ON PETERSON VS HARRIS (by James Augustus Berens) Justificationism makes conflati

ON PETERSON VS HARRIS

(by James Augustus Berens)

Justificationism makes conflation necessary, and lying possible.

Criticism leads to de-conflation, and makes lying (false testimony) less probable.

Dr. Peterson is engaging in justificationism and it makes him vulnerable to error. I don’t doubt his intentions, but I think he intuits the problem—that testimony/truth has a moral dimension—but he wrongfully conflates the two in order to justify the restoration/imposition of natural law onto the informational commons.

His errors can be corrected by (a) accepting truth as warranty of due diligence against error, bias and deceit, (b) adding moral consistency as a category of criticism for the social sciences, and (c) holding property-en-toto as the empirical measure for dispute resolution and commensurability across the inter-temporal division of perception and labor (what he vaguely refers to as Darwinian survival).

But he is a teacher, not a prosecutor or judge. The problem is that his conflation makes him a priest. History has given us enough of those.

We need Truth.