Here is a different approach to the same conclusion:

Can it be in any way validly justified that no ontologically occurring truths occur? If one believes that this is the case, what does one intend to express by the proposition of “no ontically occurring truths occur” if this proposition is not meant to conform/correspond to the actual states of affairs of the world and, thereby, of itself be an ontic truth? Thereby contradicting the very proposition made. Therefore, there is no justifiable alternative to the proposition that ontic truths occur. — javra

That's also an intelligible argument, but I think it's weaker than the other one. This is because it seems to commit the error of applying the LEM to justification, so to speak. It seems to say, "If you don't think one is justified in affirming the existence of 'ontological truths', then you must have some justification for affirming their non-existence." I don't think this works because I think that someone could reject all particular justifications on offer in either direction, even if they do not affirm the truth that there can be no justification in either direction. One example of this approach would be the ancient skepticism that you mentioned, but in a more general sense I think an agnostic stance that does not affirm either of the two "ontological truths" is coherent.

As to providing knowledge of some "ontological truths", this, again, is what our ability to honestly and cogently justify offers us the possibility of. It just that our JTB knowledge will not, by a fallibilist account, be infallible. (Fallibiilty does not equate to being wrong.) — javra

But if "fallibility" means that we cannot be certain, then the same problem arises.

The words "infallible" and "fallible" are often used by "fallibilists" but never by "infallibilists," which makes me think they involve contentious presuppositions. I would say that what is at stake is the certainty of knowledge, not the infallibility of knowledge. Actually the object of in/fallibility is a faculty or power, not a piece of knowledge, which is another reason I don't find those terms helpful. It is understandable that one would use them, but given that no one accounts themselves an "infallibilist" the distinction's usefulness is questionable. More simply, I see no reason why someone who affirms the certainty of some knowledge must be a so-called "infallibilist."

Remember that the JTB model of knowledge was presented by an Ancient Skeptic. If one presumes knowledge to be infallible, then this quote holds. If one presumes knowledge to be fallible, then it does not. — javra

...and since no one presumes knowledge to be infallible, and yet pretty much everyone holds that knowledge is certain, @Janus' conditional must apply more generally than you allow.

By everything I've so far stated, there then can occur ontically true beliefs which we can justify at will. These then will be instances of ontic knowledge, which is certain. Because we can only hold epistemic appraisals of what is ontically true, though, everything we uphold as knowledge will be epistemic knowledge, rather than ontic knowledge - which, as with epistemic truth, is less than "completely assured, fixed, and invariable." — javra

Well you're walking a tightrope with these sentences. For one thing, I would want to ask what it means for "ontic knowledge" to "occur" or be "certain." And why is it "certain" that there are instances of ontic knowledge? Couldn't someone of your persuasion hold that there are no ontically true beliefs, even though every epistemological belief aims at ontic knowledge?

I would take the more traditional approach and agree with a great deal of what you have said, but add that sometimes "epistemological knowledge" and "ontic knowledge" coincide, and can be known to coincide.

I'll be back tomorrow. — javra

Okay, and if I don't manage to post tomorrow then I will be out for a few days.

The truth of the proposition here quoted would of course of itself be an epistemic truth. One which I so far find thoroughly justifiable: To keep things short, I so far find that there can be no epistemic truth in the absence of an ontically occuring truth it aspires to express. Can you, or anyone else, cogently justify the occurence of an epistemic truth that does not claim to be or else intend to conform to an ontic truth?

If not, then it remains cogently justifiable that ontically occuring truths do occur. Conversely, it then becomes unjustifiable that ontically occurring truths do not occur. — javra

That's a fair argument. It is similar to a comment asked me about, and which could perhaps be folded into this thread:

If there is no pole of knowledge then I don't see how one [inference to the best explanation] can be better than another (because no [inference to the best explanation] can better approach that pole). — Leontiskos

You seem to be saying that "epistemic truths" presuppose the existence of "ontological truths"; we all believe ourselves to be uttering "epistemic truths"; therefore we are all presupposing the existence of "ontological truths"; and because of this the belief in "ontological truths" is justified.

I think that's a good account on the "game of pool" approach, but I would prefer an account that provides for knowledge of at least some "ontological truths," rather than mere justified belief. Or in other words, if we take up your idea of fallibilism via Janus' conditional:

So, if we know p could be false, then we don't know that it's true, but we may well believe that it's true. — Janus

Then on the premise that we know that every p (epistemological truth) could be false, we cannot know any p.

has forwarded a theory where all (or almost all - this is contentious) beliefs are inferences to the best explanation, and are thus probabilistic.

On all of these conceptions certain knowledge is impossible, and yet knowledge is traditionally understood to be certain.


(It should again be noted that none of this has anything special to do with JTB. The one who thinks JTB does not understand JTB.)

The phrase itself betrays its own bad faith intentions. A technical term that means something quite different from what it says. — Roke

The problem with "hate speech" is that it very often involves hostile translation. It very often amounts to, "You don't think your speech is hateful, but I do think it is hateful and I am going to punish you for it."

Another way to think about it is to note that if "hate speech" is an honest descriptor then it isn't bad, and if it is bad then it isn't an honest descriptor. For example, if someone were using "hate speech" as an honest descriptor, then Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war against Nazi Germany was hate speech, and yet it was not bad hate speech. And if someone is using "hate speech" the way it is usually used, as "bad speech," then Chamberlain's declaration of war fails to be hate speech for some magical reason that the person cannot articulate.

So the accusation is incoherent as used. Only pacifists or quasi-pacifists are able to use a concept like "hate speech" meaningfully, and the people trying to justify their hate on the basis of "hate speech" are far from pacifists. :wink:

If I combine this:

In short, when a truth occurs, it occurs ontically—and that which ontically is is not subject to the possibility of being wrong, i.e. fallibility. But we can only appraise what ontically is epistemologically, which will always be to some extent fallible. — javra

And this:

When differentiating the ontological from the epistemological, ontically occurring truths (which are absolutely certain and not possible to be wrong) do occur all the time. But our epistemic appraisals of what are and are not ontic truths (the latter, again, do occur) will be fallible to some measure. — javra

Is there a contradiction?

Consider this proposition as if it were itself a truth:

<Ontological truths (which are absolutely certain and not possible to be wrong) do occur all the time.>

Is this "truth" an "ontological truth" or an "epistemological truth"? Because if it is an "epistemological truth," then it is not certain, and if it is an "ontological truth," then your appraisal is not fallible. This is why I'm not sure the way you are dividing up this territory is ultimately coherent. You are speaking as if your knowledge-claims about ontological truths are themselves ontological truths and not epistemological truths, and your theory seems to preclude this.

If—as any fallibilist will maintain—all possible epistemological appraisals can only be fallible, then our appraisal of a belief being either true or not will always be liable to some possibility of being wrong (with the likelihood of this possibility varying by degrees). — javra

Right, and I think this is the more central piece for @J, along with what has said. It goes back to this:

The counterargument could be phrased this way:

1. Truth is always known via justification, and ensured by justification
2. Justification can never overcome the possibility of the one-in-a-million anomaly
3. Therefore, truth is never certain

This form of skepticism is a bit like the claim that epistemology is like a game of pool and no matter how good you are, there is always a chance that your shot will not pocket the 9-ball. Accidental contingencies are always involved, and therefore the best one can hope for is a good probability (or an ↪inference to the best explanation). Such a skeptic would say, "The only way to guarantee that the 9-ball is pocketed would be to pick it up with your own hand and place it into the pocket directly, but that would be cheating." — Leontiskos

Put more simply, for someone like @J every knowledge-claim involves guessing, and therefore there is no knowledge that is qualitatively different from a guess. Everything he is arguing about JTB is dependent on this form of skepticism that is so foundational for him. Truth is going to be a problem for him in any circumstance, JTB or otherwise. He will make (and has made!) the same objections to anyone who talks about truth as if it is a meaningful category, whether they hold to JTB or not.

