Not quite―I disagreed with an assessment (which I was not accusing you of making) that Hume was merely a nitpicker. — Janus

Ahh OK. Makes sense to me. There's the critical side and the builder side. What do you have in mind when thinking of Hume as a builder? The Dialogues, or would you say he's sort of both like a lot of the philosophers that are the usual names probably will be?

What do you have in mind when thinking of Hume as a builder? — Moliere

His History of England, surely!

His History of England, surely! — Banno

:D

So I'll go back to this:

My suspicion is that (the Grand Theory Of All) provides a rhetorical tool for authoritarianism. It's the elite philosopher kings who really understand which flower is beautiful and which plain. — Banno

The danger is not just when those in authority tell themselves stories free of critique, but stories that only reinforce their authority, not justifying it so much as entrenching it; stories that silence dissent, or only permit dissent of a certain, agreeable sort.

Imagine an Aristotelian who only allows the use of Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian insists that all valid reasoning must proceed via syllogism, that the law of non-contradiction is inviolable, and that every proposition must be either true or false — no tertium quid. No paraconsistent logic, no many-valued systems, no relevance logic, and certainly no quantum superpositions.

Anyone presenting a counterexample is either misled or misusing language. If it seems like a contradiction can be true, the Aristotelian says, you must have failed to grasp the essence of the terms.

This Aristotelian doesn’t just believe in Aristotle’s logic — they’ve made it a gatekeeping method. No proposition that requires another logical system can even get in the door. That’s not reasoned rejection; it’s methodological foreclosure.

Of course, that would never happen.

Here come the tu quoque replies.

They are logically questionable. They attack the person, not the claim. They shift focus from argument to biography. But mostly, tu quoque's a continuation of that very authoritarianism - If only the perfectly consistent may critique others, no one may critique anything - except the philosopher kings. This is at best a recipe for epistemic paralysis — no norms can be defended, because any attempt to do so can be deflected with tu quoque.

Your logical fallacy is...

Are you seriously advancing the epistemic position that no one is ever wrong but that the two options would be: "yes I agree," and "I don't know?"

"My epistemology isn't 'anything goes' but in it absolutely no one is ever wrong." Sounds like "anything goes," to me

Second, I think you're also conflating multiple senses of "undecided" here. There is:

1. We personally do not know the answer.

2. The positive statement that one knows that no one can know the answer.

3. The positive statement that one known that the position in question is neither true nor false.

These are three different things. When people have resistance to "I don't know," it is normally not on account of 1, but on account of 2, generally when there is equivocation between 1 and 2 and it is used to advance some sort of positive claim.

So for instance, if I don't know anything about molecular biology, it would make no sense for me to demand that my local school district not teach theories in molecular biology. Likewise, objecting to creationism being taught in schools only makes sense if one thinks it is likely false, or at least unlikely to be true, not because one "doesn't know" if it is likely to be true or not. But it's popular to equivocate between 1 and 2 on this issue.

"I don't know" is objected to because an appeal to one's own ignorance, masquerading a "modesty," is often used to advance positive claims as decisive. For instance, "I don't know issues related to the human good, therefore we should "bracket out" everything I don't accept and advance my liberal political theory, anthropology, and ideology on the whole of society." Or "I don't know if realism or nominalism is true so we'll have to 'bracket' and just presuppose my preference for nominalism is true." That sort of thing. If people don't use their own professions of ignorance to justify claims, then I think "I don't know," is only going to annoy people when it's obvious intransigence.

Since this word "arbitrary" has come up so consistently, I'm wondering if possibly some of us are using it to mean different things. But I'm going to use it to mean "not based on any particular reasons; like a throw of the dice." On that understanding, I would answer the second question this way: "It doesn't, but if the discipline is longstanding and has smart, experienced practitioners, quite quickly the demand for good reasons will channel the discussion away from arbitrary and unfounded practices. Furthermore, just about no one presents their views in this way."

Right, so this is an appeal to a sort of virtue epistemology. Virtues are principles, so I can get behind that. However, I don't think "smart" and "experienced," are necessarily good virtues here. Consider the examples of Aryan physics, socialist genetics, phrenology, etc., which were created by intelligent, experienced scientists.

Practices have to be open to external critique by some additional standard or else there is no way to identify pseudoscience. You get all the issues of the hermetically sealed magisterium otherwise.

