Objectively, the average contemporary western citizen is better off than most other humans throughout all of history by every applicable metric. — VagabondSpectre

1. You can't possibly know this, or even reasonably infer it. For most of human history (the vast majority) all we have to go on are a few scraps of bones from very specific burial circumstances and the limited non-perishable remains. How on earth are you sustaining a conclusion that the people whose lives are hinted at by these scant remains are "objectively" worse of than the average Westerner?

2. One of the major issues with "western" culture is inequality. It would be no surprise to find that, in such a system, the "average" person is reasonably comfortable, the question is whether it is just that this is bought at the expense of the fact that the least comfortable is an 11 year old child forced to work 12 hours a day stitching shoes so that this "average" person can lead their "comfortable" life.

If what we have now is in any way good or worth preserving, then we should continue progressing on the paths we're on as if western civilization is not a disaster. — VagabondSpectre

I don't understand your logic here. You seem to be saying that because there is some good in western culture we should continue with it along the same unaltered path. I don't really see how that's any different to saying that because the trains ran on time in Fascist Italy we should continue with Fascism. What about a system which preserves the good but discards the bad, or a system which removes the bad (at the expense of the good) but replaces them with other goods of equal value, or a system which removes the bad (and most of the good) but the net result of which is an overall improvement. Why are these options not available for you?

Obstacles in food security, fuel security, reproductive security, physical security, environmental security, and so on, will inevitably rise if a group carries on existing long enough. — VagabondSpectre

This is a very substantial underplaying of the situation we face almost to the point of being ridiculous. Global warming could very well make half the world uninhabitable, we are presiding over just about the largest mass extinction ever known, 12 million hecatres of previously productive farmland is now in "Seriously Degraded" condition according to the UN (a state from which there is currently no known remedy), we dump 2.2 billion tons of waste into the ocean every year, air pollution kills 18000 people a day, availability of fresh drinking water has halved in the last 50 years...I mean, do I have to go on? It's just absurd to suggest that these are 'just one of the obstacles that always arise with any group which carries on long enough. We lived as hunter-gatherers for at least 200,000 years without having any appreciable impact on our ability to continue doing so. Western (or modern) civilisation has been around for barely a hundredth of that and is already using more than one and a half times the resources the earth can sustain over the next 50 years.

Yes, we could overcome all these problems technologically, but where are the solutions? It's no good just wishful thinking, they have to come in time, not just eventually. If we're halving the available drinking water every 50 years we need technology to stop that right now, not at some point in the future.

Small, ancient, and otherwise non-western civilizations are not exempt from internal and self-caused disasters either, and compared to the west they're downright fragile. Small groups can have sadistic charismatic leaders who do noting but exploit. Small groups experience intra/inter-group violence and warfare, with the only convention against total injustice (war-crimes) being tradition if you're lucky (though tradition can support injustice just as easily). Disease and early natural death affect non-western societies much more than the west, owing to lack of medicinal understanding and low living standards. Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons (security, superstition, legacy), and so I say why not look at western civilization where infanticide is punished as an escape from disaster? — VagabondSpectre

Show me some evidence, any evidence at all, for any of these wildly presumptive assertions being widespread in respect to nomadic hunter-gather communities.

I'm not unsympathetic to the position you outline with the proviso that the story is not one of biblical redemption from original sin. The 'problem' that we could see enlightenment values as trying to solve is that of the change in what we might call human nature brought about by settlement, rather than the original sin of simply being human.

But if we do accept the intention of the enlightenment project, I think I'd like to reserve the ability to criticise it on its lack of success. Not that we've got some other history to test it against, but I wouldn't want to rest on our laurels and presume to just knuckle down to furthering a project which has had so little demonstrable sucess without at least exploring the alternatives.

Not trying to oversimplify you. Just thought there might be an underlying allegiance to your thoughts on philosophy and politics. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't mind being simplified, I genuinely thought it a really fascinating insight. One can provide all sorts of clues that hint at sarcasm, but very few which confirm the absence of it.

If the original sin is settlement, agriculture, etc., then all such civilizations have gone wrong. Is there something especially wrong with European civilization? — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting. I'm tempted to say that this is where the influence of your concept of force multipliers comes in. I don't know if you've read Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel', but it's pretty much an account of how those three force multipliers (plus some others) explain almost entirely the dominance of Western culture.

So, settlement sets everyone off on this diabolical race (except the very few hunter-gatherers) and the ones with the most guns, germs and steel win.

Absolutely brilliant! And here's me thinking I was complex when actually it's the same theory through and through. Quietist philosophy, quietist child-rearing.

I've not read the book, but I've read some papers based on it so I'm moderately familiar with the propositions in it, but rather than put the discussion on hold until I've read the whole thing, perhaps you could paraphrase a proposition from it that you think is particularly well reasoned and I'll attempt to use it to explain what I mean (or fail to and have to eat my hat).

