I owe more to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in terms of influencing my recent thought and my political persuasion than any philosopher. — Sapientia

I think I'd class them as philosophers too, though they didn't pursue it thoroughly and decided to change the world instead. There's a fantastic book about Marx specifically as a philosopher: Karl Marx by Allen W. Wood. It's very clear, and it's critical but broadly sympathetic. It's sort of like Eagleton's Why Marx was Right with philosophical meat on the bones (I seem to recall you saying you read that).

Marx is a writer who is constantly struggling with facts and theories of all kinds – Nietzscheans should admire him for the way he seeks out enemies. To read him in a dogmatic spirit, as if his writings were some sort of holy writ, is to miss what is best about him: the terrifying openness of mind represented by his own way of thinking and by the intellectual position into which he forces his readers – especially those who remain unconverted by his theories. This is why Marx should be loved by everyone with a philosophical mind. — Wood

As for the effect of philosophy on my life, it's definitely changed the way I approach anomalous monism and transcendental phenomenology.

His philosophical method is historical and owes a lot to Marx and Kuhn. He says that there are no transhistorical standards to appeal to in assessing moral claims, yet he is not a relativist: the world is always there to test against.

If you mean to ask exactly what facts and assessments lead him to the conclusion, have a look at After Virtue.

Yes, I did notice that bit, and I agree it's not satisfying. Really it's a different way of putting the point at issue. May say more later.

Chalmers survey results — shmik

You beat me to it.

On the other hand, most atheists are not philosophers, and we might get a better picture of things by looking at the wider secular culture. MacIntyre says we have a "culture of emotivism", in which moral claims often in effect either express mere personal preference or are used to manipulate others. In other words, emotivism, though wrong as a general theory of the meaning of moral language, is correct as a theory of contemporary use. There's surely no question that this only became possible in disenchanted modernity.

I'm a bit confused. Would anyone like to try setting out exactly why a meta-ethics based on an empirical concept of the human form of life is such a bad thing? Why, for example, the position automatically falls at the hands of Moore and Hume.

I said that our normative naturalists are marked off by the central place they give to the concept human in practical philosophy, as its highest concept and the index of the generality of its most abstract principles. This feature of these doctrines has been greeted with alarm by the larger literature as introducing something empirical or even biological into ethical theory. — Thompson

I understand the concern about biologism, but the empirical as such doesn't seem too threatening.

Ha! Yeah I hate it when people respond to my posts before I get a chance to correct them.

Thanks @Pierre-Normand.

I don't have time for a lengthy reply now, but I may make a few tentative suggestions now and maybe elaborate later on. I anticipated that most readers would find it puzzling that formal concepts that find application in experience could be known a priori. My suggestion would be to understand judgments that ascribe a form to an item of experience as being expressed by synthetic a priori propositions. Maybe my comments in those earlier two posts about the distinction between those elements of knowledge which arise from experience, or which begin with experience, may be relevant. I would suggest that only the latter, not the former, can be properly called empirical. — Pierre-Normand

As you're using Kant's phrasing, shouldn't this be the other way around? "There can be no doubt that all knowledge begins with experience [but] it does not follow that it arises from experience." That is, some knowledge that begins with experience actually arises from the mind, and only knowledge that arises from experience as well as beginning with experience is empirical. But that's a minor point; we're probably better off without "arises from" and "begins with", which are ambiguous out of context. I understand what you are saying.

I don't think I have trouble with the notion that "formal concepts that find application in experience could be known a priori". It's just that I doubt--or am unclear about--the a priori status of these particular concepts, i.e., the claim that Thompson is arguing.

