Stanley Fish (a critic I am no real fan of) has a routine he calls 'philosophy doesn't matter'. His argument is while it is true that people hold views about things (derived from philosophical positions in a haphazard way), essentially no one makes any serious decisions in their life - who to live with, what house to buy, where to work, where to shop, who to vote for, etc - based on the problem of induction, whether math is discovered or invented, or if physicalism is false, etc. — Tom Storm

Fish picked examples of impractical philosophy. If that's all philosophy is, then it's like chess problems. But consider Hobbes. Agree with him or not, he doesn't waste much time on the petty stuff. His theory of knowledge is short and sweet, and then he applies it to fixing the world. Or consider the philosophes who freed us from the dominance of superstition. It may be that philosophy has won its major battles and has become something like (not-so--common) common sense --- and melted in science.

Apes together strong. Ape sitting a room ruminating on air, almost certianly utterly moronic. — StreetlightX

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As such it can't be given ruling power. Which it clearly has in the modern world! And look at the consequences... The world has never been in a more deplorable state! Speaking of an analysis of the shadows.... — GraveItty

FWIW, Pinker's book makes a strong argument that the world has never been better, which is not to say that he fails to acknowledge our problems. IMV, it's tempting to project some golden age on the past. Life today is complex. We are condemned to be (sort of ) free.

Also, it hardly seems to me that the scientific worldview reigns in democracies. Sure, the elite tend to be more scientifically educated, and they do have disproportionate influence, but plenty of voters are happy to see abortion made almost impossible in Texas, etc. Even if 'science' reigned, there would still be problems and disagreements.

cosmology of the creation of the heavens, schools (to which you are forced to go) and universities as the seminaries, etc. etc. — GraveItty

To me it seems unrealistic indeed to imagine a culture where children are not 'forced' to learn that culture's fundamental beliefs and ways of living.

You say religion is irrelevant, confusing, self-deceiving, and biased, and science is a refind common sense stripped away of all this. But that's your personal opinion. And that's indeed all it is. An opinion. So not a common sense. What would this common sense be? How do you know the gods don't exist? Science can't explain why the universe is there! — GraveItty

You may be reading too much in to my statement. Religions may be understood in sophisticated ways that get around my complaints (such as their late, "cultural" forms, like enjoying the myths, rituals, music, architecture, and history...without 'believing' or acting on the obsolete theology and stoning sinners.)

I think a person of only average intelligence can understand why controlled experiments are convincing in a way that anecdotes are not.

Do the gods exist? What does it mean to believe so? Or to be sure that they don't exist? Instead of getting lost in the endless smoke of what people babble about, we might look at how beliefs are manifested in action. If I claim to believe I can fly but refuse to jump off a building.... If I claim to believe in an afterlife but panic when death is near...

As far as science explaining Everything, that to me sounds like you casting science as a religion again. IMV, the disabused scientific attitude no longer clings to such things, can't even make sense of them ---not out of incuriosity but rather from high standards of definiteness and seriousness when it comes to claims. I see the world as ridiculously complex, and useful patterns are something like a hard-won exception.

It's more a matter of only including what can be quantified, preferably in line with the paradigmatic model provided by physics. — Wayfarer

Quantity allows us to be definite in our observations and our predictions. Some focus on physics, but as as I can tell that would just be a bias. Metaphysicians might especially compare themselves to physicists (and the reverse), since both may perceive themselves as studying the fundamentals of reality.

I've been trying to show that just because religious tenets are verbalized in a language one grammatically and lexically understands, this doesn't yet mean that one is qualified to understand them as intended. I emphasize the emic-etic distinction. — baker

Fair enough, and that's an important distinction. Let those with ears to hear (and only those) hear. But in a 'rational' context, this means promising something that can't be supported with a controlled experiment, for instance.

It's a digression, but this touches other philosophical themes, such as whether we are calling the same something 'red.' More concretely, how does one insider recognize another?

Where I and several other posters disagree is that I put forward the view that religion/spirituality is something far stricter, less open, less democratic, less accessible, far better delineated than they present it as. — baker

Which is 'foolishness' to the humanist-without-thinking-about-it 'Greeks.' There is something appealing (because dangerous?) about a religion that's willing to abandon the game of pretending to be rational, scientific, democratic, etc. But does K need H as a foil? Perhaps you'd defend a continuing attachment to rationality and stress the elitism?

Through science? Then you ignore non-scientific cultures. Science is just one culture amidst of many and should as such not be intertwined with democratic politics. Just as Christianity should be excluded from politics (as you suggest), so should science, unless all those involved agree to make it part of politics. There simply is not one reality that constitutes truth. Scientific reality is just one amongst many. Objective as it may sound. — GraveItty

Personally it doesn't make sense to me to treat science as a religion. One way to look at science is as distilled irreligion, as something like refined common sense, where that refinement is the stripping away the biased, the confused, and the irrelevant. It's a tradition that tries to see around our congenital tendencies toward deceiving ourselves (embraced perhaps because of its undeniable success at making the impossible possible.)

