…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
Kantian Naturalist,
I would be quite put out if you didn’t.
They might be, if what you mean by “existence” in mathematics and metaphysics is the same. We can construct deductively valid proofs in mathematics demonstrating that entities that are not realizable in our universe have particular characteristics in the context of the specified axioms. While not a metaphysician myself, I understand that the same is true in that intellectual realm.
So, based on a good thirty minutes pondering over lunch, my provisional response is that there is no difference in principle between mathematical proofs and metaphysical proofs, but neither are applicable to the real world unless they can be tested against it and supporting evidence is found. Until then they remain possibly interesting intellectual constructs.
Theists generally assert that the existence of their gods is an empirical truth. That’s certainly the belief held by the vast majority of those who’s butts occupy the pews. Those assertions require evidence to be taken seriously. No such evidence has ever been provided.
Neil Rickert,
That’s what I was trying to communicate in my most recent response to Kantian Naturalist.
Rude is arguable. Accurate it seems to be.
hotshoe_,
I’ve been agreeing with you far too often lately, so I’ll call you out on this line. Please provide some support for this claim. I’ve heard it a lot, but haven’t seen it supported. It seems to be a narrative being pushed by a small group of vocal anti-Dawkins atheists.
WJM:
“Simply put, liberals/progressives are the ones who, IMO, are going to utilize these services the most. So, yeah, the fewer babies they get to raise, and the earlier we can stop them from voting, the better. On the conservative side we have the Duggars and highly religious people breeding like crazy and clinging to life for every breath they can take – which puts and keeps more conservatives in the voting pool longer.
So, as a pragmatic political matter, I say let ’em abort their young and kill themselves off to their heart’s content.”
and
“IMO, that’s the difference between a kind and a cruel nature. I get no satisfaction from being cruel.”
Patrick,
I had it out with Greg Laden because I believe “Dawkins through atheism will do more for Women than (Emma) Watson ever will.)
hotshoe, Patrick,
I cross-posted your comments to the New Atheist thread, which was created for precisely this type of discussion.
And Malt does more than Milton can.
petrushka,
I’m confused. I don’t recall having anything out with Greg Laden, whom I dimly remember as somewhat odious.
Random poetry quotation. Chosen for form rather than content.
Emma would recognize the source.
http://www.bartleby.com/123/62.html
I realize that I made a serious error in how I expressed myself!
My considered view is not that publicly available, socially coordinated, and linguistically mediated sense-experience is the only kind of objective knowledge. (Taking that view seems to require that there’s no objective knowledge in logic or mathematics, and I would never say that!)
Rather I think that — and this is a list of closely-related ideas, not a deductive argument with numbered premises —
(1) It is a conceptual truth that all knowledge is objective;
(2) any putative knowledge-claim — any claim that could be a knowledge-claim — must therefore have objective purport. (It must be, as McDowell would say, “taking a stand that things even so much as seem to be thus and so”);
(3) Objective purport is an essential property of judgment.
(4) By “empirical judgment” I mean any utterance or thought that (a) has objective purport — it commits one to taking a stand on how things even so much as seem to be thus and so and (b) has all or part of its content drawn from representations instantiated by the realization of sensorimotor abilities:
(5) empirical judgment is therefore is publicly available, socially coordinated, and linguistically mediated sense-experience (where “sense-experience” = the realization of sensorimotor abilities, not the mere having of sensation);
(6) the qualifiers “publicly available, socially coordinated, and linguistically mediated” are necessary for sense-experience to have objective purport;
(7) empirical judgment is therefore the “ground-floor” and court of appeal of all other empirical knowledge, including our knowledge of unobservable posited entities;
(8) empirical knowledge is our most reliable way of finding out how things are in the actual world, as distinct from what must be the case in all possible worlds or none of them.
I would be an empiricist if I thought that sense-experience were necessary and sufficient for empirical objective purport. But I don’t, so (by that criterion) I’m not. Of course sense-experience is necessary for empirical objective purport — depending on how one took it, that might be true by how we define “empirical”. But it is not sufficient, because the kind of perceptual openness to the world that we share with non-linguistic animals and pre-linguistic infants is not by itself also an instance of objective purport. The sensorimotor abilities of non-linguistic animals and pre-linguistic infants do not and cannot take a stand on how things even seeming to be thus and so, although they do have a kind of “knowing-how” of their own. (We might say that perceive but cannot judge; since they cannot judge, their perceptual awareness cannot take the form of empirical judgment.)
