I admit that I am groping around in the dark where views about essential properties are concerned. — Clarendon

Okay, fair enough.

I suppose that if someone says humans are essentially physical and essentially conscious, that's consistent with what's of intrinsic value about us being something that is essentially not physical. And so I think I can agree with someone who says that humans are essentially physical and essentially conscious. — Clarendon

I think that's right.

I am a human, but I do not think I am essentially a human.

...

Someone who says that we - the things that are of intrinsic moral value - are essentially physical and essentially conscious would be saying that consciousness is an essential feature of physical things. — Clarendon

Regarding these points, let's look at (1) (emphasis added):

1. If an object is intrinsically morally valuable, then it is morally valuable in virtue of some/all of its essential properties. — Clarendon

Suppose object X is essentially conscious and essentially physical. If physical things are not essentially morally valuable, and yet conscious things are essentially morally valuable, then the question of whether object X is morally valuable turns on the matter of whether we employ "some" or "all" within (1). If we use "some" then X is morally valuable, whereas if we use "all" then X is not morally valuable.

(Of course, the substratum problem rears its head here as well, for one might object that, if the "all" interpretation is true and humans are essentially physical and essentially conscious, then this proposition must be false: <physical things are not essentially morally valuable AND conscious things are essentially morally valuable>. Or in other words: the whole set of propositions is of course mutually interacting.)

Perhaps something can be intrinsically morally valuable due to answering to a concept and the moral value supervene on something essential to the concept rather than the thing itself. — Clarendon

Perhaps. I would want more detail on how the "definitional" approach and the "metaphysical" approach diverge or converge.

But even so, we can simply run the thought experiment where we ourselves are concerned and simply remove any and all of those features that our moral value is proposed to be supervening on and see if it remains.

For example, if my intrinsic moral value is claimed to be supervening on the fact I am a human, then I can simply imagine finding out that I am not one (as I did above) and see if this affects my intrinsic moral worth. — Clarendon

Yes, that seems right to me.

As it does not — Clarendon

I'm not so sure about this myself.

we still arrive at the conclusion that we are not physical things — Clarendon

I think it all goes back to "some" versus "all." Aristotle would say that the dignity proper to a human being does not derive from physicality per se, and yet that humans are nevertheless essentially physical beings.

Of course we must ask what is happening on a mind/body dualism view, such as your own. This seems to turn on the matter of how we adjudicate the question of whether we are essentially physical/bodily. If we use "all" in (1) then the question is answered. In that case we cannot be essentially physical if we have moral worth. If we use "some" in (1) then the mind/body dualist must search out some other argument for why we are not essentially physical.

5. Consciousness is not an essential property of physical objects

...

As I see it premise 5 is not question begging, for taken in isolation it is consistent with physical objects being capable of having conscious states. Just as, by analogy, colour is (plausibly) not an essential feature of physical objects, yet that is consistent with physical objects having colour. And I think that premise 5 would be accepted by most physicalists about the mind, for they are not going to hold that any and all physical things have conscious states (or that any or all of them are intrinsically valuable). Their claim - typically and as I understand it - would be only that it is possible for physical objects to bear conscious states.

There are, no doubt, some who would deny this. Pansychists do, I think. But i think they would accept that they have the burden of making a case for that. That is, I think even they would accept that premise 5 is prima facie plausible. — Clarendon

For what it's worth, there are a lot of anti-religious and a lot of mind/body monists on the forum, and both groups will view your OP with some suspicion. There is also some anti-essentialism on the forum, but that's more of a fad. The anti-essentialists seem to have never investigated essentialism with any level of seriousness.

From the perspective of Aristotelian hylomorphism—a form of mind/body monism—an objection is that a human being is essentially physical and essentially conscious. In your terms we might say that the human being has the essential property of physicality and the essential property of bearing conscious states. This means that, for the Aristotelian, although consciousness is not an essential property of physical objects, nevertheless consciousness is an essential property of the object "human being," which also possesses the essential property of physicality. Or in other words, the Aristotelian would agree that not all physical things bear conscious states without agreeing with the idea that no physical thing has 'bearing conscious states' as an essential property. The intuitive value of this lies in the fact that whereas for your theory we must reject the intuitive belief that we are physical beings, for the Aristotelian this is not necessary.

The crux here seems to be specification or taxonomical methodology, where you are thinking of a substratum of "physical object" to which properties then attach, such as "extensive," whereas the Aristotelian is thinking of a substratum of "human object," to which properties then attach, such as "physical" or "conscious." It comes down to the question of the nature of the property/predicate-bearer. This is a pretty common conflict when different forms of essentialism rub up against one another. I have a few posts relating to this problem, including <this one>.

What sources are you drawing on for your understanding of essentialism?

I am not sure how best to lay out the argument. Here is an attempt: — Clarendon

Wonderful - thank you for this.

1. If an object is intrinsically morally valuable, then it is morally valuable in virtue of some/all of its essential properties.
2. Our minds are intrinsically morally valuable objects
3. Conclusion: therefore the objects that are our minds are morally valuable in virtue of some/all of their essential properties
4. Our minds are (plausibly) intrinsically morally valuable because they bear conscious states
5. Conclusion: therefore the objects that are our minds have bearing conscious states as one of their essential properties.
5. Consciousness is not an essential property of physical objects
6. Conclusion: therefore, the objects that are our minds are not physical objects

As I see it premise 5 is not question begging — Clarendon

Yes, that clarifies the point for me. It's a good argument! (A minor thing is that you have two 5's - you might fix that with an edit.)

The main weakness, as I see it anyway, in my case is the possible conflation of what might be termed (and probably is) 'definitional' essentialism and 'metaphysical' essentialism. To use a familiar example, a bachelor is essentially unmarried. But the person who is a bachelor is not essentially unmarried. And so perhaps it could be objected that a mind is by definition something that bears conscious states - and so consciousness is an essential feature of minds in the way that being unmarried is an essential feature of bachelors - but consciousness is not thereby an essential feature of the objects that are minds, anymore than being unmarried is an essential feature of those who are bachelors. — Clarendon

Yes, very good.

My reply to that, which I am not sure is successful, is that when it comes to intrinsic moral value, that attaches to the object rather than the concept that the object answers to. — Clarendon

All of this turns on the meaning of the clause in (4), "[Minds] bear conscious states." The metaphysical interpretation seems perfectly plausible to me, but someone can pursue the objection you note if they like.

But we could also ask whether the objection you note is valid. Suppose we grant that minds are definitionally conscious. Have we lost our conclusion? Or do we just open ourselves to a definitional objection?

Huh! I have never encountered this argument before, but it looks to be quite solid. Nice work. I will have to think on it more.

-

Another form of what is essentially the same argument focusses instead on candidate essential properties of physical things - such as shape and size and location. And that version of my argument simply goes that those properties are clearly not the ground of our intrinsic moral value. As this can continue for any and all of the properties that are plausibly essential to something being physical, then this would establish that our minds are not physical things. — Clarendon

Right, and this is the argument that I am familiar with.

Thanks for the pointer. Newman and Peirce were saying much the same thing. Peirce developed it more broadly as the mathematical logic – introducing his sign of illation – that then justified his pragmatic approach to truth. — apokrisis

Interesting. I knew Peirce did something similar but with more formality and precision, so this is a helpful lead.

Where is the evidence for this in history? Which religion or even political structure because it was discovered to be a fiction? The Catholic Church lives on. Marxism too. — apokrisis

I would say they live on because they do not believe their lodestar is a fiction. An example where the lie was found out and the social order collapsed as a result would be the USSR.

