Why the is-ought gap is not a big deal
No argument crosses the is-ought gap unless it starts with exclusively non-moral premises and ends with a moral conclusion. An example of a violation of the is-ought gap is this:
1.) Whatever does not help increase the species' survival is unnatural
2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival
3.) Homosexuality is therefore unnatural
4.) Homosexuality is therefore wrong
BREACH! This argument does not work without an added premise:
*.) What is unnatural is what is wrong.
Those who peddle this sort of argument also turn a blind eye to all the things we commonly do that don't increase our survivability but nevertheless aren't typically seen as immoral.
Now, Hume argued that the is-ought gap is best explained by a fact-value gap: there are no facts of value, thus ethical subjectivism is true. But the is-ought gap is not a logical argument, it is an abductive argument, i.e. an inference to the best explanation.
Quite a few subjectivist arguments are actually abductive and not deductive or refined enough to be inductive: the is-ought, the relativity of cultural norms, the emotional structure of normative beliefs, etc.
We can question the is-ought gap by a couple of examples:
1.) Everything I say is true.
2.) I say having children is wrong.
3.) Therefore, having children is wrong.
Of course you may wonder if the premises are true. Is everything I say true? And you may wonder whether the normative conclusion is actually truth-apt and not just something like "achoo" or "wow!". But the important thing to note here is that I have successfully bridged the is-ought gap logically, and to deny this is merely question-begging. It is question-begging to already assume moral beliefs are non-cognitive.
Furthermore, the is-ought gap is actually just an example of a wider phenomenon at work: that you oftentimes cannot end a logical conclusion with information that was not previously mentioned in the premises. This, again, is an abductive argument, but it has a lot going for it.
For example:
1.) There is something in the middle of the road.
2.) The middle of the road is a dangerous place to be.
3.) Therefore, there is a hedgehog in a dangerous place to be.
Obviously this is not valid. But it's not valid in the same way the first mentioned argument about homosexuality is not valid. You oftentimes cannot end a logical argument with information that was not previously mentioned in the premises. But see how I can still bridge this gap:
1.) Everything I say is true.
2.) I say hedgehogs are cute.
3.) Therefore hedgehogs are cute.
The is-ought gap is therefore a handy heuristic that nevertheless fails to cover all its bases. We need not accept the is-ought gap (and risk ethical subjectivism), either, to point out the issues with shitty arguments against homosexuality. We simply need to question the premises.
Taken from: https://www.academia.edu/10413464/Why_we_shouldn_t_get_too_excited_about_the_is_ought_gap
1.) Whatever does not help increase the species' survival is unnatural
2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival
3.) Homosexuality is therefore unnatural
4.) Homosexuality is therefore wrong
BREACH! This argument does not work without an added premise:
*.) What is unnatural is what is wrong.
Those who peddle this sort of argument also turn a blind eye to all the things we commonly do that don't increase our survivability but nevertheless aren't typically seen as immoral.
Now, Hume argued that the is-ought gap is best explained by a fact-value gap: there are no facts of value, thus ethical subjectivism is true. But the is-ought gap is not a logical argument, it is an abductive argument, i.e. an inference to the best explanation.
Quite a few subjectivist arguments are actually abductive and not deductive or refined enough to be inductive: the is-ought, the relativity of cultural norms, the emotional structure of normative beliefs, etc.
We can question the is-ought gap by a couple of examples:
1.) Everything I say is true.
2.) I say having children is wrong.
3.) Therefore, having children is wrong.
Of course you may wonder if the premises are true. Is everything I say true? And you may wonder whether the normative conclusion is actually truth-apt and not just something like "achoo" or "wow!". But the important thing to note here is that I have successfully bridged the is-ought gap logically, and to deny this is merely question-begging. It is question-begging to already assume moral beliefs are non-cognitive.
Furthermore, the is-ought gap is actually just an example of a wider phenomenon at work: that you oftentimes cannot end a logical conclusion with information that was not previously mentioned in the premises. This, again, is an abductive argument, but it has a lot going for it.
For example:
1.) There is something in the middle of the road.
2.) The middle of the road is a dangerous place to be.
3.) Therefore, there is a hedgehog in a dangerous place to be.
Obviously this is not valid. But it's not valid in the same way the first mentioned argument about homosexuality is not valid. You oftentimes cannot end a logical argument with information that was not previously mentioned in the premises. But see how I can still bridge this gap:
1.) Everything I say is true.
2.) I say hedgehogs are cute.
3.) Therefore hedgehogs are cute.
The is-ought gap is therefore a handy heuristic that nevertheless fails to cover all its bases. We need not accept the is-ought gap (and risk ethical subjectivism), either, to point out the issues with shitty arguments against homosexuality. We simply need to question the premises.
Taken from: https://www.academia.edu/10413464/Why_we_shouldn_t_get_too_excited_about_the_is_ought_gap
Comments (137)
Or perhaps this entire pattern of reductionist reasoning is wrong when dealing with holistic realities?
So yes, one can "construct an argument" in good old reductionist predicate logic fashion. And that is a very useful tool for certain purposes. But it utterly fails when it comes to the kind of holistic thinking that answering questions at a metaphysically general level entail.
So for example, from my Peircean organic point of view, sure one can construct an argument based on this kind of hierarchical organisation of cascading constraints, but the irreducible vagueness of logic means there will always be "suppressed premises" at every point. An unlimited supply of them in fact. We can model reality as if it has this kind of propositional closure and get all syntatic on its arse, but reality itself is semantically open ... or at least that is my particular holistic model of the situation. ;)
Then taking this particular premise - 2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival - it is obvious that evolutionary psychology does apply an is-ought argument on convincing grounds. The natural assumption is that homosexuality must in fact help increase a species' survival. Or at least, make no difference.
Well actually, it is not about the species as a whole, but the genes floating around the gene pool. Yet still, if the choice for genes is either to be favoured or disfavoured, then "homosexual genes" (whatever the heck those really are in terms of the massive complexity of neurodevelopment) should either come to completely dominate or be completely eliminated.
Or wait. Maybe gene pools permit homeostatic equilibrium of traits. Perhaps "homosexual genes" are part of maintaining the "requisite variety" that is the other side of the coin to the winnowing sythe of natural selection that is forever removing variety. Etc, etc.
So take any premise and already it dissolves into a mass of uncertainties and qualifications. It ceases to seem so reasonable as a standalone claim.
This is why so little progress has ever been made with "ontological arguments". Even if the syntactic structure is not a problem, they simply can't prove anything about reality because of the irreducibility of semantic vagueness.
And this is where is-ought arguments fall down - in that general fashion where ontological arguments can't be constructed using a propositional form. To talk about the big picture, you need a big picture mode of thought. Hence why the history of metaphysics has been a fruitful conversation based on dialectical or systematic reasoning.
Isn't this, though, an ontological claim about ontological arguments?
Quoting apokrisis
Right, so like I said in the OP, we just have to question the premises. These sorts of "ontological arguments" as you call them aren't the only thing ethicists use. I prefer counterfactuals myself because I consider myself a constructivist of sorts and counterfactuals force us to consider consistency and universality.
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps the most striking problem with natural laws theories (including the rehashed naturalists) is that they have trouble prescribing specific action. How does "acting virtuously" help us in scenarios in which we're not clear which route of action we ought to take? How does "going with the flow of entropy" actually realize itself in everyday, common-sense action?
Reductionism cannot answer everything, but it's important for things like this, so important that I think it takes precedence over your holism. If you go to far in lofty abstract holism, you lose footing in the real world of everyday actions. Do you kill one person or five people? Was Hiroshima and Nagasaki ethical? Is the death penalty immoral? I don't see how metaphysics is supposed to help us determine the answers to these questions in a satisfactory manner.