It is a general feature of Thompson's work, as it is of Sebastian Rödl's (who travels a parallel path) that when he speaks of forms of judgment, the forms at issue belong to metaphysical logic, such that they characterize the way elements of thought are joined in a predicative nexus -- making up determinate judgments. Correlative to the form of such judgments (that is, to the way elements of the judgments hang together) are the metaphysical categories. Thus, a judgment that ascribes a category to an item of experience (e.g. a substance or a quantity) is a synthetic a priori judgment since it expresses how such an item can be joined to other items of suitable categories in order make up a determinate judgment. (In Haugeland's fremework, we could say that the set of constitutive rules (synthetic a priori judgments) that determine a specific empirical domain express the tacit theoretical understanding a subject must bring to bear a priori to experience in order that her observations be intelligible and contentful. For one to come progressively to master a paradigm, and thus to come to see things aright, is for one to gain an a priori knowledge that "begins with" experience. When one has amassed a sufficient amount of such knowledge -- which adds up to understanding -- then, and only then, can one gain genuine knowledge from experience (that is, understand what one sees). — Pierre-Normand

Seen in the context of his other work, then, Thompson's argument in the paper can be seen as arguing for the inclusion of the concept of life form, or the judgments wielding this concept, among these synthetic a priori judgments, yes? My doubt, I suppose, is about how and whether the life form concept is one of these formal concepts (I know it's in the name, but still), because I can't see exactly how the life form concept differs logically from other concepts that Thompson admits are empirical, such as mammal.

However, I'm not especially committed to this line of criticism.

Here's what I'm thinking about Thompson's argument. I want to agree with the conclusion that we can interpret moral judgments naturalistically, i.e., that virtue ethics could have a sound meta-ethical basis. But I'm not convinced by Thompson's arguments against the empiricist propositions, and I'm not even clear on what the propositions really mean. That leaves me either looking for a way to make room for the "autonomy of ethics" and natural goodness within a framework of empirical concepts, or beset with doubt over the distinction between empirical and a priori.

So in this post I'm going to dodge the jellyfish and look at the section headed "Against the empiricist propositions".

These are the empiricist propositions:

• The concept species or life form is itself an empirical concept.
• Concepts of particular life forms (moon jelly, umbrella jelly, white oak, horse- shoe crab, human) are invariably empirical, or observation-dependent, concepts.
• Singular representations of individual organisms are invariably empirical rep- resentations.
• Substantive knowledge of any given individual organism (propositions of types A, C and D) can only arise from observation.
• Substantive knowledge of the character of a given species or life form (propo- sitions of types B and E) can only arise from observation.

And these are Thompson's counter-propositions:

• The concept life form is a pure or a priori, perhaps a logical, concept.
• The concept human, as we human beings have it, is an a priori concept attaching to a particular life form.
• A mature human being is typically in possession of a non-empirical singular representation of one individual organism.
• Individual human beings are sometimes in possession of non-observational knowledge of contingent facts about one individual organism.
• Human beings are characteristically in possession of some general substantive knowledge of the human life form which is not founded empirically on observation of members of their kind, and thus not ‘biological’.

In this post I'll probably just look at the first proposition and counter-proposition.

Inevitably I found myself wondering: what is an empirical concept? Thompson describes it as an "abstract precipitate of observation", and this seems like the standard view. Kant's view is interestingly different. On the one hand, Kant agrees that an empirical concept is a general concept derived and abstracted from appearances. But he has another, more original way of describing empirical concepts. Using a fortuitous example, he says this about empirical concepts:

The concept of a dog signifies a rule according to which my imagination can trace, delineate, or draw a general outline, figure, or shape of a four-footed animal without being restricted to any single and particular shape supplied by experience. — Kant, CPR A141

An empirical concept is a rule that can be repeatedly and consistently applied to appearances to achieve a general representation. In this example, the concept of a dog is a rule whereby we can bring particular dogs in experience under the general representation of dog as a class or form. (Whether Kant really does identify the concept with the rule doesn't concern me now).

...whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest on functions. By function I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. — CPR B93

Concepts are active, not passive. In a certain sense they order our active experience. An empirical concept on this view seems something more than just an "abstract precipitate of observation".

Thompson's first point against the first empiricist proposition is that the five judgments can apply to things that are "utterly different from one another in material content":

The umbrella jelly, the hayscented fern, the spirochete, the human being, slime molds, turnips, tarantulas: how much more different can things get? Yet in all cases our five forms of judgment find a foothold. We see nothing unintelligible in imagining even more violently different forms of life arising on other planets, or even under different regimes of fundamental physical law. It seems that a very abstract grammar finds a place in the description of all these things, the grammar we found by reflecting on your study of the umbrella jelly. This intellectual structure is not a response to a common empirical feature of things, but is somehow carried into the scene. — Thompson

It seems to me that although there may be an intellectual structure carried into the scene, it doesn't follow either that this structure is not empirical, or that the relevant structure is that of life forms. Don't we carry the concept mammal, which Thompson accepts is an empirical one, into observations of both dolphins and monkeys? And if we also agree that there is an a priori intellectual structure carried into the scene, couldn't we say that this structure is not that concerning life forms, but is rather that which lies behind these concepts, pure a priori concepts such as universal and particular or form and individual?

