Not in your mind. It is in the more discerning ones — Gnostic Christian Bishop

So you got nothing. :up:

It was a hypothetical, goof. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

My main point stands uncontested.

Mine or yours?

Yours.

It is my threat, but you chose to live instead of die and have your hand give your cash.

It is never my choice as I cannot make your hand move. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

So... Your argument is based on someone else eradicating the near infinity of usual choices you have, narrowing it down to a miserly 2, but at least you still got to choose between them? Ha! Some "highest authority."

On a side note: since choosing death leaves you without cash too... I'm not sure what the "choice" in your example really revolves around.

It is still your choice, although it is being intentionally impaired.

It is not the others choice, it is only his suggestion, fortified by the products you mention. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

That makes no sense.

Sure you can if you are making the choice, wrong or not, to accept and make your own whatever is being sold to you. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

If you're being manipulated, lied to, hypnotized, drugged, etc. YOU are not making any choices on your own.

Have we ever had a perfect ideology or leader to follow? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

That just means there might not be such a thing as a highest leader.

Are you suggesting that a highest judge and authority cannot make a mistake? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I'm suggesting that in circumstances when someone else is causing your behavior and or manipulating you, then you cannot be considered the highest authority in that moment.

So what if any of us are? We are duped and hope we learned our lesson — Gnostic Christian Bishop

That kinda puts a wrench in the whole "being the highest judge and authority" bit.

Modern Gnostic Christians name our god "I am", and yes, we do mean ourselves.

You are your controller. I am mine. You represent and present whatever mind picture you have of your God or ideal human, and so do I. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

So what if you're being hypnotized, drugged, manipulated, or in some other way duped?

But that doesn't actually contradict it, that just bites the bullet. — Pfhorrest

Oh, oh, oh! Don't forget "God works in mysterious ways."!

I am my highest authority, judge and guide. Who is yours? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Who is this "I" person and what makes them so trustworthy?

I suggest you write an OP (following the guidelines here, of course) on the limitations of the guidelines. Please include alternative suggestions and methods for philosophical exploration.

his work in self-ontology, cogito ergo sum, is just a silly exercise in futile solipsism. — alcontali

Well... I suppose it's been perverted into that by some. But I think his point was not solipsistic--he was just examining the limits of certainty. The real lesson from Descartes failure to find any more knowledge absent God's influence (since he did insist on absolute deductivism) is that you can be reasonably convinced X, Y, and Z are true without having absolute 100% certainty that they are.

Really, the cogito becomes a refutation of the merits of the eternal skeptic. The skeptic just doesn't get anywhere, doesn't move the conversation forward, and, in the end, is just kinda boring.

keeping with the Political theme relative to the OP, here in America we value compromise in our democratic process through the two party system. — 3017amen

Although it's worked out that way in practice in America, there's no law or clause in the constitution which demands a two party system.

There are a lot of reasons why the current set-up is actually bad for American politics and winds up not fully representing the American people. For example, there are many so-called Republican voters who are actual single-issue voters (usually pro-life voters) but who would be open to otherwise democratic ideas.

In fact, abortion is a good example of when there is no middle ground. For the religious person, life and the sanctity thereof begins at birth. I don't agree with the second part of that personally, but I understand why they can't compromise with my position.

free market generally acts as its own sanctioning body or mechanism against most inequities — 3017amen

You have not been paying attention.

could go on about the virtues of being a Moderate, as I view it as common sense reasonableness, as I draw from both sides. I take a page from Aristotelian logic there :wink: — 3017amen

Moderation for the sake of moderation seems nonsensical. What's the middle ground between slavery and abolitionism? And also, as others have pointed out, a typical American liberal seems moderate in other countries. So your choice of being moderate by American standards versus German or Russian or Chinese or just international seems relatively arbitrarily determined by the place you happen to live. That's certainly not what Aristotle had in mind....

, I have to call myself libertarian.

Maybe my inability to be pigeon-holed is a failure of philosophical consistency on my part — Virgo Avalytikh

No, you're just a Libertarian. Few people fit perfectly into any of these categories, so don't take it personally when it seems you have views "outside the mainstream."

