Minimally, that it deals with a distinction that makes a difference (or, ideally, makes a distinction that ramifies so as to make cascading series of other 'distinctions that make further differences') : where 'makes a difference' must be defined pragmatically with respect to whatever problem is at hand (if want to fix the car, I need to know what is and is not relevant with respect to what might be causing the car not starting: the color of the car probably doesn't matter; that its drive chain seems to have broken into two does).

So transcendental stupidity is simply that condition in which we cannot or do not make the relevant distinctions, where the color of the car and its broken drive chain are said to belong to the same category of things which must be addressed (in order to make the car work again). TS is the condition under which thought is not subject to, or is not cognizant of, a constraint which would render it effective. Hence Deleuze's constant refrain that all thought only ever takes place under the sign of an encounter which ultimately forces it to think, and that thought, 'in-itself' is fundamentally stupid (or resides in a 'torpor').

I've been reading Daniel Dor's The Instruction of Imagination and one of the things he says about language strikes me as appropriate to thought as well. For Dor, the traditional approach to language has been to treat communicative success as the norm; that is, the success of language is a something of a given, and what needs explaining is instances of failure: when language fails to communicate, we need to look for explanations why such failures occur. For Dor, this is exactly the wrong way to look at things. Instead, what needs to be explained are the instances of communicative success; the coordination of multiple elements that enable communication to take place successfully is both massive and foreboding, and it is communicative failure that is language's 'default setting', as it were. The fact that language can sometimes work is what instead demands explanation.

Thought, I want to say, is the same: the default setting of thought is simply transcendental stupidity; it simply spins out connections and associations, connecting like with unlike, confusing kinds of some types with kinds of another. What needs to be explained is how in the world thought actually sometimes generates results; how it gains traction unto the things it ostensibly talks about. This is what the Miguel de Beistegui quote that I parenthetically included in the OP is about: "It is only by extracting itself from its own torpor that thought can cease to be stupid”; Transcendental stupidity is the native environment of thought, and it takes a great deal of effort to set it aside. The fact that thought sometimes... well, thinks, is a miracle at all.

(This is a kind of inversion of Kant, or at least the account of Kant I sketched previously).

We would be talking about the negative of a guarantee against the arbitrariness of meaning creation? — Akanthinos

Yeah, actually, this seems like a good way to put it: there is no guarantee that thought will hew closely to the significance of a problem.

Would it be correct to say that such a discussion, regardless of how it is conducted, would be essentially transcendantally stupid if only because the vast majority of users would not meet the prerequisite experiential baggage to speak meaningfully in that conversation?

I'd hesitate to answer this in the abstract (i.e. without an actual discussion to refer to), but to lay down a basic distinction, if it was just a case that people are not getting the facts right (they are unfamiliar with what the science says with respect to race and IQ, or whatever), then this would not be a case of transcednental stupidity, insofar as what's going wrong is going wrong on an empirical level; a minimally decent discussion would be at the very least getting the facts right (there's a similarly veined thread atm on the disabled and evolution - while I think the thread is pretty abhorrent, it is so largely because of its egregious misunderstanding/mischaracterization of evolution as a science: it's just flat-out stupid!).

On the other hand, there might be a question regarding the conceptual articulation between race and IQ: that is, what kind of concept is race, and what kind of concept is IQ, and what is the right way - if any - to think about their articulation such that one could draw meaningful conclusions about that articulation? Assuming one could draw a correlation between a 'race' and a statistical distribution of IQ, at what level should we pitch our conclusions: historical? biological? social? political? linguistic? Some mixture of these? And within what scope, and under what conditions? I don't know the answers, but I know that whatever they are, they cannot be taken for granted, and they need to be hashed out in order to be spoken about meaningfully at all.

With respect to this particular example, I think that transcendental stupidity would manifest when the presumptions behind however we articulate our concepts are unclear or unexamined; if the (conceptual) ramifications of the distinctions drawn are not properly set out, and contrasted with other sets of distinctions which might yield other insights, or even other, further sets of distinctions (when the differences the differences make cannot be specified). I suppose the key point is that transcendental stupidity operates at the level of concept formation: what concept is in play in such-and-such a discussion, and to what exigency does it respond? So while I don't think a discussion of race and IQ would be a priori 'transcendentally stupid', I suspect that given the general confusion that surrounds these concepts, it's more likely than not to skew that way.

He asked for his account to be disactivated.

