Tag: critique

Karl Popper and I Are in Disagreement

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Whilst Popper is correct in saying that you may (seemingly) resolve conflicts if you ignore definition alignment and go with a subjective approach. Just assume you are talking about the same thing and find accord. This is problematic because once instantiated, it will be realised that there was no common centre, and so the next round commences.

In some ways this comports with my language insufficiency postion—these terms are undefinable, so waiting for full agreement will require an infinite amount of time—, but pretending that one can ignore this step is fool’s play.

One approach might be to atomise a concept such as justice, thereby attempting to resolve a portion, but I’ll posit that this atomic approach will yield protons, neutron, electron, and then quarks and subatomic particles and quantum strangeness, so all we’ve managed is to kick the can down the road.

The best this attempt at a pragmatic approach yields is a pregnant pause, but it won’t remain resolved. It’s easy to blame the instability on the dynamism of society—and this does likely exascerbate the issue—, but this issue is inherently unstable at the start. Like an isotope, it’s just ready for any disturbance.

Should the Criminal Justice System Be Abolished?

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Much of jurisprudence is based on logic founded on faulty premises of regurgitated theological concepts shrouded in naturalistic theory and pseudoscience. This is not about the defund the police social trend of 2020. This is to say that the justice system is smoke and mirrors writ large. It’s ostensibly built on anachronistic concepts such as volition, evil, soul, blame, and forgiveness that should be tossed into the dustbin of history along with phrenology, humours, and will.

The titleof this post is taken from Robert Spapolsky’s proposed chapter concept for Behave, published in 2017, where until now, it’s languished on my Want to Read list, having entered via the vector of my interest in behavioural economics. Chapter 16 was eventually published with the title of Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will.

I’ve been writing for years about the nonesensical attachment to these notions, so it gives me comfort in solidarity to discover others who share, at least to some degree my perspective, knowing, of course, that this doesn’t make this perspective any more correct.

To be fair, I’ve held a low opinion of so-called justice (and government) systems pretty much since I was taught about them almost 50 years ago. In the US, much teaching is really propagandising about how fair these systems are and how peers and reasonable persons concepts make is superior. In my mind, those were the being failings. Later, when I hopped onto my language insufficiency bandwagon, it only fell apart more. Kafka’s The Trial represents the internal workings of most justice systems than the logic and reason of propogated but proponants.

Stopping here. Much to do. I recommend reading Behave. If you’ve read it, I’d love to see what you thought about it.

Compatible with Compatibilism?

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Full Disclosure: I consider myself to be a determinist. I looked for something like Dawkins’ spectrum of theistic probability to evaluate where one might be oriented on a scale of free will to determinism to fatalism whilst also considering compatibilism.

Dawkins’ spectrum of theistic probability

Let’s lay some groundwork by establishing some definitions from most constrained to least:

  • Fatalism : a doctrine that events are fixed in advance so that human beings are powerless to change them
  • Compatibilism : a doctrine that maintains that determinism is compatible with free will
  • Determinism : a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws
  • Freewill : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

It seems that freewill and fatalism are bookends with compatibilism attempting to moderate or synthesise freewill and deteminism. But it also seems that one’s selection may be contexual. Ultimately, this argument is fraught with semantic challenges insomuch as some underlying concepts are yet unresolved.

Crash Course Philosophy does provides a nice summary of the challenges in defending even compatibilist positions away from detemininism and even fatalism.

As this video notes, our choices may appear to be free, but it doesn’t take much effort to perform a 5-whys investigation to remove anything but homoeopathic amounts of agency.

Taking a short example, let’s look at the cases of the trial judges mentioned by Sapolsky (Behave) and Kahneman (Noise). Given all of the factors entering into sentences, prior offences, sex or gender of either the defendant or the judge, education, income, and so on, but far the largest factor in determining the length or severity of a sentence was the time between the sentencing and the judge’s last meal—effectively their blood glucose levels.

Some may argue that this is a short interval, but behaviourists would argue that a person now is a culmination of all of their experiences to date. That the decision of the so-called criminal to rob the liquor store (going for the stereotype here) was not the result of low blood sugar. This may be true, but there is still an unbroken chain of confluent events that brought them to that place.

From a culpabilty perspective, even absent true agency, the offender should still be incarcerated or whatever to prevent this behaviour from repeating. Of course, if you believe in rehabilitation, you are necessarily a behaviourist in soem shape or form: the idea is to effectively repattern experience impressions. The other problem is one of probability. That you did X once, are you lilkey to do it again? If not, then there is no further risk to society, as it were. Given the probability of recitivism—and some argue that mass incarceration increases the probability or attempting criminal actions post-release—, is this even an effective deterence? It’s time to get out of the rabbit hole.

From my position, it is impossible to reconcile experience and freewill. The best you can argue is that one is free in the moment—like some strange improv exercise, where you are shown a film that stops abrutly, and you are instructed to act out the remainder of the scene. Is this free, or is this extrapolating on your experience.