Conversely, I would be a rationalist if I thought that the framework of publicly available, socially coordinated, and linguistically mediated concepts was in any sense exterior to the finite human minds who use those concepts, either as universal laws of thought to which all minds must conform or as a universal structure of reality to which all thought must conform.
I am neither an empiricist nor a rationalist because I think that both empiricism and rationalism run afoul, in quite different but symmetrical ways, of what Sellars called “the Myth of the Given”: the thought that one has to first be aware of something as playing an epistemic and/or semantic role in order to then be able to use it as playing that role. Rather, the converse is true: one becomes aware of something as playing an epistemic and/or semantic role in the course of becoming able to use it. Knowing-that and knowing-how are entangled; neither can be understood without the other.
In epistemology, this is neither rationalism nor empiricism but pragmatism. In metaphysics, I am inclined towards naturalism. But whereas I am firmly committed to pragmatism, I am only weakly committed to naturalism.
And I am fiercely opposed to the assumption, which has sometimes been imputed to me, that judgments (whether empirical or formal) are the only kind of meaningful linguistic communication or thought. That I focus on the discursive pole of human symbolic activity — the pole of “the space of reasons” — does not mean that I do not find as much (or more) existential significance and value in the disclosive/evocative pole that is expressed in art, poetry, music, literature, dance, etc.
Rich,
That can’t be true. Dawkins and Watson are the same person according to the Internet, and the Internet is never wrong.
keiths,
The British phenotype is powerful!
Nor does anyone here know what you mean when you say this. There is knowledge about God and there is experience of God. Are neither useful?
You’ve never ever heard of the power of God to transform lives, or of people who claim their lives have been transformed?
Reality calling hotshoe_
But you’re not a skeptic, Patrick, you’re an empiricist. And not even a logical one at that. A confused one. Or at least not one who is consistent. You have one rule that you apply to theist claims and another that you apply in your everyday life.
You don’t apply your demands for operational definitions consistently.
You have no objective, empirical, means of ascertaining that “if there is no objective, empirical evidence for the existence of the something that is logically demonstrated to exist, or if that something is impossible to detect in principle, then those first principles need some questioning.”
Your own first principles need some questioning, and if you were a true skeptic you would do so. I am not going to hold my breath.
Another vastly confused soul. Perhaps Patrick can provide you with a decent operational definition of the universe so that you can objectively and empirically establish that it exists. No need to appeal to woo. Or you could just have faith.
Did you get some bad meth or something?
Can you please provide a decent operational definition of empirical truth?
The classical arguments (and probably even many modern arguments) for the existence of God are not “empirical” arguments. Your demand that they be subjected to empirical examination is laughably misguided.
You have your own personal subjective criteria for what constitutes evidence. I am not impressed. Your insistence on radical empiricism just does not provide the foundation that you need.
walto, I would not know good meth from bad, but I can tell when someone is blowing smoke. 🙂
Is there such a thing as subjective knowledge? How do you tell the difference between objective and subjective?
So, conceptual framework is definitely enclosed to the finite human minds for you and is not exterior in any sense. Is it not even “intersubjective” as Searle calls it?
I worry that “subjective knowledge” is an oxymoron. What could this phrase mean? Perhaps it means there are objectively true claims about my own psychological states, but I have privileged access to those claims because they are about my psychological states. But even that seems a bit problematic — we all know of people who are deeply self-deceived, such that others can know things about their psychology that they themselves don’t know.
I prefer to keep “objective” and “knowledge” wedded together, and allow that one can have objectively valid knowledge about one’s own mental states, rather than say that one’s knowledge of one’s own mental states is “subjective knowledge” .
The basic distinction between subjective and objective revolves around the possibility of error, and so a grasp on that distinction involves a grasp on the concept of error. I can be in error about how things really are, but I cannot be in error about how things appear to me; I can be in error about what is causing a pain in my back, but I cannot be in error about my feeling of pain, etc.
(Notice then that one’s knowledge of one’s own mental states is objective just in case it is possible to be mistaken about them. As indeed one can be.)
