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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all metaphysical theories can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

In the sense Hitchens was using the term, "religions" don't provide a partition of the possibility space, whereas in the standard sense, metaphysical theories do.

However, Hitchens's reasoning is a non-sequitur fallacy, and it's not obvious to me how to fix it with a plausuble missing premise. Merely a priori arguments for religions being false do not persuade me, since our a priori intuitions about matters of fact are not a reliable source of evidence.

I mean, if you assume that operationalizes as a low initial credence in any metaphysical theory, until reasons to believe it over other metaphysical theories are offered, I don't actually think "all metaphysical theories are 'wrong'" is a bad starting point.

While I'm not in the logical positivist camp, I understand why their rejection of metaphysical speculation was so strong. I think there are problems with Wittgenstein's "on that which I cannot speak, I must remain silent", but the basic impulse to see language as a bad tool for metaphysical speculation makes perfect sense to me. So many religions already acknowledge how bad a tool language is for this job, whether it is Taoism's "the Tao that can be described is not the true Tao", or the apophatic theology of some early Christian Church fathers.

The problem as I see it is, either language is a tool appropriate for metaphysical speculation or it is not. If it is not a proper tool for metaphysical speculation, then you're better off becoming a mystic if you want to understand the ineffable true nature of reality, or just giving up on ever truly understanding how reality works at its deepest level. If it is a proper tool for metaphysical speculation, then it's completely fair game to reject particular metaphysical theories based on a variety of criteria.

if you assume that operationalizes as a low initial credence in any metaphysical theory, until reasons to believe it over other metaphysical theories are offered

I don't think that assumption holds for the pithy Hitchens quote. I'm pretty confident we're supposed to interpret it in a different way. In any event, I agree with a lot of what you have to say.

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