I don't think that's what he actually said, though. — Tzeentch

He hoped for a future without women. It is not the exact same thing. The difference doesn't matter much.

I'm still waiting for individuals who rejoice in the genocide in Gaza to be banned. But I suppose making weird and incel posts about women is worse than endorsing the eradication of an ethnicity. — javi2541997

The state of public discourse matters unfortunately. We've had lots of discussions that will almost certainly be looked back on as adjacent to hate speech, or enabling genocide, just because that's where the state of public debate is at. Gender, Palestine, climate change, all fucked.

I read Hunchback this morning. Cosy. Simple prose. Rare to find plain descriptions of disabled people's sexualities.

It was entrapment

Imo the one where he hoped every woman would die

Admittedly @Gregory lowered the tone into the usual gender war bullshit, but I expect better of the rest of you.

You are obviously an expert at avoiding the facts that don't match your biases. — Agree-to-Disagree

I provided an even handed discussion of the positives of total bum excision, I don't know what else you wanted. I might be able to intuit what you would see as an epistemically virtuous discussion if you phrase it in small baby terms regarding bums for me.

Ye olde incidental half humanity death, I see.

Why're you gonna hope for glassing the half of humanity you could be romantically attracted to. It sounds quite counterproductive. The authors of something like the SCUM Manifesto were at least some variety of lesbian separatist. I was hoping I'd met my first gay separatist damnit.

Jesus H Christ Gregory. If I may ask, are you heterosexual?

It is because your shite comes out of your mouth. :rofl: — Agree-to-Disagree

They call this diversifying the oesophageal portfolio, I see your tail is very hedged, sir.

I imagine you charge $150 an hour.

My faith's only ever been rewarded when I do something about it.

Why would a European be partisan over US politics? — Tzeentch

My brother in Christ Denmark has opinions about Greenland and every European country is in hybrid warfare with Russia.

Yes, and the considerable reduction in swamp ass from the global bumectomy seals the deal. My guy needs to get on this ASAP.

People destroying Teslas is analogous to a big spat of people destroying electric bikes that we had in Europe. That was absolutely not treated as a threat to national, or European, security. People just hated the bikes for various reasons.

Every person would be a little lighter with no bum, meaning we'd need less calories. That could mean less production of food is required on a global level, and lead to a more equitable distribution of resources.

Smaller spaces between chairs in meeting rooms could be traversed without inappropriate bum placement.

Whole world's your oyster with no bum, mate.

Have you considered all the ways that humanity could be improved by cutting our own bums off? Sounds like denial to me.

https://www.latintimes.com/anti-vaxx-mom-whose-daughter-died-measles-says-disease-wasnt-that-bad-578871

Anti-Vaxx Mom Whose Daughter Died From Measles Says Disease 'Wasn't That Bad'

On topic I suppose.

During the interview, the young couple doubled down on their decision not to vaccinate their child even after her death. Hailing from the Mennonite community, they argued that if measles patients had access to untested treatments, the MMR vaccines would be entirely unnecessary.

"We spent the morning at Dr. Ben Edwards' clinic, and the parents are all still sitting there saying they would rather have this than the MMR vaccination because they've seen so much injury, which we have as well," journalist Polly Tommey said while interviewing the couple. "Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles and the proper treatment with Dr. Ben Edwards?"

"Absolutely [do] not take the MMR [vaccine]," said the mother. "The measles wasn't that bad. [The other children] got over it pretty quickly. And Dr. Edwards was there for us."

Compare Harold Camping's doomsday following:

His prediction {of the end of the world} for May 21, 2011 was widely reported, in part because of a large-scale publicity campaign by Family Radio, and it prompted ridicule from atheist organizations[14] and rebuttals from Christian organizations.[15] After May 21 passed without the predicted events, Camping said he believed that a "spiritual" judgment had occurred on that date, and that the physical Rapture would occur on October 21, 2011, simultaneously with the final destruction of the universe by God.[16] Except for one press appearance on May 23, 2011, Camping largely avoided press interviews after May 21, particularly after he suffered a stroke in June 2011.[17] After October 21, 2011, passed without the predicted apocalypse, the mainstream media labeled Camping a false prophet and commented that his ministry would collapse after the "failed 'Doomsday' prediction".

