So how would or should this play out for a physicalist or someone who thinks that the paranormal or the supernatural - as used as categories, not that they are named well - do not exist? IOW how should they attempt to find counter-evidence?I think it is unseemly to justify one's own biases by noting that everyone has them. It is not so much that science should be used for every investigation and inquiry, as that the scientific attitude which consists in attempting to find counter-evidence that refutes one's own theories should be used as an antidote to bias confirmation. — Janus
No-one's immune from bias, it seems. — Pattern-chaser
I think it is unseemly to justify one's own biases by noting that everyone has them. — Janus
So, you have to agree with philosophers to make it worthwhile reading them? — Janus
You could give an example of a philosopher who you have not read but feel you can dismiss. — Coben
It's not a particularly dense type of text that needs work to tease out its meanings, at least not for someone like you seem to be. — Coben
So how would or should this play out for a physicalist or someone who thinks that the paranormal or the supernatural - as used as categories, not that they are named well - do not exist? IOW how should they attempt to find counter-evidence? — Coben
So how would or should this play out for a physicalist or someone who thinks that the paranormal or the supernatural - as used as categories, not that they are named well - do not exist? IOW how should they attempt to find counter-evidence? — Coben
That's a little different from....If no convincing evidence is provided for a claim, and it appears as though no definitive evidence either way is possible, then suspension of judgement would seem to be the most intellectually honest way to go. A physicalist, or anyone, could simply say that there seems to be no reason to believe in the paranormal or supernatural. — Janus
Attempting to find counterevidence sounds active to me, not simply reacting to a perceived lack of evidence. IOW doing active research, or perhaps engaging in certain practices to seek counter-evidence.... the scientific attitude which consists in attempting to find counter-evidence that refutes one's own theories should be used as an antidote to bias confirmation. — Janus
You would try to find counterevidence to your own theories, whatever they are. This could take many forms. But it sounded active in your description. I don't think reading texts from within one's paradigm that said there was no counterevidence would count, for example. Your description sounded like you would treat your own beliefs as hypothesis and then set up some kind of testing to see if they hold.How can you find counterevidence if there is no plausible evidence to begin with; there would be nothing there to counter. — Janus
I was alluding to the tendency here to equate a dismissal of some quarters of philosophy with a failure to understand, rather than a legitimate decision. — Isaac
Its not necessary to attempt to understand a philosopher in order to dismiss their work as waffle. For that to be the case, it would require that it be necessary to understand work before distinguishing between a child's writing and Shakespeare, or between poetry and a technical manual.
I might well find a gem of insight in the middle of Mein Kampf, but I already know enough about it to make a reasonable decision that its not worth the effort.
... the scientific attitude which consists in attempting to find counter-evidence that refutes one's own theories should be used as an antidote to bias confirmation. — Janus
If you don't find value and insight in them it is arguably because you are not interested enough to spend the time to understand, or because you hold some polemical view such that you reject or devalue the insight that others have found there.[/quote
— Janus
you can dismiss work as appearing to be waffle to you, but then don't expect others who find value and insight in it to believe that you have put in the necessary work to understand it. — Janus
I don't understand what are trying to say with your second sentence there. — Janus
Of course you would use the most egregious example to try to garner support for your merely subjective point of view; almost everyone is going to agree that it is not worth reading Mein Kampf unless you were a scholar of Nazism or a Hitler biographer. — Janus
In other words, how can you argue that there objectively is value and insight in the text, when there is such disagreement (even among those who agree with you) as to what that value and insight actually consists of? — Isaac
without having to actually read the whole text and render arguments against it from citation. — Isaac
All I have said is that many people have found value and insight in the texts of the authors in question. — Janus
If you don't find value and insight in them it is arguably because you are not interested enough to spend the time to understand, or because you hold some polemical view such that you reject or devalue the insight that others have found there. — Janus
Do you want to argue that there is, objectively speaking, no value and insight to be found in those texts, and that people who say they do find value and insight there must therefore be deluded? — Janus
I also think that you could well be deluded about that, and that if you approached the texts with a different attitude and were prepared to put in the effort, you may well find value and insight there. — Janus
you can dismiss work as appearing to be waffle to you, but then don't expect others who find value and insight in it to believe that you have put in the necessary work to understand it. — Janus
