1. What's the point of James's squirrel story?
2. Who said truth is what we would end up with if we could run all the experiments and investigations we'd like to? (And what's a word his name rhymes with?)
3. What did Bertrand Russell say about James's theory of truth?
4. What 20th century philosopher carried on the pragmatist tradition? What did he say about the way words work?
5. What did Nietzsche mean by "God is dead"? (And what's a word his name rhymes with?)
6. Where did Nietzsche think Christian values come from?
7. What is an Ubermensch, and why does Nigel find it "a bit worrying"?
8. How did Nietzsche differ from Kant but anticipate Freud?
9. What were the three great revolutions in thought, according to Freud?
10. The "talking cure" gave birth to what?
11. Why did Freud think people believe in God?
12. What was Karl Popper's criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis?
FL
13. Most mass killers in America are not psychotics or paranoid schizophrenics, writes Andersen, they're what?
14. What was the moment when the NRA "settled in deepest Fantasyland"?
15. What new technologies give Andersen "the heebie-jeebies"?
DQ
- Have you ever been involved in an interminable debate that finally ended when someone clarified the definitions of the terms involved? Are most philosophical disputes like that?
- Can something be true, but then later found to be false? Can a statement that was previously false be made true by events? (Consider: if you'd said "Neil Armstrong walked on the moon" in 1968...)
- Should we distinguish provisional, falsifiable truth from ultimate truth?
- Does it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God?
- Are words tools, or more like pictures?
- Is it possible that God is dead for some but not others, in some places and times more and in others less?
- Are compassion and kindness distinctively religious values? Do you know any kind and compassionate atheists? ("Please allow me to introduce myself...")
- Should we embrace the irrational and emotional aspects of human nature, or try to overcome them?
- Is the "unconscious" well-supported scientifically? Does it need to be, in order to be useful to people in coming to terms with their own inner lives?
- Is Freudian dream symbolism (snakes and caves etc.) profound or silly? Could it be both?
- Have you ever committed an interesting Freudian slip?
- What do you think of Freud's account of religion?
- Your DQs
Old post-
Peirce & James, LISTEN: Robert Talisse on Pragmatism (PB)... Podcast... Also see "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "Sentiment of Rationality/Dilemma of Determinism"
DQ
1. Will there ever be an end of science, or a complete catalog of truths?
2. Do you agree that a "distinction without a (practical) difference" is irrelevant, and that truth and falsehood are practically the same if you can't specify the difference?
3. When James said truth is what works, did he mean what works for me, now? Or for us, on the whole and in the long run? Does this matter, practically? Does it bear on Bertrand Russell's criticism?
4. Do you think of words as tools for expressing your ideas and feelings, communicating with yourself and others, and generally "coping"... or as mental photographs that copy the world? Could they be both? What would it be like to have no words? (Could you even think about that, or about anything?) Do words ever get in the way of thought, or distort it?
5. What makes an idea valuable to you?
6. What's the difference between a fiction and a lie? Can fiction convey truth?
==
William James would agree:
An old post-
April 21, 2015
It's Peirce and James (and Vandy's Robert Talisse on the pragmatists and truth)...
Through the years I've written repeatedly and delightedly on Peirce, James, and Nietzsche@dawn, especially WJ.
I’m not especially pleased with Nigel Warburton’s take on James, true enough to the letter but not at all to the spirit of his pragmatic conception of truth. More on that later. At least he gets thesquirrel right.
Here's what James actually said, about the squirrel and about pragmatism's conception of truth:
I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right... Pragmatism, Lecture II
==
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement, with 'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term 'agreement,' and what by the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with...
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as...
...truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS...
Certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?
Pragmatism says no... Pragmatism, Lec. VI
This is a contentious and contestable view, admittedly, but it is not the caricatured reduction to whatever is "expedient" in a situation James's critics (like Bertrand Russell) made it out to be. It's more like Richard Rorty's invitation to an open and ongoing conversation between all comers with something to contribute. It is decidedly not a "Santa Claus" philosophy of truth.
James may have been wrong about truth, but (to paraphrase A.C. Grayling's comment on Descartes) if he was, he was interestingly, constructively, engagingly, entertainingly, provocatively wrong.
Besides, he's the best writer in the James family (sorry, Henry) and possibly the best writer in the entire stable of American philosophers. I call him my favorite because he's the one I'd most like to invite to the Boulevard for a beer. Unfortunately he didn't drink. (Too bad they don't serve nitrous oxide.) Also, unfortunately, he died in 1910. Read his letters and correspondence, they humanize his philosophy and place his "radical" views in the context of their genesis: the context of experience, and of life.
They also counter my friend Talisse's hasty semi-assent to Nigel's outrageous misreading of the pragmatists as missing "a sense of awe and wonder." James had it in spades, and so did Dewey and Peirce in their own ways. Likewise Rorty, who did not like being called a "relativist" and who would not agree that "Nazism and western liberal democracy are the same." Not at all.
