As a general proposition, I think you will run into trouble if you consider philosophy (or philosophers) to think of fact and reality as their object of scrutiny. It isn’t so much that metaphysics (ontology and the like) aren’t fields within philosophy, but that they do not exhaust the fields of philosophy. Further, I think you’ll find that many contemporary philosophers don’t really focus on facts and reality as such, but sort of assume the contingent nature of theories/beliefs about facts and reality and adapt to the circumstance in which facts/reality are invoked. — Ennui Elucidator

It is hard for me, given the way I think, not to draw a delineation between what I personally call "hard philosophy", more traditional philosophy which deals with those matters of metaphysics, and "soft philosophy", which delves into and incorporates the understanding of other fields of endeavor, such as sociology (Marx and Bentham), economics (A. Smith, T. Malthus, Marx), cognitive science (Dan Dennett, Doug Hofstadter), and mathematics (B. Russell, A. N. Whitehead, Hofstadter). I don't disparage these "soft philosophies", not intending to use "soft" in a disparaging sense. In many ways, these are even harder, as the philosopher who practices them must be an expert in the collateral field in question in order to be effective.

In any event, I wasn’t intending to sound like a utilitarian/consequentialist (in ethical terms). I was speaking for myself and how I approach philosophy. — Ennui Elucidator

Aaah. :up:

So truth for you has become either authoritarian or idealistic.

You've forgotten so much?

What if it is? I suggest that in the long run, the aim of "giving people moral guidance, thymos, and social cohesion" is well-served by promoting the value of truthfulness, and is impaired by promoting bullshit, lies, delusion, literal belief in fiction -- and generally speaking, a culture of unreasonableness. — Cabbage Farmer

Yep.

@TheMadFool, what do you make of @dimosthenis9's first claiming that religion is needed to keep the common rabble in their place, then agreeing that folk must make moral choices?

Why deny choice to the rabble?

It is true that many people use religion as an "excuse" for being good or evil. — dimosthenis9

I think that is limited account of how religions work.

The point is that people of good faith and good intentions often do dreadful things because they think this is what god wants from them.

People may be so awfully brainwashed by religious dogma and, coupled with inadequate education and being socialized in certain religious cultures, may actually think that harming people and judging them is what god wants. They are sincere, not using religion as an excuse.

People may be so awfully brainwashed by religious dogma and, coupled with inadequate education and being socialized in certain religious cultures, may actually think that harming people and judging them is what god wants. They are sincere, not using religion as an excuse. — Tom Storm

People could be brainwashed from many other causes too. Yes religion is one of them. But as I mentioned again if we want to attribute evil to religions. We have to attribute good also.It's only fair.
Except if you think that such a huge human "invention" such religions, which has survived all these endless centuries offered nothing good at all in humanity. Thing that for me at least seems illogical.
Many religion people are acting good using religions moral guide .We can't deny that. And despite being an atheist, I find them social useful.

What I mean when I say that they use religion as an excuse is that we can NEVER ignore the personal responsibility of each person's acts. At the end it is his and only choice what path he will choose. Even if he chooses an evil preacher as you mentioned at another post at the end is STILL his choice to follow him.
They are hundreds others peaceful great preachers who are also religious. But he chooses not to follow them.

Sure religions influence many people. But I prefer to focus on people individually at the end. We are the "core" for everything. Religions, our acts etc etc. We can't just blame "bad" religions for everything and pretend that corrupts "innocent" people. With that way we underestimate people themselves! Considering them idiots who just don't have any choice and religions force them into bad acts like robots without free will. I deny to accept that.

But there has to be something in a person that makes them follow those directions. Because not everyone follows those directions, only some do. — baker

Exactly.

I agree with you. But it doesn't change my point.

I'm not trying to describe religion in all its panoply of great and terrible - just the fact that people who think they do good can be doing bad things indeed. It's not that they need an excuse; they are actually doing 'gods' work.' The fact that religions also do good and that politics also gets good people to do terrible things has no bearing on this key truth.

