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.

You said, "I know X is not a statement of belief". Well, it IS a statement of belief in standard philosophical discourse. — Relativist

I don't think so, because it is a statement of knowledge, and knowledge is not belief. It entails a belief, but it is not a statement of belief. If I say to you, "I baked you a loaf of bread," this is not a statement about yeast. It is a statement about bread, and bread includes yeast, but it is not a statement about yeast. You are trying to make belief central in an inappropriate way, and part of that is your idea that "I know X" is a statement of belief.

I think you are required to reject all of traditional epistemology, because traditional epistemology presupposes the possibility of knowledge and you reject (or else redefine) the possibility of knowledge. For traditional epistemology, there is a form of certainty that is not merely subjective attitude and which pertains to knowledge. For you, there is no form of certainty that is not merely subjective attitude.

We're still dealing with beliefs — Relativist

When we are talking about knowledge we are not really dealing with beliefs. Belief is a vacuous aspect of knowledge. There is no need to "deal with" what is vacuous.

Our colloquial way of speaking is vague, and implies distinctions that are not real. An opinion is a belief. — Relativist

Here's an argument to show how you are equivocating: <Knowledge is a belief; Opinion is a belief; Therefore, knowledge and opinion are the same thing>. Do you agree that this is an unsound argument? Playing fast and loose with words like 'knowledge', 'belief', and 'opinion' leads to these epistemological confusions.

A TRUTH is a statement that corresponds to some aspect of reality. Of course there are truths. Truth is what we all want to have in our possession. The issue is: how do we assess whether of not some statement is true? A justification is a reason to believe the statement is true. Some justifications are better than others. If it's derived from deductive reasoning, you're on very solid ground (although you're still dependent on the premises being true). The point I've been making is that we rarely use deduction; more often we use abduction - it's an imperfect guide to truth, but it's usually the best we can do. — Relativist

If you think there are truths then can you give an example of a truth?

You made no points that go to the central point. — apokrisis

Apparently we disagree on what the central point is, but @Count Timothy von Icarus' objections seem quite strong, and I don't see that they have been answered. I was trying to highlight those unanswered objections.

And that is if wisdom and cleverness are cognitive processes, then how does that relate to the evolved structure of brains and nervous systems? If one isn’t minded to treat these things as gifts given by God to humans, but instead naturally evolved traits, then how does one make sense of their evolutionary continuity with mammalian neurobiology?

Brains in general are good in the sense that they put animals in a functional relation with their worlds. And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty. — apokrisis

I noticed that line in posts such as this one:

Sure. But the brain doing all this is the same brain with the same cognitive structure. So the only difference is that playing chess is a highly constrained and artificial task – thus good for extracting the story of what is going on in a controlled setting. And then cleverness~wisdom is this standard brain trajectory applied to our lives in their most general and uncontrolled settings – the lives we live as social creatures interacting with the perils and opportunities of a complex physical environment. — apokrisis

I think that once this manner of reasoning is explicated it will evidence significant weaknesses. For example, one inference you are relying on is, "X and Y are both cognitive processes, therefore the only difference [is one of degree]." On that sort of reasoning everything that the brain does is separated only by degree, including cleverness, wisdom, mathematics, love, dancing, sports, sleeping, etc. Then you add in the premise that you have some sort of exhaustive knowledge of the brain, and at that point most all of human existence is explained by recourse to this (highly exaggerated) account of the brain or neurology. Even beyond the problem of the reductive anthropology, the weaknesses and limitations of the premises are significant. The notions that one has exhaustive knowledge of the brain and that all human activity is reducible to the "cognitive" concept are implausible. Human life is complex and variegated, and unless one's understanding of the brain or of cognition is equally complex and variegated, the reduction of the former to the latter will be an artificial systematizing and pigeonholing. It looks like a classic conflation of part with whole (i.e. brain/cognition with human life).

This is why I claimed that wisdom requires acknowledging antinomies, and not collapsing everything into a single one-dimensional category. A simplistic theory must be sacrificed for the sake of the facts, and if a theory cannot acknowledge the fact that cleverness and wisdom are qualitatively different, then so much the worse for the theory. A "theory of everything" would be great if it actually saved the appearances.

What survives this test of time becomes the weight of mental habits that leaves us as well optimised as organisms as we can be. At least within whatever physical and social environment in which we must co-exist.