My grasp on the concept of error in turn depends on the possibility of being corrected by another person: the other person can see the non-facing side of a surface, or confirm that my back pain is a pulled muscle and not a slipped disk. And this in turn requires communication with another about objects of shared perspectival attention.
This, in a nutshell, is Davidson’s “triangulation argument”: objectivity, intersubjectivity, and subjectivity are inter-dependent concepts. The way any animal gets its way into this interdependent structure is by slowly learning how to correlate its behavioral responses with those of another animal when they are attending to the same perceptual scene. That’s how infants and children gradually, piecemeal, acquire this structure over the course of early development. (The really interesting question is how this structure emerged over the course of evolutionary time.)
The kinds of conceptual framework that are a necessary condition for judgment and knowledge are themselves necessarily intersubjective. If I had said, more carefully, “not exterior to all finite minds” this would have been clearer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_knowledge
Isn’t all knowledge subjective?
I happen to agree with KN here. If it’s not objective it’s not true knowelege. We as finite creatures can only have “true” knowelege if it is revealed to us from an objective source
peace
Yes (in my opinion). Maybe we can write down statements of what we claim to know, and those can be observed and verified by others. But it isn’t knowledge without the “knowing” part, and I see that as subjective.
I spent almost three hours at the dentist today. Then I got a haircut, a manicure, and had Mexican food for a late lunch. I know all these things and I know all their associated experiences.
I would be interested in philosophers who consider this sort of experiential knowledge to be objective knowledge or why deny that it is knowledge.
Did Patrick go silent when asked to apply his own standards to his own requirements for standards?
Mung,
No, I’m just not going to get distracted playing silly buggers with OldMung.
fifthmvonarchyman made a claim to have objective, empirical evidence that “Jesus is lord.” I’m going to focus on finding out if he really has that evidence.
OMG, the postlude thread is a stupid waste of life. It’s like Carrie trying to get through to Brody on Homeland.
It has become a full time apologetics thread. It’s an obsessive-compulsive disorder being played out on a blog.
Do you require objective empirical evidence from anyone who claims that Obama is President too?
I, like walto, realize what a waste of time it is to try to reason with irrational people. So I don’t feel obligated to respond to every single silly contrived objection to Christian belief.
From that fact that Jesus existed it doesn’t follow that God exists!
No freaking kidding.
But it’s not like walto and Neil haven’t had their own “contributions” to that thread.
And then come here to whine about it. Now that’s funny!
For what it’s worth, I laugh at Neil differently than I laugh at walto. One of you must be more manly than the other, or something.
Yep, I’m finally out. I don’t actually have a life. Or a TV. But I’d rather get one than continue casting my pearls before swine. Who shall remain unnamed, but rest assured don’t include anyone named walto. 🙂
I’m amazed (and amused) at how threatening the weakness of evidence seems to be to some people.
They have some easy outs:
:- my beliefs are based on faith, not evidence;
:- for me, the Bible is the strongest form of evidence.
But, instead, they try to shout down those who disagree with them. It seems so pointless. At the end of the day, the evidence is still very weak.
Substitute “global warming” or “the single shooter in the Kennedy assassination” for your own pet conspiracy theory and you get an idea for how your pronouncement about the strength of the evidence sounds to the rest of us.
I also find it interesting how for conspiracy buffs the presentation of reams of requested evidence is understood to be “shouting those down who disagree”.
peace
Can you explain? I’m not understanding your point.
Not sure I had a point.
It was just a response to the hand waving away of every piece of evidence with sentiments like “eyewitness testimony doesn’t count” or “you have no proof the stories were not secretly altered” or “I won’t trust anything that does not come from a source that agrees with me”.
I just find that sort of attitude to be characteristic of a certain conspiracy buff mindset.
peace
Yeah, except that’s not what has been happening here, no matter how much you try to tell yourself that it is.
We would happily take into account any actual eyewitness testimony, if you had any, but you don’t. There were no recorded eyewitness’ testimony to Jesus’ life or death. Decades later, the gospels were written down by a few men who had never met Jesus. As sources for what they wrote, they may have had fragments that did come down through the years from actual eyewitnesses — but we don’t know who those sources might have been and we don’t have their actual testimony preserved. Every legitimate scholar, christian and otherwise, recognizes the fact that we don’t have eyewitness testimony in the four gospels.