It's not that they need an excuse; they are actually doing 'gods' work.' — Tom Storm

For me that is an excuse.
"God's work" as to satisfy their evil instincts but at the same time to justify themselves and not take any blame at all! Hidden behind a "God" and with no sorrows at all. Win win situation for them.

"God's work" as to satisfy their evil instincts but at the same time to justify themselves and not take any blame at all! Hidden behind a "God" and with no sorrows at all. Win win situation for them. — dimosthenis9

Ah, so there's our problem. I don't see that as an excuse. I see that as someone practicing a faith. We need to be comfortable in the realization that some expressions of piety cause harm. Not all, I grant you. But some do and they are practiced with sincerity and not as a 'cover', which is what the word 'excuse' implies.

We need to be comfortable in the realization that some expressions of piety cause harm. Not all, I grant you. But some do and they are practiced with sincerity and not as a 'cover', which is what the word 'excuse' implies. — Tom Storm

Yeah there must be cases like that for sure. I can't deny that.
But at the end as in everything else that is accused of "corrupting" and "brainwashing" poor innocent people. Governments, religions, Media, Internet etc that I keep constantly hear how bad they are and how they brainwash people. Well yes in many cases they do indeed!

But I don't hear anything at all ever about people who LET all these to brainwash them! Everything ok with them? No personal responsibility at all?? They allow them to brainwash them! Well no I prefer to focus on people and not underestimate their ability to choose what is best for them. And when they don't I accuse them,who let themselves being brainwashed!

I wanna consider people as proud creatures and not as idiot robots! That way, imo, we help ourselves to grow bigger. Personal responsibility is a huge matter for me.

I wanna consider people as proud creatures and not as idiot robots! That way, imo, we help ourselves to grow bigger. Personal responsibility is a huge matter for me. — dimosthenis9

I can respect that. Sounds like you're a romantic, but why not? Take care.

Yeah. Mostly people are proud idiot robots.

Yep.

@TheMadFool, what do you make of dimosthenis9's first claiming that religion is needed to keep the common rabble in their place, then agreeing that folk must make moral choices?

Why deny choice to the rabble? — Banno

It exposes the paradox at the heart of religious morality - free will (ref: the problem of evil) and religious moral injunctions (no free will).

Yes, that's it. Also the double standard, the noble lie, the special pleading... take your pick... previously noted in MU and EE, shows itself again. If religion doesn't attempt to be factually correct, then it is not answerable to anything.

Yes, that's it. Also the double standard, the noble lie, the special pleading... take your pick... previously noted in MU and EE, shows itself again. If religion doesn't attempt to be factually correct, then it is not answerable to anything. — Banno

Religious ethics tries to eat the cake and have it too. To be good/bad we must exercise our free will but then it has a list of things (e.g. the decalogue) we're prohibited from doing i.e. our free will is rendered pointless.

It's like giving a slave his freedom but then preventing him from enjoying his freedom. The slave's freedom is meaningless.

Religion has to be factually correct for the simple reason that if it isn't, it's just a fairy tale and who takes fairy tales seriously? We're not children.

Yeah. Mostly people are proud idiot robots. — Banno

The "proud" part don't see it that often at all out there.

To be good/bad we must exercise our free will but then it has a list of things (e.g. the decalogue) we're prohibited from doing i.e. our free will is rendered pointless. — TheMadFool

I don't think that religions focus on free will. They focus on God's will instead. Providing a "moral map" that people should follow.

My view is that at the end which "map" you will follow and for what reasons (excuses that you will give to yourself for that) that is our own personal choice. At the end choosing to follow or not a religion as also the way you will choose to follow it (being good or evil), that is free will.
People invented religions for 2 crucial reasons for me.
1.To give some answers to their existence and trying to "escape" from the final end that death brings
2. To have a "source" of morals that are so needed for organized societies.

As people grow intellectually, morals change too, religions also. If we want to get rid of "bad" religions one day, we should focus on people and how to make them grow bigger intellectual. Reaching at some point where pure Logic would be enough to take their morals from.

But being aphoristic with theists and accuse always religions for every harm(not recognizing anything good at all to them) doesn't help at all at that progress, imo at least. Just gives birth to more fanatics and making that progress slower and slower.

