Right, many of histories most bitter wars are ideological, so clearly debate can collapse into power relations. My concern about epistemic standards that are too loose is that they basically just fast forward us towards the collapse into power relations.
Talking is effective for different reasons, right? You have your old ethos, logos, and pathos, different sorts of appeals. But isn't a "good argument" one that tends towards truth, not one that tends towards conversion and agreement? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Where do you see your preference for dissection playing in here? — Count Timothy von Icarus
First, a clarification -- A defense of dissection, in the sense that it is not superior to the builders of philosophy, is what I've set out to defend.
More or less that the skeptical position isn't inferior to the non-skeptics in terms of philosophical excellence. Both are valuable. Also there's a sense in which this delineation is quite soft, so even stating a preference for one over the other is a difficulty. As we see earlier
@Janus disagreed with my classifying Hume as a nit-picker, and
@Hanover disagreed upon that. So far it seems to me that the idea is still quite hazy.
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Actually we both liked
@hypericin's essay -- maybe we could say there are
elephants and ravensland-whales and crows (sorry hyper), as styles of philosophy.
I could defend the other side, too, and even have in this thread to some extent by referencing Plato as an obvious myth-builder -- but there is a particular habit in philosophy, like Hegel's and Marx's, which swallows up other philosophies into themselves. At this point that's the only real error that I think I can point to that I've been thinking through: sometimes the world builder builds so large that it becomes a giant, coherent circle that reinforces itself, and since Hegel-to-Marx demonstrates that we can turn Idealism into Materialism it seems to me that the coherent circle reinforcing itself doesn't exactly have a relationship to what's real at all.
Neither idealism nor materialism, in terms of metaphysics.
Now for a proper coherentist this wouldn't be a fault. But I just don't see the world that way at all -- for the coherentist who does this would be seen as a good thing, a reason to accept the account. But for myself I tend to think absurdity is a real thing, so coherentism is automatically ruled out -- rather than a marker of a good belief I tend to think entirely coherent accounts which reinforce themselves are somehow skipping over a problem to make the system appear smooth, when in fact it's not.
Ye olde appearance/reality distinction
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For my part I tend to think of metaphysics not as knowledge but ways of organizing the world around us such that multiplicity doesn't overwhelm. I'm not opposed to the metaphysics. I don't think one can be, really -- metaphysical thinking abounds. I just doubt that the metaphysics are real, exactly. The minutiae, the strange, the different, the absurd -- these are what seem real to me.
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Right, many of histories most bitter wars are ideological, so clearly debate can collapse into power relations. My concern about epistemic standards that are too loose is that they basically just fast forward us towards the collapse into power relations. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think that if we have to worry about epistemic standards being too loose in order to control power relations then we've already fallen into a battle of power relations where truth isn't as important anymore.
Not that this isn't practical, of course -- there are many social situations where we should not trust others' opinions on things. Power is in fact a part of the world that we have no choice but to contend with.
I think that if we have a good relationship, though, that the epistemic standards come to fore through that relationship. I want others to speak the truth so I speak the truth, and when we get that reciprocity from someone else then, and only then, do we have a trustworthy standard to which we can appeal.
So rather than standards or proofs I would offer relationships and trust -- if you have a good relationship of trust with someone then as we work together the standards will slowly take care of themselves as we tackle problems together.
Which is why it's easy for two traditions to clash. Both people have done a lot of work to the point that they are used to being listened to as an authority due to this or that argument or reason, and suddenly two well-informed people who think like that talk and they try to out-teach one another or show them up in some way and suddenly -- you see how that's a battle for power rather than truth?
But if we trust one another and we want the truth then we can set aside who is right and focus on "How did we get here?"
Talking is effective for different reasons, right? You have your old ethos, logos, and pathos, different sorts of appeals. But isn't a "good argument" one that tends towards truth, not one that tends towards conversion and agreement? If it was the latter, then it would seem that we are always dealing with mere power relations. That is, of course , the thesis of some philosophers though.
I am not sure if we have "succeeded" if we have successfully talked others into accepting our own false opinions though.
For sure, I agree there.
I don't see persuasion as divorced from truth, though. How else are we to craft an argument other than to make it persuasive? Are we supposed to make it sound bad in order to really make sure it's true?