And I would also argue that morality, and value, is a sui generis sort of thing, something that only exists within communities of rational agents. It's an isolated phenomenon and not something to be found elsewhere in the cosmos. Morality begins and ends with people and the basic interactions they have with each other and their phenomenological environment. Nothing more, and so it's just plain wrong to look to the stars for moral answers.
"One ought to do good and one ought not do evil."
I take this to be a priori - a definition of 'ought'.
Then one needs in one's premises, an assertion of what is good, or what is evil, in order to make an argument.
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is pretty clearly a totally inadequate assertion. Aside from the ambiguity, it is obviously denied by any poster of good will, since the internet is unnatural by any conceivable interpretation. One might try the inverse - what is natural is right, but even then, I'm not sure that tape worms are good. Finding the right moral premises is problematic, but attempts have been made, from the ten commandments, to the golden rule. Some variation on "play nice" ...
Hume is arguing that judgements about what is the case, can be supported by reasoning from direct perception (in accordance with the empiricist principles that underlie his book); whereas reasoning from what ought to be the case, appears similar in terms of conjunctions of terms, however 'ought' propositions are in fact completely different to 'is' propositions, and authors using this term make the mistake of assuming that they support logical necessity, in the way that 'is/is not' statements do, when this assumption is unwarranted.
Kant answers the challenge by arguing that the assumption of moral probity is a foundation of practical ethics; that we have no choice but to proceed on the basis that moral decisions are grounded in practical reason.
It's also worth reflecting on the famous conclusion of Hume's book, which I think has a bearing on the question as well - that passage where he says:
The point being, that if these questions are asked of Hume's Treatise, the answers are, likewise, negative!
The point being that if all are consigned to the flames, then Hume's job is done and his treatise is not needed. But you appear to want to follow his dictum for his work, but not for those others. Which is a bit contradictory.
Hume's work is the only one that offers the critique, though; and assuming that the critique is correct, then his book has a value, on those grounds, that the critiqued works do not. If Hume's critique is incorrect, then his work is simply irrelevant and not inconsistent. So, there is no inconsistency there, as you seem to suggest there is.
Yep. And being consistent, I argue for it holistically. And I argue that holism is just an ontic modelling relation, so that is then argued on epistemic grounds. Then to complete the Peircean circle of affirmation, that model of the epistemology is found to look just like the ontic model. So there is a demonstrable unity of thought ... whichever way you look at it.
So right there you can see why I'm never bothered by accusations of natural fallacies or transgressing the boundary between transcendent unknowns and pragmatic realities (as in your usual claim that I am leaving out the subjective first person point of view on moral questions).
A reductionist can only see circularity or tautology as a logical singularity - red alert, general systems failure!!! Self-reference causes arguments to collapse because ends can't shape their means.
But a holist - of the thorough going kind - starts from the other end and has a model based on the constraint of freedom. Wholes do shape their parts in developmental fashion.
So as usual, you latch on to the self-referential bootstrap nature of my position (or Peirce's and systems science in general) as if it is just an obvious bug - the first thing anyone schooled in reductionist thinking is going to see. But it is that generalised demand for holistic self-consistency which is in fact the feature of my brand of metaphysics. A holistic argument is a generalised constraint on our state of mental uncertainty, not a construction built out off already certain premises or elements of thought.
That doesn't make ordinary logic unreasonable, any more than Newtonian physics is unreasonable, or materialism is unreasonable. They are great tools for thinking within a world already concretely given. Assume your axioms, and syntactically you're good to go.
But when you do want to step up to the metaphysical whole of things - questions about fundamental being - now a holistic logic is required. And regular metaphysics has a proud tradition of doing that (one not employing simplistic deduction but the full Peircean arc of abduction/deduction/induction).
Quoting darthbarracuda
So then you agree that the whole natural fallacy/is-ought line of attack is pretty irrelevant to metaphysical strength thinking?
If our goal is to recover the fundamental symmetries of existence, we have to go at it dialectically - identifying the local symmetry-breakings and then generalising our way back to their global origin?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Again, you are back to thinking as a reductionist. A constraints-based holism says that the specific is going to be just accidental or contingent "in the end". That is why atomism eventually fails. It can only arrive at the contingent when pursued to the limit.
Again, I have explained this many times. Constraints encode a telos or purpose (they must do to persist and thus "exist"). A purpose is then itself self-limiting because it doesn't care about differences that don't make a difference. It only constrains or shapes the differences that do. Thus eventually at the limit of constraint, things become completely accidental, uncontrolled, contingent. It is all just noise - fluctuations, variation, pure meaningless difference.
Now apply that to morality. The natural philosopher says the existence has its general constraints or habits - like the laws of thermodynamics and dissipative structure. The Universe exists because what it is doing makes some generally coherent evolutionary sense. That sets a backdrop within which there is a broad kind of telos - and also a considerable degree of indifference to how its general purposes are being achieve at any particular locality, like down here on planet earth.
Then human history is another much more local story of the development of some set of constraints or purposes. There are ways of doing things which are habits that work for reasons that are fixed as local structure. Yet then again, in the end, there is always a practical limit to that constraint and so a starting point where it all starts to become pure contingency - differences that don't make a difference (at least right now and not yet - although maybe later if enough others start to join in and something collective starts to build to "change history" and construct revised global constraints).
So a natural philosopher would view morality in this fashion - a cascade of constraints that encode the pragmatic habits that enable "existence", yet which at the same time eventually fritter out at some point in a bunch of difference that doesn't make a difference (except that it then represents a storehouse of potential - the requisite variety - that stops a system from freezing senescently and allows it to continue adapting and learning).
Thus again, as ever, your bug is my feature. If you think "law" should prescribe every specific, then that is the mechanical state of complete constraint with no freedom. Such a system is brittle and not fit for survival as it has no organic store of creative potential from which it could learn.
From the organic point of view, your demand for mechanical determinism is patently "immoral" in being against nature. It is wrong because it is too rigid. And yet also - dialectically - things have to have some structure or rigidity. Thus as usual, the moral debate becomes about the productive balance. Which in turn is going to be historically conditioned - like are we talking about what's best for human organisation living within the ecological constraints of the solar flux, or what's best for human organisation predicated on the combustion of free shit-load of fossil fuel?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Sure its a balance. But you want to invert the natural order of that balance. I talk about the dialectics of constraint and freedom. You talk about atomistic construction - and live with its thousand paradoxes, like is the world random or deterministic, competitive or co-operative, subjective or objective, etc, etc.
Reductionism is fine as a tool for the everyday scale of reasoning, where all the holism required to keep it sensible can be provide intuitively as "commonsense". But it just fails when it comes to the big picture level questioning. But hey, if you're not actually interested in metaphysics, just your own state of mind, what the heck?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Just because it is that way for you personally doesn't mean it ought to be that way for serious metaphysics.
I would agree with darhbarracuda if the suggestion is that morality and ethics can only be grounded in understandings of human subjectivity; and not in 'objective' (scientific) understandings of human biology, anatomy or physiology.
Yep. Some balance of competition (play) and co-operation (nice) that is in generally conducive to the persistence of the state of being which is the author of that balance .
My stance here is that reductionism inevitably gives us stronger reasons for action than holism, as holism inevitably comes into conflict with individuality, and we inherently value individuality, freedom, and subjective experience more than any holistic framework that sees individuals as mere constituents of a larger organic population. Holism may be true in a descriptive sense but as far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant to any serious moral inquiry, i.e. the universe as a whole is not capable of supporting the imaginative depth of human morality. It's not compassionate enough.
Where I depart from your (theistic? dualistic? transcendental?) POV is that I naturalise the observer too. The obsever is no longer modelled as "a mind" (with all its theistic, dualistic, transcendental baggage) but as "a Peircean sign relation".