The reason is that truth can be transcendent even after the facts seem to have abandoned it. So God might not be real. But if society is better organised under His name, then I could live with that. — apokrisis

We will almost certainly end up disagreeing on this.

Anglicanism seems to have gone with that. The Brits also preserved the romance of having a monarchy. The nobility of running an imperial empire as a colonial trade network. In a lot of ways, the UK brand of liberalism thrived as it relied on this quite adaptive mix of transcendent authority. The US by contrast always felt officious and ill at ease with itself. Never actually a land of those feeling much freedom.

So God can be a fiction. The King can be a fiction. A Commonwealth can be a fiction. Everyone can see that and still find it a more useful truth if it binds everyone to a shared sense of social order.

The fiction isn’t the problem. The issue is whether the fiction can evolve in productive fashion. — apokrisis

I would argue that one cannot believe something and not believe something at the same time. Or that it will at least lead to problems. This is why a "noble lie" must always be told by an elite group of rulers and—if it is to succeed—be believed by a large portion of the society. If the lie comes to be known as a lie the system will fall. Not in a day, but inevitably. If a lie requires belief, and one cannot believe what they know to be false, then how could a lie function when it is known to be false?

But how close did we ever get to implementing that neutrality? — apokrisis

Does the question make sense if the neutrality is impossible? I wonder if you think the neutrality is impossible in fact but one can reach it in an asymptotic manner...? I am of the mind that it is impossible in a stronger sense than that. I would only say that certain events such as the invasion of Iraq contributed to the faltering of the fiction. Implementing the lie of neutrality and implementing neutrality are not the same thing.

I’ve sat with those in high office and their aims are far more pragmatic. Thatcher might have been more of the doctrinal stripe. Or she might just have had a middle class distaste of working class power and a matching love of the aristocratic elite.

But I’ve seen more interest in how to implement properly neutral public policy than doctrinal fervour. At least by choosing to live in a country as near the ideal as it could be in the world as it has become. — apokrisis

When I speak of those who are "doctrinally earnest" I am thinking of Locke, or of the Founders of liberal regimes in 1776 or 1789. I agree with you that the political leaders are less interested in liberal philosophies.

Yep. I have studied the details. I know the differences and also the similarities between bonobos and chimps. I wouldn’t leap to citing Peterson as my source. But RIchard Wrangham I recently mention in this light. — apokrisis

He is relying on the research of Frans de Waal. Here is an example, found at random: timestamp.

My point here is that if Peterson is correct then it seems that a simple dominance theory does not obtain. I don't know if you agree or disagree with de Waal.

The problem for liberalism is when it justifies itself under the old rubric of the good, the true, the beautiful, the almighty. The fiction is being rubbed in your face. One is being asked to worship at the base of a flag and recite an oath of obedience. Literal submission to a flapping bit of cloth.

I would gag at that. I prefer a country where no one really knows the national anthem and can’t even be sure whether the flag is their own or their neighbours, — apokrisis

Don't lies and fictions come to light eventually even if they are not rubbed in your face? If so, this is going to be a problem for liberalism's longevity.

If have to defend some transcendent principle, it would be pragmatism rather than liberalism - social or economic.

Liberalism has only won in the sense that it scales. It has outpaced the others in terms of growth in being stripped down to take risks and gamble on what burning a planet’s worth of resources can deliver.

So sure, other dynasties have their successes, especially to the degree they tended towards pragmatism and found ways to counter autocracy and corruption.

But liberalism was what lit a rocket under the world. And surely I am as big of critic of that as much as you. I never said might makes right. I’ve always said healthy balance is what we should seek. Unrestrained growth without a matching sense of direction doesn’t sound like a viable plan to me. — apokrisis

Okay. I think I am in agreement with you on much of this.

I suppose I should ask whether or to what extent you favor neutrality, and how you would societally justify neutrality in a pragmatist context. For example, is a fiction needed? Is a fiction pragmatic, especially in the long term?

Dominance-submission was an evolutionary problem for social organisation as it doesn’t scale. Homo sapiens took off just as the most successful foragers on the planet as they evolved the level of grammatical language to narratise the landscape they lived in. Turn the world into a place of ancestral history and custom. The land became organised over a vastly greater sense of space and time. It became possible to imagine life as an extended network of fighting and trading, raiding and sharing. Competing and cooperating.

The Neanderthals lived in small isolated bands. Sapiens rolled over the landscape in a sudden wave of social narrative. They wave swept across everywhere until it laid claim to the planet as its ancestral heritage. A place to be organised by war and trade. The seed of liberal order. An order that was good to the degree it could negotiate the internal contradictions that so powerfully drove it. — apokrisis

Okay, that sounds intelligible and plausible. But I want to ask why you see this as "the seed of a liberal order"? What is the signification of "liberal" in that sentence? Are you saying that social narrative is key to human success, and liberalism promotes social narrative? Or perhaps that liberalism promotes the proper kinds of social narrative?

But neutrality is about a balance. One that needs the always larger view that can encompass the necessary contradictions. And so to be “humanity”, we need to socially construct that transcendent point of view. That is what the collective narrative has always been about. — apokrisis

Okay, and what does the favored form of "neutrality" balance? What are we to be neutral with respect to?

Pragmatism just exposes the mechanics of how this is done in a post-foraging and post-agrarian world. We can appreciate the mechanism in its own rational terms. It the fictions are transparent, then at least they can be critiqued. — apokrisis

So now I am wondering if we agree that the fictions should be made transparent? Or are you just saying that now that the fictions are being laid bare we have an opportunity to recalibrate our direction?

1) Most of our beliefs are established as subjective inferences to best explanation. Consider the alternatives: few beliefs are established by deduction, and few are basic. What else is there? — Relativist

You could give a clear definition of deduction and then persuasively argue that, given the large number of beliefs each person holds, very few of them are arrived at via deduction. But I would say that the same thing holds for inference. If we give a clear definition of inference then we will find that, given the large number of beliefs each person holds, very few of them are arrived at via inference. This includes inference to the best explanation. So as noted earlier, it seems that by "inference to the best explanation" you mean something exceedingly broad and also rather vague.

If we are talking about the practical way that most people arrive at beliefs, then I think the best work on the subject is John Henry Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, where he develops his "illative sense" among other things. If we are talking about this practical matter, then I don't think deduction or inference or basic beliefs are the right answer, especially in isolation.

- At every step of the way if you just starting doing some philosophy and presenting some arguments for your positions the ridicule would dissipate. The reason you are ridiculed is because it is ridiculous to avoid philosophical argument while pretending to be the brilliant magister of TPF.

I mean by "X is an essential property of Y" metaphysical essence - so, something that makes it the kind of object it is. I would take shape and size to be essential properties of physical objects, whereas 'colour' does not seem to be (though that is just to illustrate what I mean, but it would not affect my case if colour was an essential attribute of physical things).

I agree that if physical things are essentially conscious then that would stop the argument. But consciousness does not seem to be an essential feature of physical things. Those who believe us to be physical things do not - I think - typically hold that we are essentially conscious. Consciousness would then have to be held to be a feature of all physical things (and by extension, they would have to hold that all physical things are equally intrinsically morally valuable - which seems false). — Clarendon

Okay great, thanks for this elaboration.