Next, he says that the reciprocal interdependence between natural historical judgments about life forms and vital descriptions of individuals, described in the first part of the paper, lends support to the a priority of life forms.

... almost everything we think of an individual organism involves at least implicit thought of its form. — Thompson

To me this doesn't seem to carry the point. For one thing, I imagine many of his critics could agree. He says that the life form concept is "everywhere at work" and that we "arrive at an explicit conception of it by reflection on certain of the forms of thought of which we are capable". I think he is suggesting that the implicit nature of the life form concept entails that it is a priori. But can't one absorb an empirical concept such that it becomes part of the way one implicitly structures experience? Is this enough to make it a priori? (maybe it is, as Thompson is using these terms). Alternatively, the life form concept may be no different from the concept of a mammal, in that the implicit a priori structure is what lies behind it, allowing us to distinguish generally between form and individual.

It's at this point that I begin to lose my grip on the a priori-empirical distinction, wondering if empirically formed concepts can become a priori. The concept of a life form may develop from experience based on a person's socialization combined with primitive a priori concepts or faculties; and indeed, based on the formation of personal identity and the "I".

Does it matter? Thompson seems to accept that if the human form of life is an empirical concept, then virtue ethics is biologistic or may as well be. But I don't quite see why this should be, because describing the human form of life requires more than just biology.

Nice post McD, and quite familiar to me.

I recently noticed Peter Hitchens arguing for the use of the term Judeophobia to describe present-day anti-Jewish sentiment, to distinguish it from the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. I agree that the prejudices are different today, but personally I think the term anti-Semitism is fine, because as it is we use it variously to describe, for example, the racialism of the Nazis as well as the religious bigotry of the Russian pogroms.

Note that I moved this thread to the Feedback category. We aim not to moderate Feedback at all, so you're free to say what you like here. As it happens, my original moderator action was not in response to the view you expressed--even though I think it's obnoxious--so much as your reluctance to defend it or even explain it properly, which in the end amounted to low post quality.

You haven't addressed what I said. If you're only in the discussion to spout your prejudice, don't bother posting again.

the analogy Thompson draws between his approach to 'life forms' and a linguist's approach to language — mcdoodle

Yeah, after reading that bit the first time through I chose to ignore it, as it just didn't seem helpful. I thought I had a decent enough grasp of what he was talking about without any analogy.

Incidentally, my only encounters with virtue ethics have been with Aristotle and MacIntyre, and I like the approach a lot. Although it's a side-issue, I'd be interested to see someone more knowledgeable than me compare MacIntyre with Thompson, Foot and others. I'd imagine MacIntyre's focus on history to be one of the distinguishing things about his version of virtue ethics. But one book of his that I haven't read is the one where, as far as I can tell, he sets out his own ethical naturalism: Dependent Rational Animals.

Thanks @Pierre-Normand for a great introduction.

The paper's argument is somewhat convoluted, especially if you're like me and you're not familiar with the literature. And, assuming familiarity, Thompson doesn't really tell us what he's getting at until half way through. So first I'd like to say what I think he's trying to do and then lay out the paper's structure.

The point

The point of the paper is to defend neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism against a certain kind of criticism. Ethical naturalism of the neo-Aristotelian variety is the meta-ethical component or basis of virtue ethics, which is the revival of Aristotle in moral philosophy that began in the late twentieth century, and which is distinct from deontology and utilitarianism.

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism...