Here is the classic answer: sciences are based on per se predication, what is essential to things. And it is not essential to living beings that they are observed on Tuesdays, so we do not have a sui generis "Tuesday biology," nor is it essential to physical processes that they are researched by Jewish scientists so we cannot have a "Jewish physics." This isn't a silver bullet, but it captures most of the egregious examples.

But from your response, it seems like what you really have is just loose criteria for "when people deserve a hearing," or are "reasonable" and not really anything about correctness or truth per se. Yet might this preference for current practice and what is deemed "reasonable" tend towards ruling out radical critique? If we were having this conversation just 100 years ago, perhaps a bit more, the proposition that "women and Africans have comparable mental abilities to European men" would be considered "unreasonable" by many, including smart, thoughtful people engaged in relevant practices.

Hence, it seems that there are general principles here vis-á-vis various sorts of bias that are inappropriate. And these issues are still with us. One of the things the replication crises have exposed is that fields that became ideological echo chambers became very willing to accept and teach prima facie very hard to believe conclusions as "well supported" if they just so happened to support ideological agendas.

Are you seriously advancing the epistemic position that no one is ever wrong but that the two options would be: "yes I agree," and "I don't know?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not at all.

Only two? Lol. Guess we ought to tell the vast and varied philosophers there are only two rigid ways to think. Very dialectical of you.

This is all very reasonable (!), and I largely agree. You raise an interesting point about whether being smart and experienced in a discipline is enough to preclude various pseudo-sciences. Even more concerning is the point about what these standards would have looked like 100 years ago.

I'm inclined to respond that all of this, taken together, is another way of showing how a practice advances -- not by finding first principles and sticking to them, but by a kind of build-your-boat-on-the- ocean method. Eugenics or racial anthropology, 100 years ago, were given a respectful hearing, but also immediately questioned and debated. And what followed? They've been demoted to pseudo-sciences, undeserving of serious consideration. I think we'd agree that this is the way it's supposed to happen. My view is that it doesn't happen because of a rigorous appeal to standards or principles. It's a constant back and forth between trying to clarify such things, watching what happens when different answers are tried, and allowing input from other disciplines (in this case, ethics) to help us decide. Also, of course, with science, we want results we can test and confirm.

So I'll just highlight this, as probably not necessary:

Practices have to be open to external critique by some additional standard or else there is no way to identify pseudoscience. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm all for external critique as part of the mix, but to say that science needs a non-scientific standard to identify pseudo-science seems to go too far.

Hence, it seems that there are general principles here vis-á-vis various sorts of bias that are inappropriate. And these issues are still with us. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, exactly. The conversation, and the practice, goes on. We work on finding the principles appropriate to our discipline, some smart dude or dudess disagrees, and lo . . . a new conversation!

Again, the point is the logical one, that we can say of a statement that it is true, and we can say that it is false, and thirdly sometimes we can say that we don't know it's truth value, and that doing so does not, as your statement quoted above implies, lead immediately to "anything goes". — Banno

It depends on what you're talking about. When you are ignorant of the facts, it certainly does appear that "anything goes", or "anything is possible". That is what probability and randomness are - projections of our ignorance. While probabilities seem to narrow down the list of possible truths, randomness seems to imply that anything goes. A probability is probable, but all probabilities are possible.

Right, so this is an appeal to a sort of virtue epistemology. Virtues are principles, so I can get behind that. However, I don't think "smart" and "experienced," are necessarily good virtues here. Consider the examples of Aryan physics, socialist genetics, phrenology, etc., which were created by intelligent, experienced scientists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wonder if "smart" and "experienced" were the criteria in these cases?

There's something common among these pseud-sciences -- namely that they have their conclusion in the name. There is an ideological filter by which one can become this or that scientist, or one must have the correctly shaped skull to truly understand phrenology, or whatever.

Rather than a set of positive principles for productive science I'd say there are some generally common markers for pseudo-science. The important thing here is to allow creativity on the productive side: If we don't know everything then we simply won't be able to formulate all the principles that we'll ever need to generate knowledge.

We can and will try. But I don't think we should be looking at pseudo-science as a basis for our philosophies of knowledge -- we have knowledge, and we know that's not knowledge, so our theorizing about knowledge ought to ignore them.

I'm not certain there's principles for identifying pseudo-science, but there is the notion of degenerative programs rather than generative programs -- in some way a science can become this echo chamber, as you noted. But as the process goes on we suddenly have a name "The crisis of reproduction in the sciences" and we can investigate "What's this then?"