That's true (sorry!) — J

There is an interesting meta-question here. Given that you don't actually believe in truth or knowledge and therefore are forced into an intersubjective notion of truth, here in this thread we have an example where you are at an intersubjective loss. What you are saying in this thread is simply false on an intersubjective approach to truth, given that literally everyone is disagreeing with you. Does that mean that you should accept that what you are saying is false and give up this strange line of argument (given that you yourself think truth is an intersubjective phenomenon)? Or is there something more to truth than intersubjectivity? Are you allowed to hold that although your claims about JTB are intersubjectively false, they are nevertheless not false?

I don't follow this at all. Smith is not considering two propositions, but only one, and that proposition is false and so does not entail that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,... — Ludwig V

If there were only one proposition, then how could there be an entailment? Gettier's argument depends on the entailment, and entailments involve at least two propositions. "The man who will get the job" does not refer to either Smith or Jones. It is a descriptor. What this means is that, contrary to your view, Smith is not uttering a tautology when he says, "Jones is the man who will get the job." Such an utterance is not the same as, "Jones is Jones," even for Smith.

Your theory amounts to the idea that when Smith says, "The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket," he is saying something false. But when someone else says the exact same sentence, such as the hiring agent who knows that Smith has ten coins in his pocket, he is saying something true. This goes back to what I said here:

Regarding the "false grounds," the key to the Gettier case is the difference between a material conclusion and a formal conclusion...

...Taken further we might say that a valid conclusion is different from a sound conclusion, and therefore John and Ben have reached different conclusions. — Leontiskos

So I think a material conclusion can differ from a formal conclusion, for example when both say the same thing and yet the "therefore" of the first is merely valid whereas the "therefore" of the second is sound. This may even go further and apply to propositions themselves rather than mere conclusions, as I surmised in that post. But I don't see that what is at stake is a simple matter of reference, as if there is only one proposition and no entailment occurring.

Yes, perhaps I was a bit hasty there. Though if someone tells me that the earth goes round the sun, I can demand their proof and they can, no doubt, provide it - the data exist and the interpretation can be explained to me. But I would have to trust the data, or, perhaps collect a fresh set of data. — Ludwig V

Yes, and I would go farther and say that you can see that their argument is correct. It's not so much a matter of trusting them.

A. ((¬3 → ¬2) ^ 2) → 3
B. ((¬3 → ¬2) ^ 2)
C. ∴ 3

Premise B and conclusion C complete the modus tollens. — NotAristotle

Again, I see no modus tollens there. The inference needed to achieve C is modus ponens, not modus tollens.

Second, let's do the substitutions that I suggested you do. We start with your construal:

A. ((¬3 → ¬2) ^ 2) → 3
B. ((¬3 → ¬2) ^ 2)
C. ∴ 3 — NotAristotle

And we substitute the premises into their places:

A. ((¬[MP is not false] → ¬[RAA is not false]) ^ [RAA is not false]) → [MP is not false]
B. ((¬[MP is not false] → ¬[RAA is not false]) ^ [RAA is not false])
C. ∴ [MP is not false]

That doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't even include (1) at all, and it doesn't look anything like my own construal:

(1 ^ 2) → 3
(1 ^ 2)
∴ 3 — Leontiskos

...which would be:

([If MP could be false, then RAA could be false] ^ [RAA is not false]) → [MP is not false]
[If MP could be false, then RAA could be false] ^ [RAA is not false]
∴ [MP is not false]

That's valid and intelligible, at least if we don't fret too much about the "could be" modal idea that I have not been fretting about.

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. It is stated on paper: you are free from everything, just do not violate the rights of others. Freedom lies in the fact that no one is responsible for you. In essence, at all times in liberal regimes there have always been other institutions of unfreedom: the church, morality, institutions of civil society. I wrote about this above: try to declare in a liberal society that you love Putin or Kim - you will immediately be attacked, but not by the state, but by civil society. Much has been said here about the prohibition of dissent in authoritarian regimes. And yes, the consequences of dissent in such regimes will be harsher. However, I see how many forum participants seem to have the firmware "Liberalism is good" pre-installed, and even if they themselves doubt it, they are not very willing to speak out about it. Isn't this another form of prohibition of dissent? More sophisticated? — Astorre

Yes, that's well said. You my be interested in Count Timothy's thread, "The Myopia of Liberalism."

As to the question of whether it is the liberal state or the liberal civil society which defends liberalism from illiberalism, I want to say that it is both. This is part of the paradox wherein liberalism professes to be value-neutral and yet is inevitably founded upon the value system of liberalism. When someone promotes an idea that is at odds with liberalism, the liberal culture will oppose them, and this opposition will come from both the state and the civil society. For example, the end-limit of promoting a figure like Putin will end up conflicting with the laws of the liberal state. Put differently, if enough people within a liberal society embrace an illiberal approach, then the liberalism of that society will itself fail and the laws will need to be changed to reflect the societal change.

the content of hidden pillars was revealed to me — Astorre

Can you say more about the "hidden pillars" of liberalism? Presumably you are thinking of the pushback that comes from civil society, but I am curious about the nature of those hidden pillars.

My goal is to find “something else” that would be capable of self-organizing structures, and which previous ideologies do not allow to appear, constantly putting spokes in the wheels with their interventions. — Astorre

I think philosophical anthropology is tightly knit with any political program. For example, Hobbes' "State of nature" is tightly bound up with liberalism, and the truth or falsity of Hobbes' doctrine will correlate to the success or failure of liberalism. Of course there are alternatives that deviate in smaller or larger ways from Hobbes' anthropology, but I think Hobbes is the most central, coherent, and enduring philosophical basis of liberalism. I would say that Aristotle offers a better philosophical anthropology and a better political program as well.

I would not say I misrepresented my own argument, I would say I miswrote your representation of my argument. — NotAristotle

Here is your argument:

1. If MP could be false, then RAA could be false.
2. But RAA is not false.
3. Therefore neither is MP. — NotAristotle

Here is my construal:

(1 ^ 2) → 3
(1 ^ 2)
∴ 3 — Leontiskos

Here is your construal:

[If] 1 and 2 then not 1.
1 and 2.
Therefore not 1. — NotAristotle

Isn't it clear that your construal is mistaken? Try substituting 1, 2, and 3 into each of our construals and see what happens. 1, 2, and 3 are defined in your original argument.

-

Would you agree that your representation of my argument:

...

could also be written as follows...

A. not-3 then not-2. And 2. Then 3.
B. not-3 then not-2. And 2.
C. Therefore 3. — NotAristotle

No, I don't follow this. And you'll need parenthesis and clearer operators if you are trying to transform my propositions. For example, "X then Y" is not a standard usage. You are either omitting 'ifs' or confusing 'then' with the implication sign (→).

So maybe you are right that any argument can be written metalogically as a modus ponens, but I think it cannot be so written without the logical inferences that the argument require, in this case a modus tollens is necessary to the argument and cannot be written off as being a hidden modus ponens. — NotAristotle

But I don't see how your construals are retaining the modus tollens. None of them seem to use modus tollens at all...?

The point about the ubiquity of modus ponens is related to the "therefore" of all arguments. "Therefore" means something like "Hence it follows from the preceding," and that "follows from" move is arguably identical with modus ponens.

Smith wrongly, but not without justification, believes that Jones is the man who will get the job, but the truth is that Smith will get the job. So Smith is using "the man who will get the job" to refer to Jones, but we (and Gettier) are using it to refer to Smith. — Ludwig V

Okay, that is an interesting way to approach the problem. The reason I don't think it works is because if Smith were using "the man who will get the job" to refer to Jones, then there would not be an entailment involved. In that case rather than there being an entailment, Smith's two propositions would just be saying the same thing with different words. But Gettier is explicit that an entailment is involved ("Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d)"), therefore what is at stake is not a mere matter of reference.

JTB requires me to accept a claim to knowledge only if I know it is justified and true (and believed). But that means that I have to know p as well as the person claiming knowledge. — Ludwig V

I don't think this is right. Someone can "justify" a claim to you and thereby show you that it is true. Thus one can learn from another on JTB precisely through the other's justification.