Is there only the one way of raising children in the European tradition -- and it's the wrong one -- or is the problem that at least two ways are available, at least one of them is the wrong one, and children raised one of the wrong ways "automatically" have a disproportionate impact on their environments (human and otherwise) and giving them force multipliers only makes the problem worse? — Srap Tasmaner

I think there are broad enough similarities within the obvious diversity. I actually meant to specifically reference the environment our children are raised in (in a passive sense), rather than any child rearing method (in the active sense) as such, but I think that both have a part to play so I'm quite happy to stand by either.

To the first, one thing which marks out hunter-gatherers from settled agriculturalist is the freedom the children have. The theory goes that with settled resource harvesting, it becomes beneficial to harvest excess, so there is an incentive to put as much labour as possible to that project, and children are labour. In a nomadic system, there's no advantage to gathering an excess, so only that which is currently needed is gathered. This leaves a labour excess (the San for example work a 14hr week to gather all they need). Thus children are free to play. This play, the theory goes, develops egalitarianism and a strong belief in autonomy. If you're interested the primary paper is Here.

So yes, I guess I'm strongly in the "it's the way we think" camp in that our rejection of egalitarianism is a major factor, but I don't think it is intrinsic, I think it is learnt during childhood.

Im not entirely sure what you mean by your last paragraph, but you mentioned me by name so my internal narcissist compels me to ask you to expand, if you would.

The same way I account of differences of opinions on anything. — Marchesk

What is that way?

The answers provided are meaningful, — Marchesk

I thought that was the proposition we were debating, you're referencing it as if it were a brute fact. I'm asking to you provide an account of the way in which they are meaningful. In what way does the argument about universals, including any proposed solution, carry meaning?

Oh but we all know that gravity is so much more than our experience of it, from bending spacetime to relativistic frames. And before Newton, there was no concept of gravity, despite our experiences in common of falling things. — Marchesk

Yes, but the point is all these theories have to ultimately account for something which we widely share, or agree on - the experience of objects subject to gravity. All of these theories can be accepted or dismissed on the basis of their ability to account for something we widely agree on.

This is not the case with much of metaphysics where we do not have a phenomenon we widely agree on, the nature of which the theory is attempting to explain. This means that any such metaphysical theory can be refuted either with a flaw in its logic, or with a denial that the phenomenon has the properties ascribed to it, and there's no way of deciding that latter dispute. We widely agree on the properties of the experience of gravity, we do not widely agree on the properties of the experience of consciousness, so any theory to account for those properties is only going to be meaningful to those who agree that those are indeed the properties of the experience, not meaningful sensu lato.

But when someone like David Chalmers is talking about consciousness, he's not interested in only the words being used, but rather whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world (whether it be physicalism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc). — Marchesk

Firstly, Chalmers himself admits that "in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter.", but more importantly, you're still talking about the question. Chalmers may well be "interested in ... whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world", but the claim of his (or any other metaphysics of conciousness) is not to demonstrate interest in the subject, but to provide objective (or at least inter-subjective) insights into it. It is not whether he can ask the question that's being disputed, it whether he can answer it. In order to do so, he would first have to define specifically what it is he's investigating and there is no objective answer to that question so the project falls flat before it has even started.

How could they not be understood once one is well enough versed in the debate? — Marchesk

Very easily, I'd say it's self-evident. If a proposition is testable by rational analysis then no two people with equal capacity for rational analysis could arrive at a different conclusion to that test. Yet thousands of people with equal capacity for rational analysis have arrived at different conclusions to that test. It follows then that either rational analysis is not universal, or that those doing the testing have misunderstood each others arguments. How else do you account for differences of opinion on metaphysical matters?

This is at least partly based on the further perception that some universals have the same property values. — Marchesk

Is it? How do you propose to prove that? Maybe it's due to the fact that we find talk of universals to be useful despite knowing that their definition is vague and not at all existent in the world as it actually is. We find the term 'quite' and 'lots' useful too despite the fact that neither refer to a value in the real world which can be identified specifically.

This leads to the question of what is it about the world or ourselves which results in creating universal concepts. — Marchesk

And so it seems we're back to where we started. Yes, it may lead to "the question", but none of this shows any reason to believe we can provide a meaningfulanswer to it.

I think that force multipliers undoubtedly play a massive part in the problem, but the palaeoanthropological data, whilst extremely sparse and open to massive degrees of interpretation, does seem to indicate that the 'problem' started during the technological revolution, rather than as a result of it. By that I mean that if we take some basic metrics of the problem - inequality, war-likeness, wealth acquisition without limit), these are all properties commonly assignable to very old cultures at the outset of more settled lifestyles, but crucially not to communities of exactly the same technological capacities, but who were not yet settled.

Exceptions to this rule, interestingly, are tribes like the Papua New Guineans, who are uniquely violent, possibly because the mountainous terrain offers little opportunities for widespread cooperation (there are more languages per square mile in Papua New Guinea than almost any where else in the world).