Anyway, my point here is that I’m not pulling positions out my arse. I have a metaphysics. I speak for a natural world that is organised by its natural rationality. — apokrisis

Sure, and there is a certain plausibility to your account. There are analogies and continuities between cleverness and wisdom, and also between other cognitive phenomena.

But I accord a high place to philology and linguistics, and I don't see that your account really reckons with the semantics of a word like wisdom. For example, you seem to think that wisdom is a kind of habitual and unconscious know-how that is embodied in aged and mature systems. Yet I would say that while the elderly person is wise, the elderly sage is wiser, where the sage is someone who understands the whole and its principles not only practically but also speculatively. They are the one who can explain why and how to act well rather than simply acting well out of habit. And if the one who has more than habit is wiser than the one who has only habit, then wisdom is not properly identified with habit. ...Neither do I think it is true that this "more than habit" is simple cleverness. But the key point here is that I begin with the question, "What does wisdom mean?," whereas you seem to begin with the question, "How does wisdom fit into my unified brain/cognitive system?" In the end I think you've basically written wisdom out of existence in favor of a somewhat different concept that is more acceptable to your system.

And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty. — apokrisis

Anthropology is almost certainly a central issue here. A physicalist, brain-centered anthropology will color one's conclusions, as will one's criteria. For example, if one thinks the relevant human phenomena are planning, motor control, sensory processing, focal processing, global background, habitual response, and analysis, then one simply decides what part of their Ur-explanation—in this case the brain—relates to each of these data points and they have arrived at their totalizing explanation. But the deduction is not from the brain; the deduction is from a set of "exhaustive" human activities. The brain is the intermediary for those activities deemed relevant.

I could be mistaken but you and Count Timothy von Icarus have your own metaphysical tradition. The one where we are all God’s special creation. Made imperfectly in His perfect image. Ect. You will view cleverness and wisdom within that mental framework.

And I instead have a different grounding point of view. The grand unifying perspective on Nature as a semiotic enterprise. The Universe as the growth of reason, material being as a structure of inveterate habit.

The problem becomes the God story is well known to me as it is just the general Western institution - impossible to avoid as part of collective culture. But my position seems to be poorly understood by you. — apokrisis

I see the two stories as one of a unified theory and one of "appearances," and I don't think the unified theory saves the appearances. In another sphere you would be the one positing that mind and matter are differentiated by degree and not by quality, and I would be the one positing that mind and matter are separated by quality and not by degree. You would achieve a "unifying perspective" and I would achieve a saving of the appearances. The irony here is that your totalizing approach is more Platonic and my antinomic approach is more Aristotelian (and that Peirce had rather significant affinities with Plato).

I'm not quite sure how God comes into it, except perhaps that I am more comfortable with antinomies given that an infinite and incomprehensible unifier is already in place. You perhaps require more explicit and comprehensible unification in your metaphysical theory. Put differently, I believe that reality is unified in a way that I know I cannot ultimately fully understand, whereas you must know how reality is unified. For you the human mind is at the top of the ontological and intellectual hierarchy, and because of this a totalizing (human) theory seems fitting to you.

While science does appear to push the other story that is the natural philosophy viewpoint, it does this only in the watered down guise of Darwinian evolution and Newtonian mechanics. It is not the full-blooded response that is the holism of Aristotlean systems science and Peircean semiotics. — apokrisis

The other oddity here is that you keep assuming that Aristotle and Peirce had nothing to do with God. That seems untrue, even if the specifics become complicated.

But that alternative metaphysics does exist. And it sets the terms which would count as a critique of anything I’ve said. — apokrisis

Internal critiques are not the only critiques. The more interesting critique is one that does not accept all of your own premises.

Instead, this thread has generally lapsed back to transcendental metaphysics where wisdom is just some mystical notion of The Good. Or what God would will in his own perfect image. Cleverness then gets to sit at the elbow of evil. A meretricious tool of the Devil as we have been warned ever since Adam and Eve. — apokrisis

No, I don't think that is right. The God story may not be as well known to you as you suppose. For instance, Jesus commands us to be "as wise/shrewd/cunning/subtle as serpents," which is a clear reference to that "meretricious tool of the Devil." For another example, the Antichrist is seen as a kind of faux copy of the Christ, and one which will be exceedingly persuasive. If good and bad are right and left then it would be hard to imagine how bad could mimic good so effectively. Wisdom is that which can discern the subtle but significant difference.

