And I think the counter, the demand for universality, permanence, certainty [...] should just be ignored as juvenile. — Srap Tasmaner

But who is making that counter? Doesn't it just sound like a strawman on the face of it? And where in the thread do you find someone arguing for it?

A quick inlet into the problems with @J and @Banno's view is to look at where J argues that mathematics is authoritarian, music is non-authoritarian, and philosophy must be somewhere in between. Note his premise: mathematics is authoritarian!

This is the argument:

To assess a narrative and judge it good or bad requires a standard. To assess a narrative and accept or reject it requires a standard which one takes to be somehow definitive or elevated. If there are no such definitive or elevated standards, then rejection is never permissible. We would never say, "This does not fulfill some (arbitrary) standard, therefore it is to be rejected." To reject something requires judging that it fails to fulfill some definitive or elevated standard. To judge that it is beyond the pale. — Leontiskos

We are talking about judging contributions to some field, namely judging them good or bad.

Consider two normative concepts, the minimal-negative and the maximal-negative. I am calling the maximal-negative, "Beyond the Pale." The minimal-negative would be something like "low quality," or, "sub par." The minimal-negative and the maximal-negative are both judgments of badness.

What is my argument? What is the non-strawman argument? It is that everyone has a substantive minimal-negative and maximal-negative which they deploy, and that any reasonable definitions of "authoritarianism" within this thread generate hypocrisy, given that the one who accuses of "authoritarianism" leverages his own maximal-negative that is, by his own definition, "authoritarian." By "reasonable definition of authoritarianism," I mean something that is actually held and for which there is real evidence. The canard of, "Self-imputed infallibility," is an unreasonable notion of authoritarianism precisely because it is a strawman for which no evidence exists. If @J thinks that someone holds to a self-imputed infallibility despite their protestations to the contrary, then he will have to point to the evidence.

(Note that when you say, "This should just be ignored as juvenile," you are making a negative judgment that is likely a maximal-negative. Your judgment is certainly "authoritarian" according to @J and @Banno's criteria. You are deeming something beyond the pale and rejecting it, without allowing it recourse. That is what it means to ignore. If @Banno were the least bit consistent he would label you "infallible." And I would say that your own utterance involves the hypocrisy I pointed to, given that you must have a high degree of certitude that something is worthless if you are going to dismiss and ignore it as juvenile. It is self-contradictory to eschew certitude before "ignoring something as juvenile.")

The argument of @J and @Banno is quite simple. It is that <There is at least one maximal-negative that is unacceptable, and that maximal-negative is operative within TPF>. I agree that there are unacceptable maximal-negatives, such as those generated by self-imputed infallibility, but I don't see anyone here claiming that they are infallible and that anyone who disagrees with their judgments is eo ipso beyond the pale. What I see are people like @J and @Banno who consistently refuse to engage the arguments proffered, and then get red in the face when this is pointed out to them, resorting to name-calling such as "authoritarian" and "infallible." We're witnessing defensive rhetoric, not philosophical argumentation.


* We could also consider the minimal-positive and the maximal-positive, but that is not what people are interested in in this thread.

---

Modifiable meaning that if your criteria can't evolve or aren't open to challenge or debate, you're doing it wrong. — Srap Tasmaner

Let me elaborate on that parenthetical remark. By "authoritarian" @J means something like a definitive rejection of a view or person. So, "Not open to debate," is one way of getting at that. This creates a threshold at which the maximal-negative crosses over into authoritarianism. If someone's maximal-negative is beyond that threshold, then apparently they are an authoritarian.

But note that when you say, "[It] should be ignored as juvenile," you are engaging in definitive rejection. You are denying the view recourse by ignoring it. And when @J or @Banno ignore all my posts, they are engaging in definitive rejection. It logically follows that the three of you are "authoritarian," given that you engage in definitive rejection. This was actually the premise of my thread, "Beyond the Pale," namely that everyone engages in dismissal and even definitive forms of dismissal.

