HUMOR AS TRUTH
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-12 05:46:00 UTC
Category: Epistemology and Method
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EDUCATION IN PHILOSOPHY VS EDUCATION IN SKILLS I don’t view philosophy as a trad
EDUCATION IN PHILOSOPHY VS EDUCATION IN SKILLS
I don’t view philosophy as a trade or skill, but like history, as general knowledge: ‘wisdom’. Skills and trades are niche applications of knowledge that assist in production under the division of knowledge and labor. Wisdom is the means by which we assist in the organization of society such that the voluntary organization of production in a division of labor is possible. This is why wisdom matters, but why wisdom and skill are resources that are useful the the production of different things: one is goods and services. The other is the ability to organize the voluntary production of goods and services.
Philosophy is moral and political. It will help you in general life. But only in ADDITION to skills which support you economically in the short term.
1) Philosophy, Economics, Law and Politics : The skill of the organization of voluntary production.
2) Economics, Finance, Accounting : the measurement of the organization of voluntary production: cooperative instrumentalism.
3) Science, Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, and statistics : Logical Instrumentalism for use in the organization of voluntary production.
4) Craftsmanship, Labor : the transformation of things from one state to another.
5) Aesthetics: the study of the consumption of the fruits of production. đ
Pretty much in that order. đ
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-07 02:04:00 UTC
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(note to self) Realism, Instrumentalism, and Operationalism, solve a lot of phil
(note to self)
Realism, Instrumentalism, and Operationalism, solve a lot of philosophical problems since so many of those problems are the product of language. It’s pretty funny or maybe ironic to me, that after more than a century of verbal gymnastics it turns out that language is the cause of the problems of politics not the cure for it. I don’t know why that’s so funny. So HUMAN, to conduct a century of distraction with little to show for it, but it’s definitely identifiable as an instance of the pattern of human foibles.
Realism, Naturalism, Scientific Realism,
Intuitionism, Instrumentalism, Operationalism
Acquisition, Accumulation, Defense
Perception, Objects of Utility, Change in State, Memory
Calculation, Planning,
Status and Mating
Cooperation, Free Riding
Monopoly of Control, Property, Norms
LATER
System 0: property (changes in state),
System 1: intuition (search engine),
System 2: reason (calculation)
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-03 15:08:00 UTC
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EFFECTIVE INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT VS IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL ARGUMENT. (I’m ri
EFFECTIVE INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT VS IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL ARGUMENT.
(I’m riffing off Peter’s point. Not so much countering it. Because political debate is not in the same class as intellectual and academic engagement.)
Status Update
By Peter Boettke
Four rules of effective intellectual engagement — from Daniel Dennett
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
(1) You should attempt to re-express your targetâs position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, âThanks, I wish Iâd thought of putting it that way.”
(2) You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
(3) You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
(4) Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
I was taught these rules by Don Lavoie, I wish I was good enough of a person and scholar to always follow them. I will strive to do better.
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Curt Doolittle
Very victorian Peter. It depends on the sector and the consequences. The history of Ideological debate does not agree with your advice. The history of academic study does.
I learned a hard lesson from Hayek’s gentlemanly failure, and Friedman, Rothbard and Krugman’s immediate impact: if you’re debating science then that’s a gentleman’s game. Science is a luxury good. Politics is a proxy for war, and ideology is the weapon of influence.
Time is precious.
(Affections as always.)
Curt Doolittle
–” This is granting several enormous assumptions; (1) that your fellow actually believes what he says, (2) that he is stating the same reasons that he actually has for his position, and (3) that the crowd or stakeholders actually believe his argument based on the publicly stated reasons.
I find it entirely likely, if not 100% certainly the case that (1) The arguments are just publicly digestible justifications. (2) The fellow has actual motives and reasons that differ from the arguments given, and (3) the crowd believes in the position due to the hidden reasons, regardless of the stated reasons.
To accept your methodology, in my opinion, is to admit that Public Choice Theory is not valid.”–
OMG. STEALING THIS.
