For years I have been bemused by the website called The Skeptical Zone. Every few months I go over there and peruse the posts. And I think to myself, if they are so skeptical, why does practically everything they say line up with the received dogmas and conventional wisdom of the early 21st century Western intelligentsia?
Do they not know what the word “skeptical” means? Are they going for ironical?
But in a flash of insight today, I finally figured it out. The key is in the quote from Cromwell at the top of their homepage that serves as the motto for the site:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
All of this time I mistakenly thought that they were using the aphorism the way Cromwell intended as in “We should bear in mind that each of us is fallible; it follows that each of us should always allow for the possibility that even his most intensely-held beliefs might possibly be mistaken.”
Yes, Barry, that is precisely what I intended it to mean.
No, that is not it. It all becomes clear when you realize that they mean their motto quite literally and when they think of it they think of it this way:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that YOU may be mistaken.
The YOU refers to all those who read the words, including the owner of the blog.
There you have it. They are skeptical all right. They are skeptical of everyone’s views but their own, which they hold with a breathtakingly dogmatic tenacity. It all makes sense to me now
Well, we all tend to think that people who seem unable to see our point of view are holding that view “with a breathtaking dogmatic tenacity”. After all, if we thought we were wrong, we’d change our minds, wouldn’t we? It’s intrinsic to the nature of disagreement that we think the other guy is wrong, and greater the clarity with which we think we are seeing the truth, the more dogmatically tenacious the other guy seems to be for not seeing it. Which simply goes to show that one [wo]man’s obvious is another [wo]man’s nonsense.
So: Just to remind everyone: No, the motto is neither ironical, nor addressed to a subset of the world. It is addressed to everyone, unironically, including me. And of course Barry, should he come over, which I hope he will. Please regard it as the Primary Rule of this site.
Thanks 🙂
Edited to, I hope, avoid copyright violation.
Elizabeth,
I thought it was quite ept, and not inept at all. Maybe could have been more ept, or epter.
We can and should talk about many different kinds of truth — empirical truth, mathematical truth, logical truth, poetic truth, ethical truth, religious truth. There are as many different kinds of truth as there are different kinds of rules for determining whether an assertion is warranted or appropriate. And we get ourselves into trouble when we mistakenly treat one kind of claim as belonging to a different family — e.g. treating “God exists” as an empirical truth.
I am strongly tempted by idea that truth is basically a book-keeping concept, similar to “yes!” or “amen!”. Consider: if I say, “income inequality is getting worse in the US” and someone else responds with, “yes, that’s true,” when what she has done with “that’s true” is acknowledged my entitlement to the claim that I’ve made. But she hasn’t added any content to my claim.
My entitlement to that claim consists in whether I have conformed to the norms governing discourse of that kind — for example, whether I can appeal towards the relevant statistics, and defend the legitimacy of the statistical methods used to generate those statistics. By saying “that’s true” my friend has acknowledged my status as someone who can engage in the right kinds of discourse if challenged.
But what holds in domains of empirical truth — whether economics, biology, or physics — also holds in other domains — phenomenological, poetic, religious, etc.
Elizabeth,
Truth cannot be a subset of itself. I think these concepts can overlap, but they are dimensionally different.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/truth
I think you’re on your own with “expanded truth”. Maybe we need a new word?
Well, lots of words have multiple meanings, and truth is one of them.
The truth or falsity of a statement such as “There exists an omnipotent omniscient God” is different in kind to the truth or falsity of the statement: “the universe is 13.82 billion years old”, and different also in kind to the truth or falsity of the statement “it is right to treat others as you would be treated”.
Truth is beauty and so forth.
Elizabeth,
Well, I’ve not really seen it, and can find no utility in it as it just creates confusion. The first two are truths (descriptive) and the third is prescriptive, it does comport to views I hold but I’m not the arbiter of any truth.
Truth, the new “stuff” which was the old “thing”.