So yes. This is essentially scientific in that you take the particular phenomenon and then generalise the hell out of it. But that's not a problem. Its the nature of explanation. Its the way we go about structuring our phenomenological experience so it honestly becomes a map of the territory. We make peace with Kant and stop pretending that even our perceptions are anything greater than habits of sign.
We don't see the noumenal directly. We only ever form a phenomenal relation with the noumenal. And what we all agree is that this relation is "good" when it has a productive balance for us. If seeing reds and greens is a wonderfully efficient way to carve our world at its joints, then just do that. But also don't confuse the modelling with the modelled. And don't believe there can be the modeller or the phenomenal beyond the holistic ambit of the modelling relation itself. Actual transcendence doesn't make sense.
For me, though, it is not merely a matter of the observer and the observed. The essence of subjective experience is participation, and all the dynamic affective states that go with that. I don't believe that the essence of subjective experience can productively be objectified as a mere "sign relation", any more than I believe it should be understood as being (somehow?) merely material. I don't think such propositions are even adequately intelligible; despite a long history of promissory notes.
So when I argue the exact opposite - that only my holism foundationally requires the irreducible freedom or spontaneity that your reductionism is so focused on denying - you simply pretend I said what you would need me to say so as to make what you say sound the more coherent option?
Champion.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Of course. Your arguments collapse as soon as anyone opens the window and lets any air and sunlight in. So why would you want your right to a completely subjective view on any issue central to your self-esteem publicly challenged?
Everyone has an opinion. Some of us also have the science. From the point of view of Peircean semiosis, that's moving along really nicely.
OK, you seem to be valorizing science over 'mere' philosophy; an attitude which I would count as an expression of scientism. But philosophy, and specifically here, ethics, is not science. If the purported relation between ethics and semiotics cannot be explained adequately in purely philosophical or ethical terms, then I can't see how it could be genuinely relevant to philosophy or ethics.
I've seen you many times assert that the science of semiotics can ground philosophy, but I have never seen a straightforward 'key idea' explanation from you that adequately and convincingly justifies such an assertion.
Of course. If you can frame me in this fashion, its a TKO right?
So ignore the fact that I'm not playing the philosophy vs science game. Ignore that I am instead arguing for a natural philosophy metaphysics that you can go read about any time you choose if you pick up a copy of Peirce and check how his ethics was cashed out as the universal growth of concrete reasonableness. Ignore my actual argument and just pretend I believe things I don't. Then TKO!
Quoting John
Pick any of the many papers on Peircean ethics at random.... http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Herdy.pdf
Not at all. He set the template for much of later positivism, and also the emotive theory of ethics (a.k.a. 'boo/hurrah' theory.)
The point is that like much of positivism, Hume essentially says that moral reasoning is vacuous, that declarations of what one ought or ought not to do are specious. He then declares the sources of such reasoning, i.e. books on divinity and metaphysics, ought to be committed to the flames.
"Ought to be...", note. So this goes the way of all positivism - it declares what is taken to be philosophy to be otiose, but itself is also presented as 'philosophy', so is hoist by its own petard.
My old teacher, David Stove, pointed this out. He said it was like the mythical snake the consumes itself, the Uroborous:
'The hardest part', he would say, with a wink, 'is the last bite'.
Quoting apokrisis
where 'what is latent becomes patent', right? It is like the process of latent capabilities being actualised, which is the 'growth of reasonableness'? Because that is very much in keeping with the mainstream of Western philosophy, I would have thought.
Yeah. The young are clever, but the old are wise. The specific action becomes absorbed into the general habit and loses it contingency in the process.
The difference with Peirce of course is that he saw the Universe or existence itself manifesting as the result of generalised reasoning (of the semiotic/sign relation variety). So reality is intelligible to us because intelligibility is how existence happens to be the case itself. Physical laws are habits of generalisation - the development of concrete constraints on undirected or spontaneous freedoms.
But Hegel and German Idealism and naturphilosophie were hardly a million miles away from that either. The difference there was they were theist or transcendental in then invoking spirit or God's design for the world. Peirce certainly flirted with the transcendental "get out of jail card", but on the whole thought about this as a scientist looking for a bootstrap story of immanent self-design.
What would a fractal Uroboros look like? What if while eating its tail, it was spawning smaller urobori, each of which in turn produced urobori still smaller?
There would be an infinity of urobori just as the mother uroborous took its own last bite.
The latter also hold the former hostage...
It doesn't collapse at all. Your holism is unnecessary at best, and gets in the way most of the time. If we already both agree that individualism is important, there's no need to pretend we're getting justification from the cosmos for this. Adding whatever it is your advocating here is just redundant.
I would have thought it is obvious that I was referring to the time of its writing. :s
Quoting Wayfarer
The critiques of traditional philosophy offered by Hume and by positivism are not necessarily offered as philosophy (whatever 'philosphy' might be taken to mean), at least not of the kind they are critiquing, because their grounding presuppositions make them very different beasts. They are offered, rather, simply as thinking, as critiques. Kant does the same with his critique of traditional metaphysics. In fact Kant may rightly be seen as the heir to Hume, and the grandfather of positivism (apart from the 'practical reason' dimension of his philosophy, of course).
In any case philosophy cannot rightly be seen as some monolithic thing, all of which is subject to the same principles; to do that would be tendentious. I didn't say that I think Hume's critique is correct; I said that regardless of whether it is correct or not; there is no inconsistency in the act of offering it. Hume is merely saying that it is a matter of fact that some works of metaphysics do not contain "any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence", and that they should on that account be thought to be useless. He does present "a reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence" about those very works, and an opinion about their consequent worth. There is no inconsistency in that, however wrong it might be thought to be, as far as I can see.
You keep skipping the part where I say it is about a balance. And so that balance does have a cosmic backdrop if you are a natural philosopher who doesn't want to introduce artificial boundaries around what counts as the individual or personal.
Naturalism is a science of boundary making. It accounts for why constraints are placed hierarchically at the positions they are. As I said, in being able to talk about the maximally general constraints like the laws of thermodynamics, already that is also talking of their natural local limits. We can define the point at which differences that make a difference then become differences that don't make a difference. We literally have the mathematics in statistical mechanics and other information theoretic tools, like notions of mutual information or free energy, to do that.
So what irks you is the suggestion that balance is precisely what always goes missing in your highly subjective approach to metaphysical questions.
How many times do I have to tell you, I don't consider your type of metaphysics to be sufficient or adequate for ethical discourse. You say things like "balance" but never justify WHY we need to give a damn about the rest of the universe.
We're not doing metaphysics here.
Of course not. To deny metaphysics is not to do metaphysics. That sounds totally legit.
[Sound of window being slammed, shutters closed, shade wrenched down.]
OK, thanks for making the effort, but I'm afraid that after reading what you have cited I still have no idea how pragmatism relates to ethics other perhaps than by saying that ethical behavior would be thought to more likely to lead to social harmony than unethical behavior, that the former works better than the latter, in other words. I would have no argument with that, either, but I cannot see how such principles necessarily rely on a scientific theory of semiotics or how the latter could even have any bearing on them, is all.
And, hey, you were the one who said "Some people have the science", so I am not accusing you of anything you have not proclaimed yourself.
In Uroboros fashion, semiotics claims to be a theory of scientific reasoning as well as a science of signs generally. So it explains itself. The ontic is the epistemic, and vice versa. How minds understand the world is based on a triadic modelling relation. And how the world becomes organised is via said triadic modelling relation.
So yes, part of the picture is that semiotics is a science. It is the natural culmination of a history of intellectual endeavour which includes all that good stuff like holism, organicism, general systems theory, cybernetics, self-organising complexity and hierarchy theory - the study of how complexity develops in some completely generalised sense.