Curt Doolittle
Note: one of the problems those of us at the lofty reaches fall prey to is ‘smart people disease’. (Projection Bias) Because we are both better able to identify deception and error, and because we associate with people better able to identify deception and error, and because we and those we associate with encounter less deception and error, we discount the near universal presence of deception even if we do not discount the near universal presence of error. The biggest threat to rational discourse is not error, or fallacy, it is deception, obscurantism, and postmodernism. Against which, Victorian ethics are a handicap.
CLOSING
I try to draw blood.
Because your opponent is less likely to walk away when wounded.
And you can defeat him thoroughly.
I’m not a gentlemen. I’m a warrior.
And I understand the moral difference between the two.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-02 17:25:00 UTC
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SO WAIT: IF I DON’T KNOW *HOW* TO SPEAK TRUTHFULLY, I CAN SPEAK HONESTLY BUT ERR
SO WAIT: IF I DON’T KNOW *HOW* TO SPEAK TRUTHFULLY, I CAN SPEAK HONESTLY BUT ERR?
(floundering on the obvious)
Yet, if I *DO* know how to speak truthfully, and I do not, even if I repeat my prior statement, I am speaking dishonestly.
So, then if a constitution defines honesty non-obscuranatly (operationally) then one cannot claim to NOT know it, yet at the same time argue within the constraints of the constitution? Right?
Too simple.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-02 03:40:00 UTC
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QUESTIONING MYSELF, BUT IT SEEMS THAT I MUST SOLVE HONESTY IF NOT TRUTH. (Still
QUESTIONING MYSELF, BUT IT SEEMS THAT I MUST SOLVE HONESTY IF NOT TRUTH.
(Still having serious cold and or allergy problems. And having trouble getting in the zone.)
But I’ve been wrestling with the idea of whether or not I need to solve this problem of “Truth” or not in order to finish my work. And, unfortunately, the problem is that I do have to solve it.
MORALITY: I can solve the problem of articulating the objective source of moral instincts.
ETHICS: I can solve the problem of the ethics of cooperation (free riding) – by extending the definition of property rights and adding truth, warranty, symmetry.
POLITICS: I can solve the problem of politics by adding calculability (in all its complexity)
POLITICAL SPEECH: But I think I must solve the problem of public speech as well since it is more influential in the formation of agreements than the rules by which agreements are constructed.
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MORAL VIOLATIONS
Those discounts, in economic terms are:
1. Violence (asymmetry of force)
2. Theft (asymmetry of control)
3. Fraud (false information)
4. Omission (Omitting information)
5. Obscurantism (Obscuring information)
6. Obstruction (Inhibiting someone elseâs transaction)
7. Externalization (externalizing costs of any transaction)
8. Free Riding (using externalities for self benefit)
9. Socializing Losses (externalization to commons)
10. Privatizing Gains (appropriation of commons)
11. Rent Seeking (organizational free riding)
12. Corruption ( organized rent seeking)
13. Conspiracy (organized indirect theft)
14. Extortion (Organized direct theft)
15. War (organized violence, theft and destruction)
16. Immigration (conquest via displacement)
17. Conversion (conquest via mysticism)
PERSONAL ETHICS
The Ethical code that prevents those discounts (involuntary transfers, free riding) consists in:
1. Requirement that all demonstrated property be categorized as Private Property
2. Requirement for Voluntary Exchange
3. Requirement for Speaking the Truth
4. Requirement for Accountability for Symmetry of knowledge (the whole truth)
5. Requirement for Warranty as proof of symmetry
6. Requirement for Prohibition on negative externalities.
POLITICAL ETHICS
The Political Ethical Code consists in
1. Requirement for the One Law of Property
2. The Common (Organic) Law
3. The Professional Independent Judiciary
4. Contracts not law
– perishability
– universality
5. Requirement of “Calculability”
(note: technically speaking the requirement of calculability implies the requirement for operational language, and the requiremnet for strict constructionism. However, since that deduction apparently isn’t obvious I feel I should call out operational language in the construction of law also.)
6. Right of rejection, exclusion, secession (boycott, and ostracization)
POLITICAL SPEECH
The Public Intellectual’s, Politician’s, Public Speech’s Ethical Code consists in:
1. Requirement for operational language in e-prime as a defense against deception as a means of advocating involuntary transfers.