I wouldn’t call it “gibberish”. I can make out what is intended.
The disagreement does reflect that people don’t agree on what we mean by “truth”.
Elizabeth,
Of course poetry, religion, or politics could all be “true” in the sense that it “resonates” in the person, but doesn’t that just point up the difficulty in claiming that it is “in fact true”?
“God exists” or “God is love” may be “your truth,” indeed, but for someone else “Shiva exists” or “God is destruction” may be this person’s “truth.” Some people who believe “God exists” and/or “Allah exists” may find “Shiva exists” to be a pernicious falsehood.
Clearly “truth” can be used loosely enough to say “this is my truth” or some such thing, but that’s really not what is meant by a lot of religious or political people. I may say, “ok, that’s truth to you,” but that’ll be taken as a put-down in many places (clearly, UD much of the time). Because, for one thing, “truth” generally is taken to be a universal (any reasonable person should agree–something like that), not as a viewpoint specific to a person or even a group. Not that it must be so taken.
I’m saying that calling religious or political beliefs “truth” isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is ambiguous.
As to whether religion and politics are delusional and dangerous, it seems to me that these are more or less about as dangerous as humans may be. That is, they seem to be what humans do, and it can certainly go too far, or be rather helpful to social cohesion, or, indeed, both. Religion has an added dimension that may give it an added danger, in that it often claims a kind of absolute or infinite truth that other social phenomena don’t claim as convincingly, unless religion is also involved. Not to say that irreligious politics can’t become awfully absolute, too (think Stalin), but fanaticism is likely stronger with deliberate appeals to religious symbols and ideas (think Hitler).
But I think that most human endeavors are able to turn to fanaticism and absolutism, so I don’t think that religion should be considered as danger of another degree and kind. One reason it can be dangerous is that it may resonate with people, providing a sense of purpose to them, which may be quite beneficial for some. It may be worse for others for the same reason, if the religion decides that there is an enemy of God/us.
Glen Davidson
Neil Rickert,
So we’re left with this great irony of a “truth” that isn’t.
Here was have a painting of Churchill kissing Maggie Thatcher. It is true because [Some art “truth” thing] but also not true because it didn’t happen. The more sophisticated than I may find this ‘nuanced’, but I find it ‘sad’ because it degrades a very useful tool.
Lizzie:
Sure they can, depending on how the terms are defined. If we take “God” to be the standard Christian omniGod, then the hypothesis “God exists” fits very poorly with the data.
We can justifiably say that this God doesn’t exist, just as we can justifiably say that the earth orbits the sun.
I’m not really seeing your difficulty, Richard. Some words in English have several meanings, and have had for a long time.
“There is a cup of coffee on my table”, if it has good predictive value (the cup isn’t a hologram for instance) is a statement we can confidently state to be true.
“There is an omnipotent creator deity” has no predictive value at all. So any truth it has as a statement must be for a different meaning of the word “truth”.
The same difficulty crops up in these discussions over the word “random”! Some people use it to mean “unintentional”, some to mean “unbiased”, some to mean “stochastic”, some to mean “drawn from an equiprobable distribution”.
And arguments get bogged down over which people mean.
I’m not disputing the existence of equivocation, this is a truth we can all agree on 😉
But I think the utility of ‘truth’ comes from keeping it narrow and exacting. Science, no PoMo shenanigans. I would never use “truth” in some of the ways I’ve just seen, partly because I don’t think they ‘are’ and partly because there are better words.
Unfortunately, poetry is older than science.
All you can do is avoid the word true, or insist that the meaning be narrowed for the sake of discussion.
The problem with the expanded definitions of “truth” and “God” is that too often they serve as a cover for fuzzy thinking or as a means of deception (including self-deception).
If you define God as love, then God clearly exists and I am not an atheist. However, I wouldn’t dream of calling myself a theist. I call myself an atheist because Iam an atheist with respect to the Gods that most people actually believe in. Few people actually think that God is love, even if they claim otherwise.
