disputes involving cultures which do not adhere to those (cultural) intuitions. Simpson sees Aristotle, in his Politics, doing for a variety of regimes what Rawls did for modern democracy. The crucial difference is that after showing how to optimize (or corrupt) each kind of regime, Aristotle argues for a particular ranking of the various regimes. It is this final step that is required for a universal morality or political philosophy, and it is what Rawls never attempted.

BTW, the only thing I thought was unfair about Count T's reference to Rawls was this: "We might try to imagine ourselves 'behind the veil of ignorance,' but we can't actually place ourselves there." I took this to mean that the thought experiment couldn't succeed, because we can't actually become ignorant in the right ways, and that Rawls was somehow overlooking this. But this may not have been Count T's meaning. — J

Fair enough. :up:

Let’s say that we take Popper’s model of good scientific method as our basis for determining non-dogmatic thinking. Applying this criterion, Schindler would have to base his claim for the truth of the resurrection on objectively measurable, verifiably repeatable evidence, that was capable of being falsified. And even after being validated by the consensus of a community, it found not be assumed to be true in any absolute sense, since for Popper we can only falsify. Something tells me Schindler would not accept such a criterion. — Joshs

I'd say this is actually the claim that any non-Scientistic methodology is dogmatism, which is a remarkable claim. Ironically, these varieties of Scientism are very often themselves forms of dogmatism.

I don't think Popper even believed that. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Me neither.

(@Wayfarer)

I think this is partly an accident. There are still a large number of Catholic universities with large philosophy programs, and that's where a lot of this sort of work gets done and where it is more popular/not met with disapproval. So you get a system where Catholics are introduced to it more and where non-Catholics go to Catholic settings to work in the area and become Catholic. Either process tends to make the the area of study more dominated by Catholics. Given trends in Orthodoxy, and podcast guests I've heard, I would imagine we would see a not dissimilar phenomena in Eastern European/Middle Eastern Christian-university scholarship but for the fact that they publish in a plethora of different languages and so end up more divided. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll back up @Wayfarer on this. It's no accident that Catholic universities tend to have large philosophy programs, nor that these philosophy programs tend to be Platonic or Aristotelian in nature. Indeed, Catholic clergy are required to have what is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and this education leans into Platonism and Aristotelianism. You won't find this at all in Protestantism. Orthodox are warmer towards philosophy than Protestants, but they don't come near Catholics. There was a point in the Medieval period when the Orthodox Church turned a corner, rejecting Barlaam and opting for Palamas, and that decision cemented a distrust in philosophy and eclecticism. For my money the two most philosophically robust religions are Catholicism and Hinduism.

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Once reason is made "a slave of the passions," it can no longer get round the passions and appetites to decide moral issues. Aristotle's idea of the virtues as a habit or skill that can be trained (to some degree) or educated has the weight of common sense and empirical experience behind it. We might have a talent for some virtues, but we also can build on those talents. But if passion comes first, then the idea of discourse in the "good human life," or "the political ideal," loses purchase on its ability to dictate which virtues we should like to develop. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Okay, this makes good sense to me.

The separation of reason from the will, and the adoption of Hume's bundle of drives ("congress of souls" in BG&E) makes it unclear exactly who or what is being freed, and how this avoids being just another sort of tyranny... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. Still, I would maintain that Hume and Nietzsche are more consistent than the undergraduate, and therefore the misology problem and the consistency problem come apart.

The identity movements of the recent epoch run into similar problems. I recall a textbook on psychology that claimed that a focus on quantitative methodology represented "male dominance," and that the sciences as a whole must be more open to qualitative, "female oriented," methods as an equally valid way of knowing. The problem here is not that a greater focus on qualitative methods might not be warranted, it's the grounding of the argument in identity as opposed to reason. For it seems to imply that if we are men, or if the field is dominated by men, that there is in fact no reason to shift to qualitative methods, because each sex has their preferred methodology grounded solely in identity, making both equally valid. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree.

Rawls might be another example. In grounding social morality in the desired of the abstract "rational agent," debates become interminable. We might try to imagine ourselves "behind the viel of ignorance," but we can't actually place ourselves there. Thus, we all come to it with different desires, and since desires determine justice, we still end up with many "justices." The debate then, becomes unending, since reason is only a tool, and everything must circle back to conflicting desires. Argumentation becomes, at best, a power move to try to corral others' desires to our position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As noted above, I think Rawlsianism only works if Rawls' cultural intuitions are granted as premises. So I wouldn't lump him into the same camp as Nietzsche. Hume could arguably fall into this Rawlsian mold. I think Hume has more respect for cultural intuitions than is sometimes recognized.