I said that you would need to do that only if you were making a claim such as that a work was objectively speaking, and not merely according to your assessment, waffle. You would need to cite passages and show that they were without value or insight and/ or consisted in merely trivial truisms tout court, and not merely according to your understanding. — Janus
All I am pointing out is that your subjective opinion about such things is no more privileged than others' opinions that your opinions are poorly informed. — Janus
Your rhetoric suggests that there exists some argument in reason that there is value and insight in these texts, — Isaac
There is, as far as I can tell, no connection between 'waffle' and 'value/insight/truisms'. — Isaac
If my opinion on such matters as the qualities of a text is subjective (as is that of others) then how can it be simultaneously "poorly informed"? What objective information is my subjective opinion lacking? — Isaac
The fact that hordes of scholars have pored over them for one, two or three centuries demonstrates that there is value and insight to be found. What more do you need? — Janus
Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious. — Russell
Having said that, objectively speaking you are ill-informed if you haven't studied the works that others find valuable and insightful, and are merely tossing off a half-arsed negative opinion based on your lack of familiarity with the works. — Janus
Love what you say here. Peachy. May the physicalists meet us both in a dark alley.I only said the onus is on others in cases where they make extraordinary claims. You mention physicalism: I think when analyzed it is an extraordinary claim, at least in its stronger versions, because it cannot account for abstraction, generality, real possibility and even logic and semantics. The other point regarding physicalism is that being a metaphysical position, there can be no empirical evidence for or against it, and the evidence against it is its incoherence — Janus
... the scientific attitude which consists in attempting to find counter-evidence that refutes one's own theories should be used as an antidote to bias confirmation. — Janus
Taking again your example of the supernatural and the paranormal, if someone wants to positively claim there are no such phenomena, and it matters to them (which presumably it would if they made such a positive claim), then of course they should try to find evidence that refutes their belief, just as scientists do (or should). — Janus
the evidence against it is its incoherence — Janus
Love what you say here. — Coben
No-one can mount a counter-argument because no argument was ever made in the first place, just a long-winded translation of the blindingly obvious into the satisfyingly obscure. — Isaac
It cannot possibly be the case that anyone not already disposed to do so would see the value in any given text otherwise it would be impossible to read two opposing texts (in value terms) without entering into a state of constant vacillation. — Isaac
Physicalism is not a field. I mean, not in the sense of physics or biology. And since he was expressing views I agreed with, I just went emotional. People who identify as physicalists have done incredible work, but, yes, I think there are problems with the idea as a whole. That particular ontology. Which is quite different from dismissing philosophers without having read their books. Apart from the issue of category types being conflated in your comparison, I have read a lot within physicalism and on it.So dismissing an entire field as incoherent (not just as a personal opinion, but as a property of the field itself) is "peachy"? — Isaac
I think the works of many people who are physicalists are excellent works from which I have learned a tremendous amount. I think there are problems with physicalism, however.Do you not think any physicalist work might be as you put it "a particularly dense type of text that needs work to tease out its meanings". — Isaac
I believe in our interaction I had a problem with not having read something and dismissing it as waffle.Are we not just being partisan here, it's OK to slag off the physicalists wholesale as incoherent, but dismissing the continentals as waffle is to show a lack of understanding of the text? — Isaac
Not quite sure what you are saying in paragraph 2, but as far as my involvement I think paragraph 1 is not a good summation of what happened, which my previous post goes into.To be honest, this is where the interest lies with this discussion. We have the OP dismissing theology as mere 'verbiage' but insisting that continental philosophy is not included in that same concern. We have a requirement that accusations of 'waffle' to continental philosophy be backed up by deep understanding of the text, yet physicalism is casually dismissed a "incoherent" to mutual jeers of support.
Isn't this all just demonstrating as clearly as can be that meaning is imparted by the reader, not an intrinsic property of the text? It cannot possibly be the case that anyone not already disposed to do so would see the value in any given text otherwise it would be impossible to read two opposing texts (in value terms) without entering into a state of constant vacillation. — Isaac
You are of course free to "dismiss", in the sense of saying you have no interest in, or that you find no value in, any particular area of philosophy or any other discipline. But to claim tout court that there is no significant value or original insight in philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Heidegger is something else altogether. If you don't find value and insight in them it is arguably because you are not interested enough to spend the time to understand, or because you hold some polemical view such that you reject or devalue the insight that others have found there. — Janus
if you don't agree with me yet, go back and try harder". — Isaac
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