The refutation only entrenches belief. The bodies of climate change are already mounting, and the mountain will grow more.

Living standards are falling across the political north, and the same anti-regulation anti-asset tax policies which ensure the fall are being enacted as its cure.

The prevailing social climate, increasingly, is one of a blanket denial of reality. And the majority of people I know, who do not deny the reality of things, have had to look away out of pain. You either take the blatant refutations of your beliefs as further invitation for faith, or look away from the precipice. Those are the easiest ways to cope. Denial has become a necessity.

"They broke up because they had an argument, largely caused by how each was feeling physically" seems believable enough. "She left him because of his itchy underwear" — J

I suppose it would depend on if the nearest possible world without the underwear itchiness was also a world in which they were still together. Not that I like possible worlds much. It just seems also not to care about narrative and explication in the same was as causes don't.

I'm sure if you looked at it from the perspective of the values that might cause someone to adopt a particular stance, you'd find some commonality with your interests.

You do need the content to be reasonable if we're working toward warranted belief. — J

I suppose there's a couple of types of content involved. If you established that X causes Y through an experiment, then that's an excellent justification for believing it. But that's far for explaining why X causes Y. So if someone were to say "X happened, that's why Y happened", and someone challenged it: "Why?", you could point to the experiment. But that doesn't tell you the mechanism, it doesn't explicate the why. It demonstrates it. The first type of content would be what suffices to demonstrate truth, the second type of content would be what serves as an explication. They both might work as reasons, but they don't both work as stories or explications, and only attempting to specify a mechanism would tell you why.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that the content of the claim doesn't need to make any kind of sense to serve as an excellent justification, it just needs to be established as true. And in context noting causes, without any further commitment to mechanism or generality, might serve as a terminus of giving reasons. Putting it in -isms, a kind of foundationalism which uses every passing contingency.

Are you saying that the man, if we asked him why he stood up, would deny the feeling as a cause, or say he wasn't aware of it? — J

What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter whether he was aware of it or not, were it the true and only cause. Whether there was an explication beyond "It's true that his clothing caused the break up" would be irrelevant, even if it made no sense. That's what I was getting at. Extremely narratively unsatisfying explanations that amount to "stuff just happened this way, it was established thus".

Sorry -- regardless of why we believe them, or regardless of why they're true? — J

Regardless of why we believe them if they are believed because they're true. Or just because they're true, regardless of why we believe them. Like the break up because of the uncomfortable clothes. True, utterly useless as an explication, and no one would believe it because it's not a cromulent story.

But for the man, as I think you're saying, it can't be a reason unless he goes beyond "narrative juxtaposition" and actually accepts the account. — J

Yeah. I've invited the reader to juxtapose them, but the man would be utterly insane if he blamed his partner leaving him on his itchy underwear. Even if he's totally correct.

MAGA hats might be viewed in a different light in twenty years from now, but that doesn't mean a thing today. — ssu

If they are, it will be due to the sheer incompetence of the Republican party. The party's goals and priorities are clear.

Looking at the octogenarian Democrats, I think simply they aren't understanding just what Trump is really doing to the Republic. How do they suppose that Trump will be reigned in? But Republicans saying "That's too far"??? — ssu

At this point anyone who's still supporting the Republican party ought be considered in the same light as an outright supporter of a fascist regime.

Your use of scare-quotes around "true reason" says it all: Are we willing to accept a cause or a narrative as a reason? — J

I'm going on my own hobby horse here, rather than trying to do any exegesis.

I think generally people accept narratives as reasons. Since they serve as explanations. eg He took a cookie from the jar and ate it, and he ate it since he was hungry. That's a story, it makes sense.