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." Now if there is no end being sought, and whatever is "adaptive" is just whatever just so happens to end up happening, all these value terms are simply equivocations. Indeed, "pragmatism" is itself an equivocation if there is no real end involved. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah, I think this is right, despite the fact that we seem to be beating a dead horse.

Or as the Catholic Encyclopedia of Social Theory puts it surprisingly polemically: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting quote. :up:
Is the source, "Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy"?

There are lots of interesting ideas there, but let me focus on just one:

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

Are you free?
Then be responsible for everything.

But freedom that does not include structures of responsibility — this is not emancipation, but a form of finely crafted abandonment.
And if the slave, despite all his unfreedom, was once held by the master’s sleeve, today the free person — falls alone.

...

What is more important: to be free and nobody's, or unfree, but in a system where someone needs you? — Astorre

I think this is on point, and it is at least clear that our current stage of liberalism has resulted in a dearth of subsidiarity. The individual has become isolated, responsible only for themselves and therefore not responsible at all. And where individuals are to be responsible only for themselves and their state of being, we end up confused in the face of realities which contradict this doctrine. For example, the "crack baby" confuses a society which holds to the doctrine of liberal individualism.

In the Hobbesian mindset the only foundational agent other than the individual is the state, and the only rights bestowed upon the individual by any other agent are bestowed by the state. Thus in the modern liberal mindset the only one which truly owes us obligations—the only "master"—is the liberal state. Thus one must either reason from what one receives from the state to what one is owed (i.e. "The state gave me bread therefore I was/am owed bread by the state"), or one must reason from what one is owed to what one is owed by the state (i.e. "I have a right to X, therefore it is the state and only the state which must fulfill this right").

This unnatural situation where there is only the agent of the individual and the agent of the state results in a lack of natural intermediate and subsidiary institutions and associations by which rights and duties are generated among social animals. Instead of assuming that every right must be fulfilled by the state, a non-liberal society is much more apt to assume that some rights are fulfilled by subsidiary institutions, such as the spouse, or the family, or the community, or the polis. Or in the case you give, one would look to the "master."

This discussion can go nowhere I believe because of a basic difference in our metaphysical logic. — apokrisis

The strawmen abound. I've already explained why this is a misconstrual in places like this:

Throughout there seems to be a kind of equivocation, where you eschew the terms "good" and "bad" by claiming that an optimal mixture of both is what is needed, but then you don't seem to notice that what is actually good on that account is the optimal mixture. Don't you agree that the optimal mixture or balance is good, and that the ordering is bad to the extent that it deviates from this optimal balance? This is why I think Count Timothy von Icarus' objection cuts deeper than you realize, for it applies also at this new level of good-as-balance. If I am right and you have your own conception of what is good and what is bad, then acknowledging this would help put us on the same page and would help us appreciate a common criterion. — Leontiskos

Or that "balance" approaches are fine, but not unique:

I also find that "balance" approaches tend to be almost indistinguishable from other robust approaches in practice. For example, I think you will end up appealing to the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, just in a roundabout way. The question is then whether the simplification is helpful: whether pragmatism prefers that humans conceive of an ur-cause or not. — Leontiskos

If you are aiming at balance, then for you balance is good. You can't just keep avoiding that fact and claiming that good/bad divisions must be avoided. Once it is recognized that balance is good, then one will want to ask why it is good, or what it means for it to be good.

My central objection is that survival-based poles lack explanatory power. It's as if you think that shades of grey are all that is needed to explain the world, and I think we need colors. I think that the explanadum of human social reality is more complex and robust than survival-based poles are able to account for, and that a unified survival-theory is therefore an oversimplification. Your account literally reads to me like the very Protestant Occasionalism that you so often project onto your interlocutors, with a tidy Ur-cause that accounts for everything. ...With that objection and one or two others aside, I see nothing overly wrong with a "balance" approach to ethics or metaphysics. Such is soundly Aristotelian.

Yet you are also saying that I do not properly understand how great your semiotic-evolutionary theory really is. And that may be. Maybe you really are able to explain all of the diversity of human social realities with one unified theory, and I just don't understand that theory well enough to see it. That's possible, but I have no reason to believe it, and the reason this discussion can go nowhere is because your esoteric theory is opaque to those who have not spent a large amount of time with it.

You are right that there is at least one sense in which justification and truth rise or fall together. But Gettier's argument assumes that they do not, that is, that it is possible to be justified in believing that p and for p to be false. — Ludwig V

Well, I think Gettier creates a strange division between justification and truth, but the Gettier cases I am familiar with involve a proposition that is true, not false.

But if I'm evaluating whether someone knows that p, I must make my own evaluation of the truth or falsity of p, — Ludwig V

Yes, quite right.

This has the awkward consequence that I can never learn anything from anyone else. — Ludwig V

Why think that?

---

Q1. Do I have knowledge of X (a proposition)? — J

Again, that's not what JTB is for. It doesn't give you a recipe for knowledge, and it is not primarily meant to allow you to see if your own beliefs constitute knowledge. If one thought that JTB was meant to allow you to see if your own beliefs constitute knowledge, then the T and the B would be otiose, as you keep saying.

what use is JTB if it can't show us how to tell whether we know something or not? — J

Right, because if something can't show us how to answer your pet question then it must be of no use at all. :roll:

I agree with Leon, but then, because of the possibility of error, what is happening when we think we know something but we do not? Wouldn’t we have to be able to separate J, T or B from the others to think we know something when in fact what we know is missing J, T or B? Or are all three destroyed, along with K, when we are in error? — Fire Ologist

I think the first thing is this:

JFB fails the test for knowledge, and we know P is F rather than T due to a "justification," namely a justification separate from the particular J in JFB. If someone offers a claim and we have no reason to believe it is false, then we cannot claim that it is false (i.e. not true). — Leontiskos

So on JTB we will only know we have failed when we know that one of the three conditions is absent. And we cannot know that T is absent unless we know that the knowledge-claim is not true. And we cannot know that the knowledge-claim is not true if we are not justified in so knowing, which means that we must have reasons or grounds (whether or not we can articulate them). More simply, it means that knowledge-claims are never invalidated except in light of some other, opposed knowledge-claim. So contrary to @J's thinking, one would never know or even claim that T is absent without reasoning/justification.

This means that if John claims that Ben's knowledge-claim is false, there is the presupposition that John's claim involves JTB. John believes Ben's knowledge-claim is false; it is true that Ben's knowledge-claim is false; and Ben has the proper justification for knowing that Ben's knowledge-claim is false. Nowhere arises the idea that John must know whether Ben's knowledge-claim is true or false apart from justification (or belief, for that matter).

Or are all three destroyed, along with K, when we are in error? — Fire Ologist

I don't see how belief would be destroyed, but there is at least one sense in which justification and truth rise or fall together. But that gets us back to @Sam26's questions about Gettier's objection.

how are we supposed to use JTB as a test for knowledge? — J

Is that what JTB is for? — Srap Tasmaner

What is JTB for?

It is not a "test" in the sense that we have a machine that allows us to practically run any knowledge-claim through it and know in fact whether it is or is not knowledge.

But it is at the very least supposed to provide a set of three necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.

@J's objection could be that the T in JTB is otiose, but this is obviously false. The objection could also be premised on the idea that JTB is a kind of automatic knowledge-testing machine and that J, T, and B are three separate and reliably verifiable properties of every knowledge-claim. This is also false, as is the sub-idea that the three properties are supposed to be separable: as if we could have knowledge of each of them separate from the others.

JTB is a tripartite schema, which means that the three components are not separable vis-a-vis knowledge. Beyond that, every epistemological approach will fail to provide a knowledge-guarantee-machine. If one is looking for a knowledge-guarantee-machine, then it is not only JTB that will let them down.