With Nazi/Jewish science I think we see that as degenerative -- it excludes minds that could very well help the project for reasons that aren't scientific. They are obviously political. Same with socialist science and all the rest. There's an identity attached to them such that there's a person whose better than others on the basis of some trait -- but that trait is a social designation, or something which a practioner has to confer upon someone as one of the clean (like Freud's psychoanalysis)

Lastly though -- the most damning thing about these is that they have in fact been considered respectable at times. So even if a science is respectable that does not then mean it is true, or knowledge, or what-have-you because we come to respect things for reasons other than what makes a sound inference. So we have to check, in a particular case, if that is what's happening here or not -- but we won't have a rule ahead of time for the invented pseudo-sciences of the future. We'll have seen some and have a general idea of what to look for -- but to do the identifying it'll take conversations like this with shared norms of discourse. And human beings pretty much only do that when they trust one another.

I like your framing of "arbitrariness," though, because it's really not something we need to worry about, IMO. — J

Ok, really? The issue is not the issue?
What about the framing (context) do you like? Although I’d rather have you explain how that answers the question you don’t think we need to worry about.

I’m a data privacy and security lawyer, manage many employees as a founder of my firm, and manage them one on one, mentoring new attorneys and old attorneys learning this new practice, And I learn with them, building a practice area that is still about 15 years new and growing and evolving. Most of my clients are entities that have been hacked causing data theft, ransomware events, and other fraud and compliance issues. Giant companies and mom and pop entities.

Can you think of something more amorphous than lawyers interpreting new laws and framing the context of new types of facts to make new arguments with other lawyers? I am utterly beset on all sides with gray ambiguity, unknown origins, unknown goals, on uncharted territory. Basically people being people in a virtual ‘world’.

As a lawyer, at work in the real world, where information is like concrete, a raw material, when things are broken, businesses are threatened, bankruptcy looming, and no one knows the truth or the facts or maybe even what the real issue is, I still have to speak. It is my job to frame the context and make an argument and represent my clients’ interests to help them defeat interests and people who are against them. Most of the time we are all drowning in “it depends” and “the answer is unproven or untested ” or “the law has not been interpreted by any courts” or “there are contradictory interpretations in various courts depending on the jurisdiction.”

In this world of uncertainty, I have to build something so solid I can charge businesses and insurance companies money for it. I have to justify my words and arguments and say “what is” and “what is real” and “who is wrong” and “who is absolutely full of shit” and “what this means and what it does not mean” so that people with competing interests all come to agreement; all ina climate where everything is constantly dissected. The arguments and interpretations I make convince my client to let me speak for them, convince the people and regulators suing my client to go away, and convince the insurance companies to pay for it all.

Indeterminacy, does not work or function or get me or my partners and employees paid, despite most of what I work with being indeterminate.

In this virtually new mix, if I identify no absolutes, certainties and objective truths, I will absolutely fail. Companies won’t listen to me and will falter, and lives will be impacted, in the real world. I only succeed when I demonstrate something undeniable, the absolute - words you can take to the bank, even if the cost creates great risk. Sometimes I convince people to pay their detractors, not me, millions, or pay for expensive forensic investigations, for public notices of a breach, all things that only seem to hurt them, but for sake of what is still in their best interest.

I have to convince everyone of the same thing, no matter what their biases and contexts or goals.

Do you think I could get away with the following discussion with all of these competing stakeholders if the result costed money? How about big money?

You and Banno have said a few times basically that the truth of statements is not arbitrary - that one statement can be true for one reason and another statement is true for another reason.
You said it is context that prevents arbitrariness, and prevents meaninglessness, or allows stating an opinion to serve a function as a statement.

But you have also said that, along with the arbitrary, authoritarian “absolutes” are also bad. That stating something is “absolutely true” is basically wishful story-telling, because only a tyrant would say he knows or could say ‘what is truth’ absolutely.

Right? This is your position:

The arbitrary is bad.
The authoritarian is bad.
Opinions have context to give them a value.

Nothing more to ask about in this context.
Nothing more needs to be said.

I will send you my bill for the wisdom in the morning.

And oh, by the way, if you ask me: “either all statements are true or they are not, but if not, by virtue of what are they not true?” My answer is, “it doesn’t matter, and I won’t answer.”