-

I am certainly interested in folk actually setting out their ontological commitments. And talk of "good and bad" could mean adaptively optimal and its privation, or transcendently perfect and its privation. — apokrisis

But what is the difference between the "adaptively optimal" and the "transcendently perfect"?

Or I could say that any action can be judged as an adaptive optimisation that is so generally effective it can be relied on as a regular unthinking habit, and so "having an end in mind" becomes not even some particular thing that is in mind, but is instead made the flesh and blood of what I am about.

So clever thinking is aimed at the novel. Wisdom has already assimilated what is generally "the good" as just its general orientation to the world.

And wisdom can't "know precisely which ends are actually good". That is an appeal to transcendent truths that float above the real world. It can only, in the usual fallible and pragmatic fashion, keep testing, keep exploring, by being alert to its own failings and getting out the clever thinking to figure a better world model out.

So again, I highlight the quick way you leap to a transcendent framing of what wisdom could even be as a psychological trait. There is a perfection out there waiting for the wise. Whereas I stay rooted in the pragmatic world where we are moved only by our failures of prediction.

We can propose general ends that we ought to try to achieve. Then see if they do lead us some place that seems better. And that in itself is the pursuit of an adaptive life balance rather than some idealised final perfection. — apokrisis

I don't find your eschewing of an end convincing. himself seemed happy with the idea that his theory was teleological. Your account seems to be ordered to survival or homeostasis or thermodynamic equilibrium or something of the like. If that is the highest end and wisdom is the highest virtue, then wisdom is ordered to it. To be moved by prediction or failures thereof also implies an end. It hasn't been avoided. Prediction is not aimless, nor is the act of recognizing a prediction's failure.

So as soon as someone like yourself tries to frame things as a false dichotomy – the type where there is the bad choice of being good or bad – then I try to reframe it as a true systems dichotomy. One that sets up the win~win of a complementary pair of oppositions. — apokrisis

Again, you don't seem to understand the view you attempt to critique. For instance:

So if I turn left, I can fix that by turning right. Or if I turn away from the good towards the bad, then I can turn back towards the good again. — apokrisis

Good and bad are simply nothing like left and right, and this is because left is not the privation of right. The privation theory presupposes the win~win insofar as the privation presupposes goodness. It seems that all of us acknowledge that we do not find ourselves in a "win-win" scenario such that no movement towards an end is required. Again, how does the difference between an "adaptive" privation and a "transcendent" privation ultimately cash out? Both are asymmetric, both are hierarchical, etc. Both approaches are actually found in religious thought and even in Christian thought.

Beyond that, to use Platonic theism as the foil to Aristotelian Peircianism is odd, given that Aristotelianism was passed on to Peirce precisely by (scholastic) theists.

So at the level of social psychology, that cashes out as the general systems principle of stable social systems being organised as a functional balance between local competition and global cooperation. Another way of saying that any physical system is some fruitful or rational balance of its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

This is a pretty standard view among all religions and developed traditions, namely the importance of balance. That which Peirce has synthesized should not be opposed to his thought.

Neither energy is inherently good or bad. It is the matching of the dynamical balance to some context of possibilities. Any immature social endeavour needs to burn a lot of clever ideas. Any mature social endeavour need to preserve the balance of those ideas that made for the best collective habit. — apokrisis

Throughout there seems to be a kind of equivocation, where you eschew the terms "good" and "bad" by claiming that an optimal mixture of both is what is needed, but then you don't seem to notice that what is actually good on that account is the optimal mixture. Don't you agree that the optimal mixture or balance is good, and that the ordering is bad to the extent that it deviates from this optimal balance? This is why I think @Count Timothy von Icarus' objection cuts deeper than you realize, for it applies also at this new level of good-as-balance. If I am right and you have your own conception of what is good and what is bad, then acknowledging this would help put us on the same page and would help us appreciate a common criterion.

For example, if balance is good, then cleverness is good because it achieves balance at a local and circumscribed level, whereas wisdom is good because it achieves balance at a global and less circumscribed level. Yet on my account, one reason wisdom is better is because it presupposes a knowledge and appreciation for the same local balance that cleverness cannot unfocus from.