Also curious to hear people's explanations of what gives rise to those perceptions. — Pfhorrest

I know that it's a currently discussed issue in Academia, and that statistically it is true that there are fewer conservative (especially socially) folks in academia generally, and strikingly in Philosophy. Scruton was actually known for being a relative outlier in his conservative political views.

But I think there's also some shifts and divides happening, because there are some parts of the humanities in general that adhere to identity politics and apparently don't mind cancel culture, whereas philosophers tend generally to balk at the core concepts behind those two phenomena. So, from a post-colonial theorist's view, philosophers might seem pretty conservative on the whole, but in comparison to the general population, they are not. If you aren't aware, you can read up on what happened with the Hypatia journal and the article defending Dolezal to see the tip of the iceberg of totally bonkers in-fighting.

Daily Nous and Leiter's Blog have both featured and commented on some of the drama about whether conservative students/faculty are treated unfairly... which I think might sometimes be true, but also sometimes is a result of feeling left out when you're the sole defender of traditional marriage or some such on an otherwise liberal campus.

Also, concerns have been raised that philosophical journals don't publish as many conservative articles.... which, y'know, is it bias? Or are the potential conservative papers just generally of poorer quality? Hard to tell from the outside.

contributing" to the game are deemed fine and worthy.

If you are a nice, caring, friendly, person but openly criticize the premises of life, even if you are "contributing" you are deemed as unworthy — schopenhauer1

By whom and why does their opinion matter in the least?

As if liking and not liking is something other than life. Reminds me of the horror story of the man who was disgusted by the idea that his body contained a skeleton, and eventually found a doctor to remove it... — unenlightened

That's a perfect analogy here.

What about learning how to change things you cannot change now? I'd like that much better than the quietly desparate Stoic resignation to the status quo.

Not only that, but there are tons of things in life we try to change, unsuccessfully, although by rights we ought to be able to change them — god must be atheist

I'm not against trying to find ways to change the seeming unchangeable, but I think it often leads to a lot of unhappiness when we want the change too desperately.

Perhaps a better way of putting my stance is learning to accept that things may be unchangeable, leaving open the possibility that they are changeable, but not letting our happiness depend on those things changing.

Seems like Stoicism really is a fad nowadays. I'll take Stoic apatheia or equanimity over ecstatic bliss, drugs, or other ego-tripping ideals. — Wallows

Yes, well, just say no to drugs, kid.

On a more serious note, it's my personal experience dealing with people who are struggling with mental health and/or drug issues that's led me to realize that accepting the limitations of my ability to immediately fix anything is not the same as resignation.

How do you do that? — Wallows

I don't think there's one way to do it. It starts with recognizing and learning to accept things you cannot change. But how you get there? Up to each individual, but mostly with practice, I think.

Then you need to readjust your expectations. Or be forever unhappy.

What were my original goal posts, and what have I said which I later denied saying? — Isaac

Since I've already pointed a few of them out, and had you again try to move the target, it's clear that to point them out yet again would be a waste of everyone's time. Dead end here. Time to move on.

Emojis are fine with me at this point, considering you just keep moving the target and pretending you didn't say what you did say.

Where in either of those quotes does he say anything whatsoever about opinions???

If anything, these are proof that Quine precisely did not believe what you previously attributed to him. :rofl:

Let's have the correct interpretation of Quine then... — Isaac

Quine doesn't put them on a spectrum. It doesn't make any sense to put them on a spectrum. They are not the same category of thing.

Yes. Which is most certainlynnot the location of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, ontology, theology... — Isaac

I guess that's just your (unfounded) opinion then.

Without getting into your misinterpretation of Quine and how the word "opinion" is used in the context of empirical science as well as logic....

I'm saying there's a scale, based on intersubjectivity, and physics is at one end of it (or near the end). — Isaac

If there was a spectrum (which I would debate) then anything at the far end with physics would no longer be "just opinion" now would it?

You cannot maintain both things at once.

So 'a=a' is really nothing special, it can only be used within some logical system and hence cannot be foundational. — A Seagull

It may seem obvious, but it is foundational in that it is the first step toward any logical system. And it is a fact about the universe in the same way gravity is. Moreso even.

