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Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

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Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#201

Post by mcv »

Netbeing wrote: post #149
mcv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " I'd say the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit and only the rest is even worth reading, but they all disagree about which 80% percent..." Are you saying that philosophy in general encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking?

One of my favorite things I've ever read is David Stove's essay on this subject, "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" wherein a cranky old philosopher excoriates his profession. https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html To be fair, as the GP states, most philosophers are honest about this. How much better off we'd all be if economists would admit the same truth about their "discipline".

That is certainly an interesting article. He bluntly declares it obvious that a bunch of leading, mainstream philosophical thought it utter bullshit without explaining why (and instead arguing that nobody can explain why), and I completely agree with him.

Well, except with the bit that numerology is to astrology as astrology is to astronomy. It seems to me that numerology is to mathematics as astrology is to astronomy, but I admit that like the philosophers he's criticising, I too have not read a book on numerology.

(I wrote that before I finished the article. I still haven't quite finished it, but he later ponders about the possibility of creating a nosology of thought; a system to diagnose these maladies of though. And then he gives up because it can never be simultaneously complete and usable. I think that's foolish; you can enormously expand the current nosology by identifying, naming and describing even just a few of these (and some of them seem pretty easy to me). And that vocabulary can grow slowly as people add more.)

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#202

Post by QuesnayJr »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #140
mordymoop wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a rhetorical trick that people have been using for a long time. The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing: "People don't actually care about their children." Or "Truth doesn't exist." Or "We should kill poor people to increase the average level of happiness." People are instantly nerdsniped by…

You seem to have exaggerated the 'stands' you give as examples. The problem with that is that I'm instantly reminded of all those times where I've seen critics of some 'Thinkers' accuse them of taking 'stands' like these, and after more or less digging (depending on of unpopular they were) it indeed ended up being either words taken out of context, or just strawmen.

"People in the Middle Ages don't care about their children" was a real view argued by Phillip Aries in Centuries of Childhood:

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

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#203

Post by mistermann »

cowpig wrote: post #158
mistermann wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The irony. Similarly: > There are many kinds of pseudosciences: astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx. These ‘fields’ traffic in bizarre claims with scientific pretensions. On a surface level, these claims seem to be scientific and usually appear to comment on the same kind of things that science does. However, upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is revealed to be bullshit: it is indifferent to the trut…

Both of the passages you quoted read as coherent and even convincing. Sure, terms like "epistemic" or "unconscientiousness" may be a bit unfamiliar, but they have specific meanings that are clear in the passage, and are used to make a salient argument. The use of jargon does not equate to obfuscation! For example, these two statements are very different: "Making the world a better place through canonical data models…

> Both of the passages you quoted read as coherent and even convincing.

They sure do - that's the problem! The author shows little sign of being concerned with the degree to which they are true (which considering he's representing skills in epistemology, seems like a bit of a shortcoming).

>> These ‘fields’ traffic in bizarre claims with scientific pretensions. On a surface level, these claims seem to be scientific and usually appear to comment on the same kind of things that science does. However, upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is revealed to be bullshit: it is indifferent to the truth.

Setting the stage by choosing "astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx" at the start of the article seems like a bit of the very "straw man, false dilemma and cherry-picking" the author complains about, since they go on to discuss pseudoscience in general.

I suspect "These 'fields'" is hinting (without explicitly saying) at conspiracy theories in general, going on to say "...upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is(!) [implicitly: without exception] revealed to be bullshit". (An example of using persuasive rhetoric to misinform readers.)

> An illustrative example is Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape (2010), in which straw men are lined up due to Harris’s failure to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that he criticises.

The author seems to not considered the possibility that the same applies to him (he who is without sin...).

And then wraps it up with this beauty of a paragraph:

> While pseudoscience can perhaps be counteracted by science education, the cure for pseudophilosophy is not science education but philosophical education. More specifically, it is a matter of developing the kind of basic critical thinking skills that are taught to undergraduates in philosophy. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy [Oh? Are you sure?]. Students should be taught things like learning to distinguish in a disciplined way between central philosophical concepts such as belief, truth, rationality and knowledge. They should be aware of the way ambiguities can be exploited by equivocating arguments, and become adept at how to spot other fallacies such as ad hominem and straw man. With these fundamental tools in hand, there would be a good deal less pseudophilosophy going around.