So it seems to me that it's less of a case of force multipliers acting on some intrinsic greed, selfishness and violence in a completely unavoidable fixed 'human nature', but of 'human nature' being a malleable and adaptable thing which responds with greed, selfishness and violence to some situations, but which responds with egalitarianism, tolerance and frugality in others.

The problem then is not just the force multipliers, but the environment in which our children are raised which promotes this version of 'human nature' and not any other, more desirable version.

LOL! That's just the very, very beginning of the discussion, and people are going to want to know what you mean by a human being conscious. It can mean more than one thing. A little bit more discussion, and you'll find out that people don't always agree on what it means for a human to be conscious.

That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it.

And then lo and behold, you find out some people think that plants are actually conscious (along with rocks and everything else). — Marchesk

And again, you're just talking about the question. Of course the question is more complicated than that, of course people want to know what you mean by 'concious' and different opinions emerge, but that is not the claim that a serious debate in metaphysics is making. The claim that a serious debate metaphysics is making is that there is some means of determining the answer to that question, determining what conciousness actually is, determining which of the differences is actually correct (or even closer to it). It's that assertion that you've failed to provide any justification for.

What possible reason do I have for thinking that an analysis of the sentences used in an argument about those terms will actually yield some information about the way the world actually is?

with the problem of consciousness, which is metaphysics, there is a way to become versed to a point where at least the disagreements can be understood. — Moliere

You're begging the question. How do you propose to demonstrate that the disagreements are 'understood'?

There is no "must have" except in purely deductive arguments. But purely deductive arguments do not prove the soundness of their premises; they are merely formal, not substantive arguments, so the "must have" is always going to be a relative, not an absolute, one. — Janus

Yes,that's exactly the point I'm making. Metaphysical arguments cannot say anything meaningful about the soundness of their premises. They may well make valid logical inferences (or deductions) from the connections between the terms they've defined, but they cannot demonstrate even the inductive soundness of the definitions of those terms because the entities they're defining do not have any inter-subjective agreement, we cannot collectively agree on our experience of them to any extent.

You may or may not be aware of Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', but this is the point he's making in the second Dogma. Whilst we cannot make a clear an objective dividing line between that which is empirical (science) and that which is metaphysical, we definitely can say that with decreasing empirical basis propositions become more and more vague until they eventually become meaningless.

We can meaningfully discuss gravity because we all agree on our experience of it, we can quite meaningfully discuss conciousness or free will in a limited sense because there is widespread agreement that we at least have such an experience (limited in that we do not all agree on the nature of that experience), but we can have virtually no meaningful discussion about something like universals or tropes because we do not even begin to agree on the nature of the experience that they are attempting to define.

So I don't see metaphysical arguments and systems as fulfilling the role of a search for truth at all, but rather as a search for beauty. — Janus

That's a very reasonable and consistent way to look at it, I'm much inclined that way myself, but that it most definitely not the way metaphysics is actually treated, particularly in lay discussions.

Do we think the Quine-Duhem thesis shows that no particular theoretical entity is "absolutely" necessary? (I.e., necessity is theory relative.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, if I understand what you're saying correctly, then one could relate Quine's perspective (Duhem was very much more restricted in his scope, of course) to Carnap by saying that we are already immersed in such a large chunk of the 'bundle' that supports theories confirmed by empirical evidence (trusting our sensory inputs to some extent, agreeing with logic, mathematics of some variety etc...) that it makes sense to continue with falsifying theories reliant on that particular bundle. The trouble with something like universals (or competing theories) is that no one is particularly immersed in the bundles that go along with them (our language has intrinsic meaning, that which makes sense to us is also intelligible to the world at large, our apparent a priori knowledge is meaningful etc...), so all they end up offering is alternative possibilities with no feasible way of choosing between them unless you are already committed to the entire bundle which precedes them.

I'm going to echo what Srap and Ciceronianus have said because I think it's really important but keeps getting passed by in these types of discussion. When people argue about the importance of certain metaphysics they say that the question is meaningful, we want to know "why?". But then the majority of what's being defended is not the question, it's the answer, and it's an entirely different argument to say that any answer is meaningful.

I can make intelligible sense of the question "why is there something rather than nothing?", I can make intelligible sense of the answer "some ineffable thing created it all for an equally ineffable purpose". What I can't make sense of (which is what metaphysics claims to be) is the statement "some ineffable thing must have created it all for an equally ineffable purpose because...".

With the idea that there can be a 'must have... because' without any reference to consequence (which would make the proposition falsifiable), I don't see where the 'must have' comes from. What is doing the restricting? In the physical, empirical world, we do not need to know what is doing the restricting because all the while our reactions are thus constrained it remains true. The theory of gravity remains meaningful all the while the movement of bodies continues to be constrained in a manner consistent with it, but the ontological argument, for example, is constrained by nothing, so on what grounds can we argue for or against it?