So the double standard is clearly evident. If the three of you did not engage in definitive rejection and deem certain things beyond debate, then there would be no double standard. Similarly, if I held that we should never deem anything beyond the pale, then I would be engaged in a double standard myself, because I candidly deem some things to be beyond the pale.

(The more robust point is that there are shades of negative judgments, and shades of definitiveness, and that even a minimal-negative involves a shade of definitiveness. Even to deem someone's belief sub-par or false involves a sort of micro-definitive negative. This is precisely why, elsewhere, @J posited the idea that deeming people wrong is itself immoral.)

Where do you see your preference for dissection playing in here?

We do. By talking. Sometimes negotations fail, though.

Right, many of histories most bitter wars are ideological, so clearly debate can collapse into power relations. My concern about epistemic standards that are too loose is that they basically just fast forward us towards the collapse into power relations.

Talking is effective for different reasons, right? You have your old ethos, logos, and pathos, different sorts of appeals. But isn't a "good argument" one that tends towards truth, not one that tends towards conversion and agreement? If it was the latter, then it would seem that we are always dealing with mere power relations. That is, of course , the thesis of some philosophers though.

I am not sure if we have "succeeded" if we have successfully talked others into accepting our own false opinions though.

Further, some of these debates are highly consequential. Consider the current debate over vaccines in the US. Or consider the example of a sui generis "socialist genetics" that led to famines that killed thousands, if not millions. The stakes in some debates are very high, and so I'm not sure "we talk and maybe we agree and maybe we don't" works in principle. That at least, isn't how things are often done in the wider world, again because stakes are often high.

A question here might be: "can people be taught to better evaluate claims?" If they can't, then philosophy is pretty useless, or at least general epistemology is. If they can be taught, then presumably there are principles for evaluating claims and narratives that are more general.

We rely on authority to settle a lot of these issues, e.g. doctors carry special weight in the vaccine debate. But obviously there is an issue of proper authority. Doctors don't have authority on vaccines just because they claim it, or because it is yielded to them, else there is never "improper authority" in cases where people recognize authority. The idea of a "proper authority" that is distinct from whoever just so happens to hold authority seems to me to require an additional standard, and probably one that is general in its principles since we must adjudicate proper authority across disparate spheres.

If I wanted to formalize it a bit, I might say that we're not advocating the abandonment of criteria tout court; useful, meaningful criteria (of value, of truth, et bloody cetera) are both local and modifiable. Local here meaning capturing as much of the context of their application as needed. (A question like "Is this a good car?" has no answer or too many without context.) Modifiable meaning that if your criteria can't evolve or aren't open to challenge or debate, you're doing it wrong.

And I think the counter, the demand for universality, permanence, certainty -- which will attack even what I'm saying here, "Are criteria always and everywhere like this? Then you're contradicting yourself!" -- should just be ignored as juvenile. This is not how serious people think. It's like lecturing Jerome Powell after taking Econ 101. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it is helpful to try to outline the two competing theses, but I'm not sure you're trying very hard. It looks like you attached a vacuous thesis to yourself and an absurd thesis to your opposition, which is pretty common on TPF.

If I'm wrong, then what are the two theses, clearly set out? And it would be helpful to try to be objective by skipping the epithets like "juvenile" and "unserious."

Sort of a common problem in these responses, the critique is invalid because if it was valid some sort of rigid, infallible epistemology would have to follow, and a rigid epistemology of infallibility is wrong, hence the critique is wrong.

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" (of course, I don't think I am either). It's not that these issues couldn't be ironed out, and indeed I think there is some truth to the explanation, particularly vis-a-vis the way justification works in practice (which is not to say, ideally).

Yet even an appeal to internal consistency requires some sort of standard. If we take the same approach to logic, we end up with the validity of arguments varying on a case-by-case basis as well. That consistency, avoiding self-refutation, or coherence is a worthy standard itself presumably varies case by case.