"The T in JTB is dependent on P's being true" -- yes, but if we don't ask "How can I know this?" then I don't understand how we'd ever be able to use T in JTB. — J

Again, if you think the T in JTB can be known apart from the J and the B then you have rejected the JTB account. You have claimed that there is knowledge apart from J and B.

JTB proposes that only true propositions can be known, AND that there is a way to determine truth apart from justifications. — J

If JTB thought there were a way to know truth apart from justification, then there would be no J in JTB. You are effectively objecting to a 'T' account of knowledge, not a 'JTB' account of knowledge.

You are still doing your "JTB as a recipe for knowledge-cakes," noted from my very first post.

So if we can't determine T in some way independent of J, how are we supposed to use JTB as a test for knowledge? — J

JFB fails the test for knowledge, and we know P is F rather than T due to a "justification," namely a justification separate from the particular J in JFB. If someone offers a claim and we have no reason to believe it is false, then we cannot claim that it is false (i.e. not true).

You are always searching for a magic bullet that will allow us to get behind the scenes and infallibly distinguish JTB from JFB according to some "God's-eye view." There isn't one, but that doesn't mean JTB is incoherent.

(The trouble is that you hijack every epistemological discussion and make it about this pet question of yours, in much the same way that an atheist will hijack every theological discussion and make it about the existence of God.)

My point in these last few comments is just that MT is not an instance of MP metalogically. — NotAristotle

I continue to think that modus ponens is always operating metalogically:

Yes, but I think that all arguments are, structurally, modus ponens. This goes back to the earlier point about whether all arguments are modus ponens, or whether all arguments utilize a material conditional. Tones is claiming that the metalogical inference uses a material conditional, and is not merely a modus ponens, and that this is why he thinks inconsistent premises automatically* make an argument valid [whereas I think a mere modus ponens is at play]. — Leontiskos

The initial argument I forwarded... — NotAristotle

Which was this:

1. If MP could be false, then RAA could be false.
2. But RAA is not false.
3. Therefore neither is MP. — NotAristotle

The initial argument I forwarded would, I think, be more like:
[If] 1 and 2 then not 1.
1 and 2.
Therefore not 1. — NotAristotle

The most obvious problem is that you seem to be misrepresenting your own argument. Your argument is a modus tollens that metalogically comes to this modus ponens:

• If 1 and 2, then not [antecedent of 1]
• 1 and 2
• Therefore, not [antecedent of 1]

You are mixing up the antecedent of 1 with 1 itself. But I think my phrasing is preferable since there really is a 3 in the object-level argument, namely the conclusion. The conclusion is not reducible to the premises, and neither is it "not 1." Once we recognize that the conclusion, namely 3, is the same as "not [antecedent of 1]," we see that the two construals are identical, and that both utilize modus ponens.

I still agree with what I said about the metalogical question .


* Note that we could generalize the form of this modus ponens representation of modus tollens:

• If [conditional] and [negation of conditional's consequent], then [negation of conditional's antecedent]
• [Conditional] and [negation of conditional's consequent]
• Therefore, [negation of conditional's antecedent]

(Edit: for the root issue, see my post <here>. If someone like Tones thinks RAA equally entails two completely different conclusions and makes no recourse to explosion, then I think it is obvious that what I have said about RAA is correct. Namely: The RAA inference is not as metalogically secure as the modus ponens inference, and the introduction of something which can be construed as semantically equivalent to Falsum helps show this.)

So, if we know p could be false, then we don't know that it's true — Janus

This is correct, and it is the crux. Someone like @J thinks that for every proposition or claim, we know that it could be false (and therefore we cannot know that any proposition is true). Put differently, @J thinks that every belief should include the caveat, "This could be false."

"Could have been" is a different question. You are asking the more central question, which is, "Could be false."

When Aristotle talks about this he basically talks about the possible alternatives, where the case where we know there are no possible alternatives is a case of proper knowledge. Thus if we know that something could be false then we do not have proper knowledge that it is true (scientia).

Being trapped within the ‘dead’ past and imagined future are of a piece with being stuck within the punctual ‘now’. — Joshs

Yeah, that's well said. :up:

the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (trying to pronounce that name might produce a flow state.) — Wayfarer

:lol:

A question remains though― what use is something's being true if we don't know it. — Janus

Well we could ask whether the 'T' in JTB is "accessible" truth or "inaccessible" truth. Isn't it pretty obvious that it is "accessible" truth? Or is there some JTB proponent I am unaware of who thinks "inaccessible" truths are per se important and also central to the JTB approach?

Again, the JTB approach does not claim that truths are known independently of justification and belief. The whole point of JTB is that nothing is known independently of justification and belief.

(This is why 's concern that one must be able to explain why X is true without giving any justification is a kind of ignoratio elenchus.)

No. I said IBEs are usually the best we can do. — Relativist

Right, but over and over I have been inquiring into whether there is anything other than IBEs, and over and over you keep shying away from that point.

For example:

Here are some questions about which rational answers can be given (IBEs), but the answers do not constitute knowledge:

...

Is my name actually "Fred"? — Relativist

Earlier you gave this as an example of knowledge that is not an IBE, and now it is an IBE and not knowledge.

So it looks like you hold that there is no knowledge; only IBEs. That's what I've been pointing up from the beginning.

But JTB is not about what makes something true, but how I can say I know it to be true. — J

No, that's not right. JTB is not meant to provide you with a recipe for knowledge-cakes. JTB is a descriptive theory, not a normative theory. It is something like an attempt at a definition of knowledge, not an attempt at a recipe for knowledge. It is a set of conditions that is supposed to track when knowledge is present, not a strategy for gaining knowledge.

Like, someone cannot sit down and say, "Ah, I have ten minutes to spare. I'm going to get me some knowledge. I'm going to know that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. So for 'true' I will ask ChatGPT. Check. It is true that Jupiter is the largest planet. Now I need to check the justification box, so I'll look up some arguments for the idea. Check. Now I need to believe it. I think I do believe it, but to make sure I'm going to sit here and repeat to myself the mantra, 'I believe Jupiter is the largest planet, I believe Jupiter is the largest planet...' Okay, well it looks like I now know that Jupiter is the largest planet, given that I have checked all three boxes. Four minutes to spare... what else should I learn today?"

JTB creates so much confusion that I think it may be more trouble than it's worth.

I have to be able to be justified yet wrong. — J

The problem is that you want to make sound justification and unsound justification identical, as if they were the same thing, as if they were interchangeable. You are assuming that the 'J' signifies justification regardless of whether that justification is sound or unsound. You want to say that the person who is justified yet wrong is justified with the same justification of the person who is justified and therefore right.

The crux is that, following Sam26's thought, there needs to be some space between justification and truth in order for JTB to really be a three-legged tripod. — J

...And you think that if we distinguish between sound justification and unsound justification then there is no difference between 'J' and 'T', which is incorrect. This goes back to the "three separate ingredients" strawman.

Aristotle is rather precise on this point in the second chapter of the Posterior Analytics, where he says that scientia proper requires that one knows the explanation for the thing in question. One must know what explains it; why it came to be. One must not merely have an explanation that incidentally lines up with some particular aspect of its existence. One must have more than an unsound argument with a true conclusion in order to have demonstrative knowledge. If one's understanding of 'J' does not take these distinctions into account then they will not be able to make JTB workable.

This is why I see the Gettier literature as a long detour. It multiplies refinements to patch a problem that dissolves once we keep the standard for justification strong. By “strong” I mean publicly checkable, defeater-sensitive, and free of false grounds. If a justification fails those checks, it does not count as justification. Once that is clear, Gettier’s cases lose their force: they are examples not of knowledge, but of its counterfeit—instances where someone takes themselves to know but does not in fact know. — Sam26

I think Gettier would just provide you with a case where the erroneous clock is publicly checkable and defeater-sensitive. For example: a case where multiple public clocks are all simultaneously erroneous.