Skipping to fatalism, how probable is it that absolutely everything is determined. Reality is just a film we are both in and observing or experiencing, but all of it is already laid down. We are just unawares. Every strange plot twist and early exit was not only already scripted, but it’s already been captured. There is no room for improvisation or flubbed lines. There is no opportunity to go off-script. Even these words are predestined. Even unpublished thoughts were not meant to be published.

There is no way to test this sort of system from inside the system, and there is no way to get a vantage above it, so here we are.

The notion of determinism affords humans some modicum of agency, perhaps akin to one part in a trillion trillions. Practically, we are taking credit for a butterfly effect—and punishing for this degree of freedom. As Sapolsky has noted, most instances of perceived agency are trivial. We can ‘instruct’ finger movement with our brain. Ostensibly, we think: move finger; bend; point; stop. And even so, what was the cause of the thought to move the finger? Was there truly a non-causal event?

Cognotive dissonance ensures that we can’t allow ourselves to be NPCs or automotons. We have to omuch hubris for that. We must have some free will. Some religions say we not only have agency here in this life but that we chose the life to begin with. Even so, we’ve not seen the script in advance; we’ve merely chosen which lessons we want learnt.

So what about compatibilism? Sort of, who cares? Whilst I can define some interstitial state between free will and determinism, it seems that it would not be even tempered or would otherwise skew heavily toward determinism.

What keeps me from being a hard determinist is that I hold out hope for statistics, chaos, and stochasticism. One might argue in return, that these, too, are determined; we just don’t see the underlying connection. And that’s my cognitive cross to bear.

To be fair, it seems that the notion of free will or even compatibilism are secondary, let’s say, reactions to the need for culpability, for moral responsibility. Societies are built upon these notions, as are legal systems. Necessary ingredients to invent are:

  • ‘Individual’
  • Agency and Volition
  • Choice, Motivation, and Intent
  • Responsibilty and Blame

None of these actually exist, so they need to be invented and constructed in order to associate self-control to actions. In fact, we have insanity escape clauses to recognise that there are cases where control is lost, whether temporarily or permanently, or never had in the first place for any number of ‘reasons’. At core, these attributes are necessary to exert power in a society. The next goal is to convince the actors or subjects that these things are ‘real enough’— as the saying goes, ‘good enough for the government’.

Even if we accept these things at face value, the interpretation and processing of these are different animals still. The notion of Will itself is likely speceous or another fabricated notion. Perhaps, I’ll address Will on another day. Probably not, as all of this is distracting me from my language insufficiency work.

When I think about free will, it is foisted on humanity in the same manner as gods and religion. With gods, we have been defending against theism for millennia. The gods fetish and free will are inextricably linked. As with the chicken and egg connundrum, the question is whach came first. Is God a reaction to fee will, or is it the other way around. Did we create free will to allow for responsibility and then fabricate Supreme busy bodies to act as ultimate judges? Or did we create the gods and build out the myth of free will to accommodate punishment of deviant behaviour. Or are these just parallel constructions? Enquiring minds want to know.

Descriptive Postmodernism

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I can’t count the number of times I’ve defended Postmodernism (PoMo) from attack, so I am publishing this, so I can link to it. Perhaps I am not defending PoMo, but my flavour of it, but I’ve read a lot of work published by the usual suspects—some who eschew being lumped into a poorly defined category—or at least a nebulous category.

Before I get too far, I also want to remind the reader to take care to separate the philosophy from the person. One popular attack is the conflating of identity politics and social justice advocacy as PoMo phenomena. In fact, I consider myself to be PoMO—to be defined here in a moment—and a social justice warrior (SJW), this despite contesting the very notion of identity to begin with.

By definition, a summary is a reduction of some thing, but one needs to be careful not not arrive at reductio ad absurdum. Where appropriate, one may also wish to differentiate postmodernism with postructuralism. So as not to create a definition partir de rien, I’ll reference other accessible versions. A critic may disagree with these definitions, but they will serve as the foundation of my position and vantage.

Wikipedia gives us this definition (their reference links retained):

Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of scepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, often criticizing Enlightenment rationality and focusing on the role of ideology in maintaining political or economic power. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives us this

That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

Notice the commonalities. PoMo is a descriptive, critical activity. It’s descriptive. As language and grammar can be approached descriptively of prescriptively, so can philosophy. Some ‘schools’ do both. PoMo is exclusively descriptive. PoMo was born as a reaction to Modernism, especially the unstated foundations labelled by Lyotard as metanarratives—the grand narratives and underlying ideologies of prevailing beliefs that were uncritically taken for granted, many of which that were formed or catalysed in the Age of Enlightenment.

Jean-François Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta narratives….”[4] where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the concept of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers in general argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal and that truth is always partial and “at issue” rather than being complete and certain.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_philosophy

My defence is that PoMo cannot be for social justice or engage in identity, as it has no positive position on these. It functions to critically deconstruct. People unfamiliar with PoMo concepts often misunderstand this notion of deconstruction. All to often, I see people criticise Derrida for his brand of Deconstruction, but that only illustrates the fact that they never read or simply misunderstand what Derrida means by Deconstruction. Perhaps, I’ll elaborate on that in future.