This is the modus operandi of @J and @Banno. Someone claims that there must be some criteria and in response there is an immediate equivocation between some criteria and specialized or qualified criteria. For example:

If one cannot offer any criteria for making this judgement, then the choice seems arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such a narrative will, we hope, be "reasonable." And it has no strict criteria. — J

@J feels a need to qualify the criteria by adding the word "strict." He also puts "reasonable" in scare quotes.

Banno's approach is to utilize the strawman not of "strict" criteria, but of "final infallible" criteria:

Likewise, that we cannot rank all narratives against some final infallible standard does not entail that... — Banno

Count keeps asking a question about criteria simpliciter. @J and @Banno keep responding to a different question. They are responding to a question about "strict criteria," or a question about, "final infallible" criteria. No such question has been asked.

Why won't @J and @Banno answer the question that is being asked?
Why do they feel the need to answer a question that has not been asked and then pretend that they have answered the question that has been asked?

But I don't think I'm being unreasonable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're not. I think you're giving @J and @Banno far too much credit. They are avoiding the questions being asked and failing to give arguments for their position. They won't even give a clear account of the terms that are being used within their accusations. Still, your charity in the face of that is admirable.

In the past @Srap Tasmaner has been able to lend a hand to a foundering position. Maybe he can do that here. Maybe he can clarify the thesis and the arguments that are supposed to attach to their position.

Yet even an appeal to internal consistency requires some sort of standard. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course it is, and it is a standard that @Moliere has within this thread. The fact that @Banno's championing of coherence clashes with @Moliere's ignoring of coherence is itself proof that those who favor the so-called "dissection" approach to philosophy disagree even among themselves about whether coherence should be applied as a criterion. @Moliere's tack highlights the fact that coherence (internal consistency) is a substantial criterion - at least if we are not to resort to "authoritarianism" in order to dismiss his incoherence.

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). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's pretty interesting! ...Not that it is too difficult to identify the problems, which are substantial, but it is a tidy critique on the basis of the "intersubjective" nature of LLMs, which is @J's epistemic bedrock.

I am curious, though, whether that reply was conditioned by your historical interaction with ChatGPT? Does that ChatGPT instance have access to your past history of interactions with ChatGPT?

(The "semantic drift of 'truth'" problem is something I thought about bringing up, but I decided it would be too difficult for them to understand. If @J were actually correct, then there could be no overarching word which captures correctness within each discipline. Each discipline would require a wholly different word/concept to represent its normativity (and even "correctness" and "normativity" could presumably not be applied to all). But again, this is too complicated for those who won't even consider simple objections.)

Truth is said in statements or known in subjects and is about what is. Correspondence is part of it. Alignment of subject to object. Coherence and validity is part of this. Being is part of this. Identity and unity will be issues.

This is me avoiding the question. Truly. — Fire Ologist

In this exchange, you're project building and I'm dissecting. You either become fascinated by the mechanics of dissection, or you resist it because you're in love with the project. :smile:

Right, many of histories most bitter wars are ideological, so clearly debate can collapse into power relations. My concern about epistemic standards that are too loose is that they basically just fast forward us towards the collapse into power relations.

Talking is effective for different reasons, right? You have your old ethos, logos, and pathos, different sorts of appeals. But isn't a "good argument" one that tends towards truth, not one that tends towards conversion and agreement? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Where do you see your preference for dissection playing in here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

First, a clarification -- A defense of dissection, in the sense that it is not superior to the builders of philosophy, is what I've set out to defend.

More or less that the skeptical position isn't inferior to the non-skeptics in terms of philosophical excellence. Both are valuable. Also there's a sense in which this delineation is quite soft, so even stating a preference for one over the other is a difficulty. As we see earlier @Janus disagreed with my classifying Hume as a nit-picker, and @Hanover disagreed upon that. So far it seems to me that the idea is still quite hazy.