People who are uncomfortable with their atheism or who wish to downplay their differences with theists are often tempted to equivocate on the meaning of “God”. I think Karen Armstrong is a particularly egregious example of this.
I don’t care how people define things, as long as they make it clear what they mean, in the current context.
If people want to define God as Love, that’s fine with me.
The problem with the “does God exist?” question is that it’s far too vague. Some gods do exist (the one that = Love) for instance; some gods don’t (the one who made the universe in 7 days 6,000 years ago for instance). So it’s not actually a question that makes any sense. Nor does “do you think life was intelligently designed?” – it depends on who you think the designer is, and what “intelligent” means. As they stand, the words have too many meanings for anyone to be able to answer the question.
On some definitions of “intelligent” and “design”, life was intelligently designed. On others, the answer is probably no.
The floor is something we must fight against.
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human
stance, it is that place that men fall to.
I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;
the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.
But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor;
my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into
the cracks of the floor.
Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug.
Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering
bulb of dread and dream . . .
Russell Edson
lovely!
“Teetering bulb of dread and dream . . .” gets me every time.
BTW, Edson died last year.
I asked materialists here that if they could cure the delusional belief (in god and the supernatural) with a pill, would they do so?
EL responded
Based on that comment, I wondered if EL was saying that the rationality of a belief was determined by its divergence from the cultural norm, so I asked:
EL responded:
Which indicates to me that she considers the rationality of a belief to be a direct function of it’s consilience with cultural norms.
So I asked:
EL responded:
EL seems to have provided two means by which a belief is “not delusional”; (1) if the belief is based on evidence and sound logic, and/or (2) if the belief has consilience with cultural norms. EL seems to be presenting these as if they are two different things. So, now it is time for more questions:
Would a belief be delusional if it adhered to #1 above, but was extremely divergent from #2? Regardless of whether or not a belief was delusional, which category do you hold is capable of objectively arbiting between true beliefs and false, #1 or #2? Which one should a person evaluate their beliefs by – (1) logic & evidence, or (2) cultural norms?
First of all, William, let me make it absolutely clear that I am using “delusional” in the clinical sense. I am not using it to mean “not true”.
Secondly, I think your careless use of English is masking from you the incoherence of your question. A “category” does not “arbit”. A person does. What a person might use to decide (let’s not use fancy word where a simple one will do) whether a statement is likely to be true or not could, perfectly sensibly, include:
How many other people seem to think so?
Are the people who think so generally right about other things?
Is it consistent with other things that I have hitherto are true?
Is it supported by any evidence?
Is it supported by independent evidence?
And, having considered the answers to those questions, I might make a provisional conclusion one way or the other, but always subject to further information that might alter the balance of probabilities.
But all this is is because I do not share YOUR basic premise, that there is such a thing as “objective truth”. I think there is probably something we might call “reality”, which we can attempt to model, and, by the extent to which our model predicts new observations, evaluate for its closeness to reality, and someone might want to call that postulated reality “objective truth”. But in that case, “objective truth” wouldn’t take the form of a statement (which would be a model again). It would be an assumed ideal to which our models can only converge, not reproduce.
EL said:
Thanks for that clarification, Captain Obvious.
ROFL at “fancy”. I mean … really?
What has EL actually said here? She’s listed ways people “might” decide what statements are true or not. Well, EL, people “might” roll dice or flip a coin to “decide” what statements are true or not. I didn’t ask about what “people” “might” do to decide, I asked you specifically how you “decide” (don’t want to use words too “fancy” for you) the truth-value of statements. If “how many other people agree” is one of your “deciding” factors in “deciding” the truth-value of a statement, I’m comfortable with what that reveals about your “deciding” process.
Then, basically, you’re not arguing with others because you think they are wrong in any objective sense, you’re just arguing with them because they disagree with you and some others whom you agree with about things. Wow!