I think rather evident that interpreting transcendental stupidity as an indictment of metaphysics by StreetlightX does not relate correctly to the terms he has used, and the intent stated in his posts. Really, only the term 'transcendental' and the quick example of Plato's metaphysical musings can really push us down this path of interpretation, if we are already on the defensive about the subject at hand. — Akanthinos

Yep, none of this has anything to do with metaphysics in the slightest. That said it's worth reflecting on the specificity of the 'transcendental', which has basically nothing to do with Plato or even the 'transcendent' (despite people constantly and mistakenly mixing up the two entirely unrelated terms), and everything to do with Kant: for Kant the transcendental was that which guaranteed the necessity of thought - that is, the non-arbitrariness of thought; the transcendental was invoked and invented by Kant as a specifically anti-sceptical device which was meant to make sure that thought was always thought of that which could be known, and not just, well, anything whatsoever (figments of imagination, etc, etc).

Now while Kant is full of ambiguity on this point, one essential discovery was that there were experiences where this guarantee could be broken: experiences where thought did not conform of its objects, becoming untethered to them and generating 'transcendental illusions'; these illusions were generated internally by thought itself, precisely to the degree that were not anchored in an object which would lend these thoughts the force of necessity that would relate them to something concrete in the world. The notion of transcendental stupidity is simply an extension and renovation of this Kantian idea, one oriented not toward truth, as in Kant, but toward significance: a question of relating thought less to an 'object' than to a problem. So yeah, the question of metaphysics here is almost entirely irrelevant.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-be-awesome/

Being awesome is unpredictable, different. It's also outgoing, growing, exploding.

Education should be awesome. — Banno

Hah, I really like this. It's a slick way to refer to what I'm come to know as 'becoming-other', a term here elaborated by Elizabeth Grosz (An Aussie academic!):

"Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other, just as science is the opening up of the universe to practical action, to becoming-useful and philosophy is the opening up of the universe to thought-becoming. ... [W]hat philosophy and art share in common—their rootedness in chaos, their capacity to ride the waves of a vibratory universe without direction or purpose, in short, their capacity to enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. They are among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought."

It'd be nice to add education to this.

Whereas the OP is criticizing the kind of stupidity that characterises metaphysics - well, I think that's what it's doing — Wayfarer

It's not a matter of metaphysics! Metaphysics is awesome - if, as with anything, it is approached with caution and finesse.

propositions aren't context dependent — frank

Lol.

Turing, incidentally, happens to be Zizek's own example of an idiot - an exemplary idiot, even - although he approaches the whole question with a different lens:

"There are two opposed types of stupidity. The first is the (occasionally) hyperintelligent subject who just doesn't "get it;' who understands a situation logically, but simply misses its hidden contextual rules. For example, when I first visited New York, a waiter at a cafe asked me: "How was your day?" Mistaking the phrase for a genuine question, I answered him truthfully ("l am dead tired, jetlagged, stressed out..." ), and he looked at me as if I were a complete idiot ... and he was right: this kind of stupidity is precisely that of an idiot. Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot: a man of extraordinary intelligence, but a proto-psychotic unable to process implicit contextual rules." (Zizek, Less Than Nothing).

. Are you saying that being "transcendentally stupid" consists in starting with some set of premises and then failing to make any (or many) of the significant connections, or explicate any (or many) of the relevant concomitants, within the context of those premises? — Janus

Yes, but perhaps a tad bit more radical. I don't see it as a two-step process - first, a premise, then failure to make connections, etc, etc. It's more that a premise may not even be one to begin with if, 'in-itself' it is not properly articulated: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Make all the connections you like, but the starting point itself is compromised, right at its heart.

To clarify, I would have thought that what you were saying would not have allowed you to say both that "Plato is full of shit" and that Plato is not transcendentally stupid, but if you can say both of those things, consistently with what you are trying to say about transcendental stupidity, then it appears that I have indeed misunderstood you. :smile: — Janus

To say Plato is full of shit but not a transcendental idiot is simply to say that not all disagreements resolve into transcendental stupidity. There can be substantial and interesting disgreements between positions which are motivated and non-arbitrary; none of this disqualifies that.

The first sentence is wrong. If I agree with you, it's not with the words you speak that I agree. — frank

Good thing the sentence doesn't even mention the word 'words' then.

The second sentence is quasi-mystical. He's saying that the whole is in the part. — frank

Good thing that your paraphrase is entirely off-base then.