Now is there a way to determine which metaphysical statements are meaningful and which ones aren't? — Marchesk

It depends what you mean by 'meaningful'. In Carnap's sense it means 'has some inter-subjective sense'. By that definition then yes there is a test and every metaphysical statement made so far (apart from Carnap's) has failed that test, the test being that there is inter-subjective agreement about the statement, which there clearly isn't. The problem is, as Wittgenstein arrives at, the reason that Carnap's statement is the only exception is entirely because of the way he defined 'meaningful'. Everyone who disagrees with Carnap's statement does not disagree with it internal to its own framework (ie make the claim that there exists some metaphysical statement with which everyone agrees). They disagree with him because they dispute his definition of the word 'meaningful'. But Wittgenstein tries to show how it is not possible to accurately derive the 'right' definition for a word like 'meaningful' and so disagreements are dissolved.

Then I'll assume Carnap's argument is itself meaningless. — Marchesk

You could do, but you have three options;

1. All metaphysical statements are thus rendered meaningless (which is self-referential, this being a metaphysical statement).

2. All metaphysical statements are meaningful. In which case the statement "all metaphysical statements are meaningless" must, by definition, be meaningful itself (and so cannot be dismissed).

Or

3. Some metaphysical statements are meaningful whilst others are meaningless. In which case there is nothing to prevent the statement "all metaphysical statements are meaningless (apart from this one)" from being the only meaningful metaphysical statement.

The form and validity of each step in an argument, I suppose? Don't we have a criteria for what structure a logical argument takes? — Marchesk

No, at least not one that can be demonstrated to correspond to anything externally meaningful. I'm no high level logician, but I'm aware of at least four different forms of logic all of which would disagree with each other as to the structure of a 'logical argument'.

What makes Carnap's argument logical and not irrational? How can we prove that Carnap is right? — Marchesk

Nothing. We can't. It's just one way of looking at things.

At the level of basic correspondence, I presume it is on the basis of the utility of my interactions with the world (which are based on my model of it), but this covers mainly the sort of modelling done by science, a little bit of speculative psychology and normative ethics.

At the more specific level, the level were I have no way of knowing which, out of two equally possible theories, is actually the way the world is, then I simply accept that I can't know. I go with the theory I like best.

I'm going to just come out and vote for yes, I've had enough of this shillying about trying to be equivocal about it. What we commonly refer to as "Western Civilisation" is a good enough definition for me and it's presided over one of the largest mass extinctions the world has ever seen, may well make planet inhospitable to human life and in most 'Western' countries young men are more likely to kill themselves than they are to die from any other cause. Now unless those consequences are somehow inevitably linked to the advances we've made (medicine, technology etc) then I'd say we've done a pretty disastrous job of it.

I don't see how this is possible since many people have made rational arguments for various metaphysical positions. — Marchesk

But this is begging the question. Carnap proposes that arguments for various metaphysical positions are irrational and you respond by saying that they aren't . What Carnap is really pointing to is how can you prove that they are? How can you demonstrate that the feeling you have when an argument seems to make logical sense had any meaning in the world at large. You certainly can't do it by inter-subjective agreement, 2000 years of philosophy has pretty conclusively shown there isn't any, you can't do it by objective measurement (that's Carnap's point) so how do you propose to do it?

I see. Well, the way the world actually is (which is what I'm metaphorically referring to as the library of the world at large) is important in that if our personal understanding of the way the world actually is is massively at odds with it, then the utility of our models will, it seems to me, be much lower. The problem seems to be that beyond a certain level of correspondence we seem to have no way of improving on that correlation, and so I suppose at that level it loses its importance.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, people do not seem to need to be taught how to think in order to construct useful models. Many people seem to contribute much to society in terms of science or culture and be perfectly happy, without being specifically taught philosophical propositions which are considered by many to be "closer to the way the world actually is". Either these people are wrong about their claim, or proximity to the way the world actually is does not seem to be in the least bit important, at this level. I favour the former, but I'm open to the latter too.

I think the process of arguing something helps one to get the proposition in a useful place in one's own library, rather than just shoved in a room full of propositions. I think the only way to get a proposition clear in one's own mind is to interrogate it.

Yes, I think it's evident that it is (if it exists at all). It seem plain to me that "the way the world actually is" and "the way i think the world actually is" can only be the same thing by coincidence. I clearly have no means at my disposal of ensuring that they are the same thing by deliberate action, because if I did, I would have to either be a unique genius, or in some other way explain why thousands of people of equal intellect and knowledge to me think that the world is some other way, and no such explanation seems to be forthcoming.

Sorry, I don't completely understand your meaning here. Are you implying that there might not be a "library of the world at large", or suggesting a solipsistic understanding that your library is the only library there is?

Oy! I think I'm making progress! And the work is good for me. — Srap Tasmaner

Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation. The apposite Ramsey quote (yes, I have a collection of Ramsey quotes on my computer...)

“The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and woolliness, is scholasticism, . . . which is treating what is vague as if it were precise....”

