Unless you are your stance, perhaps not too stupid to speak, but maybe a bit of brushing up in the comprehension department wouldn't be the worst idea.

Perhaps you need to set out a positive thesis about how 'linguistic minds' work (what is meant and entailed by the term 'linguistic minds'), then set the debate over whether or not, given that positive thesis, we can know how 'non-lingusitic' minds work. A yes or no question perhaps. I don't know what that positive thesis would be or look like, but maybe something to work with.

Despite SLX's protestations that I explain every position I hold with a doctoral length thesis otherwise I'm not to be taken seriously, I don't actually think an exposition of why I hold those beliefs is appropriate to the thread topic, — Pseudonym

What I'm asking is far more basic than 'why' - justification presupposes the conceptual coherency of what is so justified, and what I'm suggesting is that your stance doesn't even meet the minimal criteria of meaningfulness - of sensical speech, let alone justifiability. 'Science (and only science) can answer the questions of philosophy': but this is just language on holiday, a sentence with correct grammatical form bereft of semantic content. It may as well read: 'ornithology (and only ornithology) can answer the questions of paediatrics'. These propositions are not analogies but identities as far as semantic content goes. What kind of questions are at stake here? And what is said about the specificities of both philosophy and science that would make the one be able to 'answer' - if 'answer' is the right word, and it very likely isn't - the 'questions' of the other? But at no point are any of these specificities discussed, except in some hand waving nominalist fashion.

If 'meaninglessness' seem to be just over-the-top rhetorical bluster, take an absolutely concrete case (something unsurprisingly absent from this thread): Quine, mentioned earlier, understood being as a matter of being reckoned with as a value of a variable. What would science have to say here? But what would this question even mean? Quine's signal innovation - the very reason his 'On What There Is' paper is so widely lauded - is not only that he provided an 'answer' to the question posed, but that he changed, or rather provided a new sense to the question itself. Quine transposed, in an entirely original way, the question of ontology into the sphere of language, 'desubstantializing' the question and making it amenable to logical - in the strict, formal sense - analysis. Where does 'science' even begin with this? Or is the question simply a misuse of grammar? But of course it is. Quine's innovation takes place at the level of sense - as does all good and interesting philosophy. And while it is absolutely the case that science can be recruited to help in the quest of sense-making, it is meaningless to say - or again, not even wrong to say - that science can exhaust the interrogations posed at that level.

And this is simply how philosophy operates, as has long been recognized by those with any taste for philosophy: "The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. ...But stating the problem is not simply uncovering, it is inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened. Already in mathematics, and still more in metaphysics, the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the terms in which it will be stated. The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent: The truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved." (Bergson, The Creative Mind).

My accusations of amateurism by Pseudo aren't nice, but they are absolutely honest.

Depends if you think metaphysics is a just a neutral term for some sort of transhistorical discipline or a name for a set of historically specific or even formal set of doctrines that do not account for the 'critical turn' initiated by Kant. A matter of language in other words. Perhaps one can speak of a pre-critical metaphysics and a post-critical metaphysics, assuming that one affirms the Kantian turn. Or one can just treat 'metaphysics' as a Kripkean rigid designator and say it's all metaphysics even though it lacks internal cohesion. It's a matter of preference. I like the last two options, if I say so myself.

To reiterate in a slightly different way: you know that you have an introspective sense because it affects you, and you are cognizant of those effects because you have an introspective sense. But the eye never quite turns around and sees itself, per Wayfarer's reference. This is circular, but if you begin with the premise that we only know the world by the way it impacts is, then you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with something like this. — Pneumenon

The important thing is to distinguish between treating this inability to 'see oneself' as a mere epistemological limitation, and between treating it instead as an ontological condition of subjectivity as such. Hence: "It is not sufficient to say about the I of pure apperception that "of it, apart from them [the thoughts which are its predicates], we cannot have any concept whatsoever" (CPR, A 346). One has to add that this lack of intuited content is constitutive of the I; the inaccessibility to the I of its own "kernel of being" makes it an I ... I am conscious of myself only insofar as I am out of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my being ("I or he or it (the thing) which thinks")." (Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative).