But then semiotics is also Peirce's account of the scientific reasoning process by which any model or sign relation gets pragmatically created. Peirce's triad is the cycle of abduction, deduction and induction - the process of creative guess, logical consequences, empirical validation.
Peirce of course really struggled to take ethics or aesthetics that seriously because it was obvious that naturalism makes most of what might be said rather redundant. The problematics that motivate traditional ethics are all focused on the ridiculously specific - the hunt for deterministic specifics when it comes to human behaviour.
Should I eat pork, should I not eat pork? Should I be vegetarian or vegan? On and on with the splitting of hairs - the differences that don't make a difference (or only a tiny difference).
It's just the wrong way to think about moral issues. The whole damn point at the end of the day is to create people with a balanced view of their lives who thus can act wisely pretty much out of unthinking habit. You can't argue people into a state of good sense by ticking off some vast list of commandments they must obey. You want creative thinkers who can make personal choices within a clear framework of constraints.
And that for Peirce was Thirdness or a state of continuity where a fruitful balance between constraints and freedoms has been struck. Morality will manifest given these proper conditions. And it will be flexibly adaptive. Morality doesn't have to be discovered. We have to pay attention to fostering the generalised conditions from which a concrete reasonableness is just the way of our world.
Quoting apokrisis
It wouldn't be a 'tiny difference' to those who believe that such rules are holy writ.
But I'm not denying metaphysics. I'm denying the relevance of metaphysics that isn't trivial.
Quoting apokrisis
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice
We have to...is just the way.. Interesting how you combine those two. Why does anyone have to do what "is just the way".
I disagree. "Everything I say is true" only implies the truth of moral claims if the set of things you say includes moral premises.
What do you mean?
Validity is not the same as soundness.
Well, good luck with that; I don't think it will ever work because of the differences in mind sets between individuals.
This is not the kind of issue I would class as being directly morally or ethically significant in terms of effect on other humans.
Yeah. That Enlightenment. What a joke, eh?
Yeah! I'd like to add that I am certainly in agreement with fostering conditions of "general reasonableness", but I don't think that precludes per se any reasonable metaphysics; whether it be materialism, idealism, anti-realism or theism. Surely you would not want to advocate instilling a monolithic culture, would you?
Don't believe shit you can't check, or didn't check. Recheck sources again and again and again because your memory can't be trusted for detailed recollection, but only general form. The more internalized and understood the content, the more the symbols can be distilled down into a general principle which isn't reliant on particular details for recollection.
Just get the information right, start to overestimate everyone that you underestimate, and underestimate everyone that you overestimate.
Realize that irony is a mastery of truth, and everything you think is actually the opposite of the truth, no matter what it is.
Then realize that straw is great insulation, and begin to weave the special pants that you'll need for the next step.
Yes, any other. The assumption that the goals of the majority are the "right" goals because they are the majority, is an appeal to the majority. It's not justified.
1) The majority can have a lot of horrible consequences. Many examples can be used here (war, human rights violations, etc.). The balancing factor that may or may not work out when this is resolved in some dialectic manner... doesn't negate that horrible consequences happened. It doesn't get resolved in the magic of the balance of the universe (aka.. secular Taoism).
2) You assume what is right is what is tested. How is that assumption justified? I argued in the other thread that the very question of whether more Being is better than non-being is already assumed in your approach. You have a hypothetical imperative and assume this is what is good. You have an irrational Platonic value for testing I guess.. something you railed against.
3) Even if we went with your assumptions (survival is good and desired), testing has costs.. even if in some utopian future when all the testing lead to a more finely "calibrated" result.. the testing had collateral damage to get there. This of course is assuming one can have a utopian-like result.. Of course if you think suffering is structural, it never gets dissolved.
4) What currently exists isn't always the best option.. what is, is not always what is optimal. What happens if one has the wrong judgement of what is optimal? Who is the judge of this? What if something could have went better, but it was unknown as to what this could be? What happens if luck, accidents, and simple preference will always prevent true optimal choices? Then what is chosen by the majority is not optimal either. And if we say, that does not matter, because optimal is only survival no matter the costs or how it gets there, then that still begs the question of why survival. If you say its some other X reason.. it still begs the question. And then that brings us back to point 2 which is why value more Being?
Quoting apokrisis
Here's a curiosity. Hume points out the limits of logical reasoning, hence the term 'fallacy'. He does the exact same thing for predictive science, and yet science utterly fails to fall about in confusion, unlike ethics. Perhaps an example will bring out the difference between a pragmatically reasonable explanation of ethics, and a logical justification.
Humans value their offspring highly because they have few of them (compared to an oak tree for instance) and invest heavily in them. Sperm are plentiful, and eggs are fewer and this perhaps explains the different moral attitude to male and female sexuality. What it doesn't do is justify it.
What is odd about discussion of Hume is that he gives values primacy over logical reason; reason is the slave of passion, and one reasons always from values and not to them. If philosophers or religionists value reason over values, they have got their knickers in a twist, and need to take them off and sort them out. Why do they think he has undermined values, when he has rather undermined reason?
If attitudes are explained as serving a purpose, then are they not justified?
Only in terms of another value - in this case species survival. But as Darwkin explained, the aim of the selfish gene is to go extinct, and most of them achieve it eventually.
Facts without value are trivia.
It's all related in this case.
Sounds so, welll, primitive.
Value outside the mind sounds like, well, equivocation.
Sounds like you still don't want to answer some questions from earlier.
I don't recollect mentioning dualist, idealist or mind, and I'm fairly confident Hume is neither dualist nor idealist. But sure, Hume is primitive; that's the end of that argument.
That's just something my iPad spellchecker started auto-capitalising. I can't be arsed to correct it all the time. :)
Quoting darthbarracuda
For the 1001st time you will be pleased to hear that I generalise the notion of mind to the metaphysics of sign. So - pansemiotically - the Cosmos has telos or values, even if of the most attenuated kind from our point of view.
Can you state in a more positive fashion why it seems fair?
In fact it's of the essence of pragmatism, I would have thought. But go all sniffy if you like.
So you say, but why should I believe this? And if this "value" is so thin, why should it concern us?
Quoting unenlightened
The smell is of your misunderstanding. Rather than ground value in being, I ground being in value. First I give a shit, and then I value truth and reason and measurement, and even eventually perhaps, the distinction between mind and matter, who knows, as ways of dealing with shit.
Glad we agree. But what's with the name calling all the time. It's really pathetic, and timewasting
So you're a dick. Got it.
So I offer the natural philosophy alternative where the Cosmos is granted all four Aristotelian causes. Existence is organic, not mechanical. The Universe in a sense has a mind and a purpose in that it is organised by "reasonable" principles and has generalised habits or tendencies.
This organic view seems hard to swallow because the mechanical view of nature is so technologically triumphant. That in turn leaves notions of the mental or spiritual aspects of life no place to exist except "outside the world". But just because western intellectual culture has driven its articulated truck and got jammed up that particular cul-de-sac doesn't mean that organicism hasn't being off doing its own philosophical thing all the while. Organicism thrives inside science in fact.
Anyway, the point is to grant formal and final cause to cosmological being in a way that is sensible and scientific, not mystical or handwaving. And semiotics is about relations of evaluation or interpreting that start as spontaneous and hesitant suggestions, but which by positive feedback become established as robust habits that have formed their own "umwelt" or world of sign.
So a feeling of good or bad - approach or avoidance, reward or pain - are examples of biological level symbols. They are not perceptions of anything actually noumenal. Just like seeing red or green, they are acts of judgement. When we point to them, we are pointing to signs we have constructed as a reliable and pragmatic way of mediating our interactions with the world.