But, I do think Talisse does a good job of summarizing James's rejection of "truth-as-correspondence" as an unhelpful formula, once you move past trivial matters like catching the bus. He's also correct in pointing out James's interest in religion as rooted in the lives and experience of individuals, not particularly in God, heaven, the afterlife and so on. He psychologizes and naturalizes religion. It's mostly about life on earth, for Jamesians, not (again) about Santa.
==
(Ph'y of Happiness)
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY (1879-80)
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; andwhy do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply: They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the absence of any feeling of irrationality? I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. All feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up the theoretic way...
Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance than all the rest,--I mean the relation of a thing to its future consequences. So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar. I therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a philosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way at least, banish uncertainty from the future_. The permanent presence of the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Every one knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But when the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind. But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs; we do not know what will come next; and novelty _per se_ becomes a mental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merely because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming 'to feel at home' in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any essentially new manifestations from their character.
The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects that surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or advantage,--go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the larder. Novelty _ought_ to irritate him. All curiosity has thus a practical genesis. We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed expectation lies at the root of his emotion. A dog's curiosity about the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as the point of deciding what is going to happen next. That settled, curiosity is quenched. The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense 'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an uncertain future. A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new wonders the next moment might bring forth...
Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assumption unverified by previous experience,--why, then I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss. In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. _There are then cases where faith creates its own verification_. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.
The future movements of the stars or the facts of past history are determined now once for all, whether I like them or not. They are given irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths like these subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscure the judgment. But in every fact into which there enters an element of personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls for a certain amount of faith in the result,--so that, after all, the future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,--how trebly asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective method, the method of belief based on desire!
(continues)
THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM (1884)
A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground--not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will imply. At our very side almost, in the past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here --we see in the writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delbœuf how completely changed and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of the necessarily implied corollaries of determinism clearer to you than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. This should exclude, it seems to me, from the freewill side of the question all hope of a coercive demonstrations,-- a demonstration which I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without...
What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world.Only then is it other than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn.
If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism, from out of whose toils we have just found our way.
Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I expressly repudiated a while ago the pretension to offer any arguments which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk, obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the problem; and the most anyone can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular sense based on the judgment of regret, represents that world as vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever unacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose flesh the murder excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime. It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as anyone's diseased curiosity pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the roman naturalists state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of Parisian littérateurs among the eternally indispensable organs by which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the objective carrion I called it in to take away.
No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward; but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That "chance" whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish from my view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that "chance" is--what? Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather, on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see admitted by others tonight. But I know that if I do stop here, misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few more words.
In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word "chance" will still be giving trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than "chance" to name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part. It certainly is a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term. Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice. The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and, rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for them; and the best word is the one that enables men to know the quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word "chance," with its singular negativity, is just the word for this purpose. Whoever uses it instead of "freedom," squarely and resolutely gives up all pretense to control the things he says are free. For him, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be. It is a word of impotence, and is therefore the only sincere word we can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it honestly, and really risk the game. "Who chooses me must give and forfeit all he hath." Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretense of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to it leg to make sure it does not get beyond our sight.
But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure? Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal degrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be from all eternity.
(continues)
Happy Thanksgiving!
The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.
DQ
1. Will there ever be an end of science, or a complete catalog of truths?
2. Do you agree that a "distinction without a (practical) difference" is irrelevant, and that truth and falsehood are practically the same if you can't specify the difference?
3. When James said truth is what works, did he mean what works for me, now? Or for us, on the whole and in the long run? Does this matter, practically? Does it bear on Bertrand Russell's criticism?
4. Do you think of words as tools for expressing your ideas and feelings, communicating with yourself and others, and generally "coping"... or as mental photographs that copy the world? Could they be both? What would it be like to have no words? (Could you even think about that, or about anything?) Do words ever get in the way of thought, or distort it?
5. What makes an idea valuable to you?
6. What's the difference between a fiction and a lie? Can fiction convey truth?
==
William James would agree:
Marco Rubio said in last night's (11.10/15) GOP debate: "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers." William James would disagree. We need more philosophical welders, business-people, people generally... so we need more philosophers.
An old post-
April 21, 2015
It's Peirce and James (and Vandy's Robert Talisse on the pragmatists and truth)...
Through the years I've written repeatedly and delightedly on Peirce, James, and Nietzsche@dawn, especially WJ.
I’m not especially pleased with Nigel Warburton’s take on James, true enough to the letter but not at all to the spirit of his pragmatic conception of truth. More on that later. At least he gets thesquirrel right.
Here's what James actually said, about the squirrel and about pragmatism's conception of truth:
...Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."
Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.
I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right... Pragmatism, Lecture II
==
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement, with 'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term 'agreement,' and what by the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with...
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as...
...truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS...
Certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?