That is your current position here.

Well that is incoherent. You won’t get paid yet - it doesn’t cash out.

Count, Leon and I have showed you and Banno how it doesn’t work probably 15 distinct times and ways now across many more posts. (Once was enough to beg a reply that has not come.)

You need to be able to answer this question. I will happily address any/all questions but one at a time. Right now, we need to discuss “context or absolute truth” versus “arbitrariness”

You can have any opinion you want. But if you want me to pay you for it, it better be the right one or the ground will continue to crumble beneath us.

Answer the simple question. Whatever the answer is, I’m not seeing it, and neither is Count or Leon.

If the answer is, “there is no truth, we know nothing absolutely, so the context in which every opinion sits can never be certified or ultimately proven certain, and so the value of every opinion is as arbitrary as the next one,” then so be it. Tell me that. That’s what I am paying for. Something that hangs together that we can try to apply and show the value of in the real world.

——

The word “authoritarian” on this entire thread is a euphemism, and a metaphor. They way you and Banno and others dodge and weave around the questions make sense, where contexts shift to make any assertions whatsoever stand. Who is behaving like a tyrant, answering to no one in this debate?

We are still just philosophers, all of us literally just talking, blowing in the wind - if we want our arguments to have any impact IRL we better hope they might possibly be binding and absolute, because faced with absolute truth, people lie and cheat anyway, even when the arguments are air tight.

Rigging contexts will only get us so far, because it is still just more gray indeterminacy, able to be fire framed and deconstructed endlessly.

I would have an easy time convincing a majority of people that you and Banno are dodging the issues and questions.

I’d be allowed to treat the witness as hostile to the court.

And then the Judge would force you to answer “are all narratives acceptable or not?” The most liberal progressive judge would demand, “in my court, on my record, nothing proceeds until you answer, or the charge that you say ‘all narratives may be true’ stands. You swore to tell the truth in my court and now we see you can still say anything you want, possibly giving no meaning to the ‘truth’ you swore, since you won’t answer the question and think it doesn’t matter.”

I can hear the charges of more “authoritarian” judgmental demands. It’s just a debate. You aren’t really on the stand. I don’t really have any power over you. Whatever you say won’t change how you choose to live and whatever you do next. I can be as much a tyrant or slave as I want IRL and so can you - that is what matters not in this debate.

But if it’s a debate, why not just answer the question?

Why you analytic dissectors and logicians think you can make these arguments is baffling.



——

In the OP, Banno said something like ‘maybe you need both the discursive narrative and the analytic dissectors.’
Maybe??! That is a central issue here - wherefore the ability to “make stuff up” as Banno and Witt frame metaphysics? This is not a small admission, even if only hinted at by Banno.

Then later, Banno suggested reframing analogies as working together on a construction but not knowing the final result. This again is a huge admission. “Working together” implies something common - a work bench where we come together. It fixes something absolute, that neither can deny in order to work towards some unknown final result.

And I pointed out NONE of us like arbitrariness.

Non-arbitrariness should now be the anchor (or unknown “X” we keep in mind). We are all trying to say how non-arbitrariness is a possibility, because we all agree and have said in one way or another, arbitrariness is bad.

CC: @Count Timothy von Icarus

Seems like “in context” is meant to do the same work as “in truth, or absolutely”, all of these to avoid arbitrariness.

But we can ask of the context type limiter, “by virtue of what did you determine the context”, or “can you be wrong about the choice of context (or if not wrong, can you construct any context you want or feel)?” Context identification immediately begs these questions. Without a satisfactory answer to these questions, we are still in a world of arbitrariness. (Which I believe is basically what Count, Leon and I are saying). — Fire Ologist

Good point. We could say, "If the contexts are just gerrymandered..." — Leontiskos

I think @Fire Ologist's notion of context carving or gerrymandering is apt and insightful. This sort of thing seems central to @J's argumentation.

This is the analogue of gerrymandering:

• @J: Everyone in this geographical area voted for John.
• @Objector: But what about all the people in that area who voted for Jane?
• @J: I am arbitrarily limiting my domain to that part of the geographical area with high concentrations of John-voters.
• @Objector: But that's gerrymandering. You had your conclusion ahead of time, and then you hand-picked a methodology that would validate your pre-determined conclusion. This is post hoc rationalization, not good philosophy.

