1984

If it's incoherent, then how could it exist much less last?

"To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd." -- K

Well that's silly. Giant national debt. What's affordable?

Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty are all similar to the myth of Psyche and Eros (Eros' mother Venus is the wicked queen/evil stepmother/malevolent fairy.)

Normativity has to do with judgment: good and bad (or good and evil.)

Convention is just the way things have been and are being done.

If you act per convention because you think you ought to, there is normativity to your convention adherence. If your general outlook is that people should look to convention to discover goodness, righteousness, and error free living, you would be squashing the two concepts together to the point that you'd probably have difficulty pulling them apart. The name for people like that is conservative.

That is not what Quine had in mind. It might help to consider that he was playing with meaning nihilism.

I think norms define the game.

But do you think math is a game?

it the phenomenon of somebody making normative claims - that X is true, or that people should do Y — andrewk

The latter.

Why? Are you presently studying English?

The word is used in various ways. If you object to a certain usage, I would advise an attempt at persuasion. Historically, emotional appeals are the most influential. You can also try bribes.

Teachers are often wrong.

(Y)

It seems to me that convention-following does explain normativity, but that nevertheless we cannot escape it, because language can only be understood if conventions are followed. — andrewk

I agree the convention theory is a tidy package. I don't think it's explaining genuine normativity. It's denying it.

Maybe it's in the realm of morality that convention becomes unsatisfactory. Tradition is not infallible.

Irony underlined. — Wayfarer

I think the advocate of genuine normativity would deny irony. His point is that normative language is ubiquitous.

There is no normativity without authority, or at least the perception of authority. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's true for stoplights but what about math? Should we agree that 2+2=4 because we're commanded to?

:)

One attempt to escape genuine normativity is Quine's approach: what appears to be normative is really just convention-following. The counter argument is something like this:

"The attempt to avoid the claims of normativity by treating the normative as a matter of convention is a sham, even in connection with science. The language of this proposal, with words like “better” as well as notions like coherence, and even consistency, is normative through and through. Moreover, the argument uses, explicitly or implicitly, intrinsically normative concepts such as “concept” itself. The notion of error, obviously, is intrinsically normative. At the end of every argument we wind up with justifications, which are the essence of the normative. None of this can plausibly be naturalized, as Quine thought epistemology might be naturalized into neurophysiology. There is thus no escaping normativity by this route – even the minimal level of self-reflection forces us to acknowledge the indispensability of normativity for talking and reasoning about the world." -Explaining the Normative, pg. 62, Stephen P Turner

The idea (as I understand it) is that if convention-following explained normativity, then we should be able to escape normative language. We can't escape it, therefore: we must accept genuine normativity (whether we have an explanation for it or not).

Do you agree with that?

Truth is still there after the lie. — Banno

The snake oil salesman is pushing a certain narrative. The Stoic says that snake oil can only succeed in the short term. Nature will eventually wreck that narrative, and so be weak-eyed unto things of little value. Trust nature.

A thread on normativity would potentially be pretty interesting. Is it like truth: can't do without it, but can't discover any conceptual scaffolding under it?

From Amazon's description of that book:

" Invoking the biblical motif of Jacob's struggle with the Face of God (Genesis 32), Simon D. Podmore undertakes a constructive theological account of 'spiritual trial' (tentatio; known in German mystical and Lutheran tradition as Anfechtung) in relation to enduring questions of the otherness and hiddenness of God and the self, the problem of suffering and evil, the freedom of Spirit, and the anxious relationship between temptation and ordeal, fear and desire. This book traces a genealogy of spiritual trial from medieval German mystical theology, through Lutheran and Pietistic thought (Tauler; Luther; Arndt; Boehme), and reconstructs Kierkegaard's innovative yet under-examined recovery of the category (Anfægtelse: a Danish cognate for Anfechtung) within the modern context of the 'spiritless' decline of Christendom. Developing the relationship between struggle (Anfechtung) and release (Gelassenheit), Podmore proposes a Kierkegaardian theology of spiritual trial which elaborates the kenosis of the self before God in terms of Spirit's restless longing to rest transparently in God. Offering an original rehabilitation of the temptation of spiritual trial, this book strives for a renewed theological hermeneutic which speaks to the enduring human struggle to realise the unchanging love of God in the face of spiritual darkness."

:-}

What's kenosis? Anyway, we're done. Life's too short for me to spend much time talking to a sexist jerk.

I agree he meant that striving doesn't get one there..."power which is impotence"

What document is your quote referencing?

Reference?

Anyone who spends much time contemplating union with the divine is a mystic. I'm not sure how anyone could interpret that as anti-mystical.

We're some ways off topic now.

Kierkegaard, the man who, along with Pascal, rejected the God of the philosophers for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob! — Agustino

Yep. He was a mystic. My goodness... two posts attacking me. :D

Ok

Lol. He was tried for heresy.

He believed that the Christ is a kind of agent. God is the ground of being. He's an example of how a person can be a Christian and also be what in Spinoza's time was called atheist.

I love that movie. I've watched it about a bazillion times.

I wasn't educated by Jesuits, but I read Bernard McGinn's book about Eckhart. Eckhart did not believe that God is a person.

But you're right.. sometimes Christian mystics do.

Did Eckhart believe in a personal god?

What is the standard dogma about divinity? The belief in God? — Thanatos Sand

The more mystical Christians are, the less they tend to believe in a personal God. I tend to think of mystics of all types as having fundamentally similar outlooks. God is an underlying creative force... something like that.

I can think of comments Kierkegaard made that make it sound like he did believe that God is a person, but the image of Abraham in Fear and Trembling is one any mystic would understand.

He rejected the standard dogma about divinity. Do you agree that Kierkegaard leaned toward mysticism?

Sorry.. you're right, I should have noted it. My thought processes tend to be a little amorphous.

I meant atheist in the way Spinoza was an atheist, but yes, he saw the Lutheran Church as dried out and rigid.

Yes, but wouldn't Kierkegaard be saying it in a Thomist sense, as all things point to God in their own way, while Nietzsche would eschew such spiritual foundationalism? — Thanatos Sand

I'm like 99% convinced that Nietzsche's fundamental view of reality was very similar to Schopenhauer's. If that's true, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were both atheist/mystics. Kierkegaard's overriding point was that Christianity is dead. He wasn't trying to build anything on its grave.

As the dude says, knowledge of what's true and real is always a product of uncovering, So perhaps it's both.

OK. But I didn't say or mean to suggest anything about mind or matter. I was asking if society is constructed or discovered.

I think your position is that everything is constructed, except some things are mathematically inevitable.. so not constructed. Is your view contradictory?

His position would be better described as all has meaning. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Interesting point. That is one of Kierkegaard's positions as well.

His post was obnoxious. Your post is nothing more than cheap online bullying. — Rich

Not at all. If that was the beginning of a book, I'd be hooked.

I'm not really following you there, dude. Think about the concept of society. Is it a construction or just an abstraction? Something made or something found?

(Y) (Y) (Y)

Too vague..