Pragmatism says no... Pragmatism, Lec. VI
This is a contentious and contestable view, admittedly, but it is not the caricatured reduction to whatever is "expedient" in a situation James's critics (like Bertrand Russell) made it out to be. It's more like Richard Rorty's invitation to an open and ongoing conversation between all comers with something to contribute. It is decidedly not a "Santa Claus" philosophy of truth.
James may have been wrong about truth, but (to paraphrase A.C. Grayling's comment on Descartes) if he was, he was interestingly, constructively, engagingly, entertainingly, provocatively wrong.
Besides, he's the best writer in the James family (sorry, Henry) and possibly the best writer in the entire stable of American philosophers. I call him my favorite because he's the one I'd most like to invite to the Boulevard for a beer. Unfortunately he didn't drink. (Too bad they don't serve nitrous oxide.) Also, unfortunately, he died in 1910. Read his letters and correspondence, they humanize his philosophy and place his "radical" views in the context of their genesis: the context of experience, and of life.
They also counter my friend Talisse's hasty semi-assent to Nigel's outrageous misreading of the pragmatists as missing "a sense of awe and wonder." James had it in spades, and so did Dewey and Peirce in their own ways. Likewise Rorty, who did not like being called a "relativist" and who would not agree that "Nazism and western liberal democracy are the same." Not at all.
But, I do think Talisse does a good job of summarizing James's rejection of "truth-as-correspondence" as an unhelpful formula, once you move past trivial matters like catching the bus. He's also correct in pointing out James's interest in religion as rooted in the lives and experience of individuals, not particularly in God, heaven, the afterlife and so on. He psychologizes and naturalizes religion. It's mostly about life on earth, for Jamesians, not (again) about Santa.
==
(Ph'y of Happiness)
The Dilemma of Determinism, The Sentiment of Rationality
1. By what "marks" does James propose to recognize rationality?
1. By what "marks" does James propose to recognize rationality?
2. What is James's definition of rationality?
3. Under what conditions does James endorse the "subjective method" of believing what you desire to believe?
4. Does James intend to prove the reality of free will?
5. What are the two poles of the "dilemma of determinism"?
6. Free will is compatible with divine providence, provided the universe include what?
6. Free will is compatible with divine providence, provided the universe include what?
DQ
1. Do you like James's criteria and definition of rationality? Or do you prefer a narrower, more objective, or more intellectual definition? What role should emotions play in establishing our conception of what it is rational to believe and to do?
2. If all philosophers accepted James's account of rationality, would they approach their vocation or their lives differently?
3. Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say that the great thing about science is, it's true whether you believe it or not. Can you think of examples in which the facts depend on what we believe about them?
4. Is there something odd or inimical about attempts to coerce others into accepting the truth of an argument for or against free will?
5. Are there good things about determinism, making it not a dilemma but an opportunity for happiness? (Think about Spinoza, for example.)
6. Do you find the idea of a god of indeterminate possibilities appealing, disappointing, disillusioning, personally motivating, or what?
Dawn post: HT live an experiment... Podcast: Leaping the abyss
6. Do you find the idea of a god of indeterminate possibilities appealing, disappointing, disillusioning, personally motivating, or what?
Dawn post: HT live an experiment... Podcast: Leaping the abyss
==
These early essays convey two of the themes most central to William James's notion of happiness: enthusiastic acceptance of one's own and others' personal or subjective individuality; and a sense of one's own free agency as pragmatically vindicated by those who act on it ("my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will")... Note the latest "Stone" essay, "How to Live a Lie," implying that James was a "free will fictionalist" who willfully accepted propositions that defy rational belief. Do we all do that, when we assert religious or ethical propositions? Is it okay? jpo
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY (1879-80)
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; andwhy do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply: They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the absence of any feeling of irrationality? I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. All feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up the theoretic way...
Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance than all the rest,--I mean the relation of a thing to its future consequences. So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar. I therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a philosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way at least, banish uncertainty from the future_. The permanent presence of the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Every one knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But when the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind. But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs; we do not know what will come next; and novelty _per se_ becomes a mental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merely because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming 'to feel at home' in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any essentially new manifestations from their character.
The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects that surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or advantage,--go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the larder. Novelty _ought_ to irritate him. All curiosity has thus a practical genesis. We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed expectation lies at the root of his emotion. A dog's curiosity about the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as the point of deciding what is going to happen next. That settled, curiosity is quenched. The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense 'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an uncertain future. A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new wonders the next moment might bring forth...
Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assumption unverified by previous experience,--why, then I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss. In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. _There are then cases where faith creates its own verification_. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.
The future movements of the stars or the facts of past history are determined now once for all, whether I like them or not. They are given irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths like these subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscure the judgment. But in every fact into which there enters an element of personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls for a certain amount of faith in the result,--so that, after all, the future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,--how trebly asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective method, the method of belief based on desire!