My point is that PoMo is corrosive—like lye. It eats away at ideologies, dissolves them. It is not meant to construct anything. So where does this constructive expectation come from? It derives primarily from two places.

Modernism

Most people casting dispersion are modernists. They need to construct things. To be fair, this perspective has been an evolutionary advantage, but some people can’t allow a bunch of Lego pieces to remain unconstructed. This is fine, but you need another tool to perform this task. It’s not PoMo.

Ad Hominem

The other challenge is the inability to distinguish between the person and the idea. Michel Foucault was very vocal in the political realm and actively promoted Marxism, but, firstly, Foucault was not a self-professed PoMo—and for several reasons, one could come to accord with his assessment; secondly, in his deconstruction of history, he discovered a foundational component—this activity being squarely PoMo—, but he reconstructed historical narratives employing the lens of power. This rebuilding is not PoMo activity.

Parting Shot

Besides—or in addition to—ignorance, some people have an agenda, and they play ad hominem games, so if they can vilify a person and associate that person to an ideology, it can have the tendency of poisoning the well. Uncritical people won’t even notice the sleight of hand and redirect.

never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance*

Hanlon’s Razor

A textbook example is Stephen Hick’s attempt in Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault to conflate feminism (a positive mechanism) with postmodernism (to reiterate, a negative mechanism). In it he claims that feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mckinnon are proponents of PoMo thought, but he is apparently unaware that McKinnon has explicitly attacked PoMo as destructive to feminism. A fuller critique of Hicks‘ work can be heard on YouTube. I recommend it highly if you have the better part of an hour to spare. Jordan B Peterson is a celebrity personality whose primary exposure to PoMo is Hicks, so when you understand how off-base Hicks is, you’ll realise why Peterson is so off-base, too.

* Hanlon’s razor is originally cast as “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity“, but I prefer the term ignorance, as it it less value-laden and more broadly applicable. Besides, to be ignorant does not mean to be stupid. Many ignorant people are not stupid. I am ignorant of the Russian language, but I am not stupid.

Can Metamodernism Sublate Modernism and Postmodernism?

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I’ve been hearing that metamodernism is the next stage in the march of history toward progress. Metamodernism will synthesise modernism and postmodernism into something better that before. It’s what’s for breakfast.

Audio: Podcast conversation around this topic.

I’ve heard about metamodernism in the past, and every time I review some material, I discount it and move on. This time, I’ll react to it. My colleagues in some other online fora have suggested metamodernism (Freinacht) or post-liberalism (Pabst), who see their solution located in the middle between conventional polarities. The attempt here is to adopt Hegel’s dialectic approach, so we’ve got a starting point, an objective, a lens, and a framework. Sounds good. Let’s go. But what are we trying to reconcile?

Ideas attributed to Modernism are

  1. Faith in science
  2. Development and progress
  3. Democracy
  4. The individual
  5. A meritocratic social order
  6. Humanity can recreate nature by virtue of its reason

Ideas attributed to Postmodernism are

  1. Critical questioning of all knowledge and science
  2. Suspicion towards all grand narratives about “progress”
  3. Emphasis on symbols and contexts
  4. Ironic distance
  5. Cultures have been oppressed and ruined by modern society
  6. Reveals injustice in “democratic” societies
  7. Relations create the individual
  8. A multicultural order where the weak are included
  9. Humanity has destroyed the biosphere

Metamodern Ideas

  1. How can we reap the best parts of the other two?
  2. Can we create better processes for personal development?
  3. Can we recreate the processes by which society is governed, locally and globally?
  4. Can the inner dimensions of life gain a more central role in society?
  5. How can modern, postmodern and premodern people live together productively?
  6. How can politics be adjusted to an increasingly complex world?
  7. What is the unique role of humanity in the ecosystems of nature?

Reviewing the Modern List

I want to be careful not to construct a strawman or create a false dichotomy, so perhaps I do have to backtrack to touch on the Modern list.

Faith in science is exactly that—faith—and is not warranted without recognised and articulated assumptions.

The notions of development and progress rely on underlying teleological goals and values that are not universally agreed upon and don’t benefit participants in the same manner and to the same degrees. There are winners and losers.

Democracy is a specious notion that I’ve railed against time and again. This is simply one form of political organisation among many. There is no reason to elevate this form over many others.

Moderns do have an rather fixed notion of what defines the individual. A Postmodern is not very likely to accept this notion except as a snapshot that can only be interpreted within a narrowly defined context.

A meritocratic social order is a Modern concept ripe with metanarrative support.

That humanity can recreate nature by virtue of her reason—notwithstanding the odd use of ‘her, evidently a nod to Mother Nature—, there is a elevated notion that reason is a superior mechanism. I’d extend this to include the notion that many people—not just the elite—are capable of ‘reason’. Yet again, all of this is questionable.