2. Prohibition on advocacy of involuntary transfer and the universal requirement voluntary ethical exchange.
PROBLEMS
1. (Prohibition on Inbreeding?)
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-01 15:30:00 UTC
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CLOSER ON ELIMINATING PLATONISM FROM TRUTH Well thanks to friends here I have go
CLOSER ON ELIMINATING PLATONISM FROM TRUTH
Well thanks to friends here I have gotten a bit closer. Close enough that I can say that sure, performative truth is ‘real’ but as used, the concept of hypothetical/ theoretical/ ‘ultimate’ truth is not false or immoral, any more than any other analytically deductive proposition say, of equality, in math, logic, or science is false. Like the term ‘numbers’ in math, is obscurant but useful, and not false in ACTION, even if it is linguistically false. While the terms are false. The deductive operations used are not. And while I am attempting to accomplish in action (operations), what linguistic philosophers have done with language, to improve upon their logic, by avoiding the semantic and correspondent issues that arise in current formal logic, I only need to determine whether the underlying operations are true, not whether the words used to describe those underlying operations are precise.
I was very focused on ‘blaming’ a branch of philosophy or logic for the propagation of platonism. Because all these imaginary and imprecise terms inherited from religion and platonism have been used to create obscurant, anti-scientific means of deceptive language in economics, politics, ethics and law. But it is not so much their fault, as it is the lack of a formal logical test of such statements as a requirement for ethical, legal, political and economic speech.
I won’t go into all the detail now. It’s more important that I recognize that I do not need to look for blame (because I was angry) I just need to look for the solution, and that solution is that operationalism and instrumentalism are ‘truth and extant’ and that everything else is allegory. But that allegory can lead to true propositions and false propositions. Just as it is possible in formal logic to state that which cannot be operationally performed. Just as it is possible to state in allegorical language that which cannot and does not exist.
The problem is purely one of ethics and politics: we did not understand the origins of morality or the necessity of morality, and the logical impossibility of any alternative.
I only need address ethics because ethics is bound to reality in ways that imagination, the imaginary, and the logical and the deductive are not.
Source date (UTC): 2014-04-30 06:31:00 UTC
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WE CAN NOW OBJECTIVELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY JUDGE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS AND BAD PHILOS
WE CAN NOW OBJECTIVELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY JUDGE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS AND BAD PHILOSOPHERS
(suggestions wanted)
If we acknowledge that democracy is a failure, and all philosophers who attempted to justify democracy failures, and all philosophers who attempted to expand democracy into socialism and postmodernism failures, we are left with instrumentalists (empiricists) and reactionaries of various fields.
Philosophy as a discipline, must face the uncomfortable fact, that (a) the metaphysical program failed and was solved by cognitive science, and (b) the democratic program failed and was solved by economists (c) therefore the political program failed, and was solved by heterodox philosophers (d) the ethical problem failed and was solved by economists and heterodox philosophers. The reason for this is obvious: the incentives in Academia to attempt to replace the church’s mysticism with some sort of collectivist democratic rationalism, had it’s predictable influence.
Philosophers can produce good neutral and bad influences. Unfortunately, the greater body of philosophers that have been influential since the american revolution, have been more destructive than beneficial. We can never forgive Marx and Freud, any more than we can forgive Kant and Rousseau.
“Thou Shalt Not Harm” not only applies to doctors, but to philosophers, and to all of us.
I give great weight to computer science because unlike the logic of language and unlike abstract and mathematical logic, computer science does not drop the property of operationalism in real time from its reasoning. As such it has higher correspondence with actionable reality than mathematics, and farm more so than formal logic. And if we seek to make informal logic of any value we must learn from computer science and return the property of operationalism to philosophical discourse. Because without it, it certainly appears to consist almost entirely of nonsense built upon linguistic deception.