(continues)
THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM (1884)
A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground--not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will imply. At our very side almost, in the past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here --we see in the writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delbœuf how completely changed and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of the necessarily implied corollaries of determinism clearer to you than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. This should exclude, it seems to me, from the freewill side of the question all hope of a coercive demonstrations,-- a demonstration which I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without...
What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world.Only then is it other than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn.
If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism, from out of whose toils we have just found our way.
Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I expressly repudiated a while ago the pretension to offer any arguments which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk, obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the problem; and the most anyone can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular sense based on the judgment of regret, represents that world as vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever unacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose flesh the murder excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime. It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as anyone's diseased curiosity pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the roman naturalists state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of Parisian littérateurs among the eternally indispensable organs by which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the objective carrion I called it in to take away.
No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward; but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That "chance" whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish from my view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that "chance" is--what? Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather, on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see admitted by others tonight. But I know that if I do stop here, misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few more words.
In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word "chance" will still be giving trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than "chance" to name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part. It certainly is a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term. Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice. The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and, rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for them; and the best word is the one that enables men to know the quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word "chance," with its singular negativity, is just the word for this purpose. Whoever uses it instead of "freedom," squarely and resolutely gives up all pretense to control the things he says are free. For him, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be. It is a word of impotence, and is therefore the only sincere word we can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it honestly, and really risk the game. "Who chooses me must give and forfeit all he hath." Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretense of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to it leg to make sure it does not get beyond our sight.
But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure? Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal degrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be from all eternity.
(continues)
Happy Thanksgiving!
#10 11/20
ReplyDeleteQ: Are words tools, or more like pictures?
- I think words are tools but can serve as pictures as well. Words are crucial in communicating with others; otherwise, it would be hard and awkward to communicate. It allows us to express our thoughts to not only other but also to ourselves. Words can serve as symbols to form meaning and as a form of art )("pictures") through poetry.
Q: Is it possible that God is dead for some but not others, in some places and times more and in others less?
- Depending on the surroundings or environment, people can possibly think that God is dead. On places were people have to constantly endure war and natural disasters, they may think that God is dead due to many lives being lost; some of these people may not have deserved this. Things like unexpected or accidental deaths of good people can really question God's existence.
Q: Is Freudian dream symbolism (snakes and caves etc.) profound or silly? Could it be both?
- I think dream symbolism might provide an insight of past or future, but yet I find them silly. For example, I occasionally dreamt of my teeth falling apart, which I think means that I shouldn't have said something recently in the past. I also find it silly since I do not remember most of my dreams, and there were probably dreams during my sleep that meant something. Symbols within dreams wouldn't have meaning if I didn't remember the dream.
Q: What do you think of Freud's account of religion?
- Freud's account of religion make sense to me. We do good things to ourselves and others to protect ourselves from evil. We're taught by our parents (at least most of us) to do good so that we will receive good things. Kids lived a world of rewards and punishments, and adults are still living that world. Obviously, we always want rewards and avoid punishment as much as possible, so we do our best to satisfy our parents, as well as God for some. Protection is an important reward that we get, and it allows us continuously live without feeling so scared of death or misfortunes.
Q: Will there ever be an end of science, or a complete catalog of truths?
- People always question how the universe or life works, so science will always exist as form of investigation to answers such questions. Based on this fact, I think there is no end to science.
Q: What makes an idea valuable to you?
- An idea is valuable depending on how much it beneficially impacts the world we live in.
Q: What's the difference between a fiction and a lie? Can fiction convey truth?
- A fiction serves as a hypothesis or application of various knowledge to create events that are not real, imaginative, or could possibly happen. Lies are misguided use of knowledge and usually used to purposely deceive. Fiction can convey truth depending on how sensible or rational the fictional product is based on previous factual evidence.
1. I can't stand debates that are continuous because people don't think about the factual evidence behind things. A lot of arguments could be resolved if the "term" was defined in the first place and people understood it.
ReplyDelete2. There are plenty of ways that things can be "proved" true, but actually be false. A lot of times that comes with human error, whether we like that or not. There are also many times where things are "proved" false, but are actually true. It just depends on the all different types of situations, unfortunately.
3. I think it is impossible to to have the "full truth" in any situation because people hide too many things in this new society.
4. I wouldn't say that believing in Santa is correlated to believing in a God.
5. God is however people wish to think He is. Everyone has different views, just because the person next to you believes God is alive doesn't mean you have to have that same belief.
6. Not only should be face the facts of life and emotions being irrational, but we also need to embrace that because it is our genuine society.
#9
ReplyDeleteDoes it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God?
My mom always told me santa was not real because she said she thought it was weird to lie to me about that. i guess it can be analogous to believing in god but i think its a stupid way to teach that concept and it makes kids kind of spoiled.
#10 Post for November 20, 2017
ReplyDeleteDQ1: More than a few, and I think most disputes of any sort are like this. Though there is no shortage of different opinions and ideas, there are far more disputes than ideas! This is because we rarely follow that sage advice: "Define your terms, gentlemen!"