Critiquing the Postmodern List

At the start, I’ll suggest that Metamodernism is an attempt by Moderns to re-established ground lost to Postmoderns under the auspices of reconciliation. This does not appear to come from a disinterested mediator. The constituents of the Modern list look orthodox enough for my purposes, and I wish to spend some time parsing the Postmodern list. These lists don’t appear to be equivalent, as there is more editorialising in the PoMo list. I’ll skip the the first 4, taking them as given.

That cultures have been oppressed and ruined by modern society is quite value-laden. I’d be more inclined toward cultural constructs rely on unspoken metanarratives that leads to unbalance and disrupt the playing field. Employing the term ruin is a hint that the author is a Modern out of their element. To ruin would presume a notion of something to ruin with some teleological metanarrative in play.

That PoMo reveals injustice in “democratic” societies is interesting. First, the quotes around democratic suggests that the author finds claims of democracy to be specious or finds the term is at least at times misapplied. I can’t be certain. In the end, it’s not important because it seems to be acting as an unnecessary filler anyway. I better rendering might be the phrase ‘reveals injustice in societies‘. Full stop.

Relations create the individual feel legitimate. Identity is unnecessary in a vacuum. Although Identity is a dynamic and ambiguous concept. I don’t think this will affect my assessment.

A multicultural order where the weak are included is prescriptive. This, again, is a misinterpretation by a modern. That a Postmodern makes a claim that a culture has inequalities and inequities, it does not follow that s/he is promoting some particular solution—include the weak. Emotionally, this may indeed be the reaction by a Postmodern—perhaps myself included—, but this is not part of the philosophy that points out the discrepancy. It’s an annex.

Attributing the claim that humanity has destroyed the biosphere to Postmoderns is a huge stretch. I don’t believe this is an idea initiated by Postmoderns, and I don’t think this perspective is disproportionality held by Postmoderns over some other cohort.

Perusing the Metamodern List

Now to react to the metamodern list. Having already inspected the list, I’ll point out that every one of these questions has a Modern perspective—the need to construct and resolve over a need to deconstruct and explore.

How can we reap the best parts of the other two?

Ok. The concept of best here is a bit disconcerting since best is value-laden and relies on context, which further relies on some set of narratives.

Can we create better processes for personal development?

Again, what is this person we are developing? What is the telos? Why this telos and not another?

Can we recreate the processes by which society is governed, locally and globally?

This is a binary question, so I’ll assume the author meant more. We already know this answer. It’s yes.

The question this implies is ‘what might it be?’ We already know this answer, too. There are any number of organisations and processes of government, none particularly better than the next.

Can the inner dimensions of life gain a more central role in society?

Where is the inner dimensions idea even come from? Why would anyone even accept the notion, and why give it any preference let alone credence? Not to be a dick, but why give anyone a role? The apparent metanarrative here appears to be democracy or at least participation, but there is not reason to accept this as better or worse than alternatives.

How can modern, postmodern and premodern people live together productively?

Why ‘productively’? This is another Modern notion foisted on the solution. Aside from the productivity red herring, this is a somewhat valid question, though it does elevate the notion of an inclusive society, and there is not reason to accept this as a preference, again, without some underlying metanarrative treatment.

How can politics be adjusted to an increasingly complex world?

This feels a bit emptier that the other list entries. Again, the answer depends on the goals and expectations, so it requires this context.

What is the unique role of humanity in the ecosystems of nature?

Really? Humans need to have a unique role? This is obviously a Modernist-Humanist notion that elevate humans. I could see an argument where humans can be unique but not elevated. Again, what world would that be in? With notions of progress and productivity, it should be obvious that we’re again operating with some underlying metanarratives in place.

So What?

Reviewing metamodernism again, I can see why I forget about it shortly after I encounter it. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder that I’ve trodden this ground before. In summary, it’s painfully apparent to me that so-called Metamodernism is simply an attempt by Moderns to repackage and re-gift Modernism through the same old lens, but I’m not buying it.

Along my quick review of information on Metamodernism, there is a large metaphysical/spiritual element that is quite unlikely to resolve to either rationality or Postmodernism.

I may investigate other flavours of this concept, whether post-post modernism, post-liberalism, but from what I can tell, these are backwards looking toward Classical Virtue metaethical models. Besides having nostalgic value, I’m not a fan.

Critique of ‘Some Problems with the Intellectual Left’

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This post is a commentary on this post, which I happened upon through this other post on via this blog that I follow but that I haven’t yet read because I was distracted by the source. As the title suggests, the source post is about the author’s perspective on ‘some problems with the intellectual left‘. I am not sure who he includes in this group, so I am not defending anyone in particular.