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99. Aristotle
99. Niccolo Machiavelli
99. Adam Smith
99. Max Weber
99. Emile Durkheim
99. David Hume
99. John Locke
99. G.W.F. Hegel
99. Friedrich Nietzsche
(lesser candidates)
99. Robert Michels
99. Steven Pinker
99. Jonathan Haidt
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99. Rene Descartes
99. Alan Turing
99. Karl Popper
99. Gottlob Frege
99. W.V.O. Quine
99. Saul Kripke
THE BAD PHILOSOPHERS
99. Immanuel Kant
99. Ludwig Wittgenstein
99. Karl Marx
99. Soren Kierkegaard
99. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
20. John Rawls
99. Martin Heidegger
99. Jacques Derrida
99. Michelle Foucault
99. Jean-François Lyotard
99. Jean Baudrillard
99. Murray Rothbard
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S BAD PHILOSOPHERS
Max Horkheimer
Theodor W. Adorno
Herbert Marcuse
Friedrich Pollock
Erich Fromm
Otto Kirchheimer
Leo Löwenthal
Franz Leopold Neumann
Siegfried Kracauer
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Walter Benjamin
JĂŒrgen Habermas
Claus Offe
Axel Honneth
Oskar Negt
Alfred Schmidt
Albrecht Wellmer
Source date (UTC): 2014-04-30 05:06:00 UTC
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ALTERNATIVE TO IMAGINARY, UNATTAINABLE AND IMPOSSIBLE TRUTH? Isn’t this more sen
ALTERNATIVE TO IMAGINARY, UNATTAINABLE AND IMPOSSIBLE TRUTH?
Isn’t this more sensible than an unknowable unattainable imaginary ‘truth’?
THEORIES: correspondence with reality for desired use. A theory should map to reality (properties should correspond to reality), given the utility claimed by the author.
TRUTH: performative: you testify that this theory does what you claim, just as you testify to any other statement you claim corresponds to reality. You claim (warranty) that your theory corresponds with reality for the purposes intended. You do not claim that there is not a better theory that more narrowly corresponds, because you never can. (Although at some point further precision becomes farcical.) All theories that correspond to reality for the purpose claimed are true.
There is nothing novel here. What differs is that the execution of math, logic and science are not ethically constrained as the claims about math logic and science are. And even those claims are not as ethically constrained as economic, political, legal, ethics and moral claims are. So while it’s probably correct that Performative truth is ‘truth’ and everything else is some derivative thereof, there has simply been no reason to ‘correct’ math, logic, and science because the consequence of their ‘mystical language’ or ‘conveniences’ is not damaging. However, as we can see from the fact that we must have this argument, it’s not that their ‘mystical language’ abuse of truth as a matter of convenience does not produce damaging externalities. Because they do. Otherwise we would not have to correct this problem.
CRITICAL PREFERENCE
–“…clearly scientific inquiry is subject to economic limitations.”–
It’s not that it’s subject to economic limitations, its whether or not following the least cost course leads EMPIRICALLY to the ‘truth’ more rapidly than alternatives (although I question the popperian use of that term for theories). I suspect that it does. And I want to see if it does. And I’m hoping someone has done some work on this. As far as I know it holds up.
Given the choice between pursuing any N theories, will following the least cost experiment with the greatest explanatory power more likely lead to the truth. It would seem so. But I would like to see someone research and test that.
–“You need to understand that there exists infinitely many internally consistent bodies of knowledge that have not been falsified.”–
In any given context, this is demonstrably not true. It is true axiomatically but not empirically. We can STATE less than infinitely many theories. Much less than that number are semantically meaningful. Those that we can demonstrate are smaller still. Those that are falsifiable are smaller still. And the choice between those available options is quite small. I suspect that following the least expensive test with the greatest explanatory power is in fact, probabilistically, more likely to result in contributions to the ‘truth’.
Source date (UTC): 2014-04-28 09:21:00 UTC
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Tarski Is Specifically Referring To Formal Languages – Only Formal Languages
[F]ormal languages are subsets of our full language. They are platonic (imaginary and symbolic) by definition and intent. Operational language is not platonic, but extant and demonstrated in real time and space, and can be used to describe actions in time and space, and if constrained to the description of actions in time and space, are open to observation, and confirmation, and falsification. This is why science requires operational language. This is why ethics MUST require operational language. Otherwise deception, self deception and error are obscured by the fungibility of language. Tarski, Alfred, âThe Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semanticsâ, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4 (1944). Tarski, Alfred. âThe Concept of Truth in Formalized Languagesâ, in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Clarendon Press, 1956.