While I can see an error in accepting a conclusion just because we like the conclusion, I would say that such a person wasn't interested in whether or not the argument was actually persuasive or not -- they just wanted to have something to say, like a chant in a rally.
Further, some of these debates are highly consequential. Consider the current debate over vaccines in the US. Or consider the example of a sui generis "socialist genetics" that led to famines that killed thousands, if not millions. The stakes in some debates are very high, and so I'm not sure "we talk and maybe we agree and maybe we don't" works in principle. That at least, isn't how things are often done in the wider world, again because stakes are often high. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Oh, it doesn't work in principle. When Feyerabend says "Anything goes" he really only means at this highly abstract level where we are trying to divine the logical principles by which all knowledge is produced from the beginning of time and onto into the future. When that's the standard of universality that you're reaching for then upon examining classical cases of knowledge generation, such as Galileo's
Two Worlds, you'll simply not find a common thread through all of them. The number of people that have tried different things and succeeded is so large that you'll always be able to find some counter-example to such a giant aspiration.
More or less the question cannot be answered. But what's interesting is that if we closely examine particular sciences then you start to see patterns at least within the same era. And it seems they work in a more local sense, and in terms of a smaller (i.e. not literally the whole universe of knowledge, past present and future) generalization we can succeed for a time. It's just that it's probably going to change in the future since that's pretty much what we've observed since the beginning of science -- constant change from one theory to the next.
That in spite of the fact that the stakes are, indeed, high. There's a reason we think about this stuff. It makes complete sense to ask and pursue the questions. I have no problem with such projects -- I just think there's a lot of them out there (and this is part of the confusion in living in our modern world)
A question here might be: "can people be taught to better evaluate claims?" If they can't, then philosophy is pretty useless, or at least general epistemology is. If they can be taught, then presumably there are principles for evaluating claims and narratives that are more general. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Well I am mostly in favor of philosophy being useless. I wish it could be more useless -- but this is an aside.
I don't think that exactly follows because one can be taught something that doesn't have principles. Like
@J's use of musicology I'd go to acting theory here, particularly Stanislavski, who is explicitly building a system that doesn't have principles. We learn to do, and sometimes we can learn how to evaluate claims, but in so doing we'll be attached to a particular tradition with its own evaluative tools.
This isn't exactly damning insofar that we understand that we can't learn without making some assumptions. But just like Picasso and Botticelli are both painters so there can be two philosophers that produce different works of art. (Indeed, I largely think of philosophy as a kind of wisdom literature, which is why I think aesthetics are actually very important for understanding philosophy, moreso than epistemology)
But all that to say I would answer "Yes" to your question, but not follow your inference. People can be taught. That doesn't mean there are principles for evaluating claims and narratives. It could be that we evaluate claims and narratives with other claims and narratives, and that would explain why it gets so confusing sometimes.
We rely on authority to settle a lot of these issues, e.g. doctors carry special weight in the vaccine debate. But obviously there is an issue of proper authority. Doctors don't have authority on vaccines just because they claim it, or because it is yielded to them, else there is never "improper authority" in cases where people recognize authority. The idea of a "proper authority" that is distinct from whoever just so happens to hold authority seems to me to require an additional standard, and probably one that is general in its principles since we must adjudicate proper authority across disparate spheres. — Count Timothy von Icarus
We do, but it doesn't seem to me that doctors really ask what philosophers think on whether or not a doctor is a good doctor. Similarly so with all the trades. I did note in brief earlier how the one thing you probably have to know is some kind of trade to live in an industrial world. So these are the sources of knowledge that we work with on the day-to-day. Sometimes philosophers' ideas trickle out into the world and you can see their influence, but their influence is -- properly I think -- restricted to influencing the mind through argument, narrative, ideas, and all the various tools of philosophy.
Rather than writing the standards by which some professions ought to proceed I think the philosopher is better as a point of reflection. Philosophy is a dictatorship, but a dictatorship without any power to enforce its whims -- at least when it's best.
And then also -- while there may be an elevated relationship between philosophy and other disciplines at the very least here, on TPF, the general assumption is that we're all equal. There are people of differeing levels and exposures of course like anything, but really the only way we here can resolve a dispute is by talking and finding some sort of standard by which we can agree. Else it's the clash of worldviews talking past one another.