With respect to the metaphysical tradition - and this feeds into the discussion regarding the 'ground of being' etc, the point is that this constitutive condition is what makes Kant's philosophy properly 'Critical' and not 'dogmatic': "This is what Kant's theory of metaphysics ultimately is about: metaphysics endeavors to heal the wound of the "primordial repression" (the inaccessibility of the "Thing which thinks") by allocating to the subject a place in the 'great chain of being.' What metaphysics fails to notice is the price to be paid for this allocation: the loss of the very capacity it wanted to account for".

No, its an absolutely necessary logical conclusion. — Pseudonym

Logical conclusion of what exactly? The unargued-for dogmatism that you've simply assumed throughout this thread? You all but admitted, previously, that your entire position so far is founded on tautology - that if you assume you are right, it will follow that you will assume you are right. I thought it so obvious a triviality that I didn't bother to comment on it after having pointed it out, but it seems that you are so committed to your pseudo-philosophy that not even the most elementary of logical errors, triviality and tautology, seems to ring any alarm bells with you. The feigned psuedo confusion of why people dislike a stance that aims to exclude most of human understanding began as laughable, and it is now tired. As if the nationalist-xenophobe wondering why, when all he wants to do is kick out everyone else, he is so reviled as the scum he is - and then cries foul about 'openness to investigation'. It would be a joke if it wasn't so clear just how serious you think you are.

Ethical naturalism — Pseudonym

Another example of hand-waving nomination, as if branding about a pair of empty, unelaborated words explains anything at all, instead of crying out for explanation at the deepest level.

Again, you're simply imposing your worldview here, because I have a view about what constitutes evidence that differs from yours I must be 'unreflective', I must, through my own inadequacies, have missed something. Is the idea that I might well have reflected long and hard on these matters but simply reached a different conclusion to you so hard to accept? — Pseudonym

You're the evidence guy - and so far there is no 'evidence' that you have for a moment thought about, or understood the specificities of philosophy. I mean, there is simply no way to take seriously, for example, the idea that 'science=objective' and 'philosophy=subjective'. What is your theory of the object? What is your theory of the subject? Do you even have one? Or again, are you employing these empty terms that have nothing but a (implied and untheorized) value valence to them, and drawing conclusions based on that fake veneer of meaningfulness? Because, as with most of your terms, you simply haven't discussed or explained their use. did you know that the meaning of objectivity in science has changed so much that it's possible to write 500 page books about it? Or that the idea of what counts as an 'explanation' in science has had a similarly rich and varied history? And let's not even speak about evidence, which is a minefield all on its own.

So yeah, I freely admit that I don't take scientism seriously. It is a position deserving of scorn for it's closemindedness and philosophical vacuousness, and it ought to be treated like the toxic pseudo-philosophy that it is. If 'fostering useful investigation' means anything, it is not the cancerous idea that one and only one discipline (as usual undefined and unspecified by you except nominally) has the right to make claims of and about the world. It's sheer disingenuity to speak for 'fostering useful investigation' while literally denying legitimacy to entire swathes of human understanding. What you call 'wishy-washy' is nothing other than an index of your own inability, and more importantly, unwillingness, to understand the kinds of things philosophy does - it speaks not to philosophy but to your own barren understanding of the very topic you think you're discussing.

And just as another example, when you ask "how are you deciding that (for example) the idea that science can determine morality is not a useful one?" - what are you even asking here? Do you know? What kind of meta-ethics is implied in a question like this? A command theory of ethics? A virtue theory of ethics? What kind of thing would ethics have to be in order for science to bear - or not to bear - upon it? These are not trivial questions, despite your total insensitivity to them. Again, your very questions betray their own emptiness. They're meaningless without elaboration - which is to say, without philosophy.

You're making a claim about what knowledge actually is (or rather what it isn't) — Pseudonym

Am I? I like to think that I'm making or rather promoting claims about useful ways of thinking about knowledge, ways that can be pressed into the service of different needs, depending on different motivations. What scientism seems to do is deny - in a way that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with ideological dogma - that there are any other kinds of useful knowledge than science. Which is, prima facie, a load of horseshit that any two year old can smell.

