Category: Epistemology and Method

“PEOPLE WILL FIND TRUTH UNAPPEALING OR UNCONVINCING”

Well lets take that criticism further: due to dunning kreuger effect, just as any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic even to the scientist, any sufficiently advanced form of reasoning appears to be deception or conspiracy to those of limited ability. Or more generalized, we are all limited in our abilities. And we all want concepts reduced to terms which we can grasp within our abilities. That means that fundamental truths must be articulated in a different language for about every 15 points of IQ (standard deviation) and in life this is exactly what we see.

So any sufficiently advanced concept will be impossible to voluntarily accept into one’s framework unless it is converted into lanague (analogy to experience) that is within the ability of an individual to experience.

We do not limit truths to that which teh common man can experience. We seek to create tools by which the common man can experience it given his limited abilities to experience that which he cannot directly percieve.

I have said all along that I am not sure I am capable of reducing my language to that of the common man, and I have struggled very hard to reduce it to digestible form for the uncommon man. But there are others who will happily take this technology and transform it for their subordinate groups.

I am pretty confident that propertarianism is revolutionary on the scale of Hume and Darwin. And while both those men are better authors than I am, if Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Einstein and Heidegger can be reduced from abstraction to policy then certainly propertarianism and testimonialism can be.

After all. in the end the principles are simple:

1) We constitute a division of perception and cognition as well as labor, and it is through voluntary cooperation that we make use of the specialized perception of each.

2) The law of non imposition is sufficient for the rational decidability of all conflicts among men. This law can be incrementally discovered as we incrementally evolve our knowledge and deceit, productivity and parasitism, private property and commons, cooperation and conflict.

3) We domesticated man by the centralization of rents, and then further domesticate man by the suppression of centralized rents both of which are accomplished by the opposing arts of competition in the market, and juridical defense via common law, under natural law, insured by reciprocal warranty, where that warranty is provided by the promise of violence.

4) there are three methods of coercion which we can use for ill or good in the creation or disorder or order. and men learn to specialize in them, and we develop class hierarchies in each: violence, remuneration, and gossip. These three groups roughly battle for political control and it is this constant conflict that assists us in adaptation to different circumstances. Liberty and truth keep us flexible enough to adapt to any circumstance using the specializations of any of those three classes. Ergo they are not a hierarchy but competitors.

5) We could not mandate truth because as we developed greater knowledge the means of deceit (pseudoscience and pseudorationalism) exceeded our ability to defeat them with the common law. But today we CAN know how to defeat them by demanding the same warranties of due diligence in public speech in the market for information that we demand of goods and services in the market for consumption and commons. Testimonialism gives us sufficient criteria for putting into the common natural law, the method by which we must speak truthfully in order to prevent harm(imposition of costs) by externality.

Now does everyone need to understand all these things and their consequences? No.

They need instruction in grammar, rhetoric, and testimony: the art of warrantying that one does no harm when speaking in public. This does not mean we cannot err. It means only that we must provide due diligence to intellectual products just as we provide due diligence for goods and services rendered.

Since we did much of this in the past when our science and public speech was limited largely to direct interpersonal experience, there is no reason we cannot teach one to do the same to indirect impersonal experience of cooperation in the broader market.

This is all entirely possible. Whether liars, parasites, and rent seekers will like the fact that they can no longer speak without due diligence is something else.

People do not need to agree to truth. It just is.

People do not need to agree to common or natural law, it just is.

Only under democracy do we care about majority opinion.

Liberty is constructed by elites who refuse to tolerate the alternatives.

So we must merely not tolerate the alternatives.