DQ2: Statements made within the context of time are true or false within that context, so no, a statement that was true when made cannot later become false, nor can a statement that was false become true. The same statement made in a different chronological context may have a different truth value than the original statement, though.
DQ3: One should organize knowledge in whatever way works. Most of what we think we know about provisional, falsifiable truth will be proven wrong, unless our species ceases to exist before we discover better theories.
DQ4: Believing in Santa Claus certainly inspires happiness in children that far exceeds the gifts, which their parents, like mine did, would almost certainly keep buying. There is no relationship between believing in Santa Claus and believing in God; only the weak-minded would think that belief in God is an emotional safety net.
DQ5: Words are definitely tools, but so are pictures!
DQ6: God is an increasingly relevant reality, as evidenced from the atheistic violence of the 20th and what we've seen so far of the 21st centuries. God is not dead, not for anyone, though some will themselves to be dead to God.
DQ7: Yes, kindness and compassion are distinctly religious values; though many atheists possess a sense of morality that is either identical to or heavily informed by their culture's religious identity.
DQ8: People are people, with both rational and irrational components. I think any attempt to ignore the irrational is destined to fail, but the choice to overcome or embrace the irrational depends on the person's goals.
#6
ReplyDelete1. Yes: an argument about the hunter circling the squirrel, actually. Not all of them. Popper's issue with Freud, for instance was not due to a misunderstanding.
2. A statement that has the quality of being true or false can only be one of those, and cannot change. The provided example of foretelling the future then, would be true if it did eventually happen, as it wasn't wrong. Prophetic truth.
3. Yes, and I would go a step further by not even calling a falsifiable truth truth, but a theory: like gravity.
4. I think parents encouraging their children to believe in something they know to be false is an abuse of power. Even adults trade meaningless trinkets on Christmas (all equally destined to be returned to Walmart); so yes, we do continue to receive gifts even without believing in Santa. Belief in Santa is so close to belief in religion I find it hilarious we treat its falseness as common knowledge.
5. Words are tools, I think. They don't necessarily have to represent visualizable concepts, but they are very effective tools for conveying meaning.
6. No. If God was ever alive, he must always be so. In the metaphorical meaning (that it is unreasonable to have faith) however, this is true (e.g. after a natural disaster).
7. No. Perhaps the only original religious value is shame. Morality comes from our own ideals and experiences. If the only reason you aren't out pillaging and raping is because a book told you not to and you're afraid of the consequences, you're a terrible person.
8. I think we would do better to get beyond them (not just avoid them), but this would be against human nature. A balance must be struck to have a functional, healthy society.
9. The unconscious is a real thing, just not as sex-focused as Freud claimed (Because he wanted to have sex with his mother, he then claimed that it's not weird because everyone wants to do it. *eyeroll*). If we really want to understand ourselves on a deep level, we do need to understand these unconscious motivations to some degree.
10. It's actually hilarious. It's like he's trying to make himself look like a sexual predator with his fascination and preoccupation with sex. To say it was profound would be to stroke his ego.
11. Not that anyone heard.
12. Probably fairly accurate, at least for a couple of religions. It doesn't, for instance, work for the Greek gods, as they just did whatever they wanted, for the most part. Except in a few cases, they didn't really actively help people.
1.) I've been involved in some debates and many casual ones. Even when terms are defined and made clear there is still dispute over what these facts mean and almost anything can be twisted to defend anything. Both debaters can walk away believing they've won an argument that could have lasted forever, but the audience can usually tell who won. Most philosophical debates are the same because there is no right answer, only different philosophies. Both Hobbes and Locke were right but only one form of government can be implemented and only one is free.
ReplyDelete2.) 500 years ago, the majority agreed that the earth was flat. There are plenty of philosophical truths were disposed of after Descartes. Any second we could find every source we've ever used to support our argument could be wrong.
3.) We should distinguish possibly false truths from ultimate truths, but we know so little about the human mind, space, and our own planet that we really don't know anything to be absolutely true.
4.) Disclaimer: I don't believe in santa. There is a drug, created by random plants in the amazon, that when taken, everyone experiences the same thing, and it is the only drug where people know indisputably they went to another place and it wasn't just a trip. There they can feel all the archetypes. They see Gnomes and the polar axis, and the reindeer, and they see messages as well. The amazonians claim these are the voices of the ancestors. This may be because of the intense presence of the ancient, Holy other archetype. This drug is the same chemical our brains create when we die. Seeking to expand and understand our mind and believing in these things are all just part of the human experience. I suppose it really depends on what you mean by "work." Whether or not believing "works" its still in there somewhere.
5.) It depends on how seriously you take those words. In order for words to become more than shapes, the attention of the listener must be obtained, then they can be used artfully to describe or entertain, or to gain peoples participation in a movement.