***
Actually we both liked @hypericin's essay -- maybe we could say there are elephants and ravensland-whales and crows (sorry hyper), as styles of philosophy.

I could defend the other side, too, and even have in this thread to some extent by referencing Plato as an obvious myth-builder -- but there is a particular habit in philosophy, like Hegel's and Marx's, which swallows up other philosophies into themselves. At this point that's the only real error that I think I can point to that I've been thinking through: sometimes the world builder builds so large that it becomes a giant, coherent circle that reinforces itself, and since Hegel-to-Marx demonstrates that we can turn Idealism into Materialism it seems to me that the coherent circle reinforcing itself doesn't exactly have a relationship to what's real at all.

Neither idealism nor materialism, in terms of metaphysics.

Now for a proper coherentist this wouldn't be a fault. But I just don't see the world that way at all -- for the coherentist who does this would be seen as a good thing, a reason to accept the account. But for myself I tend to think absurdity is a real thing, so coherentism is automatically ruled out -- rather than a marker of a good belief I tend to think entirely coherent accounts which reinforce themselves are somehow skipping over a problem to make the system appear smooth, when in fact it's not.

Ye olde appearance/reality distinction

***

For my part I tend to think of metaphysics not as knowledge but ways of organizing the world around us such that multiplicity doesn't overwhelm. I'm not opposed to the metaphysics. I don't think one can be, really -- metaphysical thinking abounds. I just doubt that the metaphysics are real, exactly. The minutiae, the strange, the different, the absurd -- these are what seem real to me.
****

Right, many of histories most bitter wars are ideological, so clearly debate can collapse into power relations. My concern about epistemic standards that are too loose is that they basically just fast forward us towards the collapse into power relations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that if we have to worry about epistemic standards being too loose in order to control power relations then we've already fallen into a battle of power relations where truth isn't as important anymore.

Not that this isn't practical, of course -- there are many social situations where we should not trust others' opinions on things. Power is in fact a part of the world that we have no choice but to contend with.

I think that if we have a good relationship, though, that the epistemic standards come to fore through that relationship. I want others to speak the truth so I speak the truth, and when we get that reciprocity from someone else then, and only then, do we have a trustworthy standard to which we can appeal.

So rather than standards or proofs I would offer relationships and trust -- if you have a good relationship of trust with someone then as we work together the standards will slowly take care of themselves as we tackle problems together.

Which is why it's easy for two traditions to clash. Both people have done a lot of work to the point that they are used to being listened to as an authority due to this or that argument or reason, and suddenly two well-informed people who think like that talk and they try to out-teach one another or show them up in some way and suddenly -- you see how that's a battle for power rather than truth?

But if we trust one another and we want the truth then we can set aside who is right and focus on "How did we get here?"

Talking is effective for different reasons, right? You have your old ethos, logos, and pathos, different sorts of appeals. But isn't a "good argument" one that tends towards truth, not one that tends towards conversion and agreement? If it was the latter, then it would seem that we are always dealing with mere power relations. That is, of course , the thesis of some philosophers though.

I am not sure if we have "succeeded" if we have successfully talked others into accepting our own false opinions though.

For sure, I agree there.

I don't see persuasion as divorced from truth, though. How else are we to craft an argument other than to make it persuasive? Are we supposed to make it sound bad in order to really make sure it's true?

While I can see an error in accepting a conclusion just because we like the conclusion, I would say that such a person wasn't interested in whether or not the argument was actually persuasive or not -- they just wanted to have something to say, like a chant in a rally.