That is why it is ridiculous to point to feelings as metaphysically primary. They are merely ciphers that stand for an interpretation at the end of the day.
Of course they are ciphers with maximum meaning attached. They really matter to us. Yet still, they are the products of habit and thus emergent and developmental - meaningful to the degree they reliably reduce any requirement for actual further thought or inquiry. That is why "feelings" are fundamentally irrational or anti-philosophic. The Romantic waves them about to put a stop to any unpicking of his or her umwelt. The contextual subjectivity of the sign is treated as an objective fact of being. And when questioned about where this being exists, the Romantic has to give an anti-materialist response as justification. Feelings are have substantial being because they reside in some place called "the Mind", or "Platonia", or "the Spirit".
A cosmological naturalism based on a general four causes realism and the specific mechanics of semiosis (as the way to bridge the gap between "mind and world", or rather top down constraints and bottom up freedoms) instead sets things up as a hierarchy of being. There is a cosmological gradient from the simple to the complex, the entropic to the negentropic, the general to the particular, the necessary to the contingent, etc, etc.
So then from the point of view of the moralising human, we can look out across this orderly hierarchy of concerns and place ourselves within it. We do that intuitively already. We can decide not to eat cows on the grounds they are sentient, but eating cabbages is OK because ... we don't regard themselves as sufficiently sentient just because they can turn themselves to the light or communicate with their peers about pest invasions through chemical signals, or whatever.
Hah. Already I am returning to the point of how unmoored from scientific measurement most moral thinking is in fact. We still do want to apply all or nothing judgements on issues like sentience even when there is a gradient that more careful world modelling would reveal.
Anyway. The point is that naturalism puts mind and meaning back into the material world in a metaphysically rigorous fashion. It models it in a orderly and counterfactual fashion which is what makes it scientific and measurable.
Of course as an intellectual project, this "pan-semiosis" is not yet completed. However if it were a done deal, safely finished, I personally could hardly find it so interesting. The fun is seeing what is happening at the edge of human thought right now.
So you agree that "value" is a relation and not a thing? It is thus provisional on something other than itself and not a primary fact of being?
Hopefully you'll grow bored with this all and move on. That'll be a day to celebrate.
Why do you assume morality must be like science? What if trying to limit morality to the constraints of the world is not satisfying for our deepest moral beliefs?
As for the general idea being presented: you offer a generalized account of what your pragmatic morality would look like, but this is all it is. You make claims about gradients and models but fail to give any precise examples; you mention cows vs cabbages but fail to show how this issue changes in your ethic. What does your ethics fundamentally look like in the every-day, and how does this differ from more popular ethical theories?
I've already said it many times before, human psychology is strange and morality is not something that is flexible enough or even suitable to be applied in as broad a manner as you wish it to be. Ethics, as far as I am concerned, is always going to be un-moored from the rest of the world, as it's inherently tied to the individual and the individual's freedom of choice, which includes the phenomenology of transcendence beyond the immanent.
What you are presenting here is, as far as I know, something not particularly similar to any of the mainstream ethical views or any ones in the history of ethics and so you'll have to pardon me when I say I am highly skeptical of your ambitious claims. If you're trying to start a Nietzschean re-evaluation of value, which it seems like you are, you will need to provide more than just a blueprint hypothesis.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting darthbarracuda
I got it too.
You say 'all four causes', but one of them is a final cause, a telos, which is, I think, what your naturalistic ethos doesn't recognise. Isn't everything just headed for 'heat death', and us humans just a fancy way of 'maximising entropy'? So I think there's a gap in your accounts there. And the alternative isn't just 'hand-waving', either. It is the recognition of that sense of 'final purpose', or the reason that things occur, in some larger sense than the simply naturalistic, because all natural creatures do is consume, procreate, and die, in the end. So it has to appeal to something beyond that. That might be conceived as 'beyond nature'. That is, I think, the significance of mok?a, liberation or release, because it is something that humans can conceivably realise, which validates or makes sense of the whole process of evolution, instead of it having been a cosmic heat sink all along.
I think it's very difficult to produce epistemologically sound moral principles without determining the proper ontological status of things like final cause, intention, and will.
But that misrepresents what I say. I certainly think natural philosophy (or four causes science) is the right way, the best way, to look at ethics and aesthetics. So that can be assumed as a hypothesis and then checked against the facts. Where's the problem exactly?
Quoting darthbarracuda
But you've already heard the answer many times. Mostly I simply support commonsense notions about the hierarchical balancing of dichotomous impulses. Society is founded on being able to encourage both competition and cooperation - global integration and local differentiation, global constraint and local freedom.
So the only difference is that my triadic approach explains its dichotomous underpinnings as being natural, and not unnatural. It is meant to be a case of competition AND cooperation, constraint AND freedom. It is not a case of having to reduce nature to one or the other as the good, or the foundational, or whatever the heck else a reductionist feels to be the imperative when "caught on the horns of a dilemma".
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep. That's how it stands. Your belief system requires its foundation in the transcendent. That makes it essentially a position of personal faith. Champion.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You are very flattering. But even in this thread I posted what Peirce had to say. And there is nothing much I would say that would amaze a social psychologist or theoretical biologist.
"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end."
"No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will."
-Peter Zapffe
I don't think it's necessary to have a super-sophisticated metaphysics in order for ethics to take off, as if we couldn't do ethics without some sort of Cartesian-style metaphysics-in-the-service-of-ethics. The two above quotations are qualifications enough, I think, because they don't demand any sort of (non-trivial) metaphysics while simultaneously being extremely compelling.
But don't make the mistake of thinking I have to anthropomorphise the Universe to make sense of it's tellic nature. That gets it exactly the wrong way around. The Universe doesn't have to be characterised by some overall tendency that I recognise as being "typically human". It doesn't have to be about love or destruction or peace or intelligence. To approach metaphysics with that kind of is-ought thinking (as we are, so ought the Universe) would be ridiculous.
But on the other hand, if we arise naturally as some local expression of that Universe, then we should expect to see some impact of whatever happens to be its most general tendency. So the way the Universe is would have to have an ought attached for us - to the degree that the Universe needs pragmatically to give a fuck. Which as we all know, is not very much. All that is really forbidden is the building of perpetual motion machines.
Meant by whom? The universe? Again, why should we care what the universe thinks? Why should we care what it ultimately has planned?
So I'm not playing by the rules. It's only because I think the rules are unfair and unjust and that we can do better than what the universe initially demanded us to be. We've outgrown our darwinian impulses and can look beyond.
We're too moral for this world. If this means those who realize it go extinct, then so be it. This changes nothing.
Now that's funny,
"On the one hand, we have the idea of a moral fact as a fact about what we have reason to do or not to do. On the other, we have the idea of a moral fact in terms of what tends towards social stability and unrest. If the question is 'Which conception allows us to make the best sense of moral argument?' then the answer must surely be the former. For, to the extent that moral argument does focus on what tends towards social stability, it does so because social stability is deemed morally important, an outcome we have reason to produce.
Indeed, it seems that even this kind of moral realist's focus on explanation pushes us back in the direction of the idea of a moral fact as a fact about what we have reason to do. For, again, to the extent that we think of right acts as acts that tend towards social stability, we think that they have this tendency because they represent the reasonable thing for people to do. It is the tendency people have to do what is reasonable that is doing the explanatory work. But that, too, simply returns us to the original conception of a moral fact in terms of what we have reason to do. (We might say similar things about the idea that we can characterize a moral fact in terms of the proper function of human beings; for insofar as we understand the idea of the 'proper function' of human beings, we think that their proper function is to be reasonable and rational.)"
Ethics is the study of what we ought to do, based on rational reasons-for-action prescribed to individuals within or without a community. In order to be a convincing ethics, then, any normative theory needs to give good reasons for action, reasons that any rational individual will understand (and hopefully agree on).
