THE CHOICE OF TERMS: “TESTIMONIAL TRUTH”
I was going to go with performative truth, which is an established term, but which applies to formal languages and is already heavily loaded within the analytic movement. So I’m going to go with “Testimonial Truth” because it is easily understood and not encumbered by existing loadings.
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-01 07:46:00 UTC
DRAFT OF “THE TECHNIQUE OF CRITIQUE”
(understanding dishonest debate tactics and propaganda)
The complex deceptive argument structure called Critique, it consists of these tactics,
(a) Straw men points of advocacy as mere vehicles for criticism and attack,
(b) Avoiding support of their argument, and using empty verbalisms defend it, confirming it with criticisms by returning to the attack rather than the demonstration of the strength of their ideas.
(c) Using the “reasonable man” argument including moral appeals, appeals to reasonableness, to making individual exceptions to cases on an individual rather than facts and the problem of the consequences of exceptions at scale.
(d) “Psychologizing” an ad hominem attacking the motivations of the opponent rather than the facts and structure of the argument.
(e) Attempting to invoke guilt however possible.
(f) Use of Ridicule, Shaming and Rallying as Moral Authoritarianism;
(g) Overloading (saturation), Loading and Framing. (Use of suggestion)
(h) Use of Verbalisms (analogies, moral reasoning, and pseudoscience);
(i) Use of terminology as a logically authoritarian truth, rather than convention and claiming ignorance or incomprehension of alternatives.
(j) Retreat into Dogma, and moral offense, and return to critique
(k) Appeal to heroic figures with unworthy praise;
(l) Flooding a market with confirmatory propaganda.
(m) Use of dogma and verbalism to create a sectarian language with sectarian meaning and thereby constructing in-group/out-group conditions (a cult).
(n) Offering in-group membership for compliance, and threatening out-group membership for non-compliance.
In other words, they don’t defend their ideas (because they aren’t defensible) they merely use any weak idea, and the weaker the better, because it is easier to defend verbally and harder to attack logically, as a means of attacking your idea. (See Lew Rockwell’s most recent book as an example of a promised solution but delivering nothing but chapters of criticism without any solution provided.)
The strategy of Critique is to use western altruism (exaggerated universal morality) to create a sense of guilt against in-group members, and to invoke western altruistic punishment against in-group members, and therefore create an environment where out-group members can use deception, trickery and verbalism to employ systemic parasitism, rather than engaging in mutually beneficial production – while arguing that the approach is for the good of all.
In effect it is an elaborate set of deceptions and lies in order to overload the conversation such that we must rely on moral intuition rather than reason.
It is another assault on truth telling, and the aristocratic society. An attempt to cast immoral as moral.
Understand that the Misesian/Rothardian “Austrian” split is not Austrian at all, but yet another avenue for Critique. The only Austrians are the classical liberals at GMU etc.
COUNTERING CRITIQUE
1) As in any argument counter with the truth by calling out their tactic, refuse guilt for what is in your group interest, then return to the central argument.
DONE
So, it’s done. They’re done. It’s just a matter of putting in enough hands, and filling it all in.
Put a fork in it.
Ready to serve.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-30 13:31:00 UTC
UNPREDICTABLE JOURNEY
I started out on this journey simply because watching my people unable to argue their values on television was so painful that I needed to give them a language to do so.
Well yeah.
Now I will give them the moral argument to take their civilization back, and the institutional framework to restore and preserve it.
Overachiever I guess.
lol
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-29 08:23:00 UTC
he he he. How do we create names for numbers? What does a name for a number tell us? What is the difference between a number and a function that we use as a number substitute? All numbers are computable, but not all functions are computable.
How do we create names for observations?
The same way we create names for numbers. 🙂
he he he he….
Done. Baked cake.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-21 03:06:00 UTC
OPERATIONAL CURE FOR MADNESS
As far as I know, of the cases below, operational definitions, operational language, under e prime will make most of these sentences impossible to speak. In other words, most of the madness of philosophy (and reason) is attributable to analogies (functions) used as if they refer to objects, processes, or actions.
——————–
Here, then, are examples of forty different ways in which thought can go irretrievably wrong, of which we can identify only the first two.
1 Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.
2 Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson, and it is not the case that between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.
3 God is three persons in one substance, and one of these persons is Jesus, which is the lamb that was slain even from the foundations of the world.