Regarding the "false grounds," the key to the Gettier case is the difference between a material conclusion and a formal conclusion. So suppose we have two different cases:

Case 1:

J1. John looks at his clock which reads "2:00."
J2. John assumes that his clock is working but in fact it is not.
J3. John infers that it is in fact 2:00.
4. It is, objectively, 2:00.

Case 2:

B1. Ben looks at his clock which reads "2:00."
B2. Ben assumes that his clock is working.
B3. Ben infers that it is in fact 2:00.
4. It is, objectively, 2:00.

Case 1 and case 2 are identical except for the second proposition, and the Gettier case turns on the premise that knowledge should not be able to be had by accident or by sheer luck.

When I say "material" vs. "formal" conclusion I mean that both arguments "reach" (4) in a material sense, but only Ben reaches it in a formal sense. If we conceive of (4) as a kind of goalpost that someone must reach, and it doesn't matter how he reached it, then John has reached it. But if we conceive of (4) as a goalpost that someone must reach, and the reaching of which depends upon the means by which they arrived, then John has not reached it given the means in question. John has reached (4) materially but not formally, whereas Ben has reached it both materially and formally. ...Taken further we might say that a valid conclusion is different from a sound conclusion, and therefore John and Ben have reached different conclusions.

The same thing applies to propositions more generally, including J3 and B3.

I think what the Gettier case shows is that there are at least some conclusions which are material rather than formal, and knowledge of these conclusions is never certain. But his point isn't applicable to justification tout court. It is only applicable to those situations in which luck or accident plays a role. ...Of course the skeptic will argue that luck and accident play a role in every situation (i.e. that every conclusion is material), and that seems to be the crux.

The so-called “Gettier problem” rests on a sleight of hand. It trades on the difference between thinking one is justified and actually being justified. — Sam26

We could construe it as saying that every valid justification can be unsound, and that we can only know that a justification is valid, not sound. Such a perspective might simply argue that not all unsound reasoning has defeaters.

That's what the J is meant to capture, and it leaves room for epistemic bad luck, where your belief turns out false but anyone would have formed the same belief, and it was a one in a million chance that in this case the evidence misled you. — Srap Tasmaner

The counterargument could be phrased this way:

1. Truth is always known via justification, and ensured by justification
2. Justification can never overcome the possibility of the one-in-a-million anomaly
3. Therefore, truth is never certain

This form of skepticism is a bit like the claim that epistemology is like a game of pool and no matter how good you are, there is always a chance that your shot will not pocket the 9-ball. Accidental contingencies are always involved, and therefore the best one can hope for is a good probability (or an ). Such a skeptic would say, "The only way to guarantee that the 9-ball is pocketed would be to pick it up with your own hand and place it into the pocket directly, but that would be cheating."

namely whether the T in JTB is doing any useful work. — J

There are some folk on TPF who do not actually believe in truth or knowledge, and you are the foremost. This has been pointed out quite a few times. So it's no coincidence that you wonder whether "the T in JTB" is doing any useful work, or, "When do I ever know something...?"

This is related to a recent discussion with @Relativist:

If one locks the subject within their own beliefs, then knowledge is impossible. — Leontiskos

The other question has to do with the modern move where the subject is cut off from reality by fiat of premise. For example, if we can never get beyond our attitudes and make truth- and knowledge-claims that are not merely belief- or attitude-claims, then of course a kind of Cartesian skepticism will obtain. If every knowledge-claim is rewritten as a matter of the subject's attitude or nominalistic beliefs, then realism has been denied a hearing. — Leontiskos

-

The objection to JTB seems to be this:

<JTB means that there are three independent ingredients to knowledge, and once we have harvested all three we will be able to bake the knowledge cake. So we go find our Justification, and we go find our Truth, and we go find our Belief, and then we put them together in our mixing bowl, mix, and bake. Voila! We have knowledge. But where does Truth exist in isolation? Or Justification? Or Belief? They don't exist in isolation, to be harvested at will; therefore JTB fails.>

...That's a pretty wild understanding of JTB. The whole notion is incoherent, given that it presupposes that one can have knowledge of J independently of T and B (and knowledge of T independently of J and B, and knowledge of B independently of J and T). The "three independent ingredients" approach actually contradicts the whole epistemic notion of JTB.

Argument by bogeyman, eh? — apokrisis

That looks like a red herring, given that you seem to agree with what I've said.

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself. — apokrisis

Right, but my point is that your approach is materially identical to post hoc rationalization. "What is superior/pragmatic is that which survives; Nazi Germany did not survive; Therefore, Nazi Germany was inferior." That is the premise, and then one has to provide reasoning to connect the ur-cause to the effect, which in this case has to do with fossil fuels and fascism.

The reason such an approach is not formally identical with post hoc rationalization is because its norm really is survival, and survival really is measured in retrospect. On this approach what is good is precisely what survives, and this is associated with what "works" or what is "pragmatic" or what is "real," and there is no additional good/normativity.

My other point with Nazi Germany is that your approach seems to have suffocated contingency. Most historians would say that the Axis Powers might have won the war, but on a fatalistic view everything that happens happens necessarily (again, unless one makes distinctions such as the short-term vs. long-term distinction). So let's move to that question of contingency and freedom.

I was a climate change activist until about 2010. After that - seeing the reality of the politics and economics up close - I stop wasting my energy. It will be what it will be. And I make my own pragmatic plans within that. — apokrisis

But that's exactly what my argument predicts.

So I see no problem of working within norms and then also challenging norms. The capacity to make this critical choice is central to being a pragmatist. You either play the game or change the game. And it is reason which tells you which way to go and any juncture.

So a climate change scientist can see the need to reduce emissions. But if society fails to heed, then the climate scientist has to think that either society feels it is OK that global collapse is OK - some will survive - or that society lacks the capacity to escape the world view that fossil fuel has constructed for it. — apokrisis

What's interesting about this case is that the climate scientist seems to think that he is opposing activity that is suicidal on the level of the human species (and perhaps beyond). On your evolutionary principle "what works is what survives." So is it possible for the human species to commit accidental suicide and fail to survive? If so, then what survived was precisely what did not work (for humans).

We can make the fatalism argument more abstract if you are concerned about "bogeymen." Suppose that political ideas are measured only by whether they survive. Thus if political idea X out-survives political idea Y, then political idea X is superior to political idea Y by the only possible metric.

Now Apokrisis is standing before a society where X and Y are clashing. He must make a choice. Does he promote X? Y? Neither? If he chooses to promote one of the two ideas, such as he did temporarily in 2010, then he is at the same time predicting that X (say) will out-survive Y. Whether he is right or wrong is fairly simple, for time will tell. If X out-survives Y then he will say, "I was right." If Y out-survives X then he will say, "I was wrong, and now I will switch sides." He is always a "fair-weather fan" in that sense, for moral perplexity cannot arise where there is not more than one moral telos.

The reason the reductio ad absurdum cannot simply be brushed aside with "bogeyman" labels is because there is a very strong cultural premise whereby one would continue to resist the Nazis even after the war was lost and the Nazi "survivability" proved itself superior. The reductio is an appeal to the fairly strong idea that good is not inevitable, and has to do with more than mere survival.

A trivial example is that I refused to be promoted to a Sixer in the Cub Scouts as I said I didn’t want to order the other kids around. The look of incomprehension from the adults made me realise what this para-military organisation was all about and I left soon after. — apokrisis

What's interesting is that this is a moral choice in the classic sense, and not merely a "pragmatic" choice. You seem to be implicitly boasting that you are not the kind of person who wanted to "order the other kids around" and contribute to a "para-military organization." You are not saying, "My survivability and the survivability of my social environment will increase if I refuse the promotion to Sixer, therefore I will refuse the promotion." You are doing much the opposite, "I will sacrifice the boon of the approval of my peers and the Scout Leader because I value something that is more important than that approval, and am willing to act on it." You harmed the survivability of the social whole in order to honor your individual conscience. After all, militaristic hierarchical organization is one of the most time-proven organizational orderings.