6.) Is it possible that, if every reality exists in an alternate universes, there are some universes with a God and some without? I think if we are going to keep that question in this universe, there are many people born into unfortunate situations without doubt. It does seem that God comes and goes, but people who live honorable lives usually receive good energy in return. In the world we live in, it takes a naive mind to believe that the results don't vary.
7.) Atheists believe in most of the same core values of religion, but are typically fed up with the tradition and ritual and are very very skeptical of the supernatural.
8.) We should overcome the irrationality of the establishment and embrace a more anarchic irrationality. People need to be less emotional in a predictable and shallow way and be spontanious. Is everything so serious?
1) I have been in such a debate before, it was about culture and at the end we defined the word culture and that in itself ended the debate. I do believe that most philosophical debates are like this because many people view a word in different meanings.
ReplyDelete2) It depends what you mean by true. If true means that it's something that everyone believes in then yes, however, if by true you mean facts then no. Facts are facts and they never change.
3) Yes we should. I believe that there should only be one truth. I have a scientific point of view in everything, there is only one truth and that truth needs to be proved.
4) It does not work to believe in santa. It is analogous in believing in god, exact same thing.
5) Both. Words can work as tools in order to make a point or they can draw a picture.
6) I'm sure that god is dead to people who have been through terrible life tragedies. For example, in certain parts of Europe where the Holocaust thrived, those places aren't very religious anymore because of what happened to those people in the camps.
7) They are not just religious values, I myself am non-religion yet I am one of the most kind and selfless people I know.
8) It depends on whether those emotional aspects harm others. If we're talking about love, then no. However, if we're talking about jealousy, envy, and hate, then yes.
9) I don't know enough about the unconscious to know if it's backed up by science, I do believe I studied about it in psychology and it seemed to be backed up by science but I don't remember too clearly. In my personal experience, the unconscious has always shown me my inner life. Especially through dreams, I use those dreams to navigate my obstacles and that way I know what I must overcome.
10) I believe that it could be profound, but I think everyone has their own symbolism. There isn't universal symbolism when it comes to dreams.
11) No
DQ #10
ReplyDelete5) I would say that words can be both tools and paintings. Words can be used as tools to do persuade others to cooperate with you or agree with you, but they can also be used to “paint a picture” for people by describing places, events, or people.
7) I would not say compassion and kindness are distinctly religious values. I would say they are general human values. Anyone regardless of religion can be kind and compassionate towards others, and even those who are religious zealots can be less kind than someone who doesn’t believe in religiin whatsoever.
8) We should embrace the irrational and emotional aspects of human nature because when we embrace them we will be able to better understand who we are as people, and I doubt anything good can come from ignoring parts of yourself.
1) There will never be an end to science. Science is the only true thing about humanity, even if humanity dies off, science will thrive because science is everywhere.
ReplyDelete2) If you can't specify the difference then they are obviously the same.
3) I think he meant what works in general. This, however, is stupid because what works for me might not work for you and vice versa.
4) Words can be anything you want them to be. Words do not get in the way of thought, instead they expand the thought. If you have a well enough vocabulary you can express your thoughts and emotions through writing, personally I use writing to cope.
5) An idea is valuable to me when the idea pushes the limits to ideas in the past. It doesn't have to be a right idea, an idea isn't fact it hasn't been proved. I simply appreciate thinking outside of the box, that's all.
6) A fiction can be proved through experimentation over and over and over, a lie however, may only be proved once or many have never been proved at all.
Problems with mass incarceration
ReplyDeleteThere are many problems associated with mass incarceration. Mass incarceration separates families, breaks up communities, displays the social inequality in America, and costs taxpayers a lot of money. According to the book “Understanding Mass Incarceration” by James Kilgore, published in 2015, the United States is home to 5% of the world’s population, however, it holds 25% of the worlds prisoners. How is it that so many people are behind bars in the land of the free? Many people are thrown in jail for making quote on quote bad choices. One of these choices are drugs. According to my extensive research this is the largest element of mass incarceration. As we all know drugs are a result of poverty. In the same book James says, “Poor people, regardless of race, are the most likely to be incarcerated. Wealthy people to commit white-collar crimes that lead to losses that go into the millions often avoid prosecution or receive lighter sentences than those responsible for theft, robbery, or drug sales involving far smaller amounts of money.” In America being poor is a crime; homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are disappeared from public view when human beings contending with them are thrown into cages. Mass incarceration also costs taxpayers a lot of money. According to the book “Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration,” by Devah Page, published in 2007, Page says, “spending on the prison system rose twice the rate of spending on education, hospitals, health care, and public welfare. The prison system has ironically become one of the largest provider of meals, shelter, and healthcare for the poor and indigent populations of our country.” *The Pew Charitable Trust’s Project on the States reported in 2008 that state spending on corrections increased from 6.7 billion in 1985 to 53.5 billion in 2012. What’s crazy about mass incarceration is that it continues to rise even though crime itself has declined over the years. The Bureau of Justice reported in 2007 that the violent crime rate in the U.S. decreased seventy-six percent from 1993 to 2010. Overall the biggest problem with mass incarceration is that it turns drug use into a crime, rather than a mental health issue. In another study by the Bureau of Justice, published in May of 2004, reported that 82% of those on non-combat roles and 69% of those in combat roles prior to the Vietnam war used drugs, whereas 25% of those in noncombat roles and 24% of those in combat roles used drugs prior to the war. How are you going to lock up Vietnam veterans for drug use, what does America expect. It’s time to start dealing with the drug use in america directly instead of dealing with it indirectly though imprisonment.