Here are some concrete ways @J relies on gerrymandering:

• @J: We have to take everyone's claims seriously.
• @Objector: But not everyone is serious. Some people are unserious. Your thesis does not account for the fact that not everyone is serious.
• @J: Well I am arbitrarily limiting my domain to serious people, like professional philosophers.
• @Objector: If all you were saying is that we should take serious people seriously then it is nothing more than a tautology. Your initial claim was not a tautology: it was about everyone, not just serious people.

• @J: There is no right and wrong, good and bad, when it comes to music.
• @Objector: But everyone admits that some music is good and some music is bad, and that some noises are music while others are not.
• @J: Well I am arbitrarily limiting my domain to music that is good. For example, I want to compare Beethoven to Hummel. I don't want to talk about that horrendous singer from American Idol.
• @Objector: This is gerrymandering. If you want to arrive at the conclusion that all music is on a par, then it makes sense that you would scout ahead and sweep all of the bad music under the rug, so that no one can see any counterexamples to your thesis. But this is bad philosophy. It is jury rigging a sample to fit your predetermined conclusion.

@J does the same thing with other concepts, such as "reasonable," "valid," "equally true," etc.

Put differently, there are two theses:

1. Every professional philosopher [deserves a hearing].
2. Everyone [deserves a hearing] (including everyone on TPF).

Which thesis is J's? He keeps equivocating and vacillating between (1) and (2). He begins with (2), and then switches over to (1) when he fails to justify (2), and then after justifying (1) he switches back, pretending as if he has succeeded in justifying (2).

Note that [deserves a hearing] could be replaced with any of the other normative concepts under consideration. Whatever the normative concept, @J's equivocal arguments are the same. — Leontiskos

Ahh, you see -- one must know a trade at least.

I generally think that's where our intuitive appeals will come from first -- the trade that one survives in is the home of a person's mind. I like to make the joke that the cobbler sees the universe like one big shoe.

It's exactly in that context that I think you can begin to see a sense of coherency -- when people are aligned towards some goal or other they tend to put aside the various nit-picks which philosophers like to investigate and try to focus on what matters to the mission (namely, of making a living)

But then different trades use different norms. And therein lies the difficulty, especially since each person's trade will feel very certain to them. It's a day-to-day reinforcement of a habit of thought so it couldn't not do so.

My solution, still, is in trying to listen to one another and build a relationship of trust. Note that this answers the question without giving particular details on how to go about it or which virtues are pertinent. I think that has to be settled amongst the practitioners of a particular trade (or, in the cases of science, a research program or what-have-you), and least of all by philosophers.

As a lawyer, at work in the real world... — Fire Ologist

This is so interesting! Naivete among those who work in the real world, such as yourself, is very rare.

Answer the simple question. Whatever the answer is, I’m not seeing it, and neither is Count or Leon.

If the answer is, “there is no truth, we know nothing absolutely, so the context in which every opinion sits can never be certified or ultimately proven certain, and so the value of every opinion is as arbitrary as the next one,” then so be it. Tell me that. That’s what I am paying for. Something that hangs together that we can try to apply and show the value of in the real world. — Fire Ologist

:up: :fire:

Who is behaving like a tyrant, answering to no one in this debate? — Fire Ologist

I have been thinking the same thing. If "authoritarianism" is naturally interpreted as "tyranny," then the ones who are refusing to answer questions and refusing provide argumentation are clearly engaged in a form of tyranny. Imposing a thesis on others without rational substantiation, and without addressing their concerns, could be the definition of tyranny.

I would have an easy time convincing a majority of people that you and Banno are dodging the issues and questions.

I’d be allowed to treat the witness as hostile to the court. — Fire Ologist

It's true. A respect for charity cannot prevent us from seeing reality, from acknowledging that evasive dodging does happen, and that it is happening left and right in this thread.

Non-arbitrariness should now be the anchor (or unknown “X” we keep in mind). We are all trying to say how non-arbitrariness is a possibility, because we all agree and have said in one way or another, arbitrariness is bad. — Fire Ologist

A good common cause. :up:


That was an enlightening post. I had been thinking to myself for some time, "@Fire Ologist seems like he is somewhat new to philosophy. I don't think he has studied it formally or anything like that. Still, he has a remarkable knack for getting things right and seeing through the smokescreens, even on a forum where lots of people are blowing smoke. That's pretty difficult to do. I wonder how he does it? I wonder if he can maintain it?"