So truth for you has become either authoritarian or idealistic.

You've forgotten so much? — Banno

Prospective truth lover, heal thyself!


I have not forgotten how hastily you assigned me to the anti-vaccer camp. You've displayed there an amazing lack of critical thinking, empathy, and common decency. And you cry foul when Christians do the same thing?

↪TheMadFool
Yes, that's it. Also the double standard, the noble lie, the special pleading... take your pick... previously noted in MU and EE, shows itself again. If religion doesn't attempt to be factually correct, then it is not answerable to anything. — Banno

At some point it feels like you are willfully misreading, Banno. I have not advocated a noble lie nor have I engaged in special pleading. It would be like saying that I am engaged in a case of special pleading because I call the guy in a red hat a bishop and a chess piece a bishop. Words are used different ways in different contexts.

Please demonstrate that "fact" is used in the same way in all cases and that any uses that differs from yours is special pleading.

something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
something known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable.
Law.Often facts. an actual or alleged event or circumstance, as distinguished from its legal effect or consequence.Compare question of fact, question of law. — Fact from Dictionary.com

1.1 Facts, Facts & Facts

The word “fact” is used in at least two different ways. In the locution “matters of fact”, facts are taken to be what is contingently the case, or that of which we may have empirical or a posteriori knowledge. Thus Hume famously writes at the beginning of Section IV of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding: “All the objects of human reason or inquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact”. The word is also used in locutions such as

It is a fact that Sam is sad
That Sam is sad is a fact
That 2+2=4

is a fact.

In this second use, the functor (operator, connective) “It is a fact that” takes a sentence to make a sentence (an alternative view has it that “It is a fact” takes a nominalised sentence, a that-clause, to make a sentence), and the predicate “is a fact” is either elliptic for the functor, or takes a nominalised sentence to make a sentence. It is locutions of this second sort that philosophers have often employed in order to claim (or deny) that facts are part of the inventory of what there is, and play an important role in semantics, ontology, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

We may, then, distinguish between Humean facts and functorial facts. With the help of this distinction, two philosophical options can be formulated. One may think that there are facts in the functorial sense of the word which are contingent—the fact that Sam is sad—and facts in the functorial sense which are not contingent—the fact that 2+2=4. Or one may think that all facts in the functorial sense are contingent, are Humean matters of fact. The latter option is expounded in the influential philosophy of facts to be found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921). Wittgenstein there announces that the world is the totality of facts and that every fact is contingent (Wittgenstein TLP: 1.1). — SEP on Facts

@Banno maybe a simple example will illuminate the tension here: "It is a fact that Scrooge McDuck's nephew is Donald Duck." Is that an intelligible English sentence and is it true on your account? If it is false, are you saying that Donald Duck is not Scrooge McDuck's nephew?

1. The Nature of Fiction

In whatever way we characterize the fiction/non-fiction distinction, the distinction is widely recognized as important. We care which category a work belongs to. We read Lord Macaulay’s The History of England (1848) to learn about the overthrow of James II and its aftermath, and criticize Macaulay for departures from fact or for bias: these detract from its value as a work of non-fiction. Historical novels such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1867) or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) also display bias and they depart in numerous ways from fact, but the bias and inaccuracies don’t lessen their value as works of fiction. And when a writer passes off a work as a work of non-fiction, deliberately hiding the fact that much of its content was made up, we see that as fraudulent. (There are numerous examples. One famous case is “Jimmy’s World”, written for the Washington Post in 1980 by journalist Janet Cooke; the article won her a Pulitzer Prize that she later returned.)

Not everyone agrees that the distinction matters. Some have argued that all discourse is on a par, that there is no writing that is per se fictional or non-fictional. According to Stanley Fish, for example,

when we communicate, it is because we are parties to a set of discourse agreements which are in effect decisions as to what can be stipulated as a fact. It is these decisions and the agreement to abide by them, rather than the availability of substance, that make it possible for us to refer, whether we are novelists or reporters for the New York Times. (Fish 1980: 242)
. . .