4 Three lies between two and four only by a particular act of the Divine Will.
5 Three lies between two and four by a moral and spiritual necessity inherent in the nature of numbers.
6 Three lies between two and four by a natural and physical necessity inherent in the nature of numbers.
7 Three lies between two and four only by a convention which mathematicians have adopted.
8 There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed.
9 There is no number three.
10 Three is the only number.
11 Three is the highest number.
12 Three is a large number.
13 Three is a lucky number.
14 The sum of three and two is a little greater than eight.
15 Three is a real object all right: you are not thinking of nothing when you think of three.
16 Three is a real material object.
17 Three is a real spiritual object.
18 Three is an incomplete object, only now coming into existence.
19 Three is not an object at all, but an essence; not a thing, but a thought; not a particular, but a universal.
20 Three is a universal all right, but it exists only, and it exists fully, in each actual triple.
21 Actual triples possess threeness only contingently, approximately, and changeably, but three itself possesses threeness necessarily, exactly, and immutably.
22 The number three is only a mental construct after all, a convenience of thought.
23 The proposition that 3 is the fifth root of 243 is a tautology, just like ‘An oculist is an eye-doctor.’
24 The number three is that whole of which the parts are all and only the actual inscriptions of the numerals, ‘three’ or `3′.
25 Five is of the same substance as three, co-eternal with three, very three of three: it is only in their attributes that three and five are different.
26 The tie which unites the number three to its properties (such as primeness) is inexplicable.
27 The number three is nothing more than the sum of its properties and relations.
28 The number three is neither an idle Platonic universal, nor a blank Lockean substratum; it is a concrete and specific energy in things, and can be detected at work in such observable processes as combustion.
29 Three is a positive integer, and the probability of a positive integer being even is ½, so the probability of three being even is ½.
30 In some previous state of our existence we knew the number three face-to-face, as it is in itself, and by some kind of union with it.
31 How can I be absolutely sure that I am not the number three?
32 Since the properties of three are intelligible, and intelligibles can exist only in the intellect, the properties of three exist only in the intellect.
33 How is the addition of numbers possible? Nothing can make the number three into four, for example.
34 What the number three is in itself, as distinct from the phenomena which it produces in our minds, we can, of course, never know.
35 We get the concept of three only through the transcendental unity of our intuitions as being successive in time.
36 One is identity; two is difference; three is the identity of, and difference between, identity and difference.
37 The number three is not an ideal object of intellectual contemplation, but a concrete product of human praxis.
38 The unconscious significance of the number three is invariably phallic, nasal, and patriarchal.
39 The three members of any triple, being distinct from and merely related to one another, would fall helplessly asunder, if there were not some deeper non-relational unity of which their being three is only an appearance.
40 It may be – though I don’t really believe in modalities – that in some other galaxies the sum of three and two is not five, or indeed is neither five nor not five. (Don’t laugh! They laughed at Christopher Columbus, you know, and at Copernicus; and even the logical law of excluded middle is being questioned nowadays by some of the sharper young physicists.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-20 13:31:00 UTC
–“we need a nosology of thought”–
Sure we have lists of all sorts of biases. But we don’t have a categorical listing of the various errors of philosophical thought. Most of which are artifacts of language.
–“The Logical Positivists, to their credit, at least tried to frame a nosology of thought less pitifully inadequate than the common one. They acknowledged three ways in which thought can go wrong: contingent falsity, self-contradiction, and meaninglessness. A proposition is meaningless, they said, if it is not a tautology and not verifiable either. Propositions about the precession of the equinoxes, for example, are verifiable, while propositions about the procession of the Holy Ghost are not. And verifiability, they said, consists in standing in a certain logical relation to observation-statements.”—
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-20 12:58:00 UTC
Editing my glossary. Today it’s letter “C”. Class, Culture, Calculation etc. Came across Coercion (which is a common word in my world), and got to work on the Power spectrum: POWER / COERCION / PERSUASION / INFLUENCE / INCENTIVE. Fascinating topic when you combine it with social classes in which each form of coercion produces elites that serve the different social classes. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-18 06:35:00 UTC
In every chapter I use:
A Number (of the chapter)
An Image (a symbol – this is hard)
A Title (usually just a term)
A propertarian axis – almost poetic. (Aphoristic poetry perphaps?)
A quote (or poetic excerpt that conveys the simple meaning)
A Statement (an assertion in analytic language)
An Argument. (the rational argument.)
And after that will follow historical examples (if I ever can get to that part, since it’s not really necessary. I might also just use mythological stories. That might be more meaningful.).
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-15 06:36:00 UTC
What do you think of this?
Is the whole thing not a silly language game?
Page 6-23:
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-14 09:06:00 UTC
My Glossary alone is over 100 pages. So I will have to label necessary terms. And see what can be cut. But not much can be. Why? Because of you cleanse terms of the various fallacies endemic to democracy and the legitimacy of the state, as well as various philosophical fallacies, then the set of terms that does not need restatement is small.
Our language is polluted.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-12 08:00:00 UTC