Given my belief in model dependent realism, there is no sense in which something is fact, as opposed to opinion, other than in degree. So for me (and I think colloquially many others) the degree of intersubjectivity determines the place on the fact-opinion scale. — Isaac

But before you said this:

IF someone asks me if physics is 'just opinion' I can justifiable answer that it is not, on the basis of this meta data without needing to understand any of the actual data. — Isaac

So please make up your mind what your position is.

This is all to counter the idea that you could call philosophy an opinion but not physics. As you suggested above.

Mode of thinking sounds just like another way of saying opinion, btw. But a=a is a fact of the universe. A law which all things abide by. A more certain law than any of the things physics could possibly point to.

I'll start off by quoting myself to someone else on this forum just the other day:

"It helps when we do away with the need to "know with 100% certainty" and accept the fallibalistic realist position that "fairly confident" is the maximum anyone can be about most things in this world.

This is a tangent, but I see the demands for certainty over and over on this forum and elsewhere... I think it probably comes from a really naive understanding and application of science, where we think the answer has to be known with certainty to be true. But most of the time, even,in science (!) we're working with a theory which is just "to the best of our knowledge/understanding," and which is better or more plausible than any other theory.

All this is just to say, I think once you try to demand absolute certainty, you're asking the wrong questions"

But if you insist on comparing the certainty of philosophy versus physics, I'll just point you in the direction of the entire discipline of Logic. There is nothing in the universe we know with more certainty than that, because logic is the foundation upon which all coherent thought (including in Physics and Chess!) rests. You can question gravity before you can question a=a, and if you question the latter, you're simultaneously questioning the former.

Spend too much time with the eternal skeptics on a forum like this, and you might get the impression that logic is not certain, or that it is also just opinion... But apart from just being kind of silly, like I said it also does away with your holding up physics as some paragon of "known facts."

it must be explicitly connected, presumably empirically, to the real world. If it is not, then it is only of interest to people who want to explore those ideas and worry about its relevance later, ie philosophers.

For non-philosophers it may appear no more than an academic exercise. and a meaningless one at that. — A Seagull

I think there's a couple of false assumptions implicitly wrapped up in here.

For one, there are philosophical debates that don't seem to have "real world" applications (I'll get back to that in a moment), and sure that means that the layperson may not have much interest in them. But A) that does not mean they are not important topics, and B) that doesn't really matter in the context of what a layperson can and simultaneously cannot contribute to.

Back to the "seem" part. I think most, if not all philosophy is useful in ways for "real world" problems. That's usually why these questions are posed in the first place. Philosophers start from some real world issue, like abortion, get into discussions about God's existence, and suddenly they're debating how many angels fit on a needle head. Taken out of context, the debate seems to have no real world relation, but really it's turns out to be one of the fundamental questions that needs to be answered before we can settle the larger, real world issue. (And, yeah, I totally just pulled that example from thin air for humor's sake.)

Way to miss the point.

Yes they can. One is an opinion about the modalities of the rule set and the other is an opinion about the meta data. Two different areas of knowledge/opinion. — Isaac

a: What is your opinion on the Jabberwocky?
b: Pretty negative.
a: Do you know what the Jabberwocky is?
b: Not a clue.
a: That means you have no idea what you have a negative opinion about or what it even means to have a negative opinion thereof. Basically, your opinion is not really an opinion at all, because it is about nothing and means nothing.

Indeed. But that doesn't prevent them from having an informed and valid opinion about the origin or scope of those rules, that's the point. — Isaac

They cannot both maintain that they cannot have an informed opinion and think they have an informed opinion.

whose full modalities are nonetheless too complex for a person of only moderate intelligence to grasp. — Isaac

In which case they cannot have an opinion thereof.

Before we continue this no doubt highly fascinating discussion, I ought to point out that we've strayed far from my original point and that this discussion has little to do with it.

The philosophically engaged and interested laypersons that are suggested by your objections are not the same as the people I was mentioning. I was talking about people who want to simultaneously maintain that philosophy is both too hard/heady for them (therefore inaccessible) but also just a matter of opinion (therefore infinitely accessible). Clearly these positions cannot be maintained simultaneously.

is the rather theoretical ethics that philosophers discuss the same
domain as that empirically experienced by non-philosophers? — A Seagull

Yes. Just with more knowledge and at a different level. The difference between chess world championships and amateur chess at home.

But is it the same game they are playing? — A Seagull

Depends.