I think people only treat causes as reasons when the causes serve as part of a story. Compare:

The man had a feeling.
He went to the cookie jar.

To

The man was hungry.
He went to the cookie jar.

Even if the sensation in the first story was hunger, you'd only make sense of the story by inferring that the sensation was food related on the basis of the second sentence, which paradigmatically is hunger. Nothing in the story tells you that it is hungry, or food related, except the context of the phrase "the cookie jar" bleeding over into the first sentence.

Contrast to:

The man had a feeling.
He stood up.

Much more ambiguous. You might read that in terms of determinedness, or needing to pee. Absolutely nothing there. The nature of the cause needs to be understood in the context of the event it caused in order to serve as an explanation for it.

I've had a short story in my head for a while now, but I've not figured out a way of writing it. It concerns an argument between two partners that leads to their immediate break up, but they were very happy up until the argument. One partner's shoes had started rubbing their feet that morning. The other partner had put on a tiny amount of weight and felt it in their belt buckle. That lead to them both being irritated all day, which snowballed. The distal cause of their break up is totally and pointlessly irrelevant to their lives. I've found it quite difficult to plan, since the raw contingency of their uncomfortable clothing on that day gets seen as incidental, and how they react to the world around and each other gets given the locus of responsibility due to how it has to be described. If they have an argument, even if they're only saying what they're saying distally because of uncomfortable clothes, we go proximately for character traits. They both look like arses, or it looks like a failed relationship. It's difficult to make something a story beat if it resists any sense of narrative.

It would not be a theoretical reason, as Pincock understands one. And here the question of level is really critical. If you tell me your belief in ghosts is caused by growing up around people who believed in ghosts, I'll say "Thanks much" and completely ignore this as a reason for me to believe in ghosts. From a rationalist perspective, a reason is supposed to be "for everybody." Chakravartty and Pincock both discuss this, and as you'd imagine, Chakravartty believes some reasons can be valid for you but not for me, while Pincock thinks this is loose talk, and that a "true reason" asks for universal consent.

I think "universal consent" is a good way of putting it. "Universal comprehension" is also a component of it. people have to understand what they're consenting to. Even ff people agreed that, like in the second story, the man's feeling made him stand up, it serves as a reason for him standing up only by narrative juxtaposition/co-contextualising the feeling and standing up. And that's something I did in writing the sentences, not the hypothetical man standing up. And certainly not the partners with their uncomfortable clothing.

The reason I'm favouring this termination of explanations into causes is that correctly noticing causes doesn't have to make much sense. You don't need the content of a cause to be reasonable, or even explicable, just to notice that it really is a cause.

Which perhaps makes a meta-methodological commitment to believing things that seem to be true regardless of why, but if that's not axiomatically posited as part of a reasonable stance, what's the point in calling some stances reasonable and some not.

OK. And how do we want to fill in "good"? — J

I have no idea. If you're just estimating the mean of a data set, sample size 19 and 20 are basically the same thing. It would be really hard to justify one or the other on any purely statistical basis.

Are you sure? Didn't you end up doing precisely that? Or maybe I'm reading "hierarchical" differently from you. I'm thinking you could have (and probably had to) give reasons for what you decided to do, and in explaining them, you'd implicitly be indicating the hierarchy that wound up prevailing. But I could be way off. — J

Maybe we are thinking of it differently? Though I claim no authority over interpreting this experience.

By hierarchy I meant that there would be direction of influence between things that constitute the stance and things that constitute putatively factual level claims. By denying its existence I meant that a change in the putatively factual level claims may engender a change in what constitutes the stance. I was treating a discovery as a change in putatively factual level claims, specifically the discovery that 2 new data points had the majority of the benefit of 3. And I claim that this triggered evaluating the allocation of resources on that basis, whereas before it was largely a question of scientific accuracy.