And again, that much of what philosophy deals with is 'knowledge' is something I've only granted very provisionally, insofar as it's not at all clear that most of philosophy does in fact deal with knowledge. And the constant refrain for 'evidence' counts for very little, if only because what does and does not count as evidence is of course, precisely a philosophical and even perhaps historical issue of which you remain entirely unreflective about. Again, all these words you think you're using as self-evident - knowledge, evidence, meaningfulness - these are things you seem to think you understand, when most of your posts betray nothing but naivety with respect to their use. You're careless with language, and you wield that carelessness unthinkingly to make invalid claims, over and over again.

either all epistemological methods are valid, or none are, or some are and some aren't. — Pseudonym

Or, tertium datur, different epistemological methods are valid or appropriate for different fields, each one calling for the best or set of best kinds suitable to it. One doesn't use a microscope to conduct anthropology, and rightly so, least you be correctly outed as a loon. And again, as another instance of invalid and unthinking presuppositions, why is knowledge the criteria by which philosophy is judged against? Philosophy has very rarely concerned itself with providing straightforward 'knowledge' about the world, insofar as the kind of 'knowledge' it deals with is largely second-order knowledge, knowledge of, among other things, what it means to know at all. Zizek actually puts it very nicely in one of the interviews he gives with Gyln Daly, where he speaks of the relation between science and philosophy:

"When I understood that this is not to do with megalomania, in the sense of the standard counter-attack of naive scientists, namely, 'we are dealing with hard facts, with rational hypotheses, but you philosophers you are just dreaming about the structure of everything', I then realized that philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions. For example, when a scientist approaches a certain question, the point of philosophy is not 'What is the structure of all?' but 'What are the concepts the scientist already has to presuppose in order to formulate the question?' It is simply asking about what is already there: what conceptual, and other, presuppositions already have to be there so that you can say what you are saying, so that you understand what you understand, so that you know that you are doing what you are doing." (Zizek and Daly, Conversations with Zizek) This is what I mean, among other things, when I say that getting the question right is basically nothing other than the work of philosophy.

Or else there is the position of someone like Wendy Brown, for whom the whole point is that philosophy, or theory more generally, ought specifically to strategically disengage us from the actuality of the world: "theory depicts a world that does not quite exist, a world that is not quite the one we inhabit. ... An interval between the actual and the theoretical is crucial insofar as theory does not simply decipher the world, but recodes it in order to reveal something of the meanings and incoherencies with which we live. This is not simply to say that political and social theory describe reality abstractly. At their best, they conjure relations and meanings that illuminate the real or that help us recognize the real, but this occurs in grammars and formulations other than those of the real." (Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty)

This similarly coincides with the view of Byung-Chul Han, for whom the appeal to 'data based science' cannot but destroy any critical gaze upon the world: "Theory in the strong sense of the word is a phenomenon of negativity. It makes a decision determining what belongs and what does not. As a mode of highly selective narration, it draws a line of distinction. On the basis of such negativity, theory is violent. Without the negativity of distinction, matters proliferate and grow promiscuously. In this respect, theory borders on the ceremonial, which separates the initiated and the uninitiated. It is mistaken to assume that the mass of positive data and information — which is assuming untold dimensions today — has made theory superfluous, that is, that comparing data can replace the use of models. ... The latter lacks the negativity of decision, which determines what is, or what must be, in the first place. Theory as negativity makes reality itself appear ever and radically different; it presents reality in another light". (Han, The Transparency Society)

I quote these not as 'arguments from authority' but as demonstrations of perspectives - exemplary perspectives imo - that are totally, absolutely absent from your woefully anemic understanding of philosophy, its place, and its role. To put it excessively and starkly, perhaps philosophy ought to be understood as the study of non-knowledge, to all the better shed light on field of knowledge itself. These are alternate perspectives which far better capture what philosophy can and does do, rather than the violent caricatures presented in your vulgar presentation of the discipline.