A good suggestion of fdrake's part - Deleuze isn't as ah, striaghtfoward as Dewey. That said, I have to admit an upsetting ignorence of Dewey's work on my part, though I do know that a few scholars have drawn attention to certain parallels between the two. Imma Semetsky in particular has written a book or two on their similar approaches to pedagogy and education, though I've not read them unfortunately.

Yes. Agreement with you is not the point of dealing with a problem. The problem is. Or put otherwise:

"What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but in forms of life".

As I've said elsewhere, to the extent that propositions are simply bearers of truth, and to the extent that truth is precisely what is not at issue - or at issue only in a derivative, secondary sense - propositions are precisely what 'hang in the breeze'. Propositions are just about the least significant thing in addressing any problem. They are detritus, the necessary debris left over once you have your concepts right and distinctions properly drawn.

Where you additionally claim that a certain group of people just 'know' which truths matter to which subjects, that they just 'know' what the index of truth is for each problem, that they just 'know' what is worth addressing and what is not. — Pseudonym

Quote me or buzz off.

Ok, but impractical musing is fun and sometimes profitable. — frank

As is playing in the mud, occasionally.

If someone offers an analysis , then any criticism of it should address the errors and or untruths in it, and not simply arrogantly dismiss it as insignificant, irrelevant, vacuous, trivial or whatever. Along the latter way lies the tendency to fascism and political correctness (which is really fascism in disguise) inherent in the worst forms of postmodernist thought. — Janus

Just to circle back to this because I think it's important to address - as I said to @Akanthinos, there is no disjunction between truth and significance: in fact, a truth matters to any given subject matter to the degree that it has bearing upon it. This is hardly a radical sentiment! And in fact it's basically a tautology - a truth matters when it matters, and not all truths mattter in the context of addressing any particular problem. Again, if this somehow counts as 'fascism' at work, then you've stripped fascism of any coherent meaning.

Now, one of the few points I'm trying to make is simply that the index of any truth for any particular problem must belong to the problem itself: to understand a problem, to flesh it out, is to know, minimally, what kinds of things bear upon it, what belongs to its scope and what escapes it. This is a minimal condition - not of philosophy - but of any dialogic situation: "how are you?" "I'm a human being": the minimal, positive discrimination that we make that allows us to respond "what are you talking about?" is just the condition of rational exchange. In fact we take it so much for granted that we barely notice it because we are, for the most part, enculturated humans who know how to use language.

Thought, of course is simply no different: even to "address the errors and or untruths" in an analysis is to judge that those truths or errors as relevant to begin with: it is the very constitutive condition under which we are able to 'address the errors and or untruths' - we address them to the extent that they are relevant. To speak of transcendental stupidity - a provocative name for a rather mundane capacity that seems to have bunched up a few pairs of panties - is to simply make explicit a danger that we address - albeit mostly unconsciously - in all rational dialogue.

In fact, the reason that pedagogy is placed front and centre in the OP is that it is precisely in explicitly pedagogic situations that this danger is most obvious: in pedagogical situations, we face contexts where we have not learnt our way about, where the contours of what is and is not significant and relevant are brought most sharply into focus. It's a common trope that master mathematicians are and can be in fact awful at what a school student might consider 'math': the mundane calculations scribbled in lined paper books; but of course what makes them masters is their knowledge of the mathematical landscape: of what techniques might be brought to bear on a particular problem, of what theorems to call upon when faced with such and such an issue - and importantly, of what approaches not to take.

The only thing 'postmodern' is the radically stupid idea that anything goes, that anything is worth addressing, and that each and every mundanity is worth its weight in gold. To say that there are errors other than at the level of facts, that one can make mistakes of sense and significance is simply to make explicit what is implicit in all rationality, and to draw attention to it. To do otherwise, well, that is relativism, that is where one loses ones power to discriminate and otherwise engage in what literally is transcendental stupidity.

. What it seems most people within these fields want to do is measure it by some intuitive sense of 'rightness' held by those who've been taught to 'see' it. — Pseudonym

This of course is the false choice I was speaking of. And to frame it as a matter of 'in-groups' and 'out-groups' - as if it wasn't the case that literally anyone can assess arguments in a way that doesn't conform to your fake choices - even you(!), even though you seem constitutively incapable of acknowledging it at an explicit level of discourse - well, that's just more silly talk. An attempt to give moralist cover to your own incomprehension.