This is because you have the fixed normative habit of seeing dichotomies as unresolved monisms rather than the identification of the complementary limits on being - the complementary limits that then make an active choice of where to strike the useful balance. — apokrisis

No, I don't think so. I don't assume that I have the epistemic access to recognize every dichotomy as either an unresolved monism or complementary limits on being. They may be either. I don't know ahead of time. I think there is a resolution but I don't assume that I will be able to understand it.

So my systems perspectives says there can be local ends and global ends. These are measurably different in being selfish and collective. Or competitive and cooperative. So you have some general bounding contrast in play, and the system would want to balance those rival imperatives over all scales of its being. Hence the pragmatic understanding of society as a hierarchy of interest groups. The contrasting pulls of individuation and integration at every level of social order. — apokrisis

But what does the bolded mean, "the system would want"? Does the system have wants and desires, or is it being reified and anthropomorphized?

I understand that you have, say, the pole of the individual human and the pole of the human species, where the first has to do with selfishness and the second has to do with collectivity. But my hunch is that survivability is the only telos for both. "Selfishness" has to do with individual survivability and "collective" has to do with the species' survivability. As a more robust alternative I would offer the classic poles of subsidiarity and solidarity.

My difficulty is that this looks like a rather one-dimensional contrast. The only possible source of contrast and complexity is coming from individual survival vs. group survival. On my view the evolutionary reductionism does not properly account for the human mind and human teloi. Humans often place their end in things that are basically unrelated to survival, and this is precisely what accounts for the vast complexity of social life.

For example, the suicide bomber attests to the power of the human mind, which is able to subordinate the end of survival to other ends. There are just too many anomalies for the survival theory. If the survival theory were correct then human social realities would be a great deal simpler than they in fact are.

Happiness is probably a vague enough term to hide the difference between talking about seeking a life balance and pursuing a hedonic pole.

But if we are to understand eudaimonia properly, we have to dig into that exact difference in viewpoint. Do we mean what it feels like to be in balance with our life and world - a state of equanimity - or what it feels like to be madly ecstatic … just turned down to some low simmer that feels like the sustainable norm. A quiet content. A state of equanimity in short. Neither especially happy nor upset. Just ticking along nicely in the sense that sudden joy or sudden upset are adaptive states we could flip into as quick as circumstances might demand or justify. — apokrisis

Perhaps neither (or either), but is either one the same as the evolutionary survival account? For example, the telos of pleasure certainly seems to fold into a eudaimonic account more easily than a survival account, given that people and also groups will often harm their survivability for the sake of pleasure. I actually think your survival-account would track the data points quite well if humans did not exist at all, as the aberrations would seem to be much fewer among non-human animals.

So you keep saying that my position is the one that can’t say anything much about the good and the bad. But my reply is that you don’t even seem to have started to understand the dynamical nature of such things. You are treating the good as a fixed destination placed at some impossible distance from wherever we are. I make the argument for how it is all about the dynamical balance that can stabilise our sense of being a self in its world. The pragmatism of being as adapted as possible, both in the short term and the long term, to the game that is living a life as a social creature. — apokrisis

Oh, that's fine, but I think you will find that if you want to teach people how to pursue such a good you will require a lot more than survivability language. If this is right, then the end you outline will not actually be persuasive to most people, and it will then need to be dressed up in other clothing. So you get a new caste of priests mediating the supreme telos to the masses who cannot interact with it directly. It seems that whenever someone dreams up a new ultimate telos (such as the Enlighteners did), they quickly find that hardly anyone is waiting in line to get on board, and that the masses need to be provided with a "temporary" proxy.

Take technology for example. A new technology can drastically influence the course of human history. Many technologies seem positively opposed to the survival telos (e.g. nuclear weapons, contraception, perhaps even social media), and they are propagated nonetheless. If any such technologies are historically contingent, then we have cases where survivability is strongly impacted by a contingent cause that is not itself ordered to survivability.

I also find that "balance" approaches tend to be almost indistinguishable from other robust approaches in practice. For example, I think you will end up appealing to the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, just in a roundabout way. The question is then whether the simplification is helpful: whether pragmatism prefers that humans conceive of an ur-cause or not.

Meet the new boss… — Joshs

Auguste Comte, generally recognized as the father of social science, explicitly modeled his approach on that of religion in general and Catholicism in particular with his "Religion of Humanity." Indeed, thinkers who apply evolutionary thought to the social sphere don't generally draw a hard and fast distinction between religion and social doctrine.

The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired. — Joshs

A common notion in modernity, found in things like the "invisible hand," is that one should just focus on X and Y will work itself out. "Just focus on what is personally desired and your biological or spiritual compass will guide development in a way that takes care of the ethical." Ayn Rand's Egoism is of a similar modality.

Building on some of , I would say that this requires a kind of naivete about the easy coupling between the private good and the common good, or between the self-interested act and the noble act. "Would that it were so!"

but you don’t question the split between personal and collective desire this presupposes — Joshs

...and the "split" is a phenomenon of philosophical anthropology. It's not so easy for children of Hobbes to reprogram their belief in the split.

As we all at times think, the depravity of some actions is so obviously beyond the pale, to even ask to illuminate the grounds for such judgments is to call something already obvious into question, and thereby potentially undermine its obviousness, which in turn undermines whether it is truly beyond the pale in the first place. This all means someone might judge that, when faced with what is clearly deemed beyond the pale, there is no reason to resist one’s passionate response nor is there reason to seek the illuminating details that justify one’s judgment. And further, as we are fallible when seeking rational illumination, we may undermine our own intellectual confidence by failing to reasonably illuminate what we have already strongly rejected and passionately deemed beyond the pale. — Fire Ologist

Yes, good points. :up:

And whenever one chooses to ignore rational scrutiny, or one cannot control one’s emotions enough to allow room for rational scrutiny, one is flirting with what I see as the most basic component of behavior that is beyond the pale, namely the avoidance of reason. — Fire Ologist

Okay, interesting.

Do I write off the shooting as beyond the pale without giving the shooter a hearing? No, as I would be treating the shooter the same way it looks like the shooter treated Charlie Kirk. But if the shooter will not or cannot rationally illuminate his grounds for shooting Charlie Kirk, then I have reasonable ground to deem the shooting as beyond the pale. And if the shooter asked me what I thought before he shot Charlie, and the shooter couldn’t or wouldn’t provide a reasonable basis to justify killing Kirk, I would tell him that shooting Kirk will be beyond the pale. — Fire Ologist

Okay.

Don’t get me wrong, shooting people for their political speech alone is always wrong and beyond the pale, but it is precisely the silence and foreclosing of discussion that makes it wrong, and so we must interrogate the shooter, seek his rational illumination and then judge the nature of his crime. I suspect he will not be able to justify shooting a man like that. But it would be beyond the pale to judge the shooter without hearing him out. — Fire Ologist

Okay, and this relates to things like the paradox of tolerance.

I suppose one inroad into this topic is Elizabeth Anscombe's comment:

If someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind. — Anscombe, Modern Moral Philosophy, 40

Now if Anscombe's interlocutor thinks that procuring the judicial execution of the innocent is a live option, and if such a person is to be deemed beyond the pale, then at some point or another they must be "written off." Or in your words the discussion must be "foreclosed." The interlocutor will want to keep talking and arguing, but at some point he must be written off.

Indeed if judging someone beyond the pale involves writing them off, then to write off or "foreclose" cannot itself be beyond the pale. This is the paradox.


I myself was thinking more along the lines of the idea that something which is beyond the pale inherently lacks rationality, and therefore is going to be more or less opaque to rational scrutiny. If this is right, then something which can be rationally and transparently proscribed cannot be beyond the pale; and therefore the object of evil that is beyond the pale will always remain fuzzy. For example, we can rationally and transparently proscribe a particular mathematical error, and hence such an error is not beyond the pale. Because the error is "understandable" it is able to be formally/rationally corrected (and because it is able to be formally/rationally corrected, it is understandable).