Perhaps we should add psychology and mindfulness (self-awareness) to this list.

> The use of jargon does not equate to obfuscation!

Agreed.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#204

Post by maze-le »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #125
maze-le wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency XYZ is stable. This sentence reflects a socially constructed truth (or falsehood) insofar as we have to agree on what the symbol XYZ stands for, what a currency is (is bitcoin a currency, are apples -- depends on the context) and what criteria of stability we have. We can measure the exchange rate of a currency compared to others and we can define criteria for what we call stability in this context -- and we…

Are these examples like saying "this movie sucks" or “specific person X is tall?” In that “tall” is fuzzy and social, but if we agreed on a precise definition (“any person at least Y height is defined as tall“), we could give it truth in the photon sense, but as it’s collectively used today, it’s too imprecise a word to assign true or false?

Not every fuzzy proposition is necessarily a social construct. Your example of a tall object is as good as your definition of "tall" is, but once that is defined any object can be measured objectively.

A good way of determining if something is a social construct is to ask yourself if the proposition would still hold if one were to remove all social lifeforms from the universe. A "tall" object would still be tall (to the degree that we can define tall) and it could still be measured somehow. In my example talking about a currency or an exchange rate wouldn't even make sense if we don't have a society that exchanges money or goods.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#205

Post by robertlagrant »

whimsicalism wrote: post #69
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Focaultian mindset makes you twitchy, paranoid, and hostile. We think of it as "of the Left", but there's also nothing to stop "the Right" from buying the idea that everything is just about Power. Then if you keep at that line of thought pretty soon you turn into a Nazi. Or at the very least, you will hear all claims from "the Left" about "care" or "empathy" with knowing cynicism. And my perception is that these…

You blame this "de-domestication", this guardedness, on the spread of Foucault-esque ideas about the nature of truth. My counter-hypothesis - maybe this is what happens when the heights of power and wealth keep getting higher and higher. We are transforming more and more into a dog-eat-dog society. This is how civilizations have fallen repeatedly over the past and we are increasingly turning to a new gilded age.

A lot more wealth and power these days is coming from value creation rather than political or historical roots. Or, as was the case of the gilded age, people from poor countries migrating to a country that was rapidly enriching its citizens.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#206

Post by kar5pt »

coldtea wrote: post #22

> Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article. He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinct…

I created an account to say this, but you said it better than I ever could.

I just want to second the idea that the quote he gives as an example of Foucault's "obscurantism" is perfectly clear to someone who's actually read Foucault. The quote is unclear to someone who's never read Foucault because the author took it out of context. The "constraints" on discourse which Foucault references at the end of the quote is literally what Foucault spent his entire early career studying and explaining. To act like he just throws the word out there and never explains what he's talking about is intellectual libel.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#207

Post by kar5pt »

yboris wrote: post #200
coldtea wrote: post #22

> Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article. He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinct…

To me it seems like this is the trouble: for you, reading Foucault, it is clear what is meant by truth and that the word is constrained to a narrow scope. But to others, including me, it is not at all clear how far the scope goes. So if the defense of this ambiguity is to require everyone to read several books by the author first, I find it unacceptable. Without clarity, people can think they agree, while they disagr…

I think you can criticize Foucault to a point for being unclear sometimes, but you have to remember that sentence was taken out of context. Words get meaning from their context, so I don't think it's fair to expect every sentence a philosopher has written to make perfect sense on it's own without reading the surrounding essay/book.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#208

Post by coldtea »

mjburgess wrote: post #173
coldtea wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us". Which he fails to demonstrate - besides them using the same term for both (which everybody does). He also fails to realize that "truth as some property of the universe" in many cases is only available through "truth as it matters to us" anyway. In which case, it's wrong to extend your cl…

So you're defence of foucault's language is that: (1) there is no practical distinction; so (2) let's not make any. (1) is by the way False. It is precisely by establishing epistemic standards for deciding when we are mistaken, and when not, that we are able to evaluate historical sources and even formulate the claim that they are "subject to power relations". So your defence is rests precisely on the sort of underha…

>It is precisely by establishing epistemic standards for deciding when we are mistaken, and when not, that we are able to evaluate historical sources and even formulate the claim that they are "subject to power relations".