The problem is simply that Psuedonuym has an incredibly blinkered view of not just philosophy, but - as it turns out - of basic argument in general, which he thinks can and should only be judged on the basis of truth - the 'empirically verifiable'. Absent any basic instinct for how rational arguments can be and are evaluated on their own terms, the only alternative he thinks there is is 'personal preference' and 'self-immunised selection'. But the rudimentary failure of imagination and pragmatics on his part circumscribes even what he thinks the alternatives are; the entire terrain of his thought is wrong. At this point I doubt it can be helped. He literally doesn't know what he's talking about.

It also strikes me how the last thread on baseless speculations and the BIV offers us an example of said transcendantal stupidity. — Akanthinos

Let's just say - because I have no desire to talk about brains in vats - that the idea for this thread did not develop in a vaccum. :eyes:

An answer can be true, and yet be entirely so vulgar as to be less compelling than a known lie. A sophisticated falsehood might actually be the best tool at hand to deal with how we relate to the world (in my case I always come back to how filled with fictions and falsehoods the legal system is, and how better off it is for it).

...Having to mount serious intellectual defenses against every baseless speculation encountered seems both counterintuitive and counterproductive. You should not feel compelled to offer a serious rebuke to a string of non-sensical sounds, why should you act differently simply because in another occasion you are offered a proposition which can be interpreted in your language? Baseless is not wrong, per say. — Akanthinos

Yeah, I think this is important to acknowledge: to recognize motivated and non-arbitrary discourse is not to pit it against truth; the point is rather to make truth do work, to give truths a discourse or set of discourses in which their significance and impact could be rightly assessed. Absent this, truths are simply homeless, their significance unassailable and closed to rational engagement. Those who think that truth and falsity exhaust the means of evaluation undermine truth itself: they sap the very ground from which to understand the significance of truth - they are relativists pretending to be otherwise.

You can blithely use this fallacy to dismiss any "transcendental thinking" you don't personally like as "stupid", "trivial', "insignificant" or "irrelevant". — Janus

You really can't though, not if you understand it, and if you're honest about it. You ask how we can tell if a machine is working properly: well, machines do things, they have ends towards which they work, and if you farmiliarize yourself with a machine, you can see how effectively it runs: you may not like the work it does, you may disagree vehemently with the ends to which it is put, but that dislike should not translate to thinking that it does not work.

I think Plato is full of shit, for instance, but I don't doubt for one second the power of his work: the distinctions he draws, the ramifications he pursues on the basis of them, the vibrancy of the conceptual ecology he develops - one would be hard pressed, once familiar with the work, to call it transcendentally stupid. Or at least, it would take a great deal of further work and engagement to make that case. @Akanthinos is right that the danger of this kind of critique being wielded in an elitist, arbitrary way is a real one, but of course, if one is consistent, arbitrariness is exactly what this kind of critique aims to forestall.

I would like to call this transcendental stupidity. But actually it's quite a cunning way of dog-whistling to religious bigots, that he will seek to restore the permission to discriminate against others that they used to have before the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation (which in most cases is at least a couple of decades old). — andrewk

Hah, yeah, as much as it would be nice to think this is a stupidity endowed with philosophical significance, this is a nice example of a speech-act distinctly motivated at every level.

Isn't that one of the main points of Kant's demonstration of the antinomies of reason? — Wayfarer

Yeah - the idea takes inspiration directly from Kant, for whom the antinomies were direct products of reason themselves, and not merely some external impediment to their usual functioning. It's arguable that this in fact was Kant's greatest contribution to philosophy - in locating thought's own incapacity within thought itself, in the form of transcendental illusions, rather than assuming that - as with Descartes, say - that thought 'naturally' seeks out the known (what Kant called the 'speculative interest of Reason' was checked at each turn by the possible 'transcendent exercises' of the faculties in their 'illegitimate employment').

So, while I agree that there is 'transcendental stupidity', there might also be transcendent realities ... 'There would be no fool's gold', as the saying has it, 'if there were no gold'.

This of course I disagree with. As with Kant, the 'gold' is just... thought.

I'm reading and very much learning alot.

I wish this rose to the level of transcendental stupidity - at least that would be a good excuse. Unfortunately this really is a case of just the facts gone haywire.

Yeah, if I have to explain something as simple as that to someone who gets confused by basic logical terms that happen to begin with the same letter, consider it a lost cause.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/induction?s=t

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/inference?s=t

Primitive.