Now I see the answers to the questions I was asking in my head. :wink:

My solution, still, is in trying to listen to one another and build a relationship of trust. — Moliere

You left out one part. In order to listen, someone needs to say something to listen to.

We say as metaphysicians.
We listen as analytics.
We trust each other on the dialogue together.

Historically, these examples were resolved by an appeal to principles considered valid across the lines of the presumed disciplines though. That is, appeals to standards of objectivity, that post hoc rationalization is not good reasoning, the notion that the political or ethnic identity of the scientist is accidental to the science's subject matter, appeals to the principle of non-contradiction when consensus/authorities in different fields contradicted one another, standards of valid arguments, etc.

If there is a bad consensus and bad practices, they don't just work themselves out through discourse as a sort of random brownian motion. Or at least, they haven't historically, and they wouldn't do so quickly. The replication crisis for instance spanned many fields because the idea was that the principles that were being poorly applied in social psychology were relevant for other fields because they were general. Likewise, the Sokal Affair and later replications weren't taken to apply only to specific journals are reviewers, but represented a problem in practice.

If there is a bad consensus and bad practices, they don't just work themselves out through discourse as a sort of random brownian motion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, definitely. Or, rather, they work themselves out through discussion -- but not in a sort of random brownian motion.

I don't mind a resolution by an appeal to principles -- I'm just skeptical of them being universal principles for all time and space and every thinker ever that has been is and will be. Not that you're putting something like that forward, exactly. The two thinkers I've named are Hegel and Marx that seem to fall into the world-builders trap. Maybe we could say that there are faults of individuals and faults of groups? Something along those lines?

I'm looking for an evaluative dimension to cross across the world-builder/dissector dimension, which I'm thus far taking to be descriptive (with the extremes serving as warnings)

None?

So falsifying your data so that you can gain fame and wealth is can sometimes good practice vis-á-vis good inquiry?

So falsifying your data so that you can gain fame and wealth is can sometimes good practice vis-á-vis good inquiry? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yup. Only sometimes. (in the logical sense -- in our phenomenological sense, many times)

There are parts of science that aren't exactly falsifiable, but are the conditions on which falsifiability is built. The conservation of energy strikes me as a possible candidate here. But Feyerabend's Against Method does a much better job of using Galileo and noting how by our standards we propose today, like falsifiability, if Galileo had been held to them then his worldview would have been set aside as impossible. The spheres had better predictive power than Galileo, at least by my understanding from that book. The instruments which Galileo were using were rudimentary and imprecise in comparison to the old instruments.

The important lesson there is that Galileo was a rules-breaker with respect to good epistemic practice, especially in his time, but his creativity and diligence are what made his theory last. (Though I think it being true helped us accept it over the various methodological problems we might pose towards Galileo's inference -- truth has a way of being persuasive even if you don't follow all the rules)

I’d be allowed to treat the witness as hostile to the court.

And then the Judge would force you to answer “are all narratives acceptable or not?” The most liberal progressive judge would demand, “in my court, on my record, nothing proceeds until you answer, or the charge that you say ‘all narratives may be true’ stands. You swore to tell the truth in my court and now we see you can still say anything you want, possibly giving no meaning to the ‘truth’ you swore, since you won’t answer the question and think it doesn’t matter.” — Fire Ologist

It is very gratifying to see this. There has been an unfortunate level of gaslighting in this thread, where the tyrannous accuse others of tyranny, and those who are not willing to engage in argumentation accuse others of irrationality. That's how it always goes, but it is still unfortunate to see @Count Timothy von Icarus, who is a hallmark of earnest engagement, saying things like this while consulting ChatGPT:

But I don't think I'm being unreasonable. If you throw J's epistemic position into Chat GPT it identifies all the same issues I did, plus some others (although these seem ancillary to me). I don't think it is biased towards "foundationalism" or "infallibility"... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Moral of the story: when the guy accusing you of authoritarianism is not willing to offer answers to questions repeatedly asked, you don't have to worry about his accusations. The charges of authoritarianism in this thread are little more than an attempt to get what one wants without engaging in any reasoning or argument at all.

So falsifying your data so that you can gain fame and wealth is can sometimes good practice vis-á-vis good inquiry? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yup. Only sometimes. — Moliere

*Sigh*

But at least you're willing to be consistent in the position and bite bullets.