My premise that consciousness is not an essential feature of physical things is not equivalent to denying that any physical things are conscious, for it is consistent with consciousness not being an essential feature of such things that nevertheless, some have that feature (just as, by analogy, if colour is not an essential feature of physical things, that does not prevent physical things from having colour). However, if the argument as a whole is sound, then I think it would establish that no physical thing is conscious. For if we are morally valuable because we are things of a sort that are conscious, then that would be an essential property of the kinds of thing we are, and as that is not an essential feature of physical things, the sorts of thing that have consciousness would have been demonstrated to be non-physical. — Clarendon

This paragraph presents the tension I am worried about. First you say that your premise "is consistent with [some physical things being conscious]," but then you go on to say that the whole argument entails the proposition that no physical thing is conscious. I am wondering how we get to the conclusion, "No physical thing is conscious," especially given that humans seem to be an example of something which is simultaneously physical and conscious.

If our reason represents us to be intrinsically morally valuable, it is telling us that our moral value supervenes on some of our essential properties. That is 'being morally valuable' is a 'resultant' property- something is morally valuable 'because' it has certain other features.

If something is intrinsically morally valuable, then - by definition - it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is. This is why intrinsic moral value must supervene on some or all of a thing's essential features.

Yet as our reason does not represent shape, size, or any other physical property essential to extended things to be relevant to our moral value, it is representing us not to be extended things. To put it another way, if we are physical things then our intrinsic moral value would have to supervene on some of our essential features.....but it doesn't. Thus we are not physical things.

Maybe it will objected to this argument that the essential property that makes us morally valuable is our consciousness. However, consciousness is clearly not an essential attribute of a physical thing - at best it would be an accidental property of one. So as our moral value supervenes on some of our essential properties, then it can't be that one if, that is, we are a physical thing. — Clarendon

I think this is an interesting argument that could be reworked to be valid and even sound. The idea is something like, "Our moral value does not derive from any physical attribute, therefore we are more than merely physical."

This is not to deny that consciousness may be an essential attribute of the kind of thing we are. Nor is it to deny that it may be the property in virtue of which we - the things that have it - are morally valuable. The point is that as consciousness is not an essential property of physical things, then we can conclude that the kinds of thing that are essentially conscious are not physical things.

Does this argument work? I think it does, but perhaps I am mistaken. — Clarendon

The counterargument would seem to be something which is essentially conscious and essentially physical. Or else, if your premise, "consciousness is not an essential property of physical things," means that no physical things are essentially conscious, then I would object to such a premise.

But what do you mean when you say, "X is an essential property of Y"?

Of course! I'll go further: discussing our reasoning with others can help us improve our judgements, by getting additional facts before us, and alternative theories. It forces us to think through our reasoning with more rigor, and to justify the various intermediate judgements that lead to the position we're defending. — Relativist

Okay, I agree.

Good, but do you also agree that if everything is an IBE then there is no intelligibility given that no differentiation is possible? — Leontiskos

Absolutely not. I can't imagine why you'd suggest no differentiation is possible. Do you worry about losing your keys in an interdimensional portal? Do you worry your spouse might be an extra-terrestrial? If you do not differentiate, how can you ever make ANY decision? — Relativist

If everything is an IBE, then what sense does it make to exhort someone to engage in IBE? Or to argue in favor of IBEs?

Okay, good. So would we say that, at least in some cases, there is the real explanation and nominal explanations are better or worse depending on how well they approximate the real explanation? If so, then an IBE is presupposing the ontological existence of an aitia/cause/explanation. — Leontiskos

Yes, to the 1st question (I think).

I don't understand the 2nd. What's the ontological status of descriptions of events in the public sphere? What does it matter? The appropriate objective is truth, and this is irrespective of one's preferred theory of truth, theory of mind, or the metaphysical foundation of reality. — Relativist

Let me put it this way: if some explanations are better and some are worse, then what are they better or worse in relation to?

For example, if I run a 100m dash in 16 seconds and you run it in 13 seconds, by what standard do we say that you did better than I? Isn't it by the standard, "The shorter the time, the better" (which is equivalent to, "The faster, the better")?

1. If there are better and worse explanations, then they must be better or worse relative to some standard
2. The standard is the true explanation
3. The true explanation is not an IBE
4. Therefore, not everything is an IBE

If Sherlock Holmes is working a case then he has any number of candidate theses floating around his head. Some are better than others. Also, something actually happened in reality that he is trying to understand. The best explanation will (arguably*) be the one which most closely approximates the thing that happened in reality. That is what his spectrum of worst/worse/better/best is aiming at.

Note too that there may be a witness who knows exactly what happened. They know the answer to the question that Holmes is asking. I don't think we would call their knowledge an IBE. They have the answer to the question, "What happened here?," and that answer is not an IBE.

My point is that if you try to make everything an IBE, then IBEs make no sense. An inference to the best explanation presupposes the possibility of the real explanation. Depending on our questions and their level of specificity, a single real explanation may not be possible, but in many cases it is possible, and especially so in a theoretical or conceptual sense.

This general problem in abduction is called being "the best of a bad lot". — Relativist

Okay, sure. I don't want to get into that tangent, as I think it might take us too far afield.


* "Arguably" in the sense that we don't have to get into the subtopic of better-relative-to-available-evidence vs. better-relative-to-the-reality-being-investigated.

- You've been failing to answer arguments and even posts for months now. No one is holding their breath for you to engage in philosophy. .

I just suggested watching Owens on Charlie Kirk for two reasons. The first is as a polished example of the new media. — apokrisis

Okay, I will have a look. I generally don't watch conspiratorial material because it causes the algorithm to give me more of the same, and this muddies up my feed (and I don't have a VPN to fully insulate myself). But I'll suck it up for once. :razz:

The other thing is then how there is so much information to keep the story going. Every event has so much cell phone footage from so many angles, or citizens sleuths running around interviewing each other, immediately finding all the strange coincidences that are going to be there to be found. With so many involved on the ground, there are swiftly any number of dots for a conspiracy theory to join. — apokrisis

Fascinating.

Even months ago, AI gave a lot of shit answers. Good only for a laugh. But now it is becoming very useful for self factchecking. — apokrisis

I tend to use it in areas where the programming and the training would tend to produce an accurate response, but I think it is deceptively difficult to gauge its reliability. The manner in which we vet and eventually come to trust an authority turns out to be a rather complex process.

Banno feels like he is here to run the cosy introductory philosophy tutorials of his fond memory. That would be why he treats us like confused first year students having to retread the well worn paths of ancient debates. We are allowed to speak, but as tutor, he gets to steer and gently reveal our neophyte errors of thought. We should be warmly appreciative of his condescension. And learn to stick closely to areas where he has already prepared the answers. — apokrisis

I can vouch for that a hundred times over. Awhile back there was a wild thread where Banno chastised his wayward students, insinuating that the deplorables were forcing him into private message conversations. The thread didn't go well for Banno and had to be closed by the mods, which I ahead of time. :lol:

If I were teaching a logic class I would ask you to provide an argument for your conclusion, "...Therefore, no conspiracy theory is an IBE."

If you reply that some conspiracy theories are IBEs, but this is rare, I would point out that the conspiracy theorist agrees with you. The conspiracy theorist would not be a conspiracy theorist if they thought that conspiracy theories were common or mundane explanations. It is precisely the rarity that they are attracted to.

Then appreciate how this relates to what I'm saying about IBEs. My explanation is "better". — Relativist

But isn't it just a truism to say that one should prefer the better to the worse? That's why a preference for the best is not a substantial position. Everyone agrees with it and everyone thinks their theory is better than other theories.

But again, if nothing is certain—even conceptually—then you can't weigh anything as more or less certain. — Leontiskos

Suppose you can't find your car keys, one morning... — Relativist

But how does any of this address the point at stake? I don't even know if you are agreeing or disagreeing with my statement.