Ultimately, though, I think proscription necessarily prescinds a bit from the intelligibility of what is proscribed. For example, we say, "Thou shalt not murder," and even though murder is itself an endlessly confusing or privated act, nevertheless the proscription itself remains rational and intelligible. Of course, whether it does remain rational and intelligible is an interesting question. Can, "Do not φ," be transparent if φ is opaque? Presumably the condition must be drawn "materially" rather than "formally," and this may be precisely why an act like murder always retains a certain degree of ambiguity (and why, for example, someone might claim that capital punishment is a form of murder, or that fining a thief is a form of theft).

(Then, bringing in your points, the interesting question arises of how one is to avoid licensing premature dismissals if the object of dismissal necessarily lacks a certain degree of intelligibility.)

And I do make that structuralist claim about human social organisation. The same hierarchical systems logic applies right through history from prehistoric times. A society is a structure of global constraints and local freedoms. There must be a collective state of mind that can then make its individual choices within that context. — apokrisis

Okay, good.

History then becomes about tracking how this general theme becomes expressed in increasingly complexified and mechanised ways. There are the major transitions in the moves from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to agrarian empires to industrialised nation states. We have the shifts from oral to literate to mathematical semiosis. We have the shifts from ancestor worship to the axial religions to pragmatic realism. At each stage, the basic logic of social structure is the same, but its expression becomes focused on meeting the organisational needs of the next step. — apokrisis

It seems like your argument is that history is the inevitable outworking of semiotic or social realities, and therefore each point in history represents the highest degree of progress possible at that given point. Because we now find ourselves in "democracy," democracy represents the highest (and inevitable) degree of progress possible in 2025. If this is an accurate portrayal, then you have your Ur-cause (semiotic or social progression), you have your effect (Western democracy in 2025), and the only thing to figure out is how the effect can be traced to the cause.

Our difference here is similar to what I pointed out in <this post> regarding wisdom. Your controlling theme is your Ur-cause, and you begin with the premise that things like "wisdom" or "democracy" must be outworkings of that Ur-cause. I do not grant that premise. I would want to look at wisdom in itself or democracy in itself, rather than constraining my understanding of such phenomena to outworkings of an Ur-cause. It's a bit of the hedgehog and the fox, if you like, where the fox is not convinced that the One Big Idea will ultimately hold up.

Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the kind of approach I would recommend if one is to focus on the actual genesis of the "Western metadiscourse". — apokrisis

Okay. Lots of interesting ideas there, many of which are plausible. That definitely helps me understand more of the basis for your view.

So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.

You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is. — apokrisis

Let's revisit Count's point:

Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least. — Count Timothy von Icarus

On your sort of reasoning, if Hitler had won the war then Nazism would be wise and it would be a higher point of progress than the more democratic alternative. On your view to know whether Nazism or Western democracy is more aligned with the inevitable outworkings of nature, we only have to look at which phenomenon won out. The Allies won the war against the Axis powers, therefore Western democracy is more aligned with "realism."

That approach strikes me as simplistic. Of course you might make a short-term vs. long-term distinction and claim that unnatural progressions can occur in the short term but not in the long term. Yet in that case the relevant question asks why democracy or liberalism are long term phenomena rather than short term phenomena.

The other oddity here is that if you abandon morality in a thoroughgoing way, then you are not capable of any normative arguments. You end up in the quandary of a fatalism that precludes free will. For example, the climate change theorist might say that we should reduce CO2 emissions, but if we fail to do so and a catastrophic event occurs, he cannot but look back and say that the catastrophe was inevitable and his effort to avoid it had no chance of succeeding. The fatalist cannot choose to fight for the Allies or the Axis.

One can always debate these analyses. My point is that they are plainly far more informative about why as humans we are organised the way we are.

The structuralist perspective – the one that sees humans as social creatures organising to take advantage of the resources that nature has to provide – tells us far more about why we believe what we believe than any amount of "history of moral philosophy" story-telling. — apokrisis

Isolating a metric and making it the whole story always seems simplistic to me. It either ignores the fact that humans act for ends, or else stipulates an end without sufficient evidence. In this case the stipulation is that humans want to "get things done in the world." It seems like a projection of one telos onto all of human history.

Granted, Aristotle says that the human telos is happiness (eudaimonia), and I don't think he is projecting. But eudaimonia is not an everything-is-a-nail to the guy with a hammer. A Western industrialist may well convince himself that everyone at every point in time was only interested in industry, but history tells a different tale.

What did he say about black people or "predominately black neighborhoods?" — Outlander

Yeah, 's analogy makes no sense. I guess when you're justifying murder you have to make up analogies that make no sense.

The self gets treated like a portfolio to be optimized and protected. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Lots of good thoughts. :up:

The classical object of the common good seems mostly invisible to liberalism. The idea of a telos that transcends self is a non-starter, and a beleaguered institutional landscape is icing on the cake. The modern cosmos revolves around the passions of the individual. Alternatives have become inconceivable.

An interesting question that follows upon the OP is this: Does it undermine the strong rejection to rationally illuminate the grounds for strong rejection? For example, if one deems something beyond the pale, is that "deeming" undermined by the act of explaining why it is beyond the pale?

So you are arguing or asking if the assassination of Charlie Kirk was justified?
Youre a mod?
Thats pretty fucked up. — DingoJones

It is, yep.

Charlie Kirk didn't deserve what happened to him in the sense that all he did made him worthy of punishment: But... — Moliere

That's the whole schtick, ": But." The 'but' is the whole point here, and the colon is apt. The rest is just the necessary window dressing needed to get to the 'but'. The caveat on not deserving murder is also pretty wild.

"Fucked up" is the correct description here.

Morality isn't about good and evil, it's about good and bad. Evil is not with good in morality, good is with bad. Evil is purposely failing, and comes about against good in morality but is not part of what morality is. We aren't given the choice to be good or evil, were given the choice to be good or bad. Sure, you can be evil but that's a complete abstraction of morality. Morality is about balance of good. If you lose balance, you perform bad. Confusion arises if we put good and evil together, but it makes complete sense if it's good and bad. — Barkon

Okay good, so it looks like you are wrestling with the argument I gave in that first post.

So what is "bad," and how is it to be mitigated?

The freedom to differentiate combined with the constraint that integrates. A dynamic which always existed as the basis of social order, but with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, a dynamic that could be made even more dynamic by spelling it out as a self-conscious ideology. — apokrisis

As always, your ideas are interesting and possess plausibility. But my difficulty is that you aren't arguing for realism, or democracy, or liberalism, so much as for a particular kind of realism, democracy, or liberalism. And you are also projecting that specific form back onto history, as if the historical development was a straightforward working out of that form. I mostly think that your project could be construed as a kind of hermeneutical battle over the history of such things, which in turn becomes a jockeying for how the essence of such movements is to be understood moving forward.

To give one example, you seem to view liberalism as the freedom of groups (which are formed by free association). This is curious to me both because it is historically inaccurate and because it is close to an Aristotelian revision of liberalism that others propose. In fact liberalism is based in individual freedom, not group freedom, through the ideas of Hobbes and secondary figures like Locke or Mill, and this has become only more obvious with time. The Aristotelian approach sees man as a social animal, and therefore sees groups as primary. For example:

This appeal to the medieval arrangement, or to other arrangements of loose empire with strong local differences and independence as opposed to the despotic liberal state, is not put forward as nostalgia for a lost past. It is put forward as a way of stimulating a more imaginative and free-ranging approach to the treatment of contemporary political questions. In fact, the past combination of extensive empire with the multiplication of local differences could be imitated today precisely by a rethinking of the notion of the liberal state. For the state of nature doctrine (whence the notion of the liberal state principally derives) can be reformed into an argument for loose empire combined with strong communities. All one needs to do is to make the state of nature doctrine apply not to individuals (the way Hobbes and Locke and others did), but rather to communities. So instead of individuals forming a state by means of a social contract, let communities form a federation or league by means of defensive alliances, not unlike the way the former colonies in the United States did by means of the Articles of Confederation. Such alliances may differ in many ways and embrace more or fewer things, and the alliances might depend on a superior power as well as on member communities (the way the medieval arrangement depended on the emperor, or the way the settlement in Greece after the battle of Chaeronea depended on Philip of Macedon and then on his son Alexander the Great). No matter. The basic idea remains the same, and it is the idea that is important, rather than the details.