:naughty:

Glad you see it as at least consistent.

Bullets are my philosophical breakfast :)

To be fair, by this logic, it wouldn't necessarily be bad to simply lie about one's position for advantage here. :cool:



The rest of this seems unrelated to the basic principle that intentionally lying and falsifying is not good for inquiry.

But yes, falsification has its weaknesses. Newton was also almost immediately falsified, but instead of rejecting the theory people posited additional massive bodies (the outer gas giants) at the edge of the solar system to explain the irregular orbits of (then) outer planets. And we did indeed find those planets eventually. Mach famously declared the atom to be unfalsifiable and the quark was derided in similar grounds, as well as the anti-particles.

Yet there is a certain sort of falsifiability that I think is a very general principle. Chesterton explains this sort very well in terms of paranoid delusions:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large... Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.

But sometimes whole movements have fallen into this, e.g. where any criticism of Marxism is just evidence of Marxism.

Here come the tu quoque replies.

They are logically questionable. They attack the person, not the claim. They shift focus from argument to biography. But mostly, tu quoque's a continuation of that very authoritarianism — Banno

Not only is this a misunderstanding of tu quoque, it is an invidious attempt to pre-invalidate any replies that might come.

You are being lazy. You are avoiding philosophical argumentation. You answer @Count Timothy von Icarus with one-sentence posts and you don't even attempt to try to answer me. You'd rather share short quips in your echo chamber, with those who agreed with you before the thread even started. There are a half-dozen posts in the last few pages that you haven't even attempted to address.

Does foundationalism and completeness lead to authoritarianism? I've considered that it might be precisely the opposite. Consider that one almost never sees appeals to authority in basic arithmetic. If there is disagreement, it is almost always over ambiguous notation. But one never needs to appeal to one's job title, involvement in practice, virtues, etc. in justifying the answer to 6 × 87 or 112 ÷ 8.

There is no need for appeals to authority because the answer can be made obvious. You can, if you really want, separate 112 beans into groups of 8. It is clear when the emperor wears no clothes. Whereas appeals to standing practice and consensus open to door to authoritarianism precisely because authority can manufacture both of these.

Consider the classical image of Justice. She is not presented as exceptionally virtuous (hard to do in a statue). She is not surrounded by a crowd who agrees with her—rather she stands alone. She is not looking to some crowd, or upwards to some authority. Rather, she wears a blindfold. She carries no membership card, but rather scales. And the scales decide the issue, not her. Nor does she pull out different scales for the rich, for women, for the foreigner, nor use different scales in each instance. If she used different scales in each instance, we might worry that the choice of scale decides the issue. And it is for precisely this reason that she is justified in carrying her sword.




This is not to say that appeals to authority, practice, virtue, or consensus are never warranted, just that they aren't ideal. They are needed for where principles have less clear purchase.

I think you're rather missing my point, but this is quite common for you -- if you can't understand why someone would say something then you conclude that they must be incoherent.

But it could be that you just don't understand someone, and they only appear incoherent to you. — Moliere

No, your position is by definition incoherent. I outlined it <here>.

Let me be frank. The fundamental problem for you and @J is that you overestimate yourselves. You put yourselves on a pedestal when in fact you require instruction. The student who fashions himself a teacher is a huge liability both to himself and to others. He would do better to doubt his own ability, recognize that he does not understand and is unable to answer the questions being posed to him, and then don the habit of the novice. Instead of appealing to contradictory senses of the Liar's Paradox every time he finds himself in trouble, he should say, "I don't know. I don't have a good answer to your question. But I recognize the question and will think about it. I see how it creates problems for the position I laid out. I am not going to give a superficial and reactionary response in three seconds."

This is at the bottom of @J's tirade about authoritarianism. He doesn't want us to take professional philosophers seriously; he wants us to take himself seriously. He wants recognition and respect without doing the work of earning it, and his various threads on Kimhi and Rodl have stymied his achievement of that recognition. So after everyone agreed that so many of those threads went nowhere and were not worthwhile, @J pivots to the general rule for the sake of his own particularity, "We have to take everyone seriously! We have to deem every position worthwhile!"

The irony here is that people see the positions of novices as worthwhile, as long as the person recognizes that their own position is that of a novice. But if a novice who constantly contradicts themselves, fails to respond to objections, fails to correctly interpret texts, etc., is also arrogant and demanding of respect, then obviously their positions are not deemed worthwhile. Superficiality with a potency for improvement is deemed worthwhile; prideful superficiality which is incapable of self-critique and self-knowledge is not.