I’ll disclose at the start that although I am sympathetic to the author, I feel he has a worldview I don’t share. He is obviously very frustrated and does not feel his voice is heard. It’s evident that he wants to persuade, yet he hasn’t mastered the art of rhetoric. Not having read his other posts and the concept of political Left and Right being somewhat nebulous, I’ll presume him to identify with the Right rather than the Centre. He seeks and finds solidarity among his brethren on the Right, people it seems who share his perspective, and yet feel alienated from the Left and from society as they envisage it.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States, there is very little conservatism or liberalism in politics. These have been coöpted by the brand politics of Republicans and Democrats. My Conservative and Liberal colleagues are all pretty much fed up with the lack of an ideological anchor in the US. Each claim that neither of the dominant political parties represent them or their ideologies. That might be a topic for another day. What this means is that I will be commenting by referencing the political party brand names, which in the UK translate to Tories and Labour parties.

What I can critique is this polemic. I am neither Conservative or Liberal, though a Conservative may deem me to be a Progressive.

First, it’s nice to see you begin with an admission that you are reacting from a place of emotion. I’ll try to comment on each paragraph in sequence and as necessary.

« A general issue that tends to recur is the arrogance of assumed or presumed access to truth and reality. »

This is an interesting claim. Two things:

(1) Most rational people presume whatever opinion they hold to be true at the time they express it. This is a known cognitive phenonenon for all humans. I am not sure how this is only attributable to Left intellectuals.

(2) Let’s estabish some working definitions. When I read ‘Right’, I presume Conservatism, a fundamental element of which is about traditionalism. ‘Left’, I presume to equate either to Liberalism (non-Classical, so from a US-biased perspective) or Progressivism, which views much of the past as flawed and wishes to remdeiate it.

If we accept as a simple attribute of Conservatism that there is a desire to take what has seemed to work in the past and continue to rely on it now and going forward, then it would seem to me this past would be the single truth upon which to operate. For the Progressive, there are many possible solutions, though, admitedly, a person might choose one as being more apt to be the best past forward, which I sup0pose could be characterised as the truth.

I disagree that the person on the Left would assume this to be the only path forward, so the claim of truth intransigence seems a bit overblown.

« They will take a complicated issue with many ambiguities to it, and present dogmatically one party line as fact. »

I have not experienced this. In practise, I see that the Right is able to signal simplistic slogans and sound bites, where the Left is required to be mired in nuance to explain, thereby losing the attention span of its constituents. Again, I am speaking from the perspective of the US. It may be different elsewhere.

« Not only this, they will try to ridicule and humiliate anyone who disagrees with them. This kind of shaming approach so common on the left to force a sham public consensus, extends as a tactic also and especially to intellectuals on the left. »

As there is no discernable Left or Right in American politics, there is only us and them relative to the two dominant competing brands, each clumps of mud and spercial interests, but neither with a recognisable underlying poltical ideology.

I am going to fast-forward because the tendency to single out one party when both parties are equally guilty continues.

« For all that they may try to condescendingly diagnose people who oppose them as suffering from one from of irreality or another… »

This is not limited to one side or another.

« At no point is there respect for some reality they could be missing »

Neither is this limited to one side or another.

« This is a ludicrous state of affairs. Can you imagine anyone on the right, or just independently minded, being willing or even able to engage in a reasonable dialogue with a group of people who have such strong attachment to their values… »

Notice how we distinguish Left from Right, but we also attempt to associate Right with ‘independantly minded’. I can imagine a so-called indepenant to be able to engage in ‘reasonable dialogue’. I can’t as much image the same for a person on the Right.

« And don’t think this is not the case, because it clearly is a fact… »

This is ironic given the previous claim that the Left is steadfast in owning the truth, yet the claim here is the writer owns the truth. Anything counter to his beliefs is opinion.

« The problem I think is that there is this general tendency among more intelligent people … have been insulated from reality more… »

I’m guess I need to get clarity on how intelligent people are shielded from reality. Is the claim that these people somehow live apart from reality? Apparently intelligent people are some monolithic group.

« …they prefer to hide in theoretical realms and not face the judgement of the practical world. »

What is this hiding mechanism? Does this hiding allow one to avoid reality as we know it? Is the practical world different to the real world?

« As a result, they try to hide their assertions behind claims of neutral fact, camouflaging opinionated things in this way, and by sneaky tactics of exploiting the human desire to fit in, in order to shame people into line with these opinions. »

I am not sure I am able to parse this sentence, but somehow there are sureptitious claims that shame people into compliance. I was under the impression that people of the Left were the free sex hippies of bygone days and Conservatives were ostensibly The Man. Moving on…

« They are not sure enough of themselves and their values… »

I thought the Left were the ones with ‘presumed access to truth and reality’. How would you be unsure if this were the case?

« so they must resort to all this underhand stuff, and once it spreads worldwide we get the kind of climate we are now in today. A climate where a tautological assertion such as climate change, becomes a calling card for worldwide shame and conformity. »

If I am interpreting this correctly, the Left is bludgeoning the general populace into conformity with shame. Again, the Left is not not monolithic entity, so I am not sure what conformity is being forged.

Also, there is a claim that ‘climate change’ is a tautological assertion, yet this missing the point that the assertion is an ‘anthropogenic climate change’ rather than a generalised claim that the climate is changing, an important distinction and not nuance.