We probably had "don't spend too much money" as a value somewhere in the background, but precisely what justification that would manifest in didn't seem fixed. Since we didn't have a rule like "If 2 data points has 90% of the benefit of 3, only gather 2" prior to analysing the data. Adopting that value made sense in light of the evidence.

Maybe I'm taking this too far, but is this another way of saying "We are blank slates, and can only learn from experience" i.e. empiricism? Are there some faculties of mind which start "upstream", and are not created by input from downstream? Huge question, of course, but a serious explanation for how an epistemic stance is chosen must have a tentative answer, I think. — J

Yeah I see what you mean. What I'm going to write below has a lot of presumptions in it I've not argued for, and haven't thought through very thoroughly at all.

By "upstream all the way down" I meant that adopting values has a recursive structure as soon as you start blocking influence from one layer of the structure to higher layers - in this case stopping evidence from changing values. I meant that if we start asking "What makes people adopt this attitude toward that?", and we answer with a claim, we can ask of the new claim "What makes people adopt this attitude toward the claim?", and presumably you'd answer with a justification for a putatively factual level claim with some kind of methodological commitment, and if you ask it about a methodological commitment you'd get something about how one assigns attitudes toward evidential standards - which is thus an element of the stance. You could then ask how someone has an attitude toward that and so on, which would be... a stance toward a stance? A meta-stance? Who knows. Notably all of these answers would be inferential, they involve giving reasons.

Are there some faculties of mind which start "upstream", and are not created by input from downstream? — J

Whereas, and this is a big complication I think, people may be caused to adopt stances, paradigms of interpretations and so on. The "true reason" that someone values what they value might terminate in describing a cause or telling a story, rather than giving a reason. In that regard if some faculty is "upstream", its relationship to "downstream" inputs would be some kind of feedback relationship. Like if I look at a graph I can see if it has a trend, and that's something I learned, so something "upstream" of my raw ability to access/explore the array of information in my environment visually has conditioned the input into a specific perceptual form based on instruction. I would be able to justify that with "Line go up? Increasing trend", but that justification apes a reconfiguration of my body in accordance with the instruction, which has caused me to be able to see the world differently.

about method or process which are believed/disbelieved/held as uncertain, not merely "adopted." We want to link propositions with these same attitudes within an epistemic stance -- that's the whole point of having one -- but where are we standing before the stance? What's the further argument that there are worse and better (maybe even obligatory) reasons for enacting the stance? — J

I think it's upstreams all the way down.

I know what you mean. If a non-voluntarist is going to claim that they have a rationally/theoretically mandatory epistemic stance, they will be asked their reasons for believing this. Will the reasons they give be the same kind of reasons that two people would give who share an epistemic stance but disagree on a particular scientific interpretation? This is hard to understand. And it tempts us to say that all this talk of stances is really a way of justifying some core propositions about method or process which are believed/disbelieved/held as uncertain, not merely "adopted." We want to link propositions with these same attitudes within an epistemic stance -- that's the whole point of having one -- but where are we standing before the stance? What's the further argument that there are worse and better (maybe even obligatory) reasons for enacting the stance? — J

I had missed the possibility that, yes, while stances and beliefs about matters of fact consist of intentions toward claims, they might consist of different classes of intentions toward those claims. A stance might solely consist of intentions toward claims regarding evidence regarding putatively factual claims, and the object level discourse would consist of intentions toward some domain of putatively factual claims.

I think that's quite artificial though. Presumably a claim like "some properties are mind independent" is putatively factual even if it can't be determined as true or false, and a claim like "I am wary of claims involving the phrase "mind independence"" is object level in discourse about realism vs anti-realism, since it's an expression in it. I think this is clearer with Alice and Bob out in the wild, as @T Clark was saying. A dispute between Alice and Bob regarding sample size 19 vs 20 wouldn't just be about whether sample size 19 or 20 was good, it would be about whether it is reasonable to believe 19 or 20 is the minimum one to allow study results to update your beliefs. As in, they would explicitly be negotiating what attitudes are appropriate to hold toward claims, and what means of forming those attitudes are appropriate in context.