Whatever the right theory of the nature of fiction, (nearly) everyone agrees that there are paradigm cases of works of fiction. Many of the sentences in such works are, of course, not true since in paradigm cases of fiction much of the content is made up. For example, the sentence

It was the end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in Baker Street. (The Hound of the Baskervilles: ch. 15)

is not true at any real context of utterance since there is no Sherlock Holmes, and no Dr. Watson to utter the sentence. More generally, sentences that purport to describe the world depicted in a work of fiction are often false (or at least not true) since they misdescribe the world as it actually is; “Holmes was a detective living at 221B Baker Street, London”, for example. Still, this sentence sounds true, whereas a sentence like “Holmes was a short-order cook living in Paris” sounds false. — SEP on Fiction

And just because...

3. Truth Through Fiction

After his discussion of truth in fiction, Lewis acknowledged in Postscript B that some people value fiction “mostly as a means for the discovery of truth, or for the communication of truth” (Lewis 1983: 278), that is, genuine truth, not merely fictional truth. It is possible that Lewis simply meant that sentences like “In the Holmes stories, Holmes is a detective” are really, and not just fictionally, true, for this fact captures the sense in which it is really true, say, that Holmes is a detective and really false that he is a rockstar. But the problem of whether fiction-involving sentences communicate truths does not end here. There are various other ways of understanding how fiction might make such a contribution. To begin with, some statements true in a work of fiction are also genuine truths, included because the author wanted an appropriately realistic setting for the work (e.g., historical statements in works of historical fiction) or in order to acquaint readers with facts that the author regards as morally or politically significant (consider, for example, the fiction of Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Whatever the reason, such cases suggest that fiction can serve as a means for readers to discover genuine truths.

Philosophers and literary theorists by and large agree with this claim (Friend 2006; Lamarque & Olsen 1994). Even on imagination-based theories of fiction, there is nothing to prevent statements that readers are invited to imagine as true from also being known as fact. This is consistent, however, with acknowledging that learning from fiction is not always easy, since it requires an ability to tell whether an apparently factual claim in a work of fiction has been included in the fiction because of its truth or for other reasons. More generally, a number of psychological studies suggest that readers often lack the ability to tell truth from falsehood in fiction, failing to adequately scrutinize information when engaging with fiction while being more careful in the case of non-fiction (see, for example, Prentice & Gerrig 1999; Wheeler et al. 1999; Butler et al. 2012). While this propensity on the part of readers doesn’t show that they are never able to gain factual knowledge rather than mere (true) belief from engaging with works of fiction, it may make it harder than it first appears. One plausible suggestion is that where there is knowledge rather than mere belief, this happens because readers have acquired a competence at reliably discriminating truth from falsity in works of that genre (Friend 2014).

But learning factual truths is not what philosophers and literary theorists usually have in mind when they think of fiction as a means for the discovery, or communication, of truth. They have in mind truth that has deeper human significance, like the universals that Aristotle claims in The Poetics to find in the works of poets, or the kind of truth about human nature, for example, that Samuel Johnson finds in Shakespeare (“he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed”; Johnson 1765). Many philosophers thus embrace what is commonly called (literary) cognitivism, which claims that literary fiction can contribute to readers’ knowledge in a way that adds to the literary or aesthetic value of a work (Davies 2007; Gaut 2005).

You've displayed there an amazing lack of critical thinking, empathy, and common decency. — baker

I'm so blessed that I have you to point this out.

Please demonstrate that "fact" is used in the same way in all cases — Ennui Elucidator

You have engaged in pleading for a special case for religious discussions, here and here.

The noble lie was from .

At some point it feels like you are willfully misreading, Banno. I have not advocated a noble lie nor have I engaged in special pleading. — Ennui Elucidator

I've specifically argued against that, most recently here but also here.

You have engaged in pleading for a special case for religious discussions, here and here. — Banno

There is a difference between arguing for a special case in the face of a universal and saying that there is no universal. You know this and it is why you avoid both the “ordinary language” point (reference to the dictionary) and the jargon point (reference to a philosophical discussion). “Fact” is neither well defined nor used in an exclusive sense. Different contexts use the word differently. Why is this so problematic for you?