But yes, of course you are making progress and that is all to the good I didn't mean to disparage that in the least. The mistake that I'm trying to discuss here would be thinking that, as a consequence, we were making progress.

This would be confusing one's own understanding with a sense that one has now somehow 'got it right'. No, one has merely filed away what Wittgenstein has written in a system which makes subjective sense, like a librarian in a very complex library. This is real genuine progress because now one can retrieve what Wittgenstein has written and apply it to problems one needs to resolve. But it remains your library, and your filing system, not that of the world at large.

Oh, and whilst trawling through my favourite Ramseyisms I found this which I thought might amuse you in your current quest to understand Wittgenstein. It's from a letter Ramsey wrote about his time in Austria with Wittgenstein, talking of reading through Wittgenstein's writing...

"...he says 'Is that clear?' and I say 'No' and he says 'Damn, it's horrid to go through all that again'.

Since philosophy seems to be most intrinsically an exercise in aesthetic judgement, the same inevitable assumption of universality without the possibility of empirical evidence would appear to be inevitably operating there. — Janus

Indeed, I don't think this is far from Peirce's equation of logic with ethics and aesthetics in that all are normative descriptions, not universal truths.

I think it's not so much that I am more optimistic than you about the camaraderie on this forum than it is that I am far more pessimistic than you about the shockingly bad behavior of academic philosophers and theorists. This forum is far more cordial than the websites which cater to academics and graduate students. — John Doe

I don't know what websites you've been visiting, but I'm not going to deny the evidence of your own experience. Maybe it's the internet, more than the academic/layman divide. The thing is, given your philosophical position (or at least that part of it that has become clear during our discourse), I don't doubt for a minute that you've received a cordial welcome here. Broadly speaking, your's is a mainstream position. The attitude I'm referring to is exactly that this mainstream position has some authority over and above any other which will not allow itself to be interrogated, but nonetheless is asserted with vitriolic passion. If you already hold a mainstream position, you're unlikely to encounter the problem.

This strikes me as precisely the type of narrow position I agree with darth is wrong-headed. I have no problem with rejecting the notion of a priori knowledge. But this doesn't banish philosophy to mere knowledge of our own 'mental states' as you said, perhaps with an intentionally polemic tone. — John Doe

I think, from here on, you've misunderstood what I'm aiming at. At no point do I intend to consign philosophy to the waste heap. I'm arguing that it recognise what it really is. If we reject a priori knowledge, then we cannot make any knowledge claims without empirical evidence (which is the job of the sciences really). That doesn't mean we can't discuss those human fields of investigation which are outside of the scope of the sciences, those for which no empirical evidence can (ever) be brought forward. But we must recognises the limits of what we're doing. No-one is 'right', no-one is even 'more right', no-one is better at it than any other, there can no markers of success, there is no measure that you have understood or failed to understand. These are definitely not the attitudes held by the majority of lay philosophers.

The same holds for art. Returning to an earlier analogy, someone might not understand or appreciate a Tarkovsky film because they lack any sense of film as art, and this says nothing about the film so much as the viewer. Or perhaps they have a sense of film but not for certain types of films. Roger Ebert, for example, criticizes a lot of films that became genuine classics because he failed to understand and appreciate them. But it would seem weird to say that it reflects negatively on these films because they were open to the sort of misinterpretation that gets articulated in Ebert's reviews. (Blue Velvet is not a misogynistic film about sexual fantasy, for example, but a very interesting and profound film which touches on many important themes. — John Doe

And this is a classic example of what I've just said. Just to pick apart your language here to get at what I'm meaning. What does a "sense of film as art" look like, and how do you know if someone's got one or not? On the face of it it look like a self-immunised question-begging position. One demonstrates a "sense of film as art" simply by articulating the sort of opinion the lack of which is held as evidence one lacks a "sense of film as art".

"... he failed to understand and appreciate them.". In what way could he possibly have 'failed' here. What is the task he failed at and what is the measure by which his sucess is being judged? Again, I can't see one that isn't question begging.

"Blue Velvet is not a misogynistic film about sexual fantasy, for example, but a very interesting and profound film which touches on many important themes". Is it though? How can you determine what the film is beyond the implications it creates in the minds of those watching it? You may not have felt it was misogynistic, Ebert clearly did. Do you have some mental faculty Ebert is lacking?

So yeah, I think you're right to draw the analogy with art. Just like art, there's a lot of judgements being made on entirely subjective levels masquerading as some measureable thing.

would it be accurate to describe yourself as broadly Kantian? Objectivity defined as inter-subjective agreement with an agnosticism to the nature of the noumena? — darthbarracuda

In terms of the separation, yes, although, as I have mentioned in my responses to @John Doe, we yet again encounter the problem of interpretation. Before we even get off first base we have to decide if we're interpreting Kant in a 'Two Worlds' manner or a 'One World' interpretation. More than 200 years of analysis has not yielded any clearer understanding of what Kant actually meant by his Idealism, so I prefer to avoid associations with actual philosophical schools. In terms of epistemology in general though, yes I do prefer to remind myself of the distinction between the models we make of the world in our minds and the world itself from which those models are derived (if it exists at all).