Further, some of these debates are highly consequential. Consider the current debate over vaccines in the US. Or consider the example of a sui generis "socialist genetics" that led to famines that killed thousands, if not millions. The stakes in some debates are very high, and so I'm not sure "we talk and maybe we agree and maybe we don't" works in principle. That at least, isn't how things are often done in the wider world, again because stakes are often high. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, it doesn't work in principle. When Feyerabend says "Anything goes" he really only means at this highly abstract level where we are trying to divine the logical principles by which all knowledge is produced from the beginning of time and onto into the future. When that's the standard of universality that you're reaching for then upon examining classical cases of knowledge generation, such as Galileo's Two Worlds, you'll simply not find a common thread through all of them. The number of people that have tried different things and succeeded is so large that you'll always be able to find some counter-example to such a giant aspiration.

More or less the question cannot be answered. But what's interesting is that if we closely examine particular sciences then you start to see patterns at least within the same era. And it seems they work in a more local sense, and in terms of a smaller (i.e. not literally the whole universe of knowledge, past present and future) generalization we can succeed for a time. It's just that it's probably going to change in the future since that's pretty much what we've observed since the beginning of science -- constant change from one theory to the next.

That in spite of the fact that the stakes are, indeed, high. There's a reason we think about this stuff. It makes complete sense to ask and pursue the questions. I have no problem with such projects -- I just think there's a lot of them out there (and this is part of the confusion in living in our modern world)

A question here might be: "can people be taught to better evaluate claims?" If they can't, then philosophy is pretty useless, or at least general epistemology is. If they can be taught, then presumably there are principles for evaluating claims and narratives that are more general. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I am mostly in favor of philosophy being useless. I wish it could be more useless -- but this is an aside.

I don't think that exactly follows because one can be taught something that doesn't have principles. Like @J's use of musicology I'd go to acting theory here, particularly Stanislavski, who is explicitly building a system that doesn't have principles. We learn to do, and sometimes we can learn how to evaluate claims, but in so doing we'll be attached to a particular tradition with its own evaluative tools.

This isn't exactly damning insofar that we understand that we can't learn without making some assumptions. But just like Picasso and Botticelli are both painters so there can be two philosophers that produce different works of art. (Indeed, I largely think of philosophy as a kind of wisdom literature, which is why I think aesthetics are actually very important for understanding philosophy, moreso than epistemology)

But all that to say I would answer "Yes" to your question, but not follow your inference. People can be taught. That doesn't mean there are principles for evaluating claims and narratives. It could be that we evaluate claims and narratives with other claims and narratives, and that would explain why it gets so confusing sometimes.

We rely on authority to settle a lot of these issues, e.g. doctors carry special weight in the vaccine debate. But obviously there is an issue of proper authority. Doctors don't have authority on vaccines just because they claim it, or because it is yielded to them, else there is never "improper authority" in cases where people recognize authority. The idea of a "proper authority" that is distinct from whoever just so happens to hold authority seems to me to require an additional standard, and probably one that is general in its principles since we must adjudicate proper authority across disparate spheres. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We do, but it doesn't seem to me that doctors really ask what philosophers think on whether or not a doctor is a good doctor. Similarly so with all the trades. I did note in brief earlier how the one thing you probably have to know is some kind of trade to live in an industrial world. So these are the sources of knowledge that we work with on the day-to-day. Sometimes philosophers' ideas trickle out into the world and you can see their influence, but their influence is -- properly I think -- restricted to influencing the mind through argument, narrative, ideas, and all the various tools of philosophy.

Rather than writing the standards by which some professions ought to proceed I think the philosopher is better as a point of reflection. Philosophy is a dictatorship, but a dictatorship without any power to enforce its whims -- at least when it's best.

And then also -- while there may be an elevated relationship between philosophy and other disciplines at the very least here, on TPF, the general assumption is that we're all equal. There are people of differeing levels and exposures of course like anything, but really the only way we here can resolve a dispute is by talking and finding some sort of standard by which we can agree. Else it's the clash of worldviews talking past one another.

The truth. Something absolute. Something not arbitrary. — Fire Ologist

Yes, that would be great. But again, the opposition of "absolute" and "arbitrary". Really, nothing in between would do?