Materialism is as old as philosophy, but not older.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

To me that means something like: it was a radical step to try to look at the world without or around religion as a lens.

.

There seem to be many other ways of thinking about the "big questions", but no other way but science that seems to have any chance of delivering any definitive answers. I agree with Popper that sometimes those other metaphysical ways of thinking, apart from their poetic rewards, may also be inspirational to the abductive thought processes of scientists. — Janus

I agree. For most part the answers of science are definitive in the form of technical solutions. A vaccine can be tested, and the essence of such a test is refined common sense.

A subcategory I am very amused by is the person who has read a great philosopher and assumes that they are now a philosopher too, with all the abundant creative powers of that famous writer. — Tom Storm

And in any Discourse whatsoever, if the defect of Discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the Fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a signe of want of wit; and so will it never when the Discretion is manifest, though the Fancy be never so ordinary.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame; which verball discourse cannot do, farther than the Judgement shall approve of the Time, Place, and Persons.

And who are those "others"? Toddlers? Senile old men? Teenagers? Bored housewives? Poles? Argentinians? Jews? Stamp collectors? Chemistry teachers? Who?

Who is your epistemic community?

The whole of the human race? Probably not. — baker

Good question, though not meant for me.

The 'rational community' is something like educated, rational humanists. Sure, one can cling to cultural Christianity or whatever, but keep it out of politics, keep it in the private sphere. The true and the good are determined socially, through science and democracy, etc.

Tantalizing. Can you expand briefly? — Tom Storm

Imagine the kicks that Pinker gets being an intellectual rockstar. He has the joys of the poet. Romanticism is alive in well in him, even if he writes apologetics for seemingly anti-romantic scientism. In the same way a philosopher could write beautifully about the unreality of the self...all the while feasting vaingloriously on his own eloquence.

Think instead of an aging, poor nobody who's never felt gifted or interesting. In theory this Nobody could identify with the species and its rare, heroic specimens (Einstein and Tolstoy and Lincoln, etc.). In practice I think it's hard to accept a place at the bottom of the pyramid.

Ego kicks, an important drug.

But when it comes to religion/spirituality, they drop this distinction, and treat religion/spirituality as something that should be readily, easily accessible to just anyone, from toddlers to senile old men, from bored housewives to academics with multiple advanced degrees. As if religion/spirituality would require no qualification. People admit that even talking about haircuts or how to fold socks isn't something that just any Joe Average can do, no, even for things like that, they grant that one must know this and that. But religion/spirituality is supposed to be fair game, for everyone. Now that's strange! — baker

Many of us live in free societies where even the proles can read the Gospels in the private and either scribble improvements in the margins or burn the thing in the toilet. This is strange, historically speaking.

Many individuals now suffer perhaps because others doubt their own right to pronounce, their own mail-order credentials or what not. Do I care if a scientologist is a clear? I care far more about whether a doctor finished medical school.

If God-claims are just a speciality for nerds, it's not clear what those nerds do. Are they professional soul-savers? Or are they on private journeys? Butterfly-collecting divine experiences without a thought for the rest of the world?

think that's too strong. Pinker defends the Enlightenment tradition (which is unfashionable in many parts and provokes anger) and certainly privileges science and rationality. This does not necessitate scientism. Philosopher Susan Haack, who disparages scientism, is also a fulsome defender of the Enlightenment tradition and defends science as one of the most useful methods for acquiring reliable knowledge to meet goals. — Tom Storm

I did overstate the case perhaps. 'Scientism' is usually pejorative. It's sometimes a good play to grab a slur and rehabilitate it. I don't think Pinker would deny that he was defending scientism if I phrased the question in the right tone. Recall that I mostly find Pinker convincing. I just continue to understand the allure of religion's wicked secrets. I understand why some people aren't as enthusiastic about it as Pinker, for instance, who's basically the nerdy version of a rock star. The 'magic' of identity is still here after all, if one can manage it.

That's an interesting possibility! You make some good points; I'm no fan of scientism. but I haven't read Pinker so I can't comment on whether his arguments are scientistic. — Janus

Just to be clear, I'm saying that he argues for scientism. Or, knowing the term is used pejoratively, he defends a data-driven, scientific approach to answering big questions.

What I've been saying all along is that Western philosophy is handling religion/spirituality on terms that are extraneous to religion/spirituality, and as such, necessarily misleading at the very least. And just because Western philosophy has been doing this for centuries doesn't make it right.

Western philosophy is acting outside of its competence when it talks on the topic of God, but thereby means Jehovah or Vishnu or Allah.