... does not involve a non-natural source or realm of moral value, as does Kant's ethical theory, or Plato's or Moore's. For Aristotle, judgments of what are goods for a human being are based upon considerations about human capacities, propensities, and the conditions for successful human activity of various kinds. Thus, while it is not a scientistic conception of human agency or moral value, it also contrasts clearly with many clearly non-naturalistic conceptions of agency and moral value. Central to the view are the notions that there are goods proper to human nature and that the virtues are excellent states of character enabling an agent to act well and realize those goods. — IEP

http://www.iep.utm.edu/naturali/#SH3a

The fact that it's not "scientistic" should allay concerns that this is a naturalism that seeks to reduce morality to biology, as we might say about evolutionary ethics; or seeks to address ethical questions with an empirical "science of morality" a la Sam Harris. This is significant, because this claim, that the naturalism of virtue ethics is not biologistic in this reductionist sense, is precisely what Thompson is defending in the paper.

The following passages tell us what he's doing, and they're worth including here for orientation because they're buried in the middle of the paper.

The concept human as our naturalist employs it is a concept that attaches to a definite product of nature, one which has arisen on this planet, quite contingently, in the course of evolutionary history. For our naturalist, this product of nature is in some sense the theme of ethical theory as we humans would write it. But there is in the larger literature a kind of fear or dread of any appeal to this sort of concept in ethical theory, and this is what I want to address. The contemporary moralist is anxious to leave this concept behind, and to develop his theory in terms of ‘persons’ and ‘rational beings’, but if the naturalist is right the concept in question is everywhere nipping at his heels. There is in practical philosophy a kind of alienation from the concept human and the sort of unity of agents it expresses — Thompson

The theory he is defending...

...might seem, for example, to constitute a sort of vulgar evolutionary ethics: a system, in any case, which doesn’t know how to distinguish a mere ‘is’ from the genuine moral or normative ‘ought’ ... And such a theory might seem to give a wrong position to natural facts in the formation of ethical judgment, to turn ethics into a sub-discipline of biology, and thus to deny what is legitimately called the ‘autonomy of ethics’. — Thompson

More specifically, the issue for Thompson is this: virtue ethics rests on a notion of what is characteristically good for a human being, which in turn rests on the naturalistic concept of the human form of life (the form that is instantiated in individual humans). But if this concept is an empirical one, then whatever we identify as the characteristically human good, and whatever states (the virtues) are identified as being required for action towards this good, can be thus identified only on the basis of experience.

And this means that neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism is open to accusations of the naturalistic fallacy and of an attempt to derive ought from is. I'm not so sure that the position would collapse under these criticisms if indeed the human form of life is an empirical concept, but Thompson takes it for granted, so I'll go along with him. But I'd quite like to see someone address this question in the discussion. For example, do we have to accept that is-to-ought entailment is impossible, and could we not arrive at a non-biologistic meta-ethics even on the basis of an empirical concept?

The criticisms, Thompson says, rely on an empiricist thesis, namely that form of life is an empirical concept. Breaking this down, he identifies five empiricist propositions to attack, against which he proposes five anti-empiricist propositions. I won't cover them in this post, because my aim right now is just to explain (or work out) what he's doing.

The structure

The way I see it, the basic structure of the paper looks like this:

• He begins with the example of a naturalist examining jellyfish, to reveal the logic of various types of judgments, based on observation, that we make about living things, identifying types A through E.
• Next he presents the empiricist propositions and his own anti-empiricist propositions, relating them to the types of judgment found in the first part, and then explains how the empiricist propositions function in criticisms of virtue ethics.
• These propositions form the basis of the rest of the paper, in which he argues against the empirical and for the a priori.
• Finally he concludes that we can indeed interpret moral judgments naturalistically, on the basis that ethical naturalism can rest upon a non-empirical concept of the human life-form.

Anyway, this post is just scene-setting, partly for my own benefit. I hope to delve into the argument in future posts.

So more like a philosophical appropriation or expression of politics, rather than a political appropriation of philosophy.