Quoting darthbarracuda
This looks like a cheap trick, and it is. Here is an even simpler example:
1. The proposition "having children is wrong" is true.
2. Therefore, having children is wrong.
As in the original, the premise is ostensibly non-moral: the original premises both assert some facts about me, in my example the premise asserts a fact about some proposition. But of course, in my example disquotation yields a moral premise, and similarly, in the original example dereferencing yields the same moral premise. Indeed, we couldn't validly obtain the conclusion in either example if disquotation/dereferencing was not implied!
So the claim that by this sort of argument you can get a moral conclusion from non-moral premises is not true.
I'm not here to defend an argument against someone who makes exactly the same argument and then calls me a solipsist. Buddy.
What exactly do you mean by "...for ethics to take off"? There's a distinct difference between producing a code of ethics, and producing within other people, the will to follow a code of ethics. When you refer to "doing ethics", I assume you are talking about the former, thinking about morality, what's good and what's bad, and philosophizing about what people should and shouldn't be doing.
But what is important in ethics is how to get people inspired to act morally, and this is where metaphysics is useful. So in your final sentence, you say that the two quotations are "extremely compelling". Can you tell me what it is, about those statements, which compels you? And, can you tell me in what way do they compel you? Do they incline you to act morally, and if so, how?
Quoting darthbarracuda
So here we have the very same issue, stated with different words. Ask yourself, what gives you reason to do something, or what gives you reason not to do something, which you might otherwise be inclined to do. This is the same question as "what compels you?".
Quoting darthbarracuda
We have the following phrase in this passage "...the idea of a moral fact as a fact about what we have reason to do." First, we need to respect the fact that "reason" can be used very ambiguously, and even equivocally. The "reason" why I act, refers to the thing which compels me to act. In this sense, there is no good or bad inherent within "reason", as the act may be good or bad, both have reasons for them. There are reasons for the bad act just as much as there are reasons for the good act. From this sense of "reason" we have the word "rationalize", which is what a person does to give reason to an act which was bad. Because of this, it is a mistake to say that morality, is determined by "reason", we have reason to do bad acts just as much as we have reason to do good acts. We have "reason to do" bad acts just as much as we have reason to do good acts.
Further on, there is reference to what is "reasonable", the "reasonable thing" to do. In this sense of "reason", an attempt has been made to remove the bad reasons for acting, such that there is some objectively good form of reason, and this underpins "reasonable". This assumes that there is a particular way of reasoning, which the good person will follow, and this is what we call "reasonable". But this is not a well-grounded assumption. Each person thinks in different ways from others, and acts in different ways from others, under the same circumstances. So the assumption that there is a particular objectively reasonable, way of behaving is really unfounded. If we assume that there are many different ways of thinking and behaving under the same conditions, many of which are equally "reasonable", how would we distinguish which of the many different ways are unreasonable?
Assuming that's true for argument's sake, you still haven't explained why we should care about such "telos or values".
This failure seems to be the nub of the problem for your claim that an immanently naturalistic metaphysical underpinning of ethics is possible.
What I explain is both what we need to care about and what we don't. The world is a hierarchy of increasingly generalised constraints. So something like gravity or thermodynamics are global constraints on our freedoms. And yet if we work within those bounds, that by definition becomes our degrees of freedom.
It's hardly rocket science. But the difference lies in accepting this is the logical structure of nature. Humans aren't nature's exception. We play by the usual cosmological rules. And so even ethical and aesthetic complexity can be explained as pragmatic. Organisation that reflects the "spirit" of the Cosmos.
For anyone interested in the actual application of dissipative structure theory to social order, books are being written about it - http://download.e-bookshelf.de/download/0000/0015/66/L-G-0000001566-0002335645.pdf
Strictly Freudian. Nothing to do with the romantics AFAIK.
(New book out - Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity, Denis Noble. The first customer review provides a good synopsis. Noble is a noted biologist, contributed to invention of the heart pacemaker.)
Are you familiar with After Virtue by Alisdair McIntyre? It is said to be one of the seminal texts of modern ethical theory. The central thesis is...
I'm inclined to agree, although I don't believe that Aristoteleanism is the sole repository of ethical wisdom. But the demise of any idea of telos is nevertheless fundamental to the whole 'is/ought' problem; it was that which Hume was reflecting in the passage quoted previously.
The ascendancy of nominalism in philosophy was the main precursor of these events.
What's Wrong with Ockham?
As it is, the residue of all of this is what philosopher Richard Bernstein designated as 'Cartesian anxiety', which is 'the notion that, ever since René Descartes promulgated his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us'.
Well, I have to take account of it if I want to survive. But I don't think gravity qualifies as "telos or value"and I don't see how it has any ethical or moral implications..
I don't know if this is from Wikipedia, Wayfarer, but I just wanted to comment that to me this summary is somewhat inverted. Human beings, like every other creature or object known, have an 'ergon' in Aristotelian terms. This is sometimes translated as 'function' but it might be best left to its own devices since we know for instance how to call things 'ergonomic'. It corresponds reasonably well to 'ecological niche', in a modern revisionary version of neo-Aristotelianism. The cosmic order involves everything having a particular nature and place.
It is then part of this human ergon to have a certain telos or end. For Aristotelian humanity that's eudaimonia, a form of good achieved through virtuous living. The purposiveness, that is to say, comes second to the niche and flows from it.
This approach to Aristotle can with quite a bit of pushing and pulling be shaped into the sort of systematic 'new naturalistic' approach that apo favours, as I read it. It certainly has an ecological ring.
It's not easy to fit, though, for Aristotle's idea of order is not a 'natural order' but a social one, albeit one far from what MacIntyre calls the modern 'Weberian' view, which is what MacIntyre takes to be almost all-encompassing nowadays: a fragmented set of remnants from lost moralities re-formed one way or another by a managerial/bureaucratic ethos...greatest good as decreed by Taylorism, say...or greed-is-good individualism....or State benevolence with varying control and surveillance added for ill measure.
MacIntyre in turn contrasts the Aristotelian approach with the tragic approach of Sophocles/Euripides - that certain virtues inevitably conflict with each other, and in tragic circumstances one's commitment to one virtue does not shield one from the consequences of the other that one does not commit to.
The problem is that you want to believe that the balance of good and bad experiences somehow make the process generally "good" because that just "is" what happens. However, while being the phenomenological agent experiencing the good and bad, it is much different than looking at it from a disinterested observer who simply notes the interplay of the two in experience from afar. I'm going to call your approach "Nietzschean" simply because you want there to be an ethics beyond "good and evil" or in this case "good and bad". However, whether or not the two interplay in nature means nothing to the individual experiencing it.
No matter how much Nietzschean logic you apply to the situation, there will always be a measure of a more ideal situation. Even Buddhism and Stoicism or any system has a better situation, which may entail not judging something better..but that more ideal state is something that is not happening NOW and is continuously foisted upon the practitioner to "better themselves" against their system's ideal. Anyways, the point is that even if there is the interspersed balancing act of good and bad and intertwined mixture of the two, the ideal of better is going to be there, because humans naturally have counterfactual analysis of what could have been or could be the case (but is currently not). This in itself shows this Nietzschean approach is not "good" because it "is" how things are. We would have had it differently, but it is not that way. One can paint the yin/yang Tao symbol and say "see" this is elegant, except the fact that when the actual phenomenol Dasein experiencer goes through life, it is not a disinterested Tao but an actual organism that is experiencing the good and bad. It is not elegant, it is the tumultuous nature of living in power structures, living in social structures, living in psychological structures, living in existential structures. You have again gotten too carried away with your maps and forget the terrain.