« Another issue I have with intellectuals on the left is their disingenuous cherry picking of reality. »

Some examples would be nice.

« They think by obsessing on one “truth” in a much larger debate… »

Again, I believe that the concept of a single truth is one adopted by Conservatives, and I feel this is why more Conservatives believe in the notion of a monotheistic existence because it allows them to believe in a single source of Truth.

« …somehow saves them from criticism and gives them free reign to criticise and ridicule anyone else who questions that “truth”. »

Ditto

« Of course a person questioning it may only be making a point of nuance to distinguish an aspect of truth to it, and an aspect that is not true. »

There are a few possibilities here:

(1) That a thing can be simultaneously true and untrue, such as in a quantum place as exemplified by Schrodengers cat.

(2) That the definition of the thing being discussed is not common, so we are talking about a different reference.

(3) The definition is ambiguous, as captured by the old Groucho Marx joke, ‘I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.’

(4) The topic being discussed can be further broken down or clarified, as portrayed by the African story of the man walking down the street wearing a hat coloured red on one side and blue on the other. Asked to recount, the people on one side declared his hat to be red, and the other that it was blue. In fact, they only had access to a partial truth based upon their own limited vantage.

(5) Neither side has access to the truth, as exemplified by the stoey of the blind men and the elephant, one who envisions the tail as a rope and another who envisions the ears as a carpet.

« But once you try to go into that debate, they have achieved their aim which was solely to get you on the defensive… »

Pretty sure this is a fundamental Debating 101 tactic we learn in high school

« …so now they can just belabour their same dumb point over and over and look like they know what they are talking about. »

Perception is reality, as the adage goes.

« All these kinds of underhand tactics… »

This author sounds bitter and has a difficult time communicating his position or gaining traction on his ideas. A person coming from this position will likely be defensive and put others on the defensive from the start. I’ll presume that these ideas are ones associated to the Right. I haven’t read any of his other writings, so I don’t have a broader or deeper perspective.

« Individuals must rebel against this encroaching totalitarianism… »

Again, the author is tilting windmills or strawmen as the case might be. I’m not sure I can parse this final paragraph, so I’ll just end here.

Unfettered Capitalism

Posted in morality, philosophy, politicsTagged , , , 3 Comments

I created a post yesterday, which has taken off at LinkedIn:

Unfettered Capitalism is a major contributor to homelessness. Universal Basic Income may provide relief but does not ‘fix’ homelessness. Whilst mental illness is a contributing factor to many homeless, as is drugs addiction, requirements for employment and housing is a marked barrier to recovery: proof of income, adequate credit, and rental history requirements hobble the fortuitous homeless. Misguided policy around mental illness and addiction drive in the last nails. Foucault may have also had a thing or two to say about the prevailing headwinds.

Bry Willis – LinkedIn

Typically, I segment my social commentary as such:

  • WordPress: Philosophical & Sociopolitical
  • Facebook: Personal & Political
  • LinkedIn: Professional
  • Twitter: Who knows
  • Pinterest: Random
  • Tumblr: Music
  • YouTube (1): Philosophical
  • YouTube (2): Music
  • Link Tree: All Links: https://linktr.ee/microglyphics

And given, I’ve been a professional economist, occasionally, I post economics content on LinkedIn, though not often.

I received a lot of positive support and feedback, but there are the diehard apologists chiming in to defend this system. A defensive reaction to a polite antagonist was:

Wearing my economist and consultant chapeau, specificity is my key contention. My comment is that this is a complex problem, and humans have a poor track record at solving complex problems. Part of the problem in dealing with complexity is one of understanding boundaries; the other problem is identifying the right dimensions. In my original comment, I point out that, fundamentally, medical science does not understand pain or pain management, and government unnecessarily views these people through a moral lens, and so their solutions are misguided. In this particular use case, poverty and homelessness are a result.

This is not the right forum to debate this, but, categorically, drugs policies in the US, at least in the Kensington area in Philadelphia, are likely the prime contributors to the problem of homelessness.

It’s been a long day, so I’ll reserve commentary for some other day.

Ye Olde Wordes

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1–2 minutes

Hear ye! Hear ye! Should I rather have titled this Every Rose Has its Thorn?

Am I alone in this? Are there others who also cringe when they hear period-piece reenacters pronounce the word ye as ‘yee’, or is it just me? Be honest now.

Those as pedantic as I, know that ye was a solution to a technological limitation of early European printing. Prior to the printing press, Old English had a þ character pronounced thorn. Phonetically, it sounded like the modern English voiced dental fricative expression of the th digraph— IPA: /ð/.

Given this, ye would have been spelt þe and should be pronounced the (IPA: /ði/—not necessarily /ðə/) and not yee (IPA: /ji/). I am not sure if a hand-printed (or painted) sign of the day would have conformed to the pre-press spelling or the post-press variant. I wonder how long it took for thorn to pass by the wayside.