If someone's theory is bad, then you should say why it is bad in a way that would be convincing even to them. — Leontiskos

That assumes the other person is reasonable. — Relativist

The point is that you must do more than beg the question. The label "conspiracy theory" is too broad, bordering on things as broad as "bad" or "irrational." If one wants to engage in rational discourse, then they must offer reasons, and "bad", "irrational", and "conspiracy theory" don't really count as reasons. More generally, one must offer arguments and not assertions.

if you have a number of different explanatory kinds in your belt, and one of them is IBE, then labeling one of your explanations an IBE is intelligible vis-a-vis the differentiation it provides. — Leontiskos

Agreed. — Relativist

Good, but do you also agree that if everything is an IBE then there is no intelligibility given that no differentiation is possible? If so, then you must possess alternative approaches other than IBE if 'IBE' is to be a meaningful notion.

Or riffing on my parasitic idea from earlier, you can't talk about an "inference to the best explanation" if you aren't able to tell us what an explanation is. — Leontiskos

In this context, an explanation is a conclusion someone is drawing from some set of evidence and background facts. — Relativist

Okay, good. So would we say that, at least in some cases, there is the real explanation and nominal explanations are better or worse depending on how well they approximate the real explanation? If so, then an IBE is presupposing the ontological existence of an aitia/cause/explanation.

For example: is there a "best" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? IMO, no- because they are all consistent with the measurements- there's no objective basis to choose one, so I think we should reserve judgement. — Relativist

So would you say that when someone argues for one particular interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, they are not offering an IBE?

We often don't have multiple, distinct "explanations" to choose from; we're just assessing whether or not there's sufficient justification to support an assertion. We examine this justification and decide whether to affirm it, deny it, or reserve judgement. It's the same process, whether or not we choose to label it abduction. — Relativist

But that doesn't seem very principled. If there is not more than one explanation, then how can you talk about an inference to the best explanation? It seems like you now want "inference to the best explanation" to include any judgment that there is sufficient justification to support an assertion. But that's not what the words mean. "This is the best explanation" is not the same as, "This assertion possesses sufficient justification." "Best" and "sufficient" are not the same concept. It seems that you are being too loose with words and concepts, and that is much the point.

Yep. Another resonating point. Especially as before Trump was on The Apprentice, he was part of WWE. — apokrisis

Interesting - I did not know that.

I used to like old school boxing but find modern MMA unwatchable. One claimed to showcase the skill, the other only the brutality. — apokrisis

That seems right to me.

I completely agree. That is why I focus on Candace Owens as a particular case in point. The medium is evolving fast. It is too easy to dismiss it for its history on the fringes and its WWE levels of believability. — apokrisis

Okay, but can you elaborate on this? I'm not too familiar with Candace Owens. I know she broke off from a media company, went her own way, and become more idiosyncratic and conspiratorial (much like Tucker Carlson). And is the "medium" you speak of conspiratorial thinking, or something else?

My suggestion is that the media may evolve but it always becomes what power must capture and control. And that exists in tension with the power of the people to resist. — apokrisis

Yes, I think that's quite right.

So the printing press at first liberated people power - taking back the written world from the social elite. Then it became the tool of class factions and eventually the liberal order, such as it was.

How is the internet likely to fare in that regard? How do things go as even social media crashes into the new AI paradigm. — apokrisis

Right. I tend to share Baden's worries that he expressed in a thread that has up and vanished.

That is why I now toy with AI as the instant fact checker on PF opinion. — apokrisis

I haven't used it for philosophy much, but I have tried the LLMs for other things. I agree that one must keep abreast of such things.

The great thing about is that @Banno holds the "opinions" of AI in high regard, and often utilizes them himself. I think that's part of the reason why he got so quiet after seeing his own theories debunked by his own authorities.

Almost nothing in life is provably true, but we can still weigh facts and evidence - and strive to do this as reasonably as possible- that is all abduction is. — Relativist

But again, if nothing is certain—even conceptually—then you can't weigh anything as more or less certain. The labels "conspiracy theory" or "inference to the best explanation" are never substantive labels given that they always involve a begging of the question. The "conspiracy theorist" is always the other guy, just as the guy with the best explanation is always me.

If someone's theory is bad, then you should say why it is bad in a way that would be convincing even to them. If your explanation is good or the best, then you should say why it is such. Labels like "conspiracy theory" or "inference to the best explanation" don't add anything substantial to a conversation, particularly when they lack context.

For example, if you have a number of different explanatory kinds in your belt, and one of them is IBE, then labeling one of your explanations an IBE is intelligible vis-a-vis the differentiation it provides. But when you continually say that IBEs are all there is and also claim that "IBE" means something intelligible, you aren't making much sense.

Or riffing on my parasitic idea from earlier, you can't talk about an "inference to the best explanation" if you aren't able to tell us what an explanation is. And if you say that an explanation (or every particular explanation) is an inference to the best explanation, then you've fallen into the viciously circular quandary. If you give a traditional account of what an explanation is, then we already have an alternative to an IBE, at least from an ontological perspective, and therefore not every account is (or professes to be) an IBE.

There are a number of folk on this forum who reject all substantive approaches to causality and explanation, substitute in their term "inference to the best explanation," and think they have won the day. But this is a rather confused move. If there are no real explanations, can there really be any best explanations? If I don't have even a conceptual understanding of what counts as an explanation, then how am I to know how to identify better or lesser explanations?

A good point and I agree. — apokrisis

Okay, great.

And yet what if all societies must construct some such transcendent fiction? - an argument I have made in this thread, and which plays large in Fukuyama’s account of human political history. — apokrisis

You are introducing a number of complex issues on which we may disagree at a relatively fundamental level. I don't agree with this first one, namely that all societies must construct some such transcendent fiction, but if it were true then the society would no longer function once the "cat is out of the bag" and the fiction is known to be a fiction, and I think that is becoming increasingly true with liberalism. In any case, let's look at the way you develop it:

What seems apparent is that social animals are organised by the emergence of dominance-submission hierarchies. It is something that is engineered in at a genetic level.

Humans have a capacity to narrate their worlds and so could create social order at this new “civilised” level. To make that happen, the old dominance-submission games had to be submerged under some form of collective transcendent identity. A narrative about ancestral landscapes, judging gods, or democratic justice. Even the mightiest in the group had to bow their heads before a power that outranked even them.

So this is what all societies have in common. The need for an uber-narrative which secures the identity of the individual. A neutralising force that breaks down the local gang boss and allows a society to scale - to grow large and complex despite the still natural tendency to play dominance-submission games. — apokrisis

So on this theory I gather that we could not return to an outdated uber-narrative which has now been debunked, given that it no longer possesses the necessary plausibility to function. Does the neutrality of the liberal state still possess the necessary plausibility to function?

Another difficulty I have with this idea is that it moves freely between the conscious lie and the unconscious lie. This isn't inherently problematic, but once a lie becomes excessively conscious it is much harder to maintain, and liberalism professes the lie of neutrality with a doctrinal earnestness. Given that the liberal lie is systematically presented rather than being an element of mythology or primordial tradition, I think it will be much harder to maintain.

Finally, you are presenting this as the problem of dominance-submission dynamics and the solution of a fictional uber-narrative. First, I would note that Jordan Peterson is constantly talking about group dynamics through the perspective of primatologists who debunked the idea that "gang boss" dominance (tyrannical social ordering) is common among primates. I don't recall the details, but his point is that that form of dominance is not an efficacious social ordering, which is why one instead sees forms of leadership and submission that are not based on brute strength or tyrannical behavior. If that's right and even primates can manage to avoid "local gang boss" hierarchies, then I don't see why ideational humans would need special help from fictional narratives.