You can always use Peirce's religiosity against me. But I already agree. He wasn't of a time or place where he could easily have escaped religious indoctrination. — apokrisis

But at this point you're really not appealing to Peirce any more. You're disagreeing with him and hoping that he would agree with your disagreement in hindsight.

The idea here is that I am not convinced that your dichotomies between transcendent and adaptive, or between religious and scientific, really hold up.


Edit: It seems that a large part of what you are doing is disagreeing with some view that you find erroneous. I don't really understand the thing you are opposing. Perhaps it would be helpful if you set out that view clearly.

Most christian churches continue to parade around these two very different ideas of god. In parishes and in the scripture, god is personalist, but in religious scholarship, he is a metaphysical necessity. People don't go to church for metaphysics, but if you dedicate your entire life to one religion, I suppose it's inevitable that you search for more intellectual justifications. Ironically enough, in doing so they create a deity that nobody would really care about, because it is so detached from their parishoners' beliefs and needs. — finarfin

I think you're dealing in a lot of false dichotomies and historical inaccuracies. In every community there will be more and less rigorous presentations of the life, whether intellectual or otherwise. That doesn't mean, for example, that the intellectual who believes that God is immutable suddenly stops believing that God is personal, nor does it mean that the non-intellectual who believes that God is personal is barred from believing that God is immutable.

Does theological precision come "later" as an "addition"? Yes and no. All natural developments come later, but they are always present in what came before. The myth you are espousing always struggles to identify an actual moment when the "addition" occurred, because there is always an antecedent that the neat theory ignored. Heck, Christians were originally deemed atheists in large part because they had more in common with philosophical groups than ancient religious groups.

This is an interesting conversation between @Count Timothy von Icarus and @apokrisis. The difference seems to revolve around this:

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale. — apokrisis

I guess I am questioning if they are generally understood to be the same thing. "Intelligence," as commonly used, tends to be viewed procedurally (i.e., as discursive ratio) or even computationally. Wisdom by contrast tends to deal with ultimate ends. An IQ test is supposed to measure intelligence, but it's unclear to me if it says much of anything about a grasp of ends (at least directly). So, I suppose my question is if "intelligence" covers the (ultimate) desirability of ends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am going to use @apokrisis' word "cleverness" rather than intelligence, e.g.:

From a neurocognitive viewpoint, I would say the most useful definition is to oppose wisdom and cleverness. They relate to each other as the general and the specific. Or in brain terms, wisdom is accumulated useful habits and smartness is focused attention on a novel problem.

So wisdom comes with age and cleverness with youth. Being wise means hardly having to think about what is generally best while being smart is being able to leap to a particular answer. — apokrisis

I mostly think @Count Timothy von Icarus is right. I don't think wisdom and cleverness are the same thing, or are qualitatively similar, or are "two ends of some spectrum of possibilities," or are like the black-white spectrum. I think this post of Count's gets at the nub:

Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.

...

The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

@apokrisis' approach to wisdom is to contrast it with cleverness and to identify it with habit. It seems to me that Count has correctly identified the difference between cleverness and wisdom (i.e. means-based rationality vs ends-based living). I think the more central difficulty is the fact that wisdom is normative. As Count says, some things are wise and some things are not wise. More pointedly, some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, and therefore pointing to habit doesn't help us locate wisdom.

There was a curious statement that @apokrisis made that bears highlighting, and helps get at this point:

So how do you build a wise society? Allow the creation of social institutions to flourish. Allow wise habits to take up a permanent presence. — apokrisis

I'm not sure this says much at all, but it would be nice to know the answer to the question posed. A social institution is a kind of societal habit, and like individual habits, societal habits don't equate to wisdom. This is because some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, both individually and societally. Perhaps @apokrisis is implying that by allowing lots of social institutions to flourish the best ones will endure whereas the lesser ones will wither, and we will eventually inherit the best?

We might agree in saying that wisdom is the habit which allows us to flourish most completely, but this too differentiates it from cleverness. One can be clever at just about anything, but not so with wisdom. For example, one can be a clever chess player, but one cannot be a wise chess player. No one talks about someone who is wise qua chess. Similarly, one can be a clever pool player but not a wise pool player. I think there is an analogy between cleverness and wisdom, but I wouldn't say more than that.

These would be proper unities of opposites. Things that are the complementary bounds of what is possible in the way that the triadic structure of a hierarchy is formed by the scale difference which is to be divided as completely as possible by a local and global bound.