I can honestly think of no more morally repugnant and irresponsible idea than the notion that "nature doesn't contain its own cause." Have you ever once stopped for a moment to think about the implications of this idea? Can you imagine a more repressive statement for the affirmation of the status quo? The divine right of kings, which held humanity down in the shitter for so long, is nothing less than this idea. The idea that women are inferior, that sex is dirty, that the body is base, that manual labour is valuable, that white people are better than the rest of the world, all these ideas and more have found their basis in the awful, disgusting notion that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause'. It's vile, a repudiation of any possible happiness other than what is mandated by some extra-natural Idea which would, if it could, make the world itself disappear so as to be frozen in the image of of Timeless Beautiful Utopia where no actual things ever happen. It's a hateful, inhuman idea. — StreetlightX

If I may: I don't disagree with your substantive points here, but I think there's another side to the story, which is that materialism has not--at least not so many have noticed--managed to correct "the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism". Actually existing materialism demonstrates all the faults that @Wayfarer criticizes: it is crudely reductionist, it erases meaning, and it renders human beings as passive billiard balls rather than as active agents--thus it is just as supportive of the status quo as the philosophico-religious tradition you rightly rail against.

This means that a tactical alliance between mystics and progressive materialists might sometimes be a good thing, especially if those mystics are the only prominent advocates for human meaning beyond what we have. I mean, nobody in the realm of politics fits the bill.

Maybe, but I'm quite happy to use it too.

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'. — StreetlightX

This is an appealing idea, but maybe it's an unavoidable result of the nature of philosophy. The very practice of philosophy is a performative repudiation of the messy, sticky world--unless, I suppose, the philosopher is aware of this. Maybe if philosophy can be said to have progressed it's to the extent that it developed this self-awareness.

I know that's probably tongue-in-cheek, but let me interpret it as making a serious point, namely that one can uselessly call anything reductionist if it explains something in other, perhaps simpler, terms. But in saying that idealism is reductionist or vice versa, I'm being much more specific than that: I'm talking about the similarities between certain ontological positions, or views on what best explains the world.

Sure, but I'm playing with concepts. The way we tend to talk about these things might not be the best, and it may be that the philosophical problems with each are the same.

Or, developing one of @Moliere's examples, "This table appears like an external object, but is really a product of your subjective experience". Notice how similar this is to "This table appears like an external object, but is really a construction of your brain".

Everything is mental.

I just want to suggest that if one is arguing for a telos, one can dispense with intention, which has strong connotations of conscious purpose, even if it can be defined to exclude all psychology. Aristotle himself doesn't depend on any psychology in his notion of final causes, i.e., on intention as conscious purpose.

It seems to me that any ontology where it is fair to formulate it as "Everything is X" is reductionist. Depending on how you splice it it seems some idealist ontologies fit that description. — Moliere

I think this could be an important point. One could even draw a distinction that cuts across those which are commonly made around this issue: between, on the one hand, views that are materialist insofar as they deal with whatever science discovers, taking this to be independent of interpretation; and on the other hand, views that are idealist insofar as they pre-emptively reduce things to a familiar substance, be it mental or neural or subatomic. Seen in the light of this distinction, crude reductionists are a species of idealist. Perverse?

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms. — StreetlightX

This is exactly the problem I have with some of the criticism of reductionism. It must assume that science and materialism are crudely reductionist, because today's science and materialism leave no space for the mystical woo. Thus it would be disastrous for the mystics to accept that science and materialism today are not crudely reductionist in the way that bad pop-science philosophy sometimes suggests.

On the other hand, I suspect you may underestimate the social and ideological importance of this crude reductionism. Fighting against bad pop-science philosophy may be an important battle, even if it's not very philosophically interesting.

A nice critique, and I mostly agree with it. Some scattered thoughts...

A response to one of your arguments is that reductionism does not actually assume what it attempts to disprove, but takes it as a convenient starting point, because that is just how we see the world. What is evidently real may not be what is really real. So even if reductionists begin with a thing to be reduced, they are not committed to the reality of that thing, since the reduction can reveal it to be illusory (or a convenient fiction, an imaginary product of mid-range animal perception, etc). Reductionism thus begins with what is evident and works to uncover what is real beneath it. But this is just mereological nihilism, and as far as metaphysical commitments are apparent in science, I don't think it is a popular view. How many scientists would deny that water exists?

A more moderate reductionist may respond that in beginning with a thing to be reduced, they merely begin with what is evidently real and dig down to find what is more real. Thus they end up with ontological levels or some kind of dualism, which is likely not where they wanted to end up. Another way of putting this is that water does exist, but is nothing more than its parts, such that the privileged way of explaining anything is in terms of parts, if only we knew enough. And the same would then go for Moby Dick and the mind: they exist, but they are nothing but their material parts (and processes?).