I don't care about defending phenomenology at all, at least to the degree that I'm not so callous and brazen to claim that phenomenology alone exhausts the grounds for making any kind of claim. And certainly, if there was any kind of 'phenomenologism' it would be laughed off the intellectual stage like the joke it would be.

Ah yes, philosophy by last minute Google search. Or wikipedia. By Gods, the class of argument on display. Perhaps you can explain to me the relation between Husserlian intution, meaning, knowledge, and truth, which are are all seperate and distinct concepts, and why, as I asked, you think phenomenology nonetheless stands or falls with the Husserlian concept of intuition?

I agree, completely with this particular point. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Then you agree completely, I suggest, with the impetus behind claims of privilege.

Can this also be said to minority’s? Who claim their own personal experiences of oppression are universalisable to all minority’s? — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Do 'they'? Last I checked, the notion of intersectionality - much derided by those like Peterson - was developed precisely in order that minorities recognize the specificity of their own experiences so as to acknowledge the broad tent under which fights against opression take place.

If one accepts the premise that intuition delivers knowledge, then there is something to 'know' about phenomenonolgy... — Pseudonym

Where do you get this nonsense from? Since when was phenomenology defined by 'the premise that intuition delivers knowledge'? Do you have a source for this utter balderdash? Or is phenomenology yet another philosophical topic you know nothing about? And even if one were to grant the centrality of intuition in, say, Husserl, would phenomenology stand or fall with the Husserlian theory of intuition? It certiantly played no major role in Heidegger. And Derrida made his critique of Husserlian intuition the centrepiece of early philosophy, without sanctioning any careless dismissal of intuition in philosophy altogether. And if not Husserl, what about Kant, Bergson, or Merleau-Ponty, who also developed well known, if divergent, theories of intuition? Can you engage in any specificity whatsoever, or can you only speak in empty generalities? In other words, are you willing to do philosophy? Or are you content to bask in your ignorance?

I mean honestly, you couldn't get a better distillation of the kind of rubbish that's all through this thread: declarations that look meaningful but are based in either complete mischaracterization or sheer conceptual confusion.

I will admit one thing, though: I have had the privilege of discounting the significance of my racial background in large part because I'm white, whereas it seems much harder to do this for black people and other POC living in countries like the USA, since they're often reminded that they're the "other" through the actions of narrow-minded bigots. — Erik

This! This is - or should be - the import of what 'privilege' is about: it's acknowledging that one's experience is not universalizable, and that one cannot proscribe injunctions on the basis of that experience. One always approaches the world from a certain point of view, with different motivations, worries, and cares. 'Privilege' is the - perhaps misnamed, or at least underdeveloped - notion that those motivations and cares cannot be extrapolated to others without loss or without skewing their experience. The idea of 'checking one's privilege' (racial or otherwise) refers to nothing other than this: that one can't say 'well I don't have to worry about that, so no one else should make it an issue either".

It's not your intelligence at issue. It's your ignorance, which has the advantage of being open to remedy, if you'd care to.

That's a nice revisionist retelling of our conversation, but you might recall that I wasn't trying to answer your question. I merely intervened to say that most of what you have written in this thread is, and remains, meaningless, and that your grasp of philosophy - at least as demonstrated in this thread - is weak to the point of intellectual atrophy. I did suggest that that the course of this thread's existence was argument enough in favour of the poverty of scientism, and this exchange is, if nothing else, further proof of that.

Ah yes, my mistake, to ask how scientism justifies its claims is quite obviously off-topic in a thread discussing scientism and its critics. Perhaps this kind of sophistry answers its own question with regard to its clearly deserved ill-repute.

Do you read your posts?

You're the one making the psuedo-positive claim that only science can answer 'the questions of human existence', without elaborating on (1) what those questions are and what you understand them to imply; (2) what kinds of answers science can provide; (3) why science would have exclusive dominion to those answers. Without these, your claim is literally meaningless, actual word salad.

Note also that as someone who loves science, I think this kind of scientism does more to hurt and diminish science than any philosophical critique could. It belittles not just philosophy, but science itself, which becomes tainted by a colonizing and imperialist disciplinary cancer that exists nowhere in its actual practice.