Something said about the world, and not just about the speaker. — Fire Ologist

(Either/or opposites again. Kant?) I know more or less what you mean, but do you think that kind of statement is available for all the areas that interest us as philosophers?

More or less that the skeptical position isn't inferior to the non-skeptics in terms of philosophical excellence. Both are valuable. Also there's a sense in which this delineation is quite soft, so even stating a preference for one over the other is a difficulty. As we see earlier Janus disagreed with my classifying Hume as a nit-picker, and @Hanover disagreed upon that. So far it seems to me that the idea is still quite hazy. — Moliere

I don't fully accept that theism/atheism = believer/skeptic. That's the whole faith debate all over again. The scientific worldview does not permit skepticism of the worldview, namely of a belief in science. The theistic worldview does not permit skepticism of that worldview, namely of a belief in God. The point being that we're all believers and non-believers alike, and most of us question the certainty of our conclusions, but not of our methods. That is to say, there are plenty of "I don't really know" responses from theists and it's not like there aren't plenty of "It's just a plain fact" responses from scientists.

Theists don't walk around claiming full knowledge of everything without question any more or less than scientists. It's not as if scientists truly truly question everything.

You either become fascinated by the mechanics of dissection, or you resist it because you're in love with the project. :smile: — frank

Third option, I project build, welcoming your dissection, to produce a well tested product.

Except not here. Resisting it not on any principle but respecting the thread is maybe not the place.

This thread is about the process. Or types of processes.

do you think that kind of statement is available for all the areas that interest us as philosophers? — J

Appreciate you.

I think it’s available for anything speakable.

I also think it is difficult to achieve. But wouldn’t take step one towards it with passion if I didn’t see it as a goal.

Third option, I project build, welcoming your dissection, to produce a well tested product.

Except not here. Resisting it not on any principle but respecting the thread is maybe not the place. — Fire Ologist

Fair enough.

This thread is about the process. Or types of processes. — Fire Ologist

What I see is all the emotion involved. Project builders love their projects. There's something a little sadistic about dissection.

Oh, I definitely agree there. I didn't mean skeptic like a/theism skeptic, but philosophical skepticism like Pyrrho, Descartes, Hume.

I certainly don't think either theism or atheism are superior with respect to claims to know and such. I agree with your arguments here.

How is it uncharitable? I copied and pasted the phrases. I get that we don't always "know it when we see it," but we sometimes do. (Yet such a claim seems hard to challenge whenever it is made). What would you change? — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Some narratives are acceptable, true, or valid for one sort of reason; some are so for another sort; some for a third sort; etc. . . . [not "a different criterion in each instance"; that would be silly]. . . . If you engage in a practice consistently and thoughtfully, you know reasonableness in that practice when you see it, usually." I think that's what I said the last time. You're far too good a rhetorician not to recognize the difference in tone between my version and yours . But it's not worth squabbling over.

This is an appeal to bare personal preference. My argument is specific enough for me, how could it possibly be wrong? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Count T, I just don't know how many different ways I can try to say it. If you, or anyone, puts forward a position within some practice, and I know you and respect you, I'm going to assume that you do so with far better reasons than "bare personal preference." If people went around declaring their "bare personal preferences" with others in the practice, in short order no one would talk to them. Hasn't that been your experience as well, in whatever projects you've engaged in over the years? This is the "absolute-or-arbitrary" bogeyman again.

Likewise, I simply can't imagine a serious scholar or thinker saying, "How could I possibly be wrong?" Rather, the usual attitude is, "This is how it seems to me. Profs X and Y have said similar things, Profs V and W offer some counter-evidence, and draw different conclusions. OK, here's why I think X, Y, and me are in the right on this. Let's discuss." I know you think that out of such a discussion we would get a clear, criteria-based, permanent answer -- and I don't deny this sometimes happens, but not often. And yet, mirabile dictu, some tentative consensus may be reached, and the practice goes on.