The other point here is that most political philosophies, such as Aristotle's, try to tackle this issue head-on without the help of fictional narratives. That is, they attempt to provide rational grounds for avoiding tyrannical social orderings instead of resorting to a fictional narrative. Does that route seem unpromising to you for some reason? Because I don't see a great need to maintain the lie of liberal neutrality, at least beyond the manner in which every culture and time sees itself as normative, neutral, rational, etc.

So yes. Liberalism is a fiction. A meta narrative of a perfection that can never be achieved. But if it scales, then that already says it is a better meta-narrative than the other brands going around.

Whether human societies should freely scale is a new question that has come into view. But liberalism did win that competition. — apokrisis

This is another point where I tend to disagree. Around the timestamp I gave for that video Holland implies that liberalism didn't win that competition. There are other dynasties that far surpass liberalism, including Islam, China, Rome, and perhaps Christianity if it is separable from liberalism.

Presumably you are claiming that liberalism sits atop the mountain at this point in history, therefore it has won. On my view one must look at the natural lifecycle of a civilization in order to understand how successful it was vis-a-vis propagation or scaling. Here is the quote:

There's a default assumption that secular civilization can swallow anything up. There's a kind of arrogance there. "The secular civilization of the West is such a broad tent that everyone can be brought into it." But Islam is at least as sophisticated a civilization as the civilization of the Christian West. And a very ancient one. And for most of its existence has been much, much more powerful than the Christian world. Therefore the idea that it should accommodate itself to what liberal secularists think it should do isn't a given. — Tom Holland, ibid, 1:09:30

(The really interesting point with Islam is that it explicitly presented propagation/scaling as an argument for its own legitimacy, and the more territory it conquered, the more often it adverted to this argument. This form of "pragmatism" is common among many ancient civilizations.)

So I think you are making valid arguments, but I think the premises are questionable. Specifically, I think it would be easy to argue that it is not true that liberalism is theoretically or historically superior to other social orderings; and I don't know that a dominance-submission problem exists such that it needs to be answered with fictional narratives.

With that said, I think someone like yourself could modify liberalism fairly easily by discarding the neutrality principle and honoring values of individualism, productivity, free inquiry, etc. The argument from someone like yourself is apparently that liberalism is superior precisely because of its values, and at that point it could be argued that the fictional neutrality could be dropped given the wide recognition of the legitimacy of liberal values.

Sure. But what’s the best alternative to liberalism? — Tom Storm

Liberalism has all sorts of definitions. My claim is that if a society stops lying to itself in the way I outlined then it is no longer liberal (i.e. that that form of neutrality is a necessary condition of liberalism). The alternative is to stop lying to ourselves in that way, and this would result in substantive public debate over the particular form of good the nation-group wishes to privilege. So you might still say that rape should be illegal, but you could no longer say that legislating against rape is value-neutral. This in turn would require public debate about why and whether certain values should be enshrined in the laws. It would no longer do to say, "That is a value, therefore it has no place in law." It would become a question of which values have a place in law (or public life) and which do not.

But made a number of important points and I will have to respond to those before moving on in this line.

It would be nice if that were true. But I think instead that people get used to living in a reality show. The fact that the dramas are made up becomes neither here nor there. Instead the heightened life becomes what absorbs us into its reality. — apokrisis

So one example would be the shift from the popularity of WWF and WWE to the popularity of MMA. With the former there was a cognitive dissonance where one needed to pretend that a form of acting was not a form of acting, and the transition to the latter ironed out that cognitive dissonance. You get the same sort of event without the dissimulation.

So reality shows became a huge industry. And conspiracy theory is now moving out of the fringe and into the mainstream. It is becoming corporate and industrial. It is a flourishing economy with a real power grip on society.

Charlie Kirk is an event. And now it becomes this season’s freshest hit. The Epstein show still rolls. But Charlie Kirk could become even splashier if any of the conspiracy analysis is even a little bit true.

Reality shows spawned something real enough in Donald Trump. Conspiracy shows are becoming mainstream franchises now. An even more blurred line. What does that look like when it is the new dominant form of media owned by those with a will to power? — apokrisis

Those are good points, but at the same time I think you will find that the conspiracy theorists need to take care not to get too far over their skies. The popularity distribution will be a bell curve between non-conspiratorial material and excessively conspiratorial material. The sweet spot must still mind the further extreme, and truth or plausibility is one of the central variables governing that sweet spot.

The development of a taste for the conspiratorial is almost certainly bad for the flourishing of a society, and in this case it looks to be a reaction to an overly unified media landscape. But when you introduce magnifiers like YouTube or AI it's hard to know whether the pendulum will swing in the same manner it has in the past, or if a new dynamic will emerge.

Hence my interest in the new conspiracy theory industry on YouTube. Candace Owen and the like. Is this the new free press with the power to investigate or something compounding the problem, playing into the hands of information autocracy by amplifying the public confusion? — apokrisis

Yes, and the same could be said of AI.

But I don't think truth ever really dies. A conspiracy theorist with a YouTube channel that generates lots of views is relying on an equivocation. They rely on their audience (and perhaps themselves) believing that their end is truth when in fact it is views, or popularity, or drama, or something like that. When the dissimulation gets too far over its skies it becomes noticed that the person is not conveying truth but is instead merely gratifying their own desire for popularity, and at the point the game is up. The audience doesn't say, "Ah, well now we know for sure that none of this is true, but we're going to believe it anyway." That form of self-deception is only possible up to a point. The truth can only be ignored up to a point.

What would you argue is a realistic and beneficial alternative to liberalism? — Tom Storm

One of the central problems with liberalism is the incoherence of its neutrality principle. Liberalism claims that it is a neutral, universal, tradition-independent framework, when in fact it is one particular, non-neutral tradition among others. The liberal state envisions itself as a kind of referee who oversees the game but does not interfere on behalf of any side and has no value-commitments of its own. It is perhaps the only political philosophy which pretends that it is itself neutral; which pretends that it utilizes no metanarrative in ordering narratives.

In this way the whole notion of liberalism is founded upon a lie and a falsehood, and it is quite difficult to maintain such a bald lie on a societal and cultural level. It requires its adherents to constantly tell themselves entailed lies, such as that value-based claims like "free speech is good" or "rape is bad" are not value-based claims. The racism question that keeps coming up in my thread is another good example of the incoherence (cf. Jacobs' recent podcast).

As soon as we add to "X should be illegal" the obvious truth that the prohibition of X involves a normative or value-based premise, we have abandoned one of the most central tenets of liberalism. On the referee analogy, one might claim that the referee does not interfere with the game, but even if this is granted for the sake of argument it remains indubitably true that the referee is enforcing the rules of one particular game and not another. At the deeper and more philosophically sober level, there is no referee who is altogether neutral in that sense. So if the state is the referee and the citizens are the players, then the referee is by definition non-neutral as long as the citizens are not allowed to play any game they like. And of course this condition holds for the very definition of a referee.

-

Deeply related is this assessment by historian Tom Holland, particularly when Islam's incompatibility with secularity is discussed (1:09:19):

- :lol:

I think complete explanations are completely wrong. — Banno

Again, your choice of terminology bakes in your conclusions.