This second view is more than a methodological reductionism, but falls short of the target of your critique, so maybe it escapes the charge of assuming what it sets out to disprove, because it doesn't set out to disprove evidently real things at all; it just privileges a certain kind of explanation. But how do they justify this? As you say, they're begging the question.

So, do reductionists believe that water exists? If so, it looks like they might not be full-on reductionists in the exclusive ontological sense at all, or else they're inconsistent in the way you've described. And if not, then they're mereological nihilists. For them, water is merely simples arranged waterwise, so the ontological commitment is to the existence of simples and to the non-existence of meaningful arrangements of those simples.

I would say "ethnic group" is the best way to describe Jews too, but then what is ethnicity? Within ethnic groups you can have shared ethno-racial as well as ethno-religious (and various other) characteristics and there are those who believe Jews exhibit some of the former. — Baden

Yes, although in this discussion I think it probably doesn't matter. Ethnicity can be about shared cultural, historical, linguistic or religious practices and affiliations. For this debate I just wanted to point out that it doesn't follow from a lack of shared racial characteristics that there is no such people as the Jews. Incidentally, it still does not follow if we also find a lack of universal religious observance.

Any explanation which is given in mechanistic terms, in terms of atomistic simples such as "molecular machinery" is reductionist "in the strong sense" that's what 'reductionism' means, after all. The characteristic species of claim made by reductionist thinking is that whatever is to be explained is exhaustively explainable, at least in principle, in terms of some simples and their deterministic or mechanical interactions. Implicit in this claim is the further claim that that the thing to be explained just is, despite any appearances to the contrary, really nothing more than the sum of the interactions between its most primitive constituents.

Note that if the claim is that the explanandum is exhaustively explanatory and given entirely in terms of simples, then it necessarily follows that the simples are all that is ultimately real in the explanans. I think all such claims are inherently incoherent, simply because no explanation can itself be comprehensively understood to consist in a set of mechanical interactions between atomic parts. — John

Yes I see, but we're working with some unclear distinctions here, and I suppose I was trying to cover all the bases. In one sense reductionism is a method: the practice of explaining complex things in terms of simpler things, a practice that need not be exclusive or applied everywhere. This methodological reductionism is what I'm allowing for in my post. But yes, I should probably assume ontological reductionism in this discussion, a theory that entails Street's context invariance. Thus what I called reductionist materialism in the strong sense would become reductionism tout court, as you suggest, and the merely methodologically reductionist materialism could become part of a non-reductive materialism, in which other (higher-level) explanations are not only not ruled out, but also recognized as the best or only explanations in some contexts.

"Antisemitic" is a word used by people who think "jew" is a viable category against people that don't like 'jews'. — charleton

If Jews don't exist, who is the target of the prejudice that goes by the name of anti-semitism? This looks like a way of saying that anti-Jewish prejudice does not exist.

I agree that race is irrelevant, but that doesn't go against the standard meaning of "Jew": the Jews are an ethnic group. And to be anti-semitic is to be prejudiced against Jews.

Thompson wins. @Pierre-Normand is going to start the discussion thread in a couple of days, so get reading!

Here's where we see the reductionism of immaterialism. Supposedly, the given argument has rejected the existence of consciousness by saying it's caused by other states. An assumption which only makes sense if it is taken that consciousness has nothing to do with the material-- without that reduction, the possibility of material states causing the distinct instances of consciousness cannot be discounted. — TheWillowOfDarkness

(Y)

It's a point I've made before, although it should be noted that Dennett does mean it in the strong reductionist sense, I think. What makes the immaterialists reductionist--or perhaps I should say not anti-reductionist enough--is that they accept that material basis and material causation entail an 'explaining away', just as some materialist reductionists themselves believe. Which is why they can seem eager to deny all materialist description.

Good. Welcome to the forum. :)

Assuming it doesn't win, I think we should do it next month and not bother with a poll.