An IRL example of a thresholding dispute I have seen regarding sample size was about whether 1, 2 or 3 additional data points was "most optimal" to disentangle two hypotheses which seemed reasonable given prior collected data. Each data point was very costly to elicit, and there were diminishing returns on the discriminatory power. We stopped at 2, since a compelling reason seemed to be that getting 90% of the benefit of 3 for a 33% saving was worth it, and 2 gave twice the discriminatory power of 1. We could equally have said "go for three it's the most likely to make what we've done before worthwhile cost be damned" or "go for 1, we can safely deprioritise testing this hypothesis from the data, and you need funding for the follow up experiment", what do you believe and why do you believe it, what optimised discovery and what did we have resources for were already part of the object level discourse. Which is to say, the IRL dispute went beyond the putatively factual into our values as scientists with quite limited funding. Or - there was no way to organise the putatively factual, the methodological concerns, and our values in a hierarchical fashion. There was no upstream or downstream.

I read BG&E, Genealogy of Morals and Zarathustra years ago. I enjoyed them.

I implore you to release that syphilitic mustachoid from your heart.

God damn man, put the Nietzsche down and go outside.

Some people have reported that not working in the past. I rewrote this post three times and it didn't recall this second sentence on one of them. The automatic save feature doesn't immediately save on quit, it saves on some other time period.

No option for it on the back end. Can't be implemented.

Yeah, that's what it would be if there's no "rigid rational" epistemic stance that can trump all others, and travel both upstream and downstream is permitted. — J

I think the following is an option - upstream, downstream and alongside relations are allowed between stances and evidence, it just so happens that there is One True Dialectic that correctly links them. The One True Dialectic would have to fully understand how it related to all of its own principles, and conditions of revising them. I don't believe such a thing exists, but I would want an argument to rule it out.

Or to stay with the river metaphor, does the justificatory stream flow in a single direction? — J

does this stance now put up a kind of dam against any pesky evidentiary salmon that wants to swim upstream with new information that could put the stance itself into question? — J

I don't have a good answer in terms of the paper. I just want to throw things together and look at the muck they make. I think this works as a criticism of the paper, because its argument rests on making a few sharp distinctions that instead seem quite blurry. Namely, a stance distinguishes itself from object level factual claims, and that it does so by being "upstream" from them. And also it distinguishes stances from collections of attitudes toward object level claims. They're construed more as means of properly assigning attitudes toward object level claims.

In the final analysis, all anyone can do when confronted by conflict between epistemic stances is engage in a dialogue in which conflicting attitudes, values, aims, and policies relevant to assessing evidence can be revealed, compared, and considered. I submit that this is exactly what happens, ultimately, in debates between scientific realists and antirealists. It is what happens, ultimately,
when experts testify in courts about the differences between teaching evolution and creationism in schools. To add to this dialogue the assurance that “I, not you, possess a uniquely rational epistemic stance” adds nothing of rhetorical or persuasive power. In contrast, to endeavor to elaborate, to explain, to scrutinize, and to understand the nature of opposing stances (to engage in what I call “collaborative epistemology” [2017a, 228])—and to encourage others, when our own stances appear to pass the tests of consistency and coherence, to see things our way, upon reflection—is to do our best. There is no insight into epistemic rationality to be gained by demanding more than this.

The paper advances the idea that a selection mechanism might work on stances, and render some of them rationally impermissible and some rationally permissible. Above and beyond that, there is the possibility of there being a single stance which is obligate to hold {about some domain}. I mostly want to focus on the rhetoric in the above paragraph because I think it highlights something about the imaginative background of the argument.

Stances are posited as separate - upstream - from the content their principles concern, and thereby the sentence "To add to this dialogue the assurance that..." works as a rebuke on the back of separating the stance's principles from their content, as such a declaration "adds nothing". It is this "adds nothing", that portrays the declaration of an epistemically privileged stance as extraneous, which pumps the intuition of separation set up prior.