I promise this is the last time I'll mention it, but . . . . Chakravartty and Pincock? It's an opportunity to see how this kind of discussion actually proceeds, around a real issue of some importance.

do you think that kind of statement is available for all the areas that interest us as philosophers?
— J

Appreciate you.

I think it’s available for anything speakable.

I also think it is difficult to achieve. — Fire Ologist

Well, that's a clear enough credo. I'm probably not the right person to talk you out of it, even if I wanted to. I also appreciate you, your passion for truth as you understand it. And I think my question about how you negotiate the absolute/arbitrary chasm IRL offended you. Please let me apologize. I meant no personal criticism, though I see how it could have landed that way. I just wanted to understand better what it's like to be you! But I'm sorry if I stepped over a line.

What settles a philosophical dispute? Isn't the volume of words on this site alone enough to demonstrate that there is no such settling, once and for all? — Moliere

Thank you for returning us to what's in front of us -- the nature of philosophy itself. Those who see it otherwise -- who think that something has gone wrong because we can't settle the disputes -- have a lot of explaining to do. What, exactly, is supposed to account for this sorry situation? Why has the truth not prevailed, despite century after century of what are supposed to be obviously correct arguments?

Of course it is, and it is a standard that Moliere has ↪explicitly refused within this thread. The fact that @Banno's championing of coherence clashes with @Moliere's ignoring of coherence is itself proof that those who favor the so-called "dissection" approach to philosophy disagree even among themselves about whether coherence should be applied as a criterion. — Leontiskos

@Banno and I have a long history of talking on this very issue, as you can see in the aside where I gave Banno a theory of incommensurability -- an old topic between he and I, and one which I've gotten better at defending thanks to his nitpicking.

That the dissectors disagree with themselves is only consistent with dissection and disagreement and difference :D

Instead of addressing the criticism you choose to hide from it with a mere caricature. Not a rational or honourable response.

Well, you can have some of my stew if you so choose. It's up to you.

And I think the counter, the demand for universality, permanence, certainty -- which will attack even what I'm saying here, "Are criteria always and everywhere like this? Then you're contradicting yourself!" -- should just be ignored as juvenile. This is not how serious people think. It's like lecturing Jerome Powell after taking Econ 101. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep.

Likewise, I simply can't imagine a serious scholar or thinker saying, "How could I possibly be wrong?" — J

When you divide the world into serious and unserious, you have already provided a definitive judgment. It is not substantive to say, "Well yes, I agree with what you say, so long as we are not talking about serious people. With serious people it is much different." The "unserious" is just a special category of people you disagree with, and people you have relegated to a ghetto. The "serious" is just a category of people who all agree that they cannot be wrong about certain things, and therefore do not contradict one another on those things.

Don't you find it the least bit odd that the person decrying superiority schemes has relegated the whole human race into "the serious" and "the unserious"?

I promise this is the last time I'll mention it, but . . . . Chakravartty and Pincock? — J

If you "seriously" wanted to discuss it you would.

You can intend to create an obligation for someone to stop when you say, "Stop!" but when they don't did you actually create an obligation? — Harry Hindu

Well, yes. If your commander gives an order, you are thereby under an obligation, even if you do not follow that order.

but your response was that you simply didn't like what I was saying. — Harry Hindu

That's right. When I say "Hello" to someone walking towards me on the mountain path, I'm not informing them that we intend to start a conversation. I'm too focused on getting up the mountain and don't really want a chat.

I am greeting them.

So I don't like your response because it is wrong.

If you say, "Hello" to someone and they ignore you, did you greet them? — Harry Hindu

Yes. We say "They ignored my greeting".

Are you saying that you don't have reasons to get married or scratch your nose? — Harry Hindu

Are you saying all behaviour must be explained algorithmically? I won't agree.