Would my holism be concerned with completeness or the all-encompassing?... — apokrisis

Yep. Banno began by arguing against explanation in favor of description, and has now fallen back to a different position, namely by opposing "complete" explanations. He has fallen back from arguing against a substantive position ("explanations are important to science," or something of the like), to arguing against the bogeyman of a "complete" explanation. Motte and bailey.

The point is that this is how the world works, so there's no use pointing it out and pretending that because its 'wrong' — AmadeusD

quoted this exchange:

There simply are no sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, inferior to another. — Janus

Specifically I want to explore the question of whether this claim is empirically or logically falsifiable. — Leontiskos

What could falsify our claim? — Leontiskos

Now I have no idea what, "this is how the world works" is supposed to mean. The claim was literally, "A blow with a baseball bat could falsify the claim in question." That looks to be entirely wrong, irrational, and unphilosophical, not to mention having nothing to do with "how the world works." The world does not work via baseball-bat falsification.

Presumably what is happening here is that yet another person does not know how to justify their belief about racism, and in this case they are resorting to threats of physical violence to enforce their position within society. "I don't know how to reason for my belief about racism, but if someone contradicts me I will hit them with a baseball bat and that should take care of things. 'That's how the world works'."

A conspiracy theory is a rococo sort of explanation, containing multiple agents and moving parts that must act in perfect concert for it to be true. Prima facie there is nothing that says a conspiracy theory must be false. However due to their complexity there are almost always multiple serious flaws in such theories. — hypericin

That's a fair point, but my difficulty is that the word is almost always being used pejoratively and not substantively. For example, if we actually used the word the way you describe then we would say that according to a conspiracy theory a solar eclipse will occur on February 17th. That's simply not how the word is used.

For a conspiracy theory to be a conspiracy theory, there must be a conspiracy theorist who espouses it. The two come as a package. It is well noted that it's impossible to disabuse a conspiracy theorist of their theory. Because, It is always possible to paper over any flaw with more complexity. This is recursively endless. — hypericin

...And now we're back to the pejorative usage. If you are committed to your definition where a conspiracy theory is an explanation "containing multiple agents and moving parts that must act in perfect concert," then there is no reason to believe that "it is impossible to disabuse a conspiracy theorist of their theory." You are equivocating between a substantive and a pejorative definition.

If someone says that a solar eclipse will occur on February 17th, then on your definition they are a conspiracy theorist. It will also be perfectly easy to disabuse them of their theory, especially if their prediction turns out to be mistaken. You are involved in a kind of selection bias where you take everything that is a conspiracy theory by your substantive definition, and then exclude from that set everything that does not meet the implicit pejorative definition.

This is the irrationality of conspiracy theories. It is the selection of a theory not because it is best, but because it meets the needs of the conspiracist. To the conspiracy theorist, the fundamental axiom is that their theory is correct. Given this starting point, any apparent contradiction can be worked around, given enough time and cleverness. — hypericin

This is another example of the pejorative equivocation.

This process is obviously not rational, — hypericin

But it is. It is obviously irrational to select a theory based on one's personal psychological needs, to begin with the axiom that one must be correct, etc.

but the term "conspiracy theory" has come to have a special meaning. It refers to irrationally jumping to the conclusion that there is some absurdly widespread conspiracy behind some perceived issue. — Relativist

I would say that "conspiracy theory" is a fairly empty term in this pejorative sense. If it refers to "irrational jumping to a conclusion," then of course conspiracy theories are irrational. This is just a tautology. Yet the substantive question is always whether some theory does or does not jump to a conclusion; or whether some argument is or is not irrational. Labels like "conspiracy theory" or "irrational" always commit the fallacy of begging the question whenever there is a substantive issue being debated. Better to skip them altogether and give an argument for why something is supposed to be irrational.

Leaving aside why there must be such an explanation, a careful look will show that "abduction" doesn't provide such an explanation. "Inference to best explanation" is utterly hollow, until one sets out what a best explanation is. — Banno

This is right, as I was trying to point out to @Relativist elsewhere.

Laws are descriptions, not explanations. — Banno

Does it explain why? Or does it just detail the description of the motion? — Banno

I'm not sure you have a very clear notion of 'explanation'.

• Why did it fall?
• Because of gravity.

This is certainly an explanation. It could mean, "Because of the law of gravity by which all such things fall," or, "Because the Earth is exerting a force on the object," or any other number of things, but each of them is explanatory.

What makes gravity a better account is F=Gm₁m₂/r². — Banno

This is to say that, "There is a force being exerted on the object, that force is captured by this equation, and that force will continue to operate into the future."

Now my point would be that it doesn't matter. What we get is a brilliant and useful way of working out what will happen - description or explanation, be damned. — Banno

You have nothing at all if you don't have an explanation. One cannot describe the future without knowledge of how things will work in the future, and one cannot have such knowledge in the absence of explanations. Your "usefulness" is entirely dependent on this ability to predict the future, and your idea that this is done sans explanation is altogether incorrect.

If one describes what has happened in the past but posits no explanation or principle by which the past and the future are connected, then they will be wholly barred from "brilliant and useful ways of working out what will happen."

It's how the real world works. — baker

You are just repeating your non-answer. Tyranny is still tyranny, whether in the hands of the anti-racist or the racist. Same bat, different side: might makes right.

A blow with a baseball bat.
Seriously, arguments from power have a bad reputation in philosophy circles, yet in daily life they are the ones that matter. — baker

So if someone says this:

There simply are no sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, inferior to another. — Janus

And yet they can provide no account of how their claim is supposed to be empirically or logically falsifiable, your response would be to resort to violence, because violence would make the claim empirically or logically falsifiable?

That doesn't seem like a real response. It sounds like "might makes right." It sounds like you need to resort to violence to enforce your beliefs because they are not rationally justifiable. Such is tyranny 101.

To be persuaded is no guarantee of the soundness of what has done the persuading. I just don't see how the truths or falsities that constitute a purported justification for some belief can be irrelevant. You yourself say that a "false justification is something that purports to be persuasive but is not", which seems to agree with what I just said. Although the "purports to be persuasive" seems wrong, inapt since people are often persuaded by falsities. I would change the "persuasive" there to 'true'. — Janus

You are fixing on "persuasive" too much, and also ignoring the difference between soundness and truth that I have pointed out to you on many occasions.

Your objection is something like, "But justifications don't always objectively justify;" or, "But justifications are not always sound." And again, this involves an equivocation between two different kinds of justification (material vs. formal or subjective vs. objective). The claim, "But justifications are not always true," just muddies up the difference between justification and truth. Justification has to do with soundness or validity, and truth is different from justification. Particular truths cannot be known apart from mental acts and justification/explanation, but the concept of truth remains different from the concept of justification.

One could perhaps dispute the idea that justification and truth should ever be separated, even conceptually, but that is a very unorthodox idea which would involve one in an extreme form of internalism. Given the nature and limits of human memory it simply isn't plausible.

Right, and to restate my point, J's objection holds against any theory of knowledge which takes truth to be a necessary condition of knowledge, and this is not just JTB, it is pretty much every theory of knowledge. — Leontiskos

I am not sure about that implication of what J has been arguing, but I think truth is a necessary condition of knowledge, — Janus

@J's central move is to say that if someone thinks truth is a necessary condition of knowledge, then they must explain how truth can be known apart from all the other conditions of knowledge (such as justification or belief), and since no one can do that, therefore truth is not a necessary condition of knowledge. This is endlessly confused.

and I also think knowing the truth and knowing how you know it is also a necessary condition of knowledge. That said, I am not claiming that we cannot think we have knowledge and yet be wrong. — Janus

Okay.