Sure gravity is a constraint on us; something that makes activities both difficult and possible. It is undeniably a very big, perhaps even the biggest, part of the conditions under which we live, and certainly even for the very possibility of our living the kinds of lives we live. But whether we celebrate going up or coming back down the mountain will depend not on gravity, but on our moral character. We probably don't value the difficulty of climbing the mountain simply for itself, but more likely for the changes that overcoming the difficulty in order to climb, or simply the act of climbing, might bring about in us.
There are so many different possible reasons why someone might want to climb a mountain, and they might thus value the climb, or being on the top, or the descent, depending on the reasons for wanting to be up there, to go up there, or to get it over and done with. In any case gravity itself is not the value, but merely provides the difficulty (and in a global sense the possibility) we find ourselves faced with if we want, or need, for whatever reasons that do involve vales, to climb a mountain.
And is virtue not a good even if virtue means some degree of personal sacrifice?
Where do your ethical simplicities stop and some real moral theory start?
So you agree that gravity has a direction in that regard? For some reason, making an effort is morally improving. The underlying entropic telos of nature has come into sight right there.
Quoting John
Sure, the difficulty is the value. That is, the difference in gravitational potential that has been thus created.
So this is the simple example that illustrates the general principle. Human morality is naturally focused on the notion of building the potential for powerful action. We have to sweat to build muscle - whether that is physical, mental or emotional muscle. It costs a lot of entropy production to get there, but we see it as the highest good to build a psychosocial capacity for negentropic action.
Natural philosophy is this hierarchical approach to telos. The telic is understood as a cascade of increasingly specified constraints.
So telos can be parsed as {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. That is, a hierarchically developing gradation from universal tendencies to general functions to private purposes.
The Cosmos only has to have its telomatic tendencies to be considered telic. But for Baconian scientism, even this maximally attentuated notion of human purpose is heresy. So naturalism is outside the mainstream in that regard.
See for instance http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/Meaning_as_Finality.pdf
I certainly agree that we value potence over impotence, and that seems natural enough insofar as the difference has practical import. Beyond the ambit of practical significance it becomes more complicated. But in any case this practical understanding of human potential is basic, and self-evident to us and doesn't seem to rely on any abstruse science or metaphysics, or even on science and metaphysics at all, but rather on our everyday experience of how we feel when we succeed and fail, and so on. I think such practical understandings of human potential, struggle and character are more or less universally encountered.
Cool.
But the point of all the abstruseness is to get beyond the commonsense level of analysis and develop general mathematical models of natural phenomena. A theory of these things allows for concrete measurement and prediction.
Commonsense is always handy. But knowledge is more potent.
I don't say that a naturalistic understanding of ethics, based in science would be wrong; if it is good science it should be right. I say that when we want to get beyond the practical sphere it would be inadequate. Scientific understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding ethics in its fully human, subjective and inter-subjective dimensions. Literature, the arts, and religion do a much better job when we want to get beyond purely practical (pragmatic) considerations.
Again, I would say that to deny this, to deny the importance of the humanities, the arts and religion, or to attempt to reduce them to science; is to exaggerate the potential and the importance of science, in other words to be a proponent of scientism. For me, that just is what it means. But I also acknowledge that there is room for more than one view on these kinds of questions, in the sense that others are entitled to their views, and that a diversity of views, even if some of them must be wrong, or at least less right, is nonetheless a good thing; do you?
I think one of the key points of McIntyre's book is the loss of any idea of telos whatsoever. The SEP entry on Aristotelean ethics notes in respect of 'ergon' that:
Whereas the modern conception of reason is that it is essentially adaptive or instrumental - reason, like anything else, evolves through adapative necessity, as a means to an end.
Quoting mcdoodle
Where in this schema does 'contemplation of the One' fit in? That is the 'acme of reason' for Aristotle, as for all Platonists. It is at once aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual.
(From article mentioned above.)
Folk are always saying this kind of thing. But on what grounds should my freedoms be constrained by artistic or religious notions? Can you provide a specific example that isn't simply already commonsense.
You are making a pretty huge claim in saying "Literature, the arts, and religion do a much better job...". You might need to back that up with the evidence.
Quoting John
No, I don't support a diversity of views just so that folk can be wrong. I don't see that as an important right to uphold. Paedophiles, psychopaths, crack addicts, nazis ... I'm quite happy with the idea that diversity has its limits.
This is of course a natural principle. In a flourishing system, a balance must be struck between stability and plasticity, constraint and freedom. So the genetic variation of species is tuned to suggest many small tweaks and avoid creating a generation of "hopeful monsters".
A natural system will evolve an appropriate balance of diversity. There is a creative optimum where the system ensures it has sufficient variety so that it can continue to learn and adapt, given the irreducible unpredictability or vagueness of the future. Things are "good" when the degree of diversity matches the degree of uncertainty in accurate fashion.
I'll have a go. One of the consequences of the scientific revolution was science as a 'mode of knowing' that proceeded by deliberately bracketing out the subjective. The idea was that what was amenable to mathematical quantization is the primary reality, and what is subjective is delegated to the mind/soul/observer, and made in some basic sense private. That is why when you say 'show us the data', you know full well that nobody can - the 'data' about such matters is not actually data at all but 'lived experience', which can't be quantified or analysed in the 'third person' in the way that the subjects of scientific analysis is able to be.
(This is the subject of Thomas Nagel's book The View from Nowhere. There's a synopsis here.)
Your semiotic approach allows for that possibility of first-person knowledge, but only in the sense that it is able to simulate it. It is very much like the kind of understanding you would have to have to program a very sophisticated 'Sim Earth' type of computer game. It models life and mind far more successfully than the old reductionist paradigm that has been rightly abandoned, by the introduction of the 'triadic' structure of subject, sign and referent. But it's still not a 'first philosophy' in the sense of being a guide to lived experience, in my opinion - which is what I presume John was referring to in 'literature, the arts, and religion'.
Science enables us to understand the mechanics of what we are (physically) constrained by, but it does not inform us as to what we should do in situations involving ethical or moral choice. Studying, and practical and affective involvement with, the humanities, religion, literature and the arts generally leads to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the human condition in subjective and inter-subjective terms than can ever be achieved by mere scientific measurement and modeling. Of course that deeper understanding cannot be formulated as determinate models in the ways that scientific knowledge may be. That goes without saying. If you are promoting the idea that the only important knowledge is the knowledge that can be determinately modeled, then you are promoting scientism and you are devaluing the humanities, the arts and religion. I for one, would not want to live in a society that enforced or even instilled such values. I think such a society would inevitably devolve into a robotic mono-culture.
Quoting apokrisis
This is simply a diversion to a "slippery slope" argument as I see it. Of course a balance is desirable, but I don't believe the kind of balance you are extolling here can ever be precisely struck, and nor should it ever be attempted as artifice. That would amount to social engineering.
Yes, you explained it in another way, but very well! 8-)
But isn't this exactly what my semiotic naturalism is about - bringing four causes thinking back into scientific thought?
So there is a dualistic divide which most of the posters here embrace - matter vs mind.
And I speak for a pansemiotic holism - matter and sign.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. There is a good reason for mathematical quantification to be the "ultimate" in this regard.
Once we accept semiosis as our epistemic condition - we can't experience the world in transcendentally direct fashion, we can only form a pragmatic sign relation - then numbers are the most honest way of dealing with the noumenal. We drop all the pretence of dealing with reality in phenomenologically direct terms and treat our signs as openly and transparently just signs.
We didn't invent maths and science because it was a crazy thing to do. We did it to lift ourselves out of the merely biological to become a community of thinkers, self consciously employing an asbtracted system of sign.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, the mechanical view of nature leaves out most of what might matter. But I'm not arguing for the mechanical view here am I?