I think that's the core of the article's imaginative background on the matter. It cleaves the enactment of an epistemic stance from what it concerns, which could be read as cleaving how things are done from what's done, even though what's done influences how things are done through learning, and how things are done influences what's done through norms.

Epistemic stances also seem modelled off of relatively static principles, specifically commitments toward certain classes of statements:

In earlier work (op. cit., 207–14), I consider families of stances that seem especially
influential in disputes about where to draw such lines between belief and agnosticism.
Those sympathetic to deflationary stances, for instance, are generally wary of aspiring to describe a mind-independent world, which they may view as conceptually problematic or otherwise naïve; this leads to redescriptions of the project of scientific ontology in different terms and rejections of traditionally realist conceptions of truth and reference, as found in a variety of neo-Kantian, pragmatist, and quietist approaches to science. Empiricist stances also suggest a wariness of the more fulsome
endorsements of scientific ontology associated with realism, questioning the necessity of acceding to demands for explanation of observable phenomena (or some other subset of scientific phenomena, closely linked to observation in some way) in terms of further, less immediately accessible phenomena, thereby resisting the idea that theorizing about things beyond the observable (etc.) need or should be
regarded as a basis for warranted belief. More metaphysically inclined stances, in contrast with both deflationary and empiricist ones, suggest more optimistic takes on the efficacy of scientific methods and the force of explanation for warranting beliefs in more expansive ontologies of things inhabiting a mind-independent world.

For example, "deflationary stances" typically are "wary" toward claims that contain reference to a "mind independent world". That tells you that a whole class of stances can be characterised by their {class of} relationship to a class of claims. I say "class of" relationships because there's going to be more than one way to be "wary". The models of stances above are all principally philosophical stances, which makes sense given the terrain, but it's worthwhile to compare this with the expert witness court comparison in the final paragraph's rhetorical flourish:

I submit that this is exactly what happens, ultimately, in debates between scientific realists and antirealists. It is what happens, ultimately, when experts testify in courts about the differences between teaching evolution and creationism in schools

while keeping in mind the author's comment about stances

To sharpen the question at issue, let us note first that pseudoscientific theories—
astrology, flat earth theory, homeopathy, and so forth—are not stances. They are bodies of putatively factual claims about the world.

Even though both creationism and evolution are at least bodies of putatively factual claims about the world. It could be that teaching creationism and evolution might be more a matter of principle, but that still raises the question of how a body of putatively factual claims can ever be related to without the resultant interaction becoming in part matter of principle and of fact, thereby ending up in the circular muck we're in.

It would then seem that the stance is secretly a list of propositions and attitudes toward them, rather than a means of assigning propositions to attitudes given a context. But that goes somewhat against the author's method of parrying an accusation of doxastic voluntarism:

This is not, I take it, what is at issue in debates concerning scientific ontology, where voluntarism pertains to the adoption of underlying epistemic stances; let us call this stance voluntarism. Here, there is no question of choice per se regarding what to believe, and certainly not in any way that severs connections to and considerations of evidence. A stance, recall, is an orientation comprising attitudes and policies relevant to assessing evidence; stances are thus at a remove from, or “upstream” from, the doxastic attitudes one may form regarding aspects of theories and models. Because the primary function of a stance is to distinguish domains of inquiry in which agents think evidence licenses
belief from those where agnosticism seems more appropriate, adopting a stance suggests a much more innocent sense of “choice”: one reflecting an agent’s tolerances for epistemic risk. “Choice” in this context merely signals a recognition of the fact that there are rationally permissible alternatives, not that one can flip a switch and believe what one likes. Clarifying the distinction between doxastic and stance voluntarism thus dissolves, in this context at least, Williams’s concern about engaging with reality in a serious way.