Such a way of applying the state of nature doctrine would be not only better but also more historically accurate. For it is manifest that men do not exist first, or at all, as individuals but rather as belonging to communities. Not only are we all born into some community, such as the family or the equivalent, but with few and largely irrelevant exceptions, we all remain and function as parts of one or more communities for the whole of life. It is as such parts of communities that we live and act, that we form visions of the good and pursue them, and that, in the service of these visions, we love and hate, fight and die... — Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism, 182

The polis with thick subsidiarity that you describe is simply not modern liberalism. You are taking a reasonably good idea and calling it liberalism even though it is not historical liberalism, and I would rather just admit that it is different from liberalism rather than try to engage in a hermeneutical battle to try to argue that historical liberalism is significantly different than the received view allows.

But also, the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to resist. We see that everywhere we look in modern liberal democracy. Drill baby drill as they say in the US and everywhere else. — apokrisis

As I said earlier, many simply associate their own "good" ideas with liberalism or democracy, because they deem themselves liberals or democrats. But the laws of thermodynamics are no more potent on democracy than on oligarchy, or aristocracy, or monarchy. The idea that a thermodynamic-based theory is somehow "democratic" is not at all in evidence.

Then as for a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles... — apokrisis

Science is not decided by majority vote. It is realist by nature. It has correct and incorrect answers. Democracy is a matter of majority vote. It has no correct or incorrect answers, other than the will of the people. Do you see the difference? So what happens when the scientist claims that Covid-19 requires certain political measures, and the populus does not favor the enacting of those measures? Then you have but one example of scientific auctoritas clashing with a democratic political arrangement.

Science is anti-democratic. Folks miss this because they are predisposed to favor democracy, and they therefore conflate an aristocracy with a democracy. Contemporary science is aristocratic in that etymological merit-based sense. It is a consensus of those with the requisite merit to possess a vote. Scientific "suffrage" extends only to a tiny percentage of the population.

From the start, I was speaking of pragmatic realism. And you immediately projected on to that your own Cartesian framing in terms of the real and the ideal. While never being willing to acknowledge that my arguments are essential Aristotelean in systems science fashion. — apokrisis

You continue to project all sorts of things into this conversation that are not in evidence.

Liberal democracy as a political machinery for trading off the counter-forces of local competition and global cooperation are just expressing that natural hierarchical dynamic at the level of organismic order. — apokrisis

I think that is precisely what liberal democracy is not. Liberal democracy has from its inception erred heavily in the direction of a lack of subsidiarity. It tends towards top-down power structures, globalism, etc. This is precisely why the "revolution of the proletariat" is always a threat to the liberal state.

But I like the Big Picture view that grounds such debates in the reality of systems hierarchical order where complexity arises through an ability to balance the driving dynamics in play over all scales of that hierarchical order.

And this is the basic plumbing issue that liberal democracy is meant to address. The how of how we construct a society that is balancing its freedoms and constraints over all its scales of being – a scale of being that has the added stress of a compounding growth rate. — apokrisis

If this isn't projection, then name me one founder of liberalism who has expressed such views.

So the pragmatic model of society – such as expressed by Arthur Bentley in 1908 based on Dewey – is of a hierarchy of interest groups. Institutionalised habit forming over all levels. — apokrisis

Dewey is late to the game, and so I wouldn't count him as a founder. This is even beside the point that he was a critic of classical liberalism and proposed substantial changes, which is much to the point. Simpson agrees with much in Dewey in his critiques of liberalism.

It is hard to imagine a flourishing society that isn't organised as an organic hierarchy of interests groups properly in touch not just with the real world that is its physical ground, but also with the reality of the world it is thus making.

It is the realism of being self-aware enough that society is in precisely this pragmatic recursive loop of adaptive habit formation and so being able to frame our debate about that fact with intellectual precision. — apokrisis

That's well and good, but I see little relation between it and liberal democracy. I think that such a theory could be applied to most historical political arrangements seen through the bird's-eye view that you take. There is no special compatibility between such a theory and liberalism or democracy. You would be making the same claims if you found yourself in a tribal or feudal society, or a guild-based economy.

I do appreciate the explication. :up:


Edit: Presumably you are coming from a perspective which favors the marriage of market principles to Mill's free speech arguments, found in figures like Adam Smith. That perspective has truly become an inheritance of liberalism, even if it is contested in some ways. This would require a longer conversation, but I think here too there is an overidentification of market principles with democracy or liberalism (similar to the overidentification of thermodynamics with democracy or liberalism). It seems to me that on this point your odd dichotomy between "natural" and "moral" will become especially strained, as will the tension between democracy and your hierarchalism. ...The reason liberal democracies tend towards a thin geography of intermediate institutions (and therefore towards hierarchies that lack robustness) is because the anthropological starting point is too strongly individualist, which in turn creates a vacillation between the individual part and the societal whole (i.e. the liberal state).

I’m asking again how you think the notion of liberal democracy arose and took hold on human affairs. — apokrisis

We're talking about the relation between realism and democracy & liberalism. Now you want to talk about the genesis of liberal democracy?

• Leontiskos: How does realism generate democracy or liberalism?
• Apokrisis: Give your alternative explanation.
• Leontiskos: Alternative explanation to what?

Are you saying, "If realism did not generate liberal democracy, then what did?" Or, "If society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism did not generate liberal democracy, then what did?"

Realism, democracy, and liberalism are three incredibly complex and plastic notions. It may be that society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism supports liberalism or democracy, but first we must recognize that realism and society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism are not the same thing even if the latter is an instance of the former, and the conflation between the two seems to miss this. Second, I don't see how your relatively novel notion of society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism caused "the notion of liberal democracy [to arise and take hold on human affairs]," given the anachronism.

Historically speaking, liberal democracy arose in the relative absence of realism,* and theories such as Peirce's draw on sources behind and outside of the nominalism that had become so prevalent at the time of its rise. Presumably you are conflating realism with Baconian science, which did in fact attend the rise of liberal democracy. Of course the fact that liberal democracy arose in a relatively anti-realist period does not mean that the two are incompatible or that some variety of realism such as society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism does not support liberalism or democracy.

More generally, the democratic moral principle is that everyone is equal and votes in public affairs. The liberal moral principle has to do with individual freedom. The form of realism that will actually support democracy is therefore one which holds that equality among the demos is real, and the form of realism that will actually support liberalism is one which holds that individual freedom is real. That is how the practical-speculative juncture must be laid for things like democracy or liberalism to flourish, and my earlier point was presupposing that the juncture between the speculative sphere and the moral sphere is itself moral (and also speculative). For example, the thesis that each member of the demos is equal vis-a-vis the act of voting in public affairs is both a speculative and a practical thesis. It means that there is in fact an equality and that a political program follows upon this equality.

You only seem to be leaving supernatural circumstance as your position. And I can only conclude you are too shy to try and support that in a public forum. — apokrisis

These strawmen and the ignorance underlying them are actually rather amusing. Apparently you think that everyone who disagrees with you is naively appealing to "divine will" (whatever that is supposed to mean). I'm not much interested in engaging the anti-religious chip on your shoulder, as it seems to be an excuse to avoid giving explanations for your claims (such as the claim that realism generates democracy or liberalism).


* Modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and therefore presuppose deep-seated disagreements. Thus it is no surprise that a large dose of nominalism attended their rise. I think a rather compelling argument could be made that realism goes hand in hand with intellectualism, whereas democracy and liberalism are bound up with voluntarism. This is a basic reason why we now see a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles - there is an inherent tension. Yet Aristotle pointed out long ago that there are different forms of democracy.