Again, I know you're new at this, but you can't meaningfully disagree with the meaningless, only point out that it is meaningless.

I'm quite convinced Quine understood those questions in a meaningful way because he left behind a rich and robust body of philosophical work demonstrating - and in fact elaborating in novel ways - his understanding and mastery of them. By contrast, what I see in this thread is the empty invocation of those questions, mobilized as nothing more than meaningless interrogatives used to draw vacuous conclusions.

Quine? Who spent his career trying to understand and elaborate upon what such questions entail? Quine, whose most famous paper had the distinction of rennovating, in an entirely novel way, the meaning of 'what is?' though an invocation of certain quantifying structures? Quine, whose understanding of those questions spawned entire trajectories of thought through which philosophy has been enriched? Quine, the consummate philosopher? No, not an amateur.

I wasn't aware that they were in much doubt. — Pseudonym

That much is clear. Epecially given that one of the chief virtues of philosophy is to illuminate not merely answers to questions of these sort, but to determine, in varying contexts, what exactly they are asking. One of the things you learn once you shed the amaturism of unschooled ignorance is that engaging with very meaning of questions like these are bulk of what philosophy deals with. The hardest thing to do in philosophy is to get the question right. Taking them for granted is philosophical infantilism, not, perhaps, unlike 'scientism'.

The argument is simply that most of what you have written is meaningless - that is to say, not even wrong. You speak of 'questions of existence' as though you - or anyone - have any idea what such a phrase implies. Yet these apparent 'questions' are nowhere formulated by you, despite being taken for granted as meaningful despite their total semantic emptiness. Amatuerish shadowboxing, nothing more.

And actually yes, to dismiss an idea or set of ideas requires understanding, at least minimally, the content of those ideas, on pain of unthinking dogmatism. That isn't 'begging the question', that's basic argumentative practice, understood by schoolchildren around the world. To think that you can't even correctly impute a first-year fallacy, let alone think you might have anything to say of interest about philosophy...

Yeah, sorry, but the understanding of philosophy so far demonstrated by pseudo is so poverty stricken that it's hard to take much of what is said here seriously at all - not to speak of science itself. The parsing of the world into 'subjective' and 'objective' - as if these 17th century categories exhausted the field of understanding - is so philosophically amateurish that this thread alone ought to supply evidence against 'scientism', by the mere course of its existence. Perhaps the word is so hard to define because those who champion it do so in so half-baked a manner.

:up: This is a theme that has long been emphasised by Zizek and a few others, who have noted that the ultimate consequence of Kant's reasoning here is that in Kant, the self has the status of an object.

Markus Gabriel sets it out in the clearest manner I know: "The self becomes an object among others as soon as it is drawn within the sphere of representation. Kant developed this problem in his First Critique and his argument is as plain as it is striking. If the self was a substance, our cognitive access to it would have to be the grasp of a substance. Yet, our cognitive access to any substance is fallible insofar as it has to represent the substance in question. Even if we represent ourselves, the represented self is not identical with the representing self given that the subject of experiencing is never identical with any possible object of experience. Whatever the object of our scrutiny may be, it has to become an object among others whereby it is determined as such in a wider context." (Gabriel, The Mythological Being of Reflection).

Kant himself famously speaks of "this I or he or it (the thing) that thinks", and in the Second Critique Kant describes what would happen if the self were to access 'itself' in its noumenal dimension: "God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes... the conduct of man... would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures". Another way to flesh this out is that this inability to access itself is not a mere 'impediment' to subjectivity, but a consitutive condition of our being subjects. It's this last implication - I think perhaps the most important - that is often forgotten.

Zizek: "The basic gesture of Kant's transcendental turn is thus to invert the obstacle into a positive condition ... In the standard Leibnizean ontology, we, finite subjects, can act freely in spite of our finitude, since freedom is the spark which unites us with the infinite God; in Kant, this finitude, our separation from the Absolute, is the positive condition of our freedom. In short, the condition of impossibility is the condition of possibility." Elsewhere: "It is therefore not that Kant simply limited causality to the phenomenal domain in order to be able to assert that, at the noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents: we are only free insofar as our horizon is that of the phenomenal, insofar as the noumenal domain remains inaccessible to us" (Zizek, The Ticklish Subject).

