Nielsen on Scientism

Where I conflict with Quine is over his scientism. I do not think that he or Russell are right in believing that what science (natural science?) cannot tell us, we cannot know. There are all sorts of common-sense knowledge and social, political, and moral knowledge that science can tell us little (if anything) about:

that human beings stand in need of love,

that promises are generally to be kept,

that justice involves reciprocity,

that respect for others is, or at least should be, a central feature in our lives, and

that indifference to one's fellow humans is evil

are good examples. People who have no understanding of science---who even lived before the rise of science---can understand them and know them to be justified. And things are no different for us moderns. We need not wait on science to confirm or disconfirm them and for most of them at least we have no understanding of how science could confirm or disconfirm (infirm) them.

--Very slightly redacted from Kai Nielsen, Atheism and Philosophy, New York: Prometheus, 2005, page 11, "Preface to the Paperback Edition". This book (ISBN: 1591022983) was originally published in 1985 as Philosophy and Atheism (ISBN: 0879752890). Get this one, the paperback, since it's much cheaper and has the new (and very long) preface from which I have redacted the quote.

To Russia With Love

Поздравления и спасибо моим друзьям в России. Вы - мои наибольшие читатели вне Соединенных Штатов, и я оцениваю Вас читающий мой blog. Я уверен, что Вы можете выяснить мой адрес электронной почты на "g", так свяжитесь со мной, если Вы имеете какие-нибудь вопросы.

Lipstick on a Modernistic Pig

The problem with postmoderns who make grand universal claims about what's real is found in the vantage point and criteria with which one presumes to arbitrate such an architectonically prior notion in the first place.

Everything postmodern I've read seems to just be generic old fixed-factor reductionism, the same as Marxism, Behaviorism, Materialism, Contextualism, and so on. Pick your favorite universally determining factors and away we go, spawning universal explanatory reductionisms, arbitrating the existence, nature, and status of what's real, and so on.

Postmodern rhetoric is good for 1) logical analysis, 2) defense attorneys, 3) sociopaths and others into hoodwinking people in various senses, and 4) students who want to rhetorically hoax their way through a substantial number of school courses with writing requirements. Viva Joey Skaggs! [Look up "Sokel Hoax" to see what I mean]
 

Baudrillard's brief essay on nihilism is just sermonizing, merely one unargued pronouncement after another. It's just a selective preening neo-modernism grandstanding itself, in spite of its own assertions.

But postmodernism in general makes it much easier when I'm lobbying rich alumni to close down those useless and meaningless wastes of money called philosophy departments---as an expression of their nihilism. Others can play the nihilism game too---but in this case by redirecting the money that's normally used to prop up people who insult the views of those funding them.

Hidden In Plain Sight

Noise, anger, explosive tones, superlatives, exaggerations of passion, add nothing to the force of what we say, but rather rob our words of the power that belongs to them. But the utterance that shows a spirit subdued by truth and mastered by wisdom is the utterance that sweeps away opposition, that persuades and overcomes. It's not those who get angry and storm and swear who carry the day, but those who never lose their tempers and who never raise their voices, who keep talking quietly and placidly as if they were discussing the weather.

--Slightly redacted from Washington Gladden, 1876

Meat Machine Madness

"...every one of the endless series of "proofs" of the existence of God that has been proposed, from antiquity to the present day, is automatically a failure because, as I have mentioned, a logical deduction tells you nothing that is not already embedded in its premises."

--Victor Stenger


Consequently, the above deductive argument itself is automatically a failure.

Thanks, Vic! Good to know!

Sociopathy for the Masses

From the combox of Phaser's recent "The Unliterate Hallq blog post:

I'm really starting to wonder if there is some organization funding the idiocy of these New Atheist types. They can't really be that stupid can they? Oh, please tell me they're just play-acting for a check...

--Moi,

It happens. But then the televangelist industry is funding the idiocy of faith beyond reason and other cognitive absurdities among contemporary believers in God, and this is influencing people in other religions besides Christianity. Yikes.

Most people in general---theists, atheists, agnostics, and so on---are epistemically schizophrenic, and therefore intellectually and philosophically insane.

On the Ruins of Two Cherished Schemes

The problem with denying either free will or the self is that you end up assuming what you deny, as well as giving the denial itself a free ride.

To deny the self assumes a self in the process of carrying out the denial. All you can do is not use the term "self", but you'll still be stuck with the implied vantage point and implications of the denial itself, which on determinism is equally problematic, however hidden it might be behind Oz's curtain.

To deny free will is to assume it in the nature of the denial itself, the status of determinism as itself anything beyond its own causally reductive factors, including "known", "ought" to be believed, "true" as opposed to "false", and so on.

To counter either the existence of the self or free will, necessarily ignores the equally-determined (and therefore equally true) status of belief in both, and assumes all the features of both in those same denials of them.

Hence, the ways in which both self and free will are discussed by determinists necessarily end up giving other factors the same treatment as the self and free will, while being exempted from the implications that determinism originally alleges against both.

That's why those who deny free will or the self necessarily end up cognitively acting out a belief in both in spite of themselves, as well as treating their own denials as some kind of intellectually-obligating gospels, complete with all the same rhetoric of that which they deny.

A rose, by any other name---or no name at all---is still a rose.