I am aware that language is a human construct and even that language is like a living organism. But in this case—as with Latin—, thorn is dead. It seems we should not revise the pronunciation of a fossil of a word. It seems to me it should be frozen in the amber of time.

Bonus Round 1

Back in the day, not only was the abbreviated as ye in printing, but this was abbreviated as ys and that was shortened to yt, as in the Mayflower Compact. Don’t ask why someone felt that it was important to abridge 3- and 4-letter words to 2 characters.

Herbert Manuscripts (excerpt)

Bonus Round 2

It’s may be important to note that the ye of Ye Olde Shoppe fame, which is simply a shortened form of the, is not the same ye of biblical fame, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged‘, which was the plural form of thou, which is now rendered as you—the plural form.

And now you know…

As for the pronunciation of the ye of hear ye (hear ye), I am not sure which concept is being captured. If you know, then let me know.

Will the Real Jordan Peterson Please Stand Up?

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , 4 Comments

On the topic of social constructivism and cultural relativism, Jordan Peterson is both a vehement counter voice and a hypocritical adherent. This post calls out Peterson’s hypocrisy. To Peterson, the notion that people create their own reality and especially their own identity is heresy. Worse, he will not abide where someone wishes to be identified by some non-gender-performative pronoun.

In his world, it’s obvious that there are two each of singular, gendered subject pronouns and their correspondent object pronouns: he, she, him, and her. Betwixt the two shan’t ever meet. For people like Jordan Peterson, this arbitrary taxonomical classification is written in stone in a manner reflective of Moses encounter with God on the mount.

Peterson 23:13-15

There shalt be two and only two genders, male and female;

and all humans shall conform to these classifications;

and all humans shall dress and behave in compliance with these classifications

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For people who view the world like Peterson, there is no distinction between sex and gender, so there is no CIS-this or CIS-that. They will accept for the minority of exceptions for hermaphrodites, but these people are freaks of nature and need to pick a path.

If you have were born with certain primary sexual traits, you must comply with gender stereotypes:

  • Male = Penis
  • Female = Vagina

And these are not cultural stereotypes, by the way; it’s obvious that this is Natural Law handed down from on high because identity is not an individual’s construct. If anything, you must accept with grace the identity society bestows upon you. If they perceive you as X, you had better conform to X or all hell will break loose, and your parents and friends will corral you into the X-mould, if you’ll only listen and comply. It’s for your own good.

Society knows best. If you can’t see it, that’s your problem. It our world, it’s majority rule, and if the masses perceive you as gender X, you had better comply. And don’t be a sissy about it. Purses are for women. Makeup is for women. Dresses are for women. Skirts are for women.

9-_TfKGzN5RMaeAoFS7-SMlaQ2d5d1ZFBwRHnnkZtmw94pkdSsIUTFFT3WGHhpjGaUSjR30Ajjg2XAkPqhTaIEp2vnIv8I9nNhsZcANmL15h14s0XNBJCdsXXEzNWXOQU1[1]
Image: Men wearing kilts
As action figures are not dolls, kilts are not skirts; even so, don’t wear a kilt unless you are either Scottish or playing dress-up, but don’t play dress-up, and you’d better be toting a bagpipe or we’ll question your motives.

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Where was I going with all of this?

At the same time, Peterson and his ilk defend universalism, they leave open the ability to envision their own deities as realities as they choose in a ‘it’s my personal god’ sort of way. They want to have their cake and eat it, too.

It’s fine to take a position of objectivism versus subjectivism. I mean you’d be wrong, but you don’t really get to cherry-pick from each where it is convenient. Actually, you do, but you’d be a hypocrite, so there’s that. Perhaps just logically inconsistent or disingenuous.

Happy Endings

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If everything is just “rhetoric” or “power” or “language,” there is no real way to judge anything. 

Somehow, I happened across a blog post, Postmodernisms: What does *that* mean? Of course, this is right up my street, I skimmed a couple other posts on the site and followed some links to establish some contextual frame.

My by-now standard (read: autonomic) reaction to this line of questioning is that this is a correct assessment of the conditional statement.

If everything is just X, Y, or Z, there is no real way to judge anything.

Before evaluating the entirety of the content, let’s look at the lexical choices, in particular:

  • everything: Realising that this is hyperbole. I am going to assume that the author did not mean that everything is X, Y, or Z. I believe he means everything within some imagined yet undefined domain. I’ll guess that this domain relates to some moral or social sphere. Anything employs the same hyperbole, so I’ll ignore it.
  • just: This rhetorically modifies X, Y, and Z, in order to diminish them for the reader, to make them appear petty.
  • real: I believe the term he was looking for is objective or perhaps ontological. Otherwise, we’ll need to discern what he considers to be real versus not real.

Also, notice the use of or as a conjunction. This seems odd, as the listed items do not have equal weight or effect. Rhetoric does not exist without language, and power really feels out of place, Michel Foucault’s law of the instrument complicity notwithstanding. To him, power was his litmus.