If philosophers want to talk about the "god of philosophers", that's their thing, their prerogative. But they should stop fooling themselves, and others, that this way, they are making any relevant claims about Jehovah or Vishnu or Allah. — baker

That's the kind of point a Western philosopher might make, though, is it not? Yet you write as if the Western philosophy was a simple beast with clearly demarcated territory.

It's as if you deny the legitimacy of critically thinking about spiritual matters. It's a classic position.

8. ... Reason is lost upon them, they are above it : they see the light infused into their understandings, and cannot be mistaken ; it is clear and visible there, like the light of bright sunshine ; shows itself, and needs no other proof but its own evidence : they feel the hand of God moving them within, and the impulses of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel. Thus they support themselves, and are sure reasoning hath nothing to do with what they see and feel in themselves : what they have a sensible experience of admits no doubt, needs no probation. Would he not be ridiculous, who should require to have it proved to him that the light shines, and that he sees it ? It is its own proof, and can have no other. When the Spirit brings light into our minds, it dispels darkness. We see it as we do that of the sun at noon, and need not the twilight of reason to show it us. This light from heaven is strong, clear, and pure ; carries its own demonstration with it : and we may as naturally take a glow-worm to assist us to discover the sun, as to examine the celestial ray by our dim candle, reason. — Locke

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding/Book_IV/Chapter_XIX

I would argue that sensation is somewhat radically private, in that we never fully know what it's like to be someone else. Only what their behavior and words tell us, and to the extent that our projection or simulation of their minds is accurate. Which often enough, it's not. — Marchesk

For me there's a delicate issue here: how can words and behavior indicate sensation in the strict sense? Imagine a supervised learning scenario. I never have access to the sensations of others. I have no data in which I can discover correlations. The concept of private sensation (as solipsistic philosophers need it be) leads to a kind of hidden dimension that we shouldn't be able to reason about (indeed, we can't even say it's one dimension.)) The reason we can and do is (arguably) because 'redness' is primarily a pattern in our social behavior. Basically the hidden dimension serves no purpose.

Nevertheless I believe that I see the redness of red. I just don't know exactly what that's supposed to mean. (Nor do I know exactly what 'physical' is supposed to mean.)

I haven't read that, but I get what you mean by "sterility or humorlessness about the enterprise". Some, like Dawkins and the so-called "Four Horsemen" seem to want to dismiss, even eliminate from human life, all religion, and that is in my view a ridiculous, not to mention arrogant, aim. — Janus

We are talking about the same thing. Pinker defends scientism essentially, and he does a pretty good job. But I imagine the revolt against Pinker's scientism is something like Kierkegaard's against Hegelianism. The big sane system seems to have a blindspot (perhaps only a tonal-emotional blindspot) and can look insanely sane. A hidden assumption might be : I find myself quite comfortable in this world with only a faith in secular data-driven humanism...so others can surely also be happy this way. Another blindspot: the pleasure in secular humanism may depend on invidious comparison and therefore on the superstitious that it perhaps only pretends to want to convert.

Skepticism always wins. It can't be killed. We just tend to move on from it (or ride past it unmolested as Schopenhauer put it). — frank

Perhaps it can't be killed, but I think it can be challenged in new ways. For instance, we can refuse to accept the lonely-experience-hole of the self as fundamental (or at least see to what degree it's constructed by training.) 'The soul is the prison of the body.' The so-called soul is singular perhaps only because the body is (grasped as) singular.

Well, that's your problem then. And what are you doing about it? — baker

I was quoting a song, having pointed out what I considered your twisting of a word. Unless 'God'(or whatever) just is the text itself, merely reading about God would not typically be understood as a direct experience thereof. (Finnegans Wake was once said to not be about anything but rather to be that thing itself, so maybe FW is a self-referential god-text.)

I like the story. To me the issue is not about the denial of sensation but rather about its status. We seem to understand sensation (the 'what it's like to see red') as radically private. At the same time we thoughtlessly assume that of course we all have access to the 'same' redness. The unspoken logic seems to be that the same-enough hardware should provide the same-enough radically-private-experience-stuff. But whence this 'should'? Anything that's radically private by definition is seemingly outside the purview of logic and science, by definition.

Yes. This is just standard skepticism. How do you know the words you just said to me don't translate as "Fire at will" to me? — frank

Yes, if one accepts private experience, one seemingly opens the door for standard skepticism. To try to answer your question, I speculate that I gain confidence in the use of words by getting the desired reactions, most of the time, from other English speakers. I vote for the primacy of the practical. (For the recognition of its dominance.)

I understand why behaviorism wanted to get away from consciousness. No need to deny it, but arguably a reason to downplay it.