So, no, you’re wrong. You’ve been wrong all along in trying to fit our careful explaining of how evidence and testimony work in the real world, into your worldview that the purpose of our “conspiracy” is because we don’t want to admit Jesus into our hearts. Or something like that.
fifthmonarchyman,
No, what you and Mung have presented is not the specific, empirical evidence that you claim to have and that was requested. That and the fact that you deny massive amounts of real evidence for evolution, global warming, and anything else that doesn’t fit your religious beliefs shows that you religionists have no idea as to what “evidence” actually is.
The fact that you would assume that I deny these things when you have no evidence whatsoever that I do tells me a lot about the the sweep of the conspiracy in your mind.
That you would so quickly call this wildly incorrect assumption a “fact” pretty much tells me all I need to know about your biases.
peace
First I’d like to point out that this is not true. Further, you know it is not true.
Then I’d like to point out that you also just contradicted yourself.
Tough to be an opera singer then. Or to sing Bach cantatas or masses if you’re not Catholic.
I have a friend, a visual artist, who supported himself for years singing and playing recorder in churches. Now he has a teaching gig at a state college so he doesn’t have to sing for his supper anymore. Since he’s an atheist, I guess it’s a good thing Gregory wasn’t in charge when he needed that work.
FWIW, I wrote the music to a Christmas pageant once. And played keyboards for the performance. It was well received and there was no testing prior to the ceremony. (Now that I think of it, I also wrote some music for a service in a synagogue when I was a teen. (Again, no religious test was administered to me or to the singers (most of whom were not Jewish).
So, where is this actually a “delicate” matter?
Also, I’m curious, what the hell has Gregory ever done? (I mean other than annoy people on internet sites who don’t share his particular religion.) Does he, like, coach kids’ basketball, or volunteer at a homeless shelter or read to the blind? Is he busy every free moment teaching his twin toddlers to read?
Or does insulting people who may well be considerably more charitable and kinder than he is take up the majority of his free time?
Just curious.
BTW, speaking of toddlers, what the hell are all these threads about what they do or don’t believe? Do none of these people have children??
Isn’t that enough?
I guess we all do what we can. No sin in that.
The postlude thread has reminded me.
Not to disrespect Jesus or anything, but Wolverine def wouldn’t have died on the cross. In fact, it would be pretty amazing if any of those Jew/Romans could have gotten him up there in the first place. But say the bastards DID (somehow) get him up there. He’d of cured himself within seconds.
OK. Carry on.
Mung, don’t act like an idiot, and don’t quotemine me.
When you read a novel which may or may not include accurate quotes from people who may or may not have been actual historical people who may or may not have been present at the events they were alleged to have witnessed, do you claim that the words in the novel are eyewitness testimony?
No?
Then get off my fucking case.
If you think there is a single legitimate scholar who states that the four gospels contain actual eyewitness testimony, please do provide its source with quotations and page numbers, not just the Amazon spam you’ve been doing lately.
I’m arguing about this with you because I like to argue, not because I expect you will ever come to your senses about the definition of “evidence” and especially not the definition of “eyewitness testimony” — and not because I wish to deny Jesus’ possible existence (which I have repeatedly admitted is not just possible, but reasonably likely given what we know about ancient history).
But you and your christian pal fifthmonarchyman are seriously pissing me off with your persistent stupidity, your perhaps-deliberate misunderstanding of simple terms like “eyewitness testimony” and your giggles about atheist “conspiracies”. If that’s what you have to do to defend your faith, against the fact that the gospels were written decades later by men who had never seen Jesus, then fine. Do what you have to do.
But I’m done cooperating with you. I’m done answering you as if your questions were ever legitimate.
Another TV show I don’t get?
Dayum.
No, hotshoe, NOT a TV show!! X>{
{Note to self: I hate everyone here.}
Nope; it’s a comicbook—a whole friggin’ lot of comicbooks—you haven’t read. Wolverine is a long-standing member of the superhero group X-Men, and he has a power referred to as his “healing factor”. As is fairly common in superhero comics, the efficacy of Wolvie’s healing factor has varied significantly, depending on a number of factors including how much the author-of-the-moment likes him. As I recall, the single most excessive portrayal of Wolvie’s healing factor in print, ever, had him re-growing his entire friggin’ body from a single drop of blood…
walto,
I feel your pain.