I will just link to , particularly the second half. If someone thinks this:

The problem, as I pointed out earlier, is that if we don't know whether the justifications for our beliefs are themselves [sound] then [...] How do we know they are adequate as justifications? — Janus

...Then they are making justification into something other than justification. Justification is per se persuasive. Persuasiveness isn't something that gets tacked onto justification. A false justification is something that purports to be persuasive but is not. The question of how we know whether a justification is adequate has to do with logic, inference, validity, etc., and goes back to what about "the Aristotelian way to develop such an idea."

(Still, even once we understand how soundness pertains to justification, there remains a difference between the concept of soundness and the concept of truth. They do not collapse into each other even in those cases where they are biconditional.)

Edit: Part of the problem here is the semantic range of the word "justification." Properly speaking, what is needed for the internalism that is being presupposed is for one to have the explanation (aitia) for why something in reality is the way it is. One must be able to (correctly) explain why it is true. "Justification" can mean that, but it can also mean providing an ad hoc or unsound account, and the critiques of a justification condition are presupposing this latter meaning (of faux justification).

Thermometers never commit epistemic errors; they can only mislead those who uncritically rely upon them. Likewise, the same can be said of a 'believer's' utterances.

The dilemma is either

A. a belief merely refers to the coexistence of a believer's mental state and an external truth-maker, where the external truth-maker is decided by the linguistic community rather than the believer. In which case the intentionality associated with the believer's mental state is irrelevant with respect to the belief that the community ascribes to the believer as a matter of linguistic convention rather than of neurological fact.

or

B. Beliefs refer to the actual physical causes of the believer's mental-state - in which case the believer's intentionality is relevant - so much so, that it is epistemically impossible for the believer to have false beliefs. (Trivialism). — sime

The situation isn't different with humans as measuring devices. And hence as with the example of a thermometer, either humans have intentional belief states, in which case their beliefs cannot be false due to the object of their beliefs being whatever caused their beliefs, else their beliefs are permitted to be false, in which case the truthmaker of their belief is decided externally by their community. — sime

So we have two distinct notions of truth in play: Intersubjective mathematical truth... versus what we might call "John's subjective truth"... — sime

Consider this post a bookmark, as I have been wanting to respond to these posts but haven't had the time and am now occupied again.

I think there are false dilemmas occurring here, owing to a presupposition that can hopefully be explored later on, but which is close to the presupposition that "the situation isn't different with humans as measuring devices."

The key will be to see that one's truthmaker is not stipulated merely by oneself, and that the truthmaker is not merely a consensus reached by an external community. For the realist there is an object that exists in reality which one is trying to understand, and correctly understanding the object will not be a matter of aligning oneself with any particular linguistic community. In a more preliminary way we would want to ask why the dichotomy you present would be plausible. Why think that the two options you present are exhaustive?

This is an interesting video that touches on many of the themes of the OP: Bishop Robert Barron and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

I was thinking rather the opposite. The reason people fiddle with T is to make it so that we can possess "knowledge" and access "truth" while still maintaining a view of J (and B) that makes it impossible to possess knowledge and have access to truth in their traditional sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, I am saying the same thing.

The problem I see is that this just seems like equivocation. The problems of global fallibilism appear to go away because "knowledge" and "truth" have been redefined, but they aren't actually being dealt with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and my point is that if one rejects the traditional sense of truth then JTB in its traditional sense naturally falls. Perhaps I should have not spoken about 'T' in the way that I did, since what I said could be read as claiming that someone who replaces traditional T with some other T will thereby reject JTB in the non-traditional sense. That's not quite what I was meaning to say, but I think it is also true.

That's why I say the J, T, and B are more loaded than they might first appear.

...

A "justification," of claims to be in contact with reality (in possession of knowledge) on the basis of appearances needs some metaphysics of how appearances relate to reality. If this linkage doesn't exist, I am not sure how J ever falls into place or how T would ever show up in our experience. But if J is about the private and communal imputation of status in the first place, and not about a relationship between the knower and known, how could it ever bridge the gap? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good post. :up:

This is what I was pointing up earlier with the pool analogy. If J and T are conceived of along the lines of that analogy, then the "task" that @J has set before him is impossible by definition. None of it is as mysterious as it is being made out to be. If one's anthropology precludes the mind from knowing things, then truth will be inaccessible and any theory with a T—including JTB—will fail. For example, if T is not traditional-T but rather pragmatic-T or communal-T, then of course JTB is undermined.

@Janus

I think the central argument is as follows, and you have been wrestling with it throughout your posts:

1. If something could be false, then we do not know it
2. Everything could be false
3. Therefore, we do not know anything

Most rejoinders in this thread have attacked (2) by trying to point to certain beliefs that could not be false.

As for your other argument:

JTB declares that we possess knowledge when our justified beliefs are true. The problem, as I pointed out earlier, is that if we don't know whether the justifications for our beliefs are themselves true then where does that leave us? How do we know they are adequate as justifications? — Janus

First I would say that justification and truth are not altogether separate notions. The telos of justification is truth. If there is no truth then no justification is doing what it attempts to do. Thus it is a mistake to conceive of justification as this animal which has no intrinsic relation to truth.

Second, the Aristotelian way to develop such an idea is to identify different kinds of justifications or arguments or explanations. Once we can see that justifications come in different shapes and sizes, we can see why some are better at obtaining the aim of truth than others, and what makes for that difference. Once this is established we are no longer faced with the problem of all justifications being equal (equally sound or unsound).

To elaborate:

Right, and to restate my point, J's objection holds against any theory of knowledge which takes truth to be a necessary condition of knowledge, and this is not just JTB, it is pretty much every theory of knowledge. "Truth can't be a necessary condition of knowledge," is not merely an objection against JTB; it is an objection against the traditional understanding of knowledge in toto. — Leontiskos

@J is basically saying, "We must reject JTB because it makes truth a condition for knowledge."

"We must stop drinking milk because it contains water."

I would respond, "There my be good arguments for rejecting milk, but this is not one of them. This is an argument against water more than an argument against milk. Or rather, it is an argument against water dressed up as an argument against milk."

What is at stake here is an argument against truth dressed up as an argument against JTB.

JTB declares that we possess knowledge when our justified beliefs are true. — Janus

Right, and to restate my point, @J's objection holds against any theory of knowledge which takes truth to be a necessary condition of knowledge, and this is not just JTB, it is pretty much every theory of knowledge. "Truth can't be a necessary condition of knowledge," is not merely an objection against JTB; it is an objection against the traditional understanding of knowledge in toto.

JTB declares that we possess knowledge when our justified beliefs are true. The problem, as I pointed out earlier, is that if we don't know whether the justifications for our beliefs are themselves true then where does that leave us? How do we know they are adequate as justifications?

Or looking ta it the other way around, take the Theory of Evolution, for example. It seems we are amply justified in thinking it is true, but we don't really know whether it is true. Can the justifications for thinking it true be themselves true even if the theory is false? — Janus

As I have said in the past, I would want to use the words valid/invalid and sound/unsound for justifications, and true/false for propositions. That itself clears up part of your conundrum, albeit not all of it.

Going back to my earlier point, if we read JTB as referring to "justification" materially, then in my opinion it fails. If we read JTB as referring to "justification" formally, then in my opinion it does not fail. But the first option seems uncharitable and strawman-ish.

Regarding Evolution, I think it is clear that the theory of Evolution is not knowledge in the strictest sense (scientia), and therefore it is not demonstrable. The theory of Evolution involves precisely the sort of probabilistic guesses that some take all knowledge to be bound up with.