Yeah it's a tag search. I haven't tagged anything so far, but it could come in handy. For example, if you write something about site functionality and it's not in the usual category, you could tag it so you or others can search for tips on how to use the site. #tips

Edit: Seems to take 10 or so seconds to appear in the results.

Okay PN, Thompson's back in.

Cool, I'll add it to the list and do a poll soon.

Reading it as a kind of conversation, I'm reminded of moments of intense camaraderie. The enthusiasm is infectious, and it does feel more sincere and celebratory than merely mocking or contemptuous.

Maybe the meme, which appears in the novel and, I presume, all over 4chan, is a good exemplar for what you're talking about. But the thought occurs that these accumulating levels of mockery, irony, sincerity and sympathy already happen in face-to-face conversations, especially in banter; it's merely the form that differs. On the other hand, what's crucial in the message board is that this honesty happens more quickly and easily because of the anonymity, and this likely generates interactions of a different kind.

For me these kinds of irony seem to work mainly to enrich relationships that are both on and offline, rather than to distinguish on and offline relationships. But it's quite true that some of the most memorable moments I've had with certain people were chatting online, that it was more than just a peripheral means of communication, and more than just face-to-face conversation carried on by other means.

Just as you're unsympathetic to the appeal to a return to real-world interaction, I'm equally suspicious of the idea that online interaction is a liberation of the true potential of personal relationships, free of the artifice of politeness etc. I know you're not quite espousing that idea yourself, but I imagine there are those more optimistic than you who see it that way, who see a bright authentic cyberfuture rather than disillusionment.

Reading it as a novel, I can't say I like it, exactly. For a start, I'm much too unfamiliar with those communities. And it reads a bit like any old just-for-fun collaborative novel, only with the 4chan and PoMo references specific to their subculture. Plus I found it hard to wade through all the ropey tendrils of spooge.

Thanks for going into that. It's fascinating, but personally I can't say I've experienced anything remotely as complex and interesting, in terms of personal interaction, as the real face-to-face stuff. So I can't quite get a handle on your post-ironic trans-sincerity.

Allow me to ramble about something. Because of my job I'm hardly away from my computer, day and night, but I do make time to go out for bike rides and trips to see places. I plan these trips using various online stuff like route-plotting applications. One feature I particularly like is using a Google map in conjunction with street view. I don't use any kind of sat nav when I'm out so I just memorize the route and what certain crucial road junctions look like on street view.

The thing is, often when I'm out and about I can't remember whether I've actually been there before or have merely seen it on street view. In fact I've been sure I'd been to places that, as it turns out, I'd only seen online. There's something about using street view, quite different from just looking at photographs, that makes it feel like you've really been to a place (no doubt the moving around is a big part of it). And being out, as opposed to being at my computer, although it's great and everything, it doesn't really have the feel of the primary experience any more. Real things are a bit flatter than they used to be. (I suspect this is partly an age thing though.)

You have my sword. — Thorongil

I'm honoured.

And though I used to be one of those who defended pornography, I've changed my mind about it now. I think it really is changing the way people relate to each other, and not in a good way.

With regards to the mainstream media, in some cases, rightly so. Need I provide examples? — Sapientia

No need. You're right, but it's a baby/bathwater thing. It's one thing to dismiss Fox News, but it's another thing to dismiss work by professional journalists in favour of sensational conspiracies peddled by YouTubers.

There is also a post-ironic kind of discourse that only occurs on the internet, and that can really become your bread and butter once you get the hang of it, and make every other mode of human interaction look like socially retarded trash, or culturally dated. — The Great Whatever

What exactly do you mean by this TG? I ask because I'm instinctively one of those who agrees with statements like this from BC:

We all need to get out more to mingle, mix, socialize, gossip, agitate, organize, argue, make love, make war, make peace--real stuff, not virtual reality. — Bitter Crank

Yet it feels a bit too easy to think like this, as if I'm falling back on prejudice. It's facile to say that virtual relationships are eroding real relationships and it's the end of civilization, even if there's some truth in it. I'm interested in an alternative attitude, one that embraces quite different ways of living and interacting.

I like the easy access to (most) information provided for by the Internet. — OglopTo

I do too. It has certainly enriched my life. I wouldn't have been able to read and discuss philosophy without it.