Constructionism

Firstly, all social perception is the result of the construct of human language. Of course, there is the physical world that exists independently of humans and perception—perhaps this is the real world where real judgments occur. Let’s label this real world the terrain. The earth and the larger universe would exist absent of humans. In fact, it had for aeons and will persist for many aeons beyond the last semblance of humanity. Humans are also real, if ephemeral, on a grander scale.

If this independent, objective, real world is the terrain, language is the map. We use language to communicate and make sense of the terrain, but it is only a representation based on our imperfect sense faculties.

cat saussure labels
Image: Symbolic language mapping of terrain

So when one makes a claim that everything [sic] is, say, language, they are making a claim similar to that of Saussure. Saussure was a structuralist. In fact, post-structuralism (or its expanded form labelled post-modernism) was a reaction against structuralists. Within the context of this post, Saussure believed that if one could fully qualify the structure of language, one could achieve a one-to-one fidelity relationship of the map to the terrain.

Post-structuralists pointed out all of the reasons why this was a fool’s errand. Like a geographical map, it is only a representation of the underlying terrain. Language serves the purpose of communication including expression and phatic aspects. One form of communication is rhetoric, which is a form employed for the purpose of persuasion. One possibility of this persuasion is to gain and retain power—or to at least win the upper hand in your argument. I suppose this is where the original statement starts to coalesce: rhetoric, power, and language.

quote-all-models-are-wrong-but-some-are-useful-george-e-p-box-53-42-27[1]
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
My point, then, is that our language map is always disconnected from the terrain. Moreover, it can be a pretty low fidelity map indeed. So when one says that everything is language, they are making a claim that we can not acquire this real knowledge. We can make sensory observations and construct narratives about it.

If you’ve ever taken a basic communications class, you’ve probably experienced the telephone game. Perception works in a similar manner. There are many things of which we have little or no experience save for conveyance through language. But as with the telephone game, fidelity can be lost. This is less likely to be a problem when interfacing with the so-called real world of rock and trees and of lions and tigers and bears.

terrain saussure
Image: Symbolic language mapping of nebulous concept

It is more likely to become a problem when dealing with non-ontic concepts, these ‘things’ that would not exist without humans or, more critically, without language. These artificial (in contrast to real) concepts are things like goodness, justice, democracy, liberty, sovereignty, nations, and on and on, ad nauseum. Humans have constructed narratives about all of these, but if the last human were to die tomorrow, these concepts would die, too. Whether some new lifeform would eventually evolve to develop language and further develop these concepts is debatable.

Judging

All of this aside, let’s look at the perceived intent of this statement, which is the same sentiment behind Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ quip.

As has been discussed, the Enlightenment replaced God with Nature and Nietzsche realised that if this worldview were universally adopted, the tyrannic role that God and gods had played could not be leveraged to maintain control or power, much in the same way that the divine rights or kings had withered and died. God played a vital role in this narrative. Nature, particularly human nature, was a weak substitute. This said, moral and natural realists, quickly (and relatively successfully) filled the void with cognitive filler, a perfect pairing for budding Enlightenment thinkers.

Given that even if there were some objective morality (terrain), there is no reason to believe that a human could gain access to it. Previously, priests and pharaohs claimed to possess this ability, but this vector was no longer extant or accessible. Even if a person did have this power through some miracle of some sort or another (or another or another), what reason (other than convincing rhetoric) would one have to believe him (or her—but let’s be honest; it’s pretty much all hims).

Without access to this objective morality, we are left with creating some subjective morality. I fully admit that trying to gain consensus and compliance to a known-to-be constructed moral code would be akin to herding cats. It is no doubt that society would operate more efficiently if all constituents follow the same code.

If wouldn’t matter if this society adopted, say, monogamy over polygamy, so long as everyone accepted this as the rules of engagement. Cultural subjectivism would provide a moral framework for this situation, We have many examples of social arrangements where this is the mode of operation.

Sports are an example. There are rules. Players agree on the rules, protocols, and procedures, and they operate within this socially constructed framework. There is no objective sportsball deity on high that conveyed the commandments, and yet it works.

John+Locke+-+Jean+Jacques+Rousseau[1]

Locke and Rousseau each wrote about social contracts. Granted, they believed in a supernatural Nature with a capital N, but they still felt that people could operate as a society based on some sort compact or accord.

This missing element would be power because those in power could not use some higher power to justify their actions especially in regard to retributive justice and so on.

Commentary

What I still don’t understand after all these years is how this logic works. It is eerily similar to Pascale’s Wager.

If not SOME CONDITION,
then not DESIRED OUTCOME
therefore FABRICATE SOME CONDITION

If not [belief in God],
then not [eternity of bliss in Heaven; instead eternal suffering in Hell, so double down]
therefore [convince yourself of or feign belief in God]

If not [objective means of judgment],
then not [real judgment]
therefore [delude yourself into the belief that an objective means of judgment exists]

And they all lived happily ever after…

jessica-brooke-real-lesbian-wedding-orlando-florida-alternative-life-photography-design-first-kiss[1]

happily ever after