What saved the author from the charge was a clean distinction between "an orientation comprising attitudes and policies relevant to assessing evidence" and "bodies of putatively factual claims about the world". But which contained examples of attitudes towards beliefs - deflationists are wary toward claims regarding mind independent worlds.

I don't really know what to do with this, and I might be missing a lot of subtleties, but my suspicion is that the distinctions between stance and doxastic attitudes, and stance and object level claims, aren't as clear as the argument needs to go through.

Now I might be contradicting myself, but then it seems like philosophy might be useful at something after all ;) — Moliere

Yes. Who would've thought the rulers of the republic would be reading Foucault.

Great OP and interesting paper. Before I go off half cocked, I was wondering if Chakravartty or Pincock have any writings about how one might adapt one's values, or change stance, given evidence? I want to say roughly what I understand of stances so you can tell me if I'm hopelessly wrong.

The construal of an epistemic stance, and indeed of epistemic values, seems to be {in the paper's words} "upstream" of matters of fact and questions of ontology, rather than "alongside" or possibly "downstream" of matters of fact and question of ontology.

{Doxastic voluntarism} is not, I take it, what is at issue in debates concerning scientific ontology, where voluntarism pertains to the adoption of underlying epistemic stances; let us call this stance voluntarism. Here, there is no question of choice per se regarding what to believe, and certainly not in any way that severs connections to and considerations of evidence. A stance, recall,
is an orientation comprising attitudes and policies relevant to assessing evidence; stances are thus at a remove from, or “upstream” from, the doxastic attitudes one may form regarding aspects of theories and models. Because the primary function of a stance is to distinguish domains of inquiry in which agents think evidence licenses belief from those where agnosticism seems more appropriate, adopting a stance suggests a much more innocent sense of “choice”: one reflecting an agent’s tolerances for epistemic risk. “Choice” in this context merely signals a recognition of the fact that there are rationally permissible alternatives, not that one can flip a switch and believe what one likes. — Resolving Debates about Scientific Realism, the Challenge From Stances

I think this is highlighted by how to conceive of defeaters for claims in relationship to stances. By a defeater I mean any fact, whether empirical or a matter of reason, which has a modus tollens impact on a claim - by which the defeater may "defeat" the claim. A stance is "an orientation comprising attitudes and policies relevant to assessing evidence", which if I read it right, construes stances as hodge-podges of attitudes, intentions, implicit principles, explicit principles, social norms, behaviours and so on. It's some knowledge praxis and its rules. A stance doesn't judge matters of fact, it is a means by which matters of fact are judged - much like an assembly line for bikes can't be ridden as a bike. In that regard a commitment to a stance is an enactment of it.

You could conceive of a defeater D for a claim E in a stance S as triple {D,E,S}, which says that "D would refute E in S were D true". That comprehends defeaters as relative to systems of belief and principles.

As an example, consider a study of sample size 20 with a conclusion D that acts as a defeater for the claim E. Alice is quite conservative, and has "I will be agnostic about the conclusions of any study with sample size of 20 or less" as a principle. Bob, a bit of a cowboy, has the principle "I will be agnostic about the conclusions of any study with sample size 19 or less". Bob could revise their beliefs connected to E using D, Alice could not.

You could also conceive of defeaters as having a more pervasive impact, that they might penetrate the supposed "upstream"-ness of epistemic stances from matters of fact and ontology. It could be that in light of some defeater D for E, any stance which allows belief or agnosticism toward D is compellingly refuted but not necessarily through modus tollens impact - D may "defeat" stances permitting E by providing generic reasons for updating conduct that preclude E. An upheaval of the epistemic terrain, as it were.

An example there might be conservative Alice, who would never trust the scientific use of partially uninterpretable AI in scientific publications - and thus be agnostic about the conclusions of any paper using them. And cowboy Bob, who believes in the potential of AI and does not withhold belief on that basis. Alice and Bob would react differently to the relatively recent {almost total} solving of protein geometry given their base pair sequence by an AI, Alice would withhold belief, Bob would not.