As Nietzsche observed, the greatest failure of philosophers is their lack of historicity. — darthbarracuda

Yes. When I first encountered Nietzsche I hated his emphasis on historicity, impatient for him to get on with making the point. Decades later, I see how such an emphasis could be so important, but I think it's open to misinterpretation also. I like the conclusion of Collingwood, that metaphysics is an historical study.

I don't know if they are so much defeated, or refuted, as much as they are overcome. The theoretical attitude that skepticism draws from is a complex spurring from a more basic attunement to the "world". — darthbarracuda

Yes, that's a better way of putting it.

In a sense, Nietzsche has spoken and I have listened and appropriated certain ideas into my own sense of life, meaning, etc. — darthbarracuda

Yes, this is how I like to treat philosophy, like a work of art, it either means something to you personally or it doesn't, but like art, there'll always be those who think that what it means to them had some universal applicability. Apparently most children have developed a theory of mind by the age of six, it seems in some fields it only lasts a few years before they abandon it.

as long as we recognize that these are just games and that they're inescapable in some sense, then skepticism is without a clear target. — darthbarracuda

Yes, I too think skepticism can be defeated this way. I think extreme relativism can be defeated similarly, there's so much agreement as to the rules of the game that progress can still be made within broad parameters, it just gets problematic when we try to overstep the limits of inter-subjectivity.

I think that most of your concerns reflect the limitations of an internet forum. Faceless people quickly constructing written posts back-and-forth can come across as much ruder or more arrogant than they are in reality. I recently joined, and I am still fairly shocked at how obnoxious many of my posts read, but I don’t belive that this reveals anything significant about my character. (I hope not!) People come across strange in email too. — John Doe

I don't know if you read different threads to me, but I think that's overly magnanimous. I'd rather your generous optimism than my bitter misanthropy but I'm struggling to see how you're interpreting the sort of statements we regularly get here as quirks of the format and not the narcissistic excesses anonymity encourages. The Heidegger thread I referred to contained, for example, the weird accusation that the OP was "just making things up", as opposed to what alternative, I wonder.

If a philosopher is narcissistic because they claim to have insight into anything whatsoever other than their own mental state then there is a lot of ground we will have to cover, but I suspect that such an extreme position will not hold up to extended scrutiny. — John Doe

Entire books could, and have, been written about this of course, but the rejection of a priori knowledge (which, as I mentioned to Wayfarer) is what this is really about, is an existent philosophical position. Paul Horwich's most recent interpretation of Wittgenstein's meta-philosophy takes that exact position, so, whether you agree with it or not, it's certainly withstood scrutiny by the same standards any other philosophy has been subject to. I'd be interested to hear your particular objections though.

Do philosophers have to be so precise as to eliminate all possible misinterpretations? — John Doe

I wasn't intending to imply that the philosophers themselves should, nor even could, do anything about it, only that the project itself must be assessed by its results not its intentions. If the only method of communicating some insight is so open to interpretation that virtually any conclusion could be drawn from reading it, then nothing had really been achieved by studying it. There might be some proposition in there which really helps us understand our place in the world, but what justification do we have for thinking ourselves more likely to find it by determining what Heidegger really meant than by simply following through whatever we think he means?

I suppose I just think that it’s fair game, if someone is critiquing Heidegger, to retort that they are criticizing a position they seem to be incorrectly ascribing to Heidegger, and to offer what one takes to be something closer to his actual position. — John Doe

But the overwhelming evidence from decades of investigation is that it cannot be established whether an interpretation is "closer to his actual position". I'm no Heidegger scholar, but with Wittgenstein it is certainly the case that no amount of investigation has yielded any certainty as to what he was trying to say. Look at the thread currently running on the Tractatus, they can't get past the second proposition with becoming mired in uncertainty. That was the point of my, admittedly slight facetious, claim. Whatever anyone says (with any reasonable intellect) can be found to be a valid interpretation. Take a look at the work of William Clooney, or Michael Gelvin. They both take almost the exact position @Ciceronianus the White was taking, for which he was so lambasted.

It's an interesting article, but it touches on much of the same problems as I think Wittgenstein was trying to avoid (certainly in his later works).

Take this rather disparaging comment about the Vienna Circle;

"...their doctrine is self-contradictory, and therefore must be false."

must be false?? Apparently several decades of argument about para-consitent logic have passed the author by, but aside from that, it is self referential, not self-contradictory, meta languages, modal logic all deal quite happily with such propositions. This is exactly what I'm saying in my posts above (and pretty much everything else I've written here to be honest). We have no cause to believe that there exists a priori knowledge simply on the grounds that, at times, it appears to us that there is. We simply cannot say "...must be false" about anything metaphysical.