Metaphysics takes a leap involving hypothesis based on assumption. Hegel had hubris claiming he saw the Absolute and giving it a capital “A”.

But I also see hubris in Wittgenstein. He made a similar mic drop move, but from the opposite pole.
— Fire Ologist — Moliere

One can be too proud or too humble, and we can think of extreme examples to make the point, but there is a kind of practiced back-and-forth in philosophical dialogue where sometimes we make the assertion and sometimes we take it back or think there's something else there. — Moliere

Yes. Back. AND forth.

Both sides of the dialogue working together.

It does take humility. But not too much or you shrink from making the assertion.

But hubris is usually just bad. You need confidence in life, but not hubris. I’d say.

If I wanted to formalize it a bit... — Srap Tasmaner

It's overkill, no doubt, but we might formalise it a lot.

Supose we have a list of sentences, A, B, C...

The assumption, from Tim and others, is that each of these sentences is either true, or it is false.

We list all the true sentences: { A & B & ~C & D....} and so on. Tim's objection, so far as I can make sense of it, is that if we allow a case in which it remains undecided if some sentence is true or false, then the concatenation of sentences contains a contradiction and anything goes.

So Tim sees the existence of an undecided sentence as leading to a contradiction. {A & B & C &~C & D...} implies C and ~C, and so anything goes.

But what is being suggested is that rather than a string concatenating every sentence, we can have instead groups of sentences that are consistent with each other, even if not consistent with the whole. That is, we can have (A & B & C) as consistent with each other, and perhaps (B & ~C & D) as consistent with each other, without contradiction. {(A & B & C) v (B & ~C & D)} does not imply (C & ~C).

{(A & B & C) v (B & ~C & D} is consistent, despite including both C and ~C.

So in 's example, (A & B & C) may be how we evaluate Beethoven's music, while we evaluate his contemporary Hummel, as (B & ~C & D), and we do this without contradiction.

Tim's insistence that a contradiction must follow is simply invalid. We can happily insist on a sentence being true in one circumstance, and false in another, without contradiction.

And all this in propositional calculus, without resorting to non-classical logic.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, I do not think that you have yet addressed this. "Explaining why the distinction is not truly contradictory" is exactly what the above argument does.

And I think my question about how you negotiate the absolute/arbitrary chasm IRL offended you. — J

Maybe a little. I mean, the level of this conversation really has nothing to do with real life. We each can’t really infer anything about how we get along in life by debating metaphysics versus analytics. It’s like two people debating the causes of the Punic wars and one says to the other - how do you manage life thinking like that? Kind of made me think, what are really talking about here?

Please let me apologize. I meant no personal criticism, though I see how it could have landed that way. — J

Very kind of you. No worries.

You must know by now I kind of invite the abuse. I’m like a street brawling philosopher. Would have loved a sit down with Hume, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although I would have needed to bring Aristotle and Kant and Socrates to that fight. I can take a little abuse - and I get that the internet doesn’t always capture the real emotion involved.

I apologize myself for the distraction. Taking offense is mostly my problem not yours. Offend away. As long as you don’t just leave me hanging.

I don’t think we are understanding each other on the substance here. Life.

By now there are five other conversations to grab onto. Til next time.

Adios! And thanks for being gracious.

But hubris is usually just bad. You need confidence in life, but not hubris. I’d say. — Fire Ologist

Definitionally, yes.

So I'm not quite satisfied anymore with that dichotomy... it was a first guess from the usual thoughts.

Hubris/Humility would naturally be read as Bad/Good, and that's not what I want to convey.

It does take humility. But not too much or you shrink from making the assertion. — Fire Ologist

That's closer. I'm not sure how to put it yet in neutral terms -- I want to somehow distinguish the categorical from the evaluative.

Much like George Dickie does.

Banno has helped me understand Davidson and Wittgenstein -- without his efforts on these fora I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have cracked that nut on my own. — Moliere

Cheers. You are most welcome.