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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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The only crowd I've ever known to take an interest in this sort of thing, outside of academic philosophers, are internet theists who've given up on ever winning an argument anyone else cares about. Imagine busting this out because you saw someone chortling at the idea that Star Wars lore is real, and you'll understand how it looks from the outside. The part where everyone gains so much epistemic humility that they quit snorting whenever someone brings up the will of the Force in a serious conversation just isn't coming.

I love Star Wars more than you probably suspect, but still I wonder which you think I am? Because I doubt your guess is correct.

You say this and yet most of the contemporary institutions this forum endlessly complains about are justified through philosophical frameworks that have direct lineage to that era of criticisms of logical positivism.

People say that epistemology doesn't really matter and then they go on to live in a world where they are morally beaten down on account of standpoint theory.

It's the darndest thing. People say reading Hegel doesn't matter because it's all airy nonsense and then go about their day making received assumptions that are almost totally down to his very specific view of the world being internalized by society.

In any case, I've never cared about popularity contests or ad hominems. I care about the truth and how people on every side of every argument are undeservedly certain of things they have absolutely no logical reason to believe.

Confident ignorance is objectively worse than doubtful error. Repent before Socrates.

Listen, people who want me to believe X need to be able to put forth something outside of their own skull that points toward X being true. Anyone who wishes otherwise is either a charlatan, or needs to understand that they are indistinguishable from one.

Of course. Justification is necessary. But let us not pretend that reason and logic are the only mechanisms that can be used to do this, or that no alternative to empiricism possesses such justifications.

Not when we just talked about the infamous inconsistence of logical positivism.

I'll consider worrying about the other mechanisms as soon as I see them come up in any context other than atheists dragging religion and someone wanting to chastise them without having to actually defend it. In a quarter-century of internet, so far that's literally never happened. Everyone seems perfectly content with logic and reason under every other set of circumstances.

You need to read more and go outside your bubble then.

There's plenty of criticism of modernity underpinned specifically by its worship of reason to go around.

I know traditionalism is niche in the West. But most of the world isn't the West.

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