No - but then, neither are a lot of the bio-sciences now, out of necessity. And physics, also. The Cartesian model of mind and matter, 'exhaustive and exclusive', is being well and truly superseded. But perhaps your presentation of the 'four causes', while it acknowledges their importance, doesn't do justice to the real depth of the Aristotelean 'final cause' in the sense of being the reason why things exist. That is not at all intended as a harsh criticism.
Quoting apokrisis
I wouldn't ever say it was crazy. Again the historical background ought to be considered. Renaissance humanism re-introduced Platonism to European thought - Ficino published the first Latin edition of Plato's works. Kepler was attempting to prove the existence of the Platonic solids when he discovered the elliptical orbits of the Planets. So Platonism was hugely influential on Galileo. That was all behind Gallileo's 'the book of nature is written in mathematics', which is a Platonist intuition if ever there was one. And there is great truth in that, but I think also some profound issues about the nature of knowledge, and especially the nature of mind, were left out of the model (1). Accordingly, mind it is nowadays assumed to be a product of nature. I think the biosemiotic approach does offer an alternative to that - that is the direction it's heading. But I think, culturally, we're not there yet. There is another scientific revolution in the making, and I think biosemiosis is one element in that.
Quoting John
Right. Which is exactly where the thread started!
How many more times must I say that my semiotic approach is founded not on determinism but indeterminism. Constraints and freedoms co-arise in mutually synergistic fashion.
And note how in progressive society, art is on the rise, religion on the demise. There are a lot of things you don't want to talk about in creating your "unified front" against Scientism.
The church once controlled social iconography and acted pretty viciously against the pagan alternatives. Modern art can still create a slight frisson with its "Piss Christs". But generally - in the secular civil society that now dominates the power discourse - the battle has been long won. Transgressive freedom is the new norm - the social marker for being a member of the true elite. Look at me. I can shove outrage in your face. I win.
So "art and religion"? Hah. Whether it is telling me that your big daddy in the sky is going to come and get me, or yours is the exclusive back-slapping club to which I can't belong, it always comes back to the pragmatics of social power.
Quoting John
If a balance is desirable, then why shouldn't a balance be attempted? Why would you let the perfect become the enemy of the good? (Or is this one of those non-commonsense examples of religious/artistic wisdom that I was asking for.)
Quoting John
You mean like ... politics?
It all boils down to the organisation of power. And power is organised through systems of signs. In nature, that is all mind is - the organising and directing of material flows in pursuit of purposes.
Religion and tradition used to control individual minds. Only social-level thoughts were thinkable. The duty of the individual was to police even their own feelings. Now that was power!
Then came the Enlightenment (the resumption of the Greek philosophical project). A new understanding of power - control over material flows - was created. It needed a new scientific language - a new level of semiosis. But the social stranglehold was broken. The abstractions of mechanism rapidly eroded the mental hold of the church.
But then the Enlightement led to Romanticism. The individual wanted a complete rupture and the right to claim authorship over their own symbols. Every person could - and thus should - craft their own private realm of semiosis. Interpretation of reality became solipsistic as a social right.
But as I say, this Nietzschean inversion was really about a pragmatic power grab - at least for those not too muddled in their thinking to appreciate the development of this new secular game. What more fun is there in the modern world than to be a priest of high culture?
Dress up in black, learn a few Nietzsche quotes, display your messed up tatts and your gender confusion as the stigmata of the blessed, get invited to the right openings, and you are good to go. Yep. It is all about organising power with systems of sign.
At the very least, if you've heard of these immortal body snatchers, then they have most certainly failed.
I haven't made any reference to determinism, but rather to determination. The difference between scientific knowledge and 'humanities' knowledge is that the former can be modeled in determinate ways (i.e mathematically or statistically).
Quoting apokrisis
Really? That's a bold and apparently tendentious claim. Perhaps you can back it up with some actual textual evidence.
Quoting apokrisis
Sounds a bit shrill, even paranoid to me.
Quoting apokrisis
Educating people broadly is one thing; brainwashing is another. I don't know what letting "the perfect become the enemy of the good" could even mean. What is the "perfect" and whose idea of the "good" do think it is the enemy of, and how?
Quoting apokrisis
Politics as social engineering??? What a laugh!! In what dread orifice have have you been secreting your dome?
What are you talking about? I think you misinterpreted something along the lines. The point of the last post was that you cannot discuss this "balancing act" of good/bad and the lab of human lives lived and testing "what works" without acknowledging that the person experiencing actually has these things in real time, as a person who must feel these things, deal with them. These are real people going through real things. Are you a zombie or something? Does personal, first-person experience not occur for you? Do phenomenological experiences of life events not make sense to you?
I know this is a bit of a side road, but...I don't recognize Aristotle in this. The contemplation of the one comes later, surely, with Plotinus. Aristotle is careful not to say he's a Platonist.
Well, according to Loyd Gerson, Aristotle remains a Platonist, albeit a dissedent Platonist. And eudomonia includes as its highest form of activity, contemplation of the good. I don't think that Aristotle felt it necessary to spell it out or make it explicit, because it was assumed, whereas nowadays the opposite is true.
Does personal, first-person experience with complex variety not occur for you?
Anyway, you were addressing my question about paedophiles and crack addicts. Do you think their "is" should be our "ought"? No matter how good they think something is, would you not wish to draw a moral line on behalf of society?
It's a common saying - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
I meant in the context of your use of it.
The key word here is BALANCE. You are sneaking in a tricky word. Balance usually indicates some sort of tranquil flow or resolution. But, bad experiences, even if there is some good interspersed is not pleasant, desirable, etc. unless that was my goal and most times it is not.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, and often times the bad parts of that complex variety can be quite unpleasant.
Quoting apokrisis
I just don't get the reason you asked the question. You have to explain how this somehow enters the picture, and then maybe I can know how to provide a reply. Are you suggesting that I take some ethical stance that whatever someone believes is the right action must be the right action? Where would you justify that I would claim something like that? My point earlier is that bad experiences are unpleasant to the person experiencing them and are not just some instrumental harm for some greater sense of balance later on. Harm may be "good" in some vague evolutionary sense, but at the moment the harm is occurring it is bad for the individual. I also do not consider the pain involved in exercise or learning something new a "harm" so you don't have to include that red herring, which you are prone to do.
True that.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Is that because the pain/effort of exercise/learning are somehow naturally part of a greater balance? So we can enjoy the short term signal pointing towards the long term gain?
It is hardly a red herring that in an ecologically valid setting - life as it is lived - your monotonic moan about "bad feelings" becomes exposed as childishly simplfied "philosophy".
Quoting schopenhauer1
I realise that you are happy to derail another thread to promote your pessimism, but I thought the topic was ethics. So yes, getting back to the subject, I see a lot of loose talk about "good" and "bad". You want to reduce all analysis to how things make you feel. Yet clearly there is a reason for folk also taking a more hierarchical and abstracted "right and wrong" based view of ethics. The general good can outweigh the individual benefit in most folk's view.
But hey, you might be solipsistic enough to think paedophiles and crack addicts have a right to their phenomenological well-being.
Likewise, you might say that virtue and self-sacrifice are socially-imposed burdens/forms of self-delusion because your "feelings" are always paramount in the ethical sphere.
I mean this shows why pessimism is such a shallow subject once you've got the point. Yes, living involves always a measure of pain and struggle. And yes, existence probably does have no transcendent meaning.
But living is also fun and interesting. Nature is full of immanent meaning - human minds, being the products of nature, can't help but find meaning everywhere.
You can stay on the ride to see where it goes, or hop off the bus and get it all over. But sitting in your seat and moaning the whole trip seems the dumbest choice.
It was a take on a Wittgenstein quote "The world of the happy..." etc. I'm on the normal emotional range bus and intend to enjoy the ride.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man"