Again, part of the problem here is that some want JTB to offer a recipe for knowledge, as if we could know that we know with perfect certainty via JTB. Whether this is possible is an interesting question, but even if some kinds of knowledge could fit into that category, Evolution cannot. Note though that if we can know that we know some things with perfect certainty, then the J and the T will be inextricably bound up with respect to those things. Contrary to @J's claims, this does not mean that the J and the T are indifferentiable, but it does mean that a biconditional holds between them in the case of demonstration.

Hume was skeptical of what cannot be observed as "matter of fact". If I know you well, and I see you fall off your bicycle, there can be no doubt in that moment that I see you fall off your bicycle, so I can say that I know you fell off your bicycle because I saw it happen. How long does the "no doubt" situation last, though? — Janus

If we take Hume's theory to its logical conclusion, then it is not permissible to trust your eyes because there is no valid argument to the effect that your eyes are trustworthy, or that your eyes are providing accurate information in that moment when you see me fall.

The way that this would manifest in @J's thinking would be to say, "My belief that you fell off your bicycle could be false, therefore it is not knowledge." He would just offer the possibility of, say, unreliable faculties, hallucination, etc.

That would be down to the accuracy of my memory. I might say my memory is very good and has been well-tested over the years and hardly ever fails me, and even when it does only in small matters, not significant ones like you falling off your bike, but that doesn't logically entail that my memory remains reliable, or even that my memory of the results of my memory being tested is accurate. — Janus

Right, but Hume would say that even if you've pocketed the 9-ball in this identical situation 1,000 times in the past, it doesn't follow that you will pocket it this time. Even if we grant that your memory has been accurate in the past, it doesn't follow that it is now accurate.

---

No, you are quite right. Justification and investigation are how we determine the truth. — Ludwig V

Right.

The issue here turns on justifications that provide evidence, but not conclusive evidence. In the context of JTB, such justifications can work, because the T clause denies claims to knowledge based on partial justification when their conclusions are false. — Ludwig V

I think there is a problem with this account, and I think the problem is precisely what Gettier points up. Gettier shows that someone can have belief, truth, and inconclusive evidence, and still fail to have knowledge. (But I am going to come back to your earlier posts in this vein. I am still catching up.)

---

Well, I was going to respond to you before about "infallibalists," but I figured it might be beside the point of the thread. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right.

What then in infallible? — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I said earlier, I think it is a tangent. The crux is certainty, not infallibility. You can get to certainty via infallibility, but the claim that the only way to get to a certain judgment is through an infallible faculty is at best contentious.

I think the difficulties for truth and knowledge crop up when the metaphysics of reality versus appearances is ignored, and so we default into this thin idea of "p is true if p." There is no explanation of how the being of p relates intrinsically to the thought of p. Appeals to cognitive science or the physics of perception don't end up being able to bridge this gap if they themselves are viewed as largely a matter of pattern recognition within appearances. Fallibalism will be unavoidable, except perhaps within the realm of our own experiences (a sort of solipsistic tendency). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but going back to Aristotle, if the identity of mind and object is true, then you do not have global uncertainty. If, on the other hand, like turtles it is "probabilities all the way down," then uncertain guesses are all we are afforded. The question here is whether the intellect is capable of certain knowledge, given its relation to the objects of knowledge. If there is a Humean severance between mind and its object then Aristotle is wrong and we are playing a game of pool where everything is an extra-mental collision that cannot be grasped by the mind with certainty.

Although I will add that the fact that people are incapable of living like they believe nihilism is true is precisely what you would expect if their intellects were being informed by the world around them; they would be unable to shake off their understanding. No matter how hard they reasoned about the groundlessness of their own knowledge, they would still run from rabid dogs like Pyrrho or climb a tree to get away from raging bull elephants like Sanjaya. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes indeed. So one ends up professing to believe something that they simply do not believe, given their actions. And whether what one cannot-but-believe is also known will depend on one's epistemology (and metaphysical anthropology).

I see. I think JTB is flawed but figuring out just how is tricky. JTB seems very thin and portable, but I think an investigation of the metaphysical context in which it was developed is helpful for diagnosing it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm sort of wondering what context people take JTB to be coming from. That some are referencing Plato and others are referencing Ayer is a pretty significant difference!

The problem with J's objection, as has been pointed out...

My concerns with JTB are all about how the truth of P is supposed to be established. — J

...is that it is an objection to any theory which says that truth is supposed to be established prior to justification and investigation, and it is also linked to J's belief that truth and understanding are, properly speaking, impossible. The first problem is that there is no theory which says that truth is supposed to be established prior to justification and investigation. That is a strange strawmen that has persisted for page after page. The second problem (which is related), is that if you are opposed to truth and knowledge, then why single out JTB as if it has some specific difficulty?

I think the core problem here is J's Humean "game of pool" epistemology. If every belief is reducible to a guess and the mind never merges with its object in reality in the way that Aristotle describes, then J's conclusion that truth and knowledge do not exist is foregone. All of this meandering and ignoratio elenchus is just a working out of that Humean presupposition.

I think JTB is flawed but figuring out just how is tricky. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As noted earlier, I think the problem with the way people are here conceiving of JTB lies precisely in seeing justification as material rather than formal. In seeing an unsound justification and a sound justification as equivalently sufficient conditions for knowledge. In conflating a false explanation with a true explanation, and inferring that someone who possesses the false explanation possesses the requisite justification.

Regarding "probablistic" - do not mistake this with orthodox Bayesian epistemology, which depends on the absurd assumption that we can attach a consistent set of epistemic probabilities to every statement we claim to believe. Rather, I embrace Mark Kaplan's* "modest Bayesianism", which makes the modest claim that we can attach a relative confidence level to SOME pairs (or small sets) of statements of belief. If there's a reasonable basis for the ranking. — Relativist

Okay good, and therefore let me try to answer one of your questions from a different thread here, in part because I will be out for a few days:

If there is no pole of knowledge then I don't see how one IBE can be better than another (because no IBE can better approach that pole).

Similarly, if we know what ice is then we have a pole and a limit for the coldness of water. If we don't know what ice is, then the coldness of water is purely relative, and there is nothing to measure against. I would argue that knowledge is prior to IBE, and that IBE is parasitic upon knowledge. Thus if you make IBEs the only option, then there is nothing on which an IBE can be parasitic upon or subordinate to, and this undermines IBEs themselves. — Leontiskos

Does your "tentpole" comment refer to the mere fact that knowledge exists, are you suggesting IBEs that aren't based on knowledge are all equivalent, or something else entirely? — Relativist

Not a tentpole, but a pole such as the North Pole. If some things are more North and some things are less North, then something must be most North.

So if knowledge is probabilistic, then it would seem to be asymptotic towards "100% probable." If someone doesn't know what it means to be 100% probable, then they cannot know what it means to be probabilistic at all. And if you admit IBEs or probabilistic knowledge without admitting traditional knowledge, then it looks like you have no pole to orient your IBE.

The phrase itself, "inference to the best explanation," presupposes the idea of an explanation, and an explanation is not merely probabilistic.

The general idea here—which will apply to a large number of the epistemological theories on offer—is that if we abandon the possibility or notion of certain knowledge, then the replacement form of uncertain knowledge will cease to make sense. If all knowledge is uncertain, then no knowledge is uncertain, so to speak. And if there is to be a spectrum of certainties, then one must account for what makes the more certain knowledge more certain and what makes the less certain knowledge less certain, and this accounting will itself reinstate the traditional view of knowledge that one was trying evade in the first place.