#10 Alternative DQ
ReplyDelete1. If something true is later proven false would you examine what level of evidence you would find helpful?
2. What are some causes of endless arguments?
3. Why does God exist in some and not others?
4. What form of truth do you hold to a higher standard
5. What is unconsciousness to you?
6. Why would God be dead to a believer?
7. What would it mean for God to be dead?
8. What value do we have of our irrational emotional facet of human nature?
9. Why would we rid ourselves of it?
10. What would being purely rational do to us as a species?
11. What is an instance of words being used as a tool?
12. What is an instance of words being used as a picture?
13. How is compassion limited to pious belief structures?
14. Are you a kind or compassionate atheist?
15. How valuable would ultimate truth be if we actually obtained it?
16. Do you still believe in Santa?
17. If so why?
18. If you don't believe in Santa Claus, why believe in God?
19. What does finding truth do for you and how do you know you've found it?
#6 DQ
ReplyDelete• Can something be true, but then later found to be false? Can a statement that was previously false be made true by events? (Consider: if you'd said "Neil Armstrong walked on the moon" in 1968...)
Yes, Pluto was once a planet and now it’s not
• Does it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God?
I wouldn’t say it works because even when you don’t believe you still get gifts. I don’t think its analogous. God is real Santa is not
• Are words tools, or more like pictures?
Words are tools to describe pictures
• Is it possible that God is dead for some but not others, in some places and times more and in others less?
If we are thinking about dead being related to the amount of belief; Some places have a stronger belief in god than others
• Are compassion and kindness distinctively religious values? Do you know any kind and compassionate atheists? ("Please allow me to introduce myself...")
I don’t think you have to be religious to be kind or compassionate
• Should we embrace the irrational and emotional aspects of human nature, or try to overcome them?
I think we should embrace them because they are what makes us human
• Is the "unconscious" well-supported scientifically? Does it need to be, in order to be useful to people in coming to terms with their own inner lives?
I think is it well supported
• Have you ever committed an interesting Freudian slip?
Yes I make most of them in texting sometimes purposefully
#10 DQA's
ReplyDelete1. I would think most debates would end once one party participating in the argument has credible evidence to justify their argument. Even if that evidence is only the best researches can come up with and it can be proven wrong later.
2. Yes, something that was once true can be proven to be false. Like some scientific theories that had strong claims at the time they were proposed were proven wrong and replaced due to advancements in technology. I also believe what's proven to be false can be proven to be true if the right measures are taken.
3. We already do separate ultimate truths from falsifiable truth. That's why there are ideas proposed by mathematicians called theories and set in stone truths called proofs.
4. I think words are a tool utilized by human beings to convey meaning to an audience.
5. Since Neitsche meant belief in God, in that sense, yes you can claim God to be dead. There are people who don't believe in god, therefore, to them God is dead.
6. I don't think that kindness and compassion are emotions restricted to religious people or to those with some belief system. There are people I know, or who I have at least seen, of Christian belief that aren't always the nicest of people. Yet they have a faith that promotes kindness.
7. I think we should embrace the emotional/irrational aspects of human nature. If we didn't have emotions the world would seem so bland, we wouldn't be able to consider ourselves human. Everyone would walk the earth with poker faces, without a single smile pointed in any direction.There would be no flare. That and I don't think society would be able to progress. Just like it would seem irrational to our ancient ancestors to come up with a theory that the earth isn't flat.
#6 Discussion Questions
ReplyDelete1. Definitely. I have been in debates where we just can't agree and then one of us clarifies a term and things went better.
2. I think so. At least it could be perceived as true or false and then later be found out to be the other.
4. I don't think they're analogous. I think you believing can be fine and can 'work', especially for children. It's just different I think.
5. i think words are definitely tools more than pictures.
6. For sure. I think the idea that God is dead varies from person to person and place to place.
7. Definitely not. I think you can be kind and compassionate regardless of religion or really anything else. I know plenty of people who are atheist or agnostic and are some of the kindest and most compassionate people I've met.
11. I'm sure I have, but I can't remember. However, my ex-boyfriend used to continually do a Freudian slip where he would call me by his ex-girlfriends name. Turns out he was cheating on me so I guess that makes sense.