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?" — frank

We are tempted to say that she 'learns' what color is (in some, questionable sense.) But this presupposes a common experience of color, or, similarly, a common interpretation of 'black and white.'

As far as I can make out, if we presuppose private experience, then we create a situation where we can never be 'philosophically sure' that we ourselves are outside of Mary's room. How do you prove that you experience color? Puke up the right noises in the right order, etc.

but do you really want to valorize a wickedness that may not merely be "wicked" — Janus

It's tempting at times, but no. Reading @baker reminds me of offensive thinkers like Kierkegaard. I use 'wicked' because it's a sort of indulgence to believe against reason and decency (the universal is transcended by XXX.) . God commanded Abraham to murder a boy, his own son, and his obedience is presented as heroic or saintly. If it was just your neighbor who killed his son in the woods because the voices told him to, well then it's just madness. But Abraham was good-crazy somehow (because there really is an equally good-crazy God, I guess.)

I recently finished Enlightenment Now (Pinker), and I basically agree with him, but there's nevertheless a sort of sterility or humorlessness about his grand case for Humanism which he does not seem to recognize.

Our education remains an education in images. It is not merely an education by means of images, but what Plato provides is an education about images. — Fooloso4

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Imagology...
https://www.artforum.com/uploads/guide.003/id18182/press_release.pdf

And just for the record; I'm not saying there is anything wrong with having religious or spiritual faith, provided you are intelligent and honest enough to realize that that is what it is, and not to conflate it with knowledge. Such a conflation is dangerous; it is the first step towards fundamentalism. — Janus

I agree, but the fun of religion is precisely in the wickedness. A 'reasonable' religion is something you can buy and sell at the mall. 'Keto' is a religion. For some maybe Tesla is a religion.

Knowing God through holy scriptures is a form of direct knowledge of God. Holy scriptures are a direct revelation from God, so when you read or hear them, you are directly knowing God. — baker

Unless God just is the text, you are abusing 'direct' here. 'I don't want to sit and talk about Jesus,...I just want to see his face.'

Our abject ignorance is duly compensated for by the richness of our hypotheticals. — TheMadFool

At least when the flesh is healthy (which ignorance makes more difficult.)

at the point when a decision is contemplated, all the beliefs and attitudes that will inform that decision are usually already in place. And just as with non-moral beliefs and attitides, that is possible because we have been developing those beliefs and attitudes all throughout our lives, long before this particular action opportunity presented itself. — SophistiCat

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If every thread on the principles of mathematics is allowed to degenerate into a thread about 0.999...<>1 it would become impossible to do any philosophy of maths. — Banno

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Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. — Joshs

Nice quote, Josh.

We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). — Joshs

This too.

The answer is that an event doesn’t occur into a vacuum , but into an exquisitely organized referential totality. That is precisely what an event is, a way that this totality of relevance changes itself moment to moment. So there is a tremendously intricate and intimate overall coherence from one event to the next. Each event is a subtle variation on an ongoing theme, and it’s very appearance shifts the sense of this theme without rending its pragmatic consistency. — Joshs

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How about defining the complexity of a theorem as the length of its shortest proof in some formal system? For each formal system you could have a different unit. Each proof found for that theorem would give an upper bound.

It's my understanding that it's impossible to prove in general that a shortest proof has been found.

Every event is a carrying forward and a transformation of a prior world of referential relations. if you start with such a premise , and take a look at the modern empirical notion of objects as presently occurring entities with duration it should strike you that at some point someone decided to ‘pretend’ that this constantly flowing, changing pragmatic unfolding of world froze itself into ‘objects’ with duration and extension. — Joshs

That seems right on some level, but this game of pretend, presumably evolved, is no so easily shaken off. What's an event? Does it involve objects? 'Transformation' implies some thing that is transformed, maintaining its identity in some sense. As another poster has mentioned, this kind of point threatens to 'deconstruct itself,' which is not necessarily a bad thing.

having done so , what can we conclude about the status of ‘truth’? Can we save some sense of it that doesn’t get sucked down into the relativity of use? Is ‘true’ just another thing we say in certain contexts for certain purposes? — Joshs

Just as objects are 'fictions'/inventions (eddies in the stream), so perhaps are meanings?

materiality is already ‘conceptual’ through and through in that the very notion of an empirical object is a complex perceptual construction , an idealization. Furthermore , it is this idealizing abstraction at the heart of our ideas of the spatial object that makes the mathematical
possible. They are parasitic on and presuppose each other. — Joshs

That sounds correct, but would you agree that the conceptual is social and 'material'? So that the game of reducing one to the other is perhaps futile? Or that the game is at least fundamentally impractical inasmuch as the distinction between conceptual and the material is not likely to lose its intense utility?

Math is too serious a matter to be left to philosophers. — Olivier5

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But what we make of that math does seem to be a matter for philosophers (and everyone else, really.)