Or maybe you're ascribing far too much unilateral power to genes, which are well known for functioning differentially. I.e. the same genes can do different stuff depending on cellular context.

Consider also that we share about 50% of our genome with bananas so trying to speak of uniqueness via a discussion of genes is not a very good idea to begin with.

You'll never know.

Poor Apo, who has to write so furiously away to cover over his elementary inability to distinguish between scope and modality, while suffering from pathological political paranoia at the same time. Some people really do have it tough.

So this is a thread about deepfakes and not cool words - that is now a thread about cool words. I can't distinguish the reality of this thread from... wait. Ah. I get it. Nicely played.

I was wondering when someone might bring this up. I mean, when one can't tell the difference between reality and simulation, reality - all of reality - becomes suspect. There can be no better encapsulation of Baudrillard's thesis that all reality is already simulacra. That's the door this opens - or rather, walks through. It's kind of mind-bogging to think through.

--

Oh wait. This is literally a thread on cool words. I thought it was a clever way of talking about deepfakes without having to spell it out, lol. OK. Errr. The last cool word I came across was Paracosm: from para (beside, next-to), and cosmic (world/universe): a world parallel to ours, like the invented worlds of children, or the worlds of fiction artists - Middle Earth, Narnia, etc.

Never hard to dog whistle an atheist on this forum. — Wayfarer

Hey I'm on your side here!

Except of course if one's view is that scientific investigation is the only meaningful way to form public theories about reality, in which case it seems quite de rigueur do dismiss them out of hand. — Pseudonym

Well sure, if one indefatigably thinks one point of view is correct, one will also think that one's point of view is indefatigably correct. I will grant you this tautology, because I grant it.

I think that's not a bad definition, but what is it that you think people find so odious about that viewpoint? — Pseudonym

Well it's mostly quite clearly a heap of horseshit that doesn't even do justice to the science itself, but even more obviously no one likes to have their views dismissed on a priori bases.

Thinking about it, I think I understand scientism as a broad attitude of dismissal towards anything that doesn't take its bearings from science. As in, it's less a 'positive', well-developed point of view than a prohibitive or exclusionary one: it's a strategy of delegitimization that invalidates claims (any claims) because they are not based on scientific understanding. I'd say it differs from physicalism because where physicalism might make substantive claims about things - 'it's all physical' or somesuch - scientism doesn't actually care about the 'content' of the science - only that it is science from which claims are made. With respect to their attitudes towards philosophy, I think Krauss and Degrasse Tyson might fit this bill. although they might just be straight up against philosophy per se, and not other things.

This is entirely my own understanding of it though, and I don't speak for others who might use the label.

Strictly speaking, Communism ought to entail the 'withering away of the state' - at least according to Engels (i.e. no government at all). In the meantime, until communism is brought about, the state ought to function as a 'vanguard of the proletariat', ushering in the new communist society. After which it can 'wither away'. Of course exactly how this supposed to work out, and what the end result is meant to look like is all an open question. Also, said withering hasn't really worked out so well in the past. What you're describing seems more on the order of a strong social democracy.

I thought this guy saw himself as a prophet of capitalism. Yet he doesn't seem to understand how it works. — andrewk

He's less a prophet of capitalism than he is a travelling salesman of the status quo. It's why he can feel so disproportionally threatened by a kids movie which simply doesn't fit his palaeolithic conception of 'how things should be'.

Ahahaha, and people take this guy seriously.

Meanie.

I hope I never become wise. Wisdom is the mummification of philosophical adventure.

I'm still thinking about the negativity of what we can call natural laws. — Akanthinos

I was thinking about this too, and especially the curious idea - let me know if you agree - that even positive injunctions in the law are, in a way, simply double negatives. As in, if there's a law that says 'you must drive on the left side of the road', what's 'really' going on is an injunction to the effect of 'you must not not drive on the left side of the road'. Or in more general terms, everything that counts as 'legal' is in fact simply not-illegal. And good luck with the doberman lol.