A deduction is a species of inference and an inference is the most basic move of any rational procedure. This is primitive and the fact that you can make these kinds of rudimentary mistakes speaks volumes. Moreover, if you think inferences cannot be drawn on the basis of logic alone then you need to go back to school or consult a basic encyclopedia.

Yes, but it is the outcomes of those failures that are the "proven" successes — intrapersona

But this is nothing but a tautology: all it says is that every evolutionary success is a success, and every evolutionary failure is a failure - right up until the point a failure becomes a success and vice versa. You can draw no conclusions from this, let alone the idea that successes are 'proven' - whatever that even means.

Because it seems we really can't have any kind of natural selection going on without any human interaction involved. — intrapersona

Properly conceived, the capacity for artificial selection is just another evolutionary result of natural selection, and does not in any way conflict with latter. The idea that there are some kind of preordained 'outcomes' of natural selection which are then interfered with is just more conceptual confusion: what is 'natural' is simply what is, and this includes any so-called 'gap' between natural and artificial selection. Natural selection simply does not have ends or goals - not even 'fitness', which is an incidental outcome of a wholly indifferent process.

However it is not a naturalistic fallacy when the methods nature uses itself have proven outcomes (such as millions of years of the death of failed species and the survival of the strongest species). I — intrapersona

But this betrays a basic misunderstanding of evolution. Evolutionary 'fitness' is only ever context-bound (to an environment), and the evolutionary record is paved with detritus of the millions upon millions of evolutionary 'failures' produced by evolution itself. There is no possible, coherent way of talking about evolution - in general - as a 'legitimate' system with 'proven methods'. The majority of evolutionary history is a history of miserable failure.

What I often got though was a disorganized "picture of thought" as if students believed their impressions of what I was trying to impart could simply be regurgitated on the page and it was up to me to reinterpret that back into some properly organized whole. There was a lack of application of thought to thought, and what I tended to be given back was a filtered version of what I gave out rather than a positive transformation of it — Baden

Yeah, I often imagine thought as a kind of gear or series of cog-wheels, ones with spokes and teeth, and thought - proper thought - being a case of engaging the whole apparatus (in the sense of a meshing or 'catching' of one gear on another in concert), transmitting torque from one end of the machine to the other; And conversely, I think of the kind of cases you describe are when the gears spin-out, catching only here and there, or engaging the wrong kind of differentials for all the varying parts in motion: this latter is transcendental stupidity.

One of the reasons - perhaps the main reason - why we are so evolutionarily successful is that evolution has enabled us to relax the constraints that evolution itself lays upon us: we have evolved to loosen the bonds of evolution, as it were. If you're going to commit some horrible naturalist fallacy, at least recognize that in enabling the disabled to live the best lives they can, we are following our evolutionary imperatives literally better than any other creature on earth, and not the other way around.

Why do speculations not need to be disproven? — Pattern-chaser

Because rationality deals with arguments on the basis of the inferences that are soundly and validly developed in the course of those arguments. Speculations of the BIV kind offer nothing of the sort - just stories for children playing at philosophy.

If any speculation can be disproven — Pattern-chaser

Speculations do not need to be disproven and logic recommends nothing of speculation because the latter offers nothing to it. This entire line of questioning is just charlatanism; and of course, some are indeed here just for that.

Now, if you could just offer a logical justification for dismissing such things...? — Pattern-chaser

Why? What grounds do you offer that could be rationally engaged with? Ex nihilo nihil fit. Rationality is not your - or anyone's - play-thing.

Not at all; it's about as democratic a take on stupidity as you might find: a communi stultitia.

Right, so the idea of the BIV is not a thesis nor any kind of 'explanation', but a limit-concept - in truth, nothing more than an updated and technologized version of Descartes' demon - meant to provoke thought. And that's probably fair enough. But treating it on its own terms is indeed a non-sense too stupid to contemplate.

That's your question; if you think there's anything to the idea, that's for you to answer. Better, at least, than the trivial idiocy of 'why don't you think...'.

Because it's entirely arbitrary. If you don't get that, then go ahead and speculate all you like; even dredging the toilet bowl can be fun if you squint.

Calling the BIV hypothesis "bullshit" is... well a lot of things. Its irrelevant. Its ad hominem. Its unnecessary. — PossibleAaran

It is as necessary as the the very idea of BIVs: arbitrary and irrelevant. It's a response equal to the status of the question. I'm not saying don't discuss it; just to be aware that whatever will be discussed about it will be a bunch of crap, because the question itself is a bunch of crap.