Then, the applications of that technology happen, and new effective antibiotics are developed with these quick to press designer proteins. If everyone ought act in accordance with Alice's prohibition on trusting any fruits of AI, no one would have jumped ahead to produce the antibiotics, and we would live in a world with more death and pain as well as less scientific discovery. Alice's beliefs would have hampered the discovery of more truths, and that would be one fact among others.

Nevertheless Alice's beliefs have not been formally refuted in accordance with only the logical principles of their connection, she would need to change a stance defining principle - trust AI more. Which would be a belief about which methodologies are admissible. But that would render discoveries, facts, results - methodology - as potential changes for the admissibility of methodologies, and thus undermine a stance's construal as "upstream" from facts and matters of ontology.

If I am not talking out of my arse, I see an angle of attack in the debate that uses something like an undermining of the fact/value distinction, only this case it's an undermining of the distinctions between fact/method/methodology/meta-methodology, by construing fact, method, methodology and meta-methodology as inferentially related. The flexibility that goes into defining what allows one to adopt or enact a stance seems to give such wiggle room.

Just generally that marketers are reading about the creation of subjectivities and epistemes as a fundament to their study.

What was it?

And also tending to my hurt feelings because you called me incautious and metaphysically gluttonous. — T Clark

I called your idea it. I have plenty of ideas like that. Sorry for hurting your feelings.

Metaphysical ideas don't tell you about how stuff happens, they tell you how to talk about how stuff happens. — T Clark

Yeah. And it surprises me that you believe how stuff happens has no bearing on how we can, or should, talk about how stuff happens. It's an incredibly incautious claim, that things which happen necessarily don't influence how we talk about stuff in the abstract. A defeater of the claim would be a single example of something which possibly can have this influence. And there are examples.

Physics example - determinism vs beta decay. Which lets you refute the antecedent of your conditional statement below:

If the world is a machine and everything is caused, then the future can be precisely predicted given an adequately accurate and detailed knowledge of current conditions. — T Clark

Since beta decay isn't caused in anything like the billiard ball sense. It just kinda... happens... at some point. Spontaneously. There's potentiating conditions but no immediately antecedent, distinguishable, determining event to serve as a proximate cause. The connection between a thing which has happened to an allegedly independent realm of claims undermines the necessity of their independence.

Modally though, the mere possibility of a dispute between this interpretation of a physical process is enough to undermine the idea that the metaphysical is closed off from the way of things. It's a paradigmatic case of the possibility that how things are constraints how we may talk about them in the abstract. It thus undermines the claim that we necessarily cannot relate metaphysics and how stuff happens, by providing the possibility of a relation.

In my view it's much more metaphysically gluttonous, principle hungry, philosophically un-conservative, to believe in the independence of metaphysical theses from the stuff they concern. It is, ironically, an incredibly strong constraint on the relationship between reasoning, metaphysics and what occurs.

Yes, you're right. Of course we are influenced by our environment and our human nature. That kind of influence is addressable by empirical methods. But I stick with my judgment the overall question of determinism and free will is metaphysical. I wrote this earlier in the thread in a response to Hanover. — T Clark

I think you misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that if someone has some metaphysical idea, and if that idea tells you something about how stuff happens, how stuff happens then must influence what they will believe about that metaphysical idea.

Eg "Humans always can choose otherwise, regardless of circumstance"
+ "An addict's capacity for choice can be eroded so much it can be unfeasible for them not to take their drug of choice" = "Maybe what I think about how humans can choose needs to change, maybe how I understand can, there, isn't about practical possibility"

You must not have taken a formal course in marketing to say this. The theory of marketing says exactly that advertising is to persuade or convince the public to buy this or that particular brand. Whatever image a business wants to sell, they have all kinds of posturing to make it happen. — L'éléphant

A real "scales dropped from my eyes" moment was learning that Foucault was part of some marketing classes.