I don't like the Logical Positivist project because of it's equation of metaphysical proposition which cannot be analysed with "nonsense". As I've said, the fact that metaphysical propositions cannot be meaningfully analysed in an inter-subjective sense does not make them "nonsense", but it does make them a very specific category of proposition which is rarely how they are treated.

The author continues his attempt to wield Wittgenstein to prove his own personal beliefs;

"...the thought of there being an unutterable kind of truth that ‘makes itself manifest’. Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification."

Wittgenstein specifically does not equate this unutterable awareness with 'truth' (in that sense of the word) at all. In fact he makes great pains to do the exact opposite, He makes it abundantly clear that, for him, these matters are of a completely different kind to the matter dealt with by the sciences. The truth of the empirically verifiable statement "it is raining", is not the same kind of thing as the truth of the metaphysical statement "there exists a god", just got at a different way, as the author seems to be implying. They are of fundamentally and entirely different types. The one entirely investigate-able and a fit topic for argumentative discourse, the other totally mystical, revealed only by it's existence (not by investigation) and not a fit topic for argumentative discourse.

Again with;

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

the author is simply trying to yield some quasi-religious certainty out of Wittgenstein which just isn't there. At no point does Wittgenstein refer to these values a 'higher' (which implies a hierarchical relationship), and therefore outside of empirical propositions, simply that they are outside of empirical propositions. There is no implication that they are so because they're 'higher'.

Wittgensteins later project demonstrates his thought on this. It is about the limits of what can be sensibly expressed, it has nothing to do with hierarchy, or the 'importance' of mystical revelation, only that they are not sensibly expressible.

The author then returns to his seemingly god-given certainty about the world;

"There is simply no objective truth to be had about a judgement of value. So it would be extremely odd if the values – be they moral, aesthetic, religious, or whatever – that manifest themselves to us as individuals were to be the same for everybody."

I'm presuming here that this is the author's own view, but many readings, even of the Tractatus, see it as ultimately a rejection of the a priori (Peter Sullivan, for example). Under these interpretations, surely we must say that there may or may not be objective truth about moral or aesthetic values, we simply don't know. Which is why I so strongly oppose attempts to somehow rule out positions like Ethical Naturalism on some a priori grounds as if the matter of a priori knowledge had been settled already.

The problem with the article though (as opposed to my problem with philosophy) is summed up nicely in the last paragraph;

“There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). None of these sayings could possibly be interpreted as the views of a man who had renounced metaphysics.

If this comment comes from a man who intends to continue discussing metaphysics, then what exactly is he going to talk about? The inexpressible?

I think you're right about the narcissistic self-aggrandising nature of certain types of philosophy. But I think there are a few caveats that I would add to your argument.

You'll find the association with personal sense-making and universal 'truth' is actually less dogmatic in academic philosophy than it is in places like this. In my profession I have cause to discuss matters with professional philosophers and almost exhaustively I've found them to be humble about their beliefs and accepting of their limited nature. Most published papers will use terminology like "it seems to me...", "I find X more persuasive because...", or "my feeling is that...". It's only places like this, where people are desperate to prove themselves that you will encounter the more dogmatic "so and so proves that...", "you've misunderstood what X means", "you don't know what you're talking about until you've read X..." etc. As I say, no academic philosopher I've ever met actually speak like that, but it seems entirely de rigueur here, and that's a disappointment.

I think you unnecessarily dial back your criticism in response to @John Doe's comment about the diversity of the philosophical schools. Nietzsche is just as valid a target of your argument as Kant, or Lewis. It doesn't matter what the target of his philosophical propositions were, nor the result of an 'understanding' of them, it is still your understanding of them, It is still monumentally narcissistic of Nietzsche to write (especially in such a obscure manner), with the intention that his understanding of the world (even Nihilistically), actually means anything other than as an insight into his own mental state. In addition, you still have to take account of the manner in which certain texts are used. In terms of critiquing Philosophy, the effects are what is relevant, not the intentions. If the effect of the presentation of certain existential texts is that they are wielded as evidence in a pseudo-analytical project, then they are as guilty of misleading as the analyst.

Again, this is more the case outside of academia where you here nonsense like "that's not Heidegger's point..." (which I read recently), like any of us actually have a clue what Heidegger's point actually is. I guarantee you that if you name any conceivable interpretation of Heidegger I will find you a published author who has proposed it.

I wouldn't go as far as to include all philosophy though. I'm personally convinced of the therapeutic interpretation of Wittgenstein's meta-philosophy (not necessarily convinced that that is what he intended, just convinced that it's right). I think there is value in philosophical propositions which aim to provide a story to help make personal sense of the world, and I think there is value in discussing these propositions in the way someone might try on clothes to see which they like. There's a value in showing how the angst that the 'big' philosophical questions can cause can be dissolved by proposing that they are mostly just linguistic misunderstandings, and lots of philosophy attempts to do that.