This is all true even though the tu quoque will inevitably come. It will be said that this all applies to me. I admit that I am not a "professional" philosopher, but the spectrum still holds. I have a degree in philosophy and I have done graduate work in philosophy. I am intermediate. Most crucially, I accept that I cannot contradict myself and I respond to questions and objections as stated. And it is worth noting that I do not group @Banno with @Moliere and @J. Banno really is not a novice in that way.

Does foundationalism and completeness lead to authoritarianism? I've considered that it might be precisely the opposite. Consider that one almost never sees appeals to authority in basic arithmetic. If there is disagreement, it is almost always over ambiguous notation. But one never needs to appeal to one's job title, involvement in practice, virtues, etc. in justifying the answer to 6 × 87 or 112 ÷ 8. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, good. This is why I wouldn't have used the word "authority" in sentences like this one:

But to suppose that metaphysics, ethics, politics, etc. is not like engineering, medicine, military science, etc., i.e. that it has no proper authority, or that its measure is man and not the subject matter, is extremely consequential. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The more generic term would be rule or criterion, where an authority is one type of criterion.

There is no need for appeals to authority because the answer can be made obvious. You can, if you really want, separate 112 beans into groups of 8. It is clear when the emperor wears no clothes. Whereas appeals to standing practice and consensus open to door to authoritarianism precisely because authority can manufacture both of these. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is a notion floating about that authoritarianism has to do with appeals to authority. I don't think that's right. I think authoritarianism has to do with tyranny, as @Fire Ologist pointed out. An appeal to authority is a form of argumentation. Tyrants do not care about argumentation.

Whereas appeals to standing practice and consensus open to door to authoritarianism precisely because authority can manufacture both of these. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm. There is circular reasoning here. If appeals to consensus lead to authoritarianism, and authorities manufacture appeals to consensus, then the authority must have existed even before the appeal to consensus occurred. We can't say that the first causes the second and the second causes the first. Even if we posit a spiraling up, it has to start somewhere. I think you need to replace "authority" with "power."

More directly, as Aristotle says, a democracy can be tyrannous. Appeal to consensus can be tyrannous ("authoritarian") when the consensus absolutizes itself. This is closely related to the subset of arguments from authority that are fallacious.

Note that when @J or @Janus ground truth in intersubjective agreement they are absolutizing consensus in precisely this way.

You put yourselves on a pedestal when in fact you require instruction. — Leontiskos

Where have I put myself on a pedestal?

That'd be a rule which I agree with that I wouldn't want to do. That is, I'd say putting yourself on a pedestal is a bad thing -- where I somehow gain immunity to criticism and you somehow are more vulnerable to criticism.

What instruction do I require? What would that do, other than make me agree with you?

Does foundationalism and completeness lead to authoritarianism? I've considered that it might be precisely the opposite. Consider that one almost never sees appeals to authority in basic arithmetic. If there is disagreement, it is almost always over ambiguous notation. But one never needs to appeal to one's job title, involvement in practice, virtues, etc. in justifying the answer to 6 × 87 or 112 ÷ 8. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No one tries to control what they know cannot be controlled. Thus a tyrant will generally not try to control mathematics, given that mathematics is so hard to manipulate. Granted, we see the tyrants of Critical Theory trying to do precisely that, but the move is still uncommon. Along the same lines, we saw the Soviet Communists try to do similar things in relation to dialectical materialism.

But on the whole a tyrant will limit themselves to manipulating what can be manipulated, and fields with clear and transparent standards are more difficult to manipulate. So I think your thesis here is basically correct. This is closely related to what I said here:

This is a broader problem, in that, on TPF, discussions of ethics or politics or metaphysics are usually wholesale irrational. The current state of philosophy is incapable of addressing such topics in a rational manner. That's why the threads on logic or mathematics or reference are so popular: because they represent that small slice of reality where the Western mind can still manage to engage in rational thought. — Leontiskos

For example, engaging earnestly in moral philosophy requires being willing to change one's behavior, but given that few are willing to change their behavior and question their status quo, it follows that few are able to truly engage in moral philosophy. More simply: the tyrannous passions within us make it difficult to do moral philosophy objectively.