#6
ReplyDeleteEssay Links:
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/29333/
The Wonders of the Future
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/3846/
The Artistry In Hidden Talents
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/31/
The Joy And Enthusiasm Of Reading
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/9691/
Learning To Trust My Intuition
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/18/
Seeing in Beautiful, Precise Pictures
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/1/
The Importance of Restlessness and Jagged Edges
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/62966/
Life Is An Act Of Literary Creation
https://thisibelieve.org/essay/31760/
The Holy Life of the Intellect
#3
ReplyDeleteDQ
1. Have you ever been involved in an interminable debate that finally ended when someone clarified the definitions of the terms involved? Are most philosophical disputes like that?
I have not but a lot of people have their own definition for a word and they don’t think to look up what it actually means they just speak from their minds.
2. Can something be true, but then later found to be false? Can a statement that was previously false be made true by events? (Consider: if you'd said "Neil Armstrong walked on the moon" in 1968...)
I think something can be true until there is evidence that it is wrong.
3. Should we distinguish provisional, falsifiable truth from ultimate truth?
I feel like there is no way to distinguish the entire truth unless you could read people’s minds and that is impossible.
4. Does it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God?
I mean my parents always said that if we did not believe then we did not receive and even after I stopped believing we still do presents from Santa. I believe Santa and God have nothing to do with each other.
5. Are words tools, or more like pictures?
I think when you hear certain words it makes you think of something so I would say yes.
6. Is it possible that God is dead for some but not others, in some places and times more and in others less?
I don’t think God is dead so no.
7. Are compassion and kindness distinctively religious values? Do you know any kind and compassionate atheists? ("Please allow me to introduce myself...")
No because any human being should know how to treat others if they were raised by loving parents or someone that cared about them.
8. Should we embrace the irrational and emotional aspects of human nature, or try to overcome them?
I don’t think that we should try to cover our emotions because we were giving emotions for a reason and if we hid them then we still have to deal with them later.
#8
ReplyDeleteAlternate quiz questions
LH
1. Who stated that if anything stops being observed, it ceases to exist?
2. Why was Berkeley described as both an idealist and an immaterialist?
3. What does Locke say are primary qualities of the world?
4. What does 'Esse est percipi' mean?
5. Which one of Berkeley's friends wrote 'Gulliver's Travels?'
6. What German philosopher used the Principle of Sufficient Reason?
7. What English poet declared, 'whatever is, is right?'
8. Francois-Marie Arouet was better known by what name?
9. In what short novel did Voltaire undermine optimism about humanity and the universe?
10. What philosopher, like Locke, believed that our knowledge came from personal experiences?
DE
11. In Voltaire's opinion, who was, 'The greatest dialectician who has ever written?'
12. How did Bayle's views on atheism differ from standard views at the time?
13. Why did Bayle not believe in the persecution of heretics?
14. What were two theological controversies that Bayle addressed repeatedly?
15. According to Gottlieb, who was the best polymath since Aristotle?
16. According to Boswell, which philosopher did not ever entertain the thought of religion?
17. Which two unlikely philosophers lie together in the crypt of the Pantheon?
FL
18. What book stated that if you felt bad and didn't know why, you were probably suppressing thoughts of molestation?
19. What neurobiologist's research had never seen an instance where someone would completely suppress a memory?
#8
ReplyDelete• Have you ever been involved in an interminable debate that finally ended when someone clarified the definitions of the terms involved? Are most philosophical disputes like that?
Yessss, this has definitely happened because sometimes people misunderstand what others are talking about. I feel like many people, probably philosophers too, fall into this same situation.
• Can something be true, but then later found to be false? Can a statement that was previously false be made true by events? (Consider: if you'd said "Neil Armstrong walked on the moon" in 1968...)
Something can be true and later be found false, and vice versa. This can occur with multiple situations.
• Does it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God?
Firstly, I feel as though Santa and God isn’t a great comparison. Santa is made up just for fun, but he was a real person. God is existing throughout all ages.
• Are words tools, or more like pictures?
Words can be both tools and pictures.
DQ(2)
ReplyDelete1) No and not that i've seen
2) If something is true is true and if its false its false
3) yes
4) It doesn't 'help' but its fun; kinda not really; No
5) Words are tools
6) No
7) No
8) overcome them
9) It is, probably
10) It can be both
11) All the time
12) To each his own
DQ (1)
ReplyDelete1) No, Our knowledge will continue to expand
2) There is a black line between both
3) Truth works for us
4) Words are tools, Deaf people communicate, They do get in the way of thoughts
5) If I deem it beautiful in my own eyes
6) a lie is created with malice content; sometimes yes
#8
ReplyDeleteAlternative Discussion Questions
LH 29-30
1. For Pascal, his wager was just a way of getting what?
2. What did Nietzsche refer to as an example of self-deception?
3. Which revolution gave the idea that our planet was not at the
heart of the solar system?
FL 42-43
4. Which former US president resigned from the NRA in protest to
the jackbooted-government-thugs letter?
5. What do the Green Mountain Rangers in New York state say is
their fantasy?