Claiming that others have an argument is not a substitute to come up with an argument of your own. Maybe they do have compelling arguments, but you would not know it if you cannot say what it is. If you and I are going to have a long term discussion, I expect you to philosophize, and not merely point to other philosophers. — Samuel Lacrampe

I think you're misunderstanding the point I'm trying to argue. The point I'm trying to make is that discovering 'truth' or even approaching any kind of agreement via the Socratic method does not work. The fact that many philosophers have developed critiques of it is my argument (or at least the evidence for it). I'm not substituting their arguments for one of my own, I'm using the existence of their arguments as evidence in its support. The very fact that 2000 years after the project was first started (in written form at least) there exists in published form almost every conceivable opinion on the matter, still held by intelligent, well-educated people, demonstrates that rational debate has not even narrowed the field, let alone produced any meaningful consensus.

The evidence indicates that the universe was created before human beings existed. If we accept that evidence then a human being could not have created the universe. — Metaphysician Undercover

What evidence is there for a lack of human beings before the universe began, or outside of the observable universe?

I'd be surprised if there weren't terms even back then to distinguish trees - as tall plants branching off from a single trunk - from shrubs. — apokrisis

Absolutely. My main point here is to question the use this constraints-based approach is being put to (not is usefulness, which I don't doubt, just its use here). So what I'm getting at is that whilst we can be fairly sure, it seems to me, that the creative re-use of words is definatly constrained by needing to conform to some pattern dictated by the world, I'm not so sure that we can 'see' what those boundaries might be. Essentially, those boundaries themselves are limited only by the creativity of the language user and new uses of words may surprise us not only by a connection to the world which we can 'see' but had not made use of ourselves, but also by a connection to the world that we had not even 'seen' until the language user presents it to us.

Its like, to stick with our example, we might be unsurprised by anyone describing a new 'branchy' thing as a 'tree', we're prepared for any branch-like thing to be referred to as a 'tree' even though we might not currently be using the word that way. But then there's calling a steadfast and sturdy-like thing a 'tree'. Not only would that be a way we hadn't personally used 'tree', but it would also be a connection we weren't even expecting.

We can only agree a meaning to the extent we agree to ignore the endless possible differences of nature, of the real world. Word use corresponds not to things in themselves but to where we agree to stop debating the open-ended differences that will always remain. — apokrisis

This is a really interesting way of putting it. It's not too far from Wittgenstein's family resemblance, but I prefer this exposition. What's interesting about this for the OP, is that there is some act of definition which could be discussed prior to a debate, but that that act itself would most likely render the entire debate pointless. An honest agreement about what we had excluded by our use of a term would, I think, dissolve the majority of metaphysical debates.

we would know a unicorn if we saw one and recognize it as such. We have looked in many - many places for a very very long time, and no one has seen a unicorn. — Rank Amateur

We must determine that we would know a creator if we found one (if not, the entire search is pointless). We have certainly looked in many places for a very long time for one and no one has found such a thing. So do we rule out the possibility of a creator on the same grounds? It seems not, hence my question. By what method do we "know" the universe was not created by a human (albeit one with, as yet, unrecognised powers), which would not also be applicable to any God?

And you never will so long as you continue to equate trivial decisions such as flavors of ice cream with decisions regarding one's philosophical journey. — Arne

How does this work? What is it about my equating trivial decisions with decisions about a philosophical journey which prevents me from understanding your distinction?

In addition and consistent with my previous comments, we do not make the number of decision during the course of a day as we think we do, let alone significant decisions. We spend most of our day on "auto pilot" when it comes to executing the decisions we have already made. — Arne

I don't understand the relevance of this. How does the number of decisions we make impact on the definition on the distinction you're trying to make?

I thought I'd asked rather a simple question, I just want to know what distinguishes being drawn to something from having a preference for something. All I'm getting so far is possibly either that you're defining one as being subconscious and the other conscious, or else you're defining one as being more powerful (or less trivial) than the other. The trouble is, it's not clear which, and in either case, I'm not sure how it would be demonstrably the case in philosophy.

All these types of question seem to be quite well accepted and yet I'm still in the dark as to what the question of purpose would even mean for a creator of the universe. I'm quite happy with the distinction @Wayfarer highlights above between science describing the states and rules of the universe but remaining silent of the question "why?", but I really have no idea what anyone expects an answer to such a question to look like.

Answers to questions - "why?" have the format "because...". But 'because' literally means 'the cause of' so all we've done is move the question back, but that's exactly what science is doing, so that can't be quite it.

It seems to me that there is only one option, we have got our conception of cause and effect wrong somehow. But our conception of cause and effect is at the heart of our intuition. So where could we possibly go from here? We could analyse the possibility-space of ways in which the universe could 'be', but what tools are we going to use to do that job? We've just established that one of our most basic a priori understandings is probably wrong, so on what basis are we going to trust the rest like logic and rationality?

we know that the universe was not created by a human being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do we? How?

Look, there's no point in us arguing about it when we can easily settled the absolute, final and unequivocal Truth of the matter by simply asking David Deutch's opinion.