Only Foucault already knew that, and had studied extensively how those "epistemic standards" have been established and developed.

That's part of the problem, those standards are not some objective yardstick, but involved in the same issues themselves (again: not for hard facts nobody really cares to challenge, like "water boils at 100oC" but for facts that people do care about, have interests invested in, and so on, whether they are political, pedagogical, historical, and so on).

>So your defence is rests precisely on the sort of underhanded equivocation being described.

Well, then again, your comment rests precicely on "vaguely know about the works described, so will attribute strawmans to them, as if those authors haven't already considered the naive solutions I'm proposing to the issues they study"...

Re (1) there "being a practical distinction" is irrelevant, if the distinction is of no practical use. At best one can self-congratulate himself of knowing the "real truth", while outside, the accepted truth is something different. And nobody in their right mind would just trust that person, or trust that "they" have the correct epistemology/methodology, when most disagree.

For example, in the 19th century South the "truth" was that "blacks are inferior", and that didn't change with a different epistemology -not to mention most scientists agreed at the time to the same "truth" in every "civilized" country-, only with different power relations and social work. In the end, it took a whole civil war. Any "methodology" will be applied (and accepted) once the power relations change (or are forced to change) not before. It's the power relations enabling the change of the "truth".

Heck, even in hard sciences, like physics, as Kuhn wrote: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#209

Post by coldtea »

denton-scratch wrote: post #111
Veen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy The article's claim is not that this distinction doesn't exist or that it is not a useful distinction, but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us". That seems to me to be an interesting position that is worth considering. (btw. the claim that "The d…

> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy Hmmm. Kant, Frege, Hegel: these Germans laid the foundations of anglo-saxon analytical philosophy. Frege (who I struggle to understand) was a towering figure in language and logic, as well as maths. And wasn't Descartes from the continent? Sartre had never heard of postmodernism. His work was of a literary kind, which I associate wi…

>Hmmm. Kant, Frege, Hegel: these Germans laid the foundations of anglo-saxon analytical philosophy. Frege (who I struggle to understand) was a towering figure in language and logic, as well as maths. And wasn't Descartes from the continent?

Sure, but Continental and analytical are not geographical terms. They only originate etymologycally from the loose preference and emergence of difference schools in different geographical areas -- but obviously a European philosopher can be analytical, and an American philosopher can be continetal. Sort of like an merican band can play Irish folk and be good at it. But the Irish do it more, and usually do it better - it's, so to speak, their thing.

>FWIW, I think it's the study of logic that has the power to immunise you against bad reasoning (you also have to be bright).

You get immunity against some kinds of bad reasoning, and a vulnerability to others (scientism being one, systemic over-explanations being another, blindness to subtle things not quantifiable or qualifiable as truth propositions or logical axiomatic statements, but important nonetheless being the most important).

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#210

Post by yters »

anthk wrote: post #198
yters wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response proves my point.

You didn't prove your god.

There are many proofs:

- God is greater than the greatest imaginable thing, so must exist (this one is proven to be logically valid with computational theorem prover, and Bertrand Russell even said it was sound at one point in his life)

- the world is intelligently designed

- there must be a first cause, and that must be God

- nothing in this world is perfect so there must be a transcendently perfect being

- we can only be satisfied be an infinite being, so the object of our desire lies beyond this world

- moral laws exist and require a law giver

- our mind is not reducible to our body, and must have been created by an even greater being

- jesus existed, claimed to be God, and rose from the dead according to reliable historical documentation

Off the top of my head

On the other hand it is impossible to prove atheism, you cannot prove a negative

So we are left with theism and a lot of proofs, and atheism which is inherently incapable of being proven

Seems the rational choice leans towards theism

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