This is a deep aspect of metaphysical argument that most never get. But you only have to consider the metaphysical dichotomies that have always seemed the most fundamental. Like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, integrated~differentiated, atom~void, matter~form, and so on. Each of these pairs seem to join two things that are as completely unalike as can be imagined in some basic way, and yet they then complement each other as they thus frame all the intermediate states that could arise in between.

Think of black and white as the complete lack of brightness and its equally total presence. Each is the other's negation. Black is zero white, and white is zero black. But then between these two bounding extremes arises any possible number of shades of grey. You can have a grey that is a 1% drip of black in a 99% pot of white. Or a 50/50 mix. Or whatever balance of the two extremes you care to put a number on.

So a useful metaphysical dichotomy comes with a hierarchy of scale in transparent fashion. Complementary limits on being are set. Then everything that actually exists is some gradation – a particular balance – in between. — apokrisis

This is interesting, but does any of it apply to your cleverness~wisdom "dichotomy"? I think the ideas you are laying out here are useful, but I don't see how it bears on this discussion. Maybe you did not mean to apply it to the cleverness~wisdom contrast, but I think it helps point up why that contrast has only limited mileage.

But note too that good~bad is just as fundamental a dichotomy as those you have identified, and yet you give it rather short shrift.

The categories that make sense are the ones that make sense of all the intermediate cases as being placed at some relative position inbetween the extremes.

...

Everything can be made relative in a pragmatically flexible fashion. — apokrisis

I would say that the coincidentia oppositorum is much more than two relativizing poles, both within the same tidy genus. The Platonic tradition of evil as privation was quite familiar with the age-old idea of dueling powers of Good and Evil, and it is odd to claim that, "Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far." The reason the step was made was because the dyadic level hadn't gotten us very far. Should we go back?

A true instance of the concidentia oppositorum would say, for example, that monism and dualism are both true in their own way, and both bound up one in the other. The privation theory is a deeper reckoning with that deeper coincidentia. Lesser oppositions seem less interesting (e.g. black-white, quantitative relativizing, totalizing spectrums, etc.). The coincidentia oppositorum really begins when we run up against an anomalous juxtaposition: an antinomy. I would say that the wise person is someone who acknowledges and lives with such paradox, and that this is qualitatively different from the clever person. Cleverness, being linear and one-dimensional, has nothing to do with such things.

Still, I think Count's point holds:

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. — apokrisis

If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wisdom doesn't just sound like a good thing to have. It is a good thing to have. Are you really saying otherwise? I think someone might say that wisdom does not exist, but I don't think an English speaker could say that wisdom is not necessarily a good thing to have. If someone's system prevented them from accepting anything as good or bad, then I suppose they would have to say that wisdom does not exist. And I don't think putting the word "relatively" in front of "good or bad" helps. Contrariwise, if one accepts the existence of wisdom, then they must be willing to say what sets it apart from other things (habits): they must be able to say why it is good.

But among monotheistic religions, the philosophical god conceived by scholars of the church were much later additions to a traditionally personalist god. Ever since then... — finarfin

When do you theorize that the "addition" began?

I'm using the terms more precisely- using definitions that dovetail epistemology (dealing with beliefs and their justification) and psychology (what a belief IS to a person). — Relativist

But if you are saying that everything is believed and nothing is known, then I don't find that to be epistemologically precise. According to standard epistemology some things are known and some things are merely believed, and belief is a necessary but insufficient condition for knowledge. It feels as if you've created a non-standard semantics where there is only belief and never knowledge; where "certain" and "certainty" always denote subjectivity or an attitude and never knowledge; where there are only opinions and never facts, etc.

It's a statement of belief* by whoever formulated it — Relativist

But it's not. That's the whole point of the article and the distinction. If it were a statement of belief then "certainty" and "certitude" would be identical. But they're not. "X is certain," is not a statement of belief, just as, "I know X," is not a statement of belief. You seem to be making a move where you say, "They only think its certain, or they only think they know it. Really they don't, because certitude is always an attitude and knowledge doesn't really exist." That looks like a tendentious move to me. It also undermines the basic idea that we can know things as simple as, "This object in front of me is either a tree or else it is not a tree."

Perhaps you're thinking, "it would be true even if no one had formulated it". But what exactly would you be referring to as the "it" that is true? The statement? Does the statement exist independently of human minds? Do all possible statements have some sort of independent existence? In my opinion, statements only exist in minds. — Relativist

I think that's fine, but I don't think it follows either that statements are not about anything more than minds (nominalism), or that minds never know truth. At a very simple level, the way we linguistically distinguish facts from opinions highlights the way that facts are not subjective in the way that opinions are subjective, and that they exist all the same. That is: there really are facts (truths), and they really are something different than opinions. If everything returns to attitude, then it seems that there is nothing other than opinion.

I see two interesting questions, here. One is whether the sort of "probabilism" that you are proposing is coherent, given that it eschews knowledge. It may be that probabilism without knowledge is like branches without a trunk.

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.

(I will be offline for a number of days, but will return. Thanks for the good conversation. :up:)

No, not all unproveable truths. I was being careless in my wording. More precisely: most of our rational, acquired beliefs are IBEs. (My objective had only been to contrast this with the notion that our beliefs are somehow proven deductively; in most cases - IBEs are the best we can do, and that's perfectly fine). — Relativist

Okay thanks, that makes sense (although I may come back to this dichotomy between deduction and abduction).

I do hold that we have some beliefs that are not underdetermined. The belief that the object before me is a tree or not a tree is not underdetermined. Properly basic beliefs (e.g. there is a world external to ourselves) aren't underdetermined, because they aren't determined through reasoning at all- so the term seems inapplicable (however, arguably- they are determined by the environment that produced us. This aspect is what makes them properly basic - a variation of Alvan Plantinga's reformed epistemology). — Relativist

Okay, so you are saying that some beliefs are determined and are therefore not undetermined, such as the belief about the object before you; and that "properly basic" beliefs are neither determined nor undetermined. It seems that by "determined" you mean something like "deduced," and that this is why a "properly basic" belief is not determined. The same would presumably hold for foundational beliefs in general.

I understand the semantic distinction, but are the attitudes actually distinct? (Remember that I suggested certainty is an attitude). Some may insist there is a parallel distinction of attitude, but I'm not convinced. — Relativist

My point here is that certainty need not be an attitude, and is not always an attitude in English. When someone says, "They certainly do," they are not expressing an attitude. See for example <this entry> from Grammarist, where they point to feeling (certitude) vs factuality (certainty).

This seems similar to someone believing a proposition to be true vs the proposition actually being true. All we can ever do is to make a judgement: there is no oracle to inform us that our judgement is correct. One or more people may examine the reasoning and concur, but this only elevates a subjective judgement to an intersubjective one. Similar with the feeling of certainty: it's subjective, and so is the analysis that leads to the feeling. When we're certain of something, we believe we've arrived at objective truth - that's what it means to be certain. — Relativist

I think you are still running roughshod over the difference. There is a difference between believing a proposition to be true vs the proposition actually being true, and this is tracked by the fact that people are saying different things when they say, "I believe it is true," and, "It is true." Similarly, when you say, "That's what it means to be certain," what you are saying is, "That's what it means [for someone] to be certain." But again, "certain" is not always predicated of persons. It is very often predicated of propositions. For example, from the Grammarist entry, "It’s a near certainty that the 17-member nation eurozone won’t survive in its current form." This is not a predication about an attitude or a subjective state.

Now one could stipulate that "certain" or "certainty" is always subjective, or always a matter or attitudes, or always person-indexed, but that's not actually how we use the word in English. Sometimes it pertains to an "attitude" and sometimes it doesn't.

Because of the exclusion problem and related problems, pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It would seem that the idea of "mental to mental causation" requires a physicalist paradigm, insofar as one is thinking in terms of isolated mental events and such thinking is inherently mechanistic and materialistic. Apart from a physicalist paradigm the study of "mental to mental causation" is actually called logic, but it is about thinking and not about material mental events. It seems highly misleading to speak about mental events apart from agents and minds, as if they were physical atoms bouncing around and interacting with each other.

Under this view, we cannot achieve repayment of our sins on our own; but God has to freely choose to save us by sacrificing Himself. Salvation here is referring to the restoration of the sinner into the proper order of creation. — Bob Ross

Okay, understood. :up:

Sounds good. Here’s some differences and you can choose what you want us to discuss.

Stereotypical Christianity vs. “Bobism”

1. One must accept Christ in order to be saved; whereas one must sufficiently act in accord with God to be saved.

2. Justice is retributive; whereas justice is restorative.

3. The Great Sacrifice is freely chosen in a way where it could have been otherwise; The Great Sacrifice is a necessity of God’s freedom.

3. The Trinity, the good life, the path to salvation, etc. is revealed; all of those are naturally determinable.

4. Humans are the most loved by God; Persons of pure form are the most loved by God.

5. Unrepentant sinners go to eternal hell (viz., the lake of fire where there will be gnashing of teeth and great weeping); unrepentant sinners go to an indefinite hell that punishes them appropriately to get them to realize that their sins are bad until they repent.

6. The animal kingdom largely is ordered towards what is perfectly good (e.g., the lion eating the zebra is not bad); the animal kingdom is largely polluted with evil due to the Great Fall.

7. Humans caused the Great Fall; a person which existed prior to most if not all of evolution caused the Great Fall.

8. God can and has committed (retributively) just punishments without giving mercy; whereas God has to synthesize (Restorative) Justice and Mercy.

Etc. — Bob Ross

Okay, interesting. It looks like there are misunderstandings at various places. We can come back to these topics, but rather than getting into those I think a good starting point might be analogy. This is something that is more fundamental and might be more interesting to others.

In your document you say things like this:

When we say God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, etc. we are speaking analogically and not univocally. — Strong Natural Theism, by Bob Ross

What do you mean by this, and why do you hold that we are (or should be) speaking analogically and not univocally when we say such things?

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Let's also take up your 3:

3. The Trinity, the good life, the path to salvation, etc. is revealed; all of those are naturally determinable. — Bob Ross

Here are two quotes from Aquinas:

Objection 2. Further, the Divine Law should have come to man's assistance where human reason fails him: as is evident in regard to things that are of faith, which are above reason. But man's reason seems to suffice for the moral precepts. Therefore the moral precepts do not belong to the Old Law, which is a Divine law.

Reply to Objection 2. It was fitting that the Divine law should come to man's assistance not only in those things for which reason is insufficient, but also in those things in which human reason may happen to be impeded. Now human reason could not go astray in the abstract, as to the universal principles of the natural law; but through being habituated to sin, it became obscured in the point of things to be done in detail. But with regard to the other moral precepts, which are like conclusions drawn from the universal principles of the natural law, the reason of many men went astray, to the extend of judging to be lawful, things that are evil in themselves. Hence there was need for the authority of the Divine law to rescue man from both these defects. Thus among the articles of faith not only are those things set forth to which reason cannot reach, such as the Trinity of the Godhead; but also those to which right reason can attain, such as the Unity of the Godhead; in order to remove the manifold errors to which reason is liable. — Aquinas, ST I-II.99.2 - Whether the Old Law contains moral precepts?

For some matters connected with human actions are so evident, that after very little consideration one is able at once to approve or disapprove of them by means of these general first principles: while some matters cannot be the subject of judgment without much consideration of the various circumstances, which all are not competent to do carefully, but only those who are wise: just as it is not possible for all to consider the particular conclusions of sciences, but only for those who are versed in philosophy... — Aquinas ST I-II.100.1 - Whether all the moral precepts of the Old Law belong to the law of nature?

Aquinas' idea here is that God will give moral instruction via divine revelation even in some cases where the moral instruction could be known without the divine revelation. This is because the instruction is helpful both on account of our sinful and ignorant state, and because only the few have the time or intelligence to understand the proper moral road. Or in other words, even though the moral life is accessible to natural reason, only a tiny percentage of people would ever be capable of such knowledge. The absence of revelation on this score would seem to result in a kind of elitism, where only the select few are able to know the moral way forward.

I think what you are really contending, which to me begs the question, is whether or not God has the authority to take innocent life; and this just loops back to our original point of contention. — Bob Ross

I think it has more to do with the metaphysics of death, as noted in my last.

That’s an interesting point. I am going to have to think about that one and get back to you.

My prima facie response would be that the world is fallen due to sin, and that sin is what causally is responsible for our mortality. Without “evil of persons”, there would be no mortality. That seems like the only viable rejoinder. — Bob Ross

Sure, and that's a pretty common Christian response. But if someone is focused on individual guilt, then Original Sin will not satisfy them. Someone